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The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake argues that Vladimir Putin’s goal in interfering in the 2016 election wasn’t so much to get President Trump elected as it was to sow chaos in the American political process:
There has been plenty of fighting over exactly what Vladimir Putin’s goal was in interfering in the 2016 U.S. election. The intelligence community has concluded he favored Donald Trump, but Trump has publicly cast doubt on this, and members of his administration have regularly sought to obscure it.
In a way this all misses the point. The even-bigger motivation wasn’t necessarily about Trump personally; it was about destabilizing the American system of government. “Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order,” begins the January 2017 report from the U.S. intelligence community. Trump, by virtue of his controversial style and tendency to destroy societal norms, simply became the most obvious conduit — arguably a near-perfect one, in fact.
And this week showed just what a success it all has been for Putin.
Nearly every week we feel as though we’ve crossed the Rubicon, but this week outflanked the vast majority of them. The president of the United States publicly suggested his attorney general shut down an investigation of the president of the United States. Tensions between President Trump and the media boiled over at a couple Trump rallies, and the White House seemed to double down on its emerging campaign to tag the media not just as “fake news” but the “enemy of the American people.” And a growing number of Trump supporters at those same rallies seemed to be embracing a particularly bizarre, baseless and dangerous conspiracy theory known as “QAnon” — which could soon, with just one tweet from our conspiracy-theorist president, explode.
Large swaths of the country have decided that Trump is guilty of collusion and obstruction of justice. Many have also decided he is beholden to Putin — that the Russian president does have that much-discussed kompromat on Trump. There are certainly much more innocent explanations, including that Trump is merely the world’s most politically powerful contrarian — a guy who can’t be controlled and who is bent on getting and keeping the country’s attention no matter what it takes.
But the practical implications are really the same: Whatever his reasons, we have a president who is quite happy to destabilize the system of American government — and indeed thinks that’s the goal in many ways. And destabilizing it he is. Read more
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