Trump’s grandstanding in past 3 years was off the charts
Perhaps you were among the legions of Americans who were too overwhelmed — or underwhelmed — by contemporary American politics to pay attention to the impeachment proceedings. The rancor and grandstanding — even by the dismal standard established in the past three years — were off the charts.
So, too, was the gaslighting. That’s a term that came into vogue with the rise of Donald Trump. It refers to the up-is-down, black-is-white information warfare that aims to disorient the public to the point that people simply don’t know what to believe anymore.
Gaslighting is Trump’s shtick. He lies constantly; he lies in a way that flatters his base, that invites them to identify with him as the victim of any who would challenge his claims.
Of course, not everybody believes Trump’s lies, but that’s not really the point. The point is to sow doubt. The point is to debase the discussion. The point is to discredit the institutions that people trust to help them find the truth. The point is to impute the very vices and malign intentions of the liar to all who speak.
Sorting out truth from lies is hard work, not just for those whose job it is — reporters, prosecutors and so forth — but for the public as well. We get tired. We get angry. We get fed up. We shut out the arguing. We give up on politics.
It will not surprise you that Trump’s response to the impeachment is more gaslighting. And he has found willing accomplices in the House Republican caucus. Their screeds and stunts were all intended to confuse the public about what is a pretty straightforward story.
Trump illegally held up U.S. taxpayers’ money to put pressure on the Ukrainian government to fabricate dirt on Joe Biden, his most likely rival in the 2020 election. Trump got caught.
And yet, nothing is straightforward about an impeachment, a justifiably rare and extreme measure our legislative branch reserves for presidents and other officials of the executive branch who abuse their power.
The opacity of the process has made it ripe for gaslighting, which the Republicans have done ad nauseam. They attacked the procedures. They attacked the whistleblower. They attacked the witnesses.
There’s a final bit of disinformation that bears mentioning, and it harkens back to the interference that put the cloud of illegitimacy over Trump’s presidency in the first place. It’s a patently ridiculous conspiracy theory that holds it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 U.S. elections.
One of the egregious ways in which Russian security services interfered in the 2016 U.S. election was via hackers that attacked the Democratic National Committee in 2015 and 2016. CrowdStrike, a California-based cybersecurity firm, was one of several consultants that tied the hackers to Russian security services. Trump believes that CrowdStrike is owned by a Ukrainian, and that there is a server in Ukraine that holds evidence of a plot by Democrats and Ukrainians to frame Russia. Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to look for that server.
It’s an insane story — so insane that some members of Trump’s inner circle tried to dissuade him from believing it. And yet Trump does believe it.
Now, as they defend the president at all costs, some Republicans brazenly repeat the lies and calumny. The country was ripe for such meddling in 2016. But we’ve been warned. If the Senate does not do its duty to remove this menace from the Oval Office, we the people must do it at the ballot box.