Yet when Trump spoke from the stage in Helsinki, he refused to identify anything for which the Russian government should be punished. He chose instead to focus on Mueller’s “ridiculous” investigation, which he called a “witch hunt” that was preventing better relations between the two nations. When an American reporter, Jon Lemire, pressed him on whom he believed, Putin or his own intelligence officials, the U.S. president gave a response that will live in infamy.
“They said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia,” Trump said. “I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
With that utterance, Trump, taking the word of the KGB thug turned Russian strongman over that of his own intelligence community, had emasculated America on the international stage. He had also lent credence to the theory that Moscow had kompromat on the U.S. president. After all, the president had just spent the previous week disparaging NATO allies—condemning Germany, belittling the British prime minister while visiting her country, and referring to the European Union as a “foe.” Why the accommodating treatment of Putin and his brutal, democracy-crushing, dissenter-slaying government?
The episode was jarring for many Republicans.
Some of the president’s most steadfast defenders slammed the performance. Newt Gingrich called it “the most serious mistake of his presidency,” and Fox News’s Brit Hume said it was “a lame response, to say the least.” Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell offered unequivocal support for the intel community’s findings without criticizing Trump by name. Dozens of other congressional Republicans offered harsher-than-usual rebukes. John McCain called it “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory,” adding, “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.” And Will Hurd, the Texas congressman who had spent nearly a decade overseas working undercover for the CIA, went a step further, tweeting, “I’ve seen Russian intelligence manipulate many people over my professional career and I never would have thought that the US President would become one of the ones getting played by old KGB hands.”
Sitting in his office a few days later, Corker, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, said it was necessary to place Trump’s Helsinki performance in the sweep of his upending of conservative Republican orthodoxy.
“Let me just go through the four things I believe,” Corker said. “I believe that America is a force for good in the world, that the post–World War II institutions have been mostly very beneficial to the United States and our citizens; this president does not believe that. I believe that free trade has been an outstanding thing for the American people and for our country and for our GDP; this president is a protectionist. I believe the fiscal issues matter. He’s not even close to being a fiscal conservative. And lastly, I think the domestic institutions that are fundamental to our democracy are important. We are conservatives, we are traditionalists, we are people that hold those things up, even though every institution needs oversight and can be improved. We believe that these institutions have helped make America great. Not him. He’s willing to significantly undermine them if it benefits him politically.”
There was one class of Republicans that approved of Trump’s buddy-buddy routine with Putin: the Freedom Caucus.
In a Heritage-sponsored forum with some of the group’s members, one day after the Helsinki summit, the conservatives spent an hour taking turns slamming Obama for his weak approach to Putin; Hillary Clinton for her failed “reset” of relations with Russia; reporters for daring to question Trump’s belief in the U.S. intelligence community; and operatives of the “deep state” for attempting to undermine the president. (“The choice target was former CIA director John Brennan, who tweeted that Trump’s showing in Helsinki “exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors’” and was “nothing short of treasonous.”)
“In order for something to be treasonous, it has to undermine who we are as a nation,” Mark Meadows said of Brennan’s charge. “I’ve never seen a press conference have that effect.”
“Foreign policy-wise,” Jim Jordan said, “the trip to China last fall was good, the Korean summit was positive, the [North Korean] hostages have come home, there’s sanctions on Russia, the embassy is in Jerusalem, and we’re out of the Iran deal. So, overall, people are pretty darn pleased.”
“What was I disappointed in? I thought it was really odd that a reporter in Helsinki, Finland, after a conclusion of a brief summit, would ask President Trump the question that triggered this whole odd reaction that the summit was a failure because President Trump did not castigate and attack Vladimir Putin,” said Andy Biggs of Arizona, blaming the “idiocy” of the media’s questions.
“If I were the president,” added Andy Harris of Maryland, “I wouldn’t hold those press conferences anymore until the press decided to get serious about dealing with the world issues, as this president is. . . . It would have gotten [Trump] nowhere to get in Putin’s face with election-meddling. There is no evidence of any collusion, but this is the main story of the liberal press.”
On they went, up and down the dais, uttering not a critical syllable of the president less than twenty-four hours after he publicly sided with Putin over the U.S. intelligence community. It was surreal. Having covered many of these lawmakers for years—long before the Freedom Caucus existed—I knew for certain that had Obama said the same thing Trump had, they would have been preparing articles of impeachment.
Finally, the spinning and evading became too much. I raised my hand and asked, giving them a final opportunity, if any of them had any problem whatsoever with what Trump had said.
Davidson was the only one to speak up. “I think anybody that watched the press conference, including the president himself, would say that was not his finest hour,” the Ohio Republican said, measuring his words. “But we support the fact that the president was there on the stage having the press conference and having the dialogue. . . . We should judge more about the deeds and less about the words.”
It was the day the Freedom Caucus forfeited its credibility.
For much of the previous decade, House conservatives had been the most interesting members of Congress to cover. In an age of mindless tribalism, they were the independent thinkers, rejecting the party’s hierarchy and challenging a system that rewarded blind loyalty and reflexive partisanship. But since Trump came along, they had become the most reflexively partisan Republicans on Capitol Hill, routinely brushing off actions from the executive branch that under Obama would have prompted talk of constitutional crises.
Walking out of the event in a daze, I ran into Matt Fuller, the Huffington Post reporter who had chronicled the rise of the Freedom Caucus closer than anyone. “That was the low point in my career covering Congress,” Fuller said. I nodded in agreement. Moments later, a staffer for one of the Freedom Caucus members approached, shaking his head. “What a joke,” he grumbled.
Notably, some of the core Freedom Caucus members had not been in attendance. Raúl Labrador, one of the group’s cofounders, was absent, as was Mark Sanford, one of its leading voices. As it turned out, several members had deliberately skipped the event, not wanting to subject themselves to the humiliation incurred by their colleagues.