First, Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI and a key figure in the Russian interference case, stepped down earlier than expected after months of being publicly attacked by Trump.
Then it was then announced that Rep. Devin Nunes, himself surrounded by conflict of interest questions related to the Russian investigation, planned to release a memo about FBI and Department of Justice surveillance described as both dishonest and damaging to national security. House Speaker Paul Ryan then said that the GOP wished to “cleanse the FBI” while other Republicans have been quietly investigating the FBI and the DOJ for weeks. Independent investigative bodies that are supposed to serve as a check on executive power — and which have been openly threatened by the chief executive — are now falling prey to the president and his partisans.
Perhaps most disconcertingly, January 29 marked the day on which Russian sanctions Trump reluctantly signed in August were to be implemented. Instead, and ignoring a bipartisan resolution that passed 98-2 in the Senate, the State Department announced that the sanctions would not be fully enacted and would affect primarily “non-Russian entities.”
And finally on Tuesday, the Trump administration released a list of targeted oligarchs that was mostly just a reprint of a Forbes list of the richest Russians, an action interpreted by Russia experts like former U.S. ambassador Michael McFaul as a trolling of Congress by Trump. (Putin isn’t complaining either.) This blatancy is a departure from Trump’s days of denying that he had nothing to do with Russia.
To top it all off, CIA chief Mike Pompeo announced that the 2018 elections would likely be tampered with by Russia. Shortly after, it was reported that Pompeo himself had met with Russian spies in seeming violation of U.S. sanctions. Russian election interference is a travesty that also went unmentioned in Trump’s speech, which like all well-produced reality TV, was structured on selective truth.
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Like his bipartisan address last March, Trump’s State of the Union was meant to soothe a frustrated population into a false sense of normalcy — but there is nothing normal about a president who threatens private citizens and American institutions while displaying deference to a hostile state. It is now incumbent on Americans to ignore the presidential play-acting, and confront what is really driving the show.
Sarah Kendzior is a journalist who lives in St. Louis, Missouri and covers politics, the economy and media.