How it will shake out

There is a process to go through. But it’s clear what happened and how it’s all going to turn out. Russians at the highest government levels essentially attacked our sovereignty by cyber-meddling in the recent presidential election in behalf of a candidate they found a potential tool, Donald Trump, against a more formidable person they didn’t like, Hillary Clinton.

They hacked emails and contrived stories. Simpleton American right-wingers—a mildly redundant reference—fell for it.

There is no indication the nation possesses the will or wherewithal to defend itself when it happens again, as it assuredly will. Some of these Trumpian yahoos would rather believe Russians than American Democrats.

But Trump himself did not collude with Russians in this conspiracy against the United States. He’s too goofy to collude much.

He liked what the Russians were doing. He liked Vladimir Putin’s shirtless manliness. He committed typical stupidities such as publicly pleading with the Russians to find and leak more damaging emails by Clinton. But he wasn’t in on any conspiracy other than the easy one to snow Midwestern working people into the notion that he was their friend.

Trump did nothing criminal, though plenty of things stupid. That’s until he got defensive about the legal troubles of his ousted national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Then his stupidity became technically criminal. If you want to get technical, that is.

——————

He’d insisted Flynn take the job when Flynn didn’t want it. Flynn had proceeded to get in all sorts of trouble for his foreign associations and lack of forthrightness about them. Trump wanted to help him if he could.

What it seems Trump did was attempt to obstruct justice, a crime. But he is such a thoroughly uninformed and unethical bumbler that he had no idea he was committing a crime.

He took aside the director of the FBI, asked him to back down on the investigation of Flynn, then fired the FBI director when the investigation was not stopped, then bragged to Russian pals—it’s always Russian pals with this guy—that things were going to be easier for their relationship now that he’d gotten rid of the investigating FBI guy.

Trump defenders explain that he is such a dunce that he didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to talk to an FBI guy like that.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse, they always said, and that once went double for the president. But that was before the new international political partnership between Russia and Trump’s base. And it was before Republicans sold the last remnant of their souls to this simpleton demagogue.

Robert Mueller, the special counsel, will, within six months, file a final report detailing the Russian meddling, clearing Trump of colluding, finding potentially illegal Russian dealings by a couple of former Trump campaign associates and saying something—something—about this blundering attempted obstruction of justice by Trump.

Mueller could say Trump’s action toward fired FBI director James Comey was inappropriate, but, considering utter ignorance and that the investigation was not stopped, he is finding no actual crime. Or he could say the statute is clear and that Trump clearly violated it. He could refer that finding to the U.S. House of Representatives, which is run by imaginative Trump apologist Paul Ryan and where no impeachment would even be contemplated no matter what Mueller said.

House Republicans only impeach if a Democrat receives oral sex, which is more serious than American Russianification.

Trump will declare himself wholly vindicated. He will celebrate a special counsel’s report that Russia elected him and that he was ignorant but not quite criminal.

All of that will happen in time for Trump and Republicans to rehabilitate themselves sufficiently to avoid massive losses in the midterm elections in November 2018, aided in some of the closer races by Russian intervention.

The greater political problem for Republicans in the midterms will be that they will have failed to repeal and replace Obamacare. But they will have declared victory—as they always do— by facilitating a greater federalism. It will be one by which Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price will grant waivers allowing states to do pretty much what they want with their Medicaid and their exchanges.

Trump and Ryan will gather in the Rose Garden to spike a deflated football.

Tea Party types will lack midterm motivation because they will understand that the Republicans failed to deliver the promised “repeal and replace” of Obamacare. But Democrats will be motivated because the greater-federalism plan will allow some states—the meanest ones, like Arkansas—to throw poor people off Medicaid and diseased people off affordable private insurance.

The political dynamic in these midterms will be, as I have explained, about the people—specifically their health insurance—and not a person— specifically the lawbreaking president who got away with it because of his ignorance and a toady Congress.