Russian spies had inflicted resounding blows against America in the century since Stalin first came to power. Their goals during and after the cold war were the same: subvert the United States, undermine its power, poison its political discourse. Now Putin had pulled off the most audacious political warfare operation since the Greeks pushed a gigantic wooden horse up to the gates of Troy. Trump would prove to be a priceless asset for the Russians’ war on democracy and the rule of law. With his inauguration, they had an agent of influence in the White House, a president who supported Putin’s geopolitical interests, who echoed his propaganda, and who tried to cover up the evidence of his act of war against America.
Four months after taking office, Trump sacked FBI director James Comey, trying to scuttle the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the Russian attack. Then he welcomed Russia’s foreign minister and ambassador into the Oval Office and boasted: “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy.… I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” His brazen act of obstruction led the Justice Department to appoint Robert Mueller, the FBI director from 2001 to 2013, to lead the criminal and counterintelligence probes of the campaign and the administration. Upon learning that Mueller was on his trail, Trump slumped back in his chair in the Oval Office and moaned: “Oh, my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.” He knew, as Mueller later put it, that “a thorough FBI investigation would uncover facts about the campaign and the President personally that the President could have understood to be crimes.”
The counterintelligence investigators confronted a national security nightmare: Was Trump in the sway of the Russians?
No known evidence proved he had been bribed with cash or blackmailed by kompromat. But he had made himself an attractive target for the Russians for thirty years. He had first visited Moscow in 1987, a greedy and vainglorious businessman seeking to build a luxury hotel across Red Square from the Kremlin in partnership with the Soviet government. He had a Czech wife to whom he was unfaithful. He had dropped hints about running for president. A generation later, Trump was still running for president, still trying to build that hotel, and still cheating on his wife, though not the same one. His real estate deals in New York, Miami, Toronto, Panama, and beyond depended in part on Russian money, as did his resurrection from bankruptcy. Whether the Russians took Trump’s measure remains a mystery. But he surely was a mark. He had vulnerabilities that their intelligence officers could exploit: his transactional sex life, his greed, his corruption, and above all his ego, in the view of the CIA veteran Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, who had served four years in Moscow, ending up as station chief. He concluded that Trump’s conduct in office was “damning evidence” that the president was, in his estimation, “a Russian agent.”
Given Trump’s towering vanity, if Putin lavished him with praise and lent him political support, he didn’t have to slip him secret marching orders. He only had to influence him and win influence in return. Putin’s years in the KGB had made him an expert at “manipulating people, blackmailing people, extorting people,” said Fiona Hill, the Kremlinologist and Putin biographer who served under Trump for two and a half years as the National Security Council’s director for Russia and Europe. “That’s exactly what a case officer does. They get a weakness, and they blackmail their assets. And Putin will target world leaders.… I firmly believe he was also targeting President Trump.” Putin’s overarching goal in his political warfare against the United States, Hill said, was creating chaos: “to divide us against each another, degrade our institutions, and destroy the faith of the American people in our democracy.” Under Trump, the divisions and the degradation of American political life deepened with each tumultuous day of his presidency.
The two men met for the first time on July 7, 2017, at a global economic forum in Hamburg. Trump confiscated his interpreter’s notes of their meeting, and the concealment continued: no formal records of his five face-to-face meetings with Putin exist. But he soon started repeating disinformation put out by Putin himself: the Ukrainians, not the Russians, had manipulated the election, running a covert operation to help Hillary Clinton. “They tried to take me down,” Trump said. He obsessed over that conspiracy theory; it was his white whale. How did he know it was true? “Putin told me,” he confided to a top White House aide.
They stood side by side in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, and a reporter asked who had perpetrated the election attack. Putin said: “As to the question of who can or can’t be believed and whether anyone can be believed: no one can be believed.” There is no truth. Trump echoed him: he said his intelligence chiefs had told him that “they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.” There are no facts.
The American national security establishment exploded in rage. Senator John McCain, who represented what remained of the conscience of the Republican Party under President Trump, called this display of fealty “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory. The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naivete, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate.” John Brennan, the CIA director under Obama, said Trump was “wholly in the pocket of Putin.” Representative Will Hurd, a Texas Republican and a veteran CIA officer, wrote: “I’ve seen Russian intelligence manipulate many people over my professional career and I never would have thought that the US President would become one of the ones getting played by old KGB hands.” James Clapper, the former national intelligence czar, noted that Putin “knows how to handle an asset, and that’s what he’s doing with the president.”
The watchdogs barked, but Trump’s caravan moved on. By his third year in power, he had accomplished what three-quarters of a century of Russian active measures had left undone. He had damaged American democracy.
He undermined the architecture of American national security. He stripped the State Department of envoys to nations great and small, he shut his eyes to the CIA’s reporting when it clashed with his invincible ignorance, and he scorned his Pentagon chiefs on matters of life and death. He defamed distinguished American ambassadors as “human scum,” trashed FBI agents as subversive traitors, and vilified CIA officers as Nazi storm troopers. He savaged four-star generals and flag officers, calling them “a bunch of dopes and babies” to their faces. Trump saw them all as the sinister forces of a “Deep State”—a cryptocracy subverting his power, a conspiracy seeking to destroy him.
He ceased America’s advocacy for freedom and justice at home and abroad. He disparaged the nation’s allies. He embraced dictators like Mohammed bin Salman and Kim Jong-un, who, like Putin, imprisoned and assassinated their opponents without fearing Trump would condemn them. He smiled upon autocratic rulers in failing democracies from India to Brazil. When great throngs of people in Hong Kong and Prague took to the streets demanding their right to liberty, the silence of the White House was absolute. By 2020, the number of electoral democracies had dwindled down to the lowest share of the world’s nations since the earliest years of the cold war, and as the scholar Larry Diamond wrote, they were dying not by sudden coups, but slowly, “step by step, through the steady degradation of political pluralism, civil liberties, and the rule of law, until the Rubicon has been crossed as if in a fog, without our knowing the precise moment when it happened.”
As Trump sawed away at the Atlantic alliance, the first three nations enfolded into NATO by the United States dropped the democratic façade. Hungary’s government became a hotbed of hatred and intolerance, its leader basking in Trump’s praise. The Czech Republic was led by a racist xenophobe. Poland’s rulers corroded the civil liberties for which its people had suffered and died. “We have not truly constructed anything new in the world,” lamented Lech Wałęsa, the living emblem of Solidarity. “And there is a loss we have suffered. The loss is the leadership position of the United States. Which is a very bad situation for the world.”
No less than Putin, Trump conducted political warfare against the American government. Attacking the rule of law, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and the legitimacy of elections, he spewed propaganda and hatred into political discourse. He winked at racists and fascists when they marched in the cause of white nationalism. He used the power of his office for personal profit. He denounced his political foes as criminals and threatened them with prison. And as Mueller racked up indictments and convictions against Russian spies and the president’s close associates, Trump spoke like a mob boss, heaping contempt on cooperating witnesses and praising those who practiced the code of silence.
Mueller’s report, released on April 18, 2019, showed precisely how the Russians had interfered in the presidential election. It laid out how Trump had lied about his conduct and then lied about his lies, sabotaging and stonewalling the investigations. It chronicled seventy-seven falsehoods Trump and his inner circle told the FBI, Congress, and the American people about their contacts with Russians. It damningly detailed ten episodes in which Trump obstructed justice. Testifying before Congress that summer, Mueller was asked point-blank if he had cleared Trump of criminal wrongdoing. “No,” Mueller said. And the president exulted that he had been exonerated.
Two weeks later, on May 3, Trump initiated an unscheduled ninety-minute telephone conversation with Putin. They talked about Ukraine, and not for the first time. Putin had Trump convinced that it was not a “real country,” but part of Russia. (He had said the same to President Bush a decade before.) He and his intelligence services had led Trump to believe that Ukraine’s corrupt power brokers had concealed their collusion with Hillary Clinton and still sought to subvert him. Under Putin’s influence, the president set out on the path to his impeachment. A few days thereafter, he ordered his national security adviser, John Bolton, and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to help him dig up dirt on his Democratic rivals from a mythical El Dorado in Ukraine. They didn’t deliver.
On July 25, the morning after Mueller testified, Trump telephoned the country’s newly elected leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, not a politician by trade but an actor who had played a president on television. Trump now took the starring role in “a fictional narrative … perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services,” in the words of Fiona Hill. Trump asked for a favor. He needed the outgoing government in Ukraine nailed for the tinfoil-hat notion that it had hacked the American election to help Clinton. And he wanted the incoming government to lodge a libel against former vice president Joe Biden: a brazen lie that he had quashed a corruption case in Kyiv against his own son. Trump’s envoys made the White House quid pro quo explicit to the Ukrainians. Give him what he wants. Put your president on CNN to proclaim corruption probes against Trump’s enemies. Then he’ll give you what you need.
Trump had put the government of the United States in the grip of a Kremlin intelligence operation, driven by Russian disinformation, in his bid for four more years in power. He was extorting a foreign leader into fabricating falsehoods about his opponents for his political benefit. He had blocked $391.5 million in military aid Congress appropriated to help Ukraine defend against the Russian occupation of their country. He kept the arms frozen pending a promise of kompromat. The Pentagon, the State Department, and the NSC all supported the aid to Ukraine. Trump illegally withheld it.
The favor Trump sought had nothing to do with fighting corruption. He was seeking to shape public opinion. He wanted to create propaganda for the coming election, clandestinely. That too was illegal. American government officials are barred by law from secret efforts to “influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies, or media,” but that was exactly what the president had in mind. And it worked. Prominent Republicans, Fox News, and right-wing talk radio all told the story that Biden was corrupt and Ukraine had conspired against the president.
“Thank God,” Putin said on November 20, “no one is accusing us of interfering in the U.S. elections anymore. Now they’re accusing Ukraine.” By then, his cyber-spies were working once again on Trump’s behalf. The GRU was taking aim at Biden; its first attacks were detected by the American cyber security firm Area 1 before the end of the year. “The timing of the GRU’s campaign in relation to the 2020 U.S. elections raises the specter that this is an early warning of what we have anticipated since the successful cyberattacks undertaken during the 2016 U.S. elections,” the company reported. Americans had forewarning, if they were listening: the Russians had the capability to flood the nation with disinformation, launch cyberattacks on the presidential vote count, or knock out a city’s electrical grid on Election Day, all to serve the cause of chaos and their chosen candidate. Yet Trump refused to mobilize his administration against a new wave of Russian influence operations and cybercrimes benefitting him.
By the time of his impeachment, it was clear that Trump might do anything to stay in power. He had happily accepted dirt on his rivals from a foreign power in the last election, he had made clear he would do it again, and now he saw that no one would stop him. He had obstructed justice in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, and paid no price. He had defied every subpoena and blocked every witness at his impeachment, without penalty. The defendant determined what his jury would hear. Trump was guilty, in the words of Senator Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, of “an appalling abuse of public trust” and “a flagrant assault on our electoral rights.” He said that “corrupting an election process in a democratic republic is about as abusive and egregious an act against the Constitution—and one’s oath—that I can imagine. It’s what autocrats do.”
And Trump governed as an autocrat after his acquittal in the Senate affirmed that he could lie and cheat to stay in power. In Trump’s vision of America, all power resided in the president. Congress could not control him. Courts could not judge him. Laws could not constrain him. He worked through his attorney general to erase the evidence of the Kremlin’s political warfare, thus “abetting a Russian covert operation to keep him in office for Moscow’s interests, not America’s,” in the words of the former CIA chief John Brennan. His lies proliferated. His insistence that his official acts were infallible required Americans to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears. As he once told his followers: “Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
Authoritarians demand loyalty above all. Expertise and experience count for nothing; speaking truth to power is fatal. The fawning and bootlicking of his allies and aides and right-wing media acolytes now resembled the high councils of North Korea, where everyone must swear undying fealty to the Dear Leader. He purged the leadership of the American intelligence and national security agencies, replacing them with dishonest and disreputable partisans. He cut off the flow of intelligence reporting to Congress and the American people, increasing the risk of dangerous miscalculation and disastrous surprise.
Trump’s response to the threat of the novel coronavirus that arose in China and engulfed America in a toxic cloud was a torrent of lying, denying, and disinformation, evoking the Soviet reaction to Chernobyl, the flailing of a failing state. The president called the warnings of a pandemic a political deception cooked up by the Democratic Party and the press to defeat him, propaganda echoed by his allies in the right-wing media. He insisted for weeks that the virus was under control; he claimed it would miraculously disappear in days to come. He resisted the very idea of testing for the virus, calculating that if the number of confirmed cases rose, the chances for his reelection would fall. And then, two months into the crisis, as the death toll started to soar and the economy began to crash, he said he had always taken the danger seriously and that he had moved swiftly to address it. That lie was worthy of Stalin himself. Autocrats everywhere rewrite history in order to maintain and magnify their power.
The president and Putin’s political warriors both kept infecting the body politic with falsehoods, inflaming anger, poisoning discourse, flooding the zone with disinformation about the pandemic and the other panic-button issues of the day. Trump’s billion-dollar reelection operation already employed digital disinformation strategies adapted from the Internet Research Agency. The IRA itself was back in business, aiming as always to tear Americans apart. As the 2020 campaign began in earnest, with the Kremlin backing Trump as the chaos candidate, there was no foretelling what he would do to stay in power, how he would react if and when the people put an end to his presidency, whether he would surrender the White House peacefully if defeated, or rule as a despot if he prevailed.
On January 29, 1981, in his first news conference as president, Ronald Reagan had proclaimed that the Russians played by different rules than Americans: “The only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that,” he said. “We operate on a different set of standards.” Those standards no longer applied. Trump had made America more like Russia. He had endangered the future of American democracy.
A free society cannot survive if its people are force-fed lies. As Vaclav Havel, a Czech playwright deemed an enemy of the state by the Kremlin and jailed for years as a political prisoner, wrote in 1978: “Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future.… It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing. Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence.… For this reason, however, they must live within a lie.” By virtue of his passionate embrace of the truth, Havel became the president of a free nation. He died in 2011, the year that Donald Trump began to construct a political empire built on lies.
Our democracy depends on truths it has held to be self-evident. We created a government of laws, not men. Our elections are free and fair. No one is above the law. The president is not a king. Trump threatened to prove these ideals false. And if America’s politics are founded on falsehoods, the weapons of political warfare will prevail, and a long darkness will descend on the last best hope of what once was known as the free world. Only a free people and a free press stand in the way of its falling.
—March 20, 2020