Is It Too Late for Mueller to Save America?

With the plea deal struck by Michael Flynn and the incoming Ralph Northam administration here in Virginia next month, there is a sense of hop among many that perhaps we are seeing the beginning of the end of the national nightmare known as the Trump/Pence regime and that in the interim, in Virginia a moral and forward thinking governor and nearly balanced state legislature can ward off some of the worse Trump/Pence policies.   At the national level, however, many have concerns that the cancer within the Republican Party has so metastasized that even if Robert Mueller's investigation hands Congress a smoking gun and an indictment for collusion with Russia, Congressional Republicans would side with a man guilty of treason.  Should that occur, a grassroots revolution would be required to end the sickness.  Two pieces, one by Andrew Sullivan and another in Slate, look at the disturbing reality of where Trump's mental illness and a bankrupt Republican Party have America on a precipice.  First these highlights from Sullivan's piece which was written before the announcement of Flynn plea deal:

[T]he last few days have brought all of them together in a new, concentrated way — a super-storm, as it were, of liberal democratic destruction. We have deranged tweeting; truly surreal lies; mindless GOP tribalism; evangelicals making excuses for the molestation of minors; further assaults on the free press; an unprecedented attack on the most reliable Atlantic ally; the demonization of personal enemies; stupendous tribal hypocrisy with respect to sexual abuse; the White House’s endorsement of a foreign neo-fascist hate group; the vengeful hanging out to dry of a Cabinet member; and the attempt to pass a catastrophic omnibus piece of legislation in one mad, blind rush in order to get a “win.” And all in a few days! 

At its center is mental illness. It radiates out of the center like a toxin in the blood. And this, again, is nothing new. On Trump’s first day in office, with respect to the size of his inauguration crowd, he insisted that what was demonstrably, visibly, incontrovertibly false was actually true. At that moment, we learned that all the lies and exaggerations and provocations of the previous year were not just campaign tools, designed to con and distract, but actually constitutive of his core mental health. He was not lying, as lying is usually understood. He was expressing what he believed to be true, because his ego demanded it be true. And for Trump, as we now know, there is no reality outside his own perfervidly narcissistic consciousness. Give such a man the power and trappings of the most powerful office on earth, give him a few months, and such delusions will get worse. Sane men and women are corrupted by the wielding of power; a psychologically disturbed figure from the get-go will degenerate into deeper and deeper forms of madness. 

In his speech last Wednesday night in Missouri, for example, he claimed that his tax proposal was the biggest tax cut in history (not even close); that it was “going to cost me a fortune, this thing, believe me … I have some very wealthy friends. Not so happy with me, but that’s okay” (an absolute inversion of reality); and that the stock market had been flat before his presidency (the Dow was at 7,000 when Obama came to office and 20,000 when he left).

Or cast your eyes back a few days and consider his condemnation of various sexual abusers and harassers (such as Al Franken and Matt Lauer). Why on earth would someone who has been personally accused by a dozen women of sexual assault get on his high horse with respect to others? Because in his own mind, he never committed assault. Every single woman who accused him really is a liar and the tape that recorded his bragging of assault was in fact as faked as Obama’s birth certificate. And this is not the only indelible delusion we discover he still clings to. He believes — alone among the leaders of every single other country — that climate change is a Chinese hoax, even as the Chinese, for some unfathomable reason, invest heavily in renewable energy; he is adamant that Russia did not meddle in the U.S. elections last year and that the U.S. intelligence community is lying about it or full of “hacks.” He believes that every poll that shows him as unpopular is fake; and that virtually everything the mainstream media reports about his administration is fabricated.

This is a man who inhabits his own world — and it is not the one you or I or anybody else inhabits. And he does not do so passively. His delusions are so fixed and profound that he constantly lashes out at anyone, from a grieving Gold Star widow to random black NFL players to the prime minister of Great Britain, when they dare to inhabit the actual world and proffer a different point of view.

Because his party has become a cult around his unhinged infallibility, his fantasies are entrenching themselves in the real world. And so, faced with the gravest nuclear threat since the end of the Cold War, Trump is involved in actually baiting and taunting an unpredictable dictator, vastly increasing the chances of irreparable catastrophe, with no tangible strategy visible and no secure line of communication open. He has eviscerated the institutions of American diplomacy, because the only diplomats he needs are himself and his dim-witted, mute dauphin, who has formed a strange alliance with another privileged scion in Saudi Arabia. The foreign leader he most admires, moreover, is engaged in an open campaign to sabotage and subvert Western democratic institutions. Those he most detests — such as Angela Merkel — are attempting to save them.

All Trump cares about is the “win” — and he will describe its content as what he wants it to be, not what it is, and most of his supporters will believe him. And so, at a time of deeply destabilizing social inequality, this law will actively shovel billions more to the super-rich, add more than a trillion to an already unprecedented peacetime debt, eviscerate affordable health care for millions, increase taxes on many middle-class blue-state residents, and eventually require massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare as we inevitably face a future fiscal collapse. But again, Trump’s delusional vanity simply wishes all these consequences away.

The only form of reality that will hit sooner is, of course, whatever Mueller discovers. But Trump has already declared this a media and Democratic hoax, and his own reality must mean that Mueller is fired, that the entire justice system be derided and discredited as a corrupt form of elitist convenience, and the super-storm of this week will become a hurricane, made all the deadlier by the ever-warmer waters of the tribalism and polarization Trump daily seeks to intensify. I have no idea what follows; but this liberal democracy is in a death rattle. And so is the international order it once sustained.

The Slate piece raises similar concerns and, given what we witnessed from Senate Republicans on the grotesque GOP tax bill, one cannot assume that rationality and a loyalty to democracy will prevail even if Mueller delivers the goods on Trump - and hopefully Pence as well.  Here are excerpts:

On Friday, former national security adviser Michael Flynn agreed to a plea deal with prosecutors in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. This moment will prove to be incredibly important, or not important at all. The importance or nonimportance of Flynn’s plea will depend on whether the law and legal conclusions continue to matter going forward, or whether they matter not at all. This is the question all of us are asking all day every day: Is the rule of law an escape hatch or a relic? It’s not yet clear what the answer to that question will be.

 I have spent the past year putting great faith in the courts and legal institutions to act as a check on Donald Trump, maintaining this faith even as Trump fired career lawyers like James Comey and Sally Yates and replaced them with ideologues and thugs. And like most people on the left, I placed an enormous amount of confidence in Robert Mueller as the embodiment of the principle that Trump could not escape the oncoming steamroller of justice and legal liability. In recent weeks, and most especially in this past week, I’d begun to suspect that the forces of chaos and nihilism that stand against Mueller’s project might swallow whatever outcomes he produced. The shocking norm-and-truth defiance of the GOP tax bill, the refusal of the GOP leadership to criticize or even comprehend the enormous violence done by Trump’s anti-Muslim tweets, the president’s staggering support for the candidacy of Roy Moore, the silent Republican collusion to the seating of demonstrably unfit judges, and the virulence of the White House’s attacks on the press all contributed to a general sense that absolutely everything was broken and that Democrats had lost whatever momentum they had to halt this chaos. So long as he [Mueller] is working away, filing documents and convening grand juries, nobody needs to take to the streets. But as the year has progressed, it’s become clear that absolutely nothing will persuade Trump supporters and Republicans in Congress that it’s time to disavow the president—not lying, not spilling state secrets, not abject failure in crisis management, and not openly performed corruption. Given that reality, it often feels like it wouldn’t be enough for Mueller to hand us a smoking gun and an indictment. What if they threw a conviction and nobody came? The more abjectly deranged Trump’s behavior and the more Republicans in Congress cover for him, the less likely it is that anything Mueller can magic up in his underground hall of justice will matter. . . . . with every passing day, as Trump escapes consequences and attacks the courts and the press, the chances that a “tick, tick, tick, boom” will be played off as #fakenews also increase.

I’ve been thinking that America is operating along two parallel legal tracks. On one track is the chug-chug of law and order, as embodied in the Mueller investigation. On the other is the daily mayhem and denialism and circus-performing of the present White House. I tend to worry that with every passing day, the circus is training us to ignore, discredit, devalue, or disbelieve what’s happening on the other track. By the time the Mueller train gets to its final station, the norms that would ordinarily lead to impeachment proceedings might be tiny piles of yellow legal pad–shaped cinders. And then it really would be time to take to the streets.