Some conservatives are gamely trying to defend Donald Trump's inaction for 18 months after being told his BFF Vlad was paying cash money for dead US soldiers. Most are keeping their mouths shut.
Texas Senator John Cornyn
floats the excuse that Trump is simply incompetent and.or losing his mind:
I think the president can't single-handedly remember everything ... that he's briefed on.
Well, sure. Anyone can easily understand how being told a foreign adversary is paying militants to murder Americans could slip your mind.
Yet Trump claims to have "
one of the greatest memories of all time", so it's hard to know who to believe.
I'm putting my money on the anonymous former "senior official in the Trump administration" who wrote in
A Warning, that
Trump regularly struggles to "remember what he's said or been told".
[N]ormal people who spend any time with Donald Trump are uncomfortable by what they witness. He stumbles, slurs, gets confused, is easily irritated, and has trouble synthesizing information, not occasionally but with regularity. ... [Trump often] can't remember what he's said or been told. ... [It often] appears Trump genuinely doesn't remember important facts. ... These are events that affect millions of Americans, yet they don't seem to stick in his brain. ... You can see why behind closed doors his own top officials deride him as an "idiot" and a "moron" with the understanding of a "fifth or sixth grader."
Aaron Blake of the Washington Post
writes that the White House's defense of Trump is inching towards: He doesn't read.
While the White House is playing word games with the word "brief", the upshot is Trump may have been provided with the intelligence, but didn't bother to read it. Which makes perfect sense, especially in this case, since Trump likes reading about as much as he likes salad and he won't tolerate any bad words being said about Russia.
Blake rightly observes that "it's stunning the White House's defense here seems to be Trump simply didn't bother to learn about all of this, even though the information was provided to him".
The Post reported in early 2018 that
Trump doesn't read his Daily Briefings:
For much of the past year, President Trump has declined to participate in a practice followed by the past seven of his predecessors: He rarely if ever reads the President's Daily Brief, a document that lays out the most pressing information collected by U.S. intelligence agencies from hot spots around the world.
Trump has opted to rely on an oral briefing of select intelligence issues in the Oval Office rather than getting the full written document delivered to review separately each day, according to three people familiar with his briefings.
But even when it comes to oral briefings, it's a chore getting Trump to concentrate and
aides are reluctant to even mention Russia:
Current and former officials said that his daily intelligence update ... is often structured to avoid upsetting him.
Russia-related intelligence that might draw Trump's ire is in some cases included only in the written assessment and not raised orally, said a former senior intelligence official familiar with the matter. In other cases, Trump's main briefer — a veteran CIA analyst — adjusts the order of his presentation and text, aiming to soften the impact.
"If you talk about Russia, meddling, interference — that takes the PDB off the rails," said a second former senior U.S. intelligence official. ...
"If you say 'Russian interference,' to him it's all about him," said a senior Republican strategist who has discussed the matter with Trump's confidants. "He judges everything as about him."
So this is the strongest defense of Trump: He doesn't read or pay attention to what he's told, he can't remember anything, and he throws a temper tantrum whenever Russia is mentioned. When your best defense is that Trump acts and thinks like a four-year-old child, it's probably time to admit it's a lost cause.
Vox's Zack Beauchamp explains the scandal and
posits three scenarios:
1. Trump was never briefed on the intelligence, and all of these intelligence officials saying otherwise are lying to the press.
2. Trump was briefed on the intelligence several times and wasn't paying attention, didn't think it was important or credible enough to pay attention to, or just forgot about it despite being told about it repeatedly.
3. Trump was briefed on the intelligence and is lying about it.
Beauchamp writes that #1 "is extremely hard to believe" and that the New York Times's reporting "has been extremely, almost surprisingly specific". #2 means that Trump "might not remember being briefed about a Russian plot to kill American soldiers", which in his case, is "certainly believable".
Trump has used a similar excuse with respect to the coronavirus pandemic, blaming the intelligence community for supposedly not warning him early enough. Yet Trump was warned about the virus in November 2019.
Since Trump and his staff lie constantly about everything and Trump has a warm relationship with Putin, #3 seems most plausible. Far from directly confronting Putin on this issue, Trump has "actually worked to better Russia's international image".
As Slate's Fred Kaplan
writes:
[W]hichever version of the story is true, he and his senior advisers come off looking very bad—immoral, vaguely traitorous, astoundingly incompetent, or all three. ... What did the president know, and when did he know it? ... [T]he answer is almost irrelevant. We have a president who either doesn't know or doesn't care what's happening in the world—and a gaggle of senior advisers whose main job is to comply with his whims and cover up his inadequacies.
It's hard to deny that Donald Trump is knowingly allowing Vladimir Putin to get away with acts of war against the United States.
