NO NO NOT NYET ON RUSSIAN COLLUSION.

• Author: Hemingway, Mollie
• Position: AMERICAN THOUGHT

WE KEEP BEING TOLD that Pres. Donald Trump is not normal. This much has been blindingly obvious. He had never run for office or otherwise served in a public capacity. He has been accused, not without reason, of breaking all manner of political norms. The U.S.'s most-nontraditional president never was going to conduct business as usual from the West Wing. Less than a year into his first term, he already has caused much anguish in Washington. This should be no surprise--while running for office, Trump repeatedly promised to "drain the swamp" and shake things up. Americans knew who they were voting for, and history will judge the results.

That said, Trump's nascent presidency has coincided with perhaps the greatest violation of political norms this country ever has seen--a violation that has nothing to do with Trump's behavior. Since the election, there has been a sustained, coordinated attack on Trump's legitimacy as president. This has the potential to cause far more lasting damage to our nation than Trump's controversial style.

Democratic operatives and their media allies have attempted to explain Trump's victory with a claim they had failed to make stick during the general election: Trump had nefarious ties to Russia. This was a fertile area for allegations, if for no other reason than that Trump had been reluctant to express criticism of Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin.

By contrast, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeatedly condemned Russia's 2011 elections, saying they were "neither free nor fair," expressing "serious concerns" about them. She publicly called for a full investigation while meeting with top Russian officials. This made Putin livid. "Mr. Putin said that hundreds of millions of dollars in 'foreign money' was being used to influence Russian politics, and that Mrs. Clinton had personally spurred protesters to action," The New York Times reported.

Trump's relationship with Putin decidedly was different. In December 2015, Putin called Trump "a really brilliant and talented person." Trump replied: "It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond." He added, "I have always felt that Russia and the United States should be able to work well with each other towards defeating terrorism and restoring world peace, not to mention trade and all of the other benefits derived from mutual respect."

Then rumors surfaced in the summer of 2016 that Russia probably had something to do with the alleged hack of the Democratic National Committee email system, as well as the successful "phishing" of Democratic insider John Podesta's inbox. Russia also was alleged to have tried to hack the Republican National Committee, but without success. It remained an open question whether the Russians were trying to help Trump or were simply trying to create chaos in the election.

Regardless, these Democratic Party emails were published by WikiLeaks, and they confirmed what many critics had said about Clinton and the DNC--the DNC had engineered the primary to ensure a Clinton victory; the Clinton campaign had cozy, borderline Unethical relations with members of the main-stream media; Clinton expressed private positions to Wall Street banks that were at odds with her public positions; and various other embarrassing details indicating her campaign was in disarray.

According to Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign, the Democratic nominee for president settled on a Russia excuse within 24 hours of her concession speech. Campaign manager Robby Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn, N.Y., headquarters to engineer the case that the election was not entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.

The Russian collusion story involves a lot of details, but there are two basic tactics that Trump's enemies have used to push the narrative: they have put seemingly innocuous contacts with Russians under a microscope, and they selectively have touted details supplied by a politicized intelligence apparatus. This all has been amplified by a media that has lost perspective and refuses to be impartial, much less accurate.

If most of us can now agree that Putin's Russia is a potential threat to the U.S., we should not forget that the Washington establishment regarded this as a radical opinion not so long ago. Shortly after Pres. Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Time magazine ran a cover with him asking a Russian bear, "Can we be...