Collude Your Illusion, Too.

Appetite for Destruction/ Lack of Patience over Trump Lies

I titled this piece while listening to Guns N’ Roses on Spotify. Can you tell? The subtitle alone has four (4) puns. And in a further break from precedent in the AIRSUCS (Article I Read So You Can Skip) series, I veered away from off-putting Dall-E generated art and went with this guy, selected from an online compendium of 13 photos of bears acting suspiciously like humans. Suspiciously? There’s nothing suspicious about it. Nothing weird or underhanded (or underpawed). We are fascinated with bears because they walk upright, seem so human, and have almost singlehandedly (unipawularly) de-stigmatized the discussion of toilet paper softness in prime time. Also there was the time a bear, or maybe it was a Trump associate, it’s hard to remember now, bought a glass of pinot noir for a Maltese professor in a London wine bar. Which brings us to…

Oy Vey Iz Bear

I spent the last few posts linking to all the reporting that Jeff Gerth cited and pulled apart in his lightly read but important 24,000 CJR word series The press versus the president. In order to draw more attention to Gerth’s work I provided the links that CPJ did not, screenshots of the articles in questions, and analysis of what I thought was important reporting about important reporting. Perhaps not surprising to a rational person, that person somehow not being me, my readers were not interested. I understand.

Whatever reporting mistakes or misdeeds that took place in 2016-2018 the take-away for the vast majority of people who were originally concerned with the possibility of Donald Trump’s corruption is that Donald Trump is indeed corrupt. That the specific corruption was not precisely of the “Puppet of Vladamir Putin” nature does not matter. Trump is a venal, destructive, lawless, self-serving presence and stopping him, the thinking goes, is important. In fact, the thinking doesn’t even go. There’s not a huge incentive among people who rightly believe in Trump’s potential for causing chaos to go back and think hard about the original FBI investigation that birthed the Mueller report. Trump obstructed the commission of that report, which even if he was innocent of the underlying charges is itself a crime. Trump routinely lied about actual truths uncovered during that investigation. We all know that Trump committed future acts of destruction, and is likely to do so again if re-elected, or especially if not.

So carefully assessing the original Trump-Russia reporting feels like an after-action report on the elephant that just trampled our village. Was the fearsome beast originally spooked by an asp, not an adder? Perhaps that’s a point for posterity, but not one that most villagers wish to engage in, especially at 24,000 words.

I understand all of that. And I also note that Gerth’s analysis isn’t without flaws. He leans pretty hard on the idea that FBI investigator Peter Strzok was skeptical of the underlying crime he was investigating. This was ignored by the NY Times, and barely made a dent in the more frothy collusion-obsessive media, but it did receive coverage at the time.

Gerth acknowledges the WSJ story, but gets the larger point wrong. Having interviewed Strzok and read his book “Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump” it is clear that whatever Strzo’s initial hesitations were, he firmly believed that the investigation was properly predicated, and his duty to pursue.

I believe that too. Even if the investigation yielded no evidence that Donald Trump knowingly collaborated with the real and documented efforts by Russia to interfere in US elections, the investigation was worth conducting. Given the evidence that was available I wouldn’t want to live in a country that DIDN’T give significant resources to tracking down the actual facts and possible ties. However, once we knew those facts and ascertained Trump’s lack of active collaboration we need to say so. Trump reveled in Russian interference and did nothing to stop it, the investigation failed to show direct collusion, collaboration or coordination. I wish that were the baseline knowledge of all educated citizens and news consumers.

Because just as I don’t want to live in a country where smoke isn’t investigated as originating in fire, I also don’t want to live in a country where the vast majority of Trump-averse voters remain ignorant as to the fact that in this case there was no fire, only froth, bluster and brimstone. There has been a lack of real accountability within the media, who continue to leverage the idea that democracy dies in darkness and that a subscription doesn’t just get you Wordle it’s a blow against fascism. The New York Times didn’t report this story disastrously, or incompetently. But mistakes were made, and they remain unacknowledged and unknown within what was once derided as the “reality based community.”

MSNBC did report the story closer to incompetently, though as a business proposition, quite remuneratively. Their prime time shows too often pumped epinephrine into the bloodstream of their audience, drawn to almost any outrageous claim about the danger of the then-President. Trump obliged by acting outrageously, but there was no limiting principle to the coverage. Verifiable facts were deemed superfluous. Rachel Maddow’s June 16, 2018 opening monologue exemplifies their method.

Maddow Blog @MaddowBlog

Here's the first five minutes of Rachel Maddow tonight on Americans coming to grips with a worst case scenario that the U.S. president is compromised by a hostile foreign power. (full video: on.msnbc.com/2JvFDW7)

That day Trump had seemingly offered Vladamir Putin words of exoneration at a summit in Finland. There were many interpretations of why Trump would do this. One was he colluded with Russia and wanted to cover his tracks. Another, which he later claimed was that he misspoke. Yet a third explanation, the one that seems obvious in retrospect, is that acknowledging that a foreign adversary aided in one’s election is not good politics for any politican, but it’s especially unattractive to Donald Trump, a vain man who is loath to share credit with anyone, ever. But here is how Rachel Maddow chose to explain Trump’s utterance.

I mean, there was no explicable reason why as a presidential candidate, he would step with such excruciating care to avoid ever saying anything remotely negative or critical about Russia and its president.

There was no explicable reason why he would dig out of the vault a campaign chairman who had not worked in American politics for more than a generation but he had spent more than the past decade doing Vladimir Putin`s political bidding overseas in the former Soviet Union. There was no explicable reason to name a guy quite recently and quite literally caught up in a Russian spy ring in New York as one of his five foreign policy advisers, when this is a guy nobody had ever, ever heard of. There was no explicable reason to keep secret the fact that he did in fact have pending business deals in Russia during the campaign.

But there are in fact explicable reasons for all those things. Trump is shallow and liked Putin’s praise. Trump took on Paul Manafort because Manafort worked for free, Trump is cheap, and no one else wanted to work with him. Trump lied about business dealings in Russia because he’s a bullshit artist who has learned that it is better to lie about potentially damaging information than to cop to it. Finally, Carter Page wasn’t actually a spy.

Maddow, stating that issues of Trump’s loyalties “are no longer hypothetical questions” continued

And if the president did that today because he has some reason to serve that other country (Russia) rather than our own, then -- well, then a lot that has previously been inexplicable is now explicable, and that`s the worst case scenario and deep breath. It means we`re going to have to come to terms with this as a country and we`re going to have to come to terms with what we need to do next as a country to fix this. And in order to do that, the blinders have to come off. We have to be real.

Maddow’s reality, as presented to viewers in the years since, was that the worst case scenario was thew accurate one. The Mueller report would show that Trump was a traitor. And then when it didn’t, the first impeachment would vindicate everyone’s worries. And then when that didn’t we were on to January 6th during which Trump certainly seemed to the Maddow audience and many beyond to have behaved in a way that’s at least treason-adjacent. But on the first set of allegations, the “big national freakout” to quote the phrase Maddow utters at 4:03, was not born out. The “worst case scenario” …

…was not, in truth, what happened. And yet that doesn’t seem to matter to the people to whom it should very much matter.

In the absence of it mattering, figures from Ben Shapiro, to Matt Taibbi, to Russell Brand, to the My Pillow Guy, to the hosts of Ivermectin Today can claim, “this is why people listen to me not the mainstream media.” I think those claims are self serving and overblown, but there’s a bit of truth to them no? The biggest story in many years was at least a bit botched, the conclusion we were promised turned out not to have been delivered, the goal posts were moved, and so very few important institutions which operate on trust have really grappled with all of this.

So I chose to grapple with it, and if you’ve grappling along with my grappling to this point I thank you. I would love your comments if you’ve read the Gerth story, or if you’ve read about it. Sometimes I feel like a lone voice calling out in the forest, which is fine. In fact, it is a suspiciously human stance to take.