Or How To Go From Inauguration To Constitutional Crisis In 25 Days
This dawning of the Trump Experiment could have gone two ways (since we eliminated “business as usual” from the get-go): surprisingly efficient or horribly wrong. Less than a month in it is careening towards the latter.
A bumpy start tumbled into erratic (fabricated hissy fit on non-existent massive voter fraud) and embarrassing (insulting foreign leaders, alienating Mexico), then weird (some piece of grift theater called “alternative facts” and whatever you call that press conference this week), onto combative (blaming the media for everything; “Leaks are real, news is fake”), and then, of course, the really illegal (unconstitutional executive order on immigration ban) until finally we found ourselves dealing with the treasonous. When the National Security Advisor resigns amidst an egregious international scandal worthy of some cheap spy novel before the ass groove in the main chair at the Oval Office is comfy, we’ve got problems.
For the record, I whole-heartedly agree with the president’s defense that his administration is not in chaos, we’re more into the territory of outright mayhem now.
So what happened to the ousted General Michael Flynn?
Well, for one, he allegedly did a lot of talking to a foreign diplomat before he had the gig about that country’s sanctions that the then standing president of the United States implemented due to Russian interference in the 2016 American election. And when this little nugget was leaked, he lied to the vice president and anyone within the administration, which now includes fibbing to the FBI, which opens this puppy up to a felony. All of this would be considered merely a sack-able offense if it didn’t already reek with greater intrigue.
Lest we forget that there is more evidence that the Russian government and its despotic figurehead, Vladimir Putin, fucked with our election to skew the results towards the current president than anything Hillary Clinton did with her emails. In fact, the president has spent months defending every untoward thing Putin has said and done. So what looked kind of fishy and downright illegal has blown up to this headline: “Trump Worked with Putin & Russian Government to Circumvent U.S. Election as a Bloodless Coup to Power”.
And with apologies to Oliver Stone and Glenn Beck, this ain’t crazed speculation by half-assed conspiracy geeks. This, thanks to these Flynn revelations, is now highly probable. There is a now pretty good chance the current president of the United States made deals with the Russian government to partner with them in every nefarious shenanigan it plans on enacting over the next four years in exchange for a little “help” during the campaign. This coupled with Trump’s defiant refusal to divest himself of his business interests now makes him officially a puppet of the Russian government or at the very least a compromised chief executive and likely an easy victim of blackmail.
Just to make this juicier, the president has ties to a $500 billion Exxon/Russian oil deal that is scuttled by the current sanctions, and it smells even worse when considering Trump’s secretary of state is a former Exxon CEO with, you guessed it, long-standing relations with the Russian government.
Of course, this pattern of a resigning Trump confident with a direct connection to a despotic foreign government began during the campaign, as his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was eventually booted due to first predictable denial and then under the pressure of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, a reluctant acceptance of reality; a rare trait for any official in and around this circus. Shortly after the election intelligence reports reviewed by both the president-elect and his predecessor revealed without question that the Russian government’s leaks of private emails within the Democratic National Committee were directly connected to favoring a Trump presidency.
Favorite coincident of the week: The day Trump went ballistic on the White House press corps for continually pointing out his habitual lying, Putin made a public decree to squash anymore media “fawning” over the American president.
In true El Douche idiom, the president is now diverting attention away from this steaming mess by stressing that the real crime is the illegal leaks that buried his national security advisor, which, of course, is hilarious considering for the final month of his campaign he cited numerous leaked emails to prove Hillary Clinton’s guilt on a number of fronts and famously begged the Russian government to keep on hacking their way to more Clinton revelations.
To Trump’s credit, this level of high crimes usually takes a president years to cobble together. This is a man who gets things done. In less than a month he has turned whatever is left of this government into a freak-show tent worthy of the main room at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City if that hadn’t gone belly-up.
Good news for Trump on two fronts. Flynn is a decorated general. Similarly, Oliver North was an entrenched lieutenant colonel, who kept Ronald Reagan out of prison. What you don’t want here is a disgruntled lawyer on your hands, à la John Dean. They tend to sing. A lawyer gets you a helicopter out of town. A tight-lipped military goon helps you get an airport in DC named after you. Second, and far more important, is the GOP runs the entire legislative branch, which would usually be stumbling all over itself to get in on this. But rest assured, one fantastic gift the Trump Experiment keeps giving us is revealing the spectacular hypocrisy of this dysfunctional congress, which spent four years over nine useless Benghazi “investigations”, but will never touch this.
The formally big-bad, morally impregnable House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz has already stated that he won’t even pursue an investigation into General Flynn, never mind the president, who knew about this atrocity since January 23 and did nothing about it until the Washington Post got involved. In fact, as late as this past weekend some mouth-breathing shit-stain named Stephen Miller, who doubtless grabbed a cool gig at the White House on the strength of photos he was going to post on the Internet last summer of Trump peeing on a German hooker, defended anything the president did as some kind of religious experience. I half expected him to start speaking in tongues instead of whatever monosyllabic falderal he rolled out for the networks.
Either way, this will buy us more time on the Trump train, which for my money is the most entertaining ride of a lifetime.
Keep it coming.
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James Campion is the Managing Editor of The Reality Check News & Information Desk and the author of “Deep Tank Jersey”, “Fear No Art”, “Trailing Jesus”, “Midnight For Cinderella” and “Y”. and his new book, “Shout It Out Loud – The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon”.
