The Atlantic: 'Putin's Goal is to Bring Down American Democracy'

[riversedge]

18. "Putin .... will never have a more reliable ally than Donald Trump."......

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/putin-american-democracy/610570/

...............The sprawling federal bureaucracy has never been particularly adept at the kind of coordination necessary to anticipate a wily adversary’s next move. But there is another reason for the government’s alarmingly inadequate response: a president who sees attempts to counter the Russia threat as a personal affront.

After McMaster was fired, having made little if any progress on Russia, the director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, took up the cause, installing in his office an election-security adviser named Shelby Pierson. This past February, Pierson briefed Schiff’s committee that the Russians were planning to interfere in the upcoming election, and that Trump remained Moscow’s preferred candidate. Anyone who follows the president on Twitter knows this is a subject that provokes his fury. Indeed, the day after Pierson’s testimony, the president upbraided Coats’s successor, Joseph Maguire, for Pierson’s assessment. A week later, he fired Maguire and installed in his place the ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, a loyalist with no intelligence experience. Grenell immediately set about confirming the wisdom behind Trump’s choice. Three weeks into his tenure, a senior intelligence official in the Office of the DNI informed the Senate that Pierson’s assessment was mistaken.

Trump had graphically illustrated his recurring message to the intelligence community: He doesn’t want to hear warnings about Russian interference. Mark Warner, the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me, “A day doesn’t go by that I don’t hear from someone in the intelligence community saying, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re worried about integrity, we’re worried about morale, we’re worried about willingness to speak truth to power.’ ” I asked Warner whether he could still trust the intelligence about Russia he received—whether he has faith that the government will render an accurate portrait of the Russian threat to the upcoming presidential election. As he considered his answer, he leaned toward me. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he replied, “and that bothers me.”

Vladimir Putin dreams of discrediting the American democratic system, and he will never have a more reliable ally than Donald Trump. A democracy can’t defend itself if it can’t honestly describe the attacks against it. But the president hasn’t just undermined his own country’s defenses—he has actively abetted the adversary’s efforts. If Russia wants to tarnish the political process as hopelessly rigged, it has a bombastic amplifier standing behind the seal of the presidency, a man who reflexively depicts his opponents as frauds and any system that produces an outcome he doesn’t like as fixed. If Russia wants to spread disinformation, the president continually softens an audience for it, by instructing the public to disregard authoritative journalism as the prevarications of a traitorous elite and by spouting falsehoods on Twitter.

In 2020, Russia might not need to push the U.S. for it to suffer a terrible election-year tumble. Even without interventions from abroad, it is shockingly easy to imagine how a pandemic might provide a pretext for indefinitely delaying an election or how this president, narrowly dispatched at the polls, might refuse to accept defeat. But restraint wouldn’t honor Russia’s tradition of Active Measures. And there may never be a moment quite so ripe for taking the old hashtag out of storage and giving it a triumphalist turn. #DemocracyRIP.