an autodidact meets a dilettante…

Yevgeniy Prigozhin, one of Putin’s mafioso thugs, and boss of Russian Bot Enterprises

Now to return to that fun topic, the dumping of Trump. Just to repeat, I’ve predicted that Trump will be ousted by year’s end, and I’m today feeling more confident in that prediction than ever, though my optimism meter has bounced about over the past few months.

The so-called speaking indictment recently released by special counsel Robert Mueller has put paid to Trump’s windy blather about ‘the fake Russia thing’. I suspect this was part of its intention. Being true patriots and all, the Mueller team want to prove to the American people once and for all that they’re under attack, contra Trump and his GOP supporters. They’ve indicted 13 Russian individuals and 3 companies on 8 counts, including conspiracy to defraud the US, conspiracy to commit wire and bank fraud, and several counts of aggravated identity theft, and they’ve told a detailed 37-page story to back it all up. And although the indictment doesn’t provide direct evidence of Russian government involvement, it states that funding was provided by Yevgeniy Prigozhin, a close ally and friend of Putin. The indictment is available online here and no doubt elsewhere.

Clearly this’ll stump Trump. The terms ruse, witch-hunt and fake news will no longer be so easily available to him. He himself tweeted shortly after the indictment was announced that because the conspiracy was first launched in 2014, he was somehow in the clear. Not only is this obviously false, the tweet unwittingly admits that the Russian conspiracy was real. I heard that he quickly regretted this, but oops, too late, because his possibly soon-to-be ex-national security advisor HR Puffnstuff McMaster has announced that the indictment provides incontrovertible evidence of the Russian conspiracy.

Rubs hand with glee

So it seems Trump wants to continue to undermine Mueller’s credible findings, and meanwhile American adults will want to know when sanctions will be imposed on Russia and what will be done to safeguard the November elections. These sanctions have already been voted for in Congress, but Trump hasn’t signed them into law. My guess is he’ll try to use the ‘argument’ that the Russian conspiracy had no impact on the 2016 election to do nothing. But that’s a pretty dangerous course to take.

The impact of the Russian conspiracy on the election is impossible to prove one way or another (you can’t read the minds of voters), and it isn’t a focus of the Mueller enquiry, which is entirely concerned with illegal activities. The fact that Trump isn’t at all concerned, as America’s head of state, that Russians engaged in illegal activities to meddle in US elections, should be, you’d think, of enormous concern to citizens of one of the most jingoistic nations on Earth. It should surely be his downfall, and a national scandal. But maybe I’m misreading things. After all, I was never able to believe that Trump could be elected in any civilised country.

Which of course raises the question – why is Trump so reluctant to sanction the Russians? Is it just because of his man-crush, or is it something deeper and more sinister? As many pundits are saying, we’ll get the answer to that by following the money, which is surely what Mueller is doing.

Having just read the full indictment – which really is a page-turner – I find it pretty compelling in its argument and wealth of evidence, and yet on listening to the mainstream cable news networks (CNN and MSNBC) over these last few months, I’m coming to realise that there’s a vast bulk of Americans, perhaps a third, who are so hooked into Fox News and its so obviously crude and distorted view of the US political scene that, it seems, nothing will move them to save themselves from their patently anti-democratic wannabe dictator. I get my occasional glimpses of Fox News and its tirades from the other networks, though I snatch a few direct looks myself. It really is appalling – hilarious in a death-black sort of way. If this number of people believe this sort of guff, and this ferociously, then ultimate action against Trump could lead to something like civil war, an outcome beyond the Russians’ wildest hopes.

One of the more grotesque claims now being made by the Fox Media-Trump cabal is that the Russian meddling was completely without impact, so why bother going after them? Better to go after the Mueller team, the FBI, the CIA and other ‘enemies of the nation’. Again, could this outcome be any better for the Russians?

I’ve said that it can’t be proved that the Russian bots and trolls influenced the outcome of the 2016 election. You can’t prove that any single voter had her vote decided by a particular rally or online article or image or whatever. That’s why the enquiry never intended to investigate this. It’s police enquiry, after all, so it’s investigating illegal methods and activities. But as to the results of these methods, we assert a few facts. The Russians’ principal focus was denigrating and debilitating the Clinton campaign – that’s surely why they ‘supported’ Sanders. Another major focus was supporting Trump (though occasionally muddying the waters) – that’s surely why they attacked the campaigns of Cruz and Rubio. Another salient fact is that the Trump election campaign was successful, confounding nearly all the pundits. The Russians would’ve had multiple reasons for supporting Trump, including some sort of quid pro quo, but one reason surely was that, since the Russians’ intentions were profoundly anti-democratic, as is shown by their efforts to disrupt democracies around the world, it would be screamingly obvious to promote the cause of perhaps the most profoundly anti-democratic candidate ever to contest a US presidential election.

It seems unthinkable that Trump wouldn’t act against the Russians, and it seems unthinkable that the American people would let him get away with this. Current reporting from Wired online tells us that pro-gun Russian bots are trolling over the Florida killings, as they did at the time of the Las Vegas massacre and on other occasions. It’s surely past time for the people to rise up against a leader who cares nothing about this and would obstruct efforts to act. Maybe they’re hoping that Mueller will do their job for them. I think, though, this needs more than just Mueller. The adults need to take over the asylum.