It’s easy for us, the media, and the nation to focus on Donald Trump’s use and abuse of our government and our freedoms, but he is enabled by a powerful political party that traces its roots back to arguably the greatest American president, Abraham Lincoln. How far that party has come: Harding, Nixon, GW Bush, and now Trump all attest to long-running corruption of “the party of Lincoln.” (The ghost of Lincoln vomits in the general direction of today’s GOP.)
As the Senate impeachment trial opens, Josh Marshall makes the case that it’s not really Trump who’s on trial now, but Republican Senators—Moscow Mitch McConnell and the Russian Republicans.
Russian connections to Republicans predate the rise of President Trump and extend far beyond the Senate. Recall Paul Ryan’s secretly recorded conversation about Russian Republican assets with McCarthy in the halls of the US Congress: “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” (Still waiting to know who recorded and released the transcript of this conversation—the story has not been told by anyone that I know of.)
And there’s the Russian infiltration of the NRA, which “underwrote political access for Russian nationals Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin” and thereby affected the 2016 elections: the Kremlin supported not just Donald Trump but potentially any and all Republicans receiving financial and political support from the NRA.
And then there’s the Russian influence on 126 million American voters via Facebook alone.…
Who’s on trial? Tsarist Trump, Moscow Mitch, and all Russian Republicans. The GOP is not only defending Trump: it’s defending itself.