Imagine the Trump presidency if ‘Russiagate’ had been exposed as a fabrication

A full year after Donald Trump lost his quest for re-election, one of the dominant assumptions about his failed presidency is having to be reassessed. Let me put that rather more strongly: it is being turned on its head and exposed for the self-reinforcing collection of lies and misinformation that it always was. You could call it a conspiracy.

I am talking about the claims that together comprised what came to be known as “Russiagate”: where the central accusation, as you may recall, was that Trump had colluded with Russia (or Russia with him) – first to win the presidency, then to use the power of the White House in the interests of a hostile foreign state.

Put so baldly, that might sound absurd, and so it was, but this is the story that a large number of Americans and much international opinion willingly – even enthusiastically – embraced. And why wouldn’t they? The election of Trump was widely considered aberrant by civilised western opinion.

Fine, upstanding Americans would never vote for such a chancer without being somehow inveigled into doing so, would they? Hillary Clinton was so evidently the superior candidate. Far simpler to believe that Trump had cheated, and so obvious, in turn, to see behind it all the diabolical hand of Vladimir Putin.

Now, though, this tale of Russian manipulation – once so universally accepted that it was rarely even qualified in media reports, let alone challenged – is unravelling. In fact, it has been unravelling for some time, but the pace has gathered over the past couple of weeks, with the arrest of a certain Igor Danchenko on charges of lying to the FBI.

The significance of this is that Danchenko, a Russian formerly at a Washington think tank, supplied information for the anti-Trump dossier compiled by the ex-MI6 officer, Christopher Steele. The charges are that, when questioned by the FBI, he omitted key information, including the fact that much of what he told Steele, he had obtained, second hand, from the Clinton campaign.

Steele’s dossier, you will recall, is the one that contained among other details the allegation – vehemently denied by Trump – that the future president had once enjoyed a “golden rain” romp in the presidential suite at Moscow’s Ritz Carlton hotel. But the dossier was only one element in the efforts to discredit Trump by claims of improper dealings with Russia.

These included clandestine meetings in Prague, one or more rendezvous between Kremlin agents and Trump relatives or staff – and meetings between the Russian ambassador in Washington and future members of the Trump team.

All this was put together with allegations that Russia, if it didn’t actually hack into Clinton’s emails, disseminated material from those emails. It was then spun into a web of treachery and collusion that overshadowed the whole of Trump’s presidency.

Those who declined to “buy” this version were few, and – with the honourable exception of the Wall Street Journal – mostly outside the mainstream media on either side of the Atlantic.

We found it hard to believe, for instance, that Russia was capable of subverting one of the world’s oldest and most resilient democracies. Nor could we find any shred of evidence that Trump was in hock to Russia, that Putin had the wherewithal to blackmail Trump, or that the Steele dossier was the solid piece of work a self-selected group of US intelligence heads claimed it to be.

And in the early stages scepticism of the dossier was widely shared – so widely that when Steele was touting it around the main US media outlets during the campaign, they declined to take the bait. It was not until Trump had been elected that it was touted around once more and the internet news company, Buzzfeed, decided to publish – the rest, alas, being history.

Thereafter, the few who contested the confection that constituted “Russiagate” were dismissed as incorrigible Trump-ites, or lumped in with conspiracy theorists.

This is how things remained pretty much until now – despite the findings of Robert Mueller, as special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election, to the effect that there was no collusion. That was in 2019. It is also despite persistent questions being raised about the Steele dossier, which have largely, and incredibly, left Steele reputationally unscathed. He was out defending his stance on Sky News as recently as last month.

In the end, the reason why “Russiagate” has now started to unravel is the progress being made by John Durham, who was appointed as special counsel to examine the question that should have been asked in the first place: not whether there was Russian interference or Trump-Russia collusion, but why did anyone think there was.

Where, in effect, did the story originate? And what is now gradually emerging is – yes – a real conspiracy, but one that has nothing to do with Trump or Russia, and everything to do with Trump’s political enemies.

It was a conspiracy, first, to prevent his election, and then, when that failed, to ensure that his intentions were thwarted at every step. It was a conspiracy, what is more, that may indeed have originated in the Clinton Democrats camp, but was in time reinforced by an alliance of the US law enforcement, foreign policy and intelligence establishments. These are forces that, if you were talking about Turkey, perhaps, you might be tempted to call the “deep state”.

Trump’s hopes of improving relations with Russia formed a central plank of his campaign – and one of his few foreign policy specifics. It seems also to have been one reason – though far from the only one – why his presidency attracted such fierce opposition in security circles. Which in turn poses the serious question: what did the US and the world miss as a consequence of the blocks that were so effectively placed in Trump’s way?

A mutually beneficial and maybe productive relationship with Russia is only the most obvious. We could be looking at a world in which Russia was engaged, rather than sitting on the sidelines, in which eastern Ukraine was not the hotbed of east-west tensions it currently is, and in which Russia was leaning westwards, rather than eastwards, on China.

It would also be a world without many of the malign perceptions of Russia as interfering in elections, and trying to divide, even destroy the west. Some of this, it should be said, is now happening – just with a four-year delay. Certain elements of Biden’s foreign policy come straight from the Trump playbook.

Whether it is the early summit with Putin, the exit from Afghanistan or the start of second-tier discussions with Russia on a wide range of subjects including cyber, Biden is pursuing the sort of normalisation with Moscow that Trump would have favoured, just in a way that does not frighten Washington’s horses.

To that extent, not as much might have been lost from the thwarting of Trump’s Russia ambitions as might have been feared. Russia’s approach to any rapprochement, after all, might have been as cautious as Trump’s was likely to have been rash. And Trump might well have lost the 2020 election regardless of any policies he was able or unable to pursue.

But what does it say about US democracy that the will of the people, as it appears, was subverted not by a foreign power but by groups and individuals who appointed themselves guardians of a constitution they had no right to guard. If, as it appears, Russiagate is soon to go up in a puff of smoke, this is a state scandal of the first order. Or it should be, if anyone is still following the convoluted plotline by then.