Rumor has it that the delivery of the Mueller report is imminent, but whether the public will see it is unclear, as is what effect it will have. Trump supporters apparently already know it will be ‘fake news,’ while Trump foes know he deserves impeachment and imprisonment no matter what Mueller says.
It is easy to forget, in the blizzard of crooked business deals, porn star payoffs, Russian oligarchs, Saudi criminals, billionaire donors, unconstitutional edicts, that the crux of the mater is an attempt to steal an American election by a foreign power, possibly in cahoots with the beneficiary.
We are a long way from the opening pages of “The Making of the President:1960” in which the twelve voters of Hart’s Location, New Hampshire gathered at 12:01 AM on election day to cast the first ballots in the nation, a reaffirmation of pure democratic values that began with the New England town meeting.
Even in 1960, that Norman Rockwell sentiment was an incomplete picture of reality. The Kennedy win also relied on some questionable behavior in the West Virginia primary and in the Cook County vote delivered by the Chicago machine in the general election.
Let’s face it, corrupting the vote is as old as the Republic and the rise of the Fed and Anti-Fed factions. For eighty years after the adoption of the Constitution, African-Americans had no vote, and even after a Civil War and since the Fourteenth Amendment became law they have been systematically deprived of the franchise by Jim Crow laws, literacy tests, poll taxes, intimidation, restricted access to voting places and times, ID requirements. Whatever it took.
Women were denied the vote for 131 years, until 1919. Gerrymandering was pioneered early and is now carried out with computerized precision to give the party in power the ability to cling to it by rigging the vote to garner an unearned majority in state and federal delegations.
Billion-dollar industries have grown up to corrupt the vote through the efforts of campaign consultants, pollsters, and admen who decide which lies told to which demographic groups have the best chance of tilting the vote in the direction they desire. This supplements crude voter suppression and theft with efforts to cloud men’s minds.
War heroes are branded cowards, crooked con-men are depicted as business geniuses, fictional narratives are spun to replace reality. A fair shake for the average worker and affordable healthcare is redefined as a socialist conspiracy. A tax code rigged to enrich the donor class is free enterprise at work. We have entered the realm of Big Brother where: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.
Money to pay for all this chicanery comes from wealthy human and corporate “persons’ with vested interests. They disguise their identity and motives behind patriotic-sounding fronts like Americans for Prosperity, and FreedomWorks.
Once the vote was corrupted by the local political machine, then via mass media, then direct mail appeals, push polls, robocalls, and now via the internet. The Trump case Mueller has been pursuing has shown how an election can be subverted from afar — by a foreign intelligence troll factory in Russia, aided and abetted by Cambridge Analytica in England, Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter online, and various other collaborators, up to and including participants in the presidential campaign.
As the news reminds us day after day, Trump is not alone in benefitting from the manipulation of the voters and the vote. A North Carolina election for a seat in the House has been declared invalid because the campaign of Republican candidate Mark Harris (who is also a Baptist pastor) paid an operative to tamper with absentee ballots of district voters and falsified them to favor Harris. How many other seats were stolen by such crimes that no one detected?
In a recent “New Yorker” issue we learn that an Israeli political consulting firm, staffed by former Mossad agents, offered covert help in disrupting the campaigns of one’s foes, even down to something as trivial s a race for a seat on a hospital board in Tulare California. The customer wanted to retain power, in part no doubt to cover up millions in missing funds that were discovered when the incumbent lost.
As in the case of the GRU trolls in the Trump campaign, the method was psyops, that is, psychological warfare playing on fears and biases in the voters to get them to vote against, not for a candidate
Even if Mueller were to make a damning case against Trump, his campaign, his minions, family, and business, would his party remove him from office and send him to the hoosegow? Or is campaign theft and dirty tricks, corruption and feet of clay so commonplace that we are inured to it.
The Trump reelection campaign already has $100 million to spend on a defense of the president and attacks on his pursuers. The source of the dough is hidden thanks to campaign finance laws that like to keep political money dark. And $100 million can buy a lot of the media tools and cybertrolls needed to inject a false narrative into the body politic like poison.
His supporters might easily follow his lead and double-down on the false narrative of a conspiracy against him, his psyops playing on faith in fake news, a witch hunt, and a plot to turn a supremely white country into a home for dusky aliens.
The question the Trump presidency and the Mueller probe ask is whether there is any hope of salvaging representative government in America for its citizens, or if those with the power, resources and willingness to corrupt democracy are unstoppable. And worse, do a majority of the people care one way or the other.
If there is hope, it may be because Trump’s enterprise is different not just in degree but in kind. Yes, dirty politics, false narratives and voter suppression have become commonplace, but it’s been homegrown, All-American corruption at work.
Perhaps allowing a foreign enemy to steal an election may be enough to wake us to our peril. One would be more sanguine if a larger fraction of the electorate could find Russia on a map or name the three supposedly coequal branches of government.