1.Elephants in the Room
The Watergate scandal was a laborious exercise in connecting the dots, linking some hapless amateur burglars to low-level Nixon aides and eventually to the President himself. In the current Russia scandal, the dots are already connected. Special Prosecutor Bob Mueller has already indicted two Trump aides, including his former campaign manager, and received plea deals from two others, including former national security adviser Mike Flynn. Trump has already admitted firing his FBI director over the investigation, and that he wanted to fire his attorney general (who has also been interviewed by the Special Prosecutor) for refusing to interfere with the investigation, which, if it doesn’t qualify as obstruction of justice, certainly doesn’t qualify as facilitation of justice. Now it has emerged that as recently as last summer, Trump had asked around about potentially firing Mueller and only balked when his own White House Counsellor threatened to resign. The initial claim that the Trump campaign had no contact with Russians has imploded; it turns out that the Russians had a bunch of sketchy contacts with Trump’s operatives, including his son and son-in-law. The drip-drip-drip meme that’s become popular shorthand for the Mueller investigation really shortchanges the speed with which damning new bombshells about TrumpWorld have been exploding into view. Lately it’s been more like boom-boom-boom.
The point is that the president is in some difficulty. A-list prosecutors are rolling up his underlings like they’re investigating a Mafia don, and the investigation has expanded into money laundering and other financial matters, which is not the kind of thing the former proprietor of bankrupt casinos wants to hear. So now Trump and his Republican enablers are calling for investigations of the FBI (via the newly-released Memos, Mueller -- along with Hillary Clinton, who remains their Public Enemy No. 1 -- while trashing the FBI and floating novel legal arguments about how presidents can’t obstruct justice. There’s a lot of talk that Trump might fire Mueller or pardon key witnesses, and Republican leaders have given no indication that they would try to stop him. The specter of a constitutional crisis that has been looming over Washington all year is becoming reality.
So far, aside from the hasty firing of loose-cannon national security adviser Michael Flynn, the Russia investigation hasn’t had much substantive impact on policy. But it’s the elephant in the room of the Trump presidency, fueling the near-constant siege mentality in the White House. And Trump has maintained his strangely obsequious attitude toward Vladimir Putin, reluctantly signing but then ignoring a bipartisan bill that was supposed to strengthen sanctions against Russia, sending Putin an odd public thank-you for kicking U.S. diplomats out of Russia. (He has, however, signed off on sending sniper rifles to Ukraine.) Trump is still resisting the unanimous conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia meddled in the 2016 election, and he has refused to demand that Russia avoid future meddling. Mueller has yet to demonstrate a quid pro quo, but you don’t have to be able to see Russia from your window to recognize the quid and the quo hiding in plain view. In fact, from the current perspective, given the recent cat-and-mouse plays between the White House and the Special Prosecutor’s office around an interview with the President, it appears that both sides know we are building towards an endgame of sorts. And the hints seem to indicate some sort of presidential indictment.
Trump’s attorneys apparently assured him the investigation would end in 2017. He apparently believed them. Now reality bites. But this mess is not going to end soon, or quietly, or well. In fact, a showdown is in the cards, and the endgame is very likely to put Hollywood-generated film scenarios to shame.
2.The Gong Show Is the Real Show
When Trump’s critics aren’t describing him as a dithering narcissist with infantile impulse control, they tend to describe him as an evil genius who manipulates his enemies with look-at-the-shiny-ball misdirection. Their mantra is: Don’t get distracted! In this view, his slams at black athletes protesting police brutality, a black journalist who called him a white supremacist, and a black congresswoman who reported his dismissive comments to a black Gold Star widow were distractions from his efforts to cut his own taxes, or his inaction on guns after the massacre in Las Vegas, or his plans to cut funding for food stamps, disability insurance and other programs serving the vulnerable. Journalists and activists who make a big deal about him lobbing a Native American racial slur at Elizabeth Warren during a ceremony for Native American heroes or getting his intelligence briefings from Fox & Friends or retweeting Islamophobic videos from far-right extremists are missing the real story -- his sabotage of Obamacare, or his efforts to roll back voting rights, or his right-wing judges. Focus on what really matters!
Well, it all matters. Trump’s policies matter, but so do his frequent attacks on people of color. It’s easy to succumb to outrage fatigue, but it’s not normal that only three of Trump’s 57 nominees to be U.S. attorney have been women, or that he’s interviewed only the ones most likely to oversee cases that affect him personally, or that he reportedly pressured Senate investigators to drop their inquiry into his campaign, or that he’s publicly attacked potential witnesses on Twitter. It’s not a distraction that in this #MeToo moment of reckoning, 19 women have accused the president of the United States of sexual misconduct. Granted, his public crusade against Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation was a distraction from the final GOP push to repeal Obamacare, but it was also astonishing to see Trump openly chastise his top law enforcement official and former campaign chairman for refusing to intervene in a law enforcement probe of his own campaign. Even the goofy Trumproversies -- his surprise to learn that health care was so complicated, his apparent belief Frederick Douglass was alive, his shiny new presidential coin that replaced copper with gold and "E Pluribus Unum" with "Make America Great Again," his brazen untruths about the magnitude of his electoral victory -- often reveal extraordinary truths about the 45th president. He’s not like any of his predecessors.
The point is that the crazy stuff Trump does is not a distraction from the important stuff Trump does. It’s important when the president does crazy stuff.