On June 18, 2013, when he was already well-known in political circles for his birther attacks on then-President Barack Obama, Donald Trump made an exciting announcement.
The Miss Universe Pageant will be broadcast live from MOSCOW, RUSSIA on November 9th, he tweeted. A big deal that will bring our countries together!
Doing business with Russia was in no way illegal at the time (this was before the invasion of Ukraine that triggered the current level of Western sanctions) and wasnt even particularly unusual. The stated aspiration that a tacky pageant would help bring the countries together was somewhat odd, especially given the then-overwhelming consensus in Republican Party circles that the Obama administration was too soft on Russia. But Trump is nothing if not a self-promoter, and pretending that his upcoming television special would have important diplomatic ramifications seems like a bit of harmless puffery.
But the follow-up tweet was genuinely weird.
Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow - if so, will he become my new best friend?
By this time, the Putin regime was already infamous for its crackdown on domestic dissent, brutal war in Chechnya, the murders of journalists Anna Politkovskaya and Paul Klebnikov at home and Alexander Litvinenko in London, and the ultimately failed poisoning of former Ukrainian leader Viktor Yushchenko.
That years State Department human rights report documented several reports that the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings, while Human Rights Watch concluded that Russias cooperation with international institutions on human rights appears perfunctory.
Theres nothing particularly unusual about the United States enjoying cordial diplomatic or even business ties with authoritarian regimes that are also geopolitical allies. But Russia was not an ally of the United States, and Putin wasnt someone average Americans especially average Republicans tended to like. For Trump to express his desire for a friendly, personal relationship with the brutal and autocratic ruler of a hostile foreign country was odd.
But it proved to be the beginning of whats become, over the years, a signature element of Trumps thinking. Hes attached much more stubbornly than he is to any of his various heterodoxies on domestic policy to the idea of a Russia-friendly foreign policy that almost nobody else (including Republican lawmakers and key members of his own administration) believes in.
Thats the great mystery looming over all of the growing Trump/Russia scandals. Firmly disavowing Putin would be just about the lowest-hanging political fruit imaginable. Why wont Trump pluck it?
Soon after Election Day, it became clear that the question of Russian meddling in the 2016 election was going to be a substantial political problem for Trump. It also became clear that, as president, he was going to have to find a way to work with Republican Russia hawks in Congress and with an American military and intelligence community thats profoundly skeptical of Russia.
But before the election, he was considerably less restrained, and claimed to have a direct line to the Kremlin back in 2013, 2014, and even through much of 2015:
Later, of course, Trumps story changed. The current line from the president and his team is that any talk of him having anything to do with Russia is fake news and that he never met Putin before taking office. And, of course, Trump has lied about many things over the years. Its entirely possible that the year he spent insisting that hed been in contact with Putin and the broader Russian governing elite was just another example of Trump lying.
But its a strange thing to do. Stranger still is Trumps willingness to publicly defend Putins dismal human rights record.
Lots of American businessmen make money in countries with deplorable human rights records, and lots of American politicians are advocates for strategic alliances and commercial ties with countries that have deplorable human rights records.
But while overlooking abuses is common, its fairly unusual to straightforwardly deny them and especially to do so in a situation where there isnt any clear political, business, or strategic rationale for doing so. But Trump spent a good deal of time acting as a Putin spokesperson in the American press:
The eagerness to make excuses for Putins conduct seemed linked, rhetorically, to a somewhat half-baked notion that under Trump the United States and Russia would enjoy warmer relations.
There's nothing I can think of that I'd rather do than have Russia friendly, he said in a July 27, 2016, news conference. As opposed to the way they are right now, so that we can go and knock out ISIS with other people.
Later that day at a campaign rally, Trump said, wouldnt it be a great thing if we could get along with Putin? During the October 9 presidential debate, Trump returned to the theme that I think it would be great if we got along with Russia because we could fight ISIS together, as an example.
Shortly before Inauguration Day, on January 11, 2017, Trump said, If Putin likes Donald Trump, I consider that an asset, not a liability, because we have a horrible relationship with Russia. Russia can help us fight ISIS.
Trumps early personnel and policy moves matched up with this desire.
He quickly tapped retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, known as an outlier among American military and intelligence professionals for his pro-Russian views, to serve as his national security adviser. And he bypassed the entire range of conventionally qualified candidates to serve as secretary of state in favor of Exxon executive Rex Tillerson, a former recipient of Russias Order of Friendship award. Early in his administration, Trump aimed to relax sanctions on Russia, only to back down in the face of congressional opposition.
In the end, Trumps Russia policy has landed in a more conventional place than these early moves would have suggested. Tillerson toed the standard American foreign policy line during his confirmation hearings, Defense Secretary James Mattis is a very normal Republican Russia hawk, and Flynn got fired and replaced with the much more widely respected Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as national security adviser.
But Trump himself has acted in many ways like an outsider to his own administrations Russia policy. But while hes simply detached from the details on many issues, he has pushed back forcefully against both Congress and his own advisers repeatedly on Russian matters.
This oddness begins with simply the way that Trump talks about Putin.
Obama called him a thug. So did Mitt Romney. Paul Ryan called him a devious thug. Marco Rubio called him both a thug and a gangster.
Trump fairly consistently declines to adopt this conventional language among American politicians, and he does so even though he is clearly aware at this point and has been for some time that suspicions about the nature of his relationship with the Russian government are a key point of political vulnerability. It would be the easiest thing on the planet for Trump to have his communications team draw up some standard-issue US-politician Putin-bashing rhetoric hes a thug, he murders journalists, he invades his neighbors and at a minimum assure Republican Party foreign policy elites that hes now down with the program.
After all, Trump used to espouse very unconventional views on things like tax cuts for the rich, Medicaid, and the importance of establishing universal health insurance coverage.
But in order to consolidate his position as leader of the GOP, Trump has dropped those ideologically heterodox views even though the heterodox position was more popular. On Russia, however, he insists on flying in the face of bipartisan consensus.
Watch: Trump is asked if he believes Russia interfered in our election, instead attacks Obama and the media. https://t.co/IrfviRPwru
Hes reluctant to even acknowledge that Russian hacking took place, resorting even to ridiculous lies about G20 conversations to change the subject.
Everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the DNC server to the FBI and the CIA. Disgraceful!
Perhaps most shockingly, Trumps own team of advisers had to drag him kicking and screaming into affirming Americas commitment to upholding Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty. And he did it only after humiliating those very same advisers by letting them brief the media that an affirmation was coming, only to cut it on the fly from the prepared text of his speech.
It was a bizarre thing to do, it clearly benefitted Russian foreign policy objectives, and it offered nothing but political downside for Trump.
The intersection of politics and law is a funny thing.
Politicized investigations into potential presidential scandals often end up turning on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, making false statements to investigators, and other fine-grained ways in which people can get legally tripped up when theyre trying to cover embarrassing information. The much-discussed possibility of collusion with Russian election hacking is both vaguely defined, unproven at this point, and even if it happened may not have involved the president personally in any way.
These things end up hinging on small details, and the small details can be crucially important.
But the big picture also matters, and the big picture here is that Trump remains stubbornly unwilling to break with Putin and the Kremlin. The president used to regularly brag about his contacts with the leaders of the Russian government. The president won the election with the helping hand of the Russian government. The president repeatedly expressed his desire to change US foreign policy in a more pro-Russian direction. And though the president has, so far, been largely stymied in his efforts to do this seems to be straining against constraints imposed by the leadership of his own party and his own foreign policy team.
Perhaps Trump was lying about the contacts, ignorant about the campaign proposals, and his current attitudes reflect nothing more than bull-headedness.
Certainly thats what his Republican collaborators on the Hill seem to be telling themselves even as the White House works to get House Republicans to block a Russia sanctions bill that passed the Senate with 97 votes. But the mystery remains. Trump has been willing to reverse himself on other policy issues, gets no political benefit from pursuing such a pro-Russian course in the face of bipartisan opposition, and could score easy points by doing a little formulaic Putin-bashing. The fact that he refuses to tells you a lot about why Trumps presidency remains mired in scandal and why the worst may still be to come.
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Donald Trump's fishy behavior on Russia is bigger than possible email collusion - Vox