“Hoax.” “Witch
hunt.” “Russia, Russia, Russia.”
For a decade,
Donald Trump has incessantly claimed that there was no Moscow assault on the
2016 election and that the subsequent investigations of Vladimir Putin’s covert
interference in that contest, and the contacts between Trump’s campaign and
Russia, were all a phony Deep State plot orchestrated to destroy him. He even
railed against the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” in his recent speech to the United Nations General Assembly, a week after the
news broke that a Putin crony had attended and covered hundreds of thousands of
dollars in bills for Donald Trump Jr.’s lavish wedding celebration in the
Bahamas.
Trump has been lying about all this. Multiple inquiries have produced much evidence showing that Putin messed with the 2016 election to boost Trump’s chances. Even a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee investigation overseen by then-Sen. Marco Rubio concluded in a 2020 report that Putin “ordered” the Russian operation in part to “help the Trump campaign” and that Trump aided Putin’s operation by “minimizing Russian involvement.”
Yet Trump has essentially won the messaging war over the Russia scandal. Putin’s intervention—which included a hack-and-leak operation that targeted and impeded Hillary Clinton’s campaign and an extensive covert social media campaign that pumped divisive posts, including pro-Trump material, into the feeds of American voters—was one of several factors that contributed to Trump’s narrow victory that year. And Trump, in what was arguably an act of betrayal of country, aided and abetted a foreign adversary’s attack on American democracy by echoing and affirming Putin’s denials that he had meddled in the election. But all of this is barely mentioned these days. Not by Democrats. Not by many in the media.
Trump’s claims of Deep State persecution, though, still rings out—and not merely as a personal pet peeve. At his urging, the Justice Department is pursuing a baseless criminal investigation of former officials in the Obama and Biden administrations who participated in Trump-Russia investigations, looking to prove the existence of a grand conspiracy against Trump. And his puzzling relationship with Putin remains significant, as Trump charts an erratic course regarding the war in Ukraine and pursues his own war against Iran, which is drawing crucial support from Russia, which is passing satellite targeting and other intelligence to Tehran and sharing missile technology. Discussing the conflict in Ukraine, Trump has at times characterized Putin and himself as co-victims of “Russia, Russia, Russia”—as if it were a bonding experience that affects his approach to the war in Ukraine. Over the objections of the United States’ closest allies, Trump has invited Putin to attend the upcoming G20 meeting that will be held in a Trump resort in Florida.
How Trump Won the Russia Battle…
Despite their relevance to today, the 2016 Russian attack and Trump’s complicity have been memory-holed. Neither were prominent issues in the 2020 and 2024 elections—even though during those campaigns, Russian intelligence again mounted operations to tarnish the Democrats. In 2020, a Ukrainian legislator named Andriy Derkach, who was a Russian agent, teamed up with Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s personal attorney, to spread false claims of Joe Biden corruption (this is according to Trump’s own Treasury Department, which sanctioned Derkach). In 2024, Russian disinformation operatives pushed a host of fake allegations about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, including the false charge that Walz had inappropriately touched a student when he taught high school—an allegation seen by millions of social media users. Trump dismissed reports of these Kremlin interventions with his all-too familiar “Russia, Russia, Russia” mantra.
Some might consider Trump’s complicity with acts of (information) warfare against the United States to be a bigger scandal than Watergate, Iran-contra, or other presidential disgraces. So how has he gotten away with this? Trump’s triumph on the Russia front provides a lesson about his tactics—as well as those of the Democrats.
His strategy for surmounting the Russia scandal boiled down to deny, define, deflect, and repeat.
When Moscow’s attack on the 2016 election first hit the headlines, Trump and his top aides responded simply: They denied any such thing had happened. It didn’t matter that experts and government officials confirmed the Kremlin’s interference. Trump and his crew kept insisting the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails and memos were not Russian operations.
Next—without conceding Putin had interfered—they established a high bar for wrongdoing. Trump and his team insisted that there was no collusion between the Trump camp and Russia—that is, Trump and his aides had not directly conspired with Putin’s operatives to pull off this caper. They defined the scandal as turning on the question of whether there was proof of Trump’s participation in the Russian scheme. Trump had backed Putin’s denials and enthusiastically exploited the leaked material—even calling on Russia to hack Clinton. That could be viewed as serious misconduct for a presidential candidate. But Trump and his associates made collusion the issue.
Not until long after the election did the public learn that top Trump campaign aides met with a Russian emissary at Trump Tower after being told she was part of the covert Kremlin effort to assist Trump and that during the race Paul Manafort, the chair of Trump’s campaign, was interacting with and sending internal polling data to a former business associate who was a Russian intelligence officer (according to the Senate intelligence report). Was any of this collusion? Perhaps. But collusion is not a legal term, and Trump and his defenders successfully contended that all that counted was whether he had played a part in the assault itself. (When special counsel Robert Mueller released his final report, he noted he had uncovered no evidence of Trump’s involvement in a criminal conspiracy, which allowed Trump and his loyalists to claim he was exonerated, though Mueller identified other acts of Trump wrongdoing and possible crimes, including obstruction of justice.)
Third, while denying there was any wrongdoing and defining the terms of the scandal to his advantage, Trump also engaged in a series of deflections. Looking to change the subject, he alleged that President Obama had spied on him during the 2016 campaign. (There was no evidence of that.) He and his allies also focused on the Steele dossier, a collection of memos that former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele had compiled for an opposition research firm retained by the Democrats. These memos, never meant for public consumption, contained gossip, speculation, and unproven allegations about Trump and Russia, including the claims that Trump had been filmed cavorting with sex workers during a Moscow visit and that Putin possessed blackmail material on him.
Trump and his supporters worked hard to shift the entire Russia affair toward the Steele memos, falsely charging the Democrats had concocted the dossier to trigger a bogus investigation. (The Steele memos had nothing to do with the launch of the Russia investigation, as multiple probes have concluded.) They also fixated on the FBI’s improper use of the Steele information to obtain a surveillance warrant for a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser named Carter Page—a violation of his civil liberties.
Trump and his advocates endlessly decried the Steele memos and the Page warrant—a serious matter—to distract from the Russian operation that helped Trump and Trump’s own actions that bolstered Putin’s denials. In 2019, Republican Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, a member of the House intelligence committee, which investigated the Steele dossier, broke ranks by saying, “There is a Russian investigation without a dossier.” But Trump, MAGA, right-wing media, and top House Republicans insisted otherwise. They asserted that Trump was set up by the Steele dossier and deployed that conspiracy theory to discredit the entire Russia probe and all discussion of Putin’s assault.
In addition to denying, defining, and deflecting, Trump stuck with a tried-and-true marketing ploy. He repeated his shorthand dismissals of the Russia scandal. Over and over, he called it a hoax and a witch hunt, and whenever he was challenged or new information emerged, he wailed, “Russia, Russia, Russia.” He’s done that for years. As new controversies arose—such as his handling of the Covid pandemic, the criminal investigations of his incitement of the January 6 riot, his swiping of top-secret documents when he left the White House in 2021, and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal—he branded them continuations of “Russia, Russia, Russia.” It became a bumper sticker slogan encapsulating his claim that he was the target of a never-ending plot waged by diabolical government officials. With his persistent “Russia, Russia, Russia” chant, he drowned out discussion of what actually occurred. He transformed one of the most serious scandals in U.S. history into a dismissive three-second soundbite. In the absence of a countervailing message, this worked.
…And How the Democrats Lost It
Which brings us to the Democrats. Not only did Trump win this battle; the Democrats lost it.
After the 2016 election, they did much to keep the Russia issue alive, demanding investigations and accusing Trump and his campaign of skullduggery. Some over-promised that evidence of collusion was soon to come. But after Mueller did not uncover a smoking gun on collusion, the Democrats mostly dropped the matter. Only Trump was interested in revisiting the Russia story—as a tale of nefarious Deep State conniving against him.
You cannot win a war you do not fight. Not long ago, I asked Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island to explain why the Democrats gave up. He had not played a major role in the tussle over the Russia narrative. But for years he has released reports and delivered speeches on Republican and right- wing efforts to use “dark money” to shape the nation’s political conversation, and he has criticized his fellow Democrats for not vigorously countering the far right’s well-financed messaging operations.
Whitehouse broke down the Democrats’ shortcoming into three parts: their nature, their infrastructure, and their bad habits. “As to our nature, we’re inclined to believe the truth will out,” he said. “Once you establish facts, you can move on. But propagandists and autocrats know that’s not true.” Their rule is simple: Keep banging the drum and never stop promoting fundamental falsehoods. That’s what Trump had done with his “Russia, Russia, Russia” slogan.
As for infrastructure, Whitehouse pointed out, “We have no war room, no ops center in Democratic politics to see to it that long-term fights are maintained. Meanwhile, conservative groups persist and persist, whatever the message is: the Deep State, climate denial, the Russia hoax. It’s hard to take on an institutional apparatus without one of your own.”
Regarding bad habits, he bemoaned that the Democrats hadn’t had “much fight in us for a while.” Biden, when he was president, was consumed by process and the quest for consensus; Barack Obama promised to be a post- partisan president. “It’s been a long time since we had a forceful Democratic bully pulpit that projects itself as strongly as Trump,” Whitehouse said. “We don’t have much memory as to what a fight is. We have a baseline belief we’re on the side of good and that will win out. But Trump just talked us into the ground.”
The Democrats, who initially were fierce in pursuing investigations and excoriating Trump for siding with Putin and exploiting Russia’s attack, could not maintain that level of intensity, as Trump hammered away with his hoax/witch hunt hogwash. After the Mueller report was released, it was time for them to move on. The Trump-Russia scandal, as they saw it, was over. Even when it was clear during the 2020 and 2024 campaigns that Putin was targeting influence operations at Americans to benefit Trump, the Biden campaign and then the Biden administration did not make much noise about Moscow’s interventions. Nor did the Harris campaign.
The Mueller report was not the end of the story for Trump and the Republicans. They falsely contended it demonstrated the Russia investigation was a big nothing and absolved Trump, and they pressed this message as part of their unremitting, years-long campaign to obliterate the Russia scandal and remove the stain of Putin’s interference from Trump’s 2016 victory. They deftly turned the unproven allegation of collusion into an effective attack on the entire Trump-Russia narrative— and on their political opponents and the media. Ever since, Trump has constantly deployed his false depiction of the Trump-Russia scandal to delegitimize all the criticism and accusations of wrongdoing he subsequently faced.
“Narrative construction and narrative maintenance is an essential and robust part of Trumpian politics,” Whitehouse said. “Everything runs second to that. Their narrative has been manipulative, purposeful, and combative. We Democrats, however, believe that reality and truth once established is solidly set.” But in politics, an unopposed narrative can conquer facts.
For years, Trump and his MAGA Republicans have cast the Democrats as ferocious Machiavellian warriors fiercely conspiring around the clock with their behind-the-scenes allies to crush Trump and his movement. Yet Whitehouse considered his party mostly feeble in the messaging war against Trump, and its flaws had allowed Trump to not only survive the Russia scandal but to weaponize it against his political foes and critics.
Trump’s messaging-war tactics are far from foolproof. They haven’t worked in regard to the Iran war, his mass deportation crusade, or his economic policies. Perhaps that’s because the realities of these decisions are right in front of people. The war has not been won, and it has raised the cost of gasoline. Hundreds of thousands of people—many without criminal records—have been apprehended, with many brutally deported. And inflation has not been tamed. No matter how frequently Trump declares there is no affordability crisis (deny), current economic problems are Biden’s fault (define), and the Democrats are commies looking to destroy the nation (deflect), Americans can see and feel the consequences of these decisions.
In the case of the Trump-Russia scandal, with much of the story being a confusing tangle of accounts of clandestine actions, Trump had an easier time and could use his salesman and carnival barker talents to create and perpetuate a self-serving narrative, especially with the Democrats yielding the field.
This is not just a (one-sided) fight over history. With the war in Ukraine still raging and with Putin continuing his subterranean battle against the democracies of the West through covert influence and sabotage operation—as has been recently reported, his clandestine disinformation operatives are now targeting the midterm elections—a clear understanding of Trump’s relationship with Putin and Russia remains necessary. And though Trump is low in the polls, Democrats still must figure out how to forcefully engage in long-term narrative politics. Trump managed to survive the Russia scandal and prevail in that messaging battle.
His reliance on deceit and distraction may yet cause him to lose the larger war. But other scoundrels, no doubt, will follow his “Russia, Russia, Russia” example, and this episode, as well as the entire Trump era, shows us how vital it is that responsible politicians and journalists learn how to better confront the big lies of our political demagogues.
