From Russia, with Love

How Donnygate Reveals the True Similarity Between Trump and Putin

It seems like Trump may view himself more in the tradition of a Russian strongman than an American president.
trump putin
From left; by Patrik Stollarz/AFP/Getty Images, by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto/Getty Images, by Ida Mae Astute/ABC/Getty Images.

Amid the cascade of tantalizing new details about Donald Trump Jr.’s clandestine meeting with a Russian attorney regarding some dirt about Hillary Clinton, a series of familiar talking points have emerged from the pro-Trump universe. First, there was the retort that Clinton’s campaign, given the chance, would have done the same thing. Then: anyway, nothing came of the meeting. And, finally: even if something did come of it, the whole thing was just a trap concocted by pro-Clinton forces intended to smear Trump.

It’s always this way with Trump and his lackeys. First, they demean someone else to distract attention from whatever their side has been accused of doing. Then, they acknowledge that there may be some truth to the accusation. Lastly, they acknowledge that there may be a lot of truth to it, but insist it doesn’t matter. And then, of course, they circle back to the fireworks—Uranium! E-mails! Comet Ping Pong pizza!—which makes their followers, often aided by Sean Hannity’s cheerleading, delirious. By Tuesday morning, caught in a pinch with his tail between his legs and three reporters from The New York Times on his trail, Donny Jr. released a cache of e-mails evidencing that he happily accepted a meeting with a Russian lawyer, arranged by a corpulent former tabloid journalist, fully aware of what he was getting into. “I love it,” he wrote, after being informed of “high level and sensitive information” that could be provided to him as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Later that morning, Fox News tweeted that he would be appearing on Hannity that evening.

Trump defenders who suggest that Natalia Veselnitskaya was not officially employed as an attorney by the Kremlin are likely deluding themselves. One of Veselnitskaya’s clients, accused money-launderer Denis Katsyv, is the son of Pyotr Katsyv, who is vice president of the state-run Russian Railways and a former deputy governor of the Moscow Region. Katsyv is also reportedly a business associate of his former boss, Vladimir Yakunin, a former president of Russian Railways and a confidant of Vladimir Putin. And all of these people—Veselnitskaya, Katsyv fils and père, Yakunin and Putin—presumably hate the Magnitsky Act, the U.S. measure that punishes Russian officials responsible for the death of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. On December 19, 2012, five days after Barack Obama signed the bill into law, the Russian State Duma banned Americans from adopting Russian children. Given all this, Don Jr.’s claim that his meeting with Veselnitskaya regarding adoptions may have been, in some technical sense, accurate and misleading at the same time.

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In his defense strategy, Trump doesn’t rely on camouflage or prevarication so much as imagination. His supporters are asked not simply to ignore his lies, as supporters of any candidate or elected official are, but rather to embrace the absurd. Trump, of course, intuits this dance better than anyone else. He knows he can say anything—“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters”—and it does not matter to his base. Media observers have often repeated this quotation with vexation and alarm, but the events of Donnygate reveal a more insidious reality behind the statement. Trump, himself, carries more than a hint of the fascist spell.

Trump supporters, who scoff at the murkiness of many accusations against him, who say his critics are making unsubstantiated connections, and who say Democrats and the media are guilty (yes, once again) of “fake news,” might be forgiven for their confusion. This is not how things work here. In America, there is a system, and it is deeply flawed, and it is unnecessarily byzantine, and it is shot through with a subtle but unmistakable corruption, but it is a fundamentally better system than what they have in Russia. That is because it is a system that is made up of laws and regulations, and that is overseen by lawmakers and bureaucracies, and that is ultimately a reflection, or expression, of our elected leaders, who, in theory and, sometimes, in practice, are responsible to the voters.

In Russia, there is no system. There is a people, the often neglected narod, and then there is the oligarchy that rules them—and then, in a twist that could only work in the liminal state that is Russia—there is the vozhd, the leader, who sits atop it all. If the vozhd succeeds, it is because he is tough and unsparing, and he presides (mercilessly) over the boyars, or oligarchs, whose job is largely to execute his will. If he fails, it is because he is weak; he colludes with or is overtaken by his inner circle. In Russia, it seems that a head of state, a tsar or Soviet premier or president, can be forgiven for murdering innocents (even tens of millions of innocents), but not for losing control. He is the lord and protector of the people, who are not a self-governing people but a sprawling peasantry in need of shielding from a feudal world.

It’s not incidental that this appears to be how Donald Trump imagines the American people and, most of all, his supporters. These are the people who are so myopic, so inflamed by their partisan hatreds, that they would find a way to forgive him for killing someone in the middle of the day. It should come as no surprise that Trump’s vision of himself appears to be that of Leader protecting his people from the Chinese, North Koreans, foreign automakers, illegal immigrants, Islamists, journalists, all the countless Others conspiring against the American folk, who can’t be expected to protect themselves. It is patronizing and king-like, and it is divorced from the American tradition.

Donald Trump Jr., who symbolizes better than Ivanka or Kushner or Steve Bannon, or really anyone besides the president, the emptiness and rot of this White House, is now pushing up against the glass walls of Trumpland. He is pushing the cognitive dissonance to new degrees of absurdity. He is asking his father’s supporters to pretend that what he and the president and vice president have been saying all along was never said or was simply misunderstood or was just another feint in the information war against the lying press. He may pull this off, but there will be a cost. There will be a marginal sloughing off of voters, a further eroding of support of the polite, well-mannered, churchgoing Republicans who voted for Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio in the primaries and are wondering when, if ever, the republic will return to its former self. It will not.

There may be another, longer term consequence more acutely felt, too. Despite its flirtation with Putinism, the United States remains at its core a nation of laws. Political norms and confidence in American institutions may be bent and broken beyond repair. The president’s dissembling has helped him win a series of propaganda victories, preying on voters’ disillusionment to create an alternative fact reality. But Trump’s inability to abide his lawyers’ pleas to stay off Twitter has also yielded a goldmine for the small army of prosecutors, bureaucrats, investigators, and other agents of what Trump would call the Deep State. In a kleptocratic petrostate like Russia, a man like Trump could be king. But in Washington, six months after Trump assumed office, the reflexive response of the U.S.’s intricate legal system is already kicking in.