President Trump and his Republican Party are showing a disturbing ambivalence toward Russia’s attacks on U.S. democracy. What exactly are we to make of their disturbing behavior? Even after Trump’s intelligence chiefs handed Republicans incontrovertible evidence of Russian malevolence, Trump dismissed the warnings as a hoax, the GOP House Intelligence Committee chairman secretly plotted against those leading the Russia investigation and Senate Republicans voted in lock step against a Democratic bill providing a stronger defense against future Russian attacks.
“The X-Files” this is not. The truth about Russia is out there, and it is staring every Republican right in the face.
Trump’s https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/please-dan-coats-for-the-good-of-the-country-dont-resign/2018/07/17/f24aebb2-8960-11e8-a345-a1bf7847b375_story.html?utm_term=.7656114d79fd (director of national intelligence) said warning lights were “blinking red” and compared the threat level from Russia to what we faced leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The president’s secretary of homeland security declared that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plot against America placed “democracy itself . . . in the cross hairs.”
The president’s FBI director, in that same news conference, warned Americans that “the threat is not going away.”
But despite that clear and present danger, Trump still stubbornly sides with an ex-KGB spy over his own law enforcement and intelligence leaders. Just hours after his national security team delivered their harsh warnings in a White House press briefing, Trump bellowed to a Pennsylvania audience that “I had a great meeting with Putin. . . . Now we’re being hindered by the Russian hoax. It’s a hoax, okay?”
