The truth is not kind to Trump, and ever more desperate attacks on it are not helping

Doesn’t it seem that right-wing “outrage” over some perceived “injustice” done against them always seem just a little overcooked? To the right, any law or policy proposal that addresses societal, economic or healthcare dysfunction is an “outrage” if the “fix” isn’t just to throw people in jail or deport them. Of course, you can’t just “jail” or “deport” 80,000+ dead from the COVID-19, or a 15 percent unemployment rate. You would think that reasonable people would be tiring of Donald Trump, a Republican-controlled Senate, and this whole act generally, and the 2020 election will be an opportunity for the electorate to prove that it has come to its senses and send him packing to the dog house of history where he belongs. 

Of course nothing in the Trump “era” makes much sense, and for the past few weeks Trump, his Congressional sycophants and the right-wing media have been attempting to puff smoke into people’s eyes with the “outrages” committed against Trump and his familiars by Barack Obama in permitting the FBI to run amuck against him before the 2016 election,  by the unfair “sting” operation to catch Trump associates like Michael Flynn thinking that giving false testimony isn’t actually a crime, and  “shifty” House Intelligence committee chairman Adam Schiff’s refusal to release what was at the time the Republican-led intelligence committee’s “secret” interviews with interested parties in the Russian probe. 

The reality, of course, is somewhat different. As some of us may recall, it was not Trump but Hillary Clinton who seemed to have been the one most damaged by FBI interest during the election, not Trump.  Some of us may also recall that not a month ago the U.S. Senate intelligence committee released a report that reached the exact opposite conclusion of the House report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.  It isn’t difficult to ascertain why Schiff would be reluctant to release the transcripts that would only reveal that Devin Nunes and company were not interested in discovering the truth. The irony of the attacks on Schiff is that he knows that the Nunes-issued report is essentially worthless and will be used by the right as “proof” that there was nothing “there.” 

But if there is no “there,” than why is Trump “asking” the U.S. Supreme Court to block a ruling requiring the Justice Department to release secret grand jury material to Congress pertaining to the Mueller investigation by this week? This has been an on-going issue for a year, and why Trump and William Barr do not want this material released is obvious enough: because the material provides more detailed information than the Mueller report itself. This has been an on-going issue with this administration—if there is nothing “there,” than why is there such a strenuous effort to obstruct and evade?

We should also not be allowed to simply wave off the fact that giving false testimony to federal investigators as Flynn did, regardless of the circumstances, is still a crime. No one should feel “sorry” for Flynn, whose only “defense” is that he shouldn’t have been given the opportunity to lie in the first place. The only question that should be asked is if Flynn lied and if he failed to register as a paid foreign agent lobbying for a foreign government, which he did fail to do—and if he lied about lying as he is claiming now, then he still lied. Flynn also admitted that he had been pressured by Trump officials to obstruct the Mueller investigation, and Republican congressmen may have also tried to “persuade” him not to cooperate. That Barr dropped the case against Flynn only proves Barr’s continuing campaign to shield Trump and his associates from political damage—unlawful behavior is simply not a “problem” worth investigating—unless it is committed by the other party. The cynicism and hypocrisy of Trump and his familiars is simply astonishing in its audacious contempt for moral, ethical and lawful values.

And Trump and the right-wing media hypocrisy continues further, as he is seeking the Supreme Court to stop an order that his tax and financial records be handed over to a New York district attorney and to Congress, which has also been a very on-going issue. Trump has a new stratagem now: to claim that all these investigations into his activities are causing him to do an even “worse job” than he is doing now. Nobody should be surprised by the level of stupidity of Trump and his “advisors,” but this claim at least has the advantage of an inadvertent admission that we all can agree with, or at least those not as insipid as Trump is.

Trump and his familiars keep trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes with conspiracies and ever more nonsensical “whataboutisms.” But we (or most of us) are not as stupid as he thinks. Barr has already told us many times that his principle mission in life is a partisan political one; the administering of justice as most people understand the concept has absolutely nothing to do with his actions—and as for Trump, the accounting for his life of crime and all his crazy talk is catching up to him. The most irresponsible thing the voters of this country can do is allow this man a “get out of jail free” pass this November.