However in retrospect, I don’t blame him, like Stawek did. He – and probably many-many people in both sides of this nonsense – suffered from the illusion of two choices. This means exactly what it means: the illusion that there are only two choices.
The media and the politicians themselves in the USA thrown any bit of decency to the wind and started spewing slander on each other. Depending on what kind of politicians or media you listened to, you were fed one of the two narratives:
- Trump is an illegitimate president elected by Russian hackers and ever since he serves Putin.
- The US intelligence agencies along with the mainstream media and the megacorporations try to perform a coup against the president.
If someone is uninformed and eats one source, he’ll believe the one fed to him, that’s obvious. This is why I imagined the (1) believers as mindless campus drones who babble about white privilege and institutional sexism. This is why Smite imagined the (2) believers as Breitbart reading rednecks masturbating at Tomi Lahren.
But the trick is that Smite also assumed that I belong to the (2) believers, despite I’ve never claimed such. This is the point. The informed person who does his research and watches both Fox and CNN, reads Trump tweets and DNC statements is made believe that only these two options exist. There is simply nobody in the US public life who doesn’t claim that one of the crazy conspiracy theories is true. Considering these two crazy options, we can’t blame each other for picking the other one. Smite isn’t an idiot who believes (1), he is an informed intelligent person who finds (2) crazier than (1).
The truth is always that there are more than two options. So let me describe a third option and you can compare it to the two conspiracy theories:
- No one did anything illegal and the election was legitimate
- Everyone is doing all the dirty tricks in the book without actually breaking the law
- Both sides call the other traitor because it motivates their base in the midterms.
“it wuz dem russians!” is also an easy way for both sides to point to the common enemy.
The left can claim it is nothing they did that caused people to vote for Trump and they never had a chance, the right can claim it wasn’t their fault Trump won, he wouldn’t be president but the evil commies tricked the innocent voters.
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Gevlon,
I don’t disagree with your thrust here – there is clearly grey.
But after making that point, you’ve gone straight to black and white.
“No one did anything illegal and the election was legitimate”
You just can’t possibly believe this first part.
Russia hacked the DNC.
They did it after talking to several people in Trumps campaign, at least one of whom was stupid enough to tell Alexander Downer – a non-involved, very conservative (for Australia, anyway) diplomat who reported it to the FBI well before the election.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-31/alexander-downer-allegedly-linked-to-us-russia-investigation/9295180
That’s illegal – not Russia doing it, I mean US campaign members being knowingly involved.
Trump paid prostitutes/”porn stars” not to tell their stories, and he did it without proper campaign finance disclosure.
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/rudy-giuliani-michael-cohen-tape-trump-karen-mcdougal-2018-7?r=US&IR=T
That’s illegal too.
Neither of these things is under any sort of reputable dispute – one of them has been admitted to by Trumps’ legal team.
Now, you can argue that they didn’t affect the election. You’d probably be right.
But the point is that you’re not allowed to break the law, even if you do it badly.
You can argue that Trump didn’t know about it – I’d probably disagree, but I think he’s likely to skate on it.
But this isn’t the point either.
Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn were all people that held positions of power within the Trump campaign.
And to a man they’re proven to have broken the law.
Half of that list has plead guilty.
At least one of them is a traitor – possibly more.
So, is the election legitimate?
Of course it is.
Did agents of the Trump campaign break the law during the winning of the election? Some of them did, for sure.
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@Buboe: between “Trump is a traitor” and “FBI is traitors” the only “grey” is “nobody is a traitor”.
Somebody hacked DNC. Considering that they had zero protection (they refused to use even 2 factor authentication) and their IT head was a Pakistani spy, it’s a safe bet that everyone and his mother hacked it.
Knowingly involving in what? Receiving dirt? Hacking is illegal, accepting hacked materials is not. Otherwise all the journalists who take all the leaked materials on Trump would be criminal. Of course EVERY campaign accepts EVERY dirt from EVERYONE.
??? How the prostitutes are related to Russia? And how is having them and paying their silence is unusual in politics? If everyone who paid a prostitute would be barred from elected office, Mike Pence would sit in the Senate all alone.
OK, you lost me here. So you admit that the election is legitimate. Then what exactly your point is? How do you disagree with me?
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You see, this is not really about these two choices. These two choices are just the current manifestation of the deeper problem. The deeper problem is the contradiction of current events with people’s idea of the country they want to live in.
The country that operates on the basis of the three mechanics you described is basically a country where everybody is an opportunist and it doesn’t matter what you do as long as you are not violating the letter of the law. As it turns out, that’s not a type of country where a lot of americans really want to live in. The type of country that most americans want to live in is a country where democratic ideals actually made to work and all their intenal contradictions are resolved.
Add this component to the current situation, and you will see that – as long as this ideal of country holds (and imo it holds) – the current situation definitely presents a breach of that ideal and has to be corrected. However, the nature of the breach is up to interpretation and it can really be interpreted in only the following two ways: either the President has been elected illegitimately (basically, a breach in electoral process. Not my position), or that the government instutions opposing him have vastly overstepped what was democratically mandated to them (a breach in checks and balances architecture of the democratic ideal. My position).
If you really want to move forward constructively on this matter, you’ll have to present an interpretation of an ideal democratic country that doesn’t fall into one of these two traps. Alternatively, you can drop very the idea of a democratic country altogether. Your call.
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@Maxim: while it’s largely offtopic, I answer because it’s interesting. I believe that the “checks and balances” idea is naive and cannot be implemented without producing exactly what it produced here: the bureaucracy openly opposing the elected leadership.
The reason isn’t that they are somehow “bad”, the reason is that *all* members of the intellectual class are political and believe their position to be the moral one and feel mandated to represent it. Ergo, if *anyone* including myself had been in the shoes of Peter Strozk or Andrew McGabe he would have either done the exact same thing or the very opposite: ignore the dossier and crucify Hillary over her e-mails.
Independent institutions cannot be built because there aren’t any independent people. This create two alternatives:
* bureaucracy, where non-elected officials and their bryzantine procedures make the decisions
* autocratic democracy as defined by Bismarck: “the people elect a king who rules as he pleases and 4 years later they either re-elect him or hang him”
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My interpretation about the Trump election and russian involvment is that majority of Americans would consider elections void only if Trump had committed treason while treat the election legitimate even if russians and Trump staffers had breached some laws concerning election advertisement or connections to the foreign goverments.
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You know, there is a fourth narrative…
4) Putin ordered a sustained cyber disinformation campaign to help swing the election in favor of Trump. This includes hacking the DNC and releasing emails. Several Americans were involved in the efforts.
4a) …some or all of the Americans were tricked into working with the Russians at the time.
4b) …some or all of the Americans knew they were working with Russians at the time.
4c) …high-ranking Trump officials were working independently to make it happen.
4d) …Trump specifically tried to make it happen.
4e) …Trump needed it to happen because he’s massively in debt.
4f) …Trump needed it to happen because Putin has kompromat on him.
And so on.
You keep bringing up the entire “illegitimate president” thing, and while I don’t doubt you’d be able to find posts or articles like that somewhere, I’m personally seeing zero coverage in the US that suggests the presidency isn’t legitimate. Trump won the Electoral College by ~80,000 total votes in three key states. That’s legit. And dumb, considering the -3 million popular votes, but we have an EC system, so whatever. There isn’t a way to “void” an election in any case.
It’s an established fact that Russia meddled in the election in Trump’s favor. It could be that Putin simply hated Clinton that much (he does), and would have helped Jeb Bush if that was the alternative. It could be that Trump wanted better relations with Russia (and Putin specifically) for altruistic reasons. Or it could all be about money. Or blackmail. We’ll see how far the rabbit hole this goes, but it’s not a “conspiracy theory” that Russia helped to elect Trump. The question remains as to why, who knew when, and if it was done in exchange for something.
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Heh. In Russia we have something close to Bismark democracy, it seems (6 years cycle, though). Many are of the opinion that Yeltsin only got to die peacefully because his successor was in power and Putin won’t survive long in the event of having to abandon the post.
The checks and balances idea worked to the point of getting USA into a superpower status (though it is debatable as to how much of a credit it actually gets for USA’s success). Does seem a bad fit for a state claiming world leadership, though.
I struggle to see bureaucracy-focused systems really working in XXI century. Contemporary politics requires the kind of decision speed bureucracies just can’t provide, no matter the extent of tech advancement.
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@Azuriel: stop it.
Either the Russians swinged the election for Trump or not. If yes, he is not a democratically elected president and Hillary should be president. If not, then why do people talk about Russia?! There is no middle way here, being legitimate is a yes or no thing.
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Gevlon, facts are facts. You cannot change that from a 3rd person perspective by claiming what you did in your previous post. The fact that people are being arrested and charged in the Russian meddling case speaks volumes about Trump’s culpability in all of this, and IF certain people closer to Trump get indicted in the months to come, any American with half a brain will find it hard to believe that he knew nothing about what was going on. The issue here is just how deep this goes, and it’s quite foolish to claim what you are claiming before the final facts come out. The reports that were just released were so heavily redacted that the FBI is obviously protecting certain information(or sources) to the point that indicates that the investigation is still ongoing. Your binary treatment of this precludes any notion that there might well be bi-partisan accountancy involved in this -ongoing- investigation. I just think you are being quite premature in your conclusions considering what information is still coming out.
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What about none of the above? This nonsense is perpetuated to sell info-tainment commercials, it has no sinister motivation. These are capitalists generating a product that the consumer population wants, their only interest is more and easy to consume “news”. The actual content of the “news” has gotten more and more outlandish since Trump because the MSM now have to compete for market share with a twitter account, not because Trump himself is a Chess-master/puppet-of-Russia. Trump is the first real competitor to the MSM since the advent of the internet, and all this crazy fake news is their way of staying ahead of the curve instead of falling behind like they did with the Internet.
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Trump is the legitimately elected president but people don’t want him to be.
They are looking for reasons to justify ‘not my president’. They dig through everything – hence the total obsession with Trump and convictions for what you rightfully called political jaywalking.
No one is looking for stuff Hillary and her campaign did and there would be no special investigation or world-wide outcry had she won.
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@Noguff: stop grasping straws.
Is it possible (or even likely) that some Trump campaign people did various crimes? Of course. But why should I care about these nobodies any more than a random Chicago gang member who shoots a liquor store teller?
The only POLITICAL questions are “is Trump illegitimate” and “are the intelligence agencies engaged in a coup?”. My answers are no and no. Therefore Trump will be president till 2020 and then he can run for reelection since he won’t be removed either rightfully (illegitimate) or wrongfully (coup). The rest has no relevance to any of us.
@Trees: this is a bit bigger than usual media bullshit. On both sides politicians and intelligence leaders fuel the flames with their outlandish statements.
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NoGuff:
If there was any actual evidence it would have been leaked a long time ago. They have nothing despite intense efforts and 2 years of “investigation”.
The Russian interference is bullshit. What could they do that Trump’s campaign could not? Buy a few Facebook ads? Use state-sponsored spies? Democrats used FBI against Trump and it wasn’t enough, how could a foreign agency with very little resources on the ground do any better than that? Use propaganda? How could it possibly overcome the 90% negative coverage of all media, both US and international and 99% of Hollywood celebrities openly calling him names?
If there was any interference it was by Democrat-controlled State agencies, billionaire-controlled media and uncontrolled tech giants.
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@Stawek
US system is predicated on pretty strong rules of financing of presidential campaigns. When another country comes in and buys a metric ton of ads for a candidate, this breaks the system in a very real way.
That being said, i find this system bs and imo everyone is perfectly entitled to getting money wherever they can. So the whole thing looks like a non-issue to me.
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Gevlon,
I know its a day old but I can’t leave that last one alone.
You’ve said “some Trump campaign people did various crimes? Of course. But why should I care about these nobodies”
I’m going to leave Donald Trump Jr (you know, the president’s son) out, and concentrate on the list I gave in my previous post – i.e. Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn
So, George Papadopoulos is a legit nobody -an unpaid foreign policy adviser. But still one picked by Trumps team and who met Trump several times. So a lot less of a nobody than you or I
Roger Stone -Trump’s friend for over 30 years, and backed TRump’s campaign – not just this one, but also the one he did for the Libertarian party or whatever back in 2000. Trusted adviser – in Trump’s words
Paul Manafort – Trump Campaign Manager, and the person who was in charge of organising the Republican Convention
Carter Page – Foreign policy adviser. Met Trump numerous times. Was in direct and frequent contact with Hope Hicks, Lewandowski and JD Gordon (from Senate Intelligence hearing)
Michael Flynn -His freaking National Security Adviser. (Oh, and Also an adviser to ISIS supporting Reccep Erdogan)
That is not a list of nobodies.
Let’s leave Obama alone, because he’s a bit of a touchstone. How many Bush appointees at this level were accuseed, let alone convicted and plead guilty to these sort of crimes?
You should get your head out of the sand. You pride yourself on unemotional analytics.
But you’ve got a huge blind spot on this one.
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@Buboe: Go figure, politics is full of crooks who take illegal money for favors – who would have guessed? Feel free to lock them all up and see if I (or the Trump supporters) care. The Clinton foundation took over a hundred million dollars from foreign governments. This is how politics operates in liberal countries. Fun fact: Manafort was working for the Podesta group during the time of his crimes.
About the Bush administration. Those guys lied about nukes and used them as excuse for an unprovoked aggression that lead to the death of over 300K people. Yes, totally the same league.
The only difference is that the actions of Bush, Obama and Clinton was swept under the carpet by the career bureaucrats and the media, while they turn every stone, including breaking laws themselves to catch as many Trump staffers as they can.
That doesn’t bother me. In 2024 it will be Trump’s FBI placing “informants” into the Dem campaign and use FISA warrants to spy on them and millions of dollars special prosecutors to go over every dollar they ever earned.
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But there are only two choices. Several people in Trump’s inner circle (including his campaign manager) have been indicted by the judicial branch of the federal government. Either they’re right and there is sufficient evidence to get a FISA warrant on people close to him, or the entire judiciary is entangled in a conspiracy. They keep coming back with new information to add to the warrant, new reasons to believe that people in his inner circle is a foreign agent. They’re either right, lying, or mistaken, and the chances that such a multifaceted investigation (~10 people in his inner circle are publicly accused, several agencies are involved, many judges have signed off saying that there is justification for it) are tilting at windmills is just not a serious possibility.
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@Anon: you still don’t get it. It’s completely irrelevant if some Trump staffers are criminals. That doesn’t make Trump illegitimate. You can’t remove a president for having criminal associates, evidenced by the fact that no one tries to do it.
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If Trump, Ivanka, or Jared are convicted, would you agree that the conspiracy is real? Because those are the only people more closely connected to Trump than Paul Manafort, his campaign manager who is currently in jail. The “conspiracy” never said that Trump had to be the mastermind, only that all of his closest allies are. So he’s either a dupe, who is blindly being advised by foreign agents, or he’s somehow involved.
We know that Russia hacked and used propaganda to get Trump elected. All independent US intelligence agencies say this. If you deny that, you are saying that they (and the Department of Justice) are right, lying, or utterly incompetent at every level.
Trump might’ve been involved, he might not. It’s being investigated. But people have been indicted and convicted to prove that many of Trump’s people were foreign agents, and that Russia attacked the US election. That doesn’t necessarily make Trump illegitimate, and he couldn’t help Putin if he wanted to (Congress prevents him from, for example, removing sanctions on Russian oligarchs). But there’s no middle ground on the other things.
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@Anon: Manafort is charged with campaign finance violations done long before he met Trump, back when he was working for Podesta.
You BELIEVE that Russia hacked for Trump. You have exactly zero evidence for that. There are no “independent” intelligence agencies, they are political as hell and clearly hate Trump. Obama had zero evidence too, otherwise he’d done something.
The middle ground is exactly what I wrote. No one (relevant) did anything illegal, it’s all just propaganda and catching little guys for jaywalking.
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1) it isn’t illegal to buy ads. (All of the alleged Russian ads I’ve seen are issue ads, not advocating explicitly for either candidate, which don’t require registration in the US.)
2) It isn’t an attack for a foreign power to attempt to sway an election. In that case, America should be declaring war on Mexico and Israel long before Russia. In addition, about 200 countries around the world should be planning to declare war on America for interfering in their elections (including Russia.)
3) Where is the evidence that what Russia did was harmful to America or to democracy? If they didn’t hack any voting machines, and it actually was Americans voting in the American election, where is the problem? That Russians were talking? That’s the “threat to democracy?” That we listen to the what the rest of the world says?
If that is the case, wasn’t every fucking country in the world “interfering” with the US election when they told us how wonderful and fantastic Barack Obama was and how horrible and disgusting John McCain and Mitt Romney were?
How is it NOT a threat to democracy for an Englishman to say that he loves Obama but is a threat to democracy for a Russian to say he loves Trump?
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