The perfidy of Paul Gigot.

After endless pandering to Donald Trump, The Wall Street Journal editorial page seems to have had a moment of epiphany on Friday. Scanning the landscape of collapsing international negotiations, hollow threats, perplexed allies, and bemused and emboldened adversaries, editorial page editor Paul Gigot recognized the Trump record for what it is: "A pile of impulsive, ill-considered threats that are increasing business uncertainty, slowing the economy, and irritating friends the U.S. needs on Iran and Korea."

This is quite a turnaround for Gigot. As much as any serious opinion leader across the conservative landscape, Paul Gigot has been an enabler of the worst of Donald Trump. Forget sycophants like Fox's Sean Hannity or InfoWars' Alex Jones, or even Rush Limbaugh, who are avowedly in the entertainment business; the lesser-known Gigot has long been a serious, respected representative of the Fourth Estate, and among the most influential journalists on the right. As important as those other three might be in keeping the Trump base motivated and engaged, it is Gigot's migration away from the Journal's traditional hawkish, free-trade, small government conservatism in favor of Trump's America First populism that has lent the greatest credence to Trump and Trumpism among erstwhile mainstream Republicans. Gigot may not rip his shirt off and yell and scream like Alex Jones, and he does not have the mass following of Hannity or Rush, but his words have arguably been more consequential – and, as such, his actions more reprehensible – because he and his loyal readers should know better.

The unveiling of Spygate, Donald Trump's most recent conspiracy theory, provides a case in point. It was just over a week ago that Donald Trump lashed out at the FBI and Department of Justice, accusing "Deep State" conspirators of embedding spies in his presidential campaign. Those spies, Trump now suggests, instigated the acts of collusion with Russian operatives that are now being blamed on Trump and his campaign, and which are the subject of Robert Mueller's investigation. "If the FBI or DOJ was infiltrating a campaign for the benefit of another campaign, that is a really big deal," Trump tweeted, inflaming his followers and starting new tremors across the nation's capital. "Bigger than Watergate!"

Trump loyalists were quick to grab the baton and run with it. House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes led the charge to force the disclosure of FBI treachery, stating “If they ran a spy ring or an informant ring and they were paying people within the Trump campaign–if any of that is true, that is an absolute red line.” And, as if on cue, Paul Gigot's team stepped in to lend credence to it all, as Kimberley Strassel – a fixture on The Wall Street Journal op-ed page and a member of Gigot's editorial board – put the Journal's imprimatur on the escalating wave of what-ifs in a piece entitled Was Trump's Campaign Set-up?

What-ifs, of course, are a common Trumpian trope:

What if President Barack Obama was born in Kenya? 

What if Susan Rice used her powers as National Security Advisor to conduct domestic surveillance for political purposes? 

What if there was a web of corruption between the FBI, the CIA, and the federal judges who participate in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act process, to use FISA warrants for political purposes.

Then this week: What if the FBI, DOJ and CIA orchestrated a plot to plant evidence of Russian collusion on members of his campaign, to discredit him. That would be a huge deal! And he is right. It would be. If they did.

Trump has taken us down these ratholes for years. He gave life to the Birther movement, knowing instinctively that it could be used to build a political following. He continues to use his accusations against Barack Obama, Susan Rice, the FBI and the FISA courts to incite his supporters. And just as Strassel jumped in to lend credibility to Trump's newest conspiracy theory, Gigot and the Wall Street Journal editorial page have taken the bait and given credence to one self-serving Trump conspiracy theory after another, including the Susan Rice unmasking controversy and accusations of FISA court abuse.

Trump's What ifs? roil the news cycle, keep his base voters enflamed, and distract attention from whatever else might be going on. It matters little that the accusations and outright lies come to nothing, because the accusations serve their purpose in the moment, and the legacy of distrust and suspicion that they engender endure. That, of course, is the point. Trump has already gotten what he wanted out of Spygate: Rod Rosenstein gave credence to the charges by agreeing to an investigation, which was followed up by the much-ballyhooed meeting in the White House where the purported Spygate evidence was disclosed. But, most important, according to recent polling, 61% of Republicans have embraced Strassel's hypothesis and believe that Trump was framed by the FBI and the Department of Justice. And Trump knows well that once planted, these beliefs can live on, despite whatever evidence might be presented to disprove them. After all, according to a Economist/YouGov poll this past December, a majority of Republicans continue to believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, so it is an easy bet that by the time Robert Mueller publishes his report, a fair share of Republicans will be set in their belief – regardless of evidence Mueller's team might present – that Donald Trump was framed.

What is it that has kept Gigot and Strassel from realizing that Marco Rubio was right when he warned that Donald Trump was a con man, and that Ted Cruz was not exaggerating when he judged Trump to be a pathological liar and irredeemable narcissist – despite plentiful and unending evidence of both. Does Kim Strassel not understand that her validation of Trump's conspiracy theories gives license to millions of Republicans who should know better than to embrace his most outrageous and destructive lies?

It is hard to know what led to Gigot's change of heart this week, when he tacitly acknowledged the vacuousness of Trump's presidency. There is nothing new to Trump's impulsive, ill-considered threats; indeed those are what have defined him from the beginning. Was it Trump walking back his tariff threats against China, while continuing to threaten our allies? Or was it watching Vladimir Putin and Xi Jingping stepping into the void created by America's disengagement from its position of world leadership, as evidenced most recently by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron, each making the pilgrimage to Russia to kiss the ring, and discuss the path forward on Iran, as well as regional and energy security on the continent.

Or perhaps it was Gigot's realization, as Trump clamored to address Xi's demand that the U.S. ease restrictions that have crippled ZTE Corporation – the giant Chinese company that had been sanctioned for stealing intellectual property and selling restricted technology to our adversaries – that leaders across the globe have figured Trump out, and instead of Trump playing them, they are playing him. Or perhaps he just succumbed to the narcissism and venality of it all: Over the past two weeks, we learned about both the $500 million that China invested in Trump's new Indonesia project – announced just two weeks ago, but largely buried beneath all the rest of the news in TrumpWorld – and the $107,000 Trump pocketed last year leveraging his new reach as President to sell deodorant and bath robes.

When the dust settles, and it turns out that it was the FBI that was doing its job and it was Donald Trump who was violating the trust of the nation, Paul Gigot will have to look in the mirror and ask himself how he let himself get in so deep, and became an enabler of a man whose every action and tweet serves a single interest: his own. Gigot has been complicit – as the Wall Street Journal was last week in endorsing Trump's spygate gambit – in Trump's continuing destruction of institutions and comity that are essential to the nation's future. Perhaps Gigot's editorial on Friday suggests he has woken up. One can only hope; he has a lot to answer for.


Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit: Why Federalism is Not Just For Racists Anymore."

Artwork by Jay Duret. Check out Jay's political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.

Peace in our time.

Donald Trump set World Peace in his sights this week as he welcomed home three Americans who had been held captive in North Korea, and who were released into American custody during a meeting between North Korean President Kim Jong-un and Trump's new Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. The President thanked the Korean dictator – who he had spent much of the past year ridiculing on Twitter – praising him as an excellent and honorable man, and announced that the two would meet in Singapore in June where, as he tweeted out later, "We will both try to make it a very special moment for World Peace!"

Should Donald Trump succeed in his summit with Kim, and win an agreement to destroy North Korea's nuclear arsenal and ballistic missile capabilities, it will be widely viewed as an achievement of titanic proportions. It was, after all, Trump's predecessor and nemesis, Barack Obama, who suggested that dealing with the North Korean nuclear threat loomed as the greatest challenge that Trump would face as President. For center-left Americans, whose disdain for Trump knows few limits, and for Europeans who have just seen one more rebuke from the American President in the form of the abandonment of the Iran nuclear deal, Trump's achievement – should it come to pass – would be a bittersweet moment. But none would be more torn between their relief at the resolution of the North Korean threat and their distaste for the man on whose watch it transpired than the members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, who would have no choice but to award the Peace Prize to Trump.

Lost in the drama of the North Korea prisoner release this week and the pending summit meeting between Trump and Kim is the enormity of the changes in global strategic relationships whirling below the surface. European leaders, who hoped that much of Donald Trump's isolationist America First campaign positioning would soften once he was in office have been disappointed. He said he would walk away from the Paris climate agreement, and he did. He promised to walk away from the Trans Pacific Partnership, and he did. He promised to demand that NATO allies increase their defense spending, and he has. He promised to demand changes to global trade relationships, and he has. He promised to reject the Iran nuclear deal, and this week – to the consternation of our erstwhile European allies – he did. Importantly, much of Trump's isolationist positioning reflects a growing discomfort among the American electorate, including Bernie Sanders supporters on the left as well as among the Trump base. According to Pew Research, over the past half-century, Americans have become steadily less supportive of the country's global role and obligations, a sentiment reflected in Trump's MAGA rhetoric.

For nations with their own regional ambitions – notably China and Russia  – Trump's willingness to pull the United States back from its leadership role in the world has been a welcome change. Russia and China in particular have long chafed at American hectoring of their anti-democratic political systems, as well as its military encroachment on what each sees as their historical and rightful spheres of influence. Both countries were signatories to the Iran nuclear deal, but while each expressed official disappointment in Trump walking away from the deal, both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jingping recognized that every action that Trump takes to distance America from the world ultimately inures to their benefit. For example, in the wake of Trump's decision to pull the United States out of the Iran accord, China committed to continuing its imports of Iranian oil, and announced that it will pay for Iranian oil in yuan – the Chinese currency – rather than dollars. This provides a strategic benefit to China, as establishing the yuan as a global reserve currency alternative to the dollar is an important long-term goal of the country.

In the Middle East, where the United States has been the dominant power since the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago, Vladimir Putin has pushed – with Donald Trump's support – to restore Russia's historic role as a force in the region. The success of Putin's efforts was evident this week as the simmering conflict between Israel and Iran burst into open military conflict. Prior to launching a counterattack against Iranian forces in Syria, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu flew to Moscow to consult with Putin, to make sure that Israeli actions would not run afoul of what the Russian potentate would understand to be appropriate defense of Israel's national interests.

Similarly, the growth of nationalist movements across Europe – aided in no small measure by Russian information operations – has enabled Putin to reassert Russian influence in countries that only a few years ago pleaded for membership in NATO to escape influence from Moscow. Nationalist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is not alone in gravitating toward Putin, both in recognition of Hungary's dependency on Russia for 80% of its energy supplies, as well as Putin's greater tolerance of Orban's authoritarian inclinations.

The North Korea situation should similarly be viewed against the backdrop of China's determined efforts over the past several years to push back against American power in East Asia, exemplified by China's military buildup in the South China Sea and Xi Jingping's "Asia for Asians" efforts to bring its Asian neighbors into a common strategic alliance against western, former colonial powers. It may well be that China is pushing North Korea to make a deal with the United States – as many people assume – out of fear of Trump's trade threats, as well as the prospect that Trump might actually attack North Korea. On the other hand, China may see the North Korea nuclear negotiations as an opportunity to pursue its own strategic objective of removing American forces from East Asia. It is notable that before this March, Xi Jingping and Kim Jong-un had never met face to face, but since the prospect of a summit between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump became real – and Kim suggested the removal of American troops from the Korean peninsula as a quid pro quo for the dismantling of his nuclear program – Kim and Xi have met two times. Removing or reducing the footprint of American forces from South Korea, and, in so doing, rolling the U.S. military presence in the region back to its last Asian foothold in Japan, would be a major achievement for Xi, removing a major obstacle to China's growing political and military dominance in the region.

While a deal with North Korea that included the withdrawal of American troops from South Korea would have been dismissed out of hand by any of Donald Trump's predecessors, he has already indicated that he could be amenable to such a proposal. Bringing American troops home was a central theme of Trump's America First campaign rhetoric, and making good on his campaign promises continues to be the animating principle of his administration. Working out a peace deal with North Korea would be an accomplishment few could ignore. It would buttress his bona fides as a master negotiator in the eyes of his supporters, and – along with an economy that continues to gain momentum in the wake of last year's tax cuts – would make him a formidable candidate in 2020 – Robert Mueller notwithstanding. And then there would be the greatest incentive to making a deal happen: Trump would accomplish the task that Obama himself declared to be the most difficult to achieve, and grab a Nobel Prize in the process.

How titanic Trump's achieving could prove to be will depend on how history ultimately assesses the motivations of and objectives realized by the parties to any ultimate deal. While it is certainly possible that Kim Jong-un has simply been cowed by Donald Trump's threats and decided that this is the time to sue for peace, it may well be that China has stepped up pressure on North Korea to make a deal because China sees an unsurpassed opportunity to achieve its own objectives. What may be viewed in the moment to be a significant achievement for the U.S. President – should it come to pass – may, could come to be viewed differently the passage of time. Rather than an event that heralded peace in our time, it could instead come to be seen as a critical event in China's ascendency as a regional, if not global, power.


Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit: Why Federalism is Not Just For Racists Anymore."

Artwork by Jay Duret. Check out Jay's political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.