september 2011

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.

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!”

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.”

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.)

When Sacha Baron Cohen emerged as a comedy force in the late ’90s, the quality that powered his appeal was his shamelessness. Whether in character as the clueless white-boy rapper Ali G, the bigoted Kazakh journalist Borat, or the outrageous fashion reporter Bruno, Cohen delighted in asking questions far outside the realm of politeness and in tormenting the subjects (celebrity and non-celebrity alike) of his awkward mockumentary sketches. Sometimes, he’d dig deep enough to reveal the hidden prejudice or cynicism of whatever politician, etiquette coach, or random passer-by he was interviewing on camera.

When Cohen’s Da Ali G Show launched in 2000 in the UK, his brazenness was still exciting and novel to viewers. Who Is America?, which premiered July 15 on Showtime, is the comedian’s first TV series since Da Ali G Show went off the air in 2004, and it’s superficially similar. Though Cohen plays all-new characters, he’s pulling the same stunts, interviewing people (including politicians) under false pretenses and trying to goad them into saying something ridiculous (or at least nodding along in polite agreement as he does). But in the intervening years, shamelessness has become commonplace. The ongoing discourse in the United States, day in and day out, revolves around the dissolution of our political norms, and the best Cohen can do in his new show is loudly point that out.

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.

“Surreal.” “Extraordinary.” “Disgraceful.” Lawmakers in the U.S. and abroad appeared shell-shocked on Monday following President Trump’s press conference with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in which Trump again refused to condemn Putin for Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, even going so far as to deny the conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia was responsible.

“I think we have both been foolish,” Trump said, when asked by a reporter whether he would hold Russia accountable “at all, for anything in particular.”

“We should have had this dialogue a long time ago, before I got to office,” Trump continued. “And I think we are all to blame.” Asked later whether he would denounce Russian interference and ask Putin to never do it again, Trump said he didn’t “see any reason why it would be Russia” that interfered, and began discussing the Democratic National Committee server that, according to the Justice Department, was hacked by Russian intelligence officers in 2016. “I really want to see the server,” Trump said, appearing to cast doubt on his administration’s conclusions. (The FBI obtained copies of the DNC server from the private firm hired to investigate the hack).

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.

What happens when The Art of the Deal meets the Kremlin playbook? Given that, as one depressed NSC staffer put it to me, “our job is to build a bridge between the real world and the president’s,” the real risk is not that Donald Trump actually gives away the farm to Vladimir Putin when they meet in Helsinki next week—it’s what happens in Washington if he tries.

It’s rare for Trump to meet an autocrat he doesn’t like, from China’s Xi (with whom, Trump tweeted, he “will always be friends”) to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un (who he has called “a smart cookie”). Nonetheless, his determination to meet with Putin appears rooted not just in his apparent conviction that the two have some kind of rapport. It also reflects his grandstanding desire to prove himself the great global deal maker.