It is often the most obvious things that escape our notice, and nowhere is that more true than in the bombardment of malignancy and criminality that has been the hallmark of the Trump administration. The shower of pure evil that has cascaded from Trump throughout the entire three years and seven months since he mouthed the words to the presidential oath has been nothing short of mind-numbing in scope. The American people have literally been saturated with example after example of his criminality, to the point where it’s become nearly impossible to rank them all in terms of sheer venality.
The fact—revealed this week—that members of Trump’s Cabinet actually held an informal vote on whether to proceed with tearing children away from their parents, sending many of those parents back to countries where their lives were under mortal threat—while shuffling their stolen children among a web of prisons and cages deep within this country’s interior—will stand as one of the most evil acts of any administration in our country’s history. That was a truly perfect example of what the political philosopher and thinker Hannah Arendt, speaking of Adolf Eichmann’s trial, famously called the “banality of evil.”
But there is still one more act of this administration that defined its character more than any other—and that act implicates every Republican who continued to support him, including all of those who will display themselves willingly at the Republican convention this week. It was an act so despicable, so un-American in its character that it can only be described as pure treachery, the same type of treachery in act, thought, and deed for which American soldiers would face court-martial and imprisonment.
This was the act of willfully accepting, even encouraging whether explicitly or implicitly, the assistance of the Russian Federation and its head of state, Vladimir Putin, in the (ultimately successful) effort to surreptitiously manipulate the U.S. election to ensure the Trump administration would prevail in 2016.
Every speaker at the RNC convention this week, every politician, every U.S. elected official who speaks in support of Trump’s reelection, every private citizen, celebrity, armed services member, mother or father who takes the stage or appears remotely this week—to spew their grievances, their anger, their family tragedies, or simply their full-throated endorsement of Donald Trump—is ratifying that act of betrayal. Every single word that is broadcast over the web, every face appearing on a Zoom link, every state delegate who will echo their enthusiastic approval of Trump’s renomination, does so under the knowing shadow of his treachery.
And every flag (for there will be many, many flags) that is waved in front of the cameras will be a backhanded mockery of this nation’s ideals, tainted by the guilt and shame that only the willing and knowing betrayal of country can induce.
Every. Single. One.
The exhaustive investigation by Robert Mueller into the Trump campaign’s interactions with the Russian government, despite its domination of the country’s gaze for months, now seems to be a relic from another time. Trump was successful, through the constant effects of repetition, in turning that investigation into a referendum on his direct collusion with Russian intelligence. As the campaign had taken great pains to avoid leaving a paper or electronic trail of evidence, and because they were dealing, in the Russian GRU and FSB, with one of the most sophisticated intelligence apparatuses in the world, no “smoking gun” proving collusion was ever found.
What got lost in the politically charged finger-pointing, and drowned out by the howling maelstrom of outrage from the then-Republican House, was the fact that evidence of direct conspiracy or collusion was largely irrelevant. At a bare minimum, the administration was well aware of and actively solicitous of Russian involvement. There was never any action taken to discourage it, or even advise U.S. intelligence agencies of the degree to which Russians had infiltrated the servers of Democratic Party officials.
That was the act of treachery, laid out in plain sight. Because what Trump, his family members, and his colleagues (several of whom have been convicted of crimes directly or indirectly associated with that treachery) did in 2016 went far beyond the acceptance of foreign “assistance” or “damaging information” as it has been characterized ad nauseum. The “assistance” was coming not from an ally, not even from a neutral party, but from a regime which has attempted, since the end of World War II, to undermine not just the United States, but all of our strategic allies worldwide. As reported by The New York Times last year, this goal remains the top priority of Putin’s intelligence services.
Western security officials have now concluded that these operations, and potentially many others, are part of a coordinated and ongoing campaign to destabilize Europe, executed by an elite unit inside the Russian intelligence system skilled in subversion, sabotage and assassination.
The group, known as Unit 29155, has operated for at least a decade, yet Western officials only recently discovered it. Intelligence officials in four Western countries say it is unclear how often the unit is mobilized and warn that it is impossible to know when and where its operatives will strike.
The purpose of Unit 29155, which has not been previously reported, underscores the degree to which the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, is actively fighting the West with his brand of so-called hybrid warfare — a blend of propaganda, hacking attacks and disinformation — as well as open military confrontation.
Putin’s initial goal in undermining the 2016 election was never simply to get Trump elected, but to undermine the fabric of American democracy and weaken the U.S. strategically by fanning internal divisions within our society, and sabotaging our alliances. The Mueller report, if it did nothing else, made that explicitly clear.
The assistance that Trump’s campaign sought, acknowledged, or acquiesced in was a carefully constructed template of deliberate election interference with one end goal in mind—the degradation of elimination of the American Republic, with the end goal being its destruction.
That is who Trump and his cronies were so eager to deal with in 2016. And this was not news to them.
The warning came in the form of a high-level counterintelligence briefing by senior FBI officials, the officials said. A similar briefing was given to Hillary Clinton, they added. They said the briefings, which are commonly provided to presidential nominees, were designed to educate the candidates and their top aides about potential threats from foreign spies.
The candidates were urged to alert the FBI about any suspicious overtures to their campaigns, the officials said.
For the Trump campaign, that briefing was pointless, as their knowing acceptance of Russian assistance was already well underway.
None of these facts are unknown to the people who will be speaking at this week’s RNC convention. They are all of public record for anyone—every single American citizen—who does not make the voluntary decision to ignore them, to justify them, or to rationalize them. Donald Trump willingly sold out our country’s interests to a hostile foreign power to get himself elected. That was an act of treachery, one that cannot be rationalized by any American with even a dim sense of patriotic feeling. Those who would countenance or justify such actions, or those who would simply wink at them while turning a blind eye are as guilty of that treachery as he is.
Author and historian Daniel Goldhagen ignited a firestorm when he published, in 1996, a painstakingly researched book called Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Goldhagen’s primary thesis was that it was not only card-carrying members of the Nazi Party who enabled the Holocaust, but the active complicity and approval of ordinary Germans who knowingly allowed it to happen. The book elicited howls of indignation and provoked national embarrassment at the time among swaths of Germans, many for whom the period of 1933-1945 remained a living memory, but its basic point has been largely vindicated by the passage of time: Silence in the face of criminality is complicity.
The response of Trump’s base of support to his act of betraying our country’s institutions to the interests of the Russian Federation has been a knowing conspiracy of silence in its own right. So this week’s RNC convention will, if nothing else, provide everyone in this country with a glimpse of Vladimir Putin’s handiwork. Americans would do well to keep that in mind as they listen to the screeds and bloviating that are bound to be featured in its presentation.
Because every face on display, every speech, every endorsement, will be that of someone who has betrayed our country, whether they want to admit it or not.
