Trump has the Presidency. He has both houses of Congress and, with their help, he has successfully derailed their investigations of him. He has The Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, the Sinclair Stations, Breitbart, and his own tweets. Trump can count on these outlets to constantly invent new Clinton scandals to confuse things, change the topic, and exhaust us daily. His year-long war on the independent press has already convinced most Americans that fake news is a real thing. Most chilling of all the current political realities is that it’s now clear that thirty-five percent of Americans will support him no matter WHAT he does.
In this kind of through-the-looking-glass nightmare, Robert Mueller’s investigation—hell, his very existence—seems like the last vestige of the reality we used to cling to—that justice can still prevail, even against all odds. Mueller symbolizes the very real threat that the judicial system, which has handed Trump most of his rare losses, poses to Trump’s brutish, authoritarian tsunami. The new dream goes something like this: this black-hearted, un-American shitheel gets on quite a roll, and it nearly does us in, but in the end, like the Lone Ranger, Bob Mueller strides right up to the throne of evil and cuts its head off. One by one, the Trump gang members are hustled off to prison in chains. And then will come the ultimate Triumph of the Truth—the delicious, soul-satisfying impeachment of the most dangerous monster America has ever produced. In the end the system will have worked, the national delirium will finally subside, and we will wake from this nightmare.
Tomorrow will see Mueller’s first indictment or two. This will be a real victory for the rule of law and very bad news for Trump. We may look back on tomorrow as the beginning of the end for him.
On the other hand, we may look back on tomorrow as not the end of the most abominable and dark period in the modern American politics, but the beginning of it. Our worst nightmare may be ahead of us. Trump is not a politician. He is not a public servant. He is not a student of history. The usual governing principles of human behavior—knowing the difference between right and wrong and truth and fiction, loyalty, self awareness, empathy, love, the threat of disgrace, even basic human decency—are completely foreign to him. Many see Trump as a public buffoon and private genius, but this is not the case. Trump is an epically narcisissistic bully with a profound personality disorder who isdriven by mendacity, cruelty, viciousness, and the constant urge to attack and hurt his enemies--which are most of us.
Trump will not go quietly. He is much more like Hitler, who ordered the destruction of his own country as the Allies closed in on him, than he is reminiscent of Nixon, who left town to avoid prison. He won’t resign. He will find a DOJ lackey who will fire Bob Mueller. He will issue pre-emptive pardons to his minions and his family members. And then he will unleash the flying monkeys and launch a truly hellish and typically chaotic counter attack.
The Republican Congress and Sesions' DOJ will do NOTHING to stop him.
Trumpism will be defeated because the American people will respond by taking to the streets and doing the hard work to elect a new Congress in the 2018 midterms that will pursue impeachment. And no doubt Mueller is smart enough to have foreseen his own demise as a special prosecutor and has engineered other ways for his findings to eventually see the light of day. And firing Mueller will sow the seeds of Trump's--and the GOP's--inevitable destruction. But Bob Mueller is just the beginning of that struggle. While we celebrate the progress of his important work tomorrow and the milestone that the indictments represent, we need to also understand that Trump and the Congress will ensure that Mueller’s time is not long and that he cannot finish the job for us. Only we can do that.
