There haven’t been any major scandals so far during Donald Trump’s presidency, so his political opponents, including most of the national press, are pointing to things that didn’t happen as reasons for the electorate to rise up in revolt.
It was all the outrage this week that Trump said in an interview on ABC that he would be willing to take “information on an opponent” if it came from a foreign agent. He allowed that if he thought the “information” (we don’t know what kind because this is all a stupid hypothetical) merited a referral to the FBI, he would do so.
But you’re supposed to be upset merely at the possibility that Trump would consider evaluating “information” that could potentially make a difference in the 2020 campaign because this is precisely what didn’t happen in 2016.
Trump’s son, Donald Trump, Jr., and his son in law, Jared Kushner, in 2016 agreed to meet with a Russian who purported to have “documents” that would “incriminate” Hillary Clinton. Maybe those incriminating documents were transcripts of TV interviews or speeches. We have no idea what it could have been or if it ever existed because by all accounts, no material was ever exchanged and the meeting was a bust.
Democrats and the media are very clever in conflating this meeting, that turned up nothing, with the U.S. intelligence conclusion that Russia attempted to interfere in the election by allegedly stealing and publishing emails from the DNC and Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. But it needs to be repeated over and over again that no one, not Trump, Donald Jr., or Kushner, knew what they might be getting by taking the meeting. It’s also worth repeating over and over again that what they got at the meeting was nothing.
It would be questionable if Trump during the 2020 campaign did receive and use some valuable information that was obtained illegally. Say, for example, if Trump published the private tax information of the Democratic nominee.
Wait a minute, that’s precisely what the New York Times did just one month ago!
The paper on May 8 said that it had received “information” (there’s that word again!) on several years’ worth of Trump’s tax history “from someone who had legal access to it.” (I love that the Times was sure to note that its source “had legal access” to the information while neglecting to disclose that, unless the source was Trump himself, it was nonetheless illegal to hand it to a newspaper reporter for print.)
How rich, then, that the media would claim moral authority on something that Trump didn’t do. It’s like every other supposedly major controversy. Liberal New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg on Thursday microwaved one of the #Resistance’s favorite frozen meals: Trump’s joke in summer 2016 about Russia obtaining Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails (which the public, under freedom of information regulations, would have been entitled to see, had Clinton not deleted them).
This is, again, something that never happened. Those emails have never been seen. But where there is no scandal, you simply have to believe there could have been one.
Now-former Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no conspiracy between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia, and the Justice Department determined that there was insufficient evidence to charge Trump on obstructing justice. Yet New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait on Monday referred to special counsel’s “devastating findings of the Trump campaign efforts to collude with Russia, and Trump’s obstruction of justice thereof.”
These are, again, things that didn’t happen. But that they could have happened (even if they weren’t a crime) is supposed to be enough.
House Democrats right now are largely hanging their impeachment hopes on Trump’s half-hearted actions to have Mueller fired, which he had the executive authority to do and which he could have done himself if he were truly committed. Yet it’s one more thing that never happened. Mueller remained in his role for two years and completed his investigation.
It’s all like that scene in Steven Spielberg’s “Hook” (1991) where Robin Williams as Peter Pan sits down for dinner, exhausted and famished, only to find that the pots and pans contain nothing but steam. “I want some real food,” he says. Tinkerbell tells him to use his imagination because it was once his “favorite game.”
True, if we all use our imaginations, we can envision a world in which Mueller was fired, that Russia found Clinton’s deleted emails and that Trump obtained election-altering information from a foreign agent, even if none of it happened in the real one. Are you ready to revolt now?
