Robert Mueller, desperate content creator.
This morning, Robert Mueller stood in front of a podium at the US Department of Justice and spent most of ten minutes begging the country to read the goddamn 400+ page book he spent more than two years working on. “I worked really, really hard on it, and it says everything you need to know, and I don’t know how else to say it to you idiots, so please just read the fucking thing,” he said in unaffected monotone. He then said he would happily take questions from anybody in the room who had actually read the thing, stood expressionless for a full sixty seconds in front of a mute and shamed crowd, and then walked out.
This is, of course, not exactly how things happened, but it’s a fair way to sum it all up. You can watch the whole thing here, if you want to.
Bob Mueller is, in his flat, bureaucratic, rules-obsessed way, utterly astonished at the fact of Donald Trump’s ongoing presidency. The investigation that he led made it clear, to anyone who bothered to read the findings, that Russia instigated a massive 2016 election influence campaign, the Trump campaign expected to benefit from that influence and openly encouraged it, and that Donald Trump attempted to obstruct the investigation both publicly and privately. All of this was laid out in painstaking detail over 448 highly-readable pages. And Mueller seems baffled that nothing is really being done about it.
I was watching a bit of the Sunday news talk shows this past Sunday, as I am wont to do, and White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders was on doing her usual all-lying thing, and I found myself once again at a loss for understanding. It’s hard to overstate, at every turn of The Trumppening, just how ill-equipped our institutions are to handle the ongoing emergency that is Donald Trump. The only job of a free press in this country at a moment like this, is to hold the administration to account—but all it can seem to do is hollowly comment on how the fight between the “two sides” is going.
Executive oversight is implicit in nearly every clause of Congress’ constitutional mandate, but the Trump administration claims it doesn’t have to listen to anything Congress says unless it has a “legitimate legislative purpose”—legitimate as determined by the administration, of course. Trump has determined that one of the first things anyone learns about the US system of government—that it relies on a system of checks and balances of power among three distinct and co-equal branches—is no longer relevant.
This is just one more in a long line of examples of how completely antithetical to the Constitutional order the Trump presidency has always been, since even before he was elected. When he was rejecting the legitimacy of the election, both before and after he won, for example. He will do this again, win or lose, in 2020.
And somehow none of it matters. The press is so cowed by a fear of being called biased that it feels compelled to present everything in terms of two sides of equal legitimacy fighting for power and control. This is the real and most damaging result of Fox’s and talk radio’s generations-long assault on news legitimacy—they fucking listened to the least genuine and honest critics in the room. A functioning media wouldn’t do so—a functioning media would point out, over and over again, the simple truth: the presidency of Donald Trump is an ongoing emergency, and there are not good people on both sides. On one side is a narcissistic pathological liar and wanna-be authoritarian who is the president, and aligned behind him are his defenders or complicit cowards who value and revere power above all else—on the other side should be anyone who tells the simple truth of their corruption and bankruptcy.
Masha Gessen’s latest is an absolute must read, though not for the small bit that is its ostensible point—that Nancy Pelosi’s performance as personal Trump troll, even as she is “winning,” proves the sad reality that the “Trumpification of American politics is being perpetrated by bipartisan consensus.” What’s stuck in my head about the piece is the same thing that I think every time I hear some GOP congressman or another defend Trump by what-about’ing the Democrats or the media, or any time I hear some shitbag “Republican strategist” talk about the administration’s tactics as if they’re all just a part of the same old game we’ve always been playing—no, you assholes, it’s way worse than all of that! What’s happening is an absolute fucking emergency, and every day that we treat it like it’s not is another mile further into an abyss that we have less and less chance of even recognizing that we’re in.
I will quote Gessen’s piece at length, because it’s worth reading. It’s worth being reminded of simple truths.
The President of the United States is erratic, illiterate, and doesn’t want to know what he doesn’t know. The President has alienated former allies, befriended or courted murderous dictators, and has repeatedly brought the country to the brink of nuclear confrontation. The President lies constantly, knows that he is lying, and demands that Administration officials lie for him, and often they do. The President has waged war on the institutions of government, overseeing the gutting of the State Department and the destruction of other federal agencies by their own leaders, and effectively shut off media access to the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House. The President has acted to thwart oversight of the Administration by other branches of government. The President has never made a secret of despising the government itself: he has called it a “swamp” and gleefully shut it down for thirty-five days, during a temper tantrum. The President has not only failed to divest himself of his businesses but has installed his children in and near the White House, openly using his office for personal financial gain. The President has debased political culture and language, using his bully pulpit to spew lies, hate, and personal insults, and to serve fast-food burgers.
These are some of the known facts. The Trump Presidency has been a two-and-a-half-year high crime against common decency, good sense, human values, the national interest, and the law.
(…)
[But somehow] the known facts are not enough to make Trump’s continued Presidency inconceivable. Similarly, the idea that continued congressional hearings on the special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings are necessary to build a case for impeachment suggests that a hundred and eighty-two pages documenting the President’s efforts to obstruct the investigation are not enough.
(…)
But the logic is that the public must be shown how unfit Trump is to be President. As though the public hasn’t seen enough—as though, indeed, what the public has seen so far is a Presidency that we can live with.
(…)
Failure, in other words, is unacceptable, but this—the flagrant dysfunction, the trivialization of all that used to be politics, the spectacle of daily national shame—is acceptable. Trump will be gone someday, but the possibilities that Trumpism has created will remain.
Robert Mueller just wants Congress to read the report, and do its job. It should be obvious what the job is, if only you look reality in the face. But Congress and the media have looked this reality in the face and quickly adapted to it. They know how this game is played, and it requires willing teams on both sides to pretend like all of this is normal, beneath the tweets and the bluster. We have allowed our perpetual astonishment at Trump’s behavior to hide a simple and harmful and potentially fatal truth—the house is burning, and we’re debating the motives and tactics of the flames.
