The Two-year Tantrum

With the release of a redacted Mueller report expected soon, it’s worth reviewing the conspiracy theory that initially prompted the investigation. While the Mueller report will almost certainly contain damaging, unflattering information about Trump and his associates, U.S. Attorney General William Barr has already summarized the key findings of the investigation — there was no collusion between Russia and any American associated with the Trump campaign.

With this no-collusion conclusion, it is apparent that the Russia conspiracy theory hysteria that dominated our national politics and culture since 2016 was a huge waste of everyone’s time. Instead of responsible leadership and guidance from political and media elites, we were treated to self-indulgent nonsense about unlikely international conspiracies. At a critical point in our national politics, our elites abandoned any pretense of seriousness and embarked on what turned into a two-year tantrum.

Prominent congresspersons, former U.S. intelligence and law enforcement chiefs, and popular journalists and TV personalities spent two years predicting that the Trump presidency would end as soon as the treasonous conduct of the Trump campaign was proved. They created such high expectations among the news-reading public that NPR could run stories about elderly people who were anxious to extend their lives to live long enough to see the release of the Mueller report — the story was newsworthy not because the profiled subjects were unusually anxious about the Special Counsel investigation, but because they had a normal level of interest in the report while facing imminent death. It was hugely irresponsible to create that level of expectation among the public for something that turned out to be nothing. Anyone who missed the millions of words wasted on speculation about Russian conspiracy theories could be brought up to date with a mere four words: “don’t worry about it.”

Functionally, the possibility of Russian collusion was attractive because it gave respectability to media obsessions with Trump’s usually petty dishonesty. Politicians and journalists weren’t just complaining obnoxiously that Trump exaggerated the size of the crowd at his inauguration, they were highlighting the untrustworthiness of a man who might have committed treason to steal an election. By keeping Russian collusion in the news, every day for more than two years, they gave dignity and salience to their mostly petty and irrelevant complaints about Trump. When Trump said nice things about Putin, the liberal elite could use the treason allegation as background to indulge their strong feelings and characterize something like a press conference as literally treason.

But it should have been obvious the entire time that no collusion or treason was likely. The fact that many journalists and politicians credited these conspiracy theories is remarkable, but explainable.

— — — —

Shortly after Robert Mueller was appointed Special Counsel, in the spring of 2017, I tried to understand the collusion allegations and wrote two hypothetical dialogues. This is what I knew, and what everyone, arguably, should have known, two years ago.

Here’s approximately what you have to accept in order to believe that Trump colluded with Russia to influence the election:The DNC was hacked in April of 2016, and John Podesta, the source of most of Clinton’s leaked emails, was “hacked” (i.e. personally divulged his email password in a phishing scheme) in March of 2016. These emails were publicly released in July.Trump would either have colluded with the Russians to publicize these emails before or after the hacks.

If the collusion occurred before the hacks, it would mean that Trump and Russia made an agreement without anyone knowing what would be in those emails, or whether the hacking would be successful at all.

Trump:So what is your plan to get materials that compromiseHillary Clinton?

Putin: We’re going to email one of her employees and ask for his password. Once he gives it to us, we’re going to hope that he has thousands of archived emails from Hillary. Then we’re going to hope that what is in those emails is sufficiently damaging to Hillary that she won’t be elected president. Also, even though it is early in 2016 and you haven’t even secured the Republican nomination yet, and very few serious people in the US believe you have a chance to be president, we came to you (or you to us — I can’t remember anymore) with this uncertain plan to get uncertain emails that will uncertainly help you win the presidency. Obviously, the very existence of this arrangement, if made public, will permanently destroy your entire life — your business and TV show will fail, you may or may not face criminal charges, and you won’t be able to appear in public ever again.Thanks for risking literally everything you’ve ever accomplished in your life to make this arrangement. Also, it would be pretty bad for us too if this is discovered. But let’s do it anyway!

Trump: Sure. Makes sense to me.

Putin: Oh, if we do this, like, you have to do stuff for us.

Trump: Like what? Obama already let you annex Crimea and saved your friend Assad by intervening in Syria, and you’re becoming very friendly with Turkey.

Putin: I’ll think of something. I probably won’t come up with anything for about 18 months though — you’ll be at least six months into the presidency before you have to do anything that helps us.

Trump: OK. But wait. If we make this agreement, then once I’m president you’ll be able to blackmail me. My presidency and career and life will be ruined if you disclose this — won’t I be forced to do everything you want?

Putin: Yes.

Trump: But why would I consent to being potentially blackmailed throughout my entire presidency just so you can possibly reveal information that might not even result in me becoming president?

Putin: You’re Trump, you’re a wild card! It doesn’t have to make sense; just do what feels right.

Trump: Sign me up!

Does this seem even plausible?

Maybe after the Russians had hacked the DNC and John Podesta, then either they approached Trump, or Trump, via his Russia-connected surrogates, approached Russia.

Putin: Hey Donny, we have all these emails from the Democrats. They look pretty bad!

Trump: Perfect! A smoking gun that will lead to Hillary being indicted by the FBI!

Putin: I didn’t say smoking gun. Also, your FBI doesn’t make decisions about indictments. That’s the Attorney General’s job.

Trump: How could I have made that mistake? Anyway, so it’s not a smoking gun? Will it at least be so politically damning that Hillary won’t be able to win the election?

Putin: Who knows! It’s summer of 2016, and some Republicans are talking about boycotting the convention, or recruiting Mitt Romney to supplant you. Virtually everyone thinks Hillary will definitely win the election. But we can still make this agreement and risk your career, personal liberty, and reputation!

Trump: Perfect! But wait. Why should I make this agreement? Does this mean if I say no, you’ll sit on the emails and not make them public?

Putin: Well think about it Donny — either the emails have value as a threat against Hillary during her presidency, or they have value as a way to ensure Hillary doesn’t become president. Most American political forecasters are giving you about a ten percent chance of becoming president. New York Times says two percent.

Trump: So you’re willing to use these emails to influence the election and take a one in ten chance that I become president? And you’d forego whatever value these emails have as blackmail against President Hillary?

Putin: Yes. But you have to give us something.

Trump: What?

Putin: No one knows! Even a year from now, no one will have any guesses!

Trump: Hold on though — what if these emails don’t work? What if she is cleared of criminal wrongdoing and that turns out to be enough for most people because I am such a repulsive individual?

Putin: Well, even if she isn’t indicted, lots of things could happen. Maybe former president Bill Clinton will have a private meeting with the attorney general a week before the investigation ends, and then the FBI director will decide unilaterally to do the Attorney General’s job for her because he thinks she is compromised by that meeting. So he’ll be the one to publicly exonerate Hillary, and that will seem to be the end of it.But then Hillary’s personal assistant will be married to a former congressman who is under investigation for sending sexually explicit messages to underage girls, and right before the election the agents investigating that guy will discover on his laptop the same Hillary emails that they already reviewed. And then, because the FBI director was the one who went public about the investigation in the first place, he will decide to go public again, two weeks before the election, and say the investigation is back open! And even though he’ll later say, again publicly and prior to the election, that the investigation is closed again, that won’t matter because people will decide that since one of his three unprecedented public discussions of the Hillary investigation sort of indicated that she was… still under investigation? I don’t really understand this part of the plan… anyway, Donny, it’s definitely going to work.

Trump: I agree. That’s almost certainly how it will go down. Let’s make this deal!

Anyone who spent a few minutes thinking about Russian collusion could have produced similar conclusions. Obviously, any person, especially Donald Trump, is capable of acting irrationally or making an error. But the possibility that Trump might have erred in colluding with Russia underscores the illogic of assuming Russian collusion — had the Trump campaign worked with Russia, they would have acted not just illegally and immorally and unpatriotically, but stupidly. Colluding with Russia would have been, as they say in tennis, an unforced error.

And that was before the Trump administration had undertaken any of the anti-Russian policies that it subsequently enacted, including arming Ukraine to fight Russian soldiers in the Crimea, imposing sanctions on devious Russian personalities, pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal, urging more NATO military spending, and demanding that European nations become less dependent on Russian oil. Trump has been, in deed if not always, or ever, in word, the biggest Russia hawk to occupy the White House since Reagan.

— — — —

So why did so many get this so wrong? The answer lies in a background condition that is responsible for much of our national political disfunction: runaway political narcissism.

Democratic analysis of Russian collusion was overly credulous because it was fundamentally self-indulgent.

It was always flattering to Democrats that Russians might have stolen the election. It would mean that sixty-three million Americans didn’t really, deliberately and in full knowledge of what they were doing, reject the political views of liberals…those sixty-three million were misled and tricked and betrayed by an international conspiracy. Better yet, the journalists and politicians who uncovered that conspiracy would be the heroes in their own vindication story. This framing meant that Trump’s resistance to the Russia-collusion narrative, which he correctly perceived as embarrassing and damaging to his administration, was usually perceived as evidence of a cover-up. By flattering themselves that resistance to the Russia-collusion narrative was really evil opposition to their crusade, everything that should have been a check on that narrative was thus transformed into an accelerant.

But more than flattery, I suspect a deeper narcissism was at work. Many journalists let their disgust with Trump lead them to error — their emotional reaction to Trump was so strong that it simply must have some equally strong justification, like conspiracy and treason and Manchurian candidates and stolen elections. Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia is primarily a justification for their excessively moralistic response to his presidency.

Democrats were so concerned about the moral correctness of their response to Trump, and so caught up in a story about their own political heroism, that they came to implicitly believe that their moral commitments literally made them better at their jobs. Democrats believed they had a superior insight into a geopolitical fact based on their morally superior reaction to Trump’s character.

I, on the other hand, had the sense to realize that my strong feelings of disgust toward Trump may not be manifested, or ratified by, political reality. I was willing to accept the much more likely, although much less flattering, possibility that I am simply living in a time with an immoral and gross president, the recognition of which does not make me any kind of special. It certainly doesn’t give me special insight into unlikely international conspiracies.

To be clear, I’m speaking only of Russian collusion. I think Trump would break, and likely has broken, the law whenever he thought he could get away with it to his advantage. It will not surprise me, for example, if Trump is indicted by SDNY for something like tax fraud. But in that case, compared to Russian collusion, Democrats will have a more difficult task explaining why pre-election crimes should matter to an electorate that pretty much already knew it was putting into office a very shady New York City businessman.

But that’s assuming anyone listens to them at all. For two years, many prominent politicians and journalists presented a completely made-up story about Russia, as though it were newsworthy. It wasn’t, and they should have known better.

— — — —

What to do, then, about an elite class of leaders who spent two years generating bad analysis and irrelevant (not to say “fake”) news?

A significant portion of our political and media elite demonstrated publicly how they have substituted for reason and judgment a blind reliance on their own pure moral instincts. They implicitly believe that they have adopted a moral framework which can operate as a shortcut for actual thinking.

Stop listening to those people.

You shall know them by their works. They are the politicians who predicted Trump would finish his presidential term in prison, or who regularly announced imminent proof of treason without ever producing that evidence. They are the journalists and commentators who predicted that the Trump economy would crater, rather than prosper, and who insisted that Trump would destroy American democracy, instead of calmly acquiescing to a Democrat takeover of the House of Representatives. And they are anyone who peddled Russian conspiracy theories in lieu of actual, pressing, and substantive discussion, and who used apparently serious allegations of treason, collusion, and election fraud to justify a silly obsession with unimportant Trump behavior (I have no memory of anyone getting hysterical about emoluments, for example, when Barack Obama sold millions of his books during his presidency).

It won’t happen. Public intellectuals, journalists, and politicians are rarely punished for being wrong — even spectacularly wrong. Jonathan Chait, who wrote that Trump may have been a Soviet (and subsequently Russian) agent since 1987, still works in the industry. Rachel Maddow, who for two years may have devoted as much as half of her TV show to investigating Russian “influence” over Trump, still has her show and her viewers. Rep. Adam Schiff, who baselessly and breathlessly lied about having actual knowledge of Trump’s collusion with Russia, is now the chair of the House Intelligence Committee. With people like this leading the public astray, it will be impossible to overcome our nation’s present political disfunction.

— — — —

This is not innocuous disfunction we are experiencing. Employing moral indignation in place of thought has real consequences. While Democrats were happy to weaken Trump’s domestic popularity by tarring him with allegations of treason, this strategy almost certainly emboldened Trump’s foreign adversaries. China, North Korea, Iran, Turkey, and Russia may have all acted more aggressively toward U.S. interests in the accurate belief that Trump was unpopular at home, or with the assumption — a reasonable one for any consumer of U.S. media — that Trump would soon be impeached.

And it’s not like there were no domestic consequences of this distraction. By refusing to approach complicated political issues with understanding and reason, and choosing instead to let self-serving moral intuitions do the work that properly belongs to analysis, leaders in politics and media foreclose all possibility of understanding people who are not guided by the same moral system. For example, when an entire class of elites comes to believe in open borders on the basis of an emotional reaction to keeping someone out of the country, they also understand their opponents in the same emotional way. If one feels like a good person endorsing expansive immigration policies, then someone who endorses limited immigration policies feels a lot like a bad person. But the Left now understands only four ways to be a bad person. Bad people are white supremacists, misogynists, Islamophobes, or homo/transphobes — revealingly, half of those things are explicitly framed in emotional terms, with the “phobe” suffix referring to an irrational fear. It’s easy to assume that a critic of certain Islamic cultural practices is “Islamophobic” when one’s own defense of those practices is based mostly on unreasoning moral intuition. Similarly, anyone who opposes immigration must be a white supremacist, since there is no other conceivable basis for preventing anyone from enjoying a happy American immigrant story.

When combined with the social influence of the Left, the emotional categorization of opposing views can exert a strong influence. It may be hard to recall now, but before Trump, the Republican Party was fairly permissive of immigration — Jeb Bush, the 2016 presidential choice of establishment Republicans, called illegal immigration “an act of love” (yet another emotional characterization of the issue).

Donald Trump the candidate, despite many mainstream conservative and centrist positions, was the most “extreme” opponent of immigration of all the presidential candidates. When he proposed a wall, many people could only see it as an extreme, unreasoning policy in the opposite direction from their own unreasoning policy. As an emotional statement, the wall is an unfeeling monster that destroys the possibility of human compassion, of the type that would compassionately allow impoverished refugees to take their chances crossing a deadly desert in pursuit of the American dream with no guarantee of success or even stability.

But the better explanation of The Wall’s appeal is that Americans who wanted less immigration had lost all faith in politicians’ willingness to enforce immigration laws. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz proposed immigration policies that were, in theory, not less harsh than Trump’s wall. But voters liked the wall because they felt they could no longer trust anyone to enforce immigration restrictions. The wall was necessary precisely because so many pre-Trump politicians were so influenced by the Progressive moral intuitions around immigration that they could not bring themselves to restrict immigration in a manner satisfying to their constituencies, despite whatever they had told them to get elected. As with Russian collusion, a total reliance on moral intuition kept otherwise sane people from perceiving a genuine political disagreement and distracted them from more productive lines of inquiry. And the only person free from the moral poison, and free to endorse policies that aren’t regarded as correct by the good people who reason by moral intuition, was someone with no apparent moral feelings at all.

The danger of morally intuitive policymaking is not only that seemingly valuable people are discredited when they inevitably react wrongly, while seemingly less valuable people are elevated. It is also that we miss valuable political opportunities. When the Democrats decided that their strong disgust of Donald Trump justified their belief that he committed treason, they lost the opportunity to do a lot of good in the world by working with Trump.

Instead of imagining a neo-Mussolini conspiring with the world’s autocrats to destroy American democracy — a common belief that has no justification whatsoever aside from its basis in disgust for Trump as a person — Democrats might have perceived an unintelligent and uninformed man, with few connections to the power centers of the Republican establishment, who desperately wants “to win” even when he doesn’t know what game he is playing. If Democrats had swallowed their pride and been willing to hand Donald Trump nominal victories that still advanced Democratic policy goals, they might have given Trump a wall in exchange for permanent status for millions of Dreamers, and might have been able to work with Trump on healthcare, taxes, infrastructure, and trade. They could have had whatever they wanted, as long as they were willing to let Trump crow about winning, and it would have cost nothing but the thrill of being in the Resistance. It would have required Democratic leaders to swallow their pride — but pride, we have now definitively learned, is the impulsive force of Democratic politics.

— — — —

Going forward, we can expect that the national narcissist eruption that was largely precipitated by Trump’s election will ensure his reelection. Trump was the guy yelling “fake news” first and loudest, and he was right. Not about all the news, but certainly the news containing the most serious and prominent criticisms of Trump. When the criticism moves on from Russia to other of Trump’s ethical challenges, many if not most voters will perceive a bait and switch. Trump was supposed to be impeached on the basis of treason… now it will be on the basis of hush payments to porn stars, hardly the same thing. And nobody has the patience for another years-long investigation. Trump will need to be opposed on the basis of his policies, which few Democrats have discussed seriously, having chosen instead to focus on which Trump satellite met with which Russian agent when.

If Democrats do ever break free from the prison of their own emotions and find their way back to policy, that would almost make this whole experience (not to say “witch hunt”) worthwhile. Russiagate is the clearest of many recent failures of the politics of destruction, which find it easier to destroy careers than to argue policy. A politics of persuasion and argument would have found little time for Russian conspiracies, as it would have been too busy with issues to think it could solve any meaningful political disagreement by decapitating the opposition.

A nation that judged policy by argument and persuasion, instead of by feeling and association, could never have elected Trump in the first place — I don’t remember Trump making any arguments. The positions he advocated would have had a popular justification, for which any decent person could have advocated more capably than Trump. It isn’t until the sides are sorted by passion, rather than reason, that Trump has any place in the circus.

A self-indulgent politics; a narcissistic media: these things have helped to create the Donald J. Trump administration, and, by the spectacular failure of the left’s claims about Russian collusion, they have demonstrated their inability to destroy him. This makes Trump the Frankenstein’s monster of emotional politics. Let us stop this, before we create anything worse.