President
Trump talks to reporters at the White House, November 29, 2018. (Photo: Jim Young/Reuters)
As the year ends, the Trump legal drama winds down
towards its tawdry end.
The attacks on
him are piffle.
The immense fraudulent fantasy of a Benedict Arnold on
steroids collaborating with a foreign enemy, a Manchurian Candidate “groomed
for the presidency by his Russian controllers,” has come down to a squalid
dispute between the president, his crooked former lawyer, and the publisher of
the National Enquirer over the nature of incentivizing the pre-electoral
silence of a porn star and a former Playboy bunny.
The slab-faced, trim and grim Robert Mueller, closing in
like a heat-seeking missile on the start of the third year of the most
ineffective and redundant investigation in history, could be a brilliant
straight man, desperately serious and purposeful as he silently marches across
our television screens every night in reruns of the same old news film in the
elaborate pretense that he is doing something useful and important.
It is the same pattern as the Clinton investigation,
which began with the financial improprieties of Whitewater and meandered around
to checking the president’s semen against a White House intern’s carefully
preserved dress.
The lust to tear down a president leads ostensibly
serious and responsible people to act contemptibly, and ultimately to become
absurd.
Many of the president’s enemies do not, cannot possibly,
realize what is happening to them.
It was well known long before he became president of the
United States that Donald Trump was, by traditional standards, a somewhat déclassé
character.
As an impresario, he had sheared the hair off Vince
McMahon, founder of World Wrestling Entertainment, before 90,000 people at the
Pontiac Silverdome (but has compensated by making the temporarily glabrous McMahon’s
wife the administrator of the Small Business Administration).
His divorces and courtships prior to his relationship
with Melania Trump were massively and often rather tastelessly publicized.
His entire public personality intentionally offends half the people, while
amusing or pleasing the other half by his irreverence and disdain for the
pompous, the indecisive, and the mealy-mouthed categories that enfold the
majority of politicians.
As president, Donald Trump has considerably moderated his
formerly outlandish behavior.
He often looks and sounds more like a president than
George W. Bush referring to the country of “eye-rack” (Iraq), President Carter
sitting in a cardigan beside a roaring fire in the White House fireplace
telling the country to turn down its thermostats in the “national malaise”
speech, some of the antics of Lyndon Johnson, or even Gerald Ford falling down
the steps of Air Force One.
The country knew what it was getting with Donald Trump;
the fact that he affronted scores of millions of Americans pleased a numerous
enough mass of other Americans to elect him.
His enemies attacked savagely, invented the
Russian-collusion nonsense, have been forced off that ledge, and are now
scruffing around in the gutter with this bunk about paying off indiscreet
female claimants of former intimacy.
It is very hard to make a serious claim that the payments
to them were campaign contributions, or that anyone but Trump ultimately paid
the money.
It is impossible to take the word of Michael Cohen and the publisher
of the National Enquirer, David Pecker, over that of the president to an
extent that meets the required threshold of being “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
And no one with the slightest acquaintance with American
history or jurisprudence could conclude that whatever Mr. Trump did with or
about these women (no coercion of or contemporary payments to the women are
alleged), it amounts to the “high crimes and misdemeanors” stipulated by the
Constitution for removal from office of a president.
The point is that Trump has actually raised his game
appreciably as a president.
His enemies have descended to a nether region of
depravity and imbecility that he never, even in the least edifying moments of
his astonishing career, came close to excavating:
Not Trump University, not some of the unfortunate
properties bearing the Trump name, not Trump’s health plan (what he called
“cutting edge health and wellness formulas . . . to achieve the American
dream,” but was in fact $1,080 for twelve bottles of vitamins and two
urinalyses per year).
It was never more or less than ludicrous hucksterism
straining the ambit of the phrase caveat emptor.
In assaulting him, the political elite has abased itself.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and their chief
collaborators invented the Russian canard, dispatched the intelligence services
and Justice Department, including the FBI, to put meat on the bones of this
fraud.
They tried to legitimize the monstrous malicious
fabrications and defamations of the Steele dossier, and are now trying to
maintain their threadbare credibility by inciting their congressional and media
lackies to amplify completely pedestrian tales of sexual dalliances.
Even these facts are contested and unprovable, and in any
case unexceptionable, and no one’s business but the Trumps’, and POTUS and
FLOTUS have obviously sorted it out between themselves.
There isn’t even a vivid image to play to the prurient
howling mobs, such as Bill Clinton being fellated by an intern in the Oval
Office while smoking a Freudian cigar and conducting official business on the
telephone.
There was nothing illegal about that either, but it
wasn’t an image builder in Norman Rockwell’s America.
A clear indication that the Washington political elite
has lost its collective mind was furnished on Tuesday when federal district
judge Emmet Sullivan implied General Michael Flynn had committed treason by
being an undeclared agent of a NATO ally (albeit a wayward ally — Turkey), an
offense he apparently committed but which has not been officially charged.
The other headliner was fired FBI director Jim Comey
claiming memory loss regarding the events of two years ago 245 times before the
House Judiciary Committee.
Comey denied any responsibility for the public-relations
problems of the Bureau, disputing that his political biases influenced his
performance in office, and telling a New York audience that the future of the
country depended on throwing Trump out of office in 2020. J. Edgar Hoover, “the
nation turns its lonely eyes to you.”
All of these attacks — on the Trump charities, the Trump
inauguration committee, and by the two angry (and greedy) women — is piffle.
The president can’t lose this match politically, and as
his opponents have descended beneath him, he has already won morally.
Conrad Black — Conrad Black’s latest
book is Donald J. Trump, A
President Like No Other. @ConradMBlack
