One of Trumpism’s enduring scars will be the social fissures it’s widened by waging war on objective reality and public faith in bedrock institutions. It’s also fostered a cult of personality around Donald Trump, allowing him to posture as the final arbiter of truth and guardian of the downtrodden. But division, chaos and disrepair – and the corruption of the American experiment – are the long-term consequences.
So it’s encouraging when a bipartisan group of federal legislators reminds us that facts matter.
A 966-page Senate report published Tuesday leaves no doubt that an extensive network of Russian operatives with intelligence ties worked with Trump’s operatives to torpedo Hillary Clinton’s campaign four years ago. Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw the effort, including a successful hack of Democratic Party computer systems. Why? To smear Clinton and hobble her administration if she won, and to gain leverage with Trump if he won.
The Republican-led committee that produced the report said that Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was so steeped in the effort with Russia that he posed a “grave counterintelligence threat.” It said that Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, participated in a covert effort by the Russian government to help his father in 2016. It said the president himself may have been a possible target of Russian blackmail. It said that Putin was aware that Trump – during his presidential campaign – was secretly pursuing a deal to build a skyscraper in Moscow.
The committee also found that Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime political hatchet man, made elaborate efforts to learn about Russian leaks of confidential Democratic emails through Julian Assange’s hacking collective, WikiLeaks. And in the course of that discovery, the committee learned that Trump “did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions.” That’s interesting, because the president himself, in written testimony to former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, said he couldn’t recall those conversations.