Escape from hell (collusion)
April 18 | Posted by mrossol | Democrat Party, Henninger, TrumpWSJ 4/18/2019 Daniel Henninger
On Jan. 10, 2017, a news-and ente r tainment website called BuzzFeed published the text of the Steele dossier. Simultaneously, most of the U.S. media began running stories based on anonymous intelligence sources suggesting the possibility of a link during the previous year’s election between U.S. President-elect Trump and Vladimir Putin. This came to be known as “the Russian collusion narrative.” The Steele dossier was the narrative’s Rosetta Stone, the reason to believe all the other stories might be true.
On page 9 of the Steele dossier—if you’ve never read it, now’s the time—the following statement appears: “Speaking separately, also in July 2016, an official close to Presidential Administration Head, S. IVANOV, confided in a compatriot that a senior colleague in the Internal Political Department of the PA, DI-VYEKIN (nfd) also had met secretly with PAGE on his recent visit. Their agenda had included DIVEYKIN raising a dossier of ‘kompromat’ the Kremlin possessed . . .”
All 35 pages of the Steele dossier read that way. It is almost perfectly analogous to the children’s party game of telephone, when an adult whispers something into a 5year-old’s ear and it is passed on silently to seven other children, who all laugh at the discrepancy between what went in and what came out.
But the American people aren’t laughing. A children’s telephone game of whispered half-facts played by elites at the highest level of America’s institutions is why the U.S. political system has been in hell from 2017 until the release of the Mueller report.
How this hell got started was predictable. Days before his inauguration, the 45th U.S. president, personally offended by his media coverage, started calling the press “fake news.”
A famous saying in American politics is, “Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel.” Politicians and the press have always understood this modus vivendi, which resembles the civilizing, unwritten rules of life in the mafia.
When someone recently gunned down a crime boss on Staten Island in what looked like a classic mob hit, the first thing the cops noted was that the killer had broken the rule that you never shoot a guy in front of his own house.
With the Trump-is-Putin’sstooge narrative, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC began writing their own rules. Hitting Mr. Trump with the collusion stories in early 2017 was one thing. He hit them with “fake news,” so they hit back. Politics ain’t patty cake.
But past some point, the battle between Mr. Trump and his opposition turned into something not seen before in American political life. Many of the country’s primary institutions arrayed themselves against an elected U.S. president, who they said, explicitly and constantly, was a mortal threat to “democracy.”
These institutions—the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the intelligence services, the press, members of Congress and cultural elites—believed or talked themselves into believing that taking down Donald Trump would be worth whatever damage this effort was doing to at least half the population’s faith in them.
It was not worth it. And now the country is left with the collusion narrative’s rubble.
The Trump chase has changed the standards of American reporting forever. Asking the public to lend credibility to nameless sources, once rare, has become normal, as in, “requested anonymity in order to speak freely.” Routine guessing or insinuation has equal weight in stories with finding facts, as in: “It is unclear what this may mean.” Indeed.
No surprise, the Democrats’ ardent defense of the special prosecutor’s independence is now seen as bad faith. They didn’t care about transparency. They wanted a result. As soon as Attorney General William Barr released his letter summarizing the Mueller report, their own narrative shifted from collusion to “coverup.”
Now Democratic House committees are spraying subpoenas, like the Orkin Man, into every cranny of Mr. Trump’s business and financial life. Indiscriminate subpoenas are also likely to become a routine postcollusion standard in American politics.
The Trump presidency was always going to be a heavy load for the country to process without the Russia jihad. Even before the collusion narrative emerged, recall the generalized anxiety at the thought that some ruralized, lower-class version of H.L. Mencken’s booboisie was taking over the country. What’s worse, they won!
The Trump presidency was never a threat to democracy. It was, and remains, a daily violation of etiquette. Rather than fight Trumpism on the policy and political merits, the appalled opposition bet on the long shot of Robert Mueller proving the Oval Office violator has been in Vladimir Putin’s pocket. If successful, that would have discredited whatever happened in the 2016 election. The grievances and realities revealed in the election’s results would just kind of . . . go away.
Two hellish years later, and with Mr. Mueller’s investigation complete, Donald Trump is still president. Democrats and the media should give the rest of us a break. Find a more civilized strategy to fight the Trump presidency. Like mafia rules.
Write henninger@wsj.com.
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