Vincent J. Curtis
17 July 2017
The media hysteria over Russian “collusion” by the Trump
campaign is proving so impervious to reason that even normally reliable Fox
News is getting affected. Presently, the
hysteria is focussing on a meeting that took place between Donald Trump, Jr.
and some people of Russian origin who purported to have potentially
incriminating information on Hillary Clinton.
However, I want to focus here on a scandal that got
forgotten. The scandal is whether President Donald Trump accepted or did not accept Russian President Vladimir
Putin’s statement that he did not interfere in the American election. The meeting between Trump and Putin and U.S.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov
took place at the G20 summit just concluded, and was legendary for its
length. The meeting was supposed to last
half an hour, but lasted for two and a half hours. After one hour, Melania Trump was sent in to
break it up by the G20 organizers, and she was rebuffed.
The meeting was a productive one, and a cease-fire zone was
established in Syria as a result of it.
In the course of the meeting Trump raised the matter of Russian
interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Putin denied interfering, as he had previously. But the question the media could not stop
asking was whether Donald Trump accepted the denial or not.
Rex Tillerson at a news conference said that Trump did not
accept the denial, but the media needed to know if Trump had said so to Putin’s
face in the meeting. Media persistence
on the question led to the conclusion that Trump had not said so to Putin’s
face, and therefore that he had in fact
accepted Putin’s denial. Of course,
this would make a fool out of Tillerson and be evidence of collusion with
Russia.
A mature negotiator might find it a little undiplomatic and
counterproductive to tell a person discomfited by the facts, as Putin may have
been, to his face that he is a liar and that you don’t believe him. Doing so might get in the way of progress and
cooperation in other areas where there is less disagreement. The fact that Trump did not say to Putin’s
face that he thought Putin was lying only tells me that Trump is a mature
negotiator, not that he was Putin’s fool.
Likewise, there is little to gain diplomatically for Trump himself to
come out of the meeting and proclaim that he thought Putin was lying about
involvement in the American election.
Tillerson, the Secretary of State and an interlocutor in the
meeting, came out and answered the question; and in diplomacy that is enough to get
the point across. Putin gets told, but
not in a way that he loses face; nor does it imperil the personal diplomacy
between Trump and Putin.
However, the media is full of 27 year-old-know-nothings, as
Ben Rhodes observed; and that would include numerous 70 year olds with the maturity
and metal capacity of 27 year old know-nothings. They howled for a while about Trump being a
fool and making fools of his staff.
Then on Friday, the New York Times, of all media outlets, spills the beans on the story. The media horde were travelling on Air Force
1 with Trump to Paris for the celebration of the July 14 Bastille Day in France.
They were treated to an unexpected
bantering press conference with Trump on the way over. In the course of that conversation somebody
asked Trump about his meeting with Putin and whether he pressed Putin over
Russian interference in the election.
Trump recounted that Putin twice denied to him that Russian
had meddled in the presidential election.
Trump concluded, “What do you do?
End up in a fistfight with somebody?”
“I said to him, ‘Were you involved in the meddling with the
election?’ He said, ‘Absolutely
not. I was not involved.’ He was very
strong on it. I then said to him, in a
totally different way, “Were you involved with the meddling? He said, ‘I was not – absolutely not.’”
Mature people recognize that at that point there is no productive purpose in further pressing, or of accusing Putin of lying.
And yet the media hysteria over collusion will not let them see it; they
needed Trump to create an unproductive diplomatic spat to prove something to
them, and even then they wouldn’t have let Trump off the collusion hook.
If the media thought a little deeper about it, the whole
conversation Trump recounted shows that there hadn’t been collusion at
all. Trump would not have had to ask if
Putin was involved, because Trump would have known through the acts of
collusion. I can’t imagine that Trump
and Putin would have put on a clever charade to fool Rex Tillerson about
collusion during the election, which is what those exchanges in a private
meeting would have amounted to. With
Trump’s leaky White House, any effort to privately arrange such a charade would
be in the media before it ever happened.
The media are fixated on collusion, and any evidence to the
contrary gets ignored. Even the older
media types lack the maturity to see how the facts don’t correspond to
collusion.
Now, the media are hounding Don Jr., and their capacity to
understand plain English is being impaired by hysteria. But that is for another day.
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