This is not going to be a polite blog post. It is going to be blunt and brief. Politeness serves a purpose in life, but mostly when engaging with other people of honest intentions but different perspectives, in an effort to keep discussion civil and respectful. It is not an effective tool in dealing with prevarication, obfuscation, and deflection.
Those are the tools of the current President of the United States, and I feel sorry for those who are so enamored of the narcissist named Donald Trump that they have become incapable of seeing this reality. But I am just stubborn and old-fashioned enough to believe there is such a thing as truth. Most of us may struggle to various degrees with the challenge of discerning it, but it does exist. And many of us also are at least aware when someone is trying to obscure it rather than illuminate it.
Let us consider the case of a presidential candidate who has only recently acknowledged, as President, the reality of Russian interference in the U.S. elections through fake news and hacking of e-mails, among other activities intended to destabilize democracy, using a set of tactics they appear poised to repeat in other nations. Trump, who last year refused to admit such things were happening, and whose campaign is under investigation for possible collusion with Russia, now has the effrontery to tweet that then President Obama did “NOTHING about Russia after being notified by the CIA of meddling” and that Obama “didn’t ‘choke,’ he colluded or obstructed.” And somehow, although it was Hillary Clinton who was the target of Russian interference, Obama did this to help her.
Look—as a parent and grandparent, I know a dodge when I see one. What parent of multiple children has not heard in some form the “He did it too” defense as a means of deflecting blame? I almost have to wonder about the parenting skills of those mature voters who fail to recognize this game for what it is. It almost does not matter what Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or anyone else ever actually did or failed to do; the only real point is to deflect attention in order to avoid accepting responsibility. To the extent that we allow elected officials to play this game, we voters are essentially like ineffective, overindulgent parents who fail to call their children to account. I say this without regard to party or philosophy, even though I am targeting Trump as the current deflector extraordinaire. And I am focusing on Trump because, instead of taking the presidency seriously, he is elevating this ruse to dangerous new levels.
This requires serious linguistic deconstruction to grasp what is happening. Trump as a candidate denied and ignored Russian interference even as he sarcastically urged the Russians to hack some more. (Sean Spicer now says he was joking). How is this now the focus of alleged collusion and obstruction by Obama? If Obama is guilty of anything, in the eyes of most rational and experienced observers, it is perhaps of being too cautious to warn the public until October. And even then, when Obama or other administration officials mentioned it, they were greeted with jeers and skepticism by the Trump campaign. More importantly, note the misuse of the word “obstructed.” In the context of the current investigations being led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, obstruction is a legal term that refers to efforts to impede the administration of justice. In the Trump context of the recent tweet, suddenly it refers to hesitancy or inaction at a time when officials were still trying to determine the proper course of action in response to an attack on the American electoral process that Trump was insisting was not even happening. In the absence of any criminal investigation at the time, how does official inaction, to whatever extent Obama’s reluctance to go public can be characterized as such, become obstruction? Obstruction of what? And how does one collude by failing to act more quickly against an identified enemy whom Trump does not even perceive as such?
If this were an isolated instance of such an assault upon the meaning of words, I might not be writing this essay. But any astute observer, including many worried Republicans, knows by now that this is a persistent pattern—the rule of Trump, not eethe exception. Words are turned inside out, stripped of all normal meaning, deprived of context. James Comey should worry about tapes, while the White House spends weeks refusing to acknowledge tapes exist before finally deciding to say they don’t, and now we are to believe this was merely a ploy to keep Comey honest. A ploy, that is, by a president who has yet to establish his own credibility with anyone but his core followers. The president who would protect Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security seems woefully unaware of the contents of the Republican health care legislation, gleefully tweeting that he wants a Senate bill with “heart,” even as it starts from a premise of depriving millions of Americans of accessible health insurance through a bill that whose content was secret until only a week ago. But who cares about details when you can spend your time bashing Obama? Why spoil the fun?
Buckle your seat belts. Barring impeachment or resignation, this steady erosion of the essential meaning of words in the English language will almost assuredly continue for at least another three and a half years. The upside is that, if our democracy and constitutional system can survive this trial, it can quite possibly survive nearly anything. Keep your BS detectors fully charged and operative.
Jim Schwab