Trump’s long history of insecurity on winning the election

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Why does President Trump refuse to publicly criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin? There’s a fairly simple explanation that involves neither conspiracy theories about kompromat nor a belief that Trump was much tougher behind closed doors than he was in public.

The simplest explanation for our president’s behavior towards Putin has two elements: (1) Trump suffers from a disordered fondness for strongmen, and (2) he is still insecure about his 2016 electoral victory.

The first element is well-established and disturbing. Trump is unduly fond of oppressive strongmen. He’s praised Rodrigo Duterte’s crime-fighting in the Philippines (in short, murder) and expressed admiration for Kim Jong Un’s rise to power in North Korea (again, murder). Again and again Trump has praised Putin as “strong.” Trump’s morality looks like a total abandonment of modern liberal morality and total embrace of a dog-park, Nietzschean state of nature. He is not tapping into the better angels of our nature.

On the second element, my colleague Byron York made a compelling argument. Trump simply can’t distinguish between the investigation into what Russia did in the 2016 election and whether Trump colluded with whatever Russia did.

“The president clearly believes if he gives an inch on the what-Russia-did part,” York writes, “his adversaries, who want to discredit his election, undermine him, and force him from office, will take a mile on the get-Trump part.”

There’s a deeper issue, though. Trump, it’s true, jumps quickly from talk of “meddling” to talk of “collusion,” but something else is prior. Go back to his Monday press conference.

“I beat Hillary Clinton easily,” Trump said when nobody had asked him about the election. “And frankly, we beat her – and I’m not even saying from the standpoint – we won that race. And it’s a shame that there can even be a little bit of a cloud over it.”

When asked about the dozen Russians indicted for meddling with the U.S. election, Trump returned to this theme. The investigation into meddling, he asserted, “came out as a reason why the Democrats lost an election.” Then back to the well, “We won the Electoral College by a lot … And that was a well-fought – that was a well-fought battle. We did a great job.”

Trump isn’t worried that indictments of Russians implicate him in breaking the law. Trump is terrified that indictments of Russians take credit away from his election win. When you say “Russia tried to harm Hillary,” Trump hears, “Trump only won with foreign help.”

We first saw this aversion in May 2017. That is, of course, when Trump fired FBI Director James Comey.

In Senate testimony in early May, Comey said, “It makes me mildly nauseous to think that we might have had some impact on the election.”

Trump was angry at this reponse. “FBI Director Comey was the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds! The phony Trump/Russia story was an excuse used by the Democrats as justification for losing the election. Perhaps Trump just ran a great campaign?”

And then Trump fired Comey.

There are a million reasons why maybe Trump fired Comey, but the most proximate cause seemed to be Comey saying, under oath on national television, that he may have helped Trump win.

Then look at Trump’s other early firings. He unloaded Steve Bannon after a string of stories and comedy sketches implied that Bannon was really the mastermind of Trump’s win. While firing him, Trump emphasized the small role Bannon played in Trump’s win.

In this light, we should see Trump’s anger about the Russia investigation. Maybe he worries they’ll find something. Maybe he worries they’ll wrongly accuse him of treason. Most likely, Trump believes that federal investigators are trying to prove Trump had foreign help – that Trump couldn’t win on his own.

That terrifies Trump, and together with his undue fondness for strongmen, explains his dreadful performance in Helsinki.

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