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.
What Trump and Putin Have in Common
Many years ago, the Israeli Bedouin expert Clinton Bailey told me a story about a Bedouin chief who discovered one day that his favorite turkey had been stolen. He called his sons together and told them: “Boys, we are in great danger now. My turkey’s been stolen. Find my turkey.” His boys just laughed and said, “Father, what do you need that turkey for?” and they ignored him.
A few weeks later the Bedouin chief’s camel was stolen. His sons went to him and said, “Father, your camel has been stolen. What should we do?” And the chief answered, “Find my turkey.”
A few weeks later the chief’s horse was stolen, and again his sons asked what they should do. “Find my turkey,” the chief said.
Finally, a few weeks later his daughter was abducted, at which point he gathered his sons and told them: “It’s all because of the turkey! When they saw that they could take my turkey, we lost everything.”
.. how and why we failed to contain the egregious behavior of both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
They each started by — metaphorically speaking — stealing a turkey. And when we didn’t respond, they kept ratcheting up their wretched behavior to the point where Trump thinks he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and Putin thinks he could poison a wayward spy in London, and get away with it.
Trump’s turkey was his tax returns. During the campaign he promised to release them after the I.R.S. finished auditing him. Then, after he was elected, Trump said, sorry, not going to release them ever. And nothing happened. Trump, I am reliably told, has actually said to people close to him, “Can you believe I got away with that?”
.. Once Trump saw that he could get away with not disclosing his tax returns, he knew he could get away with anything.
.. Any Bedouin chief who watched the steady acceleration in the breadth and pace of Trump’s lying — like his recent boast that he had fabricated a trade deficit with Canada in talks with Canada’s prime minister or his dishonest statements to discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation — would tell you: Get me Trump’s tax returns.
.. Because there must be something very important in them that he wants to keep hidden.
.. Maybe it’s just the embarrassment that he is not as rich as he claims, or, maybe, it’s something more fundamental — like how dependent he is on Russian oligarchs for financing
.. Putin’s turkey was even more serious. It was the shooting down of that Malaysian civilian airliner, Flight MH17
.. Putin’s proxies in eastern Ukraine had requested that Russia send them an SA-11 surface-to-air missile launcher.
.. Putin did not push the button on that missile, but he created the conditions for it to shoot down that plane — and he walked away from it as if the plane were brought down by lightning, making up one implausible story after another. He got slapped on the wrist with a few sanctions, but his complicity faded away into a mist of baldfaced lies.
.. Who wanted to confront Russia, with all its gas exports to Europe and all its oligarchs throwing money around London or buying condos in places like … Trump Tower in New York?
.. Why not poison a former Russian spy in London with a banned military nerve agent or perpetrate genocide in Syria? Who’s going to stop me?”
Trump and Putin are cut from the same cloth. Their strategy is: keep pushing, keep grabbing, keep lying, keep denying, no matter how implausible the denials — and never apologize. Because when you lie on an industrial scale, it overwhelms everyone else. Normal people just don’t behave that way, and the sheer shamelessness eventually exhausts them.
.. when people keep eroding the norms of society, stealing — turkeys or the truth — eventually becomes the norm.
.. That steady erosion of norms is what Trump is doing to America and Putin is doing to the world.
.. American voters have to go to the polls and deal a resounding electoral defeat to this Republican Party, which Trump has taken over like an invasive species.
.. America needs a healthy conservative party in our two-party system. But this G.O.P. is not a conservative party and it is not healthy.
.. As for Putin, the only way to brush him back is with economic sanctions that truly hurt him and his corrupt clique of oligarchs, and an offensive cyber campaign that exposes just how much money they have all stolen from the Russian people.
.. Bullies like Trump and Putin are relentless. They will keep driving through red lights, smirking all the way, as long as we let them.
.. As the great philosopher Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.”
Why Is Trump So Afraid of Russia?
The former C.I.A. director John Brennan pulled no punches on Wednesday when he was asked why President Trump had congratulated his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, for his victory in a rigged election, even after Mr. Trump’s national security staff warned him not to.
.. Some Trump defenders noted that President Barack Obama also called Mr. Putin when he was elected president in 2012.
But the circumstances are very different. In the intervening years, Mr. Putin has become an increasingly authoritarian leader who has crushed most of his political opposition and engineered a deeply lopsided re-election this week.
.. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, is waging war in other parts of Ukraine and is enabling President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
.. While the administration recently imposed its first significant sanctions on Russia for election interference and other malicious cyberattacks and has faulted Russia for the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in Britain, Mr. Trump has refrained from criticizing Mr. Putin or calling him to account. The phone call reinforced that approach.
.. What Mr. Trump didn’t say to Mr. Putin was as significant as what he did say. He did not demand that Mr. Putin stop meddling in American elections or others, he did not even raise Moscow’s role in the poisoning.
.. A senior administration official told The Times that Mr. Trump didn’t want to antagonize Mr. Putin because fostering rapport is the only way to improve relations between the two countries. On Tuesday, the president said he hoped to meet Mr. Putin soon and discuss preventing an arms race — an arms race both leaders have encouraged with loose talk and investment in new weapons.Engaging Russia and preventing an arms race are undeniably important. But it’s hard to see how praising and appeasing a bully will advance American interests. That’s not the approach Mr. Trump has taken with adversaries like North Korea or Iran, or, for that matter, even with some allies... John McCain, Republican of Arizona, slammed Mr. Trump, saying “an American president does not lead the free world by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections.” Even the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who rarely crosses Mr. Trump, said calling Mr. Putin “wouldn’t have been high on my list.”
Trump Calls Putin to Congratulate Russian President on Election Win
Two leaders discuss possible meeting to address issues including Ukraine and Syria
U.S. President Donald Trump called Vladimir Putin Tuesday to congratulate the Russian president on his election victory, while the two leaders discussed a wide range of issues and avenues of cooperation.
.. The White House said Monday that there were no plans for Mr. Trump to congratulate Mr. Putin. Neither French President Emmanuel Macron nor U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May offered their congratulations to the Russian leader. Ms. May said she would comment on the election only after assessing a report on the vote from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s vote monitoring body.
Germany’s chancellor sent a note to the Russian leader congratulating him and urging dialogue.