Trump’s critics need more than vague insinuations to stop him

Let’s assume, though, that the Russians did attempt to influence the U.S. election. I remain unconvinced, however, that the choice between Clinton and Trump was the obvious one the president’s despisers assume it was. Here I will politely differ with The Post’s Anne Applebaum — who, however, at least offers a reason for Russia’s supposed preference for Trump instead of simply stating it. “Russia would have needed no inducements or collusion to support Trump’s election campaign,” she writes. Really? Why not? “His personality is the kind they understand, his cynicism and his dishonesty are familiar, his greed is the same as their greed.”

Hold on. Why wouldn’t that be a reason for the Putin regime not to support Trump? Why, in other words, is it so indisputably apparent that Russia would prefer to deal with a U.S. president who combines realpolitik cynicism with sheer madcap unpredictability in proportions that vary from day to day? I would have thought the chauvinists running the Russian government would prefer the United States to be led by a big-hearted progressive woman whose party — until the last election, anyway — didn’t think Russia was a serious threat. That’s at least as plausible, in the absence of hard evidence, as the assumption that Putin wouldn’t like the “hawkish” Clinton — whose hawkishness, I suspect, looks hawkish mainly in comparison to President Barack Obama’s indecisiveness.

Maybe Trump is precisely what they wanted, but what led Applebaum to make this assertion in this instance is not something I would describe as evidence but a collection of photographs of Trump smiling and glad-handling the Russian ambassador and foreign minister in the Oval Office. These wordless images — much like photographs of then-Secretary of State John Kerry smiling with his Iranian counterparts or Obama grinning side by side with Raúl Castro — function in much the same way as ill-defined terms such as “nexus” and “hacked the election” function: They fool us into assuming we know something we don’t know. Look, there’s a “connection” between Trump and the Russians: They’re shaking hands and smiling!