The Accused Russian Agent as Trump Republican

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-22/accused-russian-spy-as-trump-republican

That, at least, was her message to the kids in flyover country. Back in Washington, however, where Butina assiduously courted conservative activists in the gun movement and the religious right, she recognized that her new friends were engaged in a racial struggle and culture war so intense that they might be open, even eager, to align with Putin to defeat their real enemy: fellow Americans.

Putin is a thug, but for Trump, obviously, and for many of his conservative acolytes, increasingly, Putin is a thug to admire. Polls have shown rising Republican support for Putin’s Russia despite Russian military aggression in Eastern Europe, Russian carnage in Syria, Russian murders of journalists and of Putin’s political opponents, and even Russian cyberattacks against the U.S. According to a 2017 Pew survey, the share of Republicans expressing confidence in Putin doubled from 2015 to 2017, from 17 percent to 34 percent.

Like Trump, some Republicans have weighed Russia’s attack on the Democratic Party in 2016 and concluded that they very much like what they saw. Two-thirds of Republicans approved of Trump’s summit in Helsinki, where the only known accomplishment was Trump’s obsequious exoneration of previously documented Russian sabotage. As the Trump team’s collusion with Russia, both open and covert, has come into clearer focus, many Republicans are moving from “No Collusion!” to “So what?” as their inevitable default.

Yet in a Republican Party where many are still wary of gangster politics, Butina chose her targets well. The gun militants of the NRA and the Christian militants of the religious right are Trump’s most unflinching supporters and pillars of the GOP’s authoritarian-racial wing. Those who are not already fans of Putin’s racist, homophobic, macho and militaristic Mother Russia are increasingly Putin-curious.