Donald Trump Is Both Candidate And Insider Threat

Mainstream reporters should cover him as both; Democrats should campaign against him AND try to foil his schemes.

(Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

It came as little surprise, because he’d been clear all along that he intended to hide or ignore or misclassify new cases of COVID-19. But on June 20, 2020, when Donald Trump held his first mid-pandemic indoor campaign rally—a super-spreading event that would ultimately kill one of his most high-profile supporters—he confessed.

“When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases,” Trump said. “So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’”

Shocking, but consistent.

Trump disdained domestic COVID-19 surveillance, because when testing at long last became widely available, it provided Americans a much clearer picture of the prevalence and severity of the coronavirus pandemic: Thousands and thousands of new infections each day, a few percent of which would turn out to be fatal. Yet Trump remained consumed by magical thinking—not about the deadliness of the disease, but his ability to control its political and economic consequences. If he could keep enough people in the dark, he thought, workplaces could stay open, the stock market might hum along, he could stand for re-election without ever having to prove his mettle in a crisis.

But all the while he knew this approach would cost thousands of innocent lives. On February 7, 2020, when most Americans were still in the dark, he admitted to Bob Woodward that the coronavirus was airborne and lethal. “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” he said. “It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus. This is deadly stuff.” Just two weeks later he sidelined CDC’s top respiratory disease expert, Nancy Messonnier, for telling the public what he’d only shared in private with a reporter whose book wouldn’t hit shelves for many months.

Around the same time, when tests were hard to come by in the U.S. and Trump hoped to keep it that way, he learned Vladimir Putin was petrified of COVID-19—and so he sent scarce test-processing machines to him directly. A token of affection.

Putin, who’s shrewder than Trump, recognized that the U.S. public would be livid if word of this generous gift got out. To protect his most useful idiot, Putin advised Trump to tell no one.

It befits the circularity of the universe, the torturous déjà vu of the Trump era, that we have Bob Woodward to thank for this revelation, too—four years after the last one. It’s the first of at least two Putin-related Trump scoops in his forthcoming book War. And we know he got it right, because the Kremlin confirmed his reporting this week before Trump could deny it.

Why Moscow provided confirmation is an interesting riddle. Absent all surrounding evidence, it’d raise the question of whether Trump had found himself on the outs with Putin. But we have good reason to believe that’s not the case—in part because Woodward’s other big Trump-Putin scoop is that the two kleptocrats have held “maybe as many as seven” private telephone conversations since Trump left office in January 2021.

Perhaps Putin now expects Trump will lose the 2024 election, and has decided to cut him loose. Less optimistically, but more parsimoniously, he may reason that lying would be useless because he and Trump lost control of the paper trail. Little could make this revelation more damaging than a false denial, quickly contradicted by hard evidence.

In either case, though, these revelations come at a critical moment. Yes, they call to mind Trump’s most disqualifying failures and deceits. But they’re more than that. They compel both news outlets and the Harris campaign to contemplate the closing weeks of the election anew—to ask themselves what these revelations mean, and what they portend in the immediate future as the campaign draws to a close.

NO CONFUSION, YES COLLUSION

For news qua news, most outlets have underplayed the Woodward revelation the same way they’ve underplayed basically every Trump outrage since the January 6 insurrection. Political reporters are desensitized to Trump’s corruption, almost to a person. They jettisoned the ideal of holding both candidates to a single standard long ago. They never ask themselves whether they’d hit the phones if Kamala Harris were caught red handed in the same way—though of course they would. The only test they apply in their heads is whether any diehard Trump supporters would stop supporting him if they got wind of his latest scandal. Since the answer to that question is invariably no, they tend to give short shrift to his faithlessness. They certainly give it short shrift when it’s brought to light by competitor outlets.

On the other hand, we’re talking about a Bob Woodward book, slated for publication a couple weeks before the election. The author and the timing guarantee these scoops a place of prominence in the discourse, at least for this week.

But the news isn’t merely the facts reported. It’s more than just a reminder that Trump has a fondness for dictators and a particularly weird relationship with one of them. It’s also a reminder that he’s a conniver, and, for him, October of an election year is conniving season.

Trump is both a candidate and a direct threat to the integrity of the election, and political media outlets should cover him as such.

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The backdrop here is instructive.

Before Trump, even the most deceitful politicians feared getting caught telling outright lies. They believed, in most cases rightly, that flagrant lying was risky; that getting caught would leave them severely damaged. On that score, Trump benefits from more than just collective desensitization. He pioneered the novel method of conscripting armies of loyalists to repeat his lies, or tell lies for him, then work after the fact to fabricate exculpatory evidence. (Haitian immigrants aren’t eating dogs, you say? Well then explain this grainy photo of a black man carrying a goose!)

Lying to hurricane victims and the public at large about disaster-relief efforts is admittedly quite different than carrying on secret relationships with national enemies. But they share a touchpoint insofar as they’re both sordid examples of subversive intent. He’ll subvert foreign policy for personal gain. He’ll subvert emergency response for personal gain. What do we think he’ll do about the casting and counting of votes?

Reminders like these shouldn’t be necessary—Trump tried to steal the last election by force after he lost. But Trump’s conduct contains more meaning than descriptive text alone can convey.

The first-order purpose of Trump’s hurricane lies was to deceive people who don’t live in disaster regions into believing that Biden and Harris abandoned Americans. The first-order consequence (and in Trump’s mind, the ancillary benefit) was to endanger and immiserate his own supporters, hampering the broader rescue effort. But the episode also served to expose (or resurface) something elemental about him: That he will deploy subversive methods whenever necessary to gain an edge, including in the operation of the election itself.

With that stipulated, why is Trump speaking with Putin so regularly? Who could possibly unlock this impenetrable mystery.

What Unscrupulous Conduct Does Trump Have In Store For November isn’t just a parlor game for me and readers of this newsletter—it’s a story that reporters should chase on their own. Or, they can carry on as they have the past nine years, waking up each morning and going about their work as if born anew.

CLASSIFIED WARFARE

The Harris campaign responded to the Woodward revelations as best it could, given its limitations and the crowdedness of the news environment. Harris reacted with righteous indignation; Tim Walz folded the news into his stump speech; Wilmington produced a “web ad,” which is like a high-tech press release saying “we think this is an important story.”

But the campaign can’t really be the prime mover on a lead like this. For it to swell into an all consuming scandal, Harris needs more shoes to drop closer to election day. That’s on reporters, who should rouse themselves and chase the story as if it centered around any other politician. If we had a time machine, it’d be on Senate Democrats, who could and should have spent more of their time in power scrounging for evidence of Trump’s foreign corruption. And it’s on the Biden administration—which, thanks to her two-hatted role, Harris should be able to sway.

Months ago, long before Harris took the helm of the party, I argued across a series of articles that Biden should tell the public what his administration knows about Trump’s foreign collusion.

I can’t think of a better time or pretext than the days before the election, after we’ve learned Trump and Putin have a secret, ongoing relationship.

Biden’s director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, told Woodward cryptically, “I would not purport to be aware of all contacts with Putin. I wouldn’t purport to speak to what President Trump may or may not have done.” That is quite different than saying we weren’t aware of these calls, and couldn’t possibly know what transpired on them.

It would be a dramatic step, out of character for Biden, to make this information public. But it is something he could do quickly, and with no qualms. He’s a lame duck; he can brush off the norms police and the caterwauling GOP. He is the ultimate customer of all the intelligence community’s surveillance products, and the original classification authority. Even if there were some prohibition against it (which there is not) he’s now presumptively immune from prosecution for official acts. If I were Harris, I’d privately implore him to do it; if I were him, I’d do it happily.

I want to stipulate that on points, Harris has run a good campaign. She’s leading Trump in polls, and well situated to win the election. I stand by everything I wrote Wednesday in my case against bedwetting, and will continue to do so until she slips, or a major strategic failure becomes apparent.

But I also think this: Everything that happens in an election can go out the window if public attention diverts late toward something disruptive and upsetting. If you spend the final month of your campaign trying to consolidate swing voters, only to become ensnared in a governing failure or a scandal—or even a well-orchestrated pseudoscandal—all that work can go to waste and then some.

Trump understands this. It’s why he schemes the way he does. But he’s vulnerable to these same dynamics.

In a month, nobody will remember that Harris drank Miller High Life with Stephen Colbert, but they will remember if, three days before the election, the New York Times publishes an exclusive report on the salacious contents of Trump’s secret conversations with Vladimir Putin. Or the Washington Post confirms that Trump’s health records contain an undisclosed disease diagnosis. Or that he did, in fact, accept $10 million from Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. Or if we see leaked video footage of his goons pushing a cemetery worker to the ground. Or…

Harris should keep her packed schedule of interviews and rallies, she should try to farm more endorsements, and lead by example in disaster zones and all the stuff she’s already doing. But not at the expense of shaking loose the kinds of salacious revelations that could put marginal voters off Trump just as they prepare to cast their ballots. In this case, regret lies only down the high-ground path, where we only learn the full truth long after Trump returns to power.