Until a few weeks ago, the Russian media’s portrayal of Donald Trump was mostly cartoonish and upbeat. Trump was a real-estate mogul, and he cared about money and being tough, and he admired the Russian president because he was tough, too. The same things that titillated Trump’s base titillated producers and pundits in Moscow: the manliness, the bravado, the unflinching, unthinking patriotism, the faith in all things phallic. Vladimir Putin has his pipelines. Donald Trump prefers skyscrapers. It was all so Potemkin, so compensatory, to Americans of a certain ilk—those who think grown-ups, including presidents, ought not to demean people with diseases or tweet or rant or take umbrage when an actor makes fun of you on a show that only people who already hate you watch. But to the Russian media, Trump was a known quantity, and he was portrayed the same way Russian leaders are often portrayed: of noble heart, surrounded by lackeys and opportunists.
What mattered most—what really seemed to captivate Russians’ attention—was the perception that Trump’s America would no longer be hemmed in by the conventions and compartments of the cold war or even liberal democracy. Russians have been getting platitudes about international cooperation, human rights, dead journalists, and that idiotic (utterly American) “reset” since forever, and now, at last, Washington would recognize Moscow’s rightful place in the world, which would no longer be uni- but multipolar and would more closely resemble a game of Risk in the late 19th century than, say, a global order that had been imagined and policed by the United States for the past seven decades. Trump, unlike his predecessor, unlike any American who had run for the White House or held any office anywhere, admired Putin—the strong hand of the state imposing an almost rectilinear order on the chaos of the natural world. The new president could give the Russians what they really craved, which no one else could deliver no matter how much they tried, which was respect.
Trump did not emerge out of a vacuum. There were foreshadowings at least 10 or 15 years before his election. The election, the conflagration of isms that, one suspects, is but the opening act in our collective implosion, simply ratchets up a process that began with the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It is the alacrity with which Trump has moved since taking office—his disdain for process or deliberation—that has unleashed a series of kinetic energies that could fundamentally re-scramble the chess board. Hillary Clinton would likely have sought to reverse the United States’ long, slow self-marginalization—imposing a no-fly zone in Syria and, more broadly, reasserting American hegemony in the Middle East and beyond. (It’s hard to imagine Clinton acknowledging a Russian sphere of influence in the post-Soviet near abroad; Trump, who apparently has no problems with Russians bombing Syrians, seems open to as much.) All of which explains the Kremlin’s pro-Trump stance and the generally positive coverage Trump had been enjoying at Russia Today, Channel 1, NTV, and other state organs.
Until that coverage began to taper off and then, oddly, turn lackluster and sour. In January, Trump scored 202,000 mentions in the Russian media. Putin landed just 147,000. Then, in early February, less than two weeks into Trump’s presidency, that figure started to slide.
Soon after, the Moscow tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda called Trump’s position on NATO “contradictory,” and Interfax, the AP of Russia, quoted Valery Garbuzov, head of the United States and Canada Institute, a government-backed think tank, saying “mutual trust” between Russia and the United States had been “completely lost.” Then, Kremlin stooge-slash-Duma deputy Alexey Pushkov, reacting to the all the resistance Trump was facing, tweeted: “It looks like Trump didn’t expect such a powerful opposition to his decisions and plans.” Over the last week or two, the state-run news service RIA Novosti has portrayed Trump as besieged by enemies at home. Then, in late February, the news service quoted Sergei Ivanov, the former chief of staff of the presidential administration, saying that the Russian media, which had formerly been “overly optimistic” about Trump, had assumed a more “pragmatic” approach.
None of this happened accidentally. It happened because in Russia, the media, like democracy, is “managed.” There may be some free thought, but it’s only free if it doesn’t really matter. As usual, it’s impossible to know exactly what prompted the change of thinking in the Kremlin. There must be senior officials worried about Trump’s inner circle: Defense Secretary James Mattis is hardly pro-Russia. Rex Tillerson, who Putin personally awarded the Russian Order of Friendship, appears, for now, to have been marginalized. Michael Flynn is gone, and the new national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, is hawkish on Russia. (As recently as November, McMaster warned an audience at the Virginia Military Institute about “hostile, revisionist powers” like China, North Korea—and Russia.) The new C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, opened up his Senate confirmation hearing, in January, by lambasting the Kremlin for interfering in the 2016 election. And now Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, appears to have lied by omission about meeting the Russian ambassador, and has since recused himself from any investigation into ties between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign.
But the problem may be deeper, more metabolic, than personnel. Unhelpful advisers can be sidelined. (One expects the FSB has enough intel on everyone in the White House, including the president, to ruin anyone deemed uncooperative.) The problem is the shifting American psyche.
Russians, and especially Russians inside the Kremlin, won’t really get this. Their cynicism runs so deep it makes them naïve. They assume the very worst always about everyone, and they may assume that Trump is for sale. That may be true, but what’s certainly not true is that his base can be persuaded. Trump’s base believes in him. They believe in the mythology. When Trump said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his supporters wouldn’t care, he was probably right. Trump’s poll numbers are historically low—but not among Republicans. Among Republicans, and especially among the lumpenproletariat, the people who believe they’ve been left out, the permanently aggrieved, every insult that Trump hurls at Clinton or Nordstrom or the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner is justified and poetic—it is what has been coming for a long time. Of course, it will be ugly, and there will be excesses, and some Americans, even some of the faithful, will wince, but they’ll believe deep down that this is what is needed to remake everything, to raze the sclerotic, marbled corridors. For much of his base, Donald Trump is the biblical flood come to America, and even if a lot of people might drown, that’s O.K. In fact, that may be the point.
Of course, that’s insane, and even though many of Trump’s voters may not appreciate that, the Russian president presumably does. Putin is terrified of instability. Recall the angry crowds, in 2004 and 2005, protesting proposed cuts to Russia’s ancient health-care system—and Vladimir Putin’s capitulation. Or the fear of a so-called color revolution à la Ukraine or Georgia. Or the expulsion of the United States Agency for International Development. The Kremlin doesn’t want chaos. Russia actually wants to buy off America—or buy America’s capitulation to Russian revanchism—and it might just have thought it could do that by enticing its president.
Now, one suspects, the Kremlin is starting to detect what anti-Trump conservatives detected in the fall of 2015. That was when the looming catastrophe came into focus. It was a catastrophe not because of the election, not because of anything political. That was the least of it. It was a catastrophe because it simultaneously illuminated and kindled a darkness, a rot, deep in the American psyche. The Kremlin and its media puppets may not grasp the etiology of this curdling, but they must be aware, by this late date, that something bad is happening in America, and it will spill over, across the oceans and continents, and it will upset, upend, discombobulate everything everywhere. An infant is now the most powerful person on Earth, and he is loved and worshipped by millions, and they think he will save them, that he is He, that the end is near, and so is the beginning. Until a few minutes ago, the Kremlin higher-ups were laughing. Now, like everyone else who hasn’t been swindled, they wait.