The Plot to Destroy Democracy

May 14, 2018
Russian president Vladimir Putin is also “the first Russian president of the United States,” bent on world domination, with President Donald Trump merely his puppet, argues this overwrought work of conspiracy theory. NBC counterterrorism analyst Nance (The Plot to Hack America) gives a knowledgeable if disjointed rehash of the Russian government’s hacking into voter databases, leaking Democratic officials’ emails, bot-flooding social media with pro-Trump fake news, and holding suspicious meetings with Trump campaign figures during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He sets the account of these activities against a history of Russian hacking, disinformation, blackmail, and assassination in America and Europe. Nance inflates these reasonably well-attested claims into a grandiose Putin scheme to convert democracies into authoritarian ethnonationalist regimes in an “Axis of Autocracy.” Trump, he writes, is a “malignant narcissist” who displays “real idiocy” and is “willingly working with Putin to pull America down” for monetary gain alongside Republicans, white nationalists, and former Breitbart News executive chairman turned presidential advisor Steve Bannon, “the American Goebbels.” Nance produces no evidence that Trump has done anything at Putin’s behest, or that Putin masterminds the global populist right, or that Russian meddling decided the election; his larger conspiracy theories rest on hand-waving insinuations. The result is an unconvincing exaggeration of genuine misconduct into cartoonish supervillainy.

June 1, 2018
Did Donald Trump meet with the Russians before the election? By this account, almost certainly--and "virtually all of Trump's senior staff and family had numerous contacts with Russia that were nothing short of suspicious."It's a remarkable bit of spinning that has allowed right-leaning media to portray Russia, the longtime rival and even enemy of the United States, as our friend. By intelligence officer and counterterrorism analyst Nance's (Defeating ISIS: Who They Are, How They Fight, What They Believe, 2016, etc.) account, the victor in Trump's electoral win was Vladimir Putin, who "won with the aid of Americans who had turned on their own values." In this, everyone is implicated, from the putatively liberal media and its obsession with Clinton's emails to pro-Trump voters who cast their ballots for him despite their candidate's "slavish devotion to Putin." It's a story that isn't going away, despite what the president might wish. Certainly, Nance writes, the intelligence community is keeping its eye on the prize, and for those in the administration who urge that it's all just misperception and accident, Nance counters, "coincidence takes a lot of planning." The author argues that much of that planning originated inside the Kremlin, but much also came from the desk of Steve Bannon, a key actor in forging a vanguard for a new kind of pro-Moscow conservative movement in America. In a narrative dense with "active measures" and "Kompromat," Nance traces the revival of Russian enmity to Putin's second term as president, when he turned his KGB training to good use in weakening his American opponents by exploiting their divisions--exactly what those active measures are supposed to do. The author wraps up his case with a provocative declaration that will occasion divisions all on its own: "Trump has definitely convinced me that he transitioned from an unwitting asset of Vladimir Putin to a willing asset working in league with the Russian Federation." A convincing and alarming--and perhaps alarmist--cry that treason is afoot.

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