GETTING TO THE BOTTOM OF IT
If the Justice Department, congressional Republicans, the White House or the president’s supporters think the appointment of a special counsel to deal with the ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign will put a lid on Washington spin on the issue, they need to think again.
Former FBI Director Robert Mueller may well get to the bottom of any allegations and conclude there is nothing actionable about any of the now months-old rumors, but such a fishing expedition will keep the media cauldron boiling for much of the rest of the president’s term instead of tamping it down.
The Washington media, after all, was burned by Trump. He was a joke and was supposed to lose in a landslide to their candidate. Not only did he not lose, but he had — and has — the temerity to upbraid the media for the partisanship they display.
He is public enemy No. 1 in their eyes and must be taken down. When Trump said at the Coast Guard Academy Wednesday that “no politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly,” the Washington media had a field day hooting and hollering in derision.
But, with a few caveats, he may be right. Republican presidents from Nixon forward have been treated largely unfairly by the national media. None has been slighted in such treatment.
Democrats Jimmy Carter and especially Bill Clinton came under lesser amounts of media scrutiny for different reasons. Carter didn’t like the press, was a Washington outsider and felt media members were intrusive. Clinton came into the White House with baggage and accumulated more, so the media had to start pressing when his problems became obvious.
Barack Obama, of course, was given a pass by the national media.
So while Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush all received harsh treatment as their two-term presidencies wound down, Trump has received similar treatment in his first few months. He had no honeymoon, no kid-glove handling for a month, 100 days or six months.
So in that sense, the Washington media have been unduly unfair to him.
The problem is, he makes it worse by drawing attention to it, tweeting about it and continuing to say outrageous things that leave the press, his opponents and even some of his supporters shaking their heads.
Initially, the FBI and the Senate were investigating the election-Russian connections on their own. To date, there had been nothing concrete proven. We hope Mueller gets the whole story, wherever it leads. Unfortunately, these type of special counsels take lots of time, spend lots of taxpayer dollars and follow lots of unrelated rabbit trails.
Meanwhile, the business of governing is thwarted by a Senate panel looking into similar Russian-election charges and by Democrats and a media who want to talk about anything but the business of governing.
Trump on Wednesday, in the same paragraph as his statement on being treated unfairly, said something else. We hope it is the real measure of the man and the one we hope will come to work every day for the rest of his term.
“You can’t let them get you down,” he said. “You can’t let the critics and the naysayers get in the way of your dreams.”
As long as those dreams are those of the American people, they’ll be behind him.