I certainly cannot claim to offer any unique insight into the Mueller Report or what it means or doesn’t mean or might portend about the next 18 months. If you’re looking for a summary of that whole thing, there’s more than enough of that to go around this morning. Have at it! Or read the damn thing yourself! What I can do is point to a couple of things that jumped out at me yesterday, as I ingested the whole thing, like the brother who swallowed the sea.

Bill Barr’s Press Conference

I listened to the Barr press conference live on the radio, and then later went back and watched the recording. I don’t like to give too much credence to anybody else’s gut reactions, or various chills and thrills allegedly travelling up and down anybody else’s spines or legs, so feel free to ignore mine, too. But! I can’t deny that I felt weird authoritarian-induced chills as I listened to the Attorney General of the United States sound exactly like the president’s personal attorney would sound—that is, if the president’s personal attorney had, at any point, sounded coherent and capable. Barr’s performance was everything Trump could have asked for from a personal attorney but with the authoritative, objective veneer of the Department of Justice, and none of the Rudy Giuliani. He depicted Trump as the victim of an investigation that Barr himself believes was fundamentally illegitimate from the beginning, all but painting a picture of a conspiracy between the Deep State and the national media to derail the Trump presidency before it started. Trump and his supporters couldn’t possibly have scripted it better.

As he entered into office, and sought to perform his responsibilities as President, federal agents and prosecutors were scrutinizing his conduct before and after taking office, and the conduct of some of his associates. At the same time, there was relentless speculation in the news media about the President’s personal culpability. Yet, as he said from the beginning, there was in fact no collusion. And as the Special Counsel’s report acknowledges, there is substantial evidence to show that the President was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks.

I imagine Bill Barr thinks this performance is justified as a defense of the American Presidency, and not of this particular president. His belief in a strong Unitary Executive branch allows him to hold that the president can’t obstruct justice, because he has the absolute right to direct any investigation being pursued by the Department of Justice, which operates under the Executive branch. Essentially, Barr thinks, when it comes to anything being done by the DOJ, as the top law enforcement officer in the country, when the President does it, it isn’t illegal.

It’s worth pointing out here that the above Nixon comment wasn’t the crazy, almost accidental declaration of authoritarian hubris that it got played up as in that movie, but a basic explanation of a strong unitary executive when it comes to matters of national security. That it also betrayed the animating ethos of the Nixon presidency is fair enough, and important context for understanding why Barr would see his role as less Independent Justice Man and more President’s Employee. Having an Attorney General with this particular view of Executive power serving a president with some pretty expansive declared views of Executive power is what sent the chills down my back and unsettled my stomach. Calls on Barr to resign are understandable but comically unrealistic in this context—Barr is performing the duties of the office as he sees them. If the House wants Barr gone, they’ll have to impeach him, as is their constitutional right. Given Trump’s fairly vague, but repeated and increasingly ominous threats of Executive legal retribution for the “witch hunt,” they’ll probably want to move sooner than later.

You can see how a belief in a very strong unitary executive theory can reverse-engineer itself into a conviction that the president has extraordinary discretion to do whatever he deems necessary to protect himself if he believes his presidency under attack. Barr laid all this out in a press conference before the report dropped because of the overwhelming evidence within it that Trump was “obstructing justice”—as most people would understand the term—from the beginning. But Barr doesn’t believe “obstructing justice” is a thing the president can actually do—not just because Mueller didn’t prove an underlying crime, but because anything the president does is in service of justice by definition.

Barr’s Trump-as-victim narrative obscures something else that has largely gone unmentioned in the weeks since Barr issued his first memo about the Special Counsel’s investigation—that Trump himself bears a great deal of the responsibility for the media’s focus on the Russia investigation. The media’s conspiratorial focus on “Trump/Russian collusion” was consistently overblown and always kinda silly (something I’ve believed for a long time, now), the very real questions about his campaign’s contact with Russian intelligence notwithstanding. But “Trump-as-victim” is also Trump’s own ideal narrative-framing device—he wants nothing more than to be perceived as suffering unfair attacks by the media and establishment elite. He leaned into the Trump/Russia story with glee, always proclaiming his innocence but acting guilty as sin. The increasingly hysterical feedback loop was mutually reinforcing and beneficial.

Of course, the media’s and Trump’s shameful inability to deal with the Russia investigation with anything resembling measured maturity was only encouraged by a public who simply couldn’t get enough of the circus. Blaming Trump and the media is itself a bit of an obfuscation—they were playing to the market, after all. Trump and the media have worked together to present Trump as some sort of alien anomaly, but he’s just the worst possible product of his environment. He is the most American American, in all of the worst ways that phrase can be imagined.

Formalizing Institutional Lying

When I first saw that Sarah Huckabee Sanders admitted to Mueller that she had lied about “countless” FBI officials telling her how grateful they were that Trump had fired their boss, I experienced momentary satisfaction. Not because I give a shit about James Comey’s reputation with his underlings at the FBI, but because a paid, professional liar admitted under oath that she’d lied. Any other press secretary for any other administration would resign before having to face the White House press corps again. She would no longer have the trust from the press that, despite an understandably adversarial relationship, she’s at least operating in good faith. But this White House has never behaved as though the expectation of good faith, of telling the truth, is expected of them. Rather, not having the faith and respect of the press is a feature for Trump and his supporters.

So she made the rounds, claiming that she hadn’t in fact admitted that she lied, that she only admitted a “slip of the tongue.” The Mueller Report concluded that her claims were “not founded on anything,” but of course it’s not a crime to lie to the press, so she came right out and started doing it again. She will always lie to the press, and if she won’t do it anymore, Trump will find someone who will.

The Mueller Report is littered with examples of Trump and his associates lying to and lying about the press, and it often points out that lying to the press is not a crime, but a political strategy.

Of course, we’ll never know if Trump would have lied about this to Congress or Mueller, because his idiot son published all his own emails shortly thereafter, including the damning “if it’s what you say I love it” response to an ultimately disappointing promise of dirt on Hillary.

The Mueller Report lays out in lengthy detail how the Trump administration routinely treats the press, and by extension the public, with absolute contempt, lying freely and unnecessarily, from the top down. It is primarily a document of dishonesty, letting anyone who cares to listen know that nothing that the administration says is to be trusted. And then it says that there’s nothing the law can do about it. And it’s true! The public has to hold this sort of formalized institutional lying to account, because that is to whom it is being directed. Unfortunately, in a totalitarian propagandist state, public opinion, as such, functionally ceases to exist.

The Most Impotent President

Something I’ve been saying for some time is that Donald Trump isn’t really the president. I don’t mean this in a crazy conspiracy kinda way, I just mean that he sits around all day acting like the Big Boy President Man, and lots of the people around him just pretend like he’s not really the president. A good recent example of this:

Last Friday, the President visited Calexico, California, where he said, "We're full, our system's full, our country's full -- can't come in! Our country is full, what can you do? We can't handle any more, our country is full. Can't come in, I'm sorry. It's very simple."

Behind the scenes, two sources told CNN, the President told border agents to not let migrants in. Tell them we don't have the capacity, he said. If judges give you trouble, say, "Sorry, judge, I can't do it. We don't have the room."

After the President left the room, agents sought further advice from their leaders, who told them they were not giving them that direction and if they did what the President said they would take on personal liability. You have to follow the law, they were told.

The Mueller Report tells some very similar stories, including this staggering bit of summary: “The president’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”

When the president tells you to do something, you do it, or you quit. That’s how it works—especially in an administration with a firm appreciation for the strong unitary executive theory, you’d think! Instead, when Trump told people to do something they believed to be wrong or illegal or unethical or ill-advised or some combination thereof—they often just, like, went home for the weekend, and hoped he’d forget about it come Monday.

This is not a sign that the president is actually the president! And a good thing, too, but sorta disturbing nonetheless. Trump has a very deep appreciation for authoritarian regimes, leads an administration that talks a big game about his power, and isn’t shy about asserting its executive authority. But a substantial number of people in his immediate orbit just straight up ignore him when he tells them to do something terrible. (Not enough, probably!)

In bizzarro-land, of course, this is a sign of staggering presidential strength and restraint. (I don’t have the fortitude to watch this whole thing again to find what I’m looking for, and there doesn’t seem to be a good transcript out there, but that’s what Hannity was arguing on his show last Thursday.) Since Trump could have ended the investigation whenever he wanted to, if he had really wanted to end it then he would have ended it. Not doing so demonstrated strength and restraint. He wasn’t being ignored, because he can’t be ignored—he’s the president! He would have gotten what he wanted had he wanted it, but he was smarter than that. If that doesn’t illustrate the depth of delusion one achieves when one gets lost up Trump’s ass, I don’t know what will.

For all the ways Trump has diminished the office, none seems more directly on the nose. When Trump says jump, his staff often says, “Haha! See you Monday, boss!”