Post-election, there has been a lot of discussion over the moral and policy implications of Donald Trump’s victory. But there’s also another key result of this election that is generating more discussion — the role of foreign agents. The election is supposed to be a wholly domestic affair, reflecting the attitudes and beliefs on the American people. Yet in this election foreign powers tried to influence the outcome in extra-legal ways. This problem worsened with Trump legitimizing many of the narratives foreign actors pushed. Our leaders need to strongly and unequivocally condemn this interference as unacceptable in any circumstances.
It is not secret that Russia favored Trump in the presidential election. It is the official consensus of the U.S. intelligence community that the Russian government was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s emails, as well as the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta. Russia’s motivations are not hard to figure out — Clinton is a strong proponent of continuing the crippling sanctions against Russia for its actions in Eastern Ukraine. Trump, on the other hand, wants to strengthen our relationship with Russia and has questioned the need for sanctions. Even more than supporting Trump for his stances, Russia praised Trump in order to increase partisan fighting in the United States.
Working in connection with Russia was WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks seemed to have clearly preferred Trump. The organization trickled out Clinton campaign emails that have been the fodder for many news cycles. The new examples provided by these email dumps were a major factor in continuing the “lock her up” narrative of Trump supporters.
You may be thrilled that we learned about all this leaked information, or that the Russian government is helping to publish the “truth” that our entrenched media interests will not cover. I personally don’t agree with you, but the substance of what Russia and WikiLeaks have done shouldn’t really matter. What we need to recognize is that these foreign actors have what’s best for themselves in mind, not America. This does not mean that these cannot run parallel at times, but we should be already naturally suspicious of anything a foreign actor says.
Once we start to accept foreign actors as legitimate and having the shared interests, we leave ourselves open to manipulation. The trust people have started to put into Russian news sources has led them to accept false stories. Such trust could encourage greater intervention in our elections by other interested parties in the future. Every day that our leaders fail to denounce, in actions and words, foreign intervention in our elections, our sovereignty is eroded.
There is also a large moral and ethical problem of politicians not denouncing foreign intervention in the election. Russia and WikiLeaks work outside and against our laws. By supporting them, even passively, we are accepting the undermining of our laws in order to obtain political advantage, which is unacceptable. If you want to read Clinton’s emails, work through our current system; if you don’t like the system, change it. After Trump’s victory, no one can argue that people cannot create change even if the entire system is against them.
I am also troubled by how foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation might have influenced the election. However, that problem is very different than the one Russia and WikiLeaks pose. The Clinton Foundation donations were technically legal. Additionally, the Clinton Foundation actually stopped accepting money from foreign countries during the campaign, eliminating a conflict of interest. If you don’t want to have a public servant like Clinton be able to receive donations from foreign countries, you can get your representative to change the laws on foreign donations. This is not true for Russia and WikiLeaks, who need not play by our rules when trying to influence the election.
Russia and WikiLeaks work outside our democratic institutions and thus outside our legal reach. We cannot punish them with jail, so we have to do the next best thing. Condemn Russia’s actions, condemn WikiLeaks and condemn any country that tries to subvert our democratic process. More than that, we must actively work to keep foreign countries from influencing our politics. Yet, many of our leaders, including our president-elect, can be part of the issue. If we don’t stop such foreign influence immediately, other countries will only become emboldened to further manipulate our elections.
Bobby Doyle is an Opinion columnist for the Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at b.doyle@cavalierdaily.com.
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