The infatuated president’s passion for Putin couldn’t have been more obvious if he’d humped the diminutive dictator’s leg while belting out the Russian national anthem during their Helsinki newser.

AP

Lisa Van Dusen/For the Hill Times

January 17, 2019

It’s hard to pinpoint what Exhibit A might be in the investigation into whether the president of the United States is a Russian stooge. Would it be his baffling flattery of Vladimir Putin throughout the 2016 campaign and beyond? The multiple Mueller investigation indictments in the Venn intersection of his closest aides and multiple Russian people, places and things? His disregard for subtlety in a courtship of Russia that makes his fling with Stormy Daniels look like a shidduch? The notoriously fawning joint press conference in Helsinki that the late John McCain described as “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory”?

Given Trump’s record with Russia, the shocking news was not, as the New York Times reported last week, that the FBI had opened an investigation into whether the mercurial president’s most unshakeable adoration beyond his perpetually requited crush on himself constituted a threat to national security. The shocking news would have been a Times report that the FBI had not opened an investigation. The most interesting question now is why what should have been the most covert operation in the history of covert operations was so ridiculously, incriminatingly overt?

In an amplification of the Orwellian doublespeak that clogs the daily content stream from his administration, Trump, in his second address to the United Nations General Assembly last September, claimed a doctrine of “principled realism” — an insult to the intelligence of anyone who has witnessed more than five minutes of his reign of brazenly unprincipled unrealism.

The headline on the Times piece last week was ‘FBI Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on behalf of Russia.’ He’s not. He’s openly working on behalf of Russia

Principled realism — said the man who has lied thousands of times since entering the oval office and turned the presidency into a surreal reality show — “means we will not be held hostage to old dogmas, discredited ideologies and so-called experts who have been proven wrong over the years, time and time again.” In the parlance of unprincipled unrealism, that translates as a license to undertake any action at any time for any reason, regardless of truth, facts, convention, rule of law or the public good. Shutting down the government, for instance, on the tactically intractable premise of funding a border wall you know won’t be funded because the Democrats still care what happens to human beings both within and beyond your borders.

Since most of what Trump has done during the first two years of his unlikely presidency — from his attacks on the multilateral institutions of the rules-based international order to his attacks on journalism to his sudden withdrawal from Syria — has immeasurably benefited Russia and other major non-democratic powers, the smoking gun is the chaos he has unleashed and the way it replicates and compounds chaos unleashed by other democracy degraders from Putin to Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey to Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines to Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela to Viktor Orban in Hungary, among others.

Their only doctrine is thuggery and their approach to governing is operational, not ideological: Use fear as both a weapon and a rationale; redefine reality by obliterating norms; normalize corruption to annihilate inconvenient values; bully your critics and intimidate your opposition so you can implement terribly consequential change while they’re preoccupied by inconsequential commiserating; and exploit covert tactics and industrialized lying to manipulate narratives and produce otherwise unthinkable outcomes. It’s not a trend, it’s a club. And Mr. Trump’s actions — including his links to Russia — should be interpreted within the context of his unabashed membership in that club.

The headline on the Times piece last week was FBI Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working of Behalf of Russia. He’s not. He’s openly working on behalf Russia. The more pertinent question is whether he’s secretly working on behalf of the United States, since he’s certainly not doing that openly.

Policy Magazine Associate Editor Lisa Van Dusen was a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.