A Ghastly and Tasteless Escalation of Tensions…With Ourselves

Conrad Black on the war Trump finds himself in.

The response to the Helsinki meeting has been so extreme on all sides that questions about the maturity, stability, and intelligence of the entire American political community are incited and require some act of faith to deal with positively. Earlier U.S. presidents created shock waves as great as these but managed them better.

The Trump phenomenon and his assault on the political establishment were bound to cause immense convulsions....

There will long be debate about which side, Trump or his enemies, is chiefly responsible for this worrisome and unseemly escalation where his enemies want to remove him from office for undiscovered crimes before he is able to have them prosecuted and imprisoned for crimes of which there is, unfortunately, a good deal of indisputable evidence. Trump’s enemies could not resist the temptation to try to undo the election; he would have let bygones be bygones, but he is not one to turn the other cheek when attacked.

Now they must remove him, or he will try to imprison them, and in fact, they have almost no chance of removing him. We are doomed to a fierce battle that will end quickly if the Republicans hold the House of Representatives and Trump can get rid of Sessions and Rosenstein and indict his enemies, who have certainly asked for it. Or it could be dragged on for another six months if a frivolous impeachment case is mounted. We learned from the absurd impeachment of President Clinton that the effect on the target is like a revivifying enema, and he bounces back quickly.

Now the process is inexorable. The desperation of Trump’s enemies explodes at every opportunity. Nothing particularly objectionable occurred at Helsinki. Putin’s version of the Russian role in the 2016 U.S. election, though untrue, (like most of what Russian leaders have said since Peter the Great), is closer to the truth than the criminal and demented skullduggery of the Obama agency chiefs and the Clinton campaign claque.

Trump was artless and so cavalier at the joint press conference that he rattled the nerves even of his own followers. But most of his Washington followers are weak-kneed late-comers anyway. They are easily confused by the technique of the wizened Democratic leaders and their media stooges of magnifying the danger of the national basket case of Russia, and conflating the puny, ineffectual Russian 2016 election interference with the phantom canard of Trump-Russian collusion.

Until the inert Sessions-Rosenstein cork can be removed from the legal channel, Mueller will go on with the tedious charade of putting Paul Manafort on bread and water and extracting another twelve names every few months from the Moscow telephone directory and accusing them of improprieties in the United States, (a country they have no intention to visit at his invitation)....

Regrettably, it has all reached such a pass that there will be little of acceptable taste or sobriety as we proceed to the last phase. Brennan and Clapper will become ever more stupid and contemptible, a high misbehavioral hurdle. Trump’s intelligent conservative enemies among the commentators are now down to mere bile, like seasick passengers who have vomited out everything else. ...

This may all be another manifestation of the president’s undoubted singular genius at provoking his enemies to uncontrollable outbursts of psychotic foolishness. 

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