What Julian Assange and Donald Trump Have in Common

If it were just dumb luck that landed WikiLeaks in the Trump camp, then the only question would be how Republicans became so unprincipled that they would welcome the political help of avowed enemies of American democracy. But its always a mistake to explain Trumps motives as sheer opportunism. In fact, the lift from WikiLeaks wasnt dumb luck, and more than self-interest led to the embrace between Trump and Assange. For years, WikiLeaks was considered politically on the left, the darling of Western progressives. Then why did it organize its releases to inflict the greatest damage on Hillary Clinton? Why not go after Trump instead? Or, at least, Trump too? What made WikiLeaks a hero to Fox News and the American right?

The answer lies in one of the weirdest inversions of the past few years: Trump and Assange turned out to be second cousins. WikiLeaks and the Republican Party are distant ideological allies. They have common enemies. They use similarly nihilistic tactics toward similarly antidemocratic ends. In that dark place where the extremes meet, they benefit by undermining the same institutions. They despise the same mainstream press and the same nefarious deep state. Their supporters hate the same people. They hate liberals, and liberalism.

Read: A timeline of Trump associates asking for dirt on Clinton

Four or five years ago, a few writers looked into the politics of Assange and two other famous radical leakers, Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, and made a strange discovery: Many of their views shaded toward the farther reaches of the right. Their greatest animus seemed to be reserved for the Democratic Party and The New York Times. They had friendly things to say about the ultraconservative libertarian Ron Paul and the Republican Liberty Caucus. Assange eventually became an open mouthpiece of Vladimir Putins foreign policy. Snowden, after leaking thousands of secret documents to Greenwald and Laura Poitras, became the ward of and occasional apologist for the autocratic regime in Moscow. After the 2016 election, when reporters began to uncover interference by Russian intelligence, in concert with WikiLeaks, on Trumps behalf, Greenwald used his wide influence to denounce and mock the very idea.

Defenders of the radical leakers said that their politics didnt matterwhat mattered was the dirty doings of the surveillance state that the leakers exposed. It turned out that both things mattered. And now that were living in Trumps America, in what looks more and more like Putins world, its possible that the politics matters more.

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What Julian Assange and Donald Trump Have in Common