The biggest Trump news of the week went mostly unnoticed.
So much goes down in every single news cycle of the Trump administration that it’s difficult sometimes to pick out any particular atrocity as worthy of sustained interest or outrage.
The president shrugs off this perpetual gallimaufry as though it were part of some well-established conspiracy to keep him from getting the credit he views as terminally inadequate, but in the broader perspective, the whole thing feels like a strategy.
To strain a sports analogy, this administration is like a basketball team implementing a game plan that calls for it to commit more fouls than can possibly be adjudicated, lest the game grind to a farcical halt amid a symphony of whistles.
You know the boss hates whistleblowers.
So this week’s most significant story was immediately buried in another dumpster fire of misstatements, blatant nonsense and everyday treachery. It had nothing to do with the arrest of former Trump chief strategist and noted yachtsman Steve Bannon, nothing to do with the hat policy at Goodyear, and nothing to do with the fact that President Donald Trump refused to criticize the product line at Crackpottery Barn — aka QAnon — specifically the psychotic notion that Mr. Trump’s role in 21st-century history is essentially to make America safe from a ring of pedophile cannibals.
Like there are many fine young cannibals on both sides.
While law enforcement regards QAnon as a viable threat when it comes to domestic terrorism, Mr. Trump sees only a potential reservoir of bootlickery: “I don’t know much about the movement other than, I understand, they like me very much, which I appreciate. I have heard that it is gaining in popularity. I hear these are people who love our country.”
Asked about the whole saving-the-world-from-pedophiles-and-cannibals thing, the president asked, “Is that supposed to be a bad thing? We are actually. We are saving the world.”
Yeah, doesn’t feel like it though.
But see, now he’s got me doing it. I was trying to point out an important story, only to go all-in on Trump vs. The Pedophile Cannibals. So allow me to reset. On Tuesday, the Select Committee of the United States Senate on Russian Active Measures, Campaigns, and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election dropped its report on something Republicans have long insisted never happened, never mind this was Volume 5 and it was still another 952 pages.
In it, the worst suspicions about Russian meddling to get Mr. Trump elected in 2016 are illuminated in even starker terms than in the Mueller report, including: the fact that the investigators regarded jailed campaign manager Paul Manafort to be “a grave counterintelligence threat”; the fact that Mr. Trump indeed spoke to convicted lickspittle Roger Stone about the timing of an anti-Hillary Clinton Wikileaks dump and then lied to Mr. Mueller about it; and that a Wikileaks dump was activated to divert attention from the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Mr. Trump bragged about molesting women.
But that was not the important part of the important story. The important part was that the Senate Select Committee issuing this report was run by Republicans.
Yeah, the same people who refused to hear additional witnesses at his impeachment trial and voted en masse (except for Mitt Romney) not to convict him, are now telling Americans, “Um, yeah, that was no hoax. It happened.”
And as California Democrat and lead impeachment manager Adam Schiff said at the time, it will happen again.
“He has compromised our elections, and he will do so again,” Mr. Schiff said in his closing argument in February. “You will not change him. You cannot constrain him. He is who he is. Truth matters little to him. What’s right matters even less, and decency matters not at all.”
Then, turning to Senate Republicans, he said, “You are decent. He is not who you are.”
That’s what makes this story potentially momentous, even if it retained the ephemeral nature of all Trump stories (by Thursday, it had vanished entirely from the front section of this newspaper). It’s partly that Senate Republicans appear to be copping to decency, but it’s more that it might have inflamed some consciousness.
On Thursday, 73 Republicans, national security officials and former members of Congress issued a statement saying they’d vote for Joe Biden this fall.
True, this same group issued a statement in 2016 correctly predicting that Mr. Trump “would be the most reckless president in American history,” but it didn’t include an endorsement of Mrs. Clinton.
This is different. Perhaps there is a realization, an understanding, by some people sprouting a conscience, of all things, of what’s been painfully evident for some time. Mr. Trump told us early on he hires only the best people: Rick Gates — convicted; George Papadopoulos — convicted; Michael Cohen — convicted; Mike Flynn — convicted; Manafort — convicted; Stone — convicted; Mr. Bannon — arrested.
If there’s a second term of this, we all should be convicted.