Plenty there to excite the anti-Trump crowd
Americans don’t think of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin as a man of letters.
We don’t see him as a literary man, but as a man of action, at least in his own mind. In Putin-approved photos, he wrestles wild beasts and bends them to his severe Russian will. He rides horses with his shirt off, that sort of thing.
So we don’t see Putin with pen in hand, at a desk by the fire, with loyal serfs and lickspittle oligarchs bringing him tea as he sketches out a broad outline of chaos in a faraway republic.
Yet with this ongoing Russian business, he couldn’t have a more compelling American political drama to enjoy if he’d written it all by himself: the anti-Trump liberal media and their allies, the Democrats and the Republican establishment, seeking to topple the president; Trump with his paranoid and angry tweets; the pro-Trump nationalists; and the forgotten middle class devoured by the elites. All of them howling at each other’s throats.
I’m no drama critic, but the media reaction to the indictment of Paul Manafort — the creepy former campaign chairman of President Donald Trump — was just a bit predictable.
This came not only from the liberal political media, but from their nominal allies in the big-government Republican establishment, because in all things Trump they are one, having hated him for months. The boorish vulgarian defeated them, defeated the Republican establishment before he defeated Hillary Clinton, for the simple reason that Americans considered both sides — the Clintons and the establishment GOP — as corrupt and full of lies. And now, with their hold on empire threatened, they want to take Trump down.
But equally predictable was the defensive reaction of the pro-Trumpers from the nationalist right, and it didn’t take much imagination at all to write their dialogue. It doesn’t take inspiration to write for loyal hounds.
And so the pro-Trumper Sean Hannity kept up his incessant loyal barking, arguing that in special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of Manafort, there was no there there.
There was nothing to see, nothing really, at all.
And others said that the Mueller indictment wasn’t all that bad for Trump because the charging documents didn’t show the president colluding with the Russians to take the election from Clinton.
But think again. It wasn’t just some guy who was indicted. It was the president’s campaign chairman who was indicted. And Manafort will be squeezed the way the feds have always squeezed people, from mob bosses to politicians.
Their wealth will be squeezed, and their friends and family will be squeezed. All it takes to stop the squeezing is a statement, an admission, a story about someone else close to Trump, like a friend, or a son-in-law, and the thing metastasizes.
So there is something there. There’s plenty there, including the likely wiring up of the so-called foreign policy expert, George Papadopoulos.
Papadopoulos allegedly lied to federal investigators. They caught him, broke him and he rolled.
Manafort was working on behalf of Putin’s boys in Ukraine for years before hooking up with Trump, and as the Manafort indictment dropped, so did another shoe. Tony Podesta — brother of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta — resigned from the powerful lobbying firm the Podesta Group, which worked with Manafort on Ukraine.
If Mueller is serious at all about Russian interference in Washington, there’s plenty to investigate.
First, of course, Trump and his White House, but also the role of American lobbyists in the employ of Putin puppets, and the origins of that salacious ClintonDemocratic Party-funded Russian dossier on Trump.
So let us pray that Mueller investigates everything, all of it, all of them.