an autodidact meets a dilettante…

Before all this shite came up I was writing something completely different. In order to alleviate myself of my own existence for a while, I should get back to it, and update it.

We’re living in interesting times, and I can’t help but put my weird and less than minuscule shoulder to the wheel in trying to bring down Trump and his cowboy cronies. I’ve been trying to ignore this stuff but it’s just getting too exciting. There’s been the Paradise Papers, the Facebook revelations, sex scandals and of course the Mueller inquiry. The pundits of the cable news network MSNBC are almost peeing their pants on camera as they gleefully rake through the revelations of Russian links to the Trump administration. It’s a great time for the media, with an obvious charlatan in the White House, whose buffoonery provides endless talking points, while ordinary folks and elephants get shafted big-time.

I’m not always a huge US watcher, and I’m of course pretty ignorant on the details, but it’s been a circus that’s been difficult to ignore lately, and the pickings are getting richer and richer. I’m garbling up metaphors here, so let me calm down and look at the now distinct possibility of removing Trump from office. First, the Mueller inquiry. NBC news is reporting, with apparently impeccable sources, that Trump’s former, albeit brief, national security adviser Michael Flynn is close to being charged with money laundering and perjury by the Mueller team. Of course, Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and his aide Rick Gates have already been indicted and it looks like a junior but big-talking foreign policy adviser to the administration, George Papadopoulos, is assisting the team with their inquiries after pleading guilty to perjury about Russian connections. I’ve been listening to a number of legal and political experts being interviewed, mostly on NBC, and it looks as though the case against Manafort, the biggest fish, is extremely strong, and it seems like a matter of days before Flynn is indicted, but what would I know? On top of that, there’s Jefferson Sessions, the US Attorney-General and apparently an arch-racist, who has perjured himself under oath, and others who are key figures in the Trump admission, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner.

It does seem as if Trump’s hold on power is crumbling, unless I’m falling prey to the manic glee of American liberal pundits. Certainly there are polls and election results that suggest maybe I’m not getting ahead of myself. There has just been an election victory for the Democrats in Virginia, and the (extremely unpopular) Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, has been swept out of office. The Virginia result in particular is being treated by some as a watershed event (where does that odd term come from?) but maybe not. Certainly though it’s bad for Trump, who heavily supported the Republican candidate (then threw him to the dogs when he lost). The apparently reliable Reuters/Ipsos poll measuring Trump’s approval/disapproval rating has him currently at about 36%, with 59% disapproval, figures which have remained more or less steady for the last two months. I don’t see a huge dip in the polls – his numbers have always been quite low, it seems, but unless they pick up he’s going to be very vulnerable, and may become more extreme under pressure. His lack of success in pushing his agenda, his gaffes, his tweets, the Russian mess  and the inquiry, they’re all converging to ensure that he won’t be elected again, but what are the chances for those who want him out before the next election. Surely almost all hopes lie with the Mueller inquiry.

Robert Mueller was the Director of the FBI from 2001 to 2013, its longest serving director since the thuggish J Edgar Hoover. Appointed by George W Bush, he was given a two-year extension to his term by Barack Obama, and was eventually replaced by James Comey, who was controversially sacked by Trump earlier this year, a decision which may prove disastrous for the man with One of the Great Memories of All Time (a memory which may well be tested under oath soon, according to former US solicitor-general Ken Starr). It was Comey’s slightly controversial dismissal that led directly to the 2017 Special Counsel Inquiry headed by Mueller, since Comey alleged that Trump had essentially tried to obstruct justice by asking him to drop an FBI inquiry into Flynn and his connection with Russia. Mueller and his team’s brief is to investigate “any links and/or coordination between Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump, and any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation”, to quote from assistant Attorney-General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller in the position. That’s a pretty wide brief, it seems to me. Mueller has a fearsome reputation and he’s gathered together a team of 16 lawyers, some of them highly reputed, and if Flynn is indicted, which appears a near-certainty, things may well reach crisis-point for the administration.

So it all appears to be going along nicely, if painfully slowly for those who want Trump and his confederacy of dunces removed. The thing is, Mueller and his team will be thorough. They won’t go charging in and arresting people unless the evidence is clear, and even then they may try to use the guilty as hell to gain more information about other parties, in exchange for a degree of immunity. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would love to be a fly on the wall of Mueller’s Justice Department offices over the coming weeks.

Flynn seems to be a particularly revolting reptile. Apparently he tried to arrange a deal, which would have earned him oodles of money, to smuggle the moderate Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen out of the USA to Turkey, where he would’ve faced certain death under the thuggish macho dictator Erdogan, who constantly accused Gulen of organising the failed coup against him. If this is true, and provable, hopefully Flynn will live inside a cell for a long time. But there’s also a possibility that Flynn discussed this plan with the morally cretinous Trump, who would undoubtedly have approved. If there’s evidence of such discussions, that would be fantastic for us all.

Flynn’s a weak link for many other reasons, it seems. According to the Washington Post, he lied to the FBI – a felony offence – about discussions with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak regarding sanctions imposed on Russia by the Obama administration due to its meddling in the US election. It was because of this dishonesty that he was sacked by Trump – with great reluctance. Flynn also seems to have been involved in a strange plan to build US-Russian nuclear power plants in the Middle East, about which, again, he has been less than honest. The Russians who were part of the deal are under US sanctions. Flynn has an obvious penchant for the anti-democratic Russian kleptocracy, something of a liability for a National Security Advisor.

And there are other members of the confederacy – Trump junior, Kushner and Sessions stand out, but there are so many others in the worst political administration the western world has ever seen – who are being targeted by the Mueller inquiry. The question really is – when will the circus be closed down? Every day’s delay, after all, brings damage. Morans are running the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the EPA and just about every other US department…

All of this calls into question the whole of the US political system, surely. It has often been called the least democratic system in the western world, though that tends to avoid the problem with democracy itself, the problem that uninformed people have the same voting rights as informed people. If you’re going to have a democracy of that kind, you really need to maximise the number of informed people. But another problem, and it’s as clear a problem in Australia as anywhere, is that ignorant, loud-mouthed people can run for political office, with far less vetting than is carried out in protecting our borders. In this respect I’m an unashamed elitist. But America’s presidential system is way too presidential. Australia’s political system, like Britain’s, is much more party-based, with responsibilities, and culpability, more equally shared among government leaders. And this, I think, is a much better, much less dangerous system. In the USA, people generally vote every four years for a person rather than a party and its policy set, and this has so many problems associated with it, it just isn’t funny. Trump, for example, isn’t a Republican, he’s ‘his own man’, a blundering, bullying, bullshitting, bragging, belly-aching buffoon, a man born into and gifted enormous wealth, a laughing-stock as a businessman, a patsy for Russian mafioso oligarchs, who has installed an assorted pile of know-nothings to important political, scientific and cultural posts in the most economically powerful in the world – though by no means a model country for fairness, security or opportunity. I can’t think of any other western country in which this could’ve happened. The checks and balances, but above all the political culture of those countries would never have allowed it.