Donald Trump is right about the special prosecutor, but for the wrong reason.
The Mueller investigation should be shut down before all of official Washington descends into total systemic madness. We may be there already.
The madness has two sources.
.. The other source of the madness is Donald Trump’s constantly repeated admiration for Vladimir Putin. To the point of obtuseness, Mr. Trump has never provided a rationale for his attitude toward Mr. Putin.
Coincident with this praise, the Putin record includes
- Ukraine,
- the slaughter of the Assad regime’s opposition in Syria,
- the deployment of a cyber-spy team in the U.S.,
- nuclear threats,
- the London nerve-weapon assassination attempt,
- continuous internal anti-Western propaganda, and
- Sunday’s presidential-election landslide enabled by the suppression of his political opposition.
What Mr. Trump has gotten from Mr. Putin is absolutely nothing. It doesn’t compute.
Mr. Trump’s insistence on praising the Russian—including a gratuitous congratulatory phone call this week—sits before the public as an unexplained mystery... Watching Washington’s hyperbolic reaction to Jeff Sessions’s firing of Andrew McCabe last weekend makes clear that the Russian collusion narrative has become a wildfire, a self-fueling force indiscriminately consuming everyone near it, including the president.With his tweet-storms against the special counsel and other enemies, Donald Trump is starting to sound like Lear raging on the heath. O! ’tis foul!
.. King Lear had real enemies, and so does President Trump... No greater crocodile-tear phrase exists in our time than that the Trump presidency is a threat to “our democracy.”The only element of the American political system to which Donald Trump poses an existential threat is his own presidency... Threatened with impeachment over Watergate, Richard Nixon had the support of his electoral base to the end. But he knew the game was up when his fellow Republicans in Washington drew the blinds and left him alone in the street with his enemies. Donald Trump’s tragedy is that he doesn’t see the political abandonment ahead.
.. It is not beyond imagining that the Mueller team may “have something” on Mr. Trump. If so, it had better be big enough to command majority condemnation from a bewildered country.
But if, as looks likely, the prosecution will have to produce a de minimis charge—and maybe not even against Mr. Trump—then Mr. Muller should shut down the investigation and get this mess behind us.
.. Too many people are looking for the justice of a Wild West hanging judge.
.. The press would survive withdrawal from the collusion drug. It could even take on the substance of the actual Trump presidency, including the costs to America’s interests of his Putin admiration. No matter the subject, Donald Trump will always be the bull’s-eye. Which is the way he wants it.