The following is an excerpt from historian Heather Cox Richardson’s blog. The rest of the post is about the January 6 Commission’s efforts to get to the bottom of Trump’s role in the insurrection.
On July 27, 2016, even before the Republican National Committee changed the party’s platform to weaken the U.S. stance in favor of Ukraine in its struggle to fight off Russia’s 2014 invasion, U.S. News & World Report senior politics writer David Catanese noted that senior security officials were deeply concerned about then-candidate Trump’s ties to Russia.
July 27 was the day Trump referred at a news conference to his opponent and then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s emails that were not turned over for public disclosure from her private server and said: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” (We know now that Russian hackers did, in fact, begin to target her accounts on or around that day.)
Former secretary of defense Leon Panetta, who served under nine presidents, told Catanese that Trump was “a threat to national security,” not only because of his call for help from Russia, but because of his suggestion that he would abandon the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) if he were elected and, as Catanese put it, “his coziness toward Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
Former National Security Advisor Thomas E. Donilon also expressed concern over the hack of the Democratic National Committee by Russian operatives, and said that such an attack mirrored similar attacks in Estonia, Georgia, and, most prominently, Ukraine. He called on officials to confront Russian leaders publicly.
Cybersecurity expert Alan Silberberg told Catanese that Trump looked like an ally of Putin. “The Twitter trail, if you dig into it over the last year, the Russian media is mirroring him, putting out the same tweets at almost the same time,” Silberberg said.
“You get the sense that people think it’s a joke,” Panetta said. “The fact is what he has said has already represented a threat to our national security.”
Putin’s attempt to destroy democracy in Ukraine militarily has invited a reexamination of the cyberattacks, disinformation, division, attacks on opponents, and installation of puppet leaders he used to gain control of Ukraine before finally turning to bombs. This reexamination, in turn, has led journalists to note that those same techniques have poisoned politics in countries other than Ukraine.
Over the weekend, British investigative journalist Carol Cadwalladr warned that we are 8 years into “The first Great Information War,” a war sparked by Putin’s fury at the removal of his puppet Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 from the presidency of Ukraine. Putin set out to warp reality to confuse both Ukrainians & the world. The “meddling” we saw in the 2016 election was not an attempt to elect Trump simply so he would end the sanctions former president Barack Obama had imposed on Russia in 2014 after it invaded Ukraine. It was an attempt to destabilize democracy. “And it’s absolutely crucial that we now understand that Putin’s attack on Ukraine & the West was a JOINT attack on both,” she wrote.
Today in The Guardian, political and cultural observer Rebecca Solnit wrote a piece titled “It’s time to confront the Trump-Putin network.”
Half the people of the United States are so ignorant that they think thief, conman, traitor, money launderer, and Russian asset IQ45 as some sort of American hero. The fact that TRUMP is not in prison is the biggest intelligence failure in history (both senses of the word intelligence intended).
It’s freaking time to get clear about this. Click this link and read the story of Vlad’s Agent Orange, aka, Moscow’s Asset Governing America (MAGA). Trump is not a subtle person. Who he is and who he reports to has always been right out in the open.
https://newrepublic.com/article/165553/donald-trump-everything-vladimir-putin-wished-russian-asset?fbclid=IwAR2mhkRvdSZGT6TUsFdqYDhXSGwaUP2KWDRx_s400cdO9t1Hy_F4tlpPVJI
“The ‘Shared Psychosis’ of Donald Trump and His Loyalists
Forensic psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee explains the outgoing president’s pathological appeal and how to wean people from it …
“What attracts people to Trump? What is their animus or driving force?
“The reasons are multiple and varied, but in my recent public-service book, Profile of a Nation, I have outlined two major emotional drives: narcissistic symbiosis and shared psychosis…. ”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-shared-psychosis-of-donald-trump-and-his-loyalists/
If Merrick Garland gets his head out of his nether anatomy and actually prosecutes and convicts Trump for something (his list of crimes is very, very long), I wonder what this might mean for his idiot followers. I suspect that even if these people saw a video of him shooting a bazooka at the Capitol Building, they would think it justified. It really is a kind of mass insanity made possible by breathtaking ignorance.
cxs: delete “as”; whom he reports to (or to whom he reports)
cx: have always been
Yikes, so many typos in that post. Sorry.
Not typos. Outright errors in grammar. O for an editing function for WordPress comments! LOL.
But as I used to tell my students, “To err is human; not to fix the errors once they are identified is laziness.”
“They are identified AS laziness.” 😉
The Trump – Putin Pipeline has been pumping cash, chaos, criminality, crisis and CONTEMPT into 🇺🇸 USA Public School Systems. May their machinations finally encounter a conclusive Cold-Cock.
Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich:
You are always, now, on my mind. How long, how long, until we can be together?
–The Hague
“. . . a conclusive Cold-Cock.”
One might interpret that in many ways. 🙂
The categories to which Diane assigns these posts say it all:
Accountability, Fascism, Fraud, Trump
Perfect or just “FAT F.” for short….
Haaaaa!!!!
If only we had Sherlock Holmes to investigate The Case of the Missing-in-Action Attorney General.”
Well Bob you do break up my TDS with a little humor. Sadly there is nothing humorous about any of it . The failures are profound.
You’re welcome. Here, take one of these and call me in the morning:
https://mobile.twitter.com/thedailyshow/status/1499190829151358989?s=10
That helped a little LOL
I find all the excuses and rationalizations of Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine to be tiresome. He invaded because he wanted to. Ukraine did not threaten Russia. This is a brutal criminal act that cannot be justified, not even by Putin. He is dropping cluster bombs and vacuum bombs on innocent people. He is reducing entire cities—hospitals, apartment houses, schools, universities—to rubble. Putin did not have to make war on Ukraine. He is an evil man.
Diane,
Exactly. Thank you.
Heather Cox Richardson offers a personality-focused analysis of the current crisis while continuing to voice discredited Russiagate conspiracy theories.
James Eales, why do you keep making excuses for Putin’s illegal cluster bombing of civilians and the deaths of children?
The Russians cultivated Trump for a long, long time, and they bailed him out, and they owned him. And they knew he was an idiot.
I can just hear Putin talking to his Siloviki buddies: “Hilarious. We are going to give them the Idiot, Trump. And he’s our Idiot.”
You are so right, Bob.
Trump:
Pride. Check.
Greed. Check.
Lust., Check.
Envy. Check.
Gluttony. Check.
Wrath. Check.
Sloth. Check.
Yup, all seven, maxed.
Ofc, give Trump this test and he’ll think it’s an IQ test and that he had a perfect score on it and be bragging about it the next day.
“Perfect score, am I right? People call me, famous people, the best people, doctors; they say, ‘Sir, nobody has scores like that.'”
https://mobile.twitter.com/thedailyshow/status/1499190829151358989?s=10
Hilarious!
Bob,
This is great! Although it’s also frightening because it is so true.
How did this become mainstream Republican thinking instead of being marginalized?
Well, it’s a stretch to call it “thinking,” but, good question.
Catching up with yesterday….still.
Horrifying.
Trump’s election in 2017 made me physically sick. For months.
And, now I really, fully, totally understand why.
Another confirmation…trust your gut…your first instincts.
I was watching ABC news last night and their reporting on the refugees and their reception in Poland. The children, hugging their stuffed animals.
And, I was yelling at the TV….what did so many people in the U.S. want to do (STILL want to do!)…build a damn wall.
Thanks again to all of you for being my go-to voice of reason.
I’m not writing here a lot but you are always one of my first stops on the internet.
Missing those astute comments too, John. I find my last year pretty busy. Cannot write much.
Things seem busier than ever.
The final stretch.