The news from Bob Woodward’s latest book is startling.
The legendary Washington Post journalist has reported that as the Covid pandemic raged in 2020, with supplies of tests scarce in the United States, Donald Trump, then president, secretly sent test equipment to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, for his personal use. Meanwhile, in his own country, Trump downplayed – even mocked – the need for Americans to test.
Even Putin thought this would be damaging if it got out. “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me,” he reportedly told Trump.
Since then, Woodward reports, Trump has kept in touch with the Russian autocrat. Trump may have spoken to Putin as often as seven times since he left office in 2021.
Will it matter? Certainly not to the Trump faithful.
They have stood resolutely by their man, no matter what. Trump has known this for years, reflecting in early 2016 that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters”.
When, shortly before the 2016 election, NBC’s Access Hollywood tape surfaced and Trump could be heard bragging that he was such a star that he could get away with grabbing women’s private parts, his campaign took it as a death knell.
But it wasn’t. He got away with that, too.
Why does this keep happening, through every scandal and misdeed, through two impeachments, 34 felony convictions, innumerable insults and lies? Why the Teflon?
Perhaps it’s simply that Trump’s appeal to his voters is not about ethics, character or patriotism. Rather, it stands apart from the world of facts and accountability. In many ways, it’s not about behavior at all, at least not in the traditional candidate mold.
It’s about who he hates, and who his followers hate.
“He’s a character, he’s an avatar for a certain set of grievances,” a Princeton professor, Eddie S Glaude Jr, recently observed on MSNBC. The grievances are fear-based: suspicion of the “other”, portrayed as the killer-immigrant, the outsider who will take your job and your safety and your daughter’s spot on a sports team.
United in grievance, the voter and the candidate cannot be separated by something as comparatively powerless as betrayal of country or lack of humanity.
Still, for those not in the cult, each new offense seems like the end.
How could this one – for instance, the debate-stage rant that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are “eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” – not have been the end?
Yet the end never comes.
“Imagine if we learned today that Kamala Harris was having regular conversations with Vladimir Putin, had sent him a special Covid testing kit, falsely claimed to have visited Gaza, was repeatedly lying about the federal hurricane response and said that the country had bad genes,” wrote the anti-Trump lawyer George Conway.
The media would be in a frenzy, the negative attention would be unrelenting, and all of that would capsize her campaign.
But Trump sails on. Imagine if Kamala Harris had first agreed to, then backed out of, an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes, as Trump did – at least in part because he didn’t want to be fact-checked or subjected to tough questions.
By now, eight years past the Access Hollywood tape, the different sets of standards are baked in. One candidate – whether Biden or Harris – has been held to old-style judgments, with every word parsed and criticized.
The other is held to almost no standards, because his base simply refuses to care.
And the scandals build on each other. They pile up, intertwined.
Thus, the report that Trump and Putin remained in contact gives a whole new dimension to knowing that the former president had a trove of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and did not willingly turn them over.
It gives a whole new dimension to Trump’s pressuring Republicans to block military aid to Ukraine.
It brings deeper understanding to how Trump says the conflict between Ukraine and Russia would never have started under him and that it will be immediately over if he wins another term. We know what this really means; Putin would simply have his way.
Former Trump officials, right up to former vice-president Mike Pence, and some conscientious Republicans, have denounced the former president or even endorsed Harris. They know.
But Trump’s poll numbers and approval ratings don’t seem to budge. The faithful remain faithful, unperturbed – couched in their indifference, as a Paul Simon lyric put it.
Trump doesn’t often tell the truth. But when it came to his observation about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, he got something very right.