“Obama Spied on My Campaign!
Tried to Throw Election to Hillary!”
What a perfect story to
excite all Republicans who are thinking about an election in five months. A
Watergate for their side.
Trump pushes that story in
capital letters. Three weeks ago, he announced, “SPYGATE could be one of the
biggest political scandals in history!” Not just one spy, but a whole Criminal
Deep State: “Look how things have turned around on the Criminal Deep State.
They go after Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam, and end up getting
caught in a major SPY scandal the likes of which this country may never have
seen before!”
But it never happened.
The story revolves around a
professor who was an FBI
informant, had served in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations, and
campaigned for George H.W. Bush. The real story depends on information we don’t
know, locked up in official SECRET folders, so we can’t figure out what
actually happened.
But Trump is the only one
telling his treasonous story. Republicans who saw the folders say it’s baloney.
Trey Gowdy is chair of the
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, so he was one of the nine who
witnessed the FBI presentation about the incident. He told Fox
News, “I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow
citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got, and that
it has nothing to do with Donald Trump.”
Paul
Ryan attended as Majority Leader: “I
think Chairman Gowdy’s initial assessment is accurate.”
Richard
Burr, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was there, too: “I have
no disagreement with the description Trey Gowdy gave.”
FOX News rejected Trump’s
accusation. Host Shepard Smith spoke
for the network: “The president calls it Spygate. Fox News can confirm it
is not. Fox News knows of no evidence to support the president’s claim.” A
Trump favorite on FOX, Andrew
Napolitano, said Trump’s “outrageous accusation” was “baseless”.
If there was a shred of truth
to Trump’s story of Democratic skullduggery, Republicans and their media allies
would broadcast it from here to November.
Trump made no mistake. He has
never stopped saying that our government is a Criminal Deep State.
He spent years asserting that
Obama was an illegitimate President. He said the government knew in advance
about the September
11 attacks, and hinted that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had been
murdered. He said over and over again
during his campaign that our elections were rigged. He tweeted three weeks
before the election: “The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest
and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary - but also at many polling places -
SAD”.
The story did not change after
he won: at a rally a month later in Pensacola, he said four times that our system
was rigged: “We have a sick system from the inside.”
After he lost
the popular vote by the largest margin ever by an Electoral College winner,
he made up “millions
of people who voted illegally”. He was more specific in January 2017: 3 to
5 million illegal
immigrants. He created a highly partisan Commision on Election Integrity”
to show how flawed our voting is, which accomplished only one thing, to show
there had been no fraud
to find.
Trump has made American
government his biggest target. Now he has a new story to show he was always
right.
The majority of Americans reject
Trump’s accusations about a dysfunctional and dishonest government, 56% to
33%. Supporters of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump
and his campaign beat critics, 48%-44%. But Trump doesn’t care about facts or
need a majority. He makes up stories for his avid supporters, that is, most
Republican voters.
Trump has used the reservoir
of distrust which exists in every democracy, and nurtured it, amplified it in
service to himself. At a rally
in Nashville two weeks ago, he asked the crowd to raise their hands if they
were secretly
FBI informants.
He took the next
logical step on May 29: “The 13 Angry Democrats (plus people who worked 8
years for Obama) working on the rigged Russia Witch Hunt, will be MEDDLING with
the mid-term elections, especially now that Republicans (stay tough!) are
taking the lead in Polls.”
Nobody but Trump benefits
from invented stories about how our democracy is a sham.
But so many conservatives are
willing to believe the
wildest lies about everything. 81% of Republicans labeled Mueller’s
investigation not legitimate, a “witch hunt”. Two-thirds of Republicans accept
Trump’s story about “Spygate”.
The believers say they are
the best Americans: “we Trump supporters, which the left wing media calls The Deplorables,
pay the bills that makes this country run. We are the backbone of the military,
the bedrock of the economy, and we utterly reject the CNN, MSNBC, AKA extreme
left partisan propaganda.”
No matter what happens in
November, more people, urged on by Trump, will suspect the results.
When he finally leaves
office, that may be his only significant accomplishment – to have convinced
many Americans that our political system is corrupt.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
Published in the Jacksonville
Journal-Courier, June 12, 2018
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