Trump will be meeting Vladimir Putin next week. That worries me.
I keep hearing from people asking me to stop talking about Trump and Russia. "The Cold War is over!" someone recently wrote on this page, for example. "You're distracting attention from the big issues of widening inequality and climate change.
The fact is, we can't do anything about any problem we face if our democracy doesn't work. And in his treatment of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election on his behalf, Trump continues to undermine American democracy, in 3 fundamental ways:
1. Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election was an extraordinary and unprecedented attack on our democracy, yet Trump repeatedly denies that it occurred -- despite irrefutable case from all U.S. intelligence agencies that it did.
2. He has taken no known steps to protect our democracy from future Russian interference in our elections.
3. He continually attacks stories about the Russian interference and the investigation into them as “Fake News,” and calls it a media “hoax.” This ongoing demagogic effort to discredit the press in the eyes of the American people directly undermines democracy. As Thomas Jefferson said, “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press.”
What really concerns me is that Trump seems far more interested in cozying up to Putin than in preserving, protecting, and defending our constitutional system of government. -- Robert Reich
BY JORDAN FABIAN
