Schadenfreude due to the leaks about Trump’s
Russian connections is, sadly, premature.
Over the course of the last week numerous
anonymous leaks, some coming from the intelligence agencies, have kept the
media’s attention on Trump’s connection to Russia. While Trump and his
key advisors have railed against these leaks, it is not hard to figure out why
they have become so numerous. A month ago, prior the inauguration, Politico’s Jack Shafer predicted: “The
intelligence establishment, which Trump has deprecated over the issue of
Russian hacking, owes him no favors and less respect. It will be in their
institutional interest to leak damaging material on Trump.” And The Wall Street
Journal reported on 15 February, that intelligence officials
have also been withholding sensitive intelligence from Trump “because they are
concerned it could be leaked or compromised”.
But it is not just the intelligence agencies. The leakiness of the White
House itself has become big news too. The Washington Post speculated on the
motivations for these other leaks (more on this below). That the content
of the leaks – particularly the possible connections between the Trump
presidential campaign and the Russian government – are potentially explosive,
but the optimism expressed earlier this week after the resignation of National Security Advisor Michael
Flynn that the press might finally be able to hold Trump
administration to account is, I fear, a bit premature. Trump has been
damaged by the leaks, but when Trump is under attack he lashes out. This
was the pattern on the campaign trail, but now as President he has immensely
more power. He will try to wield that power against the leakers
themselves, by targeting the US intelligence community (on Twitter on 15 February he referred to them as “Very
un-American”), and minimize the impact of the leaks by continuing
his campaign to delegitimize the mainstream press.
Then there was yesterday’s (16 February 2017)
press conference. Trump “ranted and raved” about the dishonesty of the
mainstream media, and took (some) questions over nearly 90 minutes (spending
less than 5 minutes on the ostensible purpose of the press conference, the
announcement of his new nominee for secretary of Labor). He then claimed
that he was not ranting or raving, but that the press would claim that he had –
as it dutifully did. You can see some of the
low-lights of Trump’s answers to questions in the lists compiled by Vox and Rolling Stone.
Trump seems to believe he is at his best when
he has a clear opponent whom he can blame for the dystopian vision of America
that he holds; during the election Hilary Clinton, the Washington Establishment
and the mainstream media made excellent internal foils for his policy ideas
(along with the external threats of undocumented immigrants and radical
Islam). Having won the election and now installed in the White House, two
of those three internal foils are no longer as readily available to Trump (even
though he continues to try bring up the election and Clinton at every
opportunity). The mainstream media, however, by just doing its job is
still available, and given the improprieties of his administration that the
press, via leaks, are turning up, it has become a target of utmost importance
for Trump and its advisors.
It was thus no accident that Trump used an
event designed to take questions from the media to attack the media. He
didn’t need this event to send out his message to his base: he does that
constantly through prepared statements, friendly interviews on Fox, and through
his tweets. But the press conference gave Trump an opportunity to
scapegoat the press for all the problems of the first month of his
administration in the most direct way possible.
In addition to worrying sabre-rattling
against Iran, it started with the following statement (again, remember this was
an event supposedly announcing a cabinet nomination): “Many of our nation’s
reporters and folks will not tell you the truth and will not treat the
wonderful people of our country with the respect that we deserve. …
Unfortunately, much of the media in Washington, DC, along with New York, Los
Angeles in particular, speaks not for the people but for the special interests
and for those profiting off a very, very obviously broken system.” Note
it is the media of the liberal coasts that are the problem, not those in the
conservative heartland. But then, to make his point, he took questions
from those same media outlets that he sees as so hostile (sometimes with a joke
about how “terrible” the particular media outlet was). The purpose of
doing so was to elevate the media into the prime opponent to himself and his
administration: that only he could fight back against the corruption that the
press supposedly represented. That he even targeted the British BBC with
negative comments suggests there is no particular rhyme or reason to his claims
of partisanship. In reality, all the press that asks “hard” questions
(that is, asking critical questions) are bad – or in Trumpese, “failing” and
“SAD”.
Asked by one reporter how he could call leaks
of accurate information fake news, he responded: “The leaks are real; you’re
the one that wrote about them and reported them. The leaks are absolutely real.
... The news is fake because so much of the news is fake.” He continued
his approach of gaslighting by claiming that what is obvious to
any observer is just not true: “I turn on the TV, open the newspapers, and I
see stories of chaos, chaos,” he said. “Yet it’s the exact opposite. The
administration is running like a fine-tuned machine.”
Trump’s performance at this press conference
was compatible with his performances on the campaign trail: a mixture of
aggressive put downs of the media, bragging about himself, outright lies, and
simplistic, even trivial explanations of his aims and priorities. It
didn’t play well for the mainstream press, nor probably to most of the American
public, but it will have worked, just liked his campaign stops did, among his
core supporters. As he noted:
“I won with news conferences and
probably speeches. I certainly didn’t win by people listening to you people.
That’s for sure. But I’m having a good time.
Tomorrow, they will say, ‘Donald Trump rants
and raves at the press.’ I'm not ranting and raving. I’m just telling you. You
know, you’re dishonest people. But -- but I’m not ranting and raving. I
love this. I’m having a good time doing it.”
When it came to the resignation of National
Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Trump merely evaded the issue. He
suggested that even though he didn’t ask Flynn to talk about sanctions with
Russia, he wasn’t bothered by the fact that he had done so. But Flynn “didn’t
tell our vice president properly and then he said he didn’t remember, so either
way it wasn’t very satisfactory to me.” What Trump didn’t say is that the
leaks demonstrate he had known about Flynn’s misleading of the vice president
in mid-January, and yet he did not fire Flynn until the leaks this past
week. When pressed on other reports that indicated that his top advisors
had had contact with Russian intelligence prior to the election, Trump simply
waived the claim away with the charge that the report
came for the “failing New York Times”. “Speaking
for myself,” he claimed, “I know nothing in Russia, I have no loans in Russia,
I don’t have any deals in Russia.” He insisted again, “I had nothing to do with
it! I have nothing to do with Russia, I told you!” He added: “Russia is fake
news.” The “real news” was the leaking of information from “confidential
investigations.” Again, Trump and his handlers are consciously trying to spin
the story about the leaks into a scandal about the press, not about his
administration.
***
On the other hand, Trump has signaled that he
will use the leaks as an excuse to crack down on an intelligence community that
he has long perceived as his enemy. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump blamed leaks
from the intelligence community for the departure of Flynn. And he then
re-raised again the possibility of putting a crony into a watchdog position
over the intelligence agency. As The New York Times reported:
President Trump plans to assign a New York
billionaire [Stephen Feinberg] to lead a broad review of American intelligence
agencies, according to administration officials, an effort that members of the
intelligence community fear could curtail their independence and reduce the
flow of information that contradicts the president’s worldview....
Reports that Mr. Feinberg was even under
consideration to run the clandestine services shook the intelligence community, raising the prospect of
direct White House control over America’s spies at the exact moment that Mr.
Trump’s ties to Mr. Putin are under investigation by the F.B.I. and
congressional committees. The fact that the head of the Justice Department
(which overseas the F.B.I) is Jeff Sessions, a prime Trump supporter, also has
chilling implications.
Feinberg has absolutely no national security
experience. He has close ties to Stephen Bannon. As the New York Times reported: “Bringing Mr. Feinberg into the
administration to conduct the review is seen as a way of injecting a Trump
loyalist into a world the White House views with suspicion. But top
intelligence officials fear that Mr. Feinberg is being groomed for a high
position in one of the intelligence agencies.”
His potential appointment is also notable
because many of the damaging leaks are not coming from the intelligence
community at all, but from the White House itself. But that fact is
largely irrelevant if you’re looking for a scapegoat, and a way to shift the
conversation away from a damaging story suggesting collusion with a foreign
government.
It seems likely that Trump will try to move
to stop whistleblowing leaks: we can only hope that the general ineptitude of
the administration so far will mean that their efforts will be less than
effective. But we should also worry that Trump’s advisors will start
deliberate leaks of their own. Whereas prior administrations routinely
used leaks to disclose accurate, though classified, information for political
or strategic gains, it seems likely that the Trump administration will use
leaks to sow chaos and undermine the leaks of accurate information by planting
lies. As this administration is clearly willing to lie, the administration
might well exploit leaks to further obscure the truth.
So while Flynn’s departure and Trump’s train wreck of a news conference might
seem like hopeful signs of a turn towards accountability, I think we should
expect to see the Trump White House stepping-up the campaigns of blatant lying,
ad hominem attacks, and aggressive efforts to delegitimize the very
institutions that make-up America’s system of checks and balances.
Hopefully, those institutions (the Judiciary, Congress, and the Press) will not
buckle and allow this White House’s behaviour to become normalized
