Caroline Brehman/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana talks with reporters at the Capitol, November 5, 2019, in Washington. Kennedy has embraced the ‘It was Ukraine that did it’ theory of interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
Over the course of the Ukraine scandal, Republicans have latched on to a remarkable number of defenses of President Trump, each thin as parchment and cast off in turn as some new and equally preposterous claim presents itself. It’s all hearsay. There was no quid pro quo. Okay, there was a quid pro quo, but quid pro quos are good. Ukraine ended up getting the aid after Trump got caught, so it doesn’t count. Trump was trying to combat corruption, which is something he cares about. The deep state is out to get him. He isn’t getting due process. And besides, the real villain here is Ukraine. Forget about Russia; it’s Ukraine that attacked our democracy in 2016.
You can explain this routine as the inevitable consequence of being forced to defend the indefensible. Trump’s abuse of power is so egregious and so obvious that it’s impossible to construct a justification that will withstand a moment of scrutiny. But there may also be a logic at work, one based on a simple principle: In a situation like this, you don’t actually have to persuade anyone that you’re right. All you have to do is inject enough doubt to addle the minds of an inattentive public.
Republicans can be sure this strategy stands a good chance of working, because it has been used to great effect by some of their allies.
In 1969, a memo written at the Brown & Williamson tobacco company explained how they and their colleagues in the industry could push back against the growing public perception that their products were giving people cancer. It wasn’t necessary to disprove the scientific consensus, the author wrote, only to inject a sufficient amount of doubt into public debate so it would be seen as an unresolved controversy with two sides:
Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the “body of fact” that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy … If we are successful in establishing a controversy at the public level, then there is an opportunity to put across the real facts about smoking and health. Doubt is also the limit of our “product”. Unfortunately, we cannot take a position directly opposing the anti-cigarette forces and say that cigarettes are a contributor to good health.
Even the companies killing people by the millions didn’t have the gall to argue the exact opposite of reality; they only wanted to muddy the waters. Doubt was their product.
This strategy proved effective enough that the fossil fuel industry adopted the same approach to dealing with rising concern about climate change. They funded think tanks and candidates to argue that global warming was a hoax, or maybe the Earth was warming but we have no idea why, or maybe the Earth is warming but it’ll cool down again, and in any case what’s important is that we not be so hasty as to do anything about it.
The point was never to win the argument outright. Keeping the argument going was enough, because as long as it continued, they could keep selling their products with minimal regulation and keep raking in profits.
This is the same principle at work in the impeachment controversy, and in particular the newly vigorous effort on the part of Republicans to insist that Ukraine was the real nefarious actor in 2016. When intelligence officials briefed members of Congress a few weeks ago to inform them that Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine was pushing the idea that Ukraine meddled in our election, they apparently took it not as a warning but as an instruction to echo the claim. Senate Republicans are beginning an investigation to explore it, no doubt for as long as the impeachment process continues (and who knows, maybe all the way through next year’s election).
Everywhere you look, Republicans are trying to assert that Russia’s activities on Donald Trump’s behalf—a well-funded, comprehensive effort by Russian security services that involved hacking Democratic electronic systems and then releasing embarrassing information publicly to hurt Hillary Clinton, a sweeping social media campaign, and extensive outreach to the Trump campaign itself—were mirrored in Ukraine.
“I think both Russia and Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election,” said Senator John Kennedy. “There’s no difference in the way Russia put their feet, early on, on the scale—being for one candidate and everybody called it meddling—and how the Ukrainian officials did it,” says Senator Richard Burr, who as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee knows exactly what kind of manure he’s shoveling.
No difference, despite the fact that against that comprehensive Russian effort on Trump’s behalf, what did Ukraine allegedly do to help Hillary Clinton? The most damning piece of evidence Republicans can come up with is that when candidate Trump defended the Russian invasion of Crimea, the Ukrainian ambassador to the U.S.—get this—wrote a sternly worded op-ed arguing that Crimea is properly part of Ukraine and the U.S. should stand behind its ally.
Watching journalists challenge and even ridicule Republicans for spreading wild theories about Ukraine—for instance, CNN’s Chris Cuomo shouting at a buffoonish GOP congressman trying to spread Donald Trump’s favorite theory that it was actually Ukraine that hacked the DNC—I was reminded of the yearslong racist campaign to convince voters that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and was therefore not an actual American, along with the sidekick claim that he was a Muslim masquerading as a Christian. Then too, some Republicans would say it outright while others would talk about it in ways meant to maintain doubt. “The president says he’s a Christian. I take him at his word,” said Mitch McConnell, as though there were no evidence one way or another and McConnell was being magnanimous about it.
Then too, Republicans would routinely get challenged with the facts, lectured by exasperated journalists about the lies they were spreading. But it didn’t work. Right up until the end of his presidency, only about a quarter of Republicans (see here or here) believed that Obama was born in the United States.
Republican voters are emphatic in their loyalty to President Trump, and as their representatives spread the “It was Ukraine that did it” story, I’m sure that very soon we’ll see polls showing most of those voters insisting that the only scandal of the 2016 election was Ukraine’s assistance to Hillary Clinton. That will be more than enough to keep Trump’s misdeeds in the zone of controversy, not consensus, as voters in the middle are rendered unable to decide which side to believe.
History will, one hopes, make the appropriate judgment of those misdeeds. But in the meantime, enough doubt will be created to allow Trump to survive. And that’s a victory for him and his party.
