The mystery at the core of the Trump-Russia story is motive. President Trump certainly seems to have a strange case of Russophilia. He has surrounded himself with aides who have Russian ties. Those aides were talking to Russian agents during the campaign, and some are now pushing a dubious peace deal in Ukraine. Trump recently went so far as to equate the United States and Vladimir Putin’s murderous regime. But why? It’s not a simple question. In their Russia-related inquiries, the F.B.I. and the Senate Intelligence Committee will need to focus first on what happened — whether Trump’s team broke any laws and whether the president has lied about it. Yet the investigators, as well as the journalists doing such good work reporting this story, should also keep in mind the why of the matter. It will help explain the rest of the story. The United States has never had a situation quite like this. Other countries have tried to intervene in our affairs before, sometimes with modest success. Britain and Nazi Germany, for example, tried to influence the 1940 presidential election, financing bogus polls and efforts to sway the nominating conventions. But never has a president had such murky ties to a foreign government as hostile as Putin’s. I count five possible explanations for Trump’s Russophilia, and they’re not mutually exclusive.
The first is the justification that Trump himself gives, and you shouldn’t dismiss it simply because he has an open relationship with reality. He says that fewer tensions with Russia would benefit the United States, which is a reasonable position. It’s not so different from the position of John Kerry, President Barack Obama’s secretary of state. Kerry saw Russia, the key ally of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s civil war, as necessary to ending Assad’s slaughter. Many other Obama administration officials believed that seeking Putin’s help was a fool’s errand. But remember that Obama never came up with an effective approach to Syria. Any successor would be wise to see if Russia could help moderate the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Of course, Syria can’t explain all of Trump’s Russia ties. There are too many, and they’re too ominous. Together, they point to the next three explanations — the conspiracies.
The second explanation is the business conspiracy. Because many American banks wouldn’t lend money to Trump’s debt-soaked company, he had to look elsewhere, like Russia. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Donald Trump Jr. said in 2008, specifically mentioning projects in SoHo and Dubai. Trump could clear up this issue by releasing his tax returns. That he has not, unlike every other modern presidential candidate, means that he deserves no benefit of the doubt. The fairest assumption is that he has Russian business ties he wants to keep hidden.
Full Article: Trump’s Russia Motives – The New York Times.