Like father, like son?

The conflict between fathers and sons was highlighted by Ivan Turgenev in 1862. One hopes the now proverbial discord still perseveres in the Trump family in 2017.

Specifically, one hopes that no causal relationship exists between two statements, one made by Donald the father, the other by Donald the son.

Son: “… Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets… We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Dad: “If you get along and if Russia is really helping us, why would anybody have sanctions if somebody’s doing some really great things?”

If the two statements are directly linked, then impeachment will be too light a punishment for Dad. If America’s new president does Putin’s bidding for personal fiscal gain, we’ll be talking not indiscretion but high treason.

Scraping together the few residual crumbs of respect I still feel for modern politics, I have to reject this possibility – certainly until the above-mentioned link has been proved.

So let’s accept Dad’s statement at face value: he’s prepared to lift the sanctions imposed by his predecessor (and, incidentally, all other Western governments) if Russia does “some really great things”, specifically helps the US fight Islamic terrorism.

That’s like saying that a murderer must be let off because he helps old ladies across the street. Regardless of any “great things” Russia may do in the future, the sanctions were imposed for two crimes it committed: the first batch, for its aggression against the Ukraine; the second, for using electronic means to undermine the US electoral process and therefore Constitution.

Trump has acknowledged that Russia, or specifically Putin, “might have been” (the political for ‘was’) behind the hacking scandal, although he denies that the outcome of the election was in any way affected. Here’s another everyday simile: that’s like saying that attempted but failed murder is no crime.

Sabotage of a country’s constitution is a capital offence when committed by an individual. When committed by one country against another, it’s an act of war.

Dismissing it as lightly as Trump is doing, if for the sake of some mythical “great things”, bespeaks crassness even assuming, as I do for the time being, that he’s acting in good faith.

In fact, regardless of whether Trump is a legitimate candidate or a Manchurian one, Putin’s electronic warfare and the subsequent kompromat dossier have already succeeded in hamstringing the new presidency before it has even begun.

For one thing, it poisoned Trump’s relationship with both the media and the intelligence services. The latter have often had problems with politicians, never more so than in the 1970s, when Sen. Frank Church’s committee emasculated US intelligence gathering. This disaster looks likely to be repeated under Trump.

He has ascribed political motives to the spooks for passing on the compromising dossier. He’s probably wrong. Intelligence agencies tend to regard information as valuable ipso facto, regardless of its political effect.

If they felt that the dossier was sufficiently credible, it was their duty to act before the information was made public. Since the released part of the dossier has many blackened-out bits, I have no way of judging its verisimilitude. What’s clear is that Trump took its release as a personal affront, and his likely retaliation may impair America’s eyes and ears.

It’s also evident that Trump’s relationship with the media is starting off on the wrong foot. That most mainstream media favoured Clinton in the election is a fact. However, it’s up to Trump to regard this as either casus belli or a challenge to overcome.

He gives every indication of opting for the former, which is a bad omen. US media will henceforth be dissecting Trump’s presidency with relentless vigour, especially in relation to Russia.

Any attempt at a rapprochement will be presented as indirect proof of the Manchurian charges; any display of toughness, as an overreaction to them. And any US president at war with the media is on a losing wicket.

For example, the predominantly leftwing US press began to scrutinise every half-step made by Richard Nixon after he led the congressional committee investigating Alger Hiss and other Soviet agents. Following Hiss’s 1950 conviction for perjury, the press started digging up dirt on Nixon, finally succeeding with Watergate.

In no way excusing Nixon’s crimes, one could still suggest that the press would have been less diligent in investigating similar acts by, say, one of the Kennedy brothers. With Trump, they’ll be using not so much a magnifying glass as an electron microscope to find any speck of dirt.

It’s tragic folly for a great country to leave a hostile act against it unpunished. This is a shortcut to losing its greatness in a hurry. Obviously, when dealing with a country capable, in the language of Putin’s propagandist-in-chief, of “reducing America to radioactive dust”, punishment must be exacted with caution. But exacted it must be, and severe trade sanctions are the most realistic option.

Trump’s presidency elicits knee-jerk reactions pro or con on both sides of the political spectrum. One such knee jerked in my direction, when an American reader responded to my previous criticism of Trump by calling me ‘a liberal’, a charge not often levelled at me.

We’ve been conditioned to think about politics in terms of the largely meaningless and definitely relativistic left-right divide. As far as we’re concerned, truth doesn’t matter – we agree with Pontius Pilate’s rhetorical question “What is truth?”, implying that it’s either nonexistent or unknowable or irrelevant.

Being a hopeless retrograde, I tend to judge politics from the perspective of absolute truth and morality, not transient expediency. It remains to be seen whether Trump will stand up to such judgement – though we’ll all benefit if, as I hope, he does.