The Media's Self-Defeating Outrage over Trump and Russia

Daniel McCarthy

Politics, Americas

A comparison is not the same thing as an equivalence.

All states lie, and all states kill. This is a truth every adult is aware of, but one easily forgotten in free countries such as our own, where citizens are so safe in their opinions that they can easily persuade themselves that our government never willfully does wrong, it only makes mistakes. So when Bill O’Reilly recently asked President Trump how he can respect Vladimir Putin, even though “Putin is a killer,” the president shocked the gatekeepers of orthodox opinion in our land by responding, “There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers. Well, you think our country is so innocent?”

A comparison is not the same thing as an equivalence. President Trump was not saying that political murders in Russia are morally identical to the Iraq War, which was the example he gave of killings connected to our government. Rather, the president was deflating the presumption that U.S.-Russia relations should be conducted as if between a confessor and a penitent or a jailer and an inmate. Killers come in many different kinds, but they all have to mingle in the prison yard. That’s the nature of relations between states, and respect is called for, though moral approval certainly is not.

The New York Times editorial board is among the authorities to take exception to this. The paper’s objections are, however, a study in democratic delusion—not about the nature of Putin’s Russia, which is indeed increasingly illiberal and deadly dangerous for Putin’s critics, but about the U.S. government’s moral standing and what Washington can accomplish by adorning its policies with a tinsel halo.