Don Trump will soon be sworn in as the first Hacksident of the United States. Vladimir Putin’s operatives hacked the Trump and Clinton party machinery to manipulate US voters in favor of Trump, Putin’s preferred candidate. They very nearly failed.
Trump lost the popular vote by a greater margin than anyone but Hayes in 1876 and Adams in 1824. He holds on the Electoral College by a miserly 75,000 votes, or 0.026% of the 129,000,000 votes cast. The Republicans lost two seats in the Senate and six in the House, deepening our constitutional crisis.
Trump comes in with a weak hand. He owes Putin the Small bigly. Vladimir will not be shy about demanding payback. Without Putin’s hackers, there is no way Trump could have managed to get his tiny winning margin. As Wellington said, this was "a near-run thing."
So, what kind of leader did Putin get himself in our first Hacksident?
As Publius has shown in a series of analyses over the last year, Dumb Don’s ability to read, write and count is stuck in the sixth grade when he would have been eleven or twelve. (See Publius' Dumb Don.) His Billy Bush rants show that his emotional age is about the same. So, Putin’s Hacksident is an eleven-year old boy stuck in a seventy-year old man’s body. How he plans to deal with that is anybody’s guess.
Dumb Don can only think in the Planck Length of intellection, a Tweet. He sends out incoherent scatterings of Tweets which, taken together, look like a broken mirror mosaic of disconnected bits and pieces with varying reflective and refractive indices. Dumb Don’s Tweet mosaic makes no sense to him or to anyone else.
Read his speeches. Watch his interviews. Every time he gets a question that requires even a small amount of thought, he pushes back and reduces his response to an often-irrelevant Tweet-length jumble. The media insist on treating Don as if he is normal, which he isn’t. So, he barges on, dismissing them as “sad,” or “pathetic.” This way the Dumb Dude avoids acknowledging that he doesn’t understand the question, let alone how to manage a cogent response.
His advisors and cabinet members are about to find out how impossible it is to work with someone as developmentally challenged as Dumb Don. Former CIA director James Woolsey, one of the Hacksident Elect’s top security advisers, already has. “I can’t keep up with the Tweets,” he despaired.
It will get worse. Don tries to hide his illiteracy by saying that he won’t read briefing papers because they are boring. At some point, their constant exposure to Don’s failings will make his limitations painfully obvious to everyone in his Administration.
Don’s developmental challenges will rebound on Putin the Small soon enough. Relations with Russia had been increasingly complex since Theodore Roosevelt arranged the end of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union a quarter century ago and the steady implosion of the Russia that emerged, these relations have become much simpler. Russia is now an Italy-sized economy that failed to diversify when it had the chance and is being dragged into an ever-deeper recession as the price of oil sits on the floor. It has no global clout and little hope of regaining any within the next century.
For Putin the Small, getting smaller is no fun. So, he uses as many off beat techniques he can come up with to give himself the illusion of influence. With his new Hacksident in place, he may feel that he has recovered some small part of Russia’s past imperial glory.
But, the way Don thinks, the L’il Guy may get something he wasn’t expecting. If Publius was advising Vladimir, he’d tell the L’il Dude to look carefully at Publius' review of Don’s plans for illegals living here. The first thing Publius noticed was that either Don ran the numbers on the cost of deporting 15 million people, saw that it tripled the federal budget and didn’t care, or he didn’t run the numbers and still didn’t care.
For Putin, it doesn’t matter how you read Don's reasoning: Because Don reasons the same way in everything from foreign affairs to Interstates, Putin's risk in anything to do with the United States, in other words, the world, just went through the roof. There is no way he can manage his Hacksident or any Hacksidental fallout.
Putin will soon be on his knees praying for divine intervention to install Hilary Clinton as President. He can’t stand her but at least he knows what she is likely to do and that she means what she says.
Publius says, “Too late for that Vlad!! You broke it; you keep it.”
January 9, 2017
The Wall Street Journal has for decades had problems with simple logic in its editorials. Today, in a wonderful exercise in the casuistry for which it is so well known, the Journal struggled in its editorial, Bonfire of the Intelligence Vanities, to square Putin's Poodle, our Hacksident, with Clinton's popular vote victory. You have to wonder where these people went to school.
On the same day, Journal columnist Gerald Seib went several steps ahead of his struggling Editorial Board. He pointed out that, by volunteering to be Putin's Poodle well before taking office, the Dumb Dude has boxed himself in, limiting not just his options with Russia but with the Center of Everything (China in Chinese) as well.
Less than two weeks after Publius posted The Hacksident of The United States, former CIA Director James Woolsey found that he has no choice but to quit Dumb Don's team. Working with Putin's Poodle clearly did not suit Woolsey who has been just about the only level-headed and patriotic, advisor in the Dumb Dude's stable.
January 26, 2017
The Hacksident's numbers are deeply humiliating to Dumb Don and his team. They have reacted with outrage to Putin's near failure to bring it home for them. The latest to blow up publicly is Stephen Bannon, Trump's chief strategist. It is sad to watch those not smart enough to follow James Woolsey out the door in time to save themselves fall farther and farther into Trump's quagmire.
June 1, 2017
Putin is following the cry of sauve qui peut that is ripping through the fast failing Trump administration. (See Publius' March 3 Follow Up to "President Pence.") With Michael Flynn invoking the Fifth Amendment so he can get immunity and preserve his military pension, Putin knew that his number was up. He just admitted that Russia did manipulate the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. But, hoping to minimize damage to himself, he attributed the effort to "patriotic" Russians. Which, in Kremlinspeak, means the FSB.
If Jared Kushner is told that his position is weak enough that he faces jail time, likely he too will move fast to cut a deal. And that would eliminate any remaining Russian influence for at least a generation. Putin had to move.
Expect the former FBI Director, James Comey, to do everything he can to preserve his future income stream with his testimony. Others in the intelligence community will follow Comey's lead. There is too much at stake for them not to. Unlike Trump, they are not rich and have nothing on which to fall back if things go wrong.
November 12, 2017
Our Hacksident finally did the decent thing today and stuck up for Vladimir Putin. It was about time. He waited a whole year before extending his gratitude to the man who gave him everything.
February 17, 2018
The DoJ has finally indicted thirteen Russians for making Dumb Don our hacksident. This includes contact with “unwitting individuals associated with the Trump campaign.” The Dumb Dude will, of course, say that the FSB's hard work does not mean that he of his unwitting team colluded with them. His defense is that he is what we say he is, dumb. Really really dumb.
May 24, 2018
From what Greg Sargent reported in the Washington Post, none other than James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence, has swung behind Publius full force, saying on NPR:
“As a private citizen, it’s what I would call my informed opinion that, given the massive effort the Russians made, and the number of citizens that they touched, and the variety and multi-dimensional aspects of what they did to influence opinion … and given the fact that it turned on less than 80,000 votes in three states, to me it exceeds logic and credulity that they didn’t affect the election. And it’s my belief they actually turned it.”
No kidding!! Took nearly a year and a half, but there it is folks. Publius scores yet again.