Trump and Mueller

I have written at length here about the early contours of the conflict between President Trump and the established norms and organs of government. To be honest, I'm growing somewhat tired of having to write about it so regularly, but the calm efficiency with which longstanding and important checks on personal power are being discarded is horrifying - and the disinterest in or outright ignorance of the process on the part of the public even more so. This week we have learned that the conflict has taken on a more aggressive and very personal form as a direct conflict between Trump and Special Prosecutor  Robert Mueller.

Mueller, a former director of the FBI, universally well regarded public servant, and Republican, was appointed on May 17 as the special counsel to deal with the FBI inquiry into whether Russian interference in the 2016 election extended to direct cooperation with the Trump campaign. This decision, the reader may recall, was taken in the wake of two events - the March 2 decision of Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from the investigation after it was revealed he had undisclosed contacts with the Russian ambassador during the campaign, and the shocking May 9 dismissal of then-FBI director James Comey, who had been in charge of the Russia investigation, by President Trump. After Comey's firing, as Sessions had been recused, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein made the call to put the investigation in the hands of an independent figure due to fears of executive meddling.

Since before Mueller's appointment, Trump has been waging a campaign to discredit the investigation. He has attempted to paint it as the revenge of Democrats for losing the election, in spite of the fact that none of the principals involved in setting the investigation up in this way has been a Democrat. He has denied repeatedly that the Russians actually interfered in the election - in spite of his own UN Ambassador and Director of National Intelligence openly contradicting him - because he cannot abide anything that raises questions about his razor-thin margin of victory in the election. He even attempted to warn Comey off of the investigation on several occasions before abruptly firing him.

This week, however, it was revealed that the White House's campaign to fight the investigation has been far more aggressive than previously reported. The Trump team is apparently investigating not only Mueller, but the political and personal backgrounds of his entire team in an attempt to mine information that can be used to discredit the investigation in the eyes of the public. In addition, they are looking at ways to deal with potential criminal indictments, including a examination of the power of the president to pardon his family, close aides, or - astonishingly - himself.

Behind the scenes, Trump aides are defending the move by noting that the Clintons used a scorched-earth public relations strategy against congressional Republicans and special prosecutor Kenneth Starr during the Lewinsky scandal. The ad nauseam and apparently compulsive transference of every questionable action by Trump or his team to the Clintons notwithstanding, it bears notice that when Bill Clinton approved this strategy of defense he most certainly did have something to hide. Declaring political total war on an investigation as increasingly damaging revelations about what has been found dominate the press does not build a credible case for one's innocence.

I have seen it insinuated by a number of news outlets and close friends who tend to be left-leaning that Trump is desperately trying to cover up obvious malfeasance and is crassly lying to the public about his efforts. None of the known facts, inasmuch as I am aware of them, directly contradicts that view. But I see it as being incomplete without a serious picture of the psychology of the Trump family. 

Donald Trump is not a person for whom norms, convention, loyalty (to one other than himself), or conventional standards of right and wrong bear serious weight. He was taught by his hardscrabble father, and has in turn taught his own children, that the only arbiter of right is success, that winning is all that matters, and that one either takes advantage of this world or is taken advantage of by it. We know that at minimum the Trump family and campaign were aware that the Russians were trying to help them. Anything on the spectrum from that to outright collusion, whatever actually occurred, was I am sure viewed by the Trump family as an opportunity to have an extra weapon with which to bludgeon their enemies in the struggle for survival.

Trump's fight with Mueller, by extension, does not for him have anything at all to do with right or wrong, good or bad, legal or illegal. It has everything to do with a direct and very serious challenge to his authority. Trump believes that the world is ruled by the strong, and the strong destroy their enemies by using whatever means are required. He sees himself as a strong man. In the bleak social-Darwinian world the Trumps inhabit, as for Plato's Thrasymachus, "justice is nothing else but the interest of the stronger."

With this knowledge in mind, it is possible to make sense of Trump's actions and gain a plausible picture of his future dispositions. This investigation is an existential threat to his power and, as he sees it, his inevitable greatness. If there is a tactic he can use to discredit it, he will use it. He sees the probe as the attempt of his vanquished enemies to bring him down at what should be his moment of triumph. For someone as preoccupied with his self-image as Trump, such naked aggression must be met with overwhelming force. As he himself told Greta Van Susteren during the campaign, “If somebody hits me, I have to hit them back. I have to. I’m not going to sit there and say, ‘I’m wonderful, I’m a president.’ I want to win."

Even the most casual student of the American revolution will note that this mindset is precisely the one that gave the Framers nightmares. They desperately feared that the powerful executive office they had created would one day be occupied by an unscrupulous self-seeker with populist instincts and insatiable ambition. I can think of no more apt description of the president. While he hasn't lead a coup or executed any of the more outlandish fever-dreams of his opposition, he has done something no less pernicious in steadily undermining or openly ignoring the restraints on the exercise of his personal authority, not as President of the United States but as Donald Trump. It is safe, I think, to say that Trump does not see those two descriptions as distinct.

I've said it here a number of times already, and I am resigned to saying it a number more before all is said and done, but there is absolutely nothing more dangerous for separation of powers or truly democratic government than the removal of restraints on personal authority. It is a sign of our deep partisan divisions that we have not yet realized as a nation that we are ruled by a man who will take every possible opportunity to empower and enrich himself. Perhaps a number of us know and don't care, provided he suitably punishes the other side. Regardless, the structure of our government is in a precarious position.

This Is Not Normal

This is not normal. It is an obvious statement, but one that bears constant repetition in our time or else we will fail to notice the utter degradation of the executive branch as it happens. Over the last week the New York Times has broken a series of stories about a meeting between Donald Trump, Jr. and a Russian lawyer - known to be close to members of Putin's ruling circle - during the campaign. This lawyer apparently enticed the younger Trump into a meeting by offering damaging information about Secretary Clinton, which Don Jr. was informed before he accepted the meeting had come from the Russian government. He took Jared Kusher, the president's son-in-law and close adviser, and then campaign manager Paul Manafort to the meeting with him.

To summarize, the son of a presidential candidate took two close advisors from the campaign, one of them the campaign manager, to a meeting at which he intended to accept help in an American presidential election from a hostile foreign power. The law explicitly prohibits a campaign from accepting "anything of value" from a foreign national and this situation seems to place Jr. and potentially others in legal jeopardy.

That meeting was, given the most charitable possible interpretation of the actions and motives of the people involved, an act of breathtaking stupidity and irresponsibility. But there is very little reason to believe that such an interpretation is plausible. The Trump campaign and Trump administration, especially the president himself, have dismissed the extensive evidence that Russia interfered in the election with considerable scorn. There is video of Don Jr. himself calling the Russia stories a desperate invention of the Democratic Party, not long after the email exchange took place. We now have been given proof that at minimum the Trump family and two principal campaign figures were aware of the effort by the time he won the nomination. 

The only possible interpretation of those denials, Trump's included, is that they are knowing and shameless lies. While no one has an email addressed to the president in which he is told the Russians were interfering, it is literally incredible that Manafort, Kusher, and Don Jr. would all be aware of such a consequential piece of information and the candidate himself would not.

The thing that jumps off the page at me when I read the email is that Don Jr. is told that the information he's being offered "is part of Russia and its governments support for Mr Trump." The casual tone implies that this is not new information. There is no "Russia is offering to support your father! This is huge!" Just another instance of an ongoing project to be noted. It is very suggestive, and I have a hard time believing that campaign principals and the candidate were not well aware of Russian efforts before the email was sent.

I don't pretend to know exactly what happened during the campaign last year. I admit that before this email was reported on, I had assumed that no campaign aide would be so utterly careless as to accept a meeting like the one Don Jr. and Kushner attended, least of all keep an email record of it. That being said, the unending train of deceptions has become impossible to ignore. I'm not sure exactly what Trump's people are hiding, or how important it is, but when people lie so brazenly and consistently it becomes obvious that they are hiding something.

As for Trump himself, there may be no way to be sure whether or not he was aware of the meeting. Yet, the same day that Don Jr. confirmed the meeting, Trump himself gave a speech in which he promised damaging new information on the Clintons. Is it entirely coincidental that on the very day that his son is offered allegedly compromising information and sets up a meeting to receive it, Trump would himself preview soon-to-be-released new dirt? Given the consistent pattern of deception and continuous new revelations of irresponsibility on the part of Trump associates where Russia is concerned, it is difficult for me to assign that development to chance alone.

But let's not lose sight of the forest for the trees. The fact of the matter is that a large (as of this writing a minimum of eight participants were present) meeting took place on the pretense of America's chief geopolitical enemy  supporting a presidential campaign, and that campaign did not scruple to accept the offered help regardless of whether any useful information was actually ever exchanged. The immediate legal jeopardy may be with regard to campaign finance law (Don Jr.) or misrepresentation on security clearance forms (Kushner) but the real shame is that a winning presidential campaign openly courted the assistance of a foreign rival. That is dangerously close to treason.

Reflections on the Fourth

Today is the 241st birthday of the United States. I have seen around me today a riot of patriotism as people feel a very deep and emotional connection, as we all do, to the place that we call home. Yet seeing that enthusiasm gives me pause. What we are celebrating today is the Revolution of 1776. The moment when the United States told the world that it didn't belong to another country, it belonged to the people who lived here. The very radical principle, as every one of those involved with that extraordinary movement understood, that "all men are created equal."

That phrase makes me extremely uncomfortable, as it should every American. Our system of government is nearing a quarter millennium in age, and yet we still wrestle with the clearest enunciation of its purpose on a daily basis. I see the flags and I think about Philando Castile. I hear fireworks and I remember families are being broken up at this very moment by deportation. The songs commemorating the occasion all talk of freedom and brotherhood, but our society is wracked by fear and mistrust.

Everyone these days acknowledges that the principle of equality is obviously correct, but we still haven't taken in the full implications of the statement. If all of us are equal, then none of us should be taken from our families and returned to a country we haven't called home for decades. If all of us are equal, then all of us should have equal reason to trust law enforcement and the courts to deliver true justice. If all of us are equal, then all of us should have access to an upbringing, an education, and a livelihood that reward our talents above our social standing.

It is not, of course, to say that America has been on the whole a negative force in the world. I myself believe the opposite. The words of human rights and personal freedom are so powerful precisely because they are an indictment of society as it exists. When we look at an idea that is so clear and bright and obviously just, we cannot help but notice how shabby our actual existence seems by comparison. In spite of the numerous, frequent, and sometimes egregious violations of our own founding principle that we have engaged in, we were still willing to hold it up as an ideal. The common people of the world were utterly taken with the idea. They remain so to this day. More good has come from the willingness of a group of people to take up that cause than any government or any country on its own could possibly accomplish. We and the world owe that to the Founders.

But right next to the celebration and inspiration we need to remember how far short they and we have fallen from the ideal. It is now so often repeated that it has nearly become trite, but the man who wrote that "all men are created equal" owned other human beings as property. He kept one of them as a sex slave from the time she was 14. A significant proportion of the people who signed and fought and died on the side of those words also owned slaves. They were themselves largely aware of the contradiction, and yet it persisted through generations. 

We are all partly light and partly dark, and the society we have built is no different. But as Americans, we have been given a unique responsibility as the legacy of our forebears. They were willing to rebel on the notion that every person alive has a right to their freedom, and that necessarily includes the right to participate in the government that rules them. If we really do care about freedom as much as we say we do, and if we are going to call ourselves Americans with pride, we have to do the only thing that defines the American project and makes it distinct. We must continuously and relentlessly evaluate ourselves against the ideal that gave birth to us, and not flinch from acknowledging where we do not measure up. We have to make a choice, at each moment, to mold our society into what is best about our heritage. 

So here's to America. Not to what it is but what it aspires to be. May we never stop striving to achieve it. Happy Birthday.