Trump Did Collusion And Is Also A Fascist, Even If Democrats Can Be Pretty Lame Sometimes. By Brian Beutler

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Trump Did Collusion And Is Also A Fascist, Even If Democrats Can Be Pretty Lame Sometimes

An analogy that might shed some light on why the “Is Trump A Fascist?” debate is so tedious and interminable

(Photo by MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images)

In 2016, the Russian federation engaged in an extensive, coordinated campaign of cybercrimes to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton and become president of the United States.

Former FBI Director Robert Mueller—the Republican special counsel who was appointed in 2017 by a Republican deputy attorney general at the behest of Republican leaders in Congress—found that “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion,” using “a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton [and] computer-intrusion operations against entities, employees, and volunteers working on the Clinton Campaign.” Mueller “identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign” and “established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” 

A later, even more thorough bipartisan investigation by the Senate intelligence committee, spearheaded by its then chairman, the Republican Richard Burr, established facts that Mueller had not. Among them: Trump’s campaign chief Paul Manafort’s Kremlin-connected point man, with whom he shared sensitive campaign data, was in fact a Russian spy. 

Several Trump operatives were tried and convicted for their conduct adjacent to the Russian interference and for trying to obstruct Mueller’s investigation.

The man who stymied Mueller most aggressively was Trump himself, who, by dint of being president, couldn’t be charged with (or, in Mueller’s thinking, even accused of) criminal obstruction. But the evidentiary record was clear. Trump tried to terminate the investigation, solicited document destruction, and dangled (and eventually supplied) pardons to witnesses and targets to secure their silence or lies.

In part as a result of this obstruction, Mueller did not believe he could sustain a criminal conspiracy case against Trump or members of his campaign, where he’d have to overcome an exceptionally high burden of proof. But the evidence of cooperation (or collusion, as it came to be called in the discourse) was voluminous. Not only did Mueller uncover contacts and inducements that were unknown to the public before his appointment, Trump himself openly solicited intervention (“Russia, if you’re listening”) and would go on to both defend soliciting foreign interference in U.S. elections and request and extort it from other governments ahead of the 2020 election. 

But for Trump and many strange bedfellows, the story ended with Mueller’s determination that a Trump-Russia conspiracy could not be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Trump, with help from his loyalist attorney general, insisted falsely that the investigation found “no collusion, no obstruction.” They cowed Democrats in Congress into “turning the page” on the “Russia! Russia! Russia!” matter and Trump has thus faced minimal accountability for what is, by the lights of Republican investigators, an outrageous scandal. 

Trump continues to be thick with shady Russian figures and in thrall to other kleptocrats. A man his team connected with federal investigators was just indicted for lying to the FBI to frame Joe Biden, seemingly at the behest of his colleagues in Russian intelligence. By contrast a Trump-directed effort to find criminal behavior within the Russia investigation itself (and, thus, to discredit it) flopped embarrassingly. 

In spite of all this, some of Trump’s most vocal defenders on the Russia question are leading lights of the American left. 

The Russia scandal was a gateway for many leftists into anti-anti-Trumpism, because it threatened one of their highest priorities.

For obvious and in some cases justifiable reasons, they wanted conventional wisdom to attribute Clinton’s defeat entirely to her agenda and her rhetorical appeals, and their roots in liberalism—or worse, “neoliberalism.” 

Left wing critics came to view “Russia” as a shorthand for saying Trump won by cheating, which they naturally interpreted as a backhanded way of absolving Clinton and the Democratic establishment for a mix of real and imagined political and policy errors. Less generously, they wanted the lesson Democrats drew from Clinton’s defeat to be radical—to culminate in a purge of the party’s elites, and its reinvention as a social democratic party in the mold of Bernie Sanders. “Russiagate” thus needed to be discredited, and who did that mean forming a rhetorical alliance with? Yep, that’s right.

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As it happens there are very good left-wing and progressive reasons to organize resistance against an international consortium of right-wing kleptocrats collaborating in efforts to burgle their way into power. This should honestly be self-evident. If anti-corporatism is a valid expression of left-wing thought, anti-Kremlinism should be, too—unless state-based, dictatorial forms of oligarchy are deserving of a pass for reasons that go unstated. If Trump brings fascism or Putinism or even just Orbanism to the United States it’ll set back left wing causes for at least a generation, at a time when many on the left fear we have much less than a generation to spare before, e.g., the accumulation of climate emissions fully wrecks the planet.

But to this day, many left-wing critics meet any progressive or liberal effort to expose the web of Trump’s power-corruption—whether his favor trading with adversary leaders or his criminal efforts to steal elections—with derision.

The writer Glenn Greenwald, along with a phalanx of his imitators, simply echo Trump in dismissing the Russia scandal as a “hoax.” Other left-wing critics are more conciliatory, and will even allow that the Trump-Russia scandal is and was real, but their prescription for those engaged in Democratic politics is, essentially, to get over it. The Yale historian and legal scholar Samuel Moyn wrote, “Of Mr. Trump’s deeds, the ones Mr. Mueller chronicled are far from the worst. And of all the things Americans have had to be ashamed about, the president’s infractions as chronicled in the report are not high on the list. The causes of Mr. Trump’s election—most pressingly, a loss of faith in the American political system—ought to be far greater priorities.”

I have sometimes wondered how these same critics would have responded to Mueller’s revelations if Bernie Sanders had won the Democratic nomination in 2016 or 2020 and a continuing Russian influence operation had been instrumental in his defeat. 

It is of course conceivable that Sanders would have defeated Trump. (“Bernie would’ve won!”) It’s also conceivable that Trump would have defeated Sanders by a margin substantial enough to make it difficult to ascribe defeat to “collusion.” It’s conceivable in a fourth hypothetical that the Kremlin would’ve stood down if the race had come down to Trump vs. Sanders, satisfied that, whoever won, the American political establishment would have been rocked to its foundation. 

I tend to think scenario four is the most unlikely. Sanders’s politics tend toward anti-establishmentarian social democracy, but he is a political liberal and a staunch critic of oligarchy, whereas Trump and Putin are kindreds. And for the sake of argument, Russiagate deniers should entertain the first hypothetical anyhow—if they did so honestly, they’d have to admit they’d feel cheated, and they’d rightly expect liberal and centrist Americans to join them in seeking accountability for subversion. 

The debate over whether Trump is a fascist has unfolded along similar lines, including the parallel question of how left-wing critics would view the events of 2020 and beyond if Sanders had defeated Trump, only for Trump to lie about the outcome, mount a coup, then stage a comeback. 

It thus raises similar conundrums for the left. If Trump won by cheating, perhaps the root-and-branch destruction and rebuilding of the Democratic Party is unnecessary. Likewise, if Trump is a fascist then left-wing people and liberal and centrist people have a moral obligation to re-enter a truce and subordinate policy disagreement for the good of the world. 

Perhaps their views would be no different if the shoe were on the other foot. But it’s hard not to wonder.

This is why I think the effort to refute the allegation that Trump is a fascist so often resembles a twist on the man looking for his keys under a streetlamp. In this case the keys are there, plainly visible, but the man is pointing flashlights everywhere else, in the hope of opening door number two, into a world where Trump is easily beatable with socialism. 

I had largely tuned out this debate because to me it’s as tiresome as the Russia debate. If you follow politics closely over time, and take investigative findings and reportage seriously, these are questions with easy answers: Did Trump cheat in the 2016 election? Yes, obviously. Did he gain enough from cheating to flip the result? Impossible to say with certitude but it’s very likely. Does he constitute a departure from the Republican politics that preceded him? Yes, also obviously, even if there’s some continuity with his GOP forbearers. Did Trump come unacceptably close to holding power past January 20, 2021? Yes again. Is he making martyrs of his loyal militia men? Ayup. Is Trump an aspiring fascist? Duh. 

These critics might try to repurpose what I’ve written here and invert it. They could say I’m the one motivated to prop up Russian and fascist boogeymen because I want to make everyone left-of-center feel obligated to vote for Democrats—so long as they’re members of the establishment. 

There are surely liberals who fit that description. But it’s truly not where I’m coming from. I like Democratic candidates who challenge the party establishment. I share some of their critiques of the Democratic elite, and offer many others as well. I do happen to think it’s imperative that Trump be denied power, but I’d believe that whether his opponent was Joe Biden, or Bernie Sanders, or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., or a rotten potato.  

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One lasting thought I have about the 2016 primary, though, is that Sanders’s supporters would have benefitted from spending some time covering Congress as professional reporters. I think they would have found, as I did after many years on that job, that the bitter policy-based infighting of the 2016 primary was completely fanciful, and that Sanders’s promise of a political revolution would have run into the brick wall of sclerotic American institutions—including the institution of the filibuster, which, at the time, Sanders’ supported. 

My policy ideals match Sanders’s pretty closely, but I long ago stopped imagining they could materialize out of the institutional status quo, and have devoted most of my written advocacy to issues of institutional reform (filibuster abolition, yes, but also new statehoods, court packing etc.) that are pro-democratic predicates for making fast progress on shared goals of universal health care, antitrust reform, wealth inequality, and so on. 

So when I say Trump is a fascist, like when I say Trump colluded with Russia, it’s not a factional bankshot. It’s not to create an alibi for the Democratic establishment. It’s not to smear Trump, but to generate a correct consensus that the near-term goal of stopping him briefly supersedes any long-term left-of-center policy or ideological disputes. It’s because no one except cheaters and the insurrectionists should give cheaters and insurrectionists a pass for trying to steal power from people. That’s a bedrock principle, even if our antiquated system leaves democratic citizens with few choices, none of which align perfectly with their particular political commitments.

I wouldn’t encourage anyone, ever, to faithlessly inflate the Trump threat for political ends—not to beat Republicans and definitely not to prop up the Democratic elite. If you earnestly disagree with me that Trump is a fascist—maybe a “semi-fascist?” a “Christian nationalist?” an “authoritarian?”—that is totally fine. The same should go for those on the other side of this divide, who shouldn’t consciously or subconsciously deflate the Trump threat to gain a factional edge. But when you’re subjected to enough eye-rolling about January 6, enough willful ignorance of Trump’s deepening extremism since then, it makes you suspect that sanitizing him juuust a bit is the point. Because if Trump’s not such a menace after all, maybe we don’t have to worry about our answer to the question, What did you do in the fasc war, daddy?

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