Is Timothy Snyder stuck in Cold War fantasies? (He certainly expresses immense confidence in Ukraine's abilities.)

Timothy Snyder is a respected historian of Eastern Europe. He has been very engaged with the controversies around the Russia-Ukraine War. Yale University has made available his lecture from a course on “Timothy Snyder: The Making of Modern Ukraine.” It’s very much worth following. Though the title is about “modern Ukraine,” he takes the story back to the days of the Vikings. (Yes, Vikings!) (1)

He also has some excellent analysis of the democracy-vs.-autocracy problem facing democracies worldwide.

But on contemporary foreign policy questions, especially on the Russia-Ukraine War, Snyder has an unfortunate tendency to repeat some of the worst aspects of the old Cold War mentality, particularly Russophobia and threat inflation. And those aspects of his view are painfully obvious in this recent presentation of his. (2)

The “Russia-Russia-Russia” phenomenon

The Democrats’ emphasis on Trump being some kind of Russian puppet had unfortunately repercussions. One of the dumber moments of the 2016 Presidential campaign was during the last debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Trump made a vague comment about how having good relations between the US and Russia wouldn’t be a bad thing and then said that Putting had not respect for Hillary.

She responded, “That's because he'd rather have a puppet [Trump] as president.” To which Trump snapped back, “You’re the puppet.”

The various official investigations of Russian activity in the 2016 election have established clearly that Russia did try to influence the election.

The problem in telling what that may mean has to do with the fact that countries try to influence each other’s politics all the time. That’s why there are international arrangements and national laws that define what is officially acceptable practice and what it not. So, giving or selling a classified document to a foreign power (or to anybody) without formal direction is illegal. Agreeing with some official statement or foreign-policy position of a foreign country is not illegal. In fact, pretty much all of foreign diplomacy is about countries agreeing with each other on many things and disagreeing on others.

That’s why it’s important to have professional press institutions that provide professional journalistic analysis of such things. And why it’s also important for press critics and readers to pay close attention to the potential conflicts of news agencies and their sources. When a government makes up something to discredit another country or otherwise to manipulate that country and other international actors, then, well, that’s manipulation. How clever or responsible that may be or not, it’s important to recognize that it’s a normal thing.

That’s also why I.F. Stone’s comment from 1967 is still so relevant, particularly with relevant to wars and rumors of war: “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.” (3)

Of course, countries pay attention to deliberated “disinformation” being propagated by other countries. That’s just how this thing works. Some of those anti-disinformation efforts are more substantial than others. The EU vs. Disinfo site is one of the more lightweight ones I’ve encountered. But the main thing for voters and news consumers is to pay attention to the quality of information sources.

Snyder on the current war

There seems to be a broad understanding among foreign policy and defense observers that Ukraine has lost the current war, whether we date it from 2014 or 2022. Some of them, especially ones working directly or indirectly for defense contractors, may not find it convenient to say so publicly. And Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government seems to think actively continuing the war is what the Ukrainian people want.

Snyder’s position on the war has been that it was essential for the West to support Ukraine in the war and the more armaments the better, and the faster they are delivered, the better. He doesn’t make any criticisms of the blunderbuss way the US handled NATO expansion when it came to Ukraine, in particular. Because his operative principle seems to be: Russia evil, NATO good, always and everywhere.

He frames his argument by claiming that Ukraine is fighting for “the West,” which is true as a secondary matter, It’s mainly fighting Russian aggression against its legitimate territory.

But he argues that Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian invasion has saved the West from what Synder apparently thinks is Russia’s immediate desire to start seizing the territory of current NATO members. He also claims that Ukraine’s actions the last 2+ years have deterred China from invading Taiwan (!?) and contributed far more than any other country to nuclear nonproliferation in the last two years.

What is he smoking? He’s definitely not an adherent of the “realist” school of foreign policy thought.

Snyder also argues that Russia has said clearly that it intends to incorporate all of Ukraine. I’ve been following John Mearsheimer’s analysis as well as those of analysts who prefer a “restrainer” foreign policy for the US. Mearsheimer, I think, has been giving at least one interview a week on the Russia-Ukraine war. As annoying as Mearsheimer’s “offensive-realist” foreign policy framework can be (and often is!), he pays close attention to this war. He has repeatedly said that the Russians have never explicitly said they intend to take over all of Ukraine. (Snyder has some comments on Mearsheimer’s position on the war in the question period.)

Snyder also argues that Russia has said clearly that it intends to incorporate all of Ukraine. I’ve been following John Mearsheimer’s analysis as well as those of analysts who prefer a “restrainer” foreign policy for the US. Mearsheimer, I think, has been giving at least one interview a week on the Russia-Ukraine war. As annoying as Mearsheimer’s “offensive-realist” foreign policy framework can be (and often is!), he pays close attention to this war. He has repeatedly said that the Russians have never explicitly said they intend to take over all of Ukraine. (Snyder has some comments on Mearsheimer’s position on the war in the question period.)

Snyder is setting up a kind of stab-in-the-back theory of the outcome of the Russia-Ukraine War: Ukraine lost because the West was too wimpy in supporting the war!

The NATO interest in Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian invasion

At this point, there seems to be no realistic prospect of Ukraine taking back lost territory in the immediate future. Russia has a considerably larger supply of potential recruits and draftees, and Ukraine is obviously struggling to keep its military’s ranks filled. The first two years of the war meant that artillery for not only Ukraine but NATO countries has been running short. Of course there are plenty of companies that are happy to provide replacements. But they can’t just conjure them out of the air.

NATO also just added two new members, Sweden and Finland. While Ukraine is not a NATO member and NATO countries have no mutual-defense treaties with Ukraine, the NATO mutual-defense obligation does include countries sharing borders with Russia, Sweden and Finland included. As a very practical matter – which in this case does involve the much-overused “credibility” concern – the NATO countries have to give preference to shoring up their military deterrence against Russia over Ukraine’s needs. And despite French President Emmanuel Macron’s foolish speculations, sending NATO combat troops to Ukraine to fight the Russians directly is a highly unlikely prospect.

As a strictly practical matter, it made sense for NATO to provide substantial assistance to Ukraine’s resistance against Russia’s 2022 invasion. That doesn’t reduce the need for the West to understand what the very negative practical effects of NATO’s reckless gamble with membership for Ukraine have been. The US in particular wanted to get Ukraine into NATO, and Russia wanted to keep it out. Russia has won that round for the foreseeable future.

Of course, they won that round by seizing Ukrainian territory in violation of international law, and illegally incorporating Crimea and the provinces of Luhansk and Donbas into Russia. The US is on the side of international law on that one, even while it’s trampling it into the dirt by supporting Israel’s gruesome war-and-starvation campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza.

At the moment, the best-case scenario for Ukraine would seem to be a Korean-style long-term ceasefire/armistice in which Ukraine would not be required to renounce sovereignty over their lost territory. But, as we’ve heard many times during this war, the Ukrainians themselves will have to decide what kind of peace they are willing to accept. And any deal the Russians offer them at this point will be bad from Ukraine’s view.

There is also a moral question for the US and other NATO countries whether it is right to continue to arm Ukraine to carry on a war that has no good end in sight – if the Russians offer any kind of half-workable settlement in the current situation.

But if the US doesn’t take the moral questions raised by Benjamin Netanyahu’s war against Gazans seriously enough to cut off military aid over them, it’s doubtful that actual moral considerations will weigh heavily on the Biden’s Administration’s policy toward Ukraine, either.

And, of course, a second Trump Administration wouldn’t even pretend to bother about moral considerations. Who is offering the best bribes to Trump and his family and businesses will be decisive on most foreign policy issues.

There are a lot of questions about the future of NATO, even if Trump doesn’t get elected again. Asking NATO to take a major presence in East Asia seems like a very risky undertaking.

Argentinian footnote

Finally, there is a silly footnote to the current NATO discussions. El Loco, aka, Argentine’s ultra-right President Javier Milei, wants Argentina to become a “global partner” of NATO. Also: “On Thursday, the U.S. government announced it was providing Argentina with $40 million in foreign military financing for the first time in more than two decades — a grant that allows key U.S. allies like Israel to buy American weaponry.” (4)

What are Biden’s people thinking? “Defense Minister Petri hailed the acquisition of the advanced warplanes as ‘the most important military purchase since Argentina’s return to democracy’ in 1983.” (5) In other words, since the military dictatorship of 1976-1983. But of all the democratically-minded national government Argentina has had since then, El Loco’s is the one the Biden Administration wants to boost with lavish military sales. El Loco wants to stop any further investigation into that dictatorship’s many crimes.

Yet another move not obviously compatible with the Administration’s preferred Democracy vs. Autocracy framing of the US international position.

Notes:

(1) First lecture in the series: Timothy Snyder: The Making of Modern Ukraine. Class 1: Ukrainian Questions Posed by Russian Invasion. YaleCourses YouTube channel 09/03//2022. <https://youtu.be/bJczLlwp-d8?si=iTmH-rHz5l4Cs6YK> (Accessed: 2024-21-04).

(2) The Peril of Slowness: American Mistakes during Russia’s War of Aggression in Ukraine. Foreign Policy Association YouTube channel 04/08/2024.<https://youtu.be/JVs2y-YeiFM?si=2dH5egHVw602EQsf> (Accessed: 2024-21/or-04).

(3) From: In a Time of Torment, 1961-1967 (1967), 317. Source: I. F. Stone. Wikiquote 02/23/2024 <https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=I._F._Stone&oldid=3471027> (Accessed: 2024-21-04).

(4) Argentina asks to join NATO as President Milei seeks a more prominent role for his nation. AP News 04/19/2024. <https://apnews.com/article/president-milei-argentina-nato-f16s-military-bf56ef4b18646438500c921250c66e93> (Accessed: 2024-21-04).

See also: Kollman, Raúl (2024): Milei y su gobierno como sucursal de Washington. Página/12 21.04.2024. <https://www.pagina12.com.ar/730573-milei-y-su-gobierno-como-sucursal-de-washington> (Accessed: 2024-21-04).

And: Argentina formally asks to become ‘global partner’ of NATO. Buenos Aires Times 18.04.2024. <https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/argentina/argentine-defence-minister-holds-high-level-nato-meeting.phtml> (Accessed: 2024-21-04).

Belarus' aircraft hijacking and its repercussions

Timothy Snyder is stressing the importance of the EU responding to the air piracy just committed by Belarus on a Ryanair flight legally passing through its airspace traveling from one EU country to another, Greece to Lithuania. (Terror vs. the Truth in Belarus Substack 05/24/2021)

Sergei Kuznetsov reports on the hijacking in Why the Belarusian journalist was snatched from the Ryanair flight Politico EU 05/24/2021:

Both [Roman] Protasevich and a female companion, Sofia Sapega, were reportedly arrested during the enforced stopover — an incident denounced by leaders around the world as a “hijacking.” Ryanair called the forced landing an “act of aviation piracy.”

The measures to seize Protasevich were extraordinary, and they now expose Belarus to the fury of the EU and U.S. and to potential sanctions, but for Alexander Lukashenko, the longtime leader of Belarus, the threat posed by Protasevich and other bloggers and journalists is extraordinary as well.

Protasevich, 26, is among a group of inventive journalists who have detailed the violence used by forces loyal to Lukashenko to help him hang on to power. They’ve also covered the mass protests sparked by the August presidential elections — widely considered to have been stolen by Lukashenko — and also actively coordinated them. [my emphasis]

Snyder in his column gives this background:

Protasevich is important because he told the truth about his own country. Last August the Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, sought to stage yet another fake electoral victory. His usual tactic of disqualifying and arresting opponents was not working. The wife of one of his opponents ran against him, and almost certainly won. After Lukashenko announced a victory anyway, Belarusians protested peacefully in very large numbers for months. Protasevich at the time worked for NEXTA, a Telegram channel that provided Belarusians with the facts about what was happening in their own country. [my emphasis]

This kind of action - having a jet fighter force down a civil aircraft legally passing through national airspace on what was apparently a false pretence that there was some kind of terrorist danger to the plane, then arresting two people on the flight - is definitely not any kind of normal procedure. Austrian political scientist Martin Malek in the discussion referenced just below called it "a very unusual hijacking of an aircraft."

And while people in many parts of the world may assume that news from Belarus is about some inscrutable event in a mysterious eastern European country. But air piracy is something that in itself has worldwide implications. And in this case, it was a national government committing the piracy. Molly Olmstead explains in How Much Will the Belarus Flight Incident Mess Up Air Travel? Slate 05/25/2021 asks Ian Petchenik of Flightradar24:

How big of a deal is this?

It’s a huge deal. There’s very specific conventions in international law that relate to the operation of international air traffic. And this is really one of those things where it’s very clear that you’re not supposed to do this. This could have ended so badly, beyond the current situation, which ended terribly. What happens if that pilot misinterprets what the Ryanair aircraft is doing? What happens if they can’t communicate clearly? There’s so many things that could have gone wrong from 39,000 feet, when they met each other.

Then, on top of all of that, what happens now, in a real situation, where there is possibly a bomb on a plane? Does the pilot believe the air traffic controller who’s relaying that message? If there are all of a sudden fighter jets escorting the aircraft, is there a second thought there? One of the rules is if a fighter jet comes up on your wing, you should listen to that person, because if you are under threat, they have your safety in mind. So now do I second guess all that? Question if it’s false information about an emergency?

The Institute for Human Sciences (IHS) in Vienna held a Zoom discussion organized by Snyder on the incident, The Hijack: Europe, Belarus, and the Abduction of Roman Protasevich 25 May 2021:

Belarus is a former Soviet republic which briefly had democratic elections after its independence. The office of President was established in 1994 and Alexander Lukashenko was elected to the office, which he has filled ever since. Professor Viktoras Bachmetjevas of Lithuania argues that the 1994 election was a legitimate democratic one. But Lukashenko has become increasing authoritarian. And after the election of August 2020 which the public widely regarded as fraudulent, protests against his regime became widespread.

Bachmetjevas points out that much of the industry in Belarus is still state-owned, a legacy of the Soviet era. Belarus has a formal unity agreement with Russia. But Belarus under Lukashenko the last 27 years has tried to strike a balance between the EU and Russia. Fiona Hill said in the conference that the Belarus-Russia union treaty was mainly symbolic, but has become more substantive a relationship over time.

A big consideration is how the EU sees the relationship between Belarus and Russia and how they assess the risks involved. Hill argues that if Lukashenko had been successfully voted out in 2020, Putin would have been concerned that would endanger his own plans for a Russia renewal in combination with Belarus. So Lukashenko is now strongly aligned with Moscow. She thinks he is trying to suppress the opposition to make him seem more valuable to Putin.

She recounts how in 2018, Lukashenko was in a phase of tilting more toward Europe, trying to get more European and American investors, in order to get some distance from Russia with a neoliberal/technocratic approach, hoping the move would help him in the 2020 election.

She also makes the important point that Belarus is the only land link to Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg). Although even then, direct land access would also have to be granted by Poland or Lithuania.

In that same discussion, Sławomir Sierakowski, editor-in-chief of the left-leaning Polish journal Krytyka Polityczna, talks about NEXTA, the Telegram channel for which Protasevich wrote. He describes how young organizers were able to coordinate the massive post-election protests in Belarus. He thinks Lukaschnko's motives in the Ryanair hijacking include (1) revenge; (2) context - to squeeze Protasevich for information about other organizers (3) and, state terror, to scare other dissidents. Sierakowski stressed that Protasevich is in real danger now.

The IHS discussion highlights a number of issues in EU response to this incident. On the one hand, the issue really is important, both because of the human rights dangers to the two people kidnapped and the broader implications for air safety and international cooperation against real terrorist threats. But, as in most international sanctions against nations, the pressure on the leaders has to be considered along with the effects on the population and what implications that might have on Belarus' political system and international alignments. Despite the talk for the last couple of decades about "smart sanctions," any sanctions that are tough enough to push a country's leaders to change policy are almost certain to have significant detrimental effects on the people of the country.

It's also important in this and other situations to remember that the legitimate interest of political actors in one country in human rights and democracy in another country function on a continuum from democratic internationalism and international civil society interactions, on one end, to governments meddling in other countries' internal politics. The fact that a country or a party or a national leader may view any external criticism or any cooperation by people in other countries with dissidents from their own country as subversion or a hostile intelligence operation doesn't mean that they aren't legitimate civil society interactions between people of different countries. It also doesn't mean that that such accusations are always wrong. Because governments do meddle in each others internal politics and intelligence agencies do sometimes carry out hostile operations in other countries, even in peacetime. (Ask anyone from Latin America about how that works.)

So whenever we try to understand situations like the one in Belarus including this recent act of air piracy, we have to be able to walk and talk at the same time. And to remember some cynical truisms like, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you."

A fascist propaganda film at the January 6 Trump rally just before the Capitol riot?

Jason Stanley uses the f-word (fascism) in analyzing a film that was part of the Trump rally on January 6 that directly insight the storming of the US Capitol building. (Movie at the Ellipse: A Study in Fascist Propaganda Just Security 01/04/2021).

The article gives a blow-by-blow analysis of a film that strikes authoritarian themes common on the radical right and also in the Republican Party, although it may be redundant at this point to talk about the Republican Party as something distinct from the radical right. (The film is embedded in the article, though I'm not embedding it here.)

He explains that we can safely assume that the message of the video was one that the pro-coup-attempt Trump White House produced, whatever Trump's actual direct role may have been in making it:

Each of us can decide what moral responsibility Trump personally has for a video to rouse his supporters at the rally. How much of a role the White House or Trump himself may have played in deciding to show the video and sequencing it immediately after Giuliani’s speech, we don’t know. But it is worth noting that the New York Times recently reported that by early January, “the rally would now effectively become a White House production” and, with his eye ever on media production, Trump micromanaged the details. “The president discussed the speaking lineup, as well as the music to be played, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversations. For Mr. Trump, the rally was to be the percussion line in the symphony of subversion he was composing from the Oval Office,” the Times reported. [my emphasis]

It's important to remember that the Big Lie of the "stolen election" of 2020 is currently a shared framework within the Republican Party generally, including the two main groups that Timothy Snyder recently labeled the Gamers and the Breakers. (Think of the Gamers as the Liz Cheney faction, the Breakers as the Josh Hawley/Marjorie Taylor Greene/"Gym" Jordan faction.)

Stanley takes a shot at the vexed question of defining fascism:

Fascism is a patriarchal cult of the leader, who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by a treacherous and power-hungry global elite, who have encouraged minorities to destabilize the social order as part of their plan to dominate the “true nation,” and fold them into a global world government. The fascist leader is the father of his nation, in a very real sense like the father in a traditional patriarchal family. He mobilizes the masses by reminding them of what they supposedly have lost, and who it is that is responsible for that loss – the figures who control democracy itself, the elite; Nazi ideology is a species of fascism in which this global elite are Jews.

But he specifies what he means by it in the American context this way:

Fascism is not an ideology consigned to Europe. Black American intellectuals from W.E.B. Du Bois to Toni Morrison have spoken of American fascism. America has a long history of anti-Semitism similar to Nazi anti-Semitism, central to the ideology not just of the Ku Klux Klan, but to Henry Ford’s “The International Jew.” In its American version, communist Jews supposedly use Black liberation movements, control of Hollywood, and labor unions to destroy the nation in the service of a global elite. We should not be surprised at all by the rise of a fascist movement in the United States. And if it does arise, it would be no surprise if it did so in the party that keeps alive the “lost cause” myths of the American South. [my emphasis]

His concluding paragraph is a caution to avoid simplistic historical analogies while recognizing real processes that appear in different places and times:

Worldwide, there have been many fascist movements. Not all fascist movements focus on a global Jewish conspiracy as the enemy, and not all of them were genocidal. Early on, Italian fascism was not anti-Semitic in its core, though it later turned that way. British fascism was not genocidal (though it also was never given the opportunity to be). The most influential fascist movement that takes a shadowy Jewish conspiracy as its central target is German fascism, Nazism. Nazism did not start out in genocide. It began with militias and violent troops disrupting democracy. In its early years in power, in the 1930s, it was socialists and communists who were targeted for the Concentration Camps, torture, and murder. But it must never be forgotten where Nazism culminated. [my emphasis]

I'm sure that Stanley is not suggesting that not being overtly genocidal is a sufficient bar to clear for a movement to be democratic or even non-fascist! On the contrary.

Timothy Snyder on the trajectory of Trumpism (2 of 2): The Big Lie and the strategic perspective of the Party of Trump

"Post-truth is pre-fascism," writes Timothy Snyder, "and Trump has been our post-truth president." (The American Abyss New York Times Magazine 01/09/2021)

More details are coming out about the specifics of the January 6 storming of the Capitol at the direct, immediate incitement of Donald Trump himself. PBS Frontline has a documentary called Trump's American Carnage that take that riot as a starting point.

Frontline also is posting long segments of some of the interviews they did for the program. This is one that focuses on the kinds of concerns on which Snyder focuses. It's with Olivia Troye, someone I don't recall having heard of before, who was a homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to VP Mike Pence.

She was there in a professional capacity, not as a political adviser, and left Pence's staff in August 2020. This one was done after January 6 but before Biden's Inauguration. She talks quite a bit about the Capitol riot and Trump's encouragement and direct incitement.

She seems to have an impressively nuanced and realistic view of Pence himself. Toward the end (45:00 ff), she's asked about Pence's situation when he was in the Capitol and the lynch mob was coming for him. "I can't imagine what it must be like to have stood by someone unwaveringly, and been in this environment for four years, fully knowing how dangerous this man [Trump] can be. 'Cause we've seen this, repeatedly, and it leads to his own life [Pence's] being put directly in danger by this individual [Trump]. Right? You have the President basically setting up the Vice President of our country in a situation where he puts his [Pence's] life in danger.]."

And, speaking from her professional experience in counterterrorism, "And I have no doubt that the threat level on the Vice President [Pence] will remain high. 'Cause these people are not gonna forget." And at the end, she says, "You can't have unity if you don't have accountability." Olivia Troye is currently part of the Republican Accountability Project.

Snyder talks about how the Big Lie that Trump established around the blatantly false claim that Biden won the Presidential election through election fraud. The Big Lie is something historically associated in particular with the Hitler movement. Snyder describes that infamous Big Lie as:

... Hitlerian anti-Semitism: the claims that Jews ran the world, Jews were responsible for ideas that poisoned German minds, Jews stabbed Germany in the back during the First World War. Intriguingly, [Hannah] Arendt thought big lies work only in lonely minds; their coherence substitutes for experience and companionship.

In November 2020, reaching millions of lonely minds through social media, Trump told a lie that was dangerously ambitious: that he had won an election that in fact he had lost. This lie was big in every pertinent respect: not as big as “Jews run the world,” but big enough. The significance of the matter at hand was great: the right to rule the most powerful country in the world and the efficacy and trustworthiness of its succession procedures. The level of mendacity was profound. The claim was not only wrong, but it was also made in bad faith, amid unreliable sources. It challenged not just evidence but logic: Just how could (and why would) an election have been rigged against a Republican president but not against Republican senators and representatives? Trump had to speak, absurdly, of a “Rigged (for President) Election.” [my emphasis]

But this Big Lie isn't just a professional-wrestling gimmick that Donald Trump came up with. It's one that the Republican Party in general have been working on for four decades. It's just now graduated from the concept that the Democratic Party is illegitimate to the notion that democratic elections are illegitimate. And the rule-of-law system along with it.

Snyder gives us a sobering reminder of how far along Trump got with his actual plan. And the role that Trump's own lack of knowledge of politics and government and his own laziness played in its failure. On the storming of the Capitol, he writes, "It is hard to think of a comparable insurrectionary moment, when a building of great significance was seized, that involved so much milling around." In other words, "for all his lawsuits and entreaties and threats to public officials, [Trump] could not engineer a situation that ended with the right people doing the wrong thing."

But it did provide a real-world example of how close it could come. The two groups of Republicans that Snyder calls the Gamers and the Breakers have a template for a coup that they can broadly share. And did broadly share in 2020-1.

If Trump remains present in American political life, he will surely repeat his big lie incessantly. Hawley and Cruz and the other breakers share responsibility for where this leads. Cruz and Hawley seem to be running for president. Yet what does it mean to be a candidate for office and denounce voting? If you claim that the other side has cheated, and your supporters believe you, they will expect you to cheat yourself. By defending Trump’s big lie on Jan. 6, they set a precedent: A Republican presidential candidate who loses an election should be appointed anyway by Congress. Republicans in the future, at least breaker candidates for president, will presumably have a Plan A, to win and win, and a Plan B, to lose and win. No fraud is necessary; only allegations that there are allegations of fraud. Truth is to be replaced by spectacle, facts by faith.

Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-21, like other failed coup attempts, is a warning for those who care about the rule of law and a lesson for those who do not. His pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American politics. For a coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require something that Trump never quite had: an angry minority, organized for nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an election. Four years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this. To claim that the other side stole an election is to promise to steal one yourself. It is also to claim that the other side deserves to be punished. [my emphasis]

Mark Sumner has an insightful Twitter thread on this process that has played out to this point in the Republican Party. He goes back to what Ronald Reagan called the 11th Commandment, that Republicans shouldn't criticize other Republicans, which as he puts it, "erected a wall on the Republican left, but placed not a single barrier to the right. It meant there was never any internal testing of ideas. There was no competition to challenge and refine claims. No effort to call out extreme views. ..." (01/30/2021)

The Twitter format forces painting in broad strokes. So of course we could point out that the Republican Party at times over those four decades have called out the more extreme views of characters like David Duke and Pat Buchanan. But Sumer describes the basic trend very well. David Duke may have been too bitter a pill for country club Republicans to swallow. But Rush Limbaugh wasn't. Nor Alex Jones.

So, he writes, "Josh Hawley opposing votes certified by PA’s GOP legislature is the future of the Republican Party." And Hawley is by no means the only one ready to keep operating on Trump's coup template: A Slap in The Face to Voters': GOP Bill Would Allow AZ Legislature to Overturn Election The Choice 01/30/2021.

Snyder also centers the white supremacy element in the current Republican drive against democracy. "In the past half century, since the Civil Rights Act, Republicans have become a predominantly white party interested — as Trump openly declared — in keeping the number of voters, and particularly the number of Black voters, as low as possible." And he says of the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, "At bottom, the fantasy of fraud is that of a crime committed by Black people against white people."

Snyder uses the f-word (fascism) without jumping into the thornbush of academic definition. He writes of using the history of fascism to understand Trumpism, "One comfortable position has been to label any such effort as a direct comparison and then to treat such comparisons as taboo. More productively, the philosopher Jason Stanley has treated fascism as a phenomenon, as a series of patterns that can be observed not only in interwar Europe but beyond it." Mussolini actually called his politics Fascism - it's where we get the word for that brand of politics - and Hitler modeled his takeover of power after Mussolini's. So we can observe similarities without having to quibble about the precise definition.

Snyder in this article uses the word "cult" only in the context of a "martyrdom cult" the authoritarian governing party in Poland currently uses. But understanding cults does shed light on how the current Trumpian Big Lie functions:

Thanks to technological capacity and personal talent, Donald Trump lied at a pace perhaps unmatched by any other leader in history. For the most part these were small lies, and their main effect was cumulative. To believe in all of them was to accept the authority of a single man, because to believe in all of them was to disbelieve everything else. Once such personal authority was established, the president could treat everyone else as the liars; he even had the power to turn someone from a trusted adviser into a dishonest scoundrel with a single tweet. Yet so long as he was unable to enforce some truly big lie, some fantasy that created an alternative reality where people could live and die, his pre-fascism fell short of the thing itself. [my emphasis]

In the more narrow sociological-clinical sense of cult, like Jim Jones' People's Temple, or the UFO cult Heaven's Gate, or the Branch Davidians, that doesn't describe the complexity of the current authoritarianism in the Republican Party. But there is a cultish aspect in Trump following.

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, calls the Trumpified Republican Party "a one-man cult." (Rep. Jayapal: GOP Isn't A Party Of Principle. It's A Cult MSNBC/The 11th Hour 01/30/2021)

Steven Hassan, an authority on cults and author of The Cult of Trump (2019), spoke earlier this month with Kati Couric on this subject, Former Cult Follower Describes How President Trump Has Created a Cult Following (a sloppy YouTube title!) 01/13/2021:

I'll end by going back once again to what Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein wrote in their 2012 book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks:

[H]owever awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier- ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

Trump is no longer President. But the Republican Party is still a Trumpian party. And it is still on the trajectory that took it from 2012 to becoming the Party of Trump. In 2020, the Republican National Committee (RNC) didn't even bother to adopt a new party platform. They just issued a one-page resolution stating, "RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda." It really is the Party of Trump.

Timothy Snyder on the trajectory of Trumpism (1 of 2): "Gamers" and "Breakers"

Confirmed: There is no looming GOP "reckoning" over Trump, and there will never will be, no matter how many times naïve news outlets suggest otherwise.

For five years, the press has gotten this story wrong. Why? Today's Republican Party represents an unwieldy challenge for news outlets. It spent the winter wantonly trying to invalidate election results, while simultaneously endangering the masses during a public healthy crisis by deliberately misinforming Americans about the Covid-19 pandemic. It has also taken no disciplinary action against a new Congresswoman who previously supported the killing of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Yet the press remains committed to portraying the GOP as a mainstream, center-right entity. That's why it keeps botching the "reckoning" story — reporters assume there is a Republican breaking point with Trump and the politics of hate and revenge he represents. But there never is.

- Eric Boehlert, Memo to media: the GOP's Trump "reckoning" is never coming Press Run 01/29/2021

I mentioned recently the Republican ritual of distancing themselves from previous Republican Presidents and failed Republican Presidential candidates.

But that is happening now only to a very limited extent. And it's getting a lot of pushback from the majority Republicans. (Nick Reynolds, Wyoming Capitol crowd cheers on Gaetz, seeks replacement for Cheney Casper Star-Tribune 01/28/2021)

That disavowal ritual has been part of the continuous radicalization of the Republican Party over the last four decades. It's not because the radicalization process has stopped. Nomiki Konst and her two guests in this clip looks at a recent comment by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the topic, AOC: GOP Is Full-On White Supremacist Party 01/29/2021:

Frank Luntz, who now calls himself a former Republican pollster, suggests in this long interview that Trumpism reflects the political radicalization of the Republican base. "These are not your parents' Republicans." (Trump's American Carnage: Frank Luntz (interview) PBS Frontline)

Part of the restraint on criticizing Trump is surely a horse-race one. Trump is still around, he has a fanatical following in the Republican base, and he is still eligible to run for President in 2024.

But Timothy Snyder's essay earlier this month offers a useful way to look at divisions within the Republican Party post-Capitol-riot, The American Abyss New York Times Magazine 01/09/2021. He sees today's Republican Party as an alliance between two political mentalities, which he labels the "gamers" and the "breakers". I might have picked Players and Destroyers, as the labels, but he doesn't.

In his schema, Mitch McConnell is emblematic of the Gamers and Trump of the Breakers. But he does not see this as a difference in basic policies and goal. Or even in their commitment to democracy, at least not in the sense of popular rule. Those he calls the Gamers are "concerned above all with gaming the system to maintain power, taking full advantage of constitutional obscurities, gerrymandering and dark money to win elections with a minority of motivated voters."

In other words, gaming major undemocratic elements of the system like the Electoral College, the structure of the Senate, and Supreme Court elimination of controls on campaign donations and of civil rights legislation to prevent disenfranchisement of voters based on race, to maintain dominant national power even when they cannot win a majority of votes nationally. "They have no interest in the collapse of the peculiar form of representation that allows their minority party disproportionate control of government." They want to maintain the forms of democracy and Constitutional government, in other words, even while they cheat the democratic system.

Wisconsin is one of the Gamers' success stories. "In 2012, the first election with the new [severely gerrymandered legislative districts] in place, Republicans won less than half the votes, but conquered 60 of the state’s 99 assembly seats. The Republicans grew their majority in 2014 and 2016, despite earning just over 50% of the statewide vote." (Sam Levine, Wisconsin: the state where American democracy went to die The Guardian 04/10/2020; my emphasis).

Snyder writes:

In the four decades since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have overcome the tension between the gamers and the breakers by governing in opposition to government, or by calling elections a revolution (the Tea Party), or by claiming to oppose elites. The breakers, in this arrangement, provide cover for the gamers, putting forth an ideology that distracts from the basic reality that government under Republicans is not made smaller butsimply diverted to serve a handful of interests.

At first, Trump seemed like a threat to this balance. His lack of experience in politics and his open racism made hima very uncomfortable figure for the party; his habit of continually telling lies was initially found by prominent Republicans to be uncouth. Yet after he won the presidency, his particular skills as a breaker seemed to create a tremendous opportunity for the gamers. Led by the gamer in chief, McConnell, they secured hundreds of federal judges and tax cuts for the rich.

Trump was unlike other breakers in that he seemed to have no ideology. His objection to institutions was that they might constrain him personally. He intended to break the system to serve himself — and this is partly why he has failed. Trump is a charismatic politician and inspires devotion not only among voters but among a surprising number of lawmakers, but he has no vision that is greater than himself or what his admirers project upon him. In this respect his pre-fascism fell short of fascism: His vision never went further than a mirror. He arrived at a trulybig lie not from any view of the world but from the reality that he might lose something. [my emphasis]

In other words, Snyder is agreeing with those who have been commenting that we got lucky in that Trump was too stupid to actually pull off a coup. And I think this is right, although we are finding out more all the time about how close he actually came, and we will know a lot more eventually.

But Trump didn't just talk and practice "revolutionary" symbolism. He actually wanted to "revolutionize" the system. Or more clearly, to use pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric and posturing to stage an actual authoritarian coup. Here is some of the putschist rhetoric from the Transcript of Trump's January 6 incitement speech (U.S. News/AP; my emphasis in bold), all part of a long speech in which he recounted fabricated tales of voter fraud and repeatedly invoked the names of Barack Obama and Stacey Abrams, both African-American politicians his white supremacist base despite. I'm including a longish selection, to give some context to Snyder's observation that given Trump's message, the storming of the Capitol "did make a kind of sense: If the election really had been stolen, as senators and congressmen were themselves suggesting, then how could Congress be allowed to move forward?" (my italics)

Trump, January 6:

The media is the biggest problem we have as far as I’m concerned, single biggest problem. The fake news and the Big tech. ...

All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing. And stolen by the fake news media. That’s what they’ve done and what they’re doing. We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. ...

And by the way, does anybody believe that Joe had 80 million votes? Does anybody believe that? He had 80 million computer votes. It’s a disgrace. There’s never been anything like that. You could take third-world countries. Just take a look. Take third-world countries. Their elections are more honest than what we’ve been going through in this country. It’s a disgrace. It’s a disgrace. ...

We don’t have a free and fair press. Our media is not free, it’s not fair. It suppresses thought, it suppresses speech and it’s become the enemy of the people. It’s become the enemy of the people. It’s the biggest problem we have in this country. ...

We’re gathered together in the heart of our nation’s capital for one very, very basic and simple reason: To save our democracy. ...

For years, Democrats have gotten away with election fraud and weak Republicans. And that’s what they are. There’s so many weak Republicans. And we have great ones. Jim Jordan and some of these guys, they’re out there fighting. The House guys are fighting. But it’s, it’s incredible. ...

Many of the Republicans, I helped them get in, I helped them get elected. I helped Mitch get elected. I helped. I could name 24 of them, let’s say, I won’t bore you with it. And then all of a sudden you have something like this. It’s like, “Oh gee, maybe I’ll talk to the president sometime later.” No, it’s amazing.

They’re weak Republicans, they’re pathetic Republicans and that’s what happens. ...

But we look at the facts and our election was so corrupt that in the history of this country we’ve never seen anything like it. You can go all the way back. ...

Republicans are, Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back. It’s like a boxer. And we want to be so nice. We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. And we’re going to have to fight much harder. ...

Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down.

Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.

Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. ...

The American people do not believe the corrupt, fake news anymore. They have ruined their reputation. But you know, it used to be that they’d argue with me. I’d fight. So I’d fight, they’d fight, I’d fight, they’d fight. Pop pop. You’d believe me, you’d believe them. Somebody comes out. You know, they had their point of view, I had my point of view, but you’d have an argument.

Now what they do is they go silent. It’s called suppression and that’s what happens in a communist country. That’s what they do, they suppress. You don’t fight with them anymore. Unless it’s a bad story. They have a little bad story about me, they make it 10 times worse and it’s a major headline. ...

Today, for the sake of our democracy, for the sake of our Constitution, and for the sake of our children, we lay out the case for the entire world to hear. You want to hear it?

(Audience responds: “Yeah”)

In every single swing state, local officials, state officials, almost all Democrats, made illegal and unconstitutional changes to election procedures without the mandated approvals by the state legislatures.

That these changes paved a way for fraud on a scale never seen before. ...

I’ve been telling these Republicans, get rid of Section 230. And for some reason, Mitch and the group, they don’t want to put it in there and they don’t realize that that’s going to be the end of the Republican Party as we know it, but it’s never going to be the end of us. Never. Let them get out. Let, let the weak ones get out. This is a time for strength.

They also want to indoctrinate your children in school by teaching them things that aren’t so. They want to indoctrinate your children. It’s all part of the comprehensive assault on our democracy, and the American people are finally standing up and saying no. This crowd is, again, a testament to it. ...

The radical left knows ...exactly what they’re doing. They’re ruthless and it’s time that somebody did something about it. ...

As this enormous crowd shows, we have truth and justice on our side. We have a deep and enduring love for America in our hearts. We love our country. ...

We have overwhelming pride in this great country and we have it deep in our souls. Together, we are determined to defend and preserve government of the people, by the people and for the people. ...

And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore. ...

Trumpism after the Capitol invasion

Historian Timothy Snyder in a post-Capitol-assaut interview, Has the threat of Trump really gone? 01/08/2021Jan 8, 2021, in which he discusses the effect of Trumpism on the future of democracy and the rule of law, in the US and elsewhere:

One of his most important points is that Biden's election as President initially provides only a reprieve from Trumpism. Not least because we can expect Trump to continue to lead what Snyder's calls a coup faction in the Republican Party.

People who have been following the far right systematically are not surprised by this. Daryl Johnson is one of them. About a week before this article, when the news first came out about Heather Heyer having been murdered by a neo-nazi in Charlottesville in 2017, I was literally attenting a panel that David Neiwert had organized about the seriousness of far-right terrorism in the US and how authorities were dangerously ignoring it. In fact, the way the Obama-Biden Administration handled he controversy over Johnson's official report or far-right terrorism in 2009 was one of the *worst* mistakes of their government. "By 2010, there were no intelligence analysts at DHS working domestic terrorism threats."

I just saw a post-Capitol-invasion interview with Timothy Snyder, who talks about how the Trumpistas are now a "coup faction" within the Republican Party, and how Biden's election in itself is only a reprieve from Trumpism. Biden and Harris really cannot afford to act like they are living in a world where Both Sides Do It and the real existing Republican Party is looking for some kind of Bipartisan harmony for it's own sake. After the spectacle this week at the Capitol, there's every reason to think the violent radical right will be even more active the next four years against the government that Trump's Coup Faction is claiming to be completely illegitimate.

He has numerous interesting observations besides, including about how authoritarians play on fear and how reducing the real fears - including the kind that come of what liberals sometimes sneer at as "economic uncertainty" - is essential to undercutting popular support for the Republican Coup Faction. He also stresses how important it is to deal effectively with the COVID-19 pandemic. As uncomfortable as it may be to the Brunch Liberalism approach ("we have a Democratic President again so we can all go back to brunch now"), the Biden-Harris Administration has to find a way to counter Republican obstructionism than the Obama-Biden Administration did. The obstacles to doing so are clearly huge. But the stakes are even bigger.

One of the biggest mistakes of the Obama-Biden Administration was caving to malicious Republican criticism - from the perspective of January 2021 seditious criticism - of the Homeland Security report on the real danger of far-right terrorism that was authored by Daryl Johnson, who described that failure in I warned of right-wing violence in 2009. Republicans objected. I was right. Washington Post 08/21/2017. This was published just over a week after Heather Heyer having been murdered by a neo-nazi in Charlottesville. "By 2010, there were no intelligence analysts at DHS working domestic terrorism threats."

Just to be clear. This was a decision by the Obama-Biden Department of Homeland Security whose chief Janet Napolitano - who served as president of the University of California 2013-2020 - went so far as to formally rescind the report that came under fire from Republicans. This was a decision made in response to irresponsible criticism from Republicans, an irresponsible surrender in pursuit of the illusionary goal of Bipartisan harmony with the Republican Party that was quickly radicalizing itself into the party of Donald Trump.

Paul Krugman returns to the theme of dealing with Radical Republicans, one which is is very familiar for him in Appeasement Got Us Where We Are New York Times 01/07/2021.

He's right on this, as he so often is, "Donald Trump ... is indeed a fascist — an authoritarian willing to use violence to achieve his racial nationalist goals. So are many of his supporters."

Krugman face-planted for a day or so in December over the $2,000 checks, then realized he was being careless about the politics of it. But he was one of the most prominent people who are were saying things like this during the Cheney-Bush Administration about the need to reign in their lawlessness. He's not at all new to this issue, and he's been trying for the last 20 years or so to get Democratic leaders to focus on how serious a problem Republican lawlessness is and has been.

Joe Biden has a moral and a political duty to hold Donald Trump and his enablers to account. A politics of “forgive and forget” will not unify the nation—it will simply ensure that Democrats lose control of Congress in 2022 and the presidency in 2024.
https://t.co/cJiUWirsVG

— John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) January 4, 2021

Krugman's point about the Michigan precedents is important. Armed Trumpistas last year walked right into the Michigan capitol building while the legislature was in session to intimidate the legislators. The Capitol attack was the same kind of action only with obviously more immediately murderous intentions.

And Krugman is right about this, too: "this isn’t over. If you aren’t terrified about what Trump might do between now and Inauguration Day, you haven’t been paying attention."

WSJ re DJT must resign:“he has betrayed his loyal supporters by lying to them about the election and the ability of Congress and Mr. Pence to overturn it. He has refused to accept the basic bargain of democracy, which is to accept the result, win or lose.” https://t.co/iMhhmd2flp

— John W. Dean (@JohnWDean) January 10, 2021

And this: "Don’t say that we should look forward, not back; accountability for past actions will be crucial if we want the future to be better." If the Biden Justice Depaprtment operates as it's legally required to do, it will conduct professional, independent investigations of major crimes committed under Trump and prosecute them as crimes. How many hundreds of thousands of black citizens are disenfranchised today because they got convicted of marijuana possession and their state legislatures still aren't willing to "look forward, not backward" even decades later when it comes to them?

A historical reminder. Before last week, the Capitol had not been raided by armed enemies of America since the War of 1812. But white supremacist violence has struck the Capitol before. Like when the seditious, pro-slavery South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks nearly beat Massachusetts antislavery Sen. Charles Sumner nearly to death in the Senate chamber in 1856.

Trump's loss to Biden - a reprieve for democracy, but the Republican Party is still a Trumpist authoritarian party

"Trump is unusual, but the Republican Party has been preparing the way by becoming the voter-suppression party. They’ve become a party which is about a minority bullying a majority." - Timothy Snyder

Shalini Randeria and Timothy Snyder discuss Democracy in question: A Trumpian blip or a fundamental flaw in American democracy Eurozine 11/25/2020. The discussion was on a podcast of 10/08/2020, the month before the Presidential eleciton, sponsore by the Institute for Human Science (IWM) in Vienna.

Snyder analyzes Trumpism as "sadopopulism," which he describes here in this way:

Sadopopulism is a type of populism where people actually don’t get anything other than pain. In populism, the assumption is, ‘I, the leader, and you the people are against some elite’, and the policy is, ‘I’m going to transfer some of the wealth of that elite to you, the people’. The critique of populism is then usually, ‘the elite is mythical’ or ‘the elite is an ethnic minority and they’re being oppressed’. But Mr. Trump is not a populist in that sense. He isn’t transferring wealth from any kind of elite to the people. On the contrary, he’s transferring wealth from the people to the already existing elite. He’s not giving people greater chances to pursue happiness. He’s actually doing the opposite: he’s creating more pain in the system. And he’s very good at persuading people that it’s good, it’s ok for them to be hurt as long as others are hurting more. [my emphasis]

In in the following comments, I think he may give Trump a bit too much credit for not using militarism in a way that is typical of classic fascists like Mussolini. But it's an important analysis of Trump and fascism:

Trump clearly draws from a fascist toolbox, consciously, half consciously, unconsciously. One can debate how much it matters that his father was in the Ku Klux Klan and whether he knew or not that ‘America first’ could be used as a fascist slogan when he chose it for his presidential campaign slogan. Who knows? But he certainly uses fascist rhetorical tricks ­ the ‘us’ and ‘them’ ­ the quick slogans, the rallies.

So, let me try to put this carefully. I think it’s impossible to talk sensibly about Mr. Trump without invoking the history of fascism. That said, when pressed, I’ve tried to use phrases like, ‘not even a fascist’, meaning I think he does some but not all of the things a fascist would do. I think they are enough to bring down a republic, but do not include redistribution and war.

Mussolini fought wars in Ethiopia. He joined in Hitler’s wars in Europe: although little known, tens of thousands of Italian soldiers died around Stalingrad. Trump does not like war. He’s afraid of physical violence and is less of a militarist than previous American presidents have been. He does not want to control the world and does not have the tools of redistribution and military expansion. [my emphasis]

Snyder in this interview is addressing primarily Trump's political style, and he has some important insights. He doesn't talk in this interview about the sociology of Trumpism. So, no magic answers here to the "economic anxiety"-vs.-"liberal identity politics" argument that will be going on for quite a while.

The quotes here are from the article's edited transcript.

Yes, Trump and the Republican Party are promoting political violence (along with some thoughts on Chile, Brazil, and Mussolini)

They will deny it later just as they (lamely) deny it now. But Trump and the Republican Party are promoting violence against Democrats and those protesting against police murder and against Trump generally.

Timothy Snyder published a list of warning signs on his Facebook page which also appeared as 20 Lessons from the 20th Century on How to Survive in Trump’s America In These Times 11/21/2016. These are bullet-points specific to the threat that Trump presented at the time of his election, not a scholarly elaboration with a lot of historical nuances noted. These are points 17 and 18:

17. Watch out for the paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-Leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the game is over.

18. Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no. (If you do not know what this means, contact the Unit­ed States Holocaust Memorial Museum and ask about training in professional ethics.) [my emphasis]

I assume he wasn't meaning to be fatalistic by saying, "When the pro-Leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the game is over." Because we're seeing that happen to some extent right now.

But the November 3 election and the almost-certain controversy immediately afterwards in which Trump and the Republicans try to steal the election in a political-judicial coup is still an important moment that can and should lead to a reprieve from Trumpism in government. I'm not sure how many decades it will take to remove Trumpism from the Republican Party, or if that's even possible for the party as it currently exists.

Americans and Europeans are quick to assume our general superiority to "Third World" countries, mainly because it feels good to declare superiority over someone else. But the US has a lot to learn from countries like Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Honduras, and Bolivia, all of whom have relevant experience with coups and overcoming their legacies. Tom Phillips reports for The Guardian on Sunday's election in Bolivia, Bolivia election: exit polls suggest thumping win for Evo Morales' party 10/19/2020. Bolivia suffered a stereotypical kind of coup a year ago in which the military seized power and installed a far-right extremist as President.

One thing that's important to keep in mind is that American stereotypical examples of successful coups and "regime change" operations - Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, Argentina in 1976 - tend to be remembered as military operations where troops roll tanks into the streets and seize the seat of government. [Update: Indonesia reference removed]

It can happen that way. But the image can also be misleading. Chile 1973 looks like a pure military-seizes-the-Presidential-palace kind of action. But in reality, it was very much a political-military coup prepared over months with active collaboration from conservative in the Chilean Congress. Regime-change operations in the last decade in Paraguay (2912) and Brazil (2016)can legitimately be called coups without the rolling-the-tanks ritual. The student quarterly Brown Political Review describes the Brazil case, which involved the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff (Alex Burdo, The Coup that Overthrew Dilma 05/10/2017):

Undemocratic coups come in many forms. Not all of them are violent, seemingly disorganized uprisings – the ‘standard’ coup, so to speak. Many (especially in recent times) are engineered from abroad. Still others are carried out through legal means. Legal structures are often twisted and abused to attain political ends. They are often used to justify removal of a democratic government, as they were haphazardly in Honduras in 2009, when the army overthrew the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya.

Things that may be legal may not be democratic, which is the case with the overthrow of Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, last year. Rousseff’s government was on the verge of launching an investigation into a number of corrupt government figures, when, fearing for their power, they turned on her and led impeachment proceedings to remove her, supposedly because of corruption. It’s ironic that Rousseff is one of the few figures in Brazil’s government not proven to be corrupt, despite claims to the contrary in impeachment proceedings. On August 31, Rousseff was impeached, and yet, even today, the attitude online and throughout most of the Western world is that the move was a standard and democratic use of legal process. That is not the case. The undemocratic removal of Dilma Rousseff stands as Brazil’s second right-wing coup d’état in little over fifty years. Ignoring the truth about Dilma’s overthrow is dangerous when it comes to fighting undemocratic efforts in the future. International silence lends legitimacy to the coup government and motivates groups considering similar moves elsewhere. [my emphasis]

The point here is that a politically and morally illegitimate regime change can take place within existing legal structures, even in systems founded on the rule of law and democratic constitutional assumptions. The ultimate example may be Germany's Weimar Constitution, which the Nazi government never bothered to formally abolish. It was still theoretically still in effect when Germany surrended to the allies in 1945. Hitler did use violent actions by the paramilitary SA (Brownshirts) in his rise to power. But he became Chancellor in January 1933 under the legal structure, appointed by President Paul von Hindenburg, who had defeated Hitler in the Presidential election of 1930.

The Republicans' electoral strategy for after November 3 may rely primarily on a partisan Supreme Court including The Handmaid Amy Coney Barrett handing the victory to Trump despite losing the popular vote in the election. (The latter, of course, hasn't happened yet!) But he is also encouraging his own Brownshirts.

Alberto Luperon reports in Professor Calls Out GOP After Fmr Trump Official Blames President for Inspiring Political Violence Law & Crime 11/18/2020. The professor in the title is Marty Lederman:

Luperon also notes:

The criticism follows after Elizabeth Neumann, a former Assistant Secretary for Threat Prevention and Security Policy in the Trump administration, blamed the president for inspiring political violence amid an alleged kidnapping plot against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and the alleged discussion of a possible plot against Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, both Democrats.

John Cassiy provides various examples of Trump's verbal agitation in Donald Trump’s Incitements to Violence Have Crossed an Alarming Threshold New Yorker 09/01/2020. And that's from the first of September, almost seven weeks ago, a very long stretch of time in the bizarre year of 2020. It includes this appalling example:

Not content with fanning the flames in Portland, Trump retweeted a message that was supportive of Kyle Rittenhouse, the seventeen-year-old Illinois teen-ager who shot three protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last week, killing two of them. Then, at a press conference on Monday, Trump defended Rittenhouse, suggesting that he had acted in self-defense.

“I find it, frankly, terrifying,” [Steven] Levitsky told me on Monday, when I called to ask him about Trump’s latest rhetorical escalations. Although the language that the President has adopted over the past few days is entirely consistent with his 2016 campaign, the inflammatory statements he issued at rallies then were “on a micro scale” compared with what he is doing now on a national stage, Levitsky said. And the political environment, following months of protests against police racism and brutality, is even more incendiary. “We now have the potential in towns and cities across the country for pretty significant violence, with a large number of deaths,” he said. “Trump is either unaware of this or he doesn’t care. I don’t normally like to make these comparisons, but this sort of encouragement of violence for political purposes is worryingly similar to what the Fascist movement did in Europe during the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties.” [my emphasis]

Cassily also cites another classic example of how far-right takeovers don't always take the tanks-rolling-in-the-street model:

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University, is the author of a forthcoming book on authoritarian leaders, “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” In a telephone conversation, she reminded me that the Fascist Italian dictator [Benito Mussolini], before he ascended to power, in October, 1922, exploited violent clashes between groups of his armed supporters, known as the Blackshirts, and their left-wing opponents. “He used the violence to destabilize Italian society, so he could position himself as the person to stop this violence,” Ben-Ghiat said. That’s what Trump is doing now, she added.

To be sure, the historical parallels aren’t exact. After King Victor Emmanuel III appointed Mussolini as Italy’s Prime Minister, Mussolini quickly obtained dictatorial powers and seized control of the state, converting the Blackshirts into a state-sanctioned official militia. Trump has already been President for nearly four years. He’s said and done some terrible things, but, when checked by the courts or by other institutions of state, he has generally backed down, at least for a while. During the protests for racial justice in Washington, earlier this year, for example, Pentagon chiefs successfully resisted Trump’s calls to send in federal troops. [my emphasis]

Mussolini took power through the established legal structure through alliance with conservative and the economic elite in 1922. His Blackshirt March on Rome in October 28 was a Trump-style reality-show pageant coordinated with the authorities with whom he was at least partially cooperating, not a physical seizure of power or some kind of actual popular uprising.

But it is important to avoid oversimplifying these events. The Italian Fascists staged the March on Rome to demonstrate a threat of physical violence. And the turnover of governmental power to Mussolini did coincide with the March on Rome. It wasn't entirely a charade. But it was also not a military or paramilitary action that the government would have been unable to resist.

An example of the latter case would be Salvador Allende's overthrow in 1973 in Chile. Once the tanks were literally rolling in the streets, he had no practical immediate option to resist by force via loyal military units or trained partisan paramilitaries. Juan Perón made a similar judgment call in Argentina in 1955 when faced with a rightwing military coup that style itself as the Revolución Libertadora. Here is Wolfgang Schieder's description of the March on Rome from Benito Musolini (2014). My translation from German:

In Naples, tens of thousands of Fascists from all over Italy gathered [under Mussolini’s behind-the-scenes direction] for a mass assembly on 10/24/1922 to express their determination to take possession of Rome by force.

Mussolini's goal, however, was not a political upheaval, but rather a demonstration that he was capable of one. In a risky double game, he had the fascist cohorts march in order to be legally commissioned by the king to form a government. He therefore did not directly call for a "march on Rome", but merely threatened one: "Either we are given the power of government or we will take it," he proclaimed in Naples. His demand for five ministries and an additional aviation commissioner's office to be given in the forthcoming formation of the government also did not indicate a coup d'état, but rather his willingness to form a political coalition.

On October 16, at Mussolini's instigation, the military leadership of the March was entrusted to a so-called "quadrumvirat" by military leaders so that he could keep himself in the background. This opened its headquarters in Perugia and prepared for a coup. The fascist marching columns approached from three sides of the capital and took up waiting positions at the gates of Rome until 28 October. They did not have a direct connection with the further events, but the threatening backdrop they formed had a massive influence on the change of government that was about to take place. First, Prime Minister Facta, who had until then been helpless in the face of fascist violence, unexpectedly sought to seize the law of action. After a parley with King Victor Emanuel III on the evening of October 27, he called for a cabinet decision that would lead to the declaration of a state of emergency. However, when he wanted to present it to the king for signing on the morning of October 28, the king would no longer receive him. The king had chosen Mussolini.

In the absence of direct sources, the causes of this dramatic turnaround cannot be clearly clarified. In all probability, it was a set of reasons that led the indecisive "little king" to take such a far-reaching step. So his concern was that his fascism-friendly cousin, the Duke of Aosta, might challenge him for the royal throne, certainly played a role. More importantly, he was deliberately misinformed by the military leadership. The military strength of the approximately 14 000 badly armed fascist fighters was presented to him in a very exaggerated way, so that he had to fear a civil war. The decisive factor, which is usually less taken into account in research, was that his already low confidence in the parliamentary system of government had all but disappeared. Victor Emanuel III ultimately considered an authoritarian government under Mussolini to be less worrisome than democratic minority governments following each other at an ever-faster pace. [my emphasis]

The threat of Fascist violence was real. But it was primarily a bluff. And the government decided not to call the bluff, largely because the head of state King Victor Emanuel III was not committed to having a democratic government and he and a significant portion of the military leadership had some degree of actual sympathy with Mussolini and his Fascist Party.

Legitimate questions about sources (3 of 3): Russia, Russia, Russia

Nate Sliver writes of the Russian effect on the outcome of the US Presidential election in 2016:

For instance, this story makes a big deal about a (post-election) Russian social media disinformation campaign on Bob Mueller based on... 5,000 tweets? That's **nothing**. Platform-wide, there are something like 500,000,000 tweets posted each day.https://t.co/LI8wt6tua8 pic.twitter.com/I2XOIf0rdy

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 18, 2018

In the three critical states for the Democrats that narrowly went to Trump in 2016, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, "Trump won those states by 0.2, 0.7 and 0.8 percentage points, respectively — and by 10,704, 46,765 and 22,177 votes. Those three wins gave him 46 electoral votes; if Clinton had done one point better in each state, she'd have won the electoral vote, too." (Philip Bump, Donald Trump will be president thanks to 80,000 people in three states Washington Post 12/01/2016)

Bump goes on to say, "The 540-vote margin in Florida that swung the 2000 election is still the modern record-holder for close races, but this is a pretty remarkable result. (Especially since the final gap between Al Gore and George W. Bush was only a little over 500,000 votes nationally.)"

I would say that is a bit of a sloppy way to talk about the 2000 election. Because he didn't mention that in the detailed press consortium recount of the Florida votes, Gore actually won the Florida vote and the state's Electoral College votes should have gone to him. The Supreme Court gave that election to Bush Junior in a crassly partisan decision. But the results of the consortium research were announced during the orgy of patriotic fury in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. So the press generally reported those results in a sloppy way in 2001: Miranda Spencer, Who Won the Election? Who Cares? FAIR 01/01/2002.

This post is not so much about sources as such as about the frameworks we apply to thinking about US and European relations to Russia.

Russia and the 2016 US Election

Russian interference in the 2016 election outraged a lot of Americans, mostly Democrats it seems, and very justifiably so. It's the duty of the government at all levels to protect the integrity of elections.

But the actual effect of the Russian intervention via social media and their own media outlets like RT is impossible to determine for certain. Because national election results, and most below the national level, too, are overdetermined. Many factors effect them. To take a counterfactual example, if there were a state that was considered competitive in a Presidential election and no Demoratic or Republican advertising or campaign events took place in it, while Russian bots generated huge publicity for the Republican in the race, then it would be more credible to conclude that Russian interference decisively affected the outcome of the race.

This is why campaign laws are so important and spending limits are badly needed. There's a general recognition that how well a campaign is financed does affect outcomes, although spending more money it itself doesn't automatically guarantee a win. The Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling even cleared the way for donors to be able to spend essentially sums on election campaigns, in some cases without even reporting publicly who donated the money. It is mainly destructive because it gives our own oligarchs excessive power to control elections and politicians. But it also opens vulnerabilites for illicit foreign interference.

In the end, the kinds of measures that protect the integrity of elections in the United States from regular election-stealing mischief are also the kinds of things that would protect against illicit foreign interference. Secure voting machines not connected to the Internet with paper audit trails checked by systematic audits. Limits on campaign donations and effective reporting measures. Automatic voter registration and federally-enforced limits on how states purge voter lists. And social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter should be required to screen against anoymous accounts that could be fronts for illicit campaign activities, foreign or domestic.

The discussion on the significance of the 2016 Russian election interference was heavily influenced by the Clinton campaign's decision to try to blame the election outcome on it. So for many people, it became the party line that Trump's Electoral College win was mainly due to Russian meddling. And it conveniently deflected criticism from the Demoratic candidate and how both her campaign and the Democratic Party establishment.

It also had the very dubious effect of exaggerating the power of Russia and of Putin's government to influence events.

Timothy Snyder in The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018) sometimes sounds like he's arguing that the Russian intervention in the 2016 American election was a stunning feat of international cyber-aggression.

But in the "America" section, he also makes clear that it is actual weaknesses in American democracy that gives Russia or other powers an opening for illicit influence. The current way the Electoral College functions is very heavily undemocratic. That fact needs to be faced realistically. To put in the active voice, the Democratic Party must face it and take action to correct that and other problems. The Republican Party has just as much responsibility to do so. But their basic integrity and commitment to democracy are very much in doubt. And for all too many of them, it's clear that they reject democracy and the rule of law. The Democratic Party since the stalling of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1980s has avoided any serious consideration of needed Constitutional reforms as though they would be comparable to unleashing an anthrax outbreak. They have to change their mindset.

Russia as a world power

Russia and the United States have most of the nuclear weapons in the world. Russia also spends something like 10% of its GDP on military expenditures. (Though GDP numbers are not an exact measure of economic activity.) Russia's economy is usually taken to be somewhat the size of Italy's. In any case, it's not anywhere near the economic power of the former Soviet Union. And the EU's economy is far larger than Russia's. Germany and France together have a bigger military than Russia. Even excluding US contributions, NATO's military budgets are far greater than Russia's. Although that doesn't mean that they are directly comparable, because that compares a number of country to a single one, Russia.

Russia's nukes are a clear threat to the US and Europe. And Russia and the US have a vital interest in reducing and better regulating their nuclear stockpiles and in strenthening nuclear nonproliferation. We often talk these days about climate change being the biggest threat to humanity. But the single most devestating anthropogenic event affecting climate would be an all-out nuclear war betwee the US and Russia. And sudden, catastropic climate change would be only one of the devastating results.

But as the "nuclear Jesuits", the theoreticians of nuclear war, realized even in the 1950s, the actual use of nuclear weapons as a supplement to conventional war is limited in many ways. The American public regarded the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as something like a magic power to win in wars. Some fools would still like to think of it that way. But, to take an example, if Russia decided to follow up on Putinist rhetoric on how Ukraine is part of eternal Russia and take it over, dropping a nuclear bomb or two on it would be anything but a magical solution. Assuming they would nuke targets of military significance, it would not only kill a lot of people instantly and destroy infrastructure that the Russians would want to preserve. It would also spread radioactive particles all around Ukraine and into neighboring countries, including Russia and the Russian-occupied Crimea.

Another major factor in Russia's geopolitical situation is the stable relationship that Russia currently has with China. A glance at a map of Russia will illustrate why this is significant. Russia has a long border with China. And the current stable relationship between Russia and China are distinctly different from most of the Cold War, when the "Sino-Soviet conflict" was a persistent factor, only belatedly fully recognized by the government and foreign policy establishment in the US. There was even a Sino-Soviet War in 1929, before the Communists took power in China.

Speaking of China, by some measures it is already the world's largest economy. Pretty soon it will be described as such without qualifiers. Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer in his book Der Abstieg des Westens: Europa in der neuen Weltordnung des 21.Jahrhunderts (2018) describes the implications of China's rise to being the leading world power from a realist foreign policy perspective. In his view, the US will have to deal with the practical implications of becoming the second-leading power. The European Union and Russia will be among the secondary level of world powers along with the US. Fischer argues from the standard realist viewpoint that the US should manage the transition carefully in cooperation with the EU and Russia. And cooperation between the latter two will be important in protecting EU and Russian interests, all while hopefully avoiding military clashes.

In other words, the US, the EU, and Russia cannot afford to treat each other exclusively as adversaries, much less enemies. And this aspect is something easy to lose sight of in the various polemics around Russian election interference. That doesn't mean that the US and EU should refrain from hard-headed negotiating, particularly not on a unilateral or asymmetrical basis. Just the opposite. Achieving the needed level of stable relationships will require clear-headed and expert negotiations on all sides. It should go without saying that the Orange Clown and his like are incapable of such a thing.

Russia and the European Union

One factor very much at work currently is that the Putin government is more set on breaking up the EU than developing more solid cooperation with it. Brexit serves that purpose. Which of course is not the same as the question of how much Russian influence may have affected the outcome of the Brexit referendum.

Russia isn't alone. Trump's America First policy also is hostile to the European Union. While Trump's position is more drastic than those of his predecessors, the Cheney-Bush Administration also sought to divide EU members against each others, especially over the Iraq War. And had notable success in doing so. The Clinton Administration was favorable to the EU. But they wanted a broad but relatively weak EU. Which led them to push for faster expansion than a more sober assessment of how well countries like Hungary and Romania met the basic democratic and rule-of-law critieria of the EU might have produced. The Obama Administration also took a similar position of preferring a united but weak EU. But Putin and Trump share a downright hostility to the EU.

Russia's political meddling in the EU is a more serious threat to European and American interests than anything the Russians are doing to meddle in American politics. That will look like an absurd statement to anyone convinced that Machiavellian Master Vladimir Putin decided the outcome of the 2016 American Presidential election. But not only is that a questionable call, as explained above. It seems far more likely that the Russian goal was to cause enough trouble for Hillary Clinton to politically weaken her Presidency. It's conceivable that they may not even regard the actual election result as a more favorable outcome.

But if nationalistic parties succeed in fragmenting the European Union, that will put Russia in a more powerful position in shaping world politics in the era of Chinese pre-eminence relative to the US and the EU. And Putin currently exerts actual leadership on far-right parties of the Nationalist International, though that designation is still an ironic grouping more than a formal alliance. But alliances among them do exist. The Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), currently the junior coalition partner in Chancellor Sebastian "Babyface" Kurz' government, concluded a formal friendship and cooperation agreement with Putin's Russia United Party in 2016. So far, they haven't been caught taking illicit funds from Russia. Marine Le Pen's far-right party in France, currently called the National Rally (RN, Rassemblement national), on the other hand, has taken dubious Russian financing (Gabriel Gatehouse, Marine Le Pen: Who's funding France's far right? BBC News 04/03/2017):

But there is more to the relationship between Mr Putin and Ms Le Pen than ideological convergence. Because of the National Front's racist and anti-Semitic past, French banks have declined to lend the party money.

So Marine Le Pen has been forced to look elsewhere for financing.

In 2014, the National Front took Russian loans worth €11m (£9.4m). One of the loans, for €9m, came from a small bank, First Czech Russian Bank, with links to the Kremlin.

The general nationalist, Islamophobic, Christianist stance that Putin has taken in his current Presidency is attractive to the far-right parties in Europe, though some of them like the FPÖ have a more secular cast. There's no question that Putin's authoritarian practice and nationalist ideology have real political attraction for political groups in Europe, and not exclusively for those who would be considered part of the Nationalist International group. (E.g., Babyface Kurz' "turquoise" faction of the Christian Democratic People's Party in Austria.)

Here's where an interesting question arises than I can only touch on here. To what extent is the current relationship of the Russian government and ruling party like the relationship that existed between the Soviet Union and other Communist parties in the world? I don't doubt that Russian officials are drawing on their country's previous experience. I'll mention two relevant factors here. One is that the Communist political program was internationalist, however much the USSR, China, Yugoslavia, and other Communist countries may have applied their official ideology for nationalist purposes. The explicit nationalist and racist ideologies attractive to the Straches and Salvinis of Europe are much more difficult to package as internationalist. As one example, the Austrian FPÖ's plans to give dual citizenship to native-born Italians in the South Tyrol area of northern Italy, endorsed by Babyface's current Austrian government, are adamantly opposed by Italy's Salvini-dominated, more-or-less neofascist Italian government.

The second consideration is that, for all the differences, the basic problems involved in parties taking inspiration from foreign models is similar today to what the case for the USSR and affiliated Communist Parties was. There's nothing inherently wrong in a party looking to foreign examples for good ideas. In fact, its a completely commonplace thing. Lord knows the United States has never been shy about holding itself up as a model to the entire world.

On the other hand, there are national secrets to be guarded and national interests to be defended. Voters need to be confident that their leaders are committed to those things. The US Constitution specifies that the President must be a native-born American citizen. While it sounds dated today - it is really unnecessary today - it was designed to prevent a member of a European dynasty being installed as the American President. If a party owes some kind of allegiance to the ruling party of a foreign power, how can they be trusted to lead a national government?

Making such distinctions is not as hard as it may sound in the abstract. The US and EU countries have laws regulating what kinds of interactions with foreign governments are permitted and which not. And for the stealing of national secrets, people professing admiration for a foreign government that wants to steal the secrets aren't the most obvious candidates for that task. On the other hand, it's not in the least unusual for Democrats and Republicans in the United States to point to foreign examples and experiences to support their own proposals and priorities. The current court judgments against Trump allies like his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn are a reminder that laws defining what makes someone a foreign agent are fairly specific and capable of being enforced. (It's not illegal for an American citizen to act as a foreign agent for another government as long as the purpose is legal and the relationship is reported according to law.)

Evaluating Foreign Threats

Underestimating foreign threats has sometimes been a problem for the United States in the post-World War II era. The most obvious example being the Cheney-Bush Administration's reckless and irresponsible neglect of the very well known terrorist threat from Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda group in the first months of their rule.

But overestimating threats, aka, threat inflation, has caused far more problems for the US in that period. Jeffrey Record provides an excellent discussion of this problem in his The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (2007). Most of the material is included in the paper, Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s (Strategic Studies Institute; Aug 2005). Inflating threats led to some of the worst disasters of post-WWII US foreign policy, the most spectacular being the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. The sorry hisory of "Team B" is a major cautionary tale. (See: Khurram Husain, Neocons: The men behind the curtain Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Nov-Dec 2003)

The American government, political parties, and voters need to keep those lessons in mind as we're moving into the era of China as the world's leading power. Take real threats seriously, including Russian interference in American elections. But don't lose our minds about it. And remember that there are very real factions, some business lobbies and some political ideologues, who have no compunction about wildly exaggerating international dangers for cynical purposes that are not at all identiical to American interests or the cause of peace.

Concluding Thoughts

Yes, Virginia, countries try to influence political outcomes in other countries. And all countries have to deal with it. It's nothing new. In fact, the phenomenon considerably preceded the establishment of nation-states as we know them today.

Noting the Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential election, Mark Weisbrot writes (“Fort Trump” in Poland Is Another Dangerous, Delusional Idea CEPR 12/20/2018):

Americans are understandably upset about any foreign interference in our elections. As are Hondurans, Chileans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Italians, Iranians, or citizens of scores of other countries where the United States has intervened much more heavily ― sometimes with military coups to reverse results ― in elections. This includes Russia itself, where Americans organized and spent heavily to reelect their ally, Boris Yeltsin, in 1996.

Legitimate and illegitimate means of exercising such influence are defined in national and international law. And, yes, the US, Russia, and other countries will continue to break those rules in the pursuit of their national interests. That doesn't make it right. It doesn't make it effective or constructive, a fact the US really needs to keep more in mind in our own interventions. But it's a fact of international relations, and getting crazy about it isn't really helpful to any country's legitimate national interest.

And, yes, Trump should be impeached and removed from office. And he and his associates should be investigated and prosecuted for violations of the law, including those involving some kind of illegal collution with the Russian government.

[12/28/2018: The spelling of the name of Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has been corrected.]