Gloves off: Opinion writers damn Trump

Things are heating up for Donald Trump.  Yesterday -- following Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein's Friday announcement of the grand jury indictment of 13 Russians in the cyberattacks on our electoral process -- the New York Times and the Washington Post each featured a major op-ed essay by one of their senior columnists that essentially took the gloves off in getting to the truth about our president, Russia, and our democracy.

THOMAS  FRIEDMAN  (New York Times) wrote:  "Whatever Trump Is Hiding Is Hurting All of Us Now."

"Our democracy is in serious danger.  President Trump is either totally compromised by the Russians or is a towering fool, or both, but either way he has shown himself unwilling or unable to defend America against a Russian campaign to divide and undermine our democracy.

"That is, either Trump’s real estate empire has taken large amounts of money from shady oligarchs linked to the Kremlin — so much that they literally own him; or rumors are true that he engaged in sexual misbehavior while he was in Moscow running the Miss Universe contest, which Russian intelligence has on tape and he doesn’t want released; or Trump actually believes Russian President Vladimir Putin when he says he is innocent of intervening in our elections — over the explicit findings of Trump’s own C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I. chiefs.

"In sum, Trump is either hiding something so threatening to himself, or he’s criminally incompetent to be commander in chief. It is impossible yet to say which explanation for his behavior is true, but it seems highly likely that one of these scenarios explains Trump’s refusal to respond to Russia’s direct attack on our system . . . .

"Up to now, Trump has been flouting the norms of the presidency. Now Trump’s behavior amounts to a refusal to carry out his oath of office — to protect and defend the Constitution. Here’s an imperfect but close analogy: It’s as if George W. Bush had said after 9/11: 'No big deal. I am going golfing over the weekend in Florida and blogging about how it’s all the Democrats’ fault — no need to hold a National Security Council meeting.'

". . . .  America needs a president who will lead our nation’s defense against this attack on the integrity of our electoral democracy. . . .  What we have instead is a president vulgarly tweeting that the Russians are “laughing their asses off in Moscow” for how we’ve been investigating their interventions — and exploiting the terrible school shooting in Florida . . . to throw the entire F.B.I. under the bus and create a new excuse to shut down the Mueller investigation.

". . . . It is so obvious what Trump is up to: Again, he is either a total sucker for Putin or, more likely, he is hiding something that he knows the Russians have on him. . . .

"My guess is what Trump is hiding has to do with money. It’s something about his financial ties to business elites tied to the Kremlin. They may own a big stake in him. Who can forget that quote from his son Donald Trump, Jr. from back in 2008: 'Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets.' They may own our president.

". . . . But whatever it is, Trump is . . . ready to not only resist mounting a proper defense of our democracy, he’s actually ready to undermine some of our most important institutions, the F.B.I. and Justice Department, to keep his compromised status hidden.

"That must not be tolerated. This is code red. The biggest threat to the integrity of our democracy today is in the Oval Office."

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And, on the same day, the Washington Post published MAX  BOOT'S article, "Trump Is Ignoring the Worst Attack on America Since 9/11."  Max Boot calls himself a social liberal, fiscal conservative Republican.  He wrote: 

"Imagine if, after 9/11, the president had said that the World Trade Center and Pentagon could have been attacked by 'China' or 'lots of other people.' Imagine if he had dismissed claims of al-Qaeda’s responsibility as a 'hoax' and said that he 'really' believed Osama bin Laden’s denials. Imagine if he saw the attack primarily as a political embarrassment to be minimized rather than as a national security threat to be combated. Imagine if he threatened to fire the investigators trying to find out what happened.

"Imagine, moreover, if the president refused to appoint a commission to study how to safeguard America. Imagine if, as a result, we did not harden cockpit doors. If we did not create a Transportation Security Administration and a Department of Homeland Security. If we did not lower barriers between law enforcement and intelligence. If we did not pass a USA Patriot Act to enhance surveillance. And if we did not take myriad other steps to prevent another 9/11.

"That’s roughly where we stand after the second-worst foreign attack on America in the past two decades. The Russian subversion of the 2016 election did not, to be sure, kill nearly 3,000 people. But its longer-term impact may be even more corrosive by undermining faith in our democracy.

"The evidence of Russian meddling became 'incontrovertible,' in the word of national security adviser H.R. McMaster, after special counsel Robert S. Mueller III indicted 13 Russians and three Russian organizations on Friday . . .  Yet in a disturbing weekend tweetstorm, President Trump attacked the FBI, Democrats, even McMaster — anyone but the Russians. . . . 

"Trump must have thought the Russian operation was significant because he mentioned its handiwork — the release of Democratic Party documents via WikiLeaks — 137 times in the final month of the campaign. On top of that, Russian propaganda reached at least 126 million Americans via Facebook alone.

"The onslaught did not end in 2016. Russian trolls have continued . . . to sow dissension and division.  Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats just testified that Russia “views the 2018 U.S. midterm elections as a potential target for Russian influence operations.” Yet Trump has never convened a Cabinet meeting to address this threat and has resisted implementing sanctions passed by Congress.

"The president’s obstructionism makes it impossible to appoint an 11/8 Commission to study this cyber-assault and to recommend responses. Various agencies, such as the FBI, are trying to combat the Russians on their own, but there is no coordinated response. . . . [but] A greater federal role is needed, yet Trump refuses to even admit that the problem exists.

"The most benign explanation is that he is putting his vanity — he can’t have anything taint his glorious victory — above his obligation to 'protect and defend the Constitution.'  The more sinister hypothesis is that he has something to hide and, having benefited from Russia’s assistance once, hopes for more aid in 2018 and 2020. Either way, we are at war without a commander in chief."

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No longer can we continue to simply scoff and be outraged at the man who controls our nuclear codes and at the majority party in both the House and the Senate -- who so far have shown very little spunk for standing up to this incompetent, if not outright treasonous, president.

Thanks to Friedman and Boot, and other courageous journalists like them, we're beginning to get the true picture.

Anyone who thinks freedom of the press is a quaint notion that got left behind when the internet made news-spreaders (some fake, some not) of us all -- is in for a rude awakening.   Our serious media sources are doing the necessary work that our Republican controlled government is refusing to do.    That cannot and -- I dare to hope -- will not be tolerated any longer.

It's time for the truth.

Ralph