Franklin Foer - Putin’s Puppet
Vladimir Putin has a
plan for destroying the West—and that plan looks a lot like Donald Trump. Over
the past decade, Russia has boosted right-wing populists across
Europe. It loaned money to Marine Le Pen in France, well-documented transfusions of cash to keep
her presidential campaign alive. Such largesse also wended its way to the
former Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, who profited “personally and handsomely” from Russian energy
deals, as an American ambassador to Rome once put it. (Berlusconi also shared a 240-year-old bottle of Crimean wine with Putin and
apparently makes ample use of a bed gifted to him by the Russian president.)
There’s a clear pattern: Putin runs stealth efforts on behalf
of politicians who rail against the European Union and want to push away from
NATO. He’s been a patron of Golden Dawn in Greece, Ataka in Bulgaria, and
Jobbik in Hungary. Joe Biden warned about this effort last year in a
speech at the Brookings Institution: “President Putin sees such political
forces as useful tools to be manipulated, to create cracks in the European body
politic which he can then exploit.” Ruptures that will likely multiply after
Brexit—a campaign Russia’s many propaganda organs bombastically promoted.
The destruction of
Europe is a grandiose objective; so is the weakening of the United States.
Until recently, Putin has only focused glancing attention on American
elections. Then along came the presumptive Republican nominee.
Donald Trump is like
the Kremlin’s favored candidates, only more so. He celebrated the United
Kingdom’s exit from the EU. He denounces NATO with feeling. He is also a great
admirer of Vladimir Putin. Trump’s devotion to the Russian president has been
portrayed as buffoonish enthusiasm for a fellow macho strongman. But Trump’s
statements of praise amount to something closer to slavish devotion. In 2007,
he praised Putin for “rebuilding Russia.” A year
later he added,
“He does his work well. Much better than our Bush.”
When Putin ripped American exceptionalism in a New York
Times op-ed in 2013, Trump called it “a masterpiece.” Despite ample evidence, Trump denies that Putin has assassinated his
opponents: “In all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. I haven’t
seen that.” In the event that such killings have transpired, they can be forgiven: “At least he’s a leader.” And not just any old head of state: “I will tell you that, in
terms of leadership, he’s getting an A.”
That’s a highly
abridged sampling of Trump’s odes to Putin. Why wouldn’t the
Russians offer him the same furtive assistance they’ve lavished on Le Pen,
Berlusconi, and the rest? Indeed, according to Politico’s Michael
Crowley, Russian propaganda has gone full
throttle for Trump, using its Russia Todayapparatus to thrash
Hillary Clinton and hail the courage of Trump’s foreign policy. (Sample headline: “Trump Sparks NATO Debate: ‘Obsolete’ or
‘Tripwire That Could Lead to World War III.’ ”) Russian intelligence services hacked the Democratic National Committee’s
servers, purloining its opposition research files on Trump and just about
everything else it could find. They also wormed their way into the computers of
the Clinton Foundation, a breach reported by Bloomberg. And though it may be a mere coincidence,
Trump’s inner circle is populated with advisers and operatives who have long
careers advancing the interests of the Kremlin.
We shouldn’t overstate
Putin’s efforts, which will hardly determine the outcome of the election.
Still, we should think of the Trump campaign as the moral equivalent of Henry
Wallace’s communist-infiltrated campaign for president in
1948, albeit less sincere and idealistic than that. A foreign power that wishes
ill upon the United States has attached itself to a major presidential
campaign.
This was, in fact, a self-aggrandizing fabrication that Trump
himself planted in the tabloids, but it was a convincing lie. A year earlier,
Trump had traveled to Russia at the invitation of the Soviets. They wanted
Trump to develop luxury hotels in Moscow and Leningrad to feed the regime’s new
appetite for Western business. “The idea of building two monuments in the
U.S.S.R. has captured his imagination,” Newsweek reported... read more:
see also
HENRY GIROUX - Donald Trump and the ghosts of totalitarianism...- a widespread avoidance of the past has become not only a sign of the appalling lack of historical consciousness in contemporary American culture, but a deliberate political weapon used by the powerful to keep people passive and blind to the truth, if not reduced to a discourse drawn from the empty realm of celebrity culture. This is a discourse in which totalitarian images of the hero, fearless leader, and bold politicians get lost in the affective and ideological registers of what Hannah Arendt once called “the ruin of our categories of thought and standards of judgment.” Of course, there are many factors currently contributing to this production of ignorance and the lobotomizing of individual and collective agency. The forces promoting a deep seated culture of authoritarianism run deep in American society.