In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, there were numerous reports that Vladimir Putin was interfering in the process on behalf of his preferred candidate, Donald Trump, because Putin perceived that Trump would be far more useful than Hillary Clinton in advancing Putin's geopolitical goals, both for the former Soviet republics, and Europe beyond, especially the former Warsaw Pact nations. At the time, their was evidence that this was in fact happening, which is separate from the issue of whether or not this interference ultimately cost Clinton the election. The mere fact that it was happening should have terrified people enough to take it seriously, and take steps to blunt its impact on both the campaigning and the voting. We did not do that and, as a result, we may never know for certain if the election outcome was an honest one.
We do, however, know that it was a disastrous one. Honestly or not, Trump was elected, and wasted little if any time in playing the interests of the U.S. and our NATO allies right into Putin's hands. His vociferous and venomous attacks on our allies, combined with comments about Putin that suggested he viewed him as a potential date rather than a head of state, gave Putin all the cover he needed to begun advancing his plans to re-establish the pre-1989 status quo. And, just as we may never know the extent to which Putin helped Trump to become President, there is still much we do not and may never know (as I recently wrote) about the extent to which, as President, Trump enabled Putin to advance the planning for the current fighting between Russia and Ukraine.
Well, perhaps not completely. But now, we have a bit of an inkling from an unlikely source who can, perhaps, in this instance (although not generally) be trusted to be telling the truth.
John Bolton, my fellow Baltimorean, and a war hawk's war hawk back in the days when the second Bush Administration needed a national-security pretext to invade Iraq and secure oil profits for Republican donors, stated a few days ago, unequivocally, that Trump's actions made it "that much easier" for Putin to invade Ukraine. Bolton also bolstered that revelation with specific details, describing how Trump complained about the harshness of actions taken by his foreign policy staff against Putin, and noting that Trump's praise of Putin for being "very savvy" was "embarrassing" for the U.S.. (No kidding, John.) Anyway, you can read about this and a bit more right here.
Not the whole story, to be sure, but enough of it from someone who was in a position to know what was and wasn't going on. Still begs the question, of course, of what we don't know, perhaps all the more so. For example, in the conversations between Putin for which, contrary to standard security processes, their is absolutely no third-party verification whatsoever. We will probably never know what was disclosed by Trump to Putin during those conversations. Or, for that matter, what Putin instructed Trump to do. And in exchange for unknown favors.
Back in 1962, at the peak of Cold War tensions, when the world came to the brink of a nuclear conflict during the Cuban Missile Crisis, "The Manchurian Candidate" was playing in American movie theaters. It told the then-inconceivable story (or so it seemed) about an American POW being brainwashed by Communists to serve their interests as an assassin. The movie was based on a book by Richard Condon, a novelist who is credited for a principle known as "Condon's Law": "When you don't know the whole truth, the worst you can imagine is bound to be close."
It's a principle that the movie does a powerful job of illustrating. But whatever consolation audiences could have taken in 1962 that the movie was just fiction can provide no comfort to Americans who now have to face the probability that the 45th President of the United States was, in fact, a Manchurian Candidate.
You think that's bad enough? Well, it may even be worse than that. We may, in the current state of national and international crisis, have other Manchurian Candidates to deal with.
Here is one example.
Marco Rubio, who will be running this fall for a third term as a U.S. Senator from Florida, was positioned for a long time by mainstream media as the next big thing in American politics. A Cuban refugee from a theoretically "purple" state (and the third-largest state by population, in any case), with an initial reputation as a "moderate" Republican, he seemed to fit the profile of what legacy newspapers and broadcasters look for as the ideal presidential candidate. And, to be fair, during the early part of his career, his actions lent some weight to that image. Most notably, he was part of the so-called "Gang of Eight" that almost got comprehensive immigration reform across the finish line, before House Republicans decided that they didn't want to do Democrats any favors in an election year. How many refugees, from Ukraine and elsewhere, might be better off today if the CIR bill hadn't been blocked?
Whatever the answer to that rhetorical question may be, Rubio apparently got the message from it. He has spent much of his time since then flipping and flopping on issue after issue, and he did it well enough to make it to a second Senate term. But, along the way, he decided to take a detour into presidential politics in 2016, which led to a verbal sparring match between Rubio and Trump that was conducted at roughly an eighth-grade level. Trump won the nomination and the election, Rubio managed to return to the Senate despite his humiliation at the "little hands" (as Rubio called them) of the man who had described him as "Little Marco," and guess what happened after that? Rubio became subservient enough to Trump to earn Trump's "Complete and Total Endorsement" for his current re-election bid.
And there seems to be no boundaries to that subservience, as Rubio has begun to act as though, like Trump, he too is a Putin "sleeper cell." Today, I learned on Twitter that he posted a tweet in which he revealed an image from an Internet video conference between Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, and a bipartisan congressional delegation. This conference, understandably, was supposed to be confidential; unfortunately, that consideration did not stop Rubio from attempting to leverage an image from it for political advantage. Or, maybe, that didn't matter. If, like Trump, he is now working on behalf of another country, maybe he saw it as a win-win proposition.
Well, I don't. This only makes me wonder how many other members of the Republican Party, in and out of office, are "sleeper cells." Or Manchurian Candidates. How many of those "Candidates" will be candidates for office on the ballots this fall. How many of them have been working in state legislatures this past year to "reform" voting laws in such a way as to put more "Candidates" into office at all levels of government? And, as a consequence of all this, how close are we to becoming a client state of Putin? How long will it be before we share what may at this point be the fate of Ukraine?
I don't have the answers to those questions. But the answers matter. To you, to me, to all of us. And we'd better start getting the answers right now. Just to make sure this election isn't our last one.
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