We’ve all seen, heard of, or read about it. A well dressed, well off, PhD who gets skinned down to his skivvies by a 16 y.o. high school dropout with a 3 card monte table on a street corner. And no matter how often we see, hear, or read about it, it’s Donald Trump who has to keep remind us that nothing beats “book smart” like “street chutzpah.”
Tomorrow is it, Robert Mueller’s day in the sunshine. And most likely, the Gotterdammerung of the Democratic impeachment hopes. Personally, I believe that the Democrats are going to get 80% of what they want from Robert Mueller tomorrow. And it won’t be enough. Because the one thing that they desperately need is the one thing that he can’t, or won’t give them, an admission that he would have indicted Trump if it were not for that stupid OLC memo. And without that, nothing significantly moves the public opinion needle on impeachment.
And all because if one man, Donald Juan Trump. From the moment that Trump realized that his portly tushie was in extremis, he did what any master marketer does, he branded his ass off. From day one, Trump seized, and controlled the branding messaging of the crisis,. And at it’s zenith, only Donald Trump could make the four simple words of “No collusion. Ni Obstruction” as immediately recognizable and as interchangeable as his four word campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”
The FBI has an open counter intelligence investigation about Russian interference in, and Trump campaign cooperation with an operation to interfere with, and possibly alter the results of, the 2016 Presidential election? “No collusion!’ “Russian hoax! It’s a witch hunt!” And the Democrats only possible response, since unlike the Clinton e-mail server investigation, this one was conducted in a hermetically sealed chamber? “We’ll wait to see what the investigation shows. Which one is simpler and cleaner, and gives more immediate gratification, which most people crave? You tell me.
Word gets out that Robert Mueller is now investigating the possibility of obstruction of justice by Trump or administration officials into the election interference investigation? “No collusion! No obstruction!” “It’s all a giant witch hunt, the greatest hoax in American history! being conducted by 13 angry Democrats!” The Democratic response? “We look forward to the final results of the Mueller report, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings. And Donald Trump was religious about this, The Big Lie. He didn’t wait for the topic to come up in any interviews or interactions he had with the media, he initiated it, and it featured prominently in every tweet. “No collusion! No obstruction!” If Trump [ppp_patron_only]exercised as seriously as he pushed that narrative, he wouldn’t look so much like Luciano Pavarotti.
And then, out of the blue after two years, Mueller’s investigation is completed! The final report is going to be released to the public! Only maybe not so much, what was released was a four page summary by new Trump mouthpiece William “The Ewok” Barr, which, shock and awe, concludes “No collusion! No obstruction!” “A full and complete exoneration!” For three long weeks, that was the only “definitive” conclusion of the Mueller report, spouted by the biggest liars since The Boy Who Cried Wolf! And while it was reported that Mueller had written a letter to Barr, expressing extreme displeasure at the way that Barr and The Pampers President were misrepresenting the results of his findings, he failed to do the one thing that could have cleared matters up, release his “ready for the public” executive findings of his report. And so “No collusion. No obstruction” reigned supreme, until the report was finally released, and showed that the report concluded no such thing at all.
And now it’s too late, far too late. The Democrats have tried to hammer home on the seriously incriminating nature of the findings of the Mueller report. But let’s be honest, a Tom Clancy thriller the Mueller report ain’t. The damn thing reads like the instruction booklet for a surround sound system. Collusion/conspiracy is difficult to prove, even more so when the most critical evidence is safely locked away overseas in Europe and Russia, and domestic witnesses are lying to you, And obstruction of justice involves intent, which is also difficult to prove, and after all, obstruction wasn’t what people signed up for. Robert Mueller can go into those hearing rooms tomorrow and read from his report like Sean Connery doing Hamlet, and it won’t make a damn but of difference when contrasted by a two yer daily chorus of “No collusion. No obstruction.”
And as a result, a criminally traitorous President is going to walk, simply because he knows how to peddle a line of richly textured bullshit, and do it effectively. If Democrats want to start consistently winning again, we must learn how to message quickly and effectively. We got our asses kicked in the ACA debacle of 2009, and we did it again with Trump’s criminal behavior. If you don’t know what Gotterdammerung means, look it up. And if you do know what it means, then put down the books and hit the streets for a while. We gotta get schooled up.
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Yeah I know.We might as well give up and just go back to pretending “AOC” will save us. And the problem with claiming “Democrats need to learn to message”? It’s not about Democrats learning to message. They could “message” Donald Trump into oblivion. The media is the problem. Hillary had a great message. The media never shared it; they only wanted to talk about her emails. And the media is only interested in their beloved “Democrats in disarray” narrative, whether it’s true or not.
Funny, I don’t remember seeing the words “give up” anywhere in the article…And the Mueller investigation was by no means a total loss…That investigation spawned committee inquiries that the Democrats can use to “criminalize” Trump every damn day from now until next November…But without a stark mea culpa on Trump from Mueller, the public opinion needle is not going to move, and if it doesn’t, Pelosi is not going to pull the trigger on impeachment in the House…
What we can hope is that whatever happens to Trump, once he’s gone there could be a willingness to institute reforms to prevent future abuses, as was the case in Watergate.
For example, Congress might want to install legal barriers between the executive and the Justice Department. Republicans won’t entertain that now because it implicates the head of their party (and McConnell won’t want to entertain anything ever), but down the road they might find themselves willing to create roadblocks that affect both Republican and Democratic future presidents.
Who knows. But it’s possible in the post-Trump era, we could shore up some of our institutions in order to prevent this from happening again (which is always just a way of saying ‘prevent it happening for another couple of decades,’ because we always eventually forget and repeat past mistakes.)
This will change nothing.