Has Trump’s entire team been compromised by Putin? If so, everyone who continues to support him is complicit
SALON
On Monday evening, national security adviser Michael Flynn was forced to resign after supposedly losing the “trust” of President Donald Trump by failing to adequately and fully explain his phone conversations with Russian officials during the 2016 presidential election.
As the New York Times explained on Wednesday, FBI agents apparently concluded that Flynn had not been “entirely forthcoming” in describing a phone call he’d had with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States. That set in motion “a chain of events that cost Mr. Flynn his job and thrust Mr. Trump’s fledgling administration into a fresh crisis.”
As the Times report elaborates, Trump “took his time” deciding what to do about Flynn’s dishonesty, and was none too eager to fire him.
But other aides [i.e., other than press secretary Sean Spicer] privately said that Mr. Trump, while annoyed at Mr. Flynn, might not have pushed him out had the situation not attracted such attention from the news media. Instead, according to three people close to Mr. Trump, the president made the decision to cast aside Mr. Flynn in a flash, the catalyst being a news alert of a coming article about the matter.
“Yeah, it’s time,” Mr. Trump told one of his advisers.
Flynn is not alone. Other Trump operatives are also under investigation by the FBI for potentially illegal contact with senior Russian intelligence operatives.
This information is not new. The New York Times and other American news media outlets were aware of reports about Russian tampering in the 2016 election as well as an ongoing federal investigation into Trump, his advisers and other representatives. Instead of sharing this information with the American people during the election campaign, the Times and other publications chose to exercise “restraint” and “caution.” Decades of bullying by the right-wing media and movement conservatives would pay great dividends.
Afraid of showing any so-called liberal bias, the corporate news media demonstrated little restraint in its obsessive reporting about the non-story that was Hillary Clinton’s emails. This, in conjunction with other factors, almost certainly cost her the election.
In all, the Republican Party and its voters have abandoned their Cold War bonafides and their (somewhat exaggerated) reputation as diehard enemies of Russia and the former Soviet Union. To borrow from the language of spycraft, it would seem that they have been “flipped” by Vladimir Putin.
Despite mounting evidence suggesting that Trump’s administration has been compromised by Russia, his public continues to back him. The Republican Party and its leadership have largely chosen to support Donald Trump in a type of political suicide mission, because they see him as an opportunity to force their agenda on the American people and reverse or undo by the social progress made by the New Deal, the civil rights movement, feminism, the LGBT movement and other forces of progressive change.
In the midst of these not so new “revelations” about Michael Flynn and other members of Trump’s inner circle, the news media is now fixated on the Nixonian question: “What did the president know and when did he know it?” This question ought not to be treated like a mystery. The answer should be readily apparent because it is a direct reflection of Donald Trump’s political and personal values.
