TRUMP CRANKS UP THE FOG MACHINE
Donald Trump’s technique for dealing with bad news is to create enough confusion and partisanship to envelop it in dense fog.
Consider the most explosive news to come along in recent history — that the FBI has commenced an investigation of Trump aides to find out if they colluded with Russian agents to throw the election to Trump.
Nothing remotely as serious has ever occurred in United States politics. Russia’s interference is a direct attack on American democracy. If Trump’s aides were involved, that’s treason. If Trump knew about it and did nothing, that’s an impeachable offense at the very least.
Which is why Trump wants to bury it inside a fog of diversions, distractions, claims and allegations that appear to have something to do with it but lead elsewhere.
It’s why he has repeatedly blasted the press as “fake news,” “going crazy with their conspiracy theories and blind hatred”; lashed out at the intelligence agencies for their “unauthorized leaks,” “just like Russia”; and conjured up “witch hunts” and conspiracies against him resembling “Nazi Germany.”
As evidence of Trump’s advisers’ collusion with Russian operatives kept mounting through February, Trump needed a bigger fog machine. So on March 4, he alleged that Barack Obama had wiretapped him in the Trump Tower during the campaign.
Even though Trump has no evidence, and his claim is irrelevant to the FBI investigation, he’s enough of a con artist to know that merely making this preposterous allegation would give him the fog he needed.
Almost immediately, news stories about the FBI investigation were replaced by stories about Trump’s allegation, his lack of evidence, reactions from FBI Director James Comey and others, and the White House’s desperate attempts to find credible proof.
Which is where Devin Nunes, Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee comes in.
Soon after Comey’s testimony before Nunes’ committee, Nunes went to the White House to look at intelligence reports that, he said, “clearly show the president-elect and his team were at least monitored” during the presidential transition. The rest of Nunes’ committee wasn’t allowed to view the documents in question.
Two days later, Nunes said he wasn’t sure whether Trump and his aides were monitored and he needed to review more information. No matter. By then the fog machine was working overtime, generating a thick haze of stories about what Nunes saw or didn’t see, whom his potential source might be, and whether Nunes’ revelation supported Trump’s claim of Obama’s wiretapping (it didn’t). All of which ignited a storm of outrage among Democrats on the committee — and, thereby, further stories.
And on it goes, day after day, a thickening fog of diversion and obfuscation, taking public attention away from the FBI’s investigation into possible treason by Trump and his aides, and focusing it instead on a thickening smog of other controversies.
The public will have become lost and confused in the fog — exhausted, confounded, cynical. Facts and findings will vanish. It will all come to seem like politics at its worst.
Could Trump get away with it? Possibly.
The biggest danger he faces is that Republican statesmen might emerge from the mist, those who are sufficiently concerned about the integrity and sanctity of our democracy, to act as lighthouses. They would guide the public through it and shine a beam of clarity on one of the worst outrages in American history.
Do they exist? We will soon find out. Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich is a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley.