The
Silence of the Hacks
Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman FEB.
17, 2017
The story so far: A
foreign dictator intervened on behalf of a U.S. presidential
candidate — and that candidate won. Close associates of the new
president were in contact with the dictator’s espionage officials
during the campaign, and his national security adviser was forced out
over improper calls to that country’s ambassador — but not until
the press reported it; the president learned about his actions weeks
earlier, but took no action.
Meanwhile, the
president seems oddly solicitous of the dictator’s interests, and
rumors swirl about his personal financial connections to the country
in question. Is there anything to those rumors? Nobody knows, in part
because the president refuses to release his tax returns.
Maybe there’s
nothing wrong here, and it’s all perfectly innocent. But if it’s
not innocent, it’s very bad indeed. So what do Republicans in
Congress, who have the power to investigate the situation, believe
should be done?
Nothing.
Paul Ryan, the
speaker of the House, says that Michael Flynn’s conversations with
the Russian ambassador were “entirely appropriate.”
Devin Nunes, the
chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, angrily dismissed calls
for a select committee to investigate contacts during the campaign:
“There is absolutely not going to be one.”
Jason Chaffetz, the
chairman of the House oversight committee — who hounded Hillary
Clinton endlessly over Benghazi — declared that the “situation
has taken care of itself.”
Just the other day
Republicans were hot in pursuit of potential scandal, and posed as
ultrapatriots. Now they’re indifferent to actual subversion and the
real possibility that we are being governed by people who take their
cues from Moscow. Why?
Well, Senator Rand
Paul explained it all: “We’ll never even get started with doing
the things we need to do, like repealing Obamacare, if we’re
spending our whole time having Republicans investigate Republicans.”
Does anyone doubt that he was speaking for his whole party?
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The point is that
you can’t understand the mess we’re in without appreciating not
just the potential corruption of the president, but the unmistakable
corruption of his party — a party so intent on cutting taxes for
the wealthy, deregulating banks and polluters and dismantling social
programs that accepting foreign subversion is, apparently, a small
price to pay.
Put it this way:
I’ve been seeing comparisons between the emerging information on
the Trump-Putin connection and the Watergate affair, which brought
down a previous president. But while the potential scandal here is
far worse than Watergate — Richard Nixon was sinister and scary,
but nobody imagined that he might be taking instructions from a
foreign power — it’s very hard to imagine today’s Republicans
standing up for the Constitution the way their predecessors did.
It’s not simply
that these days there are more moral midgets in Congress, although
that, too. Watergate took place before Republicans began their long
march to the political right, so Congress was far less polarized than
it is now. There was widespread agreement between the parties on
basic economic ideas, and a fair amount of ideological crossover;
this meant that Republicans didn’t worry so much that holding a
lawless president accountable would derail their hard-line agenda.
The polarization of
the electorate also undermines Congress’s role as a check on the
president: Most Republicans are in safe districts, where their main
fear is of primary challengers to their right. And the Republican
base has suddenly become remarkably pro-Russian. Funny how that
works.
So how does this
crisis end?
It’s not a
constitutional crisis — yet. But Donald Trump is facing a clear
crisis of legitimacy. His popular-vote-losing win was already suspect
given the F.B.I.’s last-minute intervention on his behalf. Now we
know that even as the F.B.I. was creating the false appearance of
scandal around his opponent, it was sitting on evidence suggesting
alarmingly close relations between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia.
And nothing he has done since the inauguration allays fears that he
is in effect a Putin puppet.
How can a leader
under such a cloud send American soldiers to die? How can he be
granted the right to shape the Supreme Court for a generation?
Again, a thorough,
nonpartisan, unrestricted investigation could conceivably clear the
air. But Republicans in Congress, who have the power to make such an
investigation happen, are dead set against it.
The thing is, this
nightmare could be ended by a handful of Republican legislators
willing to make common cause with Democrats to demand the truth. And
maybe there are enough people of conscience left in the G.O.P.
But there probably
aren’t. And that’s a problem that’s even scarier than the
Trump-Putin axis.
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