Obama Spied on My Campaign!

“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