september 2008

There are exactly two possible explanations for the shameful performance the world witnessed on Monday, from a serving American president.

Either Donald Trump is flat-out an agent of Russian interests—maybe witting, maybe unwitting, from fear of blackmail, in hope of future deals, out of manly respect for Vladimir Putin, out of gratitude for Russia’s help during the election, out of pathetic inability to see beyond his 306 electoral votes. Whatever the exact mixture of motives might be, it doesn’t really matter.

Or he is so profoundly ignorant, insecure, and narcissistic that he did not  realize that, at every step, he was advancing the line that Putin hoped he would advance, and the line that the American intelligence, defense, and law-enforcement agencies most dreaded.

There’s a particular type of parent whom Angela Santomero, the creator of a number of children’s shows including Blue’s Clues, Super Why!, and PBS’s Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, encounters a lot: the guilty-feeling, screen time–loving parent. “Is it okay to let my child watch TV in general? Is that okay?” Santomero says she gets asked. “Is it okay that I need that break and I’m letting my child watch TV?”

Santomero believes that parents can and should be able to plop their kids down in front of a television screen when they need a moment, but in return it’s television’s responsibility to be a helpful babysitter. It’s a belief she shares with the creator of the show that inspired Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood: Fred Rogers, who hosted Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood for the entirety of its 33-year run until it ended in 2001.

We still do not know what hold Vladimir Putin has upon President Trump, but the whole world has now witnessed the power of its grip.

Russia helped Donald Trump into the presidency, as Robert Mueller’s indictment vividly details. Putin, in his own voice, has confirmed that he wanted Trump elected. Standing alongside his benefactor, Trump denounced the special counsel investigating the Russian intervention in the U.S. election—and even repudiated his own intelligence appointees.

This is an unprecedented situation, but not an uncontemplated one. At the 1787 convention in Philadelphia, the authors of the Constitution worried a great deal about foreign potentates corrupting the American presidency.

Even Fox News was appalled at President Trump’s performance at his Helsinki press conference alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin. The network, usually only too happy to cheer on the president, responded somewhat differently this time to Trump’s insistence that “President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial” of Russian involvement in election interference. Neil Cavuto, a Fox Business Network host, called the press conference “disgusting.” Appearing on Fox, Mary Kissel of the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board said that “President Putin scored a great propaganda victory by standing up with President Trump on that stage.” Newt Gingrich declared that Trump’s comments were “the most serious mistake of his presidency.”

Updated at 10:29 p.m. ET

When Donald Trump stood side by side with Russian President Vladimir Putin and announced he was taking Putin’s word over that of his own intelligence community, talking heads spun on cable news. And rightfully so.

On CNN, Anderson Cooper called Trump’s performance “disgraceful.” Cooper’s face was noticeably cringing and his voice was shaking. John King called the event “the surrender summit.” Dana Bash said journalists “asked the questions of Vladimir Putin that the president of the United States failed to do.”

All par for the course from CNN. The big surprise was going on over at Fox News, where the consternation and outrage were only slightly more restrained.

The day started with Fox and Friends’ Brian Kilmeade taking issue with Trump’s pre-meeting tweet, which read: “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!”

The United States is one country, but Americans are living in two separate worlds.

In one version of America, the country is headed in the totally wrong direction. Billionaires control politics. Foreign governments meddle in elections. And not enough people vote to demand a change.

In the other America, things are looking up, particularly with a good president in office. But some civic functions are still broken—especially the media, which is politically biased against certain candidates.

It’s not new for Americans to have divergent views on the health of their country’s democracy. But a new survey, co-created by The Atlantic and the Public Religion Research Institute, suggests that they have become radically split in their basic perceptions of reality, especially on controversial topics like Russian interference in the 2016 election. “We only have the thinnest of agreements of what is plaguing our election system,” said Robert P. Jones, the head of PRRI. “After that, people are viewing whatever problems they see very strongly through their partisan lenses.”

In an astonishing news conference on Monday, President Trump, standing next to Vladimir Putin, rejected the overwhelming consensus among U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election.  

“They said, ‘I think it is Russia.’ I have President Putin. He just said it is not Russia,” Trump said in Helsinki after a two-hour private meeting with the Russian leader. “I will say this: I do not see any reason why it would be.”

Trump’s apparent willingness to take Putin’s word on the alleged interference coincides with a decline in U.S. relations with its closest allies around the world. Trump has criticized Canada, Mexico, and Europe on trade, NATO on defense, the U.K. government on its Brexit plan, and Germany and Sweden on immigration and crime. European capitals, especially, will have watched Monday’s meeting and subsequent news conference closely. Trump’s meeting last week with NATO allies was marked for its rancor. He called the EU a “foe” on trade, and criticized British Prime Minister Theresa May for her “soft” approach toward Brexit and suggested it may cost her a free-trade deal with the U.S. (He since walked back those remarks.)

President Trump’s astonishing news conference Monday with Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader, was as remarkable for what was said as what wasn’t.  

“The disagreements between our two countries are well known and President Putin and I discussed them at length today,” Trump said in Helsinki, Finland. “But if we’re going to solve many of the problems facing our world, then we’re going to have to find ways to cooperate in pursuit of shared interests.”

Trump spent the rest of the news conference highlighting areas of cooperation between the two countries while lambasting his own FBI, and blaming Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election, Democrats, and Hillary Clinton for the poor state of U.S.-Russia relations. The coup de grâce against American interests came when Trump said he said he believed Putin’s assurances that he didn’t interfere in the election—and refused to validate the consensus of U.S. intelligence agencies that say otherwise.

Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, remembers asking an undergraduate seminar recently, “How many of you are waiting to find your passion?”

“Almost all of them raised their hand and got dreamy looks in their eyes,” she told me. They talked about it “like a tidal wave would sweep over them,” he said. Sploosh. Huzzah! It’s accounting!

Would they have unlimited motivation for their passion? They nodded solemnly.

“I hate to burst your balloon,” she said, “but it doesn’t usually happen that way.”

What Dweck asked her students is a common refrain in American society. The term “Follow your passion” has increased ninefold in English books since 1990. “Find something you love to do and you’ll never have to work a day in your life” is another college-counseling standby of unknown provenance.

You were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that’s ever been published. Books still in print you’d have to pay for, but everything else—a collection slated to grow larger than the holdings at the Library of Congress, Harvard, the University of Michigan, at any of the great national libraries of Europe—would have been available for free at terminals that were going to be placed in every local library that wanted one.

At the terminal you were going to be able to search tens of millions of books and read every page of any book you found. You’d be able to highlight passages and make annotations and share them; for the first time, you’d be able to pinpoint an idea somewhere inside the vastness of the printed record, and send somebody straight to it with a link. Books would become as instantly available, searchable, copy-pasteable—as alive in the digital world—as web pages.