Slow motion coup

March 26, 2019

We have all been sitting in stunned silence since the Mueller report landed with a thud, wondering how two years of investigations could have ended like this.  Mueller maintained his monk-like silence, content to deliver his confidential report to Attorney General Bill Barr, a reliable Republican hatchet man with a reputation for erasing Republican scandals.  True to form, Barr condensed an 87 page report into a four page summary which never quoted a complete sentence from Mueller, but managed to definitively state that there was no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government and to conclude that, in his own judgement, Trump had not obstructed justice, (Source:  “4 things we learned from Barr’s summary of the Mueller report,” by Daniel Bush, PBSNewshour.org, 3/24/19).

Those of us who foolishly pinned all of our hopes on Mueller delivering the coup de grace to this lawless, wildly unfit charlatan were left deflated.  Yet, rank speculation aside, there is no way to know from the snippet taken out of context what doomed a collusion finding. The only way to really know what Mueller concluded is to read the actual report in its entirety. Proof that the truth is far more complicated than Barr would have you believe is evident in how quickly McConnell blocked Chuck Schumer’s effort to release the full report, (Source:  “McConnell blocks Schumer effort to call for public release of Mueller report,” by Rebecca Shabad and Frank Thorp V, NBCNews.com, 3/25/19).

Notwithstanding that, Republicans were everywhere doing the most, the rhetorical equivalent of spiking the ball in the end zone.  Trump tweeted enthusiastically that Mueller had completely exonerated him, despite the fact that one of the few quotes we saw from the report explicitly stated that it did “not exonerate him”.  Sarah Sanders averred that the Mueller report constituted a “total exoneration of the President”  and that  the probe “wasted two years,” (Source:  “Sarah Sanders says Mueller probe accusations were ‘equal to treason’ in heated interview with Savannah Guthrie,” by Nicole Lynn Pesce, Marketwatch.com, 3/25/19).  Loathsome Trump toady Lindsey Graham wasted no time in calling for an investigation into whether the FBI and DOJ counter-intelligence probe of Russian meddling was designed to stop Trump, (Source:  “GOP launches counterattack on FBI’s handling of 2016 election,” by Burgess Everett and Marianne Levine, Politico.com, 3/25/19).

Emboldened by how quickly the mainstream media outlets began conflating Barr’s Cliff Notes’ version of the Mueller Report with the thing itself, the Trump campaign decided to press its advantage and sent a memo to television news producers instructing them how to handle Democratic officials who have been critical of the president, (Source: “Donald Trump Campaign Blacklists His Critics In Memo To TV News Producers,” by Lisa De Moraes, Deadline.com, 3/25/19).

Yet while the racist deadenders of Trump’s base were chortling about owning the libs and gleefully imagining us despondently crying in our beer, the Barr-led Justice Department was stealthily upending decades of Justice Department practice in its zeal to rip healthcare coverage from millions of people.  Yesterday, Barr sent a letter to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals alerting it that the Justice Department would file a brief in support of District Court Judge O’Connor’s roundly mocked opinion holding that the Affordable Care Act was unconstitutional, (Source:  “Trump Justice Department sides with court ruling that invalidated the Affordable Care Act,” by Ian Millhiser, Thinkprogress.org, 3/25/19).  This decision was shocking for two reasons:  1) it explicitly jettisons longstanding Justice Department policy of defending federal law against constitutional challenges; and 2) the reasoning in Judge O’Connor’s decision was decried as unsound across the political spectrum, (Source:  “Even the right dislikes the new Obamacare ruling.  Ideology isn’t everything,” by Daniel Hemel, The Washington Post, 12/18/18), making this a particularly odious example of result oriented decision making.

Those who mock our justifiable sorrow as we watch a flawed democracy transformed into a kleptocracy ruled by inept fascists need to wake up to the fact that racism won’t pay for their chemotherapy and that deriding coastal elites won’t cure their black lung.  The bitter irony is that it will fall to those of us who still believe in both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution to save them from themselves.

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