Witch Hunt by Gregg Jarrett

Author:Gregg Jarrett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Russia Hysteria: The Media Loses Its Mind

Political essayists such as “Typhoid Mary” Kramer began painting Trump as beholden to Russia’s president well before the election, not long after Simpson had put his plan into operation. He had company.

In July 2016, Franklin Foer penned a pulpy piece of partisan fancy entitled “Putin’s Puppet: If the Russian President Could Design a Candidate to Undermine American Interests—and Advance His Own—He’d Look a Lot like Donald Trump,” which opened thus: “Vladimir Putin has a plan for destroying the West—and that plan looks a lot like Donald Trump.”45 Weeks later, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, wrote, “Donald J. Trump has chosen this week to unmask himself as a de facto agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin.”46 Not to be outdone, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, published a column in August 2016 called “Trump and Putin: A Love Story.” Employing journalistic superpowers of precognition, Remnick declared that “Putin sees in Trump a grand opportunity. He sees in Trump weakness and ignorance, a confused mind. He has every hope of exploiting him.”47

The scribblings of those three journalists likely left readers convinced that Trump was a “Manchurian Candidate.” (The original movie, not the remake.) All Putin had to do was activate Trump by flashing a Queen of Hearts card. Ludicrous? Obviously. But that did not deter Abigail Tracy from publishing a hit piece in Vanity Fair just days before the election with the titillating title, “Is Donald Trump a Manchurian Candidate?”48 As evidence, she relied on Senator Reid, who, she wrote, claimed to have seen “ ‘explosive information’ linking Donald Trump and his top aides to the Russian government”—in other words, the Steele “dossier.”49 However, clueless citizens could be forgiven for assuming that those well-placed, intelligent thought leaders and politicians had seen some of the explosive proof.

Other news outlets, such as Huffington Post, ran similar articles with nearly identical titles.50 The New York Times printed a column by Ross Douthat with the headline “The ‘Manchurian’ President?”51 Above the headline was a photograph from the 1962 film in which a Communist “sleeper agent” is programmed to take over the US government. Douthat, a purported conservative voice, wrote that it is not “impossible to believe . . . that Trump’s inner circle was actually colluding with Russian intelligence . . . or that Trump himself, for reasons financial or personal, was really a Russian asset of some sort.”52

The irony, of course, is that the media paid little attention to Hillary Clinton’s prodigious and lucrative connections with Russia. Incisive reporting that Clinton might have used her office for profit rarely appeared in the pages of the press or on television news.

No one had seriously accused President Barack Obama of “colluding” with Putin when an active microphone picked up his quiet words about missile defense as he leaned over to confide in then–Russian president Dmitri Medvedev, “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.” Medvedev responded, “I will transmit this information to Vladimir.

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