Monday’s meeting in Helsinki has unleashed a torrent of wild
denunciations that verge on a direct appeal to the military and
intelligence agencies to take action to force Donald Trump’s removal
from the White House.
The Democratic Party, the corporate media
and leading figures within the US military and intelligence apparatus
have joined in branding Trump a traitor who is functioning as an agent
of the Kremlin.
Trump and his cohorts have many crimes to answer
for. But the objectives that motivate the anti-Trump hysteria in the
media and the conspiratorial methods to which the Democrats are
resorting are utterly reactionary.
The summit in Helsinki was
preceded by the strategically timed announcement of an indictment of 12
alleged Russian military intelligence officers by Special Counsel Robert
Mueller on charges of hacking into the computers of the Democratic
National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman,
John Podesta.
This indictment, which consists of a series of
unsubstantiated allegations, was seized upon by top Democrats and
sections of the media to demand that Trump call off his meeting with
Putin.
When the Republican president ignored these demands and
went ahead with the trip to Helsinki, the Democrats and their allied
media outlets were prepared to erupt as soon as the talks had ended.
This was made clear by a particularly reactionary piece by New York Times
columnist Charles Blow headlined “Trump, Treasonous Traitor” published
on the morning of the meeting, which accused Trump of “committing an
unbelievable and unforgivable crime against this country …”
The
hysterical tone had already been decided upon in advance of the
Trump-Putin meeting, and the reaction once it was over was
instantaneous.
No sooner had the US and Russian presidents
finished their joint press conference than CNN’s anchor in Helsinki,
Anderson Cooper, an heir to the Vanderbilt fortune who interned with the
CIA before going into television news, announced to his viewers that
they had been “watching the most disgraceful conduct by an American
president…that I have ever seen.”
”The most disgraceful conduct by an American president”? That’s really saying something!
More
disgraceful than George W. Bush’s launching of a war of aggression
against Iraq based on lies, which claimed more than a million lives?
More disgraceful than Barack Obama’s drone assassination campaign that
murdered thousands? More disgraceful than Trump’s own savage war on
immigrants, in which the deliberate torture of children has become a
weapon?
What was Trump’s crime in Helsinki that eclipsed all of
these war crimes and crimes against humanity? It was to question the
campaign over Russian “meddling” in the 2016 election, in which the
media treats the assertions of US intelligence agencies—the same
agencies that gave us “weapons of mass destruction”—as proven facts,
despite the lack of any substantiation.
-- Bill Van Auken, "After Helsinki, Democrats incite 'deep state' action against Trump" (WSWS).