Sunday will mark the second anniversary of Donald Trump’s Presidency. The U.S. government has been partially shut down for weeks, with no end in sight. The White House is on its third chief of staff, nearly a half-dozen Cabinet seats are empty, and the First Daughter Ivanka, previously known for her fashionable yet affordable line of high heels, appears to be in charge of picking the new head of the World Bank. Since the Defense Secretary quit, in protest over Trump’s withdrawal from Syria, the President has been reported to be unilaterally considering pulling out of Afghanistan and the NATO alliance, as well. Congressional Democrats, days into their new House majority, are talking about impeachment, and their leader, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, effectively disinvited Trump from giving the annual State of the Union address, citing the shutdown. This past Friday, we learned, via the Times, that the F.B.I. opened a counterintelligence investigation of Trump to determine whether he was a Russian intelligence asset.
On Monday, which marked a year and three hundred and fifty-nine days since his Inauguration, President Trump had his “I am not a crook” moment. All weekend, he had avoided giving even a simple denial of what, for any other American President, would have been an unimaginable revelation. Now, on the snow-covered White House drive, after discoursing on the fast-food hamburgers he planned to serve the Clemson University football team that night, Trump told reporters, “I never worked for Russia.” He added, “Not only did I never work for Russia, I think it’s a disgrace that you even asked that question because it’s a whole big fat hoax.”
Regardless of whether Trump ends up making his speech on Capitol Hill, which is scheduled for January 29th, the state of the union is not strong, and everyone knows it. Almost every day since Trump was elected, someone, somewhere, has asked if this is the constitutional crisis we have been waiting for. Was his firing of the F.B.I. director, James Comey, in what seemed to be an effort to stop the investigation into his campaign, the constitutional crisis? Or his continual talk of firing the special counsel, or his actual firing of the attorney general? Days before the midterm elections, when Trump deployed thousands of U.S. troops to the border, to combat a nonexistent “invasion” by a caravan of poor Central American migrants, I thought that might finally be the crisis. But, of course, every day of the last two years has brought something that would have previously been unthinkable. When will we finally learn that just because it is unthinkable doesn’t mean it can’t happen?
When I moved to Moscow, as a correspondent for the Washington Post, in early 2001, Vladimir Putin had recently become the President of Russia, and a debate was raging, in Washington and Moscow, over what kind of a leader the former K.G.B. lieutenant colonel would be. Just a decade after Communism’s collapse, few saw him as a hostile-to-the-West dictator in the making, although many, in both capitals, worried that the untested young spy was no democrat. Almost twenty years later, Putin is not only the longest-serving leader of Russia since Josef Stalin, but, even more remarkably, he has been accused of using the Russian secret service to help elect a President of the United States who would be sympathetic to him and his causes.
How uncomfortably relevant, then, it was to sit on a stage in Washington the other night with Vitaly Mansky, the filmmaker who helped create Putin’s image in the early two-thousands only to regret it later. Mansky’s new documentary, “Putin’s Witnesses,” includes exclusive footage of Putin’s first years in power, when it was still an open question of how Putin would run Russia. It is an incredible look at how a democracy dies—or is “killed,” as Mansky corrected me onstage—aided and abetted by those who can’t quite believe what they are seeing.
Mansky opens the film with his wife, on New Year’s Eve, 1999, the night of Putin’s surprise ascension to the Russian Presidency, lamenting the end of her country’s short-lived democratic experiment. Mansky’s young daughter agrees with her mom—Putin will end up a tyrant, just like Mao Zedong, she says. But Mansky isn’t so sure. After successfully pitching himself to the Kremlin and to state TV, he gains approval to make two separate insider films about Putin. A key moment in “Putin’s Witnesses” comes when the Russian President resurrects the Stalin-era Soviet national anthem, with only a slight tweak in the words to reflect the new Russian reality. Mansky skeptically asks Putin why this was necessary. Putin, in footage that Mansky did not use before this new documentary, is shown cynically peddling Soviet nostalgia to his change-averse supporters in the Russian hinterlands before admitting that he, too, shares their cause. Why, he peevishly demands of Mansky, does everything have to be about how terrible the Soviet Union was and the Gulag, anyway?
The takeaway is a simple one: when the former K.G.B. spy turned President of Russia decides to bring back the national symbols of the Soviet Union a mere decade after its collapse, you should pay attention. When, a couple of years after that, Putin called the Soviet breakup “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” it turned out he meant that, too, as he demonstrated with Moscow’s subsequent invasion of the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine. Sometimes in politics, things are not as complicated as we make them out to be.
Trump’s America is not Putin’s Russia, and, with the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the President ongoing, we do not yet know whether Trump himself is actually Putin’s man in Washington or merely a sycophant with a distinctly un-American affinity for autocrats in general and Putin in particular. Trump’s defenders are outraged that such a question is even being posed and point to his Administration’s tough policy toward Russia, from economic sanctions to an enhanced NATO troop presence in Eastern Europe, as exculpatory evidence. But these policies are largely promoted by advisers whom the President loves to undercut. Trump’s own affection for Putin is well established, and his record of advancing Putin’s agenda is about as subtle as Putin’s resurrection of the Soviet anthem.
The Times story about Trump privately musing to advisers about pulling out of NATO is further proof of it, as if any were needed. Trump has called NATO “obsolete.” At last summer’s contentious Brussels summit, he threatened to pull out of the alliance unless European leaders contributed more to its bottom line. He refused, until pressured, to reiterate the mutual-defense commitment that is at the heart of the pact. NATO is Putin’s enemy No. 1. For his entire tenure in office, the organizing principle of his foreign policy has been to counter and undermine it. He surely never reckoned that a U.S. President would do that for him, and yet that is exactly what Trump, for whatever reason, is doing.
On Wednesday, I spoke with Nick Burns, who served as the U.S. Ambassador to NATO during George W. Bush’s Presidency, about the Times’ NATO report. “Are we really where we are?” he said. “How is it possible an American President is really telling his aides, ‘Why are we in NATO?’ ” Burns said that leaving the alliance at a time of Russian aggression—from its U.S.-election intervention, in 2016, to the nerve-agent poisoning of a former Russian spy living in Britain—would be geopolitical malpractice. “What American of any level of leadership today would think about leaving NATO now?” It’s unbelievable, but, as I learned when covering Putin’s Russia, the unbelievable can and sometimes does come to pass.
Did Putin intervene in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf? All seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies say so, and Putin himself has confirmed that he supported Trump in the campaign. He said as much while standing right alongside Trump at their infamous Helsinki press conference, last summer. In June of 2016, when Trump’s son, son-in-law, and campaign chairman met with Russians whom they thought came to Trump Tower bearing dirt on Hillary Clinton, the intermediary who set up the meeting wrote in an e-mail to Donald Trump, Jr., that it was part of “Russia and its government’s support” for the future President. All of which is unthinkable, and nonetheless quite true.
Shortly after appearing onstage with Mansky, I went over to CNN, to discuss the Russia investigation. I arrived just as Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, left the studio. Giuliani had just made news on the Russia front, telling CNN’s Chris Cuomo, “I never said there was no collusion between the campaign or between people in the campaign.” Cuomo interrupted him. “Yes, you have,” he said. “No, I did not,” Giuliani responded. “I said, the ‘President of the United States.’ ” For nearly two years, Trump and his spinners have denied any such collusion between Russia and the campaign. Now Giuliani seemed to be saying never mind, at least it wasn’t Trump himself who did it, which appears to be at least the tenth different version of the story to come out of the Trump camp since the allegations were first raised.
This is not the end, of course. There will be more goalpost moving, and many more Giuliani cable-TV appearances to parse. But the idea that the President of the United States colluded with Russia in the midst of an American election seems a lot less unthinkable now than it was before the White House changed its story, again and again and again. This was one of those weeks in the Trump era when it seemed fair to think that, if the world feels like it is falling apart, maybe that’s because it actually is. And, however incredibly, it almost surely won’t be the last.
