Even though Jonathan Chait’s New York Magazine’s June 2018 essay “What if Trump is a Russian Asset?” is a tad old, it’s important for Americans to take heed and check off the chronological points of corruption you may have forgotten with all the Republican created distraction we’ve been forced to endure. I’ve always thought that the depth of the Russia scandal, if known, would be breath-taking when aggregated, and Chait’s essay dutifully puts it all together from the 1980s. Now as the Ukraine scandal has led to Trump’s rightful impeachment, the dreaded evidence is coming out — dripping faster and faster.
What could have caused this careful nurturing of Trump?
The Russian co-option of Trump fits perfectly into Putin’s vision of an ascendance of a new Russia (post-Soviet Union collapse), rising on the philosophical writings of an early 20th century Christian fascist named Ivan Ilyin. According to Yale historian Timothy Snyder in his book, The Road to Unfreedom, Putin embraced this vision and revived this man’s writings that proclaim Russia will be the future “Christian salvation” of the world. Snyder writes that Ilyin “despised the middle classes, whose civil society and private life . . . kept the world broken and God at bay,” quoting the fascist philosopher, “Evil begins where the person begins,” sentiments that directly contradict all of the Enlightenment ideas America was founded on. (pg. 20–22)
In both countries, evangelicals and Orthodox have actively opposed legalized abortion and have called for protection of the “traditional” family. They have turned to leaders who support their causes — American evangelicals to the Republican Party and now Trump; Russian Orthodox hierarchs to Putin.
Putin strongly believes in reactionary social theory that advances the idea that Christian Europe and America are in a “civilizational struggle against both decadent liberalism and radical Islam,”and has nurtured alliances between Franklin Graham (and other conservative organizations like the NRA) and Russian Orthodox Church patriarchs, which led up to a Graham visit to Moscow in 2015.
At that visit: "Graham . . . asserted that many Americans wished that someone like Putin could be their president, and he praised Russia for passing antigay propaganda laws.
Promptly afterward, Graham announced that Samaritan’s Purse, a ministry of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, would cooperate with the Russian Orthodox Church and would provide assistance to Russia in eastern Ukraine against the Ukrainian government who, with American support, was trying to preserve its national borders from Russian hegemony.
To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, we might say this: Remember who you are and whom you serve. Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior. Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency.
Of course the blow-back from Franklin Graham and other conservative evangelicals has been swift and harsh, but it is important now for the media to follow the money that has poured into the Christian right from Russian oligarchs since 2008 and into Trump’s pockets since 2003. Political pundits MUST stop scratching their heads asking why? why? why? are religious people supporting this guy?
From 2003 to 2017, people from the former USSR made 86 all-cash purchases — a red flag of potential money laundering — of Trump properties, totaling $109 million. In 2010, the private-wealth division of Deutsche Bank also loaned him hundreds of millions of dollars during the same period it was laundering billions in Russian money.
On a recent broadcast of Ezra Klein’s Vox Network “Impeachment in, and beyond, the Beltway,” a focus group was conducted in Pennsylvania (a Trump state) about the impeachment and Senate trial. One respondent mentioned his alarm at the white people who attend his rallies and compared them to rabid sports team fans. A comparison that was apt — everyone wears the MAGA hat, the MAGA shirt, and knows when and what to cheer on specific cues from Trump.
It is terrifying for some of us to watch, almost like watching Leni Reifenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, American-style. One wonders what part of the Trump brand do they love the most? The cruelty visited on the kids at the border? The contemptuous mocking of anyone more vulnerable than himself? His ignorance? His lack of compassion? His self-enrichment from the public weal?One asks of the religious right: what beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount have been demonstrated by Trump’s first three years in office?
It seems Trump’s holy armor has been pierced a few times, though, lately. The Christianity Today editorial and the President’s seemingly damnation of the late Rep. John Dingell of Michigan in Michigan (where he and his grieving wife are well thought of). Hopefully soon, there will be a moment of ultimate betrayal committed by Trump that will peel off some of his many admirers, akin to that Golden Dancer epiphany from the classic Stanley Kramer film Inherit the Wind, that truly exposes Trump’s hollow core for all to see.