In some liberal quarters it appears that Trump’s lovefest with Putin on Monday was about the worst thing that’s ever happened to America.
Prominent liberal journalist Sarah Kendzior co-signed a tweet from political activist Garry Kasparov calling it “the darkest hour in the history of the American presidency.” Former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks cried out that Trump’s performance “will live in infamy as much as the Pearl Harbor attack or Kristallnacht.”
This kind of hyperbole is ahistorical to the point of being offensive. Kasparov’s statement is mind-boggling: Surely the defense and expansion of slavery, ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, sending Japanese-Americans to internment camps, incinerating tens of thousands of civilians with nuclear bombs, and launching wars of aggression on false pretenses in the Middle East are … quite a bit darker. And it’s hard to know how to take Wine-Banks seriously as she likens a press conference to attacks that took human lives.
What Trump did was very bad: He undermined his own intelligence services; he excused Russia’s interference with the American electoral process; he gave Moscow the green light to pursue its most vicious foreign policy strategies and goals that are odds with US interests; he elevated Putin while putting down his own citizens; he dealt yet another blow to a liberal international order which, while unjust by many measures, is keeping the world relatively peaceful at the moment; he made the US look like a joke before the whole world.
Why not just call it what it is? Where does this need to instantly canonize it as the Worst Thing in American History come from? Why the need to rank it alongside or ahead of cleansings and massacres and enslavement? (None of which, I should say, I’m inclined to rank as the “worst” considering how disparate they are.)
I think there are two major drivers of it:
(1) The spectacle of Trump siding with an adversary of the US over his own government is deeply shocking to people, and the fact that it’s happening with Russia of all countries makes it intolerable for many. The Cold War still shapes American perceptions of Russia, and among many the idea of Trump colluding with Moscow appears to be the highest form of betrayal that a president can commit. For some reason infidelity to the nation-state seems to register as more dishonorable than mass atrocities.
(2) The desperation to see Trump taken down over his ties to Russia is doing unhealthy things to some people’s minds. The more that Trump’s “treasonous” behavior is framed as a singular kind of sin, the stronger of a case they have for impeachment. Or so they hope.
Again, what Trump did was disturbing on a number of levels, many of which I didn’t touch on. But it’s important to keep perspective. Not just so that dark chapters of American history aren’t eclipsed, but so that today’s advocates can remain judicious and strategic.
Zeeshan Aleem 