In my previous piece, I noted that Donald Trump acknowledged for the first time on January 11th that the Russians had been responsible for hacking into Democratic servers and stealing and leaking damaging materials. And that’s true as far as it goes. But he didn’t stick with that story.
I’d forgive you if have forgotten but Anthony Scaramucci was briefly Trump’s communications director, even if he never signed the paperwork to get a paycheck or make his position official. Back in July, he went on CNN’s State of the Union and tried to explain why the president keeps lapsing into doubt about the Russians’ culpability.
On Sunday, Mr. Trump’s new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, repeated the White House position that Mr. Trump remains unconvinced by the evidence Russia was the culprit behind the election hacking. He said that when the subject comes up, Mr. Trump cannot separate the intelligence findings from his emotional sense that the issue is being used to cast doubt on his legitimacy as president.
“It actually in his mind, what are you guys suggesting?” Mr. Scaramucci said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “You’re going to delegitimize his victory?”
This is a reminder that we’re dealing with a crazy person. At times, Trump understands his campaign was sending people all over the globe to meet with Russians. He knows that his team met in Trump Tower with Russians who were promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. He knows that his campaign chairman owed a Russian oligarch $15 million dollars and offered to give him private briefings and hoped to be released from some of his debt. He knows that his son-in-law was meeting with Russian intelligence officers and Putin’s representatives and trying to set up backchannels to communicate with them outside of the eye of the American intelligence community. He knows that he promised a relaxation of sanctions, which is why so much Russian help was forthcoming. He knows he’s in deep shit.
But at other times, he convinces himself that this is just a big hoax drummed up to deny him the adoration he deserves for pulling off the biggest upset win in American electoral history.
I truly believe that these two states of consciousness do not coexist. He flips between them.
In other words, sometimes when he’s lying, he’s actually convinced that he’s telling the truth.
But it does no good to look at the established facts and respond by saying “What are you suggesting?”
He wants his victory to be legitimate, but it’s not, and I don’t know why there is this persistent drip-drip-drip of liberal columnists who think their highest calling right now is to lecture other liberals about being too outspoken about it.
About the only thing Trump is correct about is the fact that his victory won’t be seen as legitimate if it becomes accepted that he colluded with the Russians.
Liberals spend too much time trying to explain why the election was illegitimate. Just directly attack the man. Call him illegitimate. Call him a liar. Call him a criminal. Don’t explain why he is an illegitimate, lying, criminal president. Just talk as if it is a fact that need not be explained.
Don’t try to delegitimize his victory; delegitimize his status as a human being.
The time to do this was 1980 and the target was Reagan. It wasn’t done. It is now too late.
I’m okay with, after he is no longer in office and deprived of the means to retaliate, that the whole world takes the opportunity to pull apart DT’s empire green by green, and beam by Chinese steel beam.
“About the only thing Trump is correct about is the fact that his victory won’t be seen as legitimate if it becomes accepted that he colluded with the Russians.”
And the reason that NeoprogressivesTM are currently lecturing anyone they deem impure about being outspoken against Strongman Trump, is because they want the narrative to be that they were right all along, because, you know, whatabout Hillary Clinton’s speeches to Goldman Sachs, and the obvious shooting war with Russia if elected, and, of course, emails.
Also: F̶a̶k̶e̶ ̶N̶e̶w̶s̶ deep state neoliberal neocon neocentrist media.
The denocratic party can only be failed.
Nice strawman. Whatever it takes to change the narrative, I guess.
Quick!
Point to where I said the Democratic party is in great shape and doing a bang-up job in terms of messaging and governance, based on left-wing politics.
I’ll wait here.
Since I never accused you of that, you will have to keep waiting. Let me know if your solution ever evolves beyond “clap louder dirty hippies.”
Another strawnan. At least your consistent.
If trump was smart he’d argue colluding with the russians was legitimate.
“Did Vladimir Putin tell you how to vote? Fair elections!”
It is up to those who have a problem with what he did to talk about why it isn’t legitimate. And with sufficient argument that independents start to understand the issue.
His supporters are arguing this. They’ve been at it since at least early this summer, claiming:
I’m not sure how that last one is supposed to help. I guess if they didn’t have a specific goal, they’re just being mischievious. “Those rascals!”
Heck, we’ve seen argument number 1 right here on this blog, from the Putin apologist True Progressives.
Trump’s first term is penance for Mossadegh.
His second term is penance for either Diem or Allende, I’m not sure which.
After that we can work out how many more elections get thrown to the fascists before the accounts are balanced.
Can’t be more than four or five.
Trump has cheated at everything all his life, so in some respects he probably sees winning as its own reward, and whatever cheating he had to do to get there makes it no less legit. And that’s okay, as long as no one knows he cheated.
Trump’s problem is he knows that we know he cheated, that his crowd size was way smaller than Obama’s and that his undersized hands are indicative of an undersize problem elsewhere. And it would be his absolute end if facts showed he wasn’t a billionaire. Which accounts for his threat to Mueller, and why I fully expect him to fire Mueller if it appears his tax returns may be released. He knows he’s not, but that’s okay, as long as he thinks we don’t know it.
Its his knowing that we know that bothers him.
What galls me is that we have a legitimate national security crisis of staggering proportions as long as he remains in office, but nobody in Washington wants to do anything about it.
How is that possible?!
You are exactly right, but it is going to take saying squarely what that national security crisis is and what its consequences are before people born after 1970 get it.
And this goes to the huge danger that the Citizens United decision made by anonymizing political donations. Or the view of American politics as a culture war or before that an ideological war in which there were no limits on behavior.
A President in office has lots of ways to punish adversaries just so long as he maintains the ability to get people to obey him.
I get the impression that the uniformed military has its limits on how far Trump can go with formally stated adversaries in US doctrine.
Until Democrats stop assuming that the rest of the country understands immediately what the issue is and is ready right now to toss Trump out on his ear they will behave lazily and react by being galled instead of by understanding that there is a huge part of the world that changed very quickly between November and June. And that normalizing Trump as President has been all to easy for Democrats in Congress.
Schumer’s “me too” on Jerusalem so undercut Democrats as the opposition party. So does Machin’s and Heitkamp’s (and Jones’s if he makes it in) hemming and hawing about opposing the Republican atrocities absolutely.
Normalizing authoritarianism and militarism are the worst things a sitting Democrat can do with this administration.
John Feffer, Foreign Policy in Focus: If the Trump Revolution Is Possible, So Is a Progressive One
By the time that 2020 comes around, the GOP wrecking crew will have broken the old consensus. There is the opportunity to have a popular and progressive rebuilding of the American consensus that strips a lot of the excesses of power of the past 40 years.
Quibble: misleading claims about popular support is a common feature of all revolutions (or major political upheavals, generally). Even ones that started out relatively popular end up bleeding that support, often literally. A good example would be France 1789 through 1793.
Agreed–Trump’s victory was not legitimate! This is the second Presidential election the Democrats have been screwed on. Action needs to be taken to ensure that when there is a suspected problem regarding the Presidential vote that there is a fair and reasonable solution to the problem on record. Also, that enough time is allotted to solve the problem. My suggestion would be that the President in office continues to serve until the election problem/s is/are solved. This needs to be put in writing and before the 2020 election.
One other change that is needed is that the requirements for running for President need to be updated. Right now, the only requirement is age. A high school dropout could run right now. I am also for a mental health checkup in addition to the physical checkup done by an impartial doctor.
Additionally, I am for a requirement that 5 to 10 years of state/Federal government be required. Yes, I know about that “drain the swamp” business; but, as we can see now, trump never really meant it. I worked for the Federal Government for 37 Years. I was never a higher grade than a GS-8; but, I could run circles around trump when it comes to running the Federal Government.
Granted if these changes were made via a Constitutional Amendment, it will take forever; but, maybe not after Americans are seeing and understanding the mess that trump is making. If Americans are too stupid to work on such solutions, then, they get what they deserve.
Do you really think the Republicans give a crap about how they get power? I don’t
Even if he is a lying sack of excrement, Donald Trump is still president, and until that changes, I don’t think Republicans see much of a downside from just about anything that gives them a “win”. See: Roy Moore.
Is Russia buying a few Facebook adds any more deligitimizing than the Kochs (or any of the other right wing billionaire oligarchs that want to return the country to the 19th century) dumping millions into unattributed dark money campaigns in support of Republican candidates?
Let’s face it, we have a rickety, sclerotic electoral system that is easily influenced by money. That a foreign power exploited that weakness should hardly be surprising but look what is happening right now- the Republican party and the Trump administration is preparing to destroy net neutrality to the benefit of a few large telecoms, radically shift taxes away from the rich to the working class at the behest of a few billionaires, open up vast swaths of public land to oil drilling for a few large oil companies, etc… and almost all of it is against the public will (including Republican voters) Why? Because they are working for the guys with the money, and in the end, that is probably what is really the most threatening to any of our illustrious politicians “legitimacy” with the voting public. That our Supreme Court has effectively legalized corruption doesn’t make what they are doing any less obscene.
Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see this disaster of an administration frog-marched off to prison, where I think they truly belong. But I won’t be holding my breadth for the Republicans to suddenly see the light. It’s all about the power, and in the end I think that’s what Trump cares about too. Sure, He will rant at the TV on twitter, but until he’s not president, I don’t think it matters much.
What you say is true but he also knows that for many years he has accepted laundered Russian money in the form of empty Russian own apartments in Trump Tower and many other Trump-owned/connected properties because of his awful business acumen and willingness to always deal with shady business partners, especially the Russians.
Trump is an owned operative of the Russian Government.
I’m not convinced Trump waffles back and forth between coherent and distorted realities. In my view, he appears to live in a world of his own creation. He’s deeply fractured as all narcissists are. Most likely from a very early age. He’s forever running from his shame and sense of unworthiness by pumping himself up like a blow fish. And he can’t afford to ever see this or admit it to himself because it would tear him to shreds. He’s a hard shell over a deeply wounded, childlike, even helpless core.
He’s a particularly virulent form of narcissist, combining significant doses of sociopathy and sadism. The man’s a real piece of work. Hard to fathom how he snooked (and continues to snooker) so many.
They like what they see, because what they see is themselves.
They think that they are good people, him also, because they lack the self-awareness to see themselves as they truly are. Self-righteousness motivated fervor because they simply lack awareness of how mean and how bullying their true motivations are.
Such good people! /s
It’s cognitive dissonance and projection, all the way down.
The twin pillars of modern US conservatism.
I’m inordinately obsessed with this question. (The first step in recovery is admitting you have a problem, right?)
I just can’t figure it out, but I really want to. I’ve known people like Trump — people who make egregious claims that everyone can see through, but seem to genuinely believe them — and I never know how to react, how to respond; how to understand it.
There are used-car-salesman types, of course, who routinely “exaggerate” in order to make a sale — who may not be outright lying like the Glengarry Glenn Ross characters but who will insist that some feature is “an improvement” when it’s a drawback or will blandly tell you that you’ll be able to return the goods if unsatisfied when in reality you’ll face obstacles they’re not mentioning. Some of this explains Trump.
But then you get instances like the Monet on the airplane, which he insists is genuine…even after the reporter explains that it’s a copy of a real painting that’s in the Art Institute of Chicago and here’s a picture…and Trump just says, “No, it’s real” and won’t budge. (This is what’s happening with the inauguration crowd sizes, I think.)
And other times it’s a Stephen Glass phenomenon where he’s caught in an obvious lie and has to keep extending it way past where he’s comfortable (so he changes the subject). This is what Roy Moore is doing — just trying to brazen it out with blanket denials. (Slate has a great piece on this today.)
And then other times Trump just doesn’t seem to understand any of it, like with the budget or the ACA repeal or this legitimacy question — I don’t think he knows what “legitimacy” is; he’s not good with abstractions (like, say, “democracy” or “separation of powers” or “rule of law”).
But I keep getting more obsessed with drilling down into how his mind works. I wish someone could really cross examine him…except that’s happened, hasn’t it? Testimony where he keeps blithely changing his story? I don’t know. All I do know is that having someone like this anywhere near any position of responsibility, let alone the Oval Office, is an abomination.
He tells different types of lies. Though, since he’s always lying, I doubt he consciously realizes it.
He knows he’s lying when he’s negotiating (and that includes courting votes), but that doesn’t matter because “that’s what every good businessman does” (i.e., he projects his corruption on everyone else, a sociopath’s hallmark) and the words are just gambits – anything to achieve the goal.
Then there are the lies that result from fear – the Monet lie, or the time when he was a kid and wouldn’t admit he got some athlete’s name wrong, even though everyone told him he was wrong. To admit being wrong is the worst thing he can imagine, he’s terrified not of being wrong, but being seen by others as being wrong. He knows these are lies, too, but he’s in panic mode and he can’t help himself. It’s reflex for him. He gets caught, and the lying kicks in automatically.
Then there are the truly delusional lies, like the “I think that tape might be fake” intermezzo that touched off a flurry of head shaking recently. Those lies, I agree, he probably thinks are the truth. These are the lies that have obliterated the facts as time passes, the revision of his life story, and he needs to assure himself he really is the victim here.
It’s absolutely essential at this point moving forward to adapt a Republican communication techniques for discrediting the opposition. The Democratic brain trust has to focus on the delegitimization of Trump and to discredit the “Russian judges’ from Gorsuch on down.
Once Mueller delivers the goods, putting pressure on these `Russian judges’ to resign has to be a primary goal. We can’t re-do the election but we have to reverse the benefits of the Republicans having received stolen goods.
The real damage is just beginning. My biggest fear right now is appointments to the federal bench. And not too far behind that is the decimation of the agencies.
Both parties need to get their acts together before it’s too late, if it isn’t already. Obviously the Republicans have the most responsibility for this scary mess, but I’m not all that impressed with the Democrats who still don’t seem to be able to maintain a strong appealing message and united front. Schumer being a prime example. His comments on Jerusalem threw more gasoline on the Middle East inferno and further alienated us from our allies. His remarks outraged me.