If you’re wondering why so many high government officials insist on remaining anonymous while they rightly trash Donald Trump, just remember what happened to Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. In sworn testimony last year, he publicly exposed Trump’s impeachable acts – and for that he was stripped of his Army career.
The upside is that Vindman is now free to fully speak his mind about Trump’s affinity for totalitarianism. Granted, his warnings probably won’t sway any votes – people who respect Vindman will likely vote against Trump anyway; people who love Trump (the maskless are literally willing to die for Trump) won’t be swayed one whit by Vindman. And let’s face it, Trump’s slobbering subservience to Vladimir Putin is not a top-tier voting issue. Which is tragic for this imperiled democracy.
But now more than ever, we need voices like Vindman’s – because facts and truth are worth fighting for, because our enduring American values should not be apathetically surrendered. As Vindman points out in his first wide-ranging interview,
I was drawn into this by the president, who politicized me. I think it’s important for the American people to know that this could happen to any honorable service member, any government official. I think it’s important for me to tell people that I think the president has made this country weaker. We’re mocked by our adversaries and by our allies, and we’re heading for more disaster…Authoritarianism is able to take hold not because you have a strong set of leaders who are forcing their way,. It’s more about the fact that we can give away our democracy. In Hungary and Turkey today, in Nazi Germany, those folks gave away their democracy, by being complacent.
Vindman, you may recall (though it feels like eons ago), was the National Security Council official who sounded the alarm after he heard Trump put the squeeze on Ukraine’s president for dirt on Joe Biden. Vindman says now, “I found it repulsive and un-American for an American president to try to get a leg up by pressuring a foreign leader to get dirt on an American politician…I had to choose between the president and the Constitution.”
But what best explains Trump’s despotic behavior? Is he, perchance, an asset of Russian intelligence?
Vindman took that question and ran with it:
President Trump should be considered to be a useful idiot and a fellow traveler, which makes him an unwitting agent of Putin…They may or may not have dirt on him, but they don’t have to use it. They have more effective and less risky ways to employ him. He has aspirations to be the kind of leader that Putin is, and so he admires him. He likes authoritarian strongmen who act with impunity, without checks and balances. So he’ll try to please Putin.
In the Army we call this “free chicken,” something you don’t have to work for – it just comes to you. This is what the Russians have in Trump: free chicken.
Just for the record, Trump says that Vindman has “problems in judgement.” I’ll just leave that there.
We Americans are so benumbed, so beaten down, and (in many cases) so blissfully ignorant that it’s easy to overlook or ignore the import of Vindman’s remarks. Here we have a career military officer and combat vet who fought and literally bled for his country – a former National Security Council director of European affairs, a guy previously posted to the American embassy in Moscow and the Pentagon – describing the President of the United States as a weak sap for the Russians, as “a willing participant in their enterprise,” as “free chicken”…yet it has barely breached the news cycle before vanishing like vapor.
On NBC News last night, he warned: “We cannot have four more years of this president and the kind of damage he’s done to American institutions. We can’t sit out on the fence.”
To which I say: 49 days.