The president’s obvious admiration for Vladimir Putin (“great guy,” “terrific person”) still continues to puzzle us, including those on the team who shrug off his outlandish behavior. Where did the Putin hero worship come from? It’s almost as if Trump is the scrawny kid trying to suck up to the bully on the playground. Commentators have speculated, without any evidence, that Moscow must “have something” on the president. I wish I could say. All I know is that whatever drives his love for Putin, it’s terrible for the United States because Vladimir is not on our side and no US president should be building him up.
We need a comprehensive strategy to counter the Russians, not court them. But Trump is living on another planet, one where he and Putin are companions and where Russia wants to help America be successful. As a result, US officials fear they’re “on their own” in fighting back against Moscow. They’re right. They are. If an agency wants to respond to Russia’s anti-US behavior around the world, they shouldn’t plan on steady air cover from the president. In fact, officials know they risk Trump’s ire if the subject comes up in public interviews or congressional testimony. “I don’t care,” one fellow senior leader snapped when reminded by his staff that he needed to watch his words in Senate meetings. “He can fire me if he wants. I’m going to tell the truth. The Russians are not our friends.”
Trump was once asked during a meeting with Putin whether he raised the subject of election interference. In response to the question, the president turned and offered a light-hearted scolding to his counterpart, wagging his finger. “Don’t meddle in the election, please.” Away from the cameras, advisors groaned. We were similarly confounded in Helsinki, when Trump insisted on having a private two-hour meeting with the Russian president, with no advisors present. This hardly ever happens. What is communicated between world leaders, especially competitors, can easily be misunderstood or misrepresented when there aren’t witnesses to the conversation on both sides. Meeting with Putin privately was a risky move in light of allegations about collusion, and it remains a mystery to us why he demanded it.
I want to make a side note here. The president’s secretive interactions with foreign leaders is generally concerning. International negotiations are often kept under wraps for good reason, but Trump’s efforts have gone beyond the norm. When he hides them from members of his own administration, it should set off alarm bells. What arrangements does he make with regimes like Russia behind closed doors? Why doesn’t he want people to know? The Ukraine scandal demonstrates that it’s not beneath Trump to inappropriately ask personal favors of foreign leaders and submit more lamentable requests. Even if the Ukraine inquiry concludes Trump didn’t commit a federal crime or the Republican Senate declines to convict him, voters should weigh these episodes seriously in the 2020 election. We should see Trump’s actions as fireable offenses, regardless of whether or not Congress determines they are impeachable ones. If the president is reelected, you can count on the fact that he will make other dishonorable requests of foreign powers that Americans and his advisors are unlikely to know about. I, for one, don’t want this president cutting secret deals with Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s cavalier attitude toward the Russian security threat has had a predictable yet devastating consequence. Moscow has not been deterred from attacking American interests. It has been emboldened. They continue to take advantage of the United States, around the world and on our own soil. Former director of National Intelligence Dan Coats testified in January 2019 that Russia was still sowing social, racial, and political discord in the United States through influence operations, and several months later, Robert Mueller said the same. “It wasn’t a single attempt,” he testified to Congress. “They’re doing it as we sit here. And they expect to do it during the next campaign.”
This should be a national scandal, a cause for outrage and action against the Russian government. Instead, it’s being ignored where it should matter most—in the Oval Office. Reporters asked Trump about Mueller’s assessment days later and quizzed him again on whether he’d pressed Putin on the topic.
“You don’t really believe this,” he shot back. “Do you believe this? Okay, fine. We didn’t talk about it.” Then he boarded Marine One.
The person he does believe is Putin. According to a former top FBI official, Trump at one point rejected information he received regarding a rogue country’s missile capability. He said the Russian president had given him different information, so it didn’t matter what US spy agencies said. “I don’t care. I believe Putin,” the official quoted him as saying.
Willful ignorance is the fairest way to describe the president’s attitude toward our enemies. He sees what he wants to see. If Trump likes a foreign leader, he refuses to accept the danger they might pose or ulterior motives they bring to the table. That’s what makes it so easy for him to offhandedly dismiss detailed US threat assessments about nation-states or urgent alerts from our closest allies.
North Korea is another troubling example, one that may be odder than the president’s infatuation with Russia.
Trump is fascinated by the country’s young dictator, Kim Jong Un. “How many guys—he was like twenty-six or twenty-five when his father died—take over these tough generals, and all of a sudden… he goes in, he takes over, and he’s the boss,” he said in awe at an event when speaking about Kim’s rise. “It’s incredible. He wiped out the uncle, he wiped out this one, that one. I mean, this guy doesn’t play games.” Trump proposed meeting with the leader during the presidential race, a proposal that was rejected by North Korea as a propaganda ploy.
Once in the White House, the president went the other direction. He announced a policy of “maximum pressure” toward the north, punishing the regime for its aggressive behavior. Advisors traveled the world whipping up support for sanctions to further isolate Pyongyang. We were relieved, frankly, because we thought the president was taking a clear-eyed view of the situation, standing up against a horrible government that was not only producing nuclear weapons but starving and torturing its own people. It felt like a righteous cause, and we were proud to be getting tough in a place where other presidents had prostrated themselves.
But Trump couldn’t hold the line for very long. He wanted badly to make a deal with Kim, whom he called “a pretty smart cookie,” though top advisors warned him against it. Many administrations have been trapped in failed negotiations with North Korea, discussions that the regime exploited to buy time and build weapons. It was a bad idea to fall for it again unless circumstances changed dramatically.
Then one day Trump’s unpredictability doctrine kicked in. South Korean officials were visiting Washington to deliver a message that the north wanted to negotiate over its nuclear program. The president brought the officials into the Oval Office, where they reported that Kim wanted to meet personally. Trump, who months earlier had threatened North Korea with “fire and fury,” agreed on the spot. Aides—including senior officials at the Departments of State and Defense—were caught off guard. Trump said he would speak to Kim face-to-face, the first meeting between an American president and his North Korean counterpart.
Externally, the White House billed the announcement as an exciting breakthrough. It offered the possibility of reducing tensions on the Korean Peninsula and created hope for a denuclearization deal. Internally, we thought it was very stupid. Only hours earlier, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters it was far too soon to think about negotiations between US and North Korean officials, let alone a meeting of the two countries’ leaders. To put Trump and Kim in the same room, we thought, there would need to be major concessions from the North Koreans. Rex’s view was that we weren’t going to give them an audience with the most powerful man on earth without forcing them to pay a price; that is, until Trump decided otherwise.