Soon, according to a June report in The Washington Post, the moment of truth will arrive. Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating the president, his administration, and his campaign, will deliver his verdict on whether Donald Trump obstructed justice.
On the larger and more complicated question of his campaign’s possible collusion with Russia, Mueller may take longer to issue a second report. But it is widely expected in Washington—which has been wrong about such matters before—that a first report, on obstruction, will drop before Labor Day. Assuming it happens, it will follow shortly after Mueller’s July 13 indictment of twelve Russian military intelligence officers. Those indictments have to do with the larger collusion story, and they suggest that more indictments might well be on the way. Even as Trump gave Putin the benefit of the doubt in Helsinki, a Russian woman, Maria Butina, was charged with trying to illegally influence the 2016 election.
It seems inconceivable that Mueller will absolve the president in that first report. Trump has obstructed justice right in front of our noses, and more than once, either because he doesn’t know what obstruction of justice is or because he knows and doesn’t care. The most notable instance was his interview with Lester Holt of NBC in May 2017, right after he fired FBI Director James Comey. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had prepared a letter laying out the president’s reasons for the dismissal. The reasons included, rather laughably, the charge that Comey was unfair to Hillary Clinton in his handling of the probe of her State Department e-mails. Holt asked Trump about the reasons stated in the letter, and eventually Trump acknowledged that they hadn’t a thing to do with it:
All of this doesn’t begin to detail what Mueller and his team have learned from interviews about what took place in private. It’s a reasonable bet, then, that Mueller will find that Trump and others around him—former press aide Hope Hicks, possibly his son Donald Jr., maybe Jared Kushner, other campaign associates and hangers-on—have lied or tried to quash or in some way compromise the investigation.
If that happens, what comes next? Three days before Trump’s inauguration, the neoconservative Bush administration official Eliot A. Cohen wrote that “this will be a slogging match until the end.” He felt confident, however, that “the institutions will contain him and the laws will restrain him if enough people care about both, and do not yield to fear of him and whatever leverage he tries to exert from his mighty office.”
Of those forty-five words of Cohen’s, the most important is “if.” When Cohen wrote his piece, there may have been reason for optimists to hope that the Republicans who control Congress and the conservative jurists who constitute the majority on the Supreme Court, as well as rank-and-file Republicans, would tire of this vulgar burlesque and would find ways to check Trump, to communicate to him that even a president can’t just do whatever he wants.
But what has actually happened over the last year and a half has been the opposite. Two Republican legislators who have criticized him in a way that bared any teeth, Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, are giving up the fight and retiring, while much of the congressional GOP is instead laying the groundwork for an all-out assault on Mueller when a report hits. The Supreme Court, which will presumably soon have two Trump appointees, is far more political and less independent than the Supreme Court that in 1974 ordered Richard Nixon to hand over his tapes. Trump’s base, as long as he is deporting asylum-seekers and inveighing against knee-taking football players and fake news journalists, grows more and more besotted. And undergirding it all is the Fox News Channel, now a pure propaganda network, from which Republicans take their cues and get their talking points. What will they do when Mueller’s first allegations appear?
It’s worth stepping back here to review quickly the steps by which the Republican Party became this stewpot of sycophants, courtesans, and obscurantists. It’s easy to forget these things, but it’s not as if Trump announced his candidacy in mid-2015 and all this self-abasement suddenly happened. In a May 2015 Washington Post–ABC poll, his favorable-to-unfavorable numbers among Republicans were 23 to 65 percent. Then he announced his candidacy in mid-June, warning us about those Mexican rapists. By mid-July, another Washington Post–ABC News poll gave Trump a 57 percent favorable rating among Republicans, with 40 percent seeing him unfavorably—a big improvement, but still far from Dear Leader territory.
That August brought the first Republican debate, at which Megyn Kelly confronted Trump over his “disparaging comments about women’s looks.” The day after that debate, Trump said that Kelly had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” The war that resulted between Trump and Fox News foreshadowed his subsequent takeover of the Republican Party as a whole.
Trump had known Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity for years, and occasionally appeared on Fox to natter on about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Now, however, he grandly announced a boycott of the network and put out a flurry of tweets like this one, which reads strangely (except for the grammatical error) in light of all we know today: “.@oreillyfactor was very negative to me in refusing to to [sic] post the great polls that came out today including NBC. @FoxNews not good for me!” Who knows the extent to which this was all show. Murdoch and Ailes no doubt felt that they had to at least appear to be defending Kelly, their top female star at the time, who has since decamped to NBC (this was months before Ailes was exposed as a serial sexual predator).
It now seems as if what we were witnessing then was really a cautious waltz of alpha-male lions loosed upon an unfamiliar savannah, fighting to determine which one would lead the pride. And Trump clearly won. I’m not sure this qualifies as something for which he deserves credit, but it’s a fact that Trump is the only Republican politician I can think of since the network has been on the air (1996) to take it on and bend it to his will rather than the other way around.
As Trump began piling up primary victories, Republicans started coming around. Some stopped short of endorsing him, but they found ways to signal that they would do nothing to stop him. In late April 2016, Tennessee’s Bob Corker announced his support for Trump. The day before, Trump had given a foreign policy address that Corker praised as “challenging the foreign policy establishment that has been here for so long.” That June, when Trump delivered a racist tirade against the judge (of Mexican heritage) who was presiding over the Trump University case, Senator Lindsey Graham said, “There’ll come a time when the love of country will trump hatred of Hillary.” But for most Republicans—very much including Graham himself, who just three months into Trump’s term announced himself “the happiest dude in America right now” over the administration’s anti-Iran saber-rattling—that time never came.
The release of the Access Hollywood tape in early October 2016 provided another look-in-the-mirror moment for Republicans. More than forty elected Republicans did back away from Trump at that point—a significant number, no doubt, but still a small minority. Big donors like Robert and Rebekah Mercer announced they were sticking with him. The Never-Trumpers, which at the time included those forty, along with a number of conservative writers and intellectuals and conservative TV pundits, stood their ground, but they were overwhelmed and warned by their constituents that they had better fall into line: Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Roger Stone, Julian Assange, and Fox News were now fully in charge of the Republican Party.
None of this was inevitable. I used to argue, in these pages and elsewhere, that the Republicans could have stopped Trump, and I still believe it. Doing so would have required three elements: a bit of leadership from Reince Priebus, then the party chairman and later the easily steamrolled White House chief of staff; an agreement (this was the hard part) among the other major presidential candidates to check their egos and coalesce behind one of them; and a commitment by a few major donors to support that candidate.
But they didn’t do this, and no one stood up to Trump. His only forceful critic was Mitt Romney, who called him “a phony, a fraud” in a scathing speech; but he delivered that speech in March 2016, two days after Trump had swept the Super Tuesday voting, i.e., after he was already well on his way to the nomination. The time for that speech was before the Iowa caucuses. Today, Romney, running for the Senate in Utah, cheerily predicts that Trump will “be reelected solidly.” This is at least the fourth political incarnation of Romney, from the moderate who gave Massachusetts a health care plan in the early 2000s to the “severe” conservative who ran for president in 2012 to the anti-Trump spokesman of two years ago to the capitulator of today.
This is the remarkable thing we have witnessed: the Republican Party has essentially ceased to be a political party in our normal understanding of the term and has instead become an instrument of one man’s will. Fifty years ago, the GOP was an amalgam of different factions that often disagreed among themselves—New England liberals, the heirs of the “Free Soil” moderates, prairie conservatives, Wall Street money people. Then in 1980, the new “movement conservatives” gained the upper hand. Incrementally, they took over. Incrementally, they moved ever more rightward, egged on by the new right-wing media.
All that was bad enough for the country—it led us to a war waged under false pretenses against an “enemy” that hadn’t attacked us and a campaign to dismantle a social compact carved out over the course of a century. But at least through all those phases, the Republican Party remained committed to the basic idea of democratic allocation of power. Since the Civil War, Democrats and Republicans have fought sometimes fiercely over their ideological goals, but they always respected the idea of limits on their power.
No one had come along to suggest that power should be unlimited. But now someone has, and we have learned something very interesting, and alarming, about these “conservatives,” both the rank and file and holders of high office: their overwhelming commitment is not to democratic allocation of power, but to their ideological goals—the annihilation of liberalism, the restoration of a white ethno-nationalist hegemony. They know better than to speak of such things openly, but every once in a while they have allowed a piece of the cat’s anatomy to slip out of the bag, a tail here, a hind leg there. In June 2016, for example, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said:
It has often been written, and I’ve written it myself, that the Republicans have been weak in the face of Trumpism. But I’ve come to think that’s wrong. They’re not weak at all. Most of them are perfectly happy to have become Trump’s vassals. They were waiting for just such a man.
Trump’s popularity among Republicans now stands at close to 90 percent. This is a fairly recent development—since the early part of this year. No doubt it is a function in part of certain accomplishments, notably the tax cut and the reshaping of the courts. But I think it’s tied most directly to the increasing awareness of what a serious threat Mueller poses to the president. Hence the ferocious pushback, orchestrated by Fox. Most nights, if I’m watching Rachel Maddow at 9 PM on MSNBC, I’ll flip over for a few moments to watch Hannity on Fox. If you don’t do this, I recommend that you do. It’s like being transported to a parallel universe. Hours continue to be devoted to why Hillary belongs in jail. The Mueller probe is discussed only for the purpose of telling viewers how corrupt it is.
by Michael Tomasky, NYRB | Read more:
Image: Siegfried Woldhek
[ed. I hesitate to pollute this blog with anything Trump-related but sometimes you just can't avoid it. At least this article lays blame where it's deserved: establishment Republicans and media outlets who debase themselves by continuing to support him. See also: We Know Trump Is Guilty. We’re Having a Hard Time Admitting It.]
On the larger and more complicated question of his campaign’s possible collusion with Russia, Mueller may take longer to issue a second report. But it is widely expected in Washington—which has been wrong about such matters before—that a first report, on obstruction, will drop before Labor Day. Assuming it happens, it will follow shortly after Mueller’s July 13 indictment of twelve Russian military intelligence officers. Those indictments have to do with the larger collusion story, and they suggest that more indictments might well be on the way. Even as Trump gave Putin the benefit of the doubt in Helsinki, a Russian woman, Maria Butina, was charged with trying to illegally influence the 2016 election.
It seems inconceivable that Mueller will absolve the president in that first report. Trump has obstructed justice right in front of our noses, and more than once, either because he doesn’t know what obstruction of justice is or because he knows and doesn’t care. The most notable instance was his interview with Lester Holt of NBC in May 2017, right after he fired FBI Director James Comey. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had prepared a letter laying out the president’s reasons for the dismissal. The reasons included, rather laughably, the charge that Comey was unfair to Hillary Clinton in his handling of the probe of her State Department e-mails. Holt asked Trump about the reasons stated in the letter, and eventually Trump acknowledged that they hadn’t a thing to do with it:I was going to fire Comey knowing there was no good time to do it. And in fact when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.That is obviously Trump saying, as directly as Trump can say anything, that he fired Comey because of the FBI’s investigation into his campaign’s possible Russia ties. But it’s hardly the only example we know of. Two months before that, in March 2017, he’d berated Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a meeting about Sessions’s earlier decision to recuse himself from the Russia probe and urged him to reverse course. He also made requests to both Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and National Security Agency director Michael Rogers to issue statements proclaiming that there was no collusion (both refused). There is more along these lines. Arguably every single tweet the president writes about the investigation, attacking Mueller’s “13 Angry Democrats” and denouncing it as an invariably upper-cased Witch Hunt, is an attempt to obstruct justice; if you don’t think so, get yourself placed under federal investigation and try mimicking Trump’s Twitter habits and see what happens to you.
All of this doesn’t begin to detail what Mueller and his team have learned from interviews about what took place in private. It’s a reasonable bet, then, that Mueller will find that Trump and others around him—former press aide Hope Hicks, possibly his son Donald Jr., maybe Jared Kushner, other campaign associates and hangers-on—have lied or tried to quash or in some way compromise the investigation.
If that happens, what comes next? Three days before Trump’s inauguration, the neoconservative Bush administration official Eliot A. Cohen wrote that “this will be a slogging match until the end.” He felt confident, however, that “the institutions will contain him and the laws will restrain him if enough people care about both, and do not yield to fear of him and whatever leverage he tries to exert from his mighty office.”
Of those forty-five words of Cohen’s, the most important is “if.” When Cohen wrote his piece, there may have been reason for optimists to hope that the Republicans who control Congress and the conservative jurists who constitute the majority on the Supreme Court, as well as rank-and-file Republicans, would tire of this vulgar burlesque and would find ways to check Trump, to communicate to him that even a president can’t just do whatever he wants.
But what has actually happened over the last year and a half has been the opposite. Two Republican legislators who have criticized him in a way that bared any teeth, Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, are giving up the fight and retiring, while much of the congressional GOP is instead laying the groundwork for an all-out assault on Mueller when a report hits. The Supreme Court, which will presumably soon have two Trump appointees, is far more political and less independent than the Supreme Court that in 1974 ordered Richard Nixon to hand over his tapes. Trump’s base, as long as he is deporting asylum-seekers and inveighing against knee-taking football players and fake news journalists, grows more and more besotted. And undergirding it all is the Fox News Channel, now a pure propaganda network, from which Republicans take their cues and get their talking points. What will they do when Mueller’s first allegations appear?
It’s worth stepping back here to review quickly the steps by which the Republican Party became this stewpot of sycophants, courtesans, and obscurantists. It’s easy to forget these things, but it’s not as if Trump announced his candidacy in mid-2015 and all this self-abasement suddenly happened. In a May 2015 Washington Post–ABC poll, his favorable-to-unfavorable numbers among Republicans were 23 to 65 percent. Then he announced his candidacy in mid-June, warning us about those Mexican rapists. By mid-July, another Washington Post–ABC News poll gave Trump a 57 percent favorable rating among Republicans, with 40 percent seeing him unfavorably—a big improvement, but still far from Dear Leader territory.
That August brought the first Republican debate, at which Megyn Kelly confronted Trump over his “disparaging comments about women’s looks.” The day after that debate, Trump said that Kelly had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” The war that resulted between Trump and Fox News foreshadowed his subsequent takeover of the Republican Party as a whole.
Trump had known Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity for years, and occasionally appeared on Fox to natter on about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Now, however, he grandly announced a boycott of the network and put out a flurry of tweets like this one, which reads strangely (except for the grammatical error) in light of all we know today: “.@oreillyfactor was very negative to me in refusing to to [sic] post the great polls that came out today including NBC. @FoxNews not good for me!” Who knows the extent to which this was all show. Murdoch and Ailes no doubt felt that they had to at least appear to be defending Kelly, their top female star at the time, who has since decamped to NBC (this was months before Ailes was exposed as a serial sexual predator).
It now seems as if what we were witnessing then was really a cautious waltz of alpha-male lions loosed upon an unfamiliar savannah, fighting to determine which one would lead the pride. And Trump clearly won. I’m not sure this qualifies as something for which he deserves credit, but it’s a fact that Trump is the only Republican politician I can think of since the network has been on the air (1996) to take it on and bend it to his will rather than the other way around.
As Trump began piling up primary victories, Republicans started coming around. Some stopped short of endorsing him, but they found ways to signal that they would do nothing to stop him. In late April 2016, Tennessee’s Bob Corker announced his support for Trump. The day before, Trump had given a foreign policy address that Corker praised as “challenging the foreign policy establishment that has been here for so long.” That June, when Trump delivered a racist tirade against the judge (of Mexican heritage) who was presiding over the Trump University case, Senator Lindsey Graham said, “There’ll come a time when the love of country will trump hatred of Hillary.” But for most Republicans—very much including Graham himself, who just three months into Trump’s term announced himself “the happiest dude in America right now” over the administration’s anti-Iran saber-rattling—that time never came.
The release of the Access Hollywood tape in early October 2016 provided another look-in-the-mirror moment for Republicans. More than forty elected Republicans did back away from Trump at that point—a significant number, no doubt, but still a small minority. Big donors like Robert and Rebekah Mercer announced they were sticking with him. The Never-Trumpers, which at the time included those forty, along with a number of conservative writers and intellectuals and conservative TV pundits, stood their ground, but they were overwhelmed and warned by their constituents that they had better fall into line: Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Roger Stone, Julian Assange, and Fox News were now fully in charge of the Republican Party.
None of this was inevitable. I used to argue, in these pages and elsewhere, that the Republicans could have stopped Trump, and I still believe it. Doing so would have required three elements: a bit of leadership from Reince Priebus, then the party chairman and later the easily steamrolled White House chief of staff; an agreement (this was the hard part) among the other major presidential candidates to check their egos and coalesce behind one of them; and a commitment by a few major donors to support that candidate.
But they didn’t do this, and no one stood up to Trump. His only forceful critic was Mitt Romney, who called him “a phony, a fraud” in a scathing speech; but he delivered that speech in March 2016, two days after Trump had swept the Super Tuesday voting, i.e., after he was already well on his way to the nomination. The time for that speech was before the Iowa caucuses. Today, Romney, running for the Senate in Utah, cheerily predicts that Trump will “be reelected solidly.” This is at least the fourth political incarnation of Romney, from the moderate who gave Massachusetts a health care plan in the early 2000s to the “severe” conservative who ran for president in 2012 to the anti-Trump spokesman of two years ago to the capitulator of today.
This is the remarkable thing we have witnessed: the Republican Party has essentially ceased to be a political party in our normal understanding of the term and has instead become an instrument of one man’s will. Fifty years ago, the GOP was an amalgam of different factions that often disagreed among themselves—New England liberals, the heirs of the “Free Soil” moderates, prairie conservatives, Wall Street money people. Then in 1980, the new “movement conservatives” gained the upper hand. Incrementally, they took over. Incrementally, they moved ever more rightward, egged on by the new right-wing media.
All that was bad enough for the country—it led us to a war waged under false pretenses against an “enemy” that hadn’t attacked us and a campaign to dismantle a social compact carved out over the course of a century. But at least through all those phases, the Republican Party remained committed to the basic idea of democratic allocation of power. Since the Civil War, Democrats and Republicans have fought sometimes fiercely over their ideological goals, but they always respected the idea of limits on their power.
No one had come along to suggest that power should be unlimited. But now someone has, and we have learned something very interesting, and alarming, about these “conservatives,” both the rank and file and holders of high office: their overwhelming commitment is not to democratic allocation of power, but to their ideological goals—the annihilation of liberalism, the restoration of a white ethno-nationalist hegemony. They know better than to speak of such things openly, but every once in a while they have allowed a piece of the cat’s anatomy to slip out of the bag, a tail here, a hind leg there. In June 2016, for example, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said:
For all of his obvious shortcomings, Donald Trump is certainly a different direction, and I think if he is in the White House he’ll have to respond to the right-of-center world which elected him, and the things that we believe in. So I’m comfortable supporting him.In other words, to McConnell, that “right-of-center world” predated Trump, and on most important questions—taxes, deregulation, cultural issues, and the judges who have the power to nullify so many liberal achievements—Trump would do just what McConnell wanted a Republican president to do.
It has often been written, and I’ve written it myself, that the Republicans have been weak in the face of Trumpism. But I’ve come to think that’s wrong. They’re not weak at all. Most of them are perfectly happy to have become Trump’s vassals. They were waiting for just such a man.
Trump’s popularity among Republicans now stands at close to 90 percent. This is a fairly recent development—since the early part of this year. No doubt it is a function in part of certain accomplishments, notably the tax cut and the reshaping of the courts. But I think it’s tied most directly to the increasing awareness of what a serious threat Mueller poses to the president. Hence the ferocious pushback, orchestrated by Fox. Most nights, if I’m watching Rachel Maddow at 9 PM on MSNBC, I’ll flip over for a few moments to watch Hannity on Fox. If you don’t do this, I recommend that you do. It’s like being transported to a parallel universe. Hours continue to be devoted to why Hillary belongs in jail. The Mueller probe is discussed only for the purpose of telling viewers how corrupt it is.
by Michael Tomasky, NYRB | Read more:
Image: Siegfried Woldhek
[ed. I hesitate to pollute this blog with anything Trump-related but sometimes you just can't avoid it. At least this article lays blame where it's deserved: establishment Republicans and media outlets who debase themselves by continuing to support him. See also: We Know Trump Is Guilty. We’re Having a Hard Time Admitting It.]
