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The conversation

After You, Mr. Putin

Live in Helsinki, Trump brings his blame-America-first tour to a close.

A demolition derby car in Forks, Wash.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Gail Collins and

Ms. Collins and Mr. Stephens are opinion columnists. They converse every other week.

Gail Collins: Bret, there are so many things to say about the Trump-Putin press conference in Helsinki. But let me admit that my absolute top take away was that at a critical moment in modern American history, our president managed to mention his winning margin in the Electoral College.

I’m not normally a speechless person but wow. Tell me everything you’re thinking.

Bret Stephens: The 25th Amendment. You know the one: the mechanisms for removal of a president who is manifestly unfit for office.

Gail: To think that just last weekend we thought he was only unfit for office because he was a morally bankrupt egomaniac with a very shady legal history. Those were the days.

Bret: Also, I’m thinking about just what Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and the rest of right-wing punditry would be saying if it had been President Barack Obama at that podium, saying the sort of things Trump was saying, not to mention the way he said it.

They’d call him the Manchurian Candidate. They’d accuse him of treason. They’d call for an armed insurrection or something close to it. They’d say he hates America. And they wouldn’t be wrong. Here is a president of the United States who repeatedly blames America first; who takes the word of a former K.G.B. agent over his own intelligence agencies; who promises to work constructively with a despot whose regime kills journalists, shoots down civilian airliners and uses nerve agents to assassinate its enemies abroad; and who aims his rhetorical fire on an opposing party instead of an enemy government. And the Make America Great Again crowd, with an exception or two, says pretty much nothing, or averts its gaze, or switches the subject.

I’m not speechless, exactly. But as a disaffected conservative, I just feel like someone who’s trying to scream while underwater.

Gail: The Republicans in Congress don’t exactly seem to be falling over each other in their rush to take him on. I’ve noticed the ones who are prepared to go beyond “Our national security officials are good guys” are heavily weighted toward people not running for re-election

Bret: John McCain, to his continuing credit and nobody’s surprise, called Trump’s performance in Helsinki “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.” But with a few other honorable exceptions — Jeff Flake and Bob Corker and Ben Sasse in particular — the rest of the Republican Mouse Corps was pretty quiet, perfectly illustrating why they have no business running Congress.

Gail: Just thinking a little bit more about the serenity of last weekend. When I was so freaked out about the Russians and cybercrimes that I was imagining them taking down our power grid. Apparently top intelligence people in the Trump government were thinking the same things. And he took Vladimir Putin’s side against them, too.

Bret: It just blows my mind — and breaks my heart.

Gail: Do you think Putin actually has anything on him? Hard to believe even Trump would be such a patsy for no better reason than wanting to insist he won the election fair and square.

Bret: My position is not to have a position until Robert Mueller completes his investigation. That’s why I find G.O.P. attacks on Mueller’s integrity and the investigation so pernicious.

Look, maybe there are non-conspiratorial explanations for Trump’s behavior. Is he a stooge — or a schmuck? You can read his behavior either way, though as the former C.I.A. director John Brennan has noted, “people who go along a treasonous path do not know they are on a treasonous path until it is too late.” I think we need to use the word “treason” very advisedly, but what we heard on Monday from an American president should be cause for profound disquiet.

Gail: Do you think this is the worst thing Trump has ever done? There are so many contenders.

Bret: Charlottesville is another contender. But, because I’m the son of a refugee, nothing has freaked me out quite as much as Sunday’s front-page photograph of Adan Galicia Lopez, a tender-eyed 3-year-old boy who was reunited with his mother last week after spending four months in a government detention center. The thought that the government — our government — just put this child through that trauma for no other reason than Jeff Sessions’ fantasy that it will “deter” desperate migrants or otherwise help Stephen Miller work out his manhood issues turns my stomach as nothing else has in a long time. That a majority of Republicans support the policy turns it even more.

In some ways, this worries me a lot more than whatever Putin and his cyber-armies might be trying to do to us. Putin is a former KGB agent, so at least he’s playing to type. It’s the trashing of democratic values from the inside that concerns me even more.

Gail: Well put. And it takes me back to what I found to be the scariest, freakiest and most depressing moment in the Trump tour before he got to Russia. (The high point, I would want to add, was the way he screwed up the visit with the queen.) During his press conference in the U.K. with Theresa May, he warned Europe to watch out for immigration because it was “changing the culture.” It was such a pathetic call for racism to rise up. And then of course he blamed Sadiq Khan, London’s Muslim mayor, for encouraging terrorism.

I guess that, as horrific as I find the stories about those poor kids being tormented at the border, I’m even more disturbed by the way our president is trying to promote this kind of ideology around the world.

Bret: And he’s succeeding: xenophobic populism is on the rise in Germany, Sweden and Holland, and in government in Austria, Italy, Poland and Hungary. All are fellow travelers to Trump and Steve Bannon, who was in London last week trying to gin up the movement. And many of them are sympathetic to Putin, which is no surprise given the financial or ideological support his government has given people like Marine Le Pen in France or Heinz-Christian Strache in Austria.

Gail: Oh God, Steve Bannon too. I think we need a rule about how many reactionary macho Americans can be allowed to go abroad at one time. Especially when there are so many other awful political thugs running around in places like Italy and Austria.

Bret: That said, as important as it is to oppose these parties, it’s also important to understand why they’ve gained so much strength recently. The key is their ability to traffic in half-truths, to pick up on a legitimate issue and put it to an illegitimate end.

Take immigration, Europe really has had problems integrating and assimilating immigrants, and a succession of center-left and center-right governments never seemed to get a handle on the problem. When the refugee crisis of 2015 hit, it just created an impression that European governments had lost the means and the will to control their own borders. It was certain to stir a backlash.

That’s why I think calls in the United States to “abolish ICE” are so dangerous: They create the impression that Democrats want unregulated migration, as opposed to a generous but lawful immigration policy. And that just helps Trump and the Bannonites.

Gail: For most Democrats, “abolish ICE” is just shorthand for getting rid of the Trump anti-immigration agenda. Although I do agree we could use a better code. Perhaps involving a quote from the Statue of Liberty.

Bret: “Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” for instance. Go on.

Gail: During the presidential campaign I was very, very, very strongly under the impression that Trump had no opinion about immigration whatsoever, except maybe for the utility of hiring non-resident aliens to work at his various real estate holdings. But he got excited when the crowds reacted to that early, careless rant about Mexican rapists and drug dealers, and he went with the flow.

Bret: You know, after the 2012 election he actually criticized Mitt Romney for the callousness of the Massachusetts Governor’s “self-deportation” message.

Gail: I continue to believe that if those first audiences had applauded “milk for babies” we’d have an entirely different world dedicated to infant nutrition.

Oh God, that reminds me of the fact that our government representatives attacked an international group for endorsing the idea of encouraging mothers in developing countries to breast feed. On behalf of the formula makers.

Bret: It isn’t the least bit surprising, somehow.

Gail: Let’s change the subject for a minute. Tell me what kind of an impact you think all the immigration fights will have on the fall elections. Would your average American voter want to support closed borders, racist rants about protection of “the culture” and little kids separated from their mothers?

Bret: That’s probably the central question for the election. Will the appeal to the base — and “base” applies in both senses of the word here — guarantee a kind of Trumpian rip current that cuts through the expected blue wave? You know, what mostly matters in American politics is location, not turnout. If anti-immigrant sentiment plays well in Indiana, West Virginia and North Dakota, Democrats can pretty much give up their hope of retaking the Senate, even if they can rack up big numbers in, say, California. And Democrats should be careful about counting on a big Latino turnout: In 2016, Hispanic turnout was actually a little bit lower than it had been in 2012, despite Trump’s wretched rhetoric.

Gail: Let me stop here for a minute and whine about the fact that no matter how many Latinos turn out in California, their state of nearly 40 million people is only going to be represented by two senators, which is exactly the same number as Wyoming, population 579,315. I keep harping on the fact that the real division in this country is between the empty-places people and the crowded-places people. Us crowded folk are virtually disenfranchised.

But back to the election. What’s your fallen-away Republican recommendation to us Democrats?

Bret: I think Democrats need to find a way to change the conversation about immigration, in two ways. First, stop feeding the perception that immigration is an act of humanitarianism by the United States. It’s a matter of self-interest: Newcomers mainly bring energy and drive and imagination and ambition to this country. Second, accept the premise that we need to police our borders, while making the case that we can police them better with a much more liberal system that diminishes the incentive to come into the country illegally.

Gail: And maybe we can get somebody from Mar-a-Lago to testify on how hard it is to get affordable help.

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Gail Collins is an Op-Ed columnist, a former member of the editorial board and was the first woman to serve as Times editorial page editor, from 2001 to 2007. @GailCollins Facebook

Bret L. Stephens joined The Times as an Op-Ed columnist in 2017 after a long career with The Wall Street Journal, where he was deputy editorial page editor and a foreign affairs columnist. Before that he was the editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. @BretStephensNYT Facebook

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