Donald Trump Begat the Russian Collusion Story And Pulitzer Winning Journalists Didn't Notice
The Pulitzer Prize board reviewed its 2018 prize in national reporting (focused on Trump’s campaign connection to Russia) and decided that it was well deserved. This, despite the fact that it was very much obvious from the beginning that the idea that Donald Trump had any notable connection to Putin and Russia was preposterous. Not only does this reporting not deserve a prize - the fact that this nonsense was pursued at all points, at the very least, to the awarded journalists’ complete inability to keep in mind the very basic facts and timelines in the very story they won the Pulitzer for.
How come? Because the sole person responsible for establishing a connection between Donald Trump and Russia in the public mind was Donald Trump. For this very reason, the idea that Trump was secretly working with the Russians never made any sense.
Let us remember how it all happened:
In November 2015, Donald Trump claimed, weirdly, that Vladimir Putin and him were “stablemates” on the show “60-minutes”. What really happened was that the show “60-minutes” aired two separate interviews with the two men during a single episode. Yet, somehow, Trump wanted to make it look like they in fact knew each other. If Trump were actually blackmailed or conspiring with Putin, why would he draw attention to it, begging the audience to see a connection?
In another 2015 interview with Joe Scarborough Trump responded to the claim that Putin kills journalists who don’t agree with him with “our country does plenty of killing, too”. Now - how hard would it have been to, instead, throw some boilerplate about the importance of free speech and the #1 geopolitical threat? And how hard would it have been to throw it out knowing that you must hide your secret relationship with Putin? Donald Trump can in fact remain silent as needed – for example regarding his tax returns or, largely, his liaison with Stormy Daniels. Yet here he was, loudly advertising the lengths to which he would go to absolve Putin of any sins. The very same Putin whom, before Trump began his candidacy, not one in a million people would suspect had any relationship to Trump.
Similar pattern was in play with Carter Page. The only reason anyone has heard of this man is that, while bluffing through an interview with the Washington Post, Trump read Page’s name from a list of his non-existent “foreign policy advisers”. This led the FBI to check their older file on Page and the whole Carter Page sideshow began. But if Carter Page was in fact directed by Trump to conspire with the Russians, why would Trump bring the name of the person tasked with such sensitive matters to the public? Without it nobody would have bothered to check Page for anything nor connect him to the Trump campaign.
According to the Dossier, Page/Trump’s associates were supposedly offered an equivalent of several billion dollars to help lift US sanctions against Russia. Why would the Russians pay so much money to a mere intermediary that their own intelligence officers described as “an idiot”? In fact, why would they need to pay anyone – didn’t they already have a deal with Trump himself? Why didn’t they just use the mighty kompromat? And why was this deal being hammered so late in the game (June 2016) when, according to the Dossier, Russians cultivated Trump for several years prior?
Every documented contact between Trump campaign and Russians, rather than proving “collusion” essentially underscored the fact that the two had no contact beforehand; these are all cases of “six degrees separation” similar to which would have been, had they been searched for, found between Donald Trump and any large-ish country in the world.
Why would Russian agents in the US haphazardly and pathetically try to contact the Trump campaign (the type of dogged but entirely pointless reporting that won the Pulitzer) if there already was a contact between Trump and the Russians? Why would Trump need Page to travel to Moscow in a conspicuous manner (to give a speech) in the middle of the campaign? Why didn’t Trump use “regular exchange with Kremlin that has existed for at least 8 years” according to the Dossier? Why would Michael Flynn need to ask the Russian ambassador not to overreact to the closure of the Russian diplomatic compound if Russians were a few weeks away from having their own asset become the president of the USA? What was the point of collusion if such a basic issue as the sanctions has not been worked out?
Here is what happened. For whatever reason, Donald Trump had a favorable opinion about Russia and especially its leader, Vladimir Putin. These views were not majority views in America but, at least at the time, neither were they on the fringe: in 2016 there were millions of Americans who saw Putin favorably, end, evidently, tens of millions who, while disagreeing, did not find that perspective disqualifying.
However, in the American intelligence and foreign policy community, these were very much fringe views. Long before the war in Ukraine, an expert opinion on Russia was equivalent to an extremely negative view to the point where former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper felt comfortable saying on TV that “Russians… typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor”. Judging from their Twitter feeds, this view has been especially strong among those who have worked in Russia such as former ambassadors and intelligence chiefs, and, one surmises, people like Christopher Steele.
All this happened before the war in Ukraine. At the time, Trump’s praise of Putin was basically a quirky sideshow in the minds of the voters. However, it still set off a five-alarm fire in the foreign policy and intelligence community. These professionals could not understand why anyone would be pro-Putin and therefore looked hard – much too hard, in fact – for an explanation that would make more sense to them – a blackmail, a bribery or a conspiracy. This made them gullible to an extremely shoddy document – the Steele dossier – that was ruled too implausible to publish by a vast majority of journalists (many of whom did not like Trump but did not experience the same panic regarding Russia) prior to the 2016 election. Only when Trump won did the least critical among them pursued this dead-end, and were then rewarded for it.
The sloppiness, contradictions and sheer absurdity of the dossier were always glaring. In the most ridiculous part, Trump is said to have watched Russian prostitutes urinate on a bed that President Obama slept on several years prior. Putting aside Trump’s well known germophobia; Michael Wolff’s report that Trump didn’t know what “golden shower” was; Trump’s bodyguard’s testimony that Trump refused to see prostitutes, and the rare frequency of this fetish: on what planet does dirtying a bed years after someone slept on it without him even knowing about it counts as a revenge and a “win”?
Perhaps once candidate Trump was playing a 39-dimensional chess by developing a cloud of suspicion of treason that would follow him for the rest of his life and beyond. Or perhaps Donald Trump liked Vladimir Putin and blurted it out because he felt like it. One would think that Pulitzer winning journalists would have been able to figure out which of these was a more plausible scenario.