Foil politics in the age of Trump
The recent memorials for late US Republican senator John McCain were, at least on the surface, occasions to commemorate the life of a notable American dignitary. But in both form and content, they conveyed a deeper meaning than that.
Glioblastoma is an aggressive, debilitating brain cancer, and I wouldn’t wish McCain’s fate on anyone. Still, moral people have a responsibility to separate any sympathy we may presently feel for McCain and his loved ones from our assessment of his real record as a public figure. Unless robustly challenged, official stories become official history, and affect the future considerations of both policymakers and a press charged with holding them to account.
One after another, McCain’s prominent eulogists both at the ceremonies themselves and in the surrounding politico-media discussion have heaped praise on not only on the senator himself, but his legacy and the values he supposedly embodied. This extraordinary fanfare over McCain’s death — including outpourings of grief, fond if selective remembrances, and more than a few outright absurdities (what on earth is a “warrior for peace?”)— symbolizes far more than the legacy of a single man. It reflects the aloofness and collective narcissism of Washington’s policy establishment — a group inattentive to many of the tangible consequences of its own deeds, and enamored of an idealized, largely delusional self-image.
Typical terms of commendation for McCain cite his supposed extraordinary decency and integrity, his penchant for building unity and consensus across ideological lines, his “maverick” sensibility.
To his credit, McCain was a reasonably consistent opponent of torture, defying bipartisan peer pressure, and he supported the release of a Senate investigation into that practice under the administration of George W. Bush. This is what passes for a redeeming quality in Washington.
But the most salient trait of McCain’s political outlook was ardent, knee-jerk support for American military intervention, no matter how dubious its stated justification. As Max Blumenthal notes, McCain wasn’t averse to backing ideologically extremist factions, including jihadis or neo-Nazis — as long as their depredations happened to advance the interests of America’s imperium. And though he often postured as an adversary of the blowhard-in-chief, he voted to ratify President Donald Trump’s legislative proposals far more often than not. His “maverick” nature also led him to select Sarah Palin as his running mate on the Republican presidential ticket in 2008.
That McCain is a “war hero” with an unimpeachable record of “service to his country” is an iron dogma in elite circles. But in reality, McCain was an aviator shot down and captured while on his way to bomb a civilian lightbulb factory, partaking of a savage war of aggression in Vietnam. That he endured torture and beatings at the hands of his captors in no way mitigates his own complicity in extraordinary violence and war crimes.
Anyone seeking to expose the roots of contemporary American racism and xenophobia — a frequent preoccupation of American liberals, many of whom justifiably attribute Trump’s unlikely victory in the 2016 election in part to that social scourge— would do well to ponder why a man with McCain’s track record should today receive such fulsome plaudits from across the mainstream political spectrum. Is it reasonable that ardent devotion to the cause of American military intervention in Indochina — which involved carpet-bombing and indiscriminate massacres of civilians, dousing of a country with toxic defoliants, and a blatantly illegal blitz of Cambodia (which McCain defended soon after returning home from captivity in Vietnam) — should be celebrated decades later as “heroism”?
Note that such atrocities were rationalized at the time, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, on the ground that “the Oriental” values life far less than the American of European stock does. For his part, McCain claimed in 2000 that he would “hate the gooks” as long as he lived.
To exemplify McCain’s supposed leadership, a video has made the rounds on social media in which, while campaigning for the presidency in 2008, McCain negates a woman’s statement that she distrusts then-presidential candidate Barack Obama because he’s “an Arab”. (He isn’t, of course, but that’s beside the point.) McCain rebuts this charge by describing Obama as a “decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with”. This exchange, though perhaps well intentioned on McCain’s part, carries the unfortunate connotation that the categories “Arab” and “decent family man and citizen with whom one happens to disagree” are mutually exclusive.
McCain was a reliably enthusiastic endorser of American military (mis)adventures in the Middle East, among them the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, the 2011 NATO regime change operation in Libya, and the ongoing proxy war in Syria — conflicts that have incidentally claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs.
He was also a leading water-carrier for the Washington-centric conception of Human Rights™ — namely, selective deployment of human rights-based criticism (often married with economic sanctions or other forms of low-level aggression) as a political cudgel against US adversaries. This longstanding double standard of US foreign policy is spelled out with unusual clarity in a 2017 memo to Trump’s former secretary of state Rex Tillerson, written by the chief diplomat’s aide Brian Hook:
The classic dilemma of balancing ideals and interests is with regard to America’s allies. In relation to our competitors, there is far less of a dilemma. We do not look to bolster America’s adversaries overseas; we look to pressure, compete with, and outmaneuver them.
For this reason, we should consider human rights as an important issue in regard to U.S. relations with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. And this is not only because of moral concern for practices inside those countries. It is also because pressing those regimes on human rights is one way to impose costs, apply counter-pressure, and regain the initiative from them strategically.
This framework also implies no inconsistency between, on one hand, supporting or participating in wars of aggression that killed millions, calling for sanctions on US adversary states with the express intent of inflicting hardship on their populations, defending a totalitarian regime as it spearheads a near-genocidal assault on an impoverished neighbour, and building alliances with Nazis and al Qaeda affiliates — and on the other hand, being recognized as a principled, consistent defender of Human Rights™. The response to McCain’s passing from principals of the world’s leading human rights NGOs, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, suggests not only their considerable admiration for McCain, but also, indirectly, the influence that the above-mentioned approach to human rights exerts over those organizations.
For their part, the corporate media in the US and internationally, many of which have lately positioned themselves as champions of the #Resistance, have echoed and amplified praise for McCain.
However, perhaps even more intriguing than the largely incongruous reverence heaped on the late senator, is the way a halcyon, distorted picture of him has been favourably contrasted with the real politics and style of Trump.
This typifies what I call foil politics: the promotion of a candidate, bloc, or political coalition through juxtaposition with an unsavoury Other. Often, this technique involves deception, including exaggeration of both the former’s virtues and the latter’s comparative faults. It culminates in an appeal to authority and emotion rather than rationality.
The Washington establishment’s real concern
Reporter, the aptly-named memoir of veteran American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh (Knopf, 2018), bears testament to the tendency of official histories to inform the present.
In Chapter 18, Hersh provides an overview of the political climate in scandal-ridden post-Watergate Washington, and the attitudes of both ordinary Americans and their elected representatives to the seats of institutional power, and the FBI and CIA in particular. From the perspective of the national security state, it’s not a pretty picture:
America had slowly, but emphatically, turned against the Vietnam War, with its fifty-eight thousand combat deaths, horrific brutalities, and most important, resounding defeat at the hands of an outgunned guerrilla force. The Watergate scandals had forced Nixon from office and put investigative reporting, albeit briefly, on a pedestal. Stories about illegal wiretapping of Washington officials, official lying as codified in the Pentagon Papers, and the CIA’s covert activities in Chile and Africa had raised obvious questions about the integrity and competence of those who ran Washington.
In other words, it was a moment of profound skepticism of the US government by the American public, and distrust in elite rule and its machinations more broadly. It’s safe to infer that America’s current power elite, and the politicians, officials, news organizations, and commentators who represent it, are keen to avoid a resurgence of anything resembling that today.
Trump as foil of the establishment
Given the presence in the White House of a bigoted buffoon, the widespread popular disgust for both him and his reactionary policies, and the obvious discontent with the status quo of the voters who elevated him to executive power, America’s power elite has ample reason to fear renewed hostility to the high institutions of state. But the elites are nothing if not politically shrewd, and amid crisis, they sense opportunity. If they can succeed in framing themselves as paragons of virtue and integrity in contrast to Trump, they can re-establish a toehold of authority in what might otherwise be troubled times for them. Such an effort requires that the public overlook the establishment’s numerous failures, crimes, and misdeeds of recent decades, and as such, requires a sustained propaganda drive of immense proportions. Liberal elites are doing their part by helping to rehabilitate neoconservatives and once-despised figures like George W. Bush.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and the extraordinary ties that supposedly bind it to Trump, has a key role to play in this exercise, as the principal foreign scapegoat for the Washington establishment’s entirely domestic predicament. It’s no coincidence that #Resistance-aligned media, in their reporting on Russia-Trump ties and the supposed Russian threat to America, consistently err in the same direction — i.e. that of exaggeration rather than understatement of the Russian menace. That Trump is evil because he’s “soft” on Putin, and McCain was angelic because he was tough on Putin, is a concept the promoters of Russiagate desperately want you to internalize.
In fact, the bulk of Trump’s political agenda is welcomed by many members of the power elite, particularly those at the commanding heights of the private sector and high finance. The elite seek to keep this gravy train rolling while encouraging public hostility to Trump chiefly on the basis of his proverbial “Russia ties” — thereby diverting public scrutiny and animosity away from themselves, and into establishment-friendly channels.
As Noam Chomsky points out, Trump has amply demonstrated his prowess as a showman and con artist, and constantly orchestrates distractions; Russiagate and its various spin-off scandals have accentuated this characteristic of his. Meanwhile, under cover of a barrage of inanity and manufactured outrage, the administration and Republican legislators are dismantling what little remains of protections for workers, the commons, the environment, and the social safety net, and entrenching a right-wing judiciary, while siphoning yet more lucre to the already opulent pinnacle of the wealth distribution.
Meaningful democracy can’t endure the unprecedented degree of social and economic inequality that prevails in the contemporary US, and which Trump’s policies are exacerbating. As this process has advanced over many years, the millions struggling paycheck-to-paycheck have come to share ever fewer common interests with the insular billionaire claque. This invites both widespread discontent and increasingly aggressive moves by the extremely wealthy to parlay their fortunes into political influence, and bulwark their status against any leveling impulse that might arise from the rabble. Invariably, the result is de facto (if not de jure) plutocracy. See, for example, the work of political scientist Thomas Ferguson and his colleagues on the investment theory of party competition, and analysis of the 2016 election.
The present campaign to promote a sense of “unity” as opposed to “discord”, and the active state-corporate censorship of online independent media and commentary, reflect the elite’s desire to consolidate control over public narratives, and artificially revive a nationalistic conception of Americans’ supposed common interests at the expense of class consciousness.
Their fixation on a supposed Kremlin “influence campaign”, whose impact on the 2016 election appears negligible at most, is almost certainly not an expression of genuine concern for the health of American democracy. After all, a power elite by nature has little vested interest in functional democracy. But it does have plenty of reason to fear the left — the political constituency best positioned to unite the masses around a reformist (or even revolutionary) economic agenda.
The ability to steer the perceptions and priorities of liberals and progressives in directions innocuous or even beneficial to themselves is of considerable value to the elite. To that end, the Russiagate campaign and special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation have proven reasonably serviceable. There’s a stark contrast between the contemporary enthusiasm of liberals and some progressives for the intelligence agencies, prosectors, and the military, and Hersh’s portrait of the early 1970s, when the disdain of the same political constituency for the violent and coercive institutions of the state was profound. The skill with which the elite have co-opted opposition to Trump largely accounts for the difference.
Here the logical fallacy of foil politics is on conspicuous display again. Trump appears intent on discrediting Mueller’s investigation and claims it is unjustified; as far as many liberals are concerned, this means Mueller’s investigation must be thoroughly credible and justified, and Mueller himself must be something akin to a saint.
Though Trump is a card-carrying member of the power elite, and his agenda poses no existential threat to elite rule, his personal style has surely alienated doyens of the Washington establishment. Clearly, an internecine struggle is underway within the elite over control of America’s destiny, but neither of the contending factions is democratic or progressive in nature. Both of the partisan Russiagate orthodoxies ultimately serve one or the other of these competing juntas. If you believe Trump colluded with Russians to rig the 2016 election by surreptitiously brainwashing the electorate, you may consider it imperative that Americans rally behind establishment Democrats, neoconservatives, intelligence agencies, the military, and Mueller. If you believe Trump has been targeted by a Deep State operation deadset on a palace coup, you may conclude that his base should rally behind him and like-minded Republicans.
Still, Trump’s bluster, ignorance, lack of refinement, and frequent outbursts of stupidity, bigotry, and petty rancour do pose an across-the-board downside for America’s elite. Not only are they deeply embarrassing; they engender widespread disfavour both at home and abroad, and sabotage the network of alliances, commercial relationships, and client states that have amplified American power at least since the end of World War II. Trump has also extended rather measly olive branches to a pair of designated adversaries: Putin and North Korean chairman Kim Jong-un. All of these dispositions erode the projection of American might — reliant as it is on strategic alliances, officially designated enemies, consistency, and credible intimidation — so many American elites have reason to regard them as a nuisance. John McCain would intensely disapprove.
For the sake of their global standing, most of America’s power elite would surely prefer a more articulate, more pliant, less abrasive figurehead than Trump; from their perspective, his deputy Mike Pence would do. But that doesn’t necessarily imply consensus among the elites that they’d be better off without Trump, let alone that removal of the president is an urgent priority. After all, his incoherent, bellicose trade policies notwithstanding, he’s doing no harm to their investment portfolios.
#Resistance from within
A recent and highly controversial New York Times editorial, ostensibly by an unnamed Trump administration official working in secret to undermine aspects of the president’s agenda, offers a snapshot of the conflicted elite appraisal of the president: “We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America [read: our core constituency of billionaires and Wall Street] safer and more prosperous.”
Despite his approval of said policies, the author goes on to identify as core concerns the “amorality”, “impulsiveness”, “erratic behaviour”, and lack of commitment to principle of the president. Demonstrating an ego befitting a Trump associate, Anonymous identifies himself and his fellows as “unsung heroes” within the administration. Yet he offers few concrete examples of incidents that caused him distress.
He claims that Trump shows a “preference for autocrats and dictators”, but this of course signals one of Trump’s few defensible inclinations: the expressed desire for detente with designated US adversaries Russia and North Korea. Anonymous is presumably far less discomfited by the affinity of Trump and past presidents for the autocratic rulers of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, or any of a number of other Trump-friendly strongmen he neglects to mention.
More broadly, Anonymous alleges that Trump shows little dedication to the supposed “conservative” values of “free minds, free markets, free people” — but these are dogmatic platitudes, devoid of intellectual or practical content. Anonymous’ complaints about Trump’s “anti-democratic” instincts ring equally hollow.
The spectre of a cabal of unaccountable, non-transparent, unelected insiders sabotaging the political agenda of a legally elected president is itself a direct challenge to any coherent principle of democracy and popular sovereignty, ably examined by Glenn Greenwald and others here. Indeed, that the efforts of Anonymous and his like-minded fellows are not being widely denounced as “meddling in American democracy” is itself quite revealing.
Predictably, Anonymous echoes establishment Russiagate tropes, expressing dismay at Trump’s reluctance to further escalate hostilities with Russia (“hold Moscow accountable”) over as-yet unproven charges of election interference and poisonings on British soil. Never mind that the two countries possessing the world’s largest nuclear arsenals are on the brink of a shooting war in multiple flashpoints, with Trump having gone to greater lengths than his precedessor to appease the vocal and highly persistent anti-Russia lobby.
Anonymous concludes with a couple of paragraphs lionizing Trump’s foil John McCain along familiar lines.
The editorial’s contribution to public discourse is useless from a whistleblowing standpoint, and too light on specifics to inform the Times’ readership about anything of value to them. But the article’s provenance at the end of a long summer makes sense if Anonymous’ intent is to influence public opinion with midterm elections approaching, portraying the president as a loose cannon while reinforcing an elite-contrived, beneficent image of John McCain and the Washington establishment he represents. Trump’s frenetic search for the alleged turncoat(s) within his cabinet is a predictable consequence as well, inviting the surmise that Anonymous meant to provoke exactly that reaction, perhaps to validate his own argument.
Russia and Syria as foils of the US and Washington bloc
The legendary investigative journalist I.F. Stone remarked that “all governments lie”. That observation is as accurate now as it was when Stone first made it, and journalists disregard it at their peril.
Yet in their coverage of issues involving Russia since the start of the Ukraine civil conflict in 2014, Western legacy media have typically relied on a very different principle: assertions by Russian government officials should be presumed false; in contrast, allegations by Western governments against Russia should be presumed true until either conspicuously proven false, or disappeared down the memory hole. In this calculus, verifiable evidence is, at best, deprioritized.
Consider the ongoing controversy over Russian “meddling” in the 2016 US election and its aftermath. In press coverage of the July 2018 Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki, as on many previous occasions, a common refrain was that Trump seemed more inclined to trust Putin’s denial of Russian election interference than the “conclusions” of his own intelligence agencies. This slogan carries an obvious if unstated value judgement: only a moron, or else some kind of traitor or useful idiot of the Kremlin, would question the reality and significance of Russian subversion of the election.
By now, a figurative lightbulb may have lit up in you brain: the press’s demand for absolute credence in the findings of the intelligence agencies, and reflexive rejection of Putin’s denials, is addressed not only at Trump, but more importantly, at us.
No rational person should blindly obey this commandment. Carefully review the crucial January 6, 2017 joint intelligence report, and you’ll find the disclaimer that the intelligence agencies have no proof of their assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. One should also take into account the distinct possibility that the process by which that report took shape was politicized. Keeping up with more recent developments, one should understand that prosecutorial indictments — no matter how detailed — are not the same as verifiable evidence.
It’s possible that Trump is privy to classified information demonstrating beyond a reasonable doubt that Russian operatives deliberately and significantly manipulated the election on his behalf. But his pronouncements on the subject, whether affirming or impugning the intelligence agencies’ judgements, are useless as barometers of their credibility.
A rational person should also acknowledge the history representatives of the US intelligence agencies and the Russian government both have of prevarication (and worse), and exercise due skepticism of their self-interested claims. Take this approach to Western official charges against Russia or its allies in today’s politico-media climate, though, and you’re liable to earn a disparaging moniker like “apologist”.
Western official and media responses to a series of recent, real or alleged chemical weapons incidents are equally instructive.
Concerning Syria, Western official claims about the nature of events in Eastern Ghouta (2013), Khan Sheykhoun (2017), and Douma (2018) have all been contested by highly qualified experts and credible journalists.
As columnist Peter Hitchens reports in The Daily Mail about Khan Sheykhoun:
I have checked several of the Syrian poison gas claims in the past, by reading carefully the reports of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Here are the two most important: the OPCW never even went to the site of the alleged gas attack in Khan Sheikhoun in April 2017, which was the pretext for a spectacular American cruise missile attack on Syria.
I also found that there was no reliable custody chain for the samples supposedly taken from this site.
This is vital for the detailed forensic work that alone can discover what happened and who is to blame.
How important is this? Ask the OPCW. In April 2013, the OPCW’s then spokesman, Michael Luhan, said quite clearly: ‘The OPCW would never get involved in testing samples that our own inspectors don’t gather in the field because we need to maintain chain of custody of samples from the field to the lab to ensure their integrity.’
Bolstering the case for skepticism, Trump’s national security advisor James Mattis stated in February of this year that the administration had “no evidence” of past combat use of the nerve agent sarin by Assad’s forces — contradicting an already dubious White House “intelligence” assessment, presented to the public as justification for supposed retaliatory strikes by the US in 2017.
The evidentiary basis for the alleged 2018 chemical attack in Douma — the rationale for fresh cruise missile attacks on Syrian targets by the US, UK, and France — is even weaker: as of this writing, there remains no conclusive ground for the claim that chemical weapons were deployed there at all.
Some Western officials, notably including British prime minister Theresa May and French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, charged that inspectors from the UN Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons had been deliberately barred from Douma by Russian and Syrian security forces. Naturally, this invited speculation of a joint Russian-Syrian cover-up. But these allegations and conjectures, reported prominently by Western legacy news organizations, turned out to be misleading; according to OPCW director-general Ahmet Üzümcü, the delay owed to justified caution in a live combat zone by the UN’s Department of Safety and Security, not Russo-Syrian obstructionism.
Whatever else you believe, it’s an officially acknowledged fact that ground forces opposing the Syrian government have had access to chemical weapons for years. Given the “red line” position Western governments have taken, it’s obvious that opposition fighters have both motive and opportunity to deploy those weapons in such a way as to falsely implicate the Syrian military. And it’s equally clear that Western officials have few qualms over misleading the public about Russian and Syrian activities in order to justify military intervention, economic sanctions, and other manifestations of enmity.
Nonetheless, standard practice among US and other Western legacy media is to attribute all prominent real or perceived chemical weapons incidents in Syria to Assad’s government, in a matter-of-fact tone, as if it were common sense. Challenges to this party line are often not only summarily dismissed, but accompanied by insinuations that the skeptic is an Assad apologist, Kremlin proxy, or both.
Information war
The paradigm of “Russian propaganda and disinformation” holds that Russia is conducting an “information war” against Western governments, and intentionally sowing doubts about events and circumstances that are really unambiguous.
This charge has evoked a kind of Pavlovian response from legacy media and many journalists they employ. If Russia is trying to undermine the credibility of Western governments — if indeed we are at war, and disinformation is Russia’s weapon of choice — the appropriate, patriotic response is to resolutely believe and support one’s own government. If Russia is actively obfuscating the actions and intentions of itself and its allies, the antidote is to marginalize, censor, or otherwise suppress doubters, and malign reasonable skepticism as an asset of the enemy [4:20].
In sum, the Russia foil plays a powerful propaganda role, conditioning Western media, and in turn, Western publics, to be more credulous and less resistant to their own governments’ messaging.
This dynamic has been on display in the British legacy media’s coverage of the poisoning of ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia.
While it’s reasonable to identify the Russian state as a suspect in that crime, the details of the official narrative are hard to swallow. How plausible is it that Putin would order the assassination on British soil of a former Russian spy and prison inmate, using the clumsy and self-incriminating method of poisoning with an easily detectable compound first developed in the Soviet Union, thereby inviting a fresh round of sanctions and opprobrium on Russia leading up to the World Cup football tournament? How likely is it that the would-be Russian intelligence assassins were so careless and incompetent that they didn’t bother to verify the kill, and eventually discarded the poison vessel in a public place, where it somehow remained undiscovered by police and investigators for months?
Whither Russiagate if Trump is impeached?
I expect the Russiagate fever to persist throughout Trump’s period in office, and break only in the event of successful impeachment of the president. Though Trump’s likely replacement Pence is no less a beneficiary of Russian interference than his boss, the trajectory of Russiagate thus far suggests logical consistency is probably not in the cards.
Liberals’ wholesale embrace of the narrative notwithstanding, there will remain independent holdouts and skeptics among the population at large who continue to suspect Russiagate and the Mueller probe are politically motivated on some level; to suppress these thoughtcrimes, the elites will deem necessary ongoing indoctrination and further internet censorship. The notion that “Russians” (now joined by Iranians and other residents of designated adversary states) are fomenting discord and discontent in America provides cover for the censorship drive, which serves to undermine the utility of the internet as a practical tool for political organizing and information-sharing. The heavily monopolized character of the modern internet, combined with the abolition of net neutrality, have provided the state an online First Amendment work-around.
Russiagate has evolved into an anti-democratic assault on the left, masquerading as a defence of democracy and legitimate politico-legal offensive against Trump. It’s hard to overstate the folly of self-identified progressives who uncritically cheer on the likes of Mueller and the intelligence agencies, endorse online censorship in the name of combatting “foreign propaganda” or “conspiracy theories”, and generally credit the elites’ pretext of bulwarking American democracy.
The elites broadly delight in the emergence of this Muellerite “left”, and will grudgingly abide the Trumpian right. But as we lurch toward what seems inevitable — a forthcoming financial and economic crisis even more severe than the global earthquake a decade ago — the elites’ anxiety over the prospect of a broad anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist mobilization is growing, hence their desire to exert greater control over the means of narrative production and communication.
On the bright side, Russiagate has delivered a revelatory litmus test of leftists’ bona fides. We now know who is likely to jettison core progressive principles under the duress of a reactionary and obnoxious president, with the temptation of a politically and intellectually effortless but fundamentally right-wing, authoritarian “resistance” close at hand.
Trump exploits his own brand of foil politics
Despite his frequently hysterical anti-Mueller tweets, I sometimes wonder whether Trump refrains from firing the special counsel for self-interested reasons.
Considering the apparent absence of a justificatory predicate crime (even if persuasive evidence existed, “collusion” and “coordination” are not statutory criminal offences), the Mueller probe plausibly resembles a petty attempt by a political old guard to undermine an espied outsider in Trump. It has thus generated a prime opportunity for the president to conduct foil politics of his own, casting himself as the perpetual victim of a “rigged Deep State witch hunt”. His attacks on the special counsel evoke predictable outrage from Muellerites and sympathy from his base, in the process distracting both political factions from more pressing concerns.
A disinterested appraisal of Trump’s record in office reveals that he has let down many of the voters who supported him in 2016: for instance, campaign promises of a better health care system, the long-overdue “draining” of the “swamp”, improved diplomatic relations between the US and Russia, The Wall, and a less hawkish foreign policy overall have not materialized. Under these circumstances, one might reasonably expect support for Trump among his base to wane.
But the Russiagate commotion and Mueller probe have (inadvertently?) afforded the president a convenient set of excuses. Trump is clearly battling oppositional forces within both the state and the broader establishment; never mind that some of the circumstances troubling him are of his own device. The pitch to his base is: I am one of you, an outsider, a straight talker; I still deserve your support. And it resonates with many of his erstwhile voters. Though Trump’s job approval rating nationwide is around 40 percent and slumping, and in single-digits among Democrats, it’s still close to 90 percent along Republicans.
If Trump is not supplanted through impeachment or some other extra-electoral manoeuvre, Russiagate and Mueller will continue to exert pressure on him to implement the Russia-hostile and generally hawkish foreign policy desired by the Washington establishment. Of course, Trump also has plenty of hawkish instincts of his own. Many of his supporters have been hoodwinked by the administration’s insistence on the nobility of US aggression against Iran and Venezuela, and cruise missile strikes on Syria.
In large numbers, rank-and-file Republicans are either persuaded by the president’s portrayal of himself as hapless, or prepared to resort to mental gymnastics to rationalize their continued support for a figure with whom they personally sympathize, despite his numerous shortcomings and broken promises. (This is not a defect unique to Trump voters; progressive-ish Obama supporters evince a similar bias to this day.) One consequence of Mueller and Russiagate, paradoxically, has been a deepening and entrenchment of the longstanding, enforced partisan division in American society between so-called “liberals” and “conservatives”. So much for Russiagaters’ designs on reducing division and discord.
Given both the sustained enthusiasm for Trump among Republican voters, and a growing but broadly unpopular affinity between the Democratic Party and the police, surveillance, intelligence, and military branches of the state, don’t discount the possibility that Trump will win a second presidential term in 2020. His foil politics — embodied in strident denunciations of Mueller, the Deep State, former intelligence officials who oppose him, and his own Justice Department appointee Rod Rosenstein, among others— will continue to play a prominent role in his angling for re-election.
The always far-fetched liberal fantasy that the Mueller probe will someday adduce overwhelming evidence of a criminal Trump-Russia electoral conspiracy — sufficient to convince tens of millions of Trump voters that they were indeed brainwashed by Putin, that their votes in 2016 thus shouldn’t have counted, and that they should now abandon the president without reservation — seems less tenable with each passing day.
On the other hand, there is broad support among the American public for sensible progressive reforms, including single-payer health care, investment in infrastructure, climate change action, serious measures to reduce the role of money in politics, shoring up of social security, and de-escalation of foreign conflicts, including Israel-Palestine. The likeliest way for Trump’s political opponents to energize their base and prevent his second term is to attack his administration’s policies, emphasizing how they’ve fallen short of or even undercut those popular desiderata. (This wouldn’t be difficult.) But neither the leadership of the Democratic Party nor the elite factions it serves seem committed to doing so; they would rather run in 2018 and 2020 primarily against Trump’s unpopularity and supposed bromance with Putin, hoping those factors suffice to turn the electoral tide in their party’s favour.
Maybe they’re right, but I wouldn’t bet on it, especially in 2020. Even if they do manage to secure power, establishment Democrats are likely to keep advancing the interests of their constituents in the war machine and intelligence agencies, rather than those of most Americans.
These Democrats share much in common with the international liberal elite. The death of the liberal class is finished; the “liberals” who populate mainstream politics today are ideologically undead, a vampire legion determined to Make Neoconservatism Great Again. Only a progressive mass mobilization can counteract both Trump and the wave of repressive, misanthropic politics sweeping much of the Western world, and represented in both of America’s mainstream political parties.
By no means should US progressives rely on Robert Mueller or the institutions of the power apparatus to deliver the republic from evil. These figures are not friends of the left, and politics is not a spectator sport.
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