Russian Meddling in US Elections Backfires on Both Putin and His Man Trump

A man passes by a graffiti mural in Lithuania that depicts Donald Trump kissing Vladimir Putin outside a barbecue restaurant earlier this month. (Valda Kalnina/EPA) 

THE BIG IDEA: Eight years ago this month, Barack Obama’s high command became very worried after Russia invaded Georgia. 

The first-term senator, then 47, had no meaningful national security experience, a liability Hillary Clinton had highlighted throughout the Democratic primaries. And he happened to be vacationing in Hawaii.

Campaigning in Pennsylvania, John McCain recounted a phone call he had just had with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. "Today, we are all Georgians,” the hawkish war hero said, drawing cheers from the crowd of several thousand.

The Obama team was worried about losing voters of Eastern European descent as a result of McCain's hard-line rhetoric on Russia. There are lots of Polish Americans, Ukrainian Americans and Lithuanian Americans who live in swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. Many came to the United States to escape the Iron Curtain. 

The campaign manager responsible for Pennsylvania and Ohio, vividly remembers pushing the pro-Georgia and anti-Vladimir Putin message. “We also were hopeful that the ethnic communities, particularly the Polish Americans in the Cleveland suburbs, would be a hidden block for us, and did a lot of coalition work there,” he recalls. “It wasn’t ultimately enough to overcome the massive Obama [get out the vote] effort in Cuyahoga County, but it was definitely part of our strategy to drive up our numbers.”

Now the script is completely reversed. Those voters for whom McCain fought so hard in 2008 are still out there. They normally would be very inclined to vote for someone like Trump — on paper, they look just like his core supporters — but Putin’s clear preference for him over Clinton (combined with Trump’s naiveté on all things Russia) gives them great pause.

John Weaver, who was John Kasich’s chief strategist this year and advised both of McCain’s presidential bids, thinks the blowback is starting to show up in polls, specifically Trump’s weakness among Catholics who regularly attend Mass.

“In and around Cleveland, Akron, Toledo, Detroit and all throughout Wisconsin, you’re talking about voters with family in Poland, the Baltics, Ukraine and the Czech Republic,” said Weaver. “These voters are key to any narrow path that Trump has left.”

Paul Manafort listens to Trump talk at Trump Tower last week. (Carlo Allegri/Reuters) 

-- Trump alarms Americans of Eastern European ancestry for many reasons. Among them:

• He has suggested that America will only conditionally live up to its obligations under the NATO charter and questioned the value of the alliance.
• He’s said he’ll look into whether Putin should be allowed to keep Crimea, which he annexed with complete disregard for international law. “Having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing,” he said this month.
• Just three weeks ago, Trump pleaded directly with the Russian government to find and release tens of thousands of Clinton’s private emails. Asked whether Russian espionage into the former secretary of state’s correspondence would concern him, he replied: “No, it gives me no pause.”
• Trump’s campaign chairman until last Friday, Paul Manafort, orchestrated the ill-fated political comeback of Putin ally Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine and is closely linked with other Putin cronies.
• At the Republican National Convention last month, the Trump campaign stripped the party platform of language calling for the United States to provide lethal weapons to Ukraineto resist Russian belligerence.

-- This is not some silly political issue. The stakes are enormous. My colleague Andrew Roth reports from Kiev that “Russia is set to hold large military drills on the peninsula next month. And in eastern Ukraine, the use of heavy weapons between Russian-backed separatists and the army has increased as opposing trenches have crept so close that opposing fighters can shout across the breach. … And in Kiev, it is not unusual to hear again that Russia is preparing to invade Ukraine.”

-- Putin clearly likes what he sees. U.S. intelligence officials believe very strongly that Russian intelligence agencies were behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee and other Democratic entities before the stolen emails were then published by WikiLeaks. Many Democratic members of Congress are getting new phones and emails after their pilfered personal contact info was mysteriously posted online. Trump has not spoken out as Russia has become increasingly aggressive in this vein.

“Kremlin-controlled media outlets have stated publicly their preference for Trump,” former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul notes. “RT, Russia’s state-controlled television station broadcasting in the United States, has a clear preference for Trump. In one of many pro-Trump reports, the Russian state-controlled news service, Sputnik, said it confirmed Trump’s claim about Obama being the ‘founder’ of the Islamic State and tweeted the hashtag: #CrookedHillary. With vigor and volume, pro-Kremlin bloggers echoed these same messages on Twitter and Facebook. Putin himself has weighed in, praising Trump as a ‘colorful’ (‘yarkii’) and talented politician (though not as a genius, as Trump has claimed).”

-- Eastern Europeans are keenly aware of these developments, perhaps nowhere more so than in Ohio, a must-win state for Trump. “If there is an effect, Ohio is a good place to see if it has resonance,” said Kyle Kondik from the University of Virginia Center for Politics, who has written a book about the demographics of the Buckeye State.

If you were in Cleveland for the RNC last month, you noticed many monuments that showcased how much of the region’s cultural identity is tied to the east. The Ohio delegation, for example, stayed next to a monument to those harmed by the 1956 Soviet crackdown on Hungary.

-- A story in today’s New York Times chronicles the despair about Trump in the suburb of Parma: “Ukrainian-Americans have felt at home in the Republican Party since Franklin D. Roosevelt and Stalin divided control of Europe at Yalta. But … they are watching (2016) with a mix of confusion and fear,” Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports.

The best vignette from her piece: “As a proud Ukrainian-American, Taras Szmagala has worked for decades to elect Republicans, the party he associates with freedom. He ran an ethnic outreach program for Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 campaign, and advised President George Bush as the Soviet Union crumbled, when Ukraine became an independent state. Mr. Szmagala, 83, will mark Wednesday’s 25th anniversary of statehood at a parade and festival on Saturday in this Cleveland suburb, where the blue and yellow flag of Ukraine flies along the main thoroughfare in ‘Ukrainian Village.’ But there is a pall over the festivities. His name is Donald J. Trump. ‘The party’s dead as far as I’m concerned,’ Mr. Szmagala declared.”

Quote du jour: “Oksana Zavhorodnyuk, 44, was serving schnitzel and jumbo pirogi from behind a counter. She wrinkled her nose when asked about the presidential race. ‘I don’t like Trump,’ she volunteered, in English that is still halting, though she has been here for 25 years. ‘He likes Russia; he likes Putin. He’s not in his mind, you know?’”

-- I hear anecdotes like this almost every day now. It’s important to reiterate that these would probably be Trump supporters if they did not find his position on Russia so repugnant. Most of these folks do not like Obama or Clinton.

-- Democrats see a major opening, and they are planning intensive outreach to these voters this fall. “You can get rid of Manafort, but that doesn't end the odd bromance Trump has with Putin,” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said in a statement. “Trump still has to answer serious questions hovering over his campaign given his propensity to parrot Putin’s talking points, the roster of advisers like Carter Page and Mike Flynn with deep ties to Russia, the recent Russian government hacking and disclosure of Democratic Party records, and reports that Breitbart published articles advocating pro-Kremlin positions on Ukraine. It's also time for Donald Trump to come clean on his own business dealings with Russian interests.”

The campaign has prepared a web video showing how Trump and Putin often echo one another: 

-- Joe Biden could also play a key role in this effort. It was no coincidence that, appearing with Clinton in his home town of Scranton last week, he attacked Trump for expressing fondness toward Putin. “He would have loved Stalin,” Biden told the crowd. Watch for him to make a similar cast post-Labor Day.

The vice president landed in Latvia overnight. While in Riga today, he will participate in a summit with the leaders of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. Biden’s mission is to reassure these fearful allies in what was formerly the Warsaw Pact — who know all too well what it’s like to be under the yoke of Soviet oppression and whose national survival depends on an American security guarantee — that the United States still has their back, no matter what Trump says.

Vice President Biden and Latvian President Raimonds Vejonis speak during their bilateral meeting in Riga this morning. (Petras Malukas/AFP/Getty Images) 

-- At least two Ukrainian activists were given credentials to the Democratic National Convention by the DNC office responsible for taking care of coalitions and allied groups. One wrote a first-person account for the Ukrainian Weekly about their efforts to work media row drawing attention to Manafort’s ties with the Viktor Yanukovych. “We were very happy to see many friends of Ukraine on the convention floor,” wrote Ulana Baluch Mazurkevich. “It is clear that the decisions the U.S. electorate will make regarding its next president will invariably determine … the future of Ukraine.”

-- The Trump campaign pushes back: Asked for comment, the campaign responded by highlighting an allegation in the book “Clinton Cash” that donations to the Clinton Foundation influenced the handling of the sale of U.S. uranium mines to a Russian-backed company. “Hillary Clinton, who effectively sold U.S. uranium to Russia for cash, is complicit in large-scale criminal activity,” adviser Stephen Miller said in an email. “Therefore, anything she says should be regarded as untrue.” (The Clinton campaign replied with a link to a nonpartisan fact check, as well as another story that offered a partial refutation of the book.)

-- 1976 offers a precedent that should worry Trump. Gerald Ford’s insistence during a debate with Jimmy Carter that there was “no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe” — mild compared to what Trump has said — hurt him badly with white ethnic voters. “Ohio and Wisconsin were two of the closest states that year, and both of those states had a fair number of white Eastern European ethnics,” the University of Virginia’s Kondik notes. “So in close races (Ohio was decided by less than a point, and Wisconsin by about two), there are all sorts of things that could have been decisive.”

A refresher:

-- Many experts in the political and national security realm are baffled by what they believe is Putin’s myopia. “I don’t quite understand what kind of long game he is playing,” said Weaver, the Republican strategist who has worked for Kasich and McCain. “She’s going to win. How does Putin think this is going to help his relationship with the next president?”

This story appeared on Tuesday 23, 2016 on The Washington Post and it was written 

by James Hohmann

 with Breanne Deppisch (@breanne_dep) and contributions from Elise Viebeck (@eliseviebeck).