Planning a coup
Greg Sargent at the Post says Trump and his enforcers are attempting to put together another “Saturday Night massacre,” i.e. another case of a criminal president firing the people who are investigating his crimes.
Let’s be clear on what’s happening in our politics right now. President Trump and his media allies are currently creating a vast, multi-tentacled, largely-fictional alternate media reality that casts large swaths of our government as irredeemably corrupt — with the explicitly declared purpose of laying the rationale for Trump to pardon his close associates or close down the Russia probe, should he deem either necessary.
We often hear that Trump and his allies are trying to “distract” from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s intensifying investigation. That’s true, but this characterization inadequately casts this in terms ordinarily applied to conventional politics. Instead, Trump’s trafficking in this stuff should be seen as another sign of his fundamental unfitness to serve as president. Similar efforts by his media allies should be labeled as a deliberate effort to goad Trump into sliding into full-blown authoritarianism, and to provide the air cover for him if he does do so.
That is to say, Fox. Fox is trying to goad Trump into sliding into full-blown authoritarianism, and it will shield him if he does. There was no Fox when Nixon attempted his coup.
Monday night, Sean Hannity delivered perhaps the most perfect expression yet of efforts to create the rationale for such moves. Hannity dismissed the news of major allegationsagainst Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort and the cooperation adviser George Papadopoulos as big nothingburgers. He also hit all the high points of the new Trump/media campaign. Those include reviving the made-up scandal that Hillary Clinton approved a deal for a Russian nuclear agency to gain access to U.S. uranium extraction rights in exchange for kickbacks, and the absurdly exaggerated claim that the Clinton campaign, having paid through various intermediaries for research that ultimately led to the “Steele Dossier,” actually colluded with Russia to interfere in the election. These have been extensively fact checked and debunked.
But Fox is Fox. It trades in lies. It has no qualms about it.
[I]t’s important to reckon with the scope of what Trump and his allies are alleging. The idea is that Mueller — who was originally appointed to head the FBI by George W. Bush, and who became special counsel because of Trump’s own firing of his FBI director over the Russia probe — originally participated in a hallucinatory conspiracy to cover up Clinton collusion with Russia. Now Mueller is using the current investigation to distract from it. In this alternate universe, all of that is the crisis (Hannity’s word) we face, and the only way to address it is for Trump to close all of it down. Dem strategist Simon Rosenberg is right to point out that Trump’s trafficking in all of this — his endorsement of the idea of preposterous levels of corruption and conspiracy theories unfurling at many levels throughout the government — itself raises questions about Trump’s fitness to serve. We need to confront the insanity and depravity of all this forthrightly, and convey it accurately.
It’s Reichstag fire stuff. Fox is Goebbels. There are no guarantees Trump will fail.
Unfortunately, it isn’t just Fox. I was reading breathless discussions of the Uranium deal and the Steele dossier in a supposedly balanced magazine, The Week, that pretends to present information from all sides (though it is often strangely tilted in one direction, with a single paragraph somewhere in the middle from the “other” side, which I suppose is the side the editors disagree with, and is usually, but not always, liberal). And not a hint that any of this is in question; it’s assumed to have legs because….I don’t know, I guess because Hillary. And way too many media outlets will pick up the thread and run with it, because it generates viewers. Hillary hatred is now an industry, and it is big business.
The planning of that coup probably started long ago, and not in DC.
Such big business that they’re talking about the ‘Clinton administration’ and Hannity even *interrupted himself* to call her ‘President Clinton’.
These deluded fools will laugh themselves into a civil war.
Rrr, I’m thinking it might have started in Voronezh
It would be nice, as a start, if the far right would stop pretending that either Clinton or Obama or anyone else they fear or despise is part of the present executive swamp.
I used to think the only silver lining to Trump was that the frenzied fanatics would stop stroking their guns now that UberCrazy is in office, but now it seems they will manufacture civil unrest just so they can find their happy hateful place they used to be when the Obama-AntiChrist was in office. It’s almost as if they want (in some parallel universe) Clinton to have been president so they can turn hate to 11.
“Planning a coup” – I may have to plan a coup. I am in my living room, working (for some reason, even as a woman I manage to be able to put in that 80 hours a week – more like 90 – that being an academic requires). My husband is watching the World Series, which is OK, except he keeps flipping over to watch Donald pontificate about taxes and how his tax cut is the greatest, the biggest, the first of its kind. I can see the divorce papers now – he wouldn’t quit watching Donald Trump, and I just can’t take it anymore, your honor. (He has a horrid fascination with the Donald, like watching a car wreck. He just can’t stop, even though he despises him as much as I do. I need him to stop, at least for now. I may have to throw a tantrum. Maybe I should watch Donald to learn how, since I’ve never really been one for throwing tantrums…oh, wait, that would defeat my goal of not watching Donald).