It's Deadly Serous, but it's also a Charade
All in Congress save the most rabid know that Trump is guilty of something - though they may not know for certain how much he is guilty of. The most pressing question for them is what if anything to do about it, and if so when? Perhaps more immediate than that though is this; how long can they/should they maintain a front that the current operation of he U.S. government even remotely resembles business as usual? When can/will they admit that our nation is in a profound crisis? Essentially we are experiencing a cover up of a cover up of grave crimes having been committed (some of which may continue in real time.) Let's call it a meta cover up now in process, coducted by people who, for various reasons, are trying to buy more time before more of the truth comes out.
The initial "Russiagate" cover up is of course ongoing, organized from the White House and from other centers of Trump world in general. It involves both guilty people trying to avoid the consequences of their behavior and others who are so firmly joined by the hip to those culprits, that their own careers will go down in flames also if those who are guilty of the original sins are ever caught and punished. In other words, on one level, there's a standard garden variety cover up - not exactly uncharted territory. But there's another level, the one I call the meta cover up, and at least from a motivational perspective it actually is more complex. It involves people in government and politics, on both sides of the aisle, who know damn well that the Trump administration is unraveling and that the ending won't be pretty.
They have seen all of the “circumstantial” evidence for high crimes and misdemeanors (and there are of course tons of it.) They see the massive billowing clouds of smoke but still hold firm, for now, to the convenient fiction that there may be some other plausible explanation for all that smoke other than a fire, even while the fabric of their garments start to singe from the heat. Thy are not, the vast majority of them at least, dumb. They recognize the behavior of a guilty party when they see it, over time that always increasingly becomes obvious. And Trump fits the description precisely.
The truth of that is glaring. Were Trump not so hopelessly ensnared with Russia, election day 2016 would have represented a turning point. Were Trump simply a craven opportunist he would have pivoted once the presidency became his. No, I don't mean making a move toward the electoral center on a broad range of policies. I mean a move away from some of the bull headed, reckless incendiary words and behavior that only (perhaps) served him well as a campaigner. Some of Trump's antics helped convince just enough voters that he was the victim of an establishment conspiracy to destroy him, helping solidify his appeal as an outsider. The first goal of any politician is to get elected. The second is to achieve their objectives once in office.
Case in point. A war of words with the intelligence community of America during an election cycle conceivably could be spun as evidence that Trump was a true maverick, uncowed by establishment efforts to predetermine his footsteps once in office. If that is all that there was to it, then once in office it was time for Trump to make peace with the agencies in his new administration that are crucial to our nations national security. Continued warfare with them no longer suited mere political ends, rather it severely complicated them, making Trump some seemingly unneeded powerful enemies in the process. Why?
Only two explanations make any sense, and ultimately they boil down to one and the same. You could say that Trump's literal objective once in office was to intentionally pursue a foreign policy that runs contrary to the currently understood mission of our intelligence agencies, and their findings relevant to that. But that only begs the same question again, why? The only answer to that, which makes any sense at all, is that Trump is intentionally aligning his foreign policy with the national interests of Russia. And that is a true mind bender which points in one and one only direction; the President of the United States of America has been compromised through his past dealings with Putin and his power circles; which include Russian intelligence agents, Russian oligarchs, and Russian crime bosses. Once one accepts that simple truth it perfectly explains why Trump had no other option than to attempt to destroy, or at least severely hobble, the intelligence community before it could destroy him.
There are so many other actions that can't be explained other than through an assumption of a presidential cover up of guilt, the above is merely one of them. The continued refusal to release his taxes, the failure to immediately fire Flynn when the Justice Department reported that he was subject to Russian blackmail attempts, we've see the whole list before. And so have members of Congress. No other president has ever conducted scorched earth warfare against the free press during his so called honeymoon period, but Trump had no other choice. Investigative journalism has the power to reveal and discredit his fraudulent presidency, so any media that pursues it must be discredited first.
People in Congress by and large are well connected to the Washington web. They know exactly what, and who, is going down. The meta cover up is the reluctance to admit to that now. Democrats and Republicans can harbor different motives for participating in it. Some are genuinely fearful of wide spread instability and even social unrest, should a newly elected President too forcefully be attacked for criminal and Un-American behavior prematurely. The evidence must be irrefutable, the public must largely be brought on board, and prepared for the constitutional crisis that lies before us. Others are more politically craven. They know this drama will play out, minimally, over months, and in the meantime there are political objectives now within their reach, that will only recede from their grasp once the lid is fully blown off “Russiagate”. They too are playing for time, the time needed to consolidate short term but long reaching partisan political gains.
And so the charade continues a little longer, with one eye on Trump's approval ratings, and the other on the legislative calendar.
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