President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin looked glum in France at the meeting last week of world leaders marking 100 years since World War I ended. But that changed when the two faced each other.
At one point Mr. Trump gave an approaching Mr. Putin a large smile as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron scowled at the Russian. There was also a moment when Mr. Putin gave Mr. Trump a thumbs-up.
The sincerity of Mr. Trump’s smile was questionable. Even if Mr. Trump is not beholden to Mr. Putin as many believe he is, one would think that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Russian ties and possible collusion with Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign would be enough for the sight of Mr. Putin to put the U.S president in a somber mood.
By contrast, the sudden gesture of the usually composed Mr. Putin might have been sincere.
And that’s not just because Mr. Trump’s antics in Paris so perfectly played into Mr. Putin’s hands by underscoring the U.S. leader’s split with his European counterparts, who question his commitment to NATO and hence to Europe’s security from the Russian aggression.
But also because Mr. Trump has been a godsend to Mr. Putin by turning U.S. politics into a reality show exploited by the Russian leader for his own domestic political interest.
For months, at least since the beginning of 2018, Kremlin-controlled media and Internet trolls doubled down on exaggerating the growing political split between the urban and rural America and pushed the idea that the United States is backsliding toward a civil war. To a Russian, the words “civil war” sound particularly frightening after the 1917-1922 civil war in Russia claimed millions of lives, mostly civilian.
Other Kremlin propagandists contend that Mr. Trump might be leading the United States toward a financial crisis.
“Unfortunately, Trump didn’t reach the level of Abraham Lincoln and didn’t drive the U.S. to civil war. That’s sad. Hopefully, he’ll become Herbert Hoover and at least drive them into a Great Depression,” Andrei Sidorov, a department chair at the world-politics college at Moscow’s State University, said on Channel One Russia national television as translated and tweeted by Russian-media analyst Julia Davis, for example.
Once the U.S. midterm elections ended without too much trouble, the Russian gloating tone briefly dropped but then quickly recovered after Attorney General Jeff Sessions was pushed out of his job and Matthew Whitaker was appointed as the new acting attorney general.
The Russian media gleefully alleges both that the “trumped up and politically motivated” Mueller investigation is now doomed and that Mr. Trump’s political demise is near.
Dmitri Smirnov, Russia’s Komsomolskaya Pravda daily newspaper’s special correspondent accredited at the Kremlin, tweeted that “agent Trump has never been so close to being found out” (translation is mine) — an apparent reference to a Russian cult movie about an impossibly high-placed, and equally impossibly efficient, Russian spy.
The tweet echoes Mr. Putin’s coy admission at a news conference following the Trump-Putin July summit in Helsinki of having played a part in swinging the 2016 presidential election in Mr. Trump’s favor.
The scope of the U.S. midterms coverage and the U.S. politics in its aftermath have not receded, despite Mr. Trump’s efforts at leadership changes in the justice department. The “civil war” topic is pushed by the Kremlin-controlled media as it suggests the probability of a constitutional crisis if Mr. Whitaker tries to undermine the Mueller investigation.
Mr. Putin’s goal here is to cast the democratic United States as an unstable, dangerous place and — by contrast — the undemocratic Russia he controls as a heaven of stability and security.
The need to do so has intensified as Mr. Putin has been increasingly challenged lately by mass protests over an immensely unpopular increase of pension age that put retirement out of reach to an estimated 40 percent of men and 20 percent of women in Russia. The people there are often blaming their dwindling livelihoods on government officials’ corruption.
Mr. Putin realizes that the Democrats’ new control of the U.S. House of Representatives will make it impossible for Mr. Trump to remove the U.S. sanctions against Russia, thus giving Mr. Putin and his controlled media another script to blame the United States for the woes of his people.
Mike Sigov, a former Russian journalist in Moscow, is a U.S. citizen and a staff writer for The Blade.
First Published November 18, 2018, 5:00 a.m.
