David Corn

Trying to make sense of the l'affaire Russe is enough to make anyone a conspiracy theorist, and this book should come with a skein of red yarn to help readers connect the dots.

The basic facts are clear enough: in 2016, as part of a longstanding intelligence operation against the United States, Russia hacked into servers controlled by the DNC and the gmail account of longtime Clinton staffer John Podesta. The hacked documents trickled out to the media through the twitter persona Guccifer 2.0 show more and Wikileaks, and on Nov 9, 2016, we woke up and Donald Trump was President. Welcome to the darkest timeline.

The story is complex, and there are a lot moving parts. One part is Putin's campaign against the United States, and the nature of Russian intelligence operations and hybrid warfare. The authors point to the "Gerasimov doctrine", and longstanding animus between Putin and Clinton personally, but don't have the space to make a really good case about the nature of Russia's foreign policy, it's strategies of ambiguity and tension, and the role of Putin.

The second story is the hacks and the leaks. Isikoff reveals a decidedly lackluster cybersecurity effort at the DNC and in the Federal government. The DNC cyber people didn't take FBI warnings seriously. The Federal government dragged its feet on coordinating a response, done in by a belief that this could be resolved once Hilary was inevitably elected, Obama's desire to appear non-partisan, and the absolute refusal of Senate Major Leader Mitch McConnell to be part of a response (Turtle Mitch is dirty as fuck). This story matters, and a bunch of people in charge of state level election security need to be doing much better than they currently are, but the story of the leaks has an almost impossible job to do. We have to understand the weirdness of the race, both as it felt in fall of 2016, and knowing what we know now.

The third and final story can be summed up by that phrase from Watergate. "What did the President know? And when did he know it?" Collusion, the actions of Paul Manafort, who showed up after a decade long career repping pro-Russian plutocrats to work for Trump for free, Roger Stone and his history of dirty tricks, the idea that Russians have had compromat on Trump for years if not decades, linked to his desire to build a hotel in Moscow, along with the Steele dossier and The Pee Tape. This is the part of the story that is evolving the fastest, with the Mueller investigation ongoing, and Trump shitting himself in public constantly. And it's also the part where nothing is yet proven.

I think about who should read this book. Political junkies probably know all this already, and the material isn't organized, or linked with enough value insight to be really worth it. My Left-skeptic friends would dismiss the whole thing as CIA CYA. And as for the C.H.U.Ds, well, nothing will convince a C.H.U.D.

Wait for the final verdict. show less

When I was younger I never imagined I'd be devouring books about politics. And it's not just being "woke" that makes me feel that I need to keep up on what's going on in the world. Rather, it's a desire to understand all those goings-on, and how they affect my world and me. The more I know the more interesting it all becomes. Perhaps the political milieu seems boring to many Americans because we know so very little about how it works. That's a shame, really, and if I wanted to I could devote show more a whole post (or many) about why that is, and what can be done about it.

But this is intended to be a review of the Isikoff and Corn history of the run-up to the 2016 election with an eye to Republican collusion with Russia, so let me just say that they do a damn fine job of it. The book reads like a political thriller -- without the car chases, shoot-outs and fistfights, though there is a good bit of poison, courtesy of the Russians -- a chronological account of the events that informed the presidential election, and a look at the players involved.

The Trump camp does not come off well, but then did you expect they would? If there was no collusion between them and Russia, the coincidences are so unbelievable that I'd guess the odds are up in the killed-by-a-meteor-while-collecting-a-billion-dollar-Powerball-check area. Is Trump culpable here? That's hard to say because he comes off as one of the most oblivious humans on the planet, never entirely knowing what's happening, or really caring about any of it unless it earns him money.

The Clinton camp seems more feckless than anything else, forced to play defense at every turn. The Sanders camp barely registers, except to come across badly when they do. Surprisingly, James Comey seems more sympathetic than I'd expected. Isikoff and Corn paint a picture of a man who kept finding himself between a rock and a hard place, and who made some bad decisions because it it. It made me want to read his new book, so that should tell you something.

What did I take away from all this? There is no doubt in my mind that Russia intended to influence the election in favor of Trump. There is no doubt in my mind that America was played for a collective chump by Putin and his allies. There is no doubt that there were Putin allies in the Trump camp, and they may have included The Donald. As of the writing of this book, the jury was still out on the proof of culpability and the level of damage that was done to our democracy, though the news brings us closer to answers every day, and I suspect that had this book been published next year it would have been far more damning.

Nevertheless it's food for thought, and it is, in one important sense, one of the best accounts of what happened that I've run across. Isikoff and Corn are brilliant at contextualizing these events so that it's simple to understand what happened and why it was important and, not incidentally, who was involved. For a clear, concise timeline of these events, I don't think you could do better. show less

At times I would like to think malfeasance from high office might only be incompetence, but with Bush, "Scooter" Libby, and the gossip-y Dick Armitage it sures looks like incompetent malfeasance: attacks on Ambassador Wilson, faking claims of Iraqi bio-weapon trucks and Hussein yellow cake purchases were hopeless endeavors that that succeeded inspite of themselves. (The Nigerian documents, sold by a wanna-be freelance spy more dishonest than Curveball was so inaccurate it was akin to show more producing one stating Ronald Reagan, C-I-C of the CSA piped twleve billion gallons of nerve gas to terrorists in 2001.) Ah, if only it were a novel, than I couldn't believe it.

Cheney was the puppet master, that's for sure, but earlier books like Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack and even the Dick Cheney autobiography In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir make that clear. This book basically takes that as a given and explores the bizarrely shaky foundations of the Nigerian yellowcake accusation, the mobile germ warfare labs Colin Powell reluctantly and regrettably laid out before the U.N. and how someone that should have known better, George Tenet (At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA) was seduced or misled by the neo-con juggernaut to become mere character victims in the misdirected bloodbath. show less

Psychosis, clinically speaking, is a mental disorder characterized by a disconnection from reality. The individual suffering from psychosis has major disruptions to their thoughts and perceptions that prevent them from distinguishing what is real from what isn’t.

This incapacitating psychological state is typically characterized by delusions, paranoia, and conspiratorial thinking. Left untreated, psychosis is detrimental to both the individual and to those around them. But what if this show more state of psychosis infected an entire political party? Imagine the type of damage that could be done if politicians found a way to encourage and exploit, on a mass scale, widespread delusive and conspiratorial ideas.

Well, we’re frankly living through that nightmare scenario currently. Welcome to the Republican Party, a party where, according to an Economist/YouGov poll, 49 percent of Republicans believe that it is definitely or probably true that “top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings.” (Remember Pizzagate?)

In American Psychosis, journalist David Corn investigates, in painstaking detail, the history of the unholy alliance between extremist views like the one above and the Republican Party that leverages these views—views conservative political leaders often disagree with but turn a blind eye to—for political gain and votes.

Honestly, there are simply too many historical examples to summarize in this review, but the reader—especially one unfamiliar with the history—will realize that the era of Trump is no aberration from the general direction the Republican Party has been moving for quite some time. It’s simply the apotheosis of the party’s natural movement towards outright insanity.

Corn does a tremendous job of documenting this progression, which happens to be one of history’s greatest tragedies: namely, how the party of Lincoln—which was founded on the noble principle of halting the expansion of slavery—became the party of Trump and the economic elite. It’s also the story of how respectable, moderate conservatives have been overtaken by the lunatic fringe.

The biggest lesson we can learn from this book is that far-right conservatism appears most ridiculous only in hindsight. A prominent case in point is McCarthyism. Led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, McCarthyism was a vociferous campaign against alleged communists that were believed to have infiltrated the US Government and other institutions (McCarthy even accused President Dwight Eisenhower of being a Communist asset). In hindsight, we can now confidently say that McCarthy was a paranoid lunatic and that McCarthysim was an utter embarrassment, grounded in baseless accusations and irrational and overblown fears. But at the time, Joseph McCarthy was revered, even idolized, as the “savior of the country.”

Examples like this beg the question: In 50 to 100 years time, what are we going to think about Donald Trump, a president who, by one estimate, uttered an unprecedented 30,573 false or misleading statements, including the statement that he “handled the coronavirus masterfully.” Do we really believe the historical pattern of the Republican Party successfully exploiting extremist views and conspiracies for political gain has been broken by a man that suggested to scientists that they look into treating the coronavirus by injecting people with UV light and disinfectant?

In all likelihood, based on the history outlined in this book, Trump is destined to be viewed, historically, in a similar manner as McCarthy—essentially, as a semi-deranged, narcissistic laughingstock. And this view is not simply an example of unchecked political bias; I don’t know what else to label a president that betrays his oath to the country and Constitution by inciting domestic terrorists to violently invade the Capitol based on the complete fabrication—with no credible supporting evidence whatsoever—that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him. (Claims that were thrown out in court by conservative judges Trump himself appointed.)

Whatever faults the Democratic Party may have—and there are more than a few—there is simply no Democratic equivalent to this virulent conspiracy-mongering, which has become the staple characteristic of Trump’s GOP. For Trump, truth is simply beside the point; the only thing that matters to him is loyalty. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an autocracy expert and history professor at New York University observed, “[Trump] changed the party to an authoritarian party culture. So not only do you go after external enemies, but you go after internal enemies. You’re not allowed to have any dissent.”

The only remaining question is whether or not you really want to be associated with this. After reading this book, I would hope that you’d want to stay as far away from this paranoid style of politics as possible. Nothing less than the sanity of the country is at stake. show less