Imagine for a moment that Robert Mueller was never pressed into service as a special counsel and wasn’t a household name. Imagine that there had never been any prompt for his investigation — that Donald Trump hadn’t blown all those kisses at Vladimir Putin, that the stooges and grifters around Trump hadn’t swooned at the prospect of sucking on Mother Russia’s teat, or that there’d been no offer of milk in the first place.
What would we be focusing on right now?
Maybe the just-published Politico report of Trump’s deliberate, cavalier use of a cellphone that doesn’t have strict security safeguards would be getting extra attention. The story outraged me, because it’s yet another glaring example of Trump’s dual set of rules — proper ones that apply to others and nonexistent ones that let him and his clan do as they please — and it puts the lie to his supposed horror over Hillary Clinton’s sloppy email habits. Not for the first time or for the last, he’s being a raving hypocrite.
Without Mueller and Russia, Scott Pruitt would be closer to center stage, with an even brighter, harsher spotlight on him. He’s not exactly evading scrutiny, but he’s being spared the relentless top-of-the-screen, start-of-the-newscast treatment that he would likely endure if lawmakers, journalists and other watchdogs weren’t so mesmerized by the convoluted twists of Mueller v. Trump.
Perhaps more Americans would notice what Trump is doing to the judiciary, by which I mean stacking it, and to important government agencies, by which I mean gutting them.
In The New Yorker this month, Evan Osnos documented the politically motivated sidelining and purging of venerable public servants; the Interior Department under Ryan Zinke is operating with less maturity and mission than a kindergarten class on the cusp of recess. Sadly, I heard less chatter about Osnos’s story than it deserved.
Mueller and Russia, Russia and Mueller: This is the drumbeat, sometimes deafening and often drowning out all else. It’s the yardstick whose measurement has come to matter more than any other, the one test that Trump must pass.
What if he passes it? That won’t make him a successful president, a fit leader or even a decent human being. But it will permit a master of distraction to distract many Americans from his other misdeeds.
The longer Mueller soldiers on, the more I worry, and the duration is part of the reason. There’s a Catch-22 to these special-counsel extravaganzas: In order to be credible, they must be thorough, but in order to be thorough, they risk becoming unwieldy, appearing indiscriminate and taxing the patience and trust of voters to the point where they numbly tune out.
“Foreign threats to the stability of our political system should always be investigated,” Vanity Fair’s T. A. Frank wrote this week. “But the more some of us learn, the harder it gets to take each breathless headline seriously.”
He argued that a recently revealed meeting in the summer of 2016 between Donald Trump Jr. and an emissary for two Arab princes only muddies the waters of a possible Russia-Trump partnership, adding, “One could go mad trying to prove that Donald Trump Jr. tried to collude with the Russians or the Saudis or the Emiratis, as opposed to being a dunce.”
Mueller’s journey down certain tributaries strikes even some observers who aren’t Trump partisans as invasive and punitive. His crawl and sprawl have also given the president the time and the trove of details that he needs to refine his tactics for delegitimizing the investigation. His shameless effort has evolved in sophistication from the reflexive yelp of “witch hunt” to more elaborate and alluring conspiracy theories, including the scenario of espionage within his campaign.
And Trump’s storytelling has takers. A CBS News poll several weeks ago showed that fewer Americans believed Mueller’s investigation to be legitimate (44 percent) than to be politically driven (53 percent).
By my reckoning, there’s already proof of attempted obstruction of justice, but that’s receding in a thick fog of collateral nefariousness and a teeming cast of unsavory opportunists. It may also be why Trump’s mantra is “no collusion,” “no collusion,” “no collusion.”
Contrary to what his aides reportedly murmur, he’s no idiot. He knows that if he sets the bar at incontrovertible evidence of him and Putin huddled over a Hillary Clinton voodoo doll, he just might clear it. And he knows that if Americans are fixated on collusion, they aren’t concentrating on much else. That’s good for him and terrible for the country.
He could be entirely innocent of soliciting or welcoming Russian help and he’d still be a proudly offensive, gleefully divisive, woefully unprepared plutocrat with no moral compass beyond his own aggrandizement. While we obsess over what may be hidden in the shadows, all of that is in plain sight.
<
FRANK BRUNI>
댓글 안에 당신의 성숙함도 담아 주세요.
'오늘의 한마디'는 기사에 대하여 자신의 생각을 말하고 남의 생각을 들으며 서로 다양한 의견을 나누는 공간입니다. 그러나 간혹 불건전한 내용을 올리시는 분들이 계셔서 건전한 인터넷문화 정착을 위해 아래와 같은 운영원칙을 적용합니다.
자체 모니터링을 통해 아래에 해당하는 내용이 포함된 댓글이 발견되면 예고없이 삭제 조치를 하겠습니다.
불건전한 댓글을 올리거나, 이름에 비속어 및 상대방의 불쾌감을 주는 단어를 사용, 유명인 또는 특정 일반인을 사칭하는 경우 이용에 대한 차단 제재를 받을 수 있습니다. 차단될 경우, 일주일간 댓글을 달수 없게 됩니다.
명예훼손, 개인정보 유출, 욕설 등 법률에 위반되는 댓글은 관계 법령에 의거 민형사상 처벌을 받을 수 있으니 이용에 주의를 부탁드립니다.
Close
x