American HustleJuly/August 2019 71Trump’s connections to Russia were hardly a secret during the cam-
paign. In June 2016, Kevin McCarthy o California, who was then the
Republican House majority leader and is now the minority leader and a
staunch Trump supporter, stated behind closed doors to party colleagues
in a secretly taped meeting, “There’s two people I think Putin pays:
Rohrabacher and Trump.” (Dana Rohrabacher was a curiously pro-Putin
Republican U.S. representative from California.) When some o those
present laughed, McCarthy added: “Swear to God!”
The most revealing example o the Trump team’s attitude toward
Russia was the campaign’s infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting
with a group o Russians who promised that they had dirt on Clinton.
The meeting was arranged by Donald
Trump, Jr., and attended by Kushner
and Paul Manafort, who was running
the campaign at the time. Steve Ban-
non, the former Breitbart impresario
who became Trump’s campaign chair a
few months after the meeting and who
later served as the chie White House
strategist, told the journalist Michael
Wol that the meeting was “treasonous.” Bannon added, “Even i [they]
thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I
happen to think it’s all o that, [they] should have called the imme-
diately.” Bannon was right, even i he went on to suggest not that the
meeting should have been refused but that it should have been organ-
ized far away (“in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire”) and
that its contents, i damaging to Clinton, should have been dumped
“down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more
legitimate publication.”
Given the fact o such contacts, there is no question that an inde-
pendent investigation o the Trump campaign was abundantly war-
ranted. And yet the Trump-Russia story sent much o the media on
a bender that was crazed even by today’s debased standards. In their
coverage, Trump’s antagonists in the commentariat sometimes sank
to his level. “I play to people’s fantasies,” Trump wrote in The Art of
the Deal. “People want to believe that something is the biggest and
the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole.” In
the past two years, the main source o “truthful hyperbole” has been
not Trump alone but also elite media personalities, such as £¤¥¦’sThe phantasm of an all-
powerful Kremlin has
diverted too much
attention from Americans’
own failings.11_Kotkin_pp2.indd 71 5/20/19 3:35 PM