Part of me wishes the whole Russia thing would just go away. Yes, Russia interfered. Yes, Trump and his hideous brood, even if they weren’t active in soliciting Russian help, did nothing to stop Russia’s interference by, for example, making it public that Russia had offered help. And nobody cares. Trump’s supporters don’t care. The Democrats are nowhere to be seen. If they’re giving Trump and the Republicans enough rope to hang themselves, they should be tugging the other end of the rope. But all we have is their silence and that silence, right now, looks very much like not caring. If they don’t care, why should we?
Part of me also wonders if the whole Russia thing is a useful distraction from the real damage that the Republicans are doing. The Muslim ban has distracted from zillions of administrative hurdles that have been placed in the path of Muslims (and everyone else – my nephew is struggling to visit as a student) who apply for visas. The Keystone XL authorization, which did nothing more than remove one of the many obstacles to the project, distracts from the systematic dismantling of environmental protections; the Paris pull-out from executive fiat that is being used to side-line qualified scientists and civil servants whose work goes against the agenda.
Yet instead of using these as headlines, the newspapers headline ExecuTweets and ignore blatant lies such as “clean fossil fuels” (Note: all fossil fuels contain carbon and burning those fuels amounts to adding oxygen to carbon thus producing carbon dioxide: there is no such thing as a “clean” fossil fuel).
So part of me thinks that the Russia thing in particular, and Trump’s public idiocy in general, are welcome distractions from what’s going on behind the scenes: the fulfillment of the Tea Party agenda – for which Russia itself is a model. Putin’s politics are, like the Tea Party’s, divisive and xenophobic; he has no coherent vision other than clinging on to power, and milking the structure for as much as he and his family and cronies can get out of it. In his fifteen-odd years in power, has done nothing to fix Russia’s broken economy, nothing to control the oligarchs, and has hidden his inaction behind a series of distractions including the wars in Chechnya and the Crimea. He won’t pay the price for this: millions of disenfranchised and impoverished Russians (not to mention Syrians and Chechens) pay that price.
But part of me is an entrepreneur, and that part says “bring it on.” As Trump leads his country backwards into the 1950s of his imagination, he vacates a world of opportunity for those of us moving into the 2050s. Yes, the rest of us will have to try a little harder on climate change than we otherwise would. Yes, sooner or later he’ll go to war with someone because – well, that’s what embattled autocrats do. Yes, eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. But as Trump renders America irrelevant on the world stage, he makes that same world an oyster for the rest of us.