Who’s Conspiracy Mongering Now?
Every presidency is a mixed bag, but today’s intelligence follies cross a Rubicon.
Donald Trump and Jared Kushner in Rome, May 24.
Donald Trump and Jared Kushner in Rome, May 24. PHOTO: ETTORE FERRARI/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
June 6, 2017 7:41 p.m. ET
492 COMMENTS
The president who tweeted last week to complain about his “covfefe” last year ran a campaign. Whatever you like to believe about certain Trump companions and their conversations with Russian persons, nothing about it suggested an organization capable of participating in an arch conspiracy with a foreign intelligence agency. The campaign was a typically disorganized, free-form, low-budget Trump production. People came and went with head-spinning speed while having distressingly little effect on the candidate.
That’s why the storm that is getting ready to break may have a lot less to do with Trump collusion than you think. House Intelligence Committee subpoenas name three former Obama officials related to the “unmasking” of Americans captured in the vast electronic trawl supposedly undertaken purely for foreign intelligence purposes.
One subpoena concerns former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, with no intelligence responsibilities but personally close to President Obama. Why?
This comes amid a report from the U.S.’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about a pattern of Obama violations of the privacy of Americans “incidentally” caught up in foreign surveillance. We already know of one unmasking illegally leaked to the press for political purposes, Mike Flynn.
More important, we know one case of foreign intelligence seen by U.S. officials turning out to be a Russian plant, i.e., the fake document concerning Hillary Clinton that prompted James Comey’s intervention in the campaign.
So add two questions to the list. Did Obama officials use allegations about Trump-Russia connections as an excuse to abuse intelligence collection for political purposes, and how much intelligence that caught their interest was actually fake intelligence planted by Russia? The obvious case being the scurrilous Trump dossier that was widely circulated internally and leaked to the media.
You can doubt his perspicacity, but Mr. Trump’s view of Russia is far from inexplicable, and voters got a full blast of it during the campaign. Vladimir Putin walks all over the U.S. because our leaders are weak. Russia relations were a specific case of the general Trumpian pitch. He is a strong leader who, with his amazing personality, would transform bad situations into good ones.
Improved relations with Russia have been the aim of every president since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and indeed every president since FDR.
Presidents and presidents-elect have been using secret emissaries and back channels forever.
If the Trump campaign directed or cooperated in illegal acts by Russia, that would be collusion in the sense of contributing to a crime. If Mr. Flynn promised privately what Trump was saying publicly, that he would seek better relations with Russia, as a deliberate inducement to encourage Russian meddling in the race, most of us would consider that an impeachable offense.
But unable to substantiate any such allegation, the media reach for an error so bad it has a name—the equivocation fallacy. Thus Jared Kushner is accused of, after the election, trying to “collude” with Russia in settling the Syrian war—the ad absurdum case of trying to make those seven letters c-o-l-l-u-d-e substitute for proof of something nefarious.
The qualifications for president are light and Donald Trump meets them all. He’s a natural-born U.S. citizen of the requisite age. He received a majority of the electoral vote. U.S. voters are entitled to elect someone whom their fellow citizens consider an idiot, and may even have good reason for doing so since every election is a binary choice between X and Y.
Let’s also recognize that the U.S. voter has hit very few home runs in 228 years. Presidents are a mixed bag—always. Even Obama idolaters by now should be rethinking how he spent his first two years, which ended up throwing away the last six and helped bring Mr. Trump to power (ironically, thanks to many frustrated “hope and change” Obama voters in the Midwest).
And certainly nothing about Sarbanes-Oxley, the Medicare drug benefit, the Iraq war, or the Department of Homeland Security makes us particularly long for George W. Bush.
Mr. Trump is many things, but he’s not an idiot. He has a deep, instinctive understanding of New York political, real estate and media culture, and, like many presidents, now is struggling to apply his mostly irrelevant knowledge to a job he is poorly prepared for. He still strikes us as a good bet not to finish his term—his age, his temperament, the anti-synergy between his business interests and his White House life, the latter not helped by his classy in-laws.
But unless you think everything was hunky dory, or unless you’re a member of the class for whom his status is a threat to your status, his election was exactly what you want in a democracy, a timely message from the electorate to the class of people who make it their profession to try to lead us. Never mind what fairer-minded historians write, even liberal ones will say the seminal fact of Mr. Trump’s time was how quickly his critics sank to his conspiracy-mongering level and worse.
