A lot of people are waiting for something dramatic to happen, some line to be crossed, an epic event like the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller III that will allow them to say that now we have had a coup and now we are ready to do something about it.
We already had the coup.
It happened on November 8, 2016, when an unqualified candidate won a minority victory in a corrupted election thanks in part to foreign intervention. Any time is the right time to pour into the streets and demand that it all grinds to a halt and the country change direction. The evidence that the candidate and his goons were aided by and enthusiastically collaborating with a foreign power was pretty clear before that election, and at this point, they are so entangled there isn’t really a reason to regard the born-again alt-right Republican Party and the Putin Regime as separate entities.Take the recent revelations about the president’s personal errand boy, Michael Cohen. He ran a shell company from which money was used to pay Stormy Daniels to remain silent in what was quite likely an illegal campaign contribution. Money came in, along with major corporations, from a Russian oligarch close to Putin, Viktor Vekselberg, or rather from a corporation called Columbus Nova, run by a cousin of his apparently appointed to mask Vekselberg’s own role. The New Yorker reports, “It is a company technically owned by others but which looks after money owned and controlled in large part—if not entirely—by Vekselberg and his family.” Or as Frank Rich put it at New York Magazine, it’s “an example of collusion so flagrant that it made Trump and Rudy Giuliani suddenly go mute: a Putin crony’s cash turns out to be an essential component of the racketeering scheme used to silence Stormy Daniels and thus clear Trump’s path to the White House in the final stretch of the 2016 election.”
The Washington Post reports that Columbus Nova “is listed as the organization behind a string of websites targeted toward white nationalists and other members of the alt-right.” That is, this Russian oligarch’s company was illegally attempting to influence the election, and they were giving money to the bagboy of the election’s winner. Pro Publica reports that another personal lawyer of the president’s, Marc Kasowitz, also worked on behalf of Columbus Nova. There are a thousand other details like that of financial dealings—real estate sales, investments, odd transfers of wealth, social connections, meetings—that tie the Trump mob to the Russian mob—because most of the oligarchs are, in that autocratic regime, in one way or another mobsters, because Putin himself runs that vast country as though he was a mob boss intent on exerting control through fear, and profit through extortion.
The Trump family aspires to mafia status, a thuggocracy, but they are manipulable and bumbling where Putin and company are disciplined and Machiavellian. They hire fools and egomaniacs and compromised figures—Scaramucci, Giuliani, Bannon, Flynn, Nunberg, the wifebeating Rob Porter—and then fire them, with a soap opera’s worth of drama; the competent ones quit, as have many lawyers hired to help Trump navigate his scandals. The Trumps don’t hide things well or keep their mouths shut or manage the plunder they grab successfully, and they keep committing crimes in public. Remember when Trump revealed highly classified data to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister when they visited him in the Oval Office, not long after he fired FBI director James Comey (but before he admitted it was to obstruct Comey’s investigation of his ties to Russia?). There’s a picture of that visit in which the Russians are laughing at him and he looks befuddled. Remember when Donald Jr. met with the Russian agent in Trump Tower in June of 2016 to get purloined data on Clinton and tried to cover it up by saying it was about adoptions? Remember when the Trump team was forced out of the Panama hotel that Trump still profited from, and how his lawyers appealed directly to the president of Panama? How he profits from that business and others despite the emoluments clause of the Constitution? Or the various lawsuits for violating that clause, including one pending from the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia? Or the women suing Trump for defamation? Perhaps not, as so many scandals have piled up on those ones.
From the aforementioned slush fund we just learned about, Cohen made a second payoff to a woman who had sex with and was supposedly impregnated by another wealthy Republican, though there’s suspicion that the $1.6 million payment wasn’t really on behalf of Elliott Broidy, but of Trump himself. Shutting up women is a big part of what these people do, though maybe the existence of those affairs shuts Trump up too. Jonathan Chait writes of last week’s Cohen revelations: “For all the speculation about the existence of the pee tape, the latest revelations prove what is tantamount to the same thing. Russia could leverage the president and his fixer—who, recall, hand-delivered a pro-Russian ‘peace plan’ with Ukraine to Trump’s national-security adviser in January 2017—by threatening to expose secrets they were desperate to keep hidden. Whether those secrets were limited to legally questionable payments, or included knowledge of sexual affairs, is a question of degree but not of kind.”
It’s understandable if you find connecting the dots hard when there are so many dots they blur into a blob. (...)
Right now, Devin Nunes is trying to drill a hole out of the Justice Department and push classified information through it, into the open. The Washington Post reported last week, “A subpoena that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) issued to the Justice Department last week made a broad request for all documents about an individual who people close to the matter say is a sensitive, longtime intelligence source for the CIA and FBI. The Justice Department has refused to provide the documents. Intelligence officials say the material could jeopardize the source.” There seems to be widespread expectation that Nunes is fully capable of setting someone up to be assassinated, since his clear agenda since Trump arrived has been to block, disrupt, discredit, or sabotage the investigation of ties between Russia and the president and his pack of thugs. It’s been more than a year since, in a midnight drama, Nunes rushed information to the White House that he got as a member of the House Intelligence Committee.
Sabotage of national institutions, laws, standards, and the greater good has been accepted as part of the new normal, which is staggeringly far from normal. An elected official is trying to prevent his country’s agencies and its citizens from finding out if and how the president and his goons are tangled up with a foreign regime and how that prevented us from having free and fair elections and may again. As fired FBI director Comey noted in his first briefing of the president, there is no concern with protecting the nation and its information systems. The president himself has done many extraordinary things to try to interfere with the investigation, and last year White House counsel Don McGahn reportedly only prevented him from firing Mueller by threatening to resign if he did. (...)
Some of the press is already on board, of course, though we are at a point where we should probably stop calling propaganda outlets news sources. The rightwing Daily Caller, a widely read online publication co-founded by Fox’s Tucker Carlson, has cut out the middle men and the apologists and gone straight to Oleg Deripaska, aka Putin’s favorite oligarch, the one who kept Paul Manafort on a short leash, letting him publish an editorial headlined “The Ever-Changing ‘Russia Narrative’ Is False Public Manipulation.” Traditionally you don’t let the accused party dictate the narrative, especially when the accused is suspected of being part of a foreign conspiracy to subvert the government of the United States. But it’s is no more unusual than Fox’s and the National Enquirer’s deep allegiance to Trump over truth. For Fox that means constantly running disinformation or just avoiding major news that casts the president in a negative light (and for Fox’s Sean Hannity, that means, according to a stunning new piece in New York magazine, a bedtime call with the president every night—“Generally, the feeling is that Sean is the leader of the outside kitchen cabinet,” says one source in the piece, which also reminds us Fox is almost Trump’s sole source of news). For the Enquirer, it means catch-and-kill payoffs to women who might damage his reputation (a catch-and-kill is when you pay for exclusive rights to a story and then don’t publish it).
The Enquirer performed a catch-and-kill operation to silence former playmate Karen McDougal, who had a relationship with Trump around the same time Daniels had her lone sexual encounter with him.
There are so many threads in this tangle involving women and how to shut them up. Deripaska—whose money apparently went to Cohen’s slush fund—took Sergei Prikhodko, Russia’s deputy prime minister, on an August 2016 cruise on his yacht with a very young paid female companion on board who goes by the name Nastya Rybka. Rybka shared a video she recorded of the two of them discussing the US election and says she has 16 hours more of recordings containing valuable information for the Mueller investigation. The Putin regime found the video—and an opposition candidate’s interpretation of it—so significant that the government attempted to shut down YouTube in Russia. Rybka is currently imprisoned in Thailand on prostitution charges. The New York Times reports that earlier this year she said, “If America gives me protection, I will tell everything I know. I am afraid to go back to Russia. Some strange things can happen.” The US seems disinclined to take her or take a look at her evidence.
More recently the National Enquirer ran a hit piece on Michael Cohen, which makes it seem possible that Cohen is going to rat on Trump and the forces lined up with Trump are going to try to discredit him. CNN reports that it “could be a strong sign President Donald Trump is upset with his personal lawyer and turning against the man,” as though it’s normal for the president to use the tabloids to discredit longtime allies. Acts that would have been shocking if committed by previous administrations are overshadowed and crowded by equally transgressive acts that pile up into something that would like us to forget that this is not normal. Even when Trump is gone, the corruption of a significant percent of the American population, those with whom we don’t merely disagree on principles and goals, but on reality itself, will be a lingering problem. They are weaponized minds, and their hate, as hate always is, is easily directed. The Republican Party itself now stands for little other than its own grasp on power, and for the domination of this country’s white male Christian-identified minority over the majority of us. (...)
The current situation of the United States is obscene, insane, and incredible. If someone had pitched it for a thriller novel or film a few years ago, they would’ve been laughed out of whatever office their proposal made it to because fiction ought to be plausible. It isn’t plausible that a solipsistic buffoon and his retinue of petty crooks made it to the White House, but they did and there they are, wreaking more havoc than anyone would have imagined possible, from environmental laws to Iran nuclear deals. It is not plausible that the party in control of the federal government is for the most part a kleptomaniac criminal syndicate.
Sabotage of national institutions, laws, standards, and the greater good has been accepted as part of the new normal, which is staggeringly far from normal. An elected official is trying to prevent his country’s agencies and its citizens from finding out if and how the president and his goons are tangled up with a foreign regime and how that prevented us from having free and fair elections and may again. As fired FBI director Comey noted in his first briefing of the president, there is no concern with protecting the nation and its information systems. The president himself has done many extraordinary things to try to interfere with the investigation, and last year White House counsel Don McGahn reportedly only prevented him from firing Mueller by threatening to resign if he did. (...)
Some of the press is already on board, of course, though we are at a point where we should probably stop calling propaganda outlets news sources. The rightwing Daily Caller, a widely read online publication co-founded by Fox’s Tucker Carlson, has cut out the middle men and the apologists and gone straight to Oleg Deripaska, aka Putin’s favorite oligarch, the one who kept Paul Manafort on a short leash, letting him publish an editorial headlined “The Ever-Changing ‘Russia Narrative’ Is False Public Manipulation.” Traditionally you don’t let the accused party dictate the narrative, especially when the accused is suspected of being part of a foreign conspiracy to subvert the government of the United States. But it’s is no more unusual than Fox’s and the National Enquirer’s deep allegiance to Trump over truth. For Fox that means constantly running disinformation or just avoiding major news that casts the president in a negative light (and for Fox’s Sean Hannity, that means, according to a stunning new piece in New York magazine, a bedtime call with the president every night—“Generally, the feeling is that Sean is the leader of the outside kitchen cabinet,” says one source in the piece, which also reminds us Fox is almost Trump’s sole source of news). For the Enquirer, it means catch-and-kill payoffs to women who might damage his reputation (a catch-and-kill is when you pay for exclusive rights to a story and then don’t publish it).
The Enquirer performed a catch-and-kill operation to silence former playmate Karen McDougal, who had a relationship with Trump around the same time Daniels had her lone sexual encounter with him.
There are so many threads in this tangle involving women and how to shut them up. Deripaska—whose money apparently went to Cohen’s slush fund—took Sergei Prikhodko, Russia’s deputy prime minister, on an August 2016 cruise on his yacht with a very young paid female companion on board who goes by the name Nastya Rybka. Rybka shared a video she recorded of the two of them discussing the US election and says she has 16 hours more of recordings containing valuable information for the Mueller investigation. The Putin regime found the video—and an opposition candidate’s interpretation of it—so significant that the government attempted to shut down YouTube in Russia. Rybka is currently imprisoned in Thailand on prostitution charges. The New York Times reports that earlier this year she said, “If America gives me protection, I will tell everything I know. I am afraid to go back to Russia. Some strange things can happen.” The US seems disinclined to take her or take a look at her evidence.
More recently the National Enquirer ran a hit piece on Michael Cohen, which makes it seem possible that Cohen is going to rat on Trump and the forces lined up with Trump are going to try to discredit him. CNN reports that it “could be a strong sign President Donald Trump is upset with his personal lawyer and turning against the man,” as though it’s normal for the president to use the tabloids to discredit longtime allies. Acts that would have been shocking if committed by previous administrations are overshadowed and crowded by equally transgressive acts that pile up into something that would like us to forget that this is not normal. Even when Trump is gone, the corruption of a significant percent of the American population, those with whom we don’t merely disagree on principles and goals, but on reality itself, will be a lingering problem. They are weaponized minds, and their hate, as hate always is, is easily directed. The Republican Party itself now stands for little other than its own grasp on power, and for the domination of this country’s white male Christian-identified minority over the majority of us. (...)
The current situation of the United States is obscene, insane, and incredible. If someone had pitched it for a thriller novel or film a few years ago, they would’ve been laughed out of whatever office their proposal made it to because fiction ought to be plausible. It isn’t plausible that a solipsistic buffoon and his retinue of petty crooks made it to the White House, but they did and there they are, wreaking more havoc than anyone would have imagined possible, from environmental laws to Iran nuclear deals. It is not plausible that the party in control of the federal government is for the most part a kleptomaniac criminal syndicate.
by Rebecca Solnit, LitHub | Read more:
