The House Democrats are pursuing an inquiry to impeach President Trump. The Senate Republicans are about to pass a resolution which will say that unless the full House (not just the Democrats) votes to pursue an impeachment inquiry, any articles of impeachment passed by the House Democrats are dead on arrival in the Senate. Because of this threat, the House announced a vote on Thursday.
Meanwhile, the administration’s Attorney General’s inquiry into the origins of the Russian interference just turned into a criminal investigation — meaning that the Department of Justice can now issue subpoenas and summon witnesses. In the crosshairs are many of the FBI and CIA officials of the Obama administration who are alleged to have abused their government power to spy on Trump’s campaign in 2016.
Major media outlets, who are 90 per cent opposed to Trump, are carpet-bombing the airwaves and the internet with so many negative stories that often they don’t even mention the honorific term President, preferring to designate him as Mr. Trump, a treatment clearly meted out to someone who, in their minds, is an illegitimate president. While media coverage of Obama following Osama bin Laden’s death was glorifying, their coverage of Trump after the death of ISIS leader al-Baghdadi was horrendously critical. Even when the country wins, Trump must be vilified. The saving grace is that at least they still use the Mr. prefix.
Different vibe in countryside
Out in the countryside, Trump’s approval rating has remained steady, a remarkable achievement considering that he is often held by the media in worse esteem than Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein put together. The liberal coasts can’t stand a day more of Trump. But the vast fly-over country that put Trump into office is even more energised than in 2016, vowing to return him to a second term in 2020.
All this started in June 2015, when then businessman Donald Trump came down the escalator of his impressive Trump Tower building in New York to announce that he would run for the office of the presidency of the United States as a Republican. He had been a reality TV star before and, as a real-estate mogul who was fond of women friends, had been a regular presence in the tabloid press. No one took him seriously and most people in the media denigrated his candidacy as a joke. The Republican Party ignored him because it was fielding veteran politicians including Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Chris Christie, and Marco Rubio.
But Trump knew how to get free TV coverage. He would make an outrageous statement (many Mexicans who cross the border illegally are rapists and drug dealers), invite ridicule by the media and go on to say something else, such as Muslims should be banned from entering the US until they are fully vetted. While his statements were Hollywood-style exaggerations, most of his supporters understood the underlying elements, about uncontrolled borders and Islamic terrorism, to be true. In fact, they would speak to one another the same way. It was just that Trump was speaking the truth in public.
Media-savvy
Trump was a businessman running against the political establishment of Washington D.C. which he said was a cabal of legacy media, politicians, lobbyists, former federal government workers, and companies, trying to exploit federal spending to fatten their bank accounts. “Drain the swamp”, “Crooked Hillary” and “Fake News”, were memorable 6th-grade-vocabulary slogans that stuck in the heartland. He was always ready to be interviewed by the press. People began to sign up to follow him on Twitter — and he unleashed the first truly social-media-driven campaign in world history. Today he has 65 million Twitter followers.
Estimates are that he garnered over $2 billion in free media coverage during the 2016 campaign. While other politicians had to raise money to spend on a 90-second campaign commercial, media companies would cover his campaign rallies wall to wall, waiting for him to drop another outrageous charge. Trump, always media-savvy, would fly into an airport in his own Trump Force One plane (a Boeing 757 with gold furnishings) and speak to his audience with the plane in the background. The background music was always set to the score starring Harrison Ford in the blockbuster hit Air Force One .
He steadily climbed in the polls and, by the time the Republicans held their first debate two months later, he was smack in the centre of the stage — signalling that he was #1 in the polls. For the next 10 months, he never dropped from that perch, and easily won the Republican nomination, despite significant resistance from the Republican elites, who hated his guts.
During the Republican convention, top officials sat out the event. It was left to Trump’s family — Eric, Don, Ivanka, and Jared (son-in-law) — to take on important speaking roles. For the first time, the Washington establishment of government officials began to consider the possibility that he could defeat Hillary Clinton, although polls consistently maintained a 10-12 point lead for her.
Senior FBI officials began to think the unthinkable. What if Trump actually became president? In a famous exchange of text messages since released, one FBI agent reveals to another with whom he was having an extramarital affair that it was time to have an “insurance policy.”
The dossier
In the telling of conservative media outlets, the CIA trolled a Trump campaign official, George Papadopoulos, in Rome, that some Russians had dirt on Hillary to sell. They wanted him to fall for the bait, and he did. Meanwhile, the Hillary campaign had done far worse. It had paid a former British MI-6 officer, who spent years in Moscow, to create a report on Trump. This so-called Christopher Steele dossier was full of dirt — saying that Trump spent time with prostitutes in Moscow and the like — none of which has ever been proved. Even the media, to whom John McCain, a Republican who hated Trump, leaked the report, decided not to publish the salacious details.
But senior officials of the FBI thought the Steele dossier had sufficient merit. So, they obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Warrant and had a judge approve a request to tap a senior Trump campaign official, Carter Page — even before the election. The charge was that the Trump campaign was coordinating help from the Russians to defeat Hillary, and therefore, a tap on a senior official was needed to investigate.
This was the insurance policy that some in the FBI wanted. They expected Hillary to win in a landslide, but in case she didn’t, they wanted to use the enormous powers of the US intelligence agencies to investigate everyone in the Trump circle. Imagine this — senior government officials investigating a potential future leader of the free world. The Washington Post ran a story two days after Trump’s inauguration about how he could potentially be impeached!
Under sharp scrutiny
From then on, everything that Trump said or did was under scrutiny. When he fired the FBI chief, James Comey, opponents charged that he did so to cover his Russia connections — and therefore was obstructing justice. This led to the appointment of Robert Mueller to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election. The charge was that Trump knowingly coordinated with the Russians to have them leak Hillary Clinton’s emails so that the negative information would help sink her candidacy and get him elected in 2016.
Mueller conducted the most expansive investigation in US history for nearly two years. His office was given enormous powers to prosecute. There were no limits to what paths he could take, whom he could pursue, how much money he could spend and how far back he could go. He used 19 senior prosecutors and over 40 FBI agents, summoned over 500 witnesses with over 2,500 subpoenas so that they were forced to testify, and examined millions of pages of documents. If there’s anyone who knows about the inner workings of the Trump campaign and presidency, that person is Robert Mueller.
Mueller’s conclusion at the end of it all? Trump did not collude with the Russians.
On the charge of obstructing justice — such as firing Comey to “cover up” collusion — Mueller did not report one way or another and left it to the Attorney General of the United States, William Barr, to conclude. Barr concluded that Trump did not obstruct justice either.
What started it all?
But Mueller failed to look at an extremely crucial point. What started this all? What even gave the FBI doubts to begin suspecting that Trump may have been colluding with the Russians? What made the FBI set wiretaps and spy on Americans related to the Trump campaign? In other words, if Mueller found the entire investigation didn’t implicate Trump, who started the “witch hunt?”
This is what the current Department of Justice is looking into. Was there any bias in the Obama Justice Department to try and trip Trump up using official means?
The Congressional Democrats and the media, thoroughly disappointed in Mueller’s findings, were looking for another opportunity to kick Trump out of office. The day after Mueller testified in Congress, Trump had a call with the President of Ukraine. In it, he requested the new Ukrainian president to help the DoJ investigate the origins of how the Russian investigation started because published reports said that the previous Ukrainian administration had worked hard to help Hillary win.
During the call, Trump also asked his counterpart to see how the investigations into the Bidens were going on. This was because during the Obama administration, Joe Biden, the then VP, was the pointman on US policy in the Ukraine. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, had also obtained a cushy $50,000 per month job as a director in one of the most corrupt companies of Ukraine. The US has been pushing Ukraine to clean up its corrupt practices for years, so Trump asked how this was going on.
The Democrats and the media pounced. Trump was asking a foreign power to help investigate a political rival, they charged. They said that Trump was not above the law. They forgot to state that Joe Biden is not above the law either. Just because Biden is running in the 2020 election does not give him immunity against being investigated.
Worse to come?
I’ve lived in the US for over 33 years — and I have never seen the nation so divided. Politics, like sports and weather, has long been a conversation starter in polite company. But people are scared to talk about politics for fear of being ridiculed by others around them. Erstwhile friendships have collapsed.
If Trump wins in 2020, this divide will turn into an abyss. If he loses, it will be worse. With 65 million Twitter followers, a single tweet can cause havoc. He may hold more rallies too and continue his campaign against a corrupt swamp.
As the old American expression goes, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”