The Trump-Russia connection is best understood as political theater–or better, theater of the absurd transmogrified into reality television. Make no mistake, it is having real impacts, but it matters mostly because people are paying attention to it.
Does President Trump have dealings with potentially shady Russians? Who knows? It certainly isn’t impossible. It’s probably not even implausible. But how much does it matter, even in the worst case scenario, of say Trump owing vast amounts of money to unscrupulous Russian oligarchs who also have highly embarrassing blackmail material on him?
In this “worst case scenario” what would the Russians want him to do? In the Cold War days, the fear was that compromised politicians might push for unilateral disarmament was common enough and used to disparage left-leaning or ever-so-slightly dovish candidates. But Trump is pushing for a build-up of military capacity, particularly in the category of prestige weaponry oriented to Great Power warfare. Otherwise, so far as anyone can tell, he is continuing Obama (and Bush) administration military policies with respect to the wars and “high explosive interventions” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Pakistan.
On the home front, Trump’s incipient policies–the “Muslim ban,” the continuation of the promise to “build the wall,” the pushing to replace Obama-care with a watered down version of Obama-care, and the pointless shadow-boxing with the “intelligence” community–have certainly embarrassed the United States. But does anyone seriously think that Russian mobsters-cum-psyops specialists are ordering Trump to pander to racism and xenophobia? Does anyone think that he wouldn’t be a walking disaster of a President if Russia didn’t exist?
Or maybe it’s the Russians who are ordering Trump to vomit incoherent hysteria on his Twitter account? Sort of in the mode of a celluloid hypnotist ordering his entranced volunteer to stand on one leg and cluck like a chicken. Yes, this seems likely.
Of course, the reason some folks are so keen to explore the “Russia connection” is that they believe that, unlike the racism, pseudo-populism, and xenophobia that got him elected, they might be able to “get rid of Trump” if there is any there, there. Then we can have a “rational” regime led by Mike “evolution is a theory” Pence and dominated by Paul “I never met a scheme to help billionaires I didn’t like” Ryan. We could refocus our foreign policy on a land war with Iran. Yes, that sounds like such a vast improvement. After all, neither Pence nor Ryan is liable to pick fights with Saturday Night Live on social media. Thank goodness we can get rid of that threat!
None of this is to say that Trump isn’t a douche bag. It isn’t even to say that alleged connections to Russia shouldn’t be investigated, because, yeah, Putin is also a douche bag and if we have to be ruled by douche bags, it should probably be ones we are responsible for. But, here is the final bit of irony: if it can be definitively proved that Trump has been “compromised” by the Russians, it will likely as not be through recordings of telephone conversations. In a sense, filtered through the gobbledygook of Trump speak, he is likely correct that his phones were “tapped.” Not (probably) by the FBI, but by the NSA–which I remind everyone routinely records the conversations of Americans with foreign intelligence targets.
Score one potential point for the Tweeter in Trump.