Donald Trump, Ann Coulter, and the Culture of Hysteria

 As the establishment's coup d'etat against the democratically elected government of Donald Trump gathers momentum, readers are invited to read Ann Coulter's latest book (Resistance Is Futile: How The Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind), which the author says is a "self-help book for liberals," though their hysteria about Trump will insure that few of them read it.

Psychologists have been treating "Trump anxiety" for some time now, and judging by the reaction of liberals to Coulter, they may soon have to treat Trump Tantrum Disorder as well. As Coulter points out, liberals have grown furiously unhinged by isolating themselves in self-righteous bubbles of Trump haters that exchange indignant comments about his latest outrages, most of which are simply imaginary.

For example, whenever the specter of American fascism is raised (every five minutes) we are told that Trump is a virtual Hitler clone. Uh, right. We all remember from our history books how Hitler went around boasting of his opportunities to grab women by the pussy, promising to replace the Treaty of Versailles with "something terrific," and engaging in fawning adulation of anyone he hoped to get something from. As Coulter puts it, "I don't remember Hitler or Stalin going around saying, 'These people are great. Incredible, outstanding, quality people.' And who in the WWII era would have described Hitler as Coulter describes Trump:  '[He's] utterly undisciplined, runs his mouth, flatters everyone, and agrees with the last person he spoke to. Why, it's right out of the Mein Kampf playbook!" 
 
The rage against Trump is proof that the election of 2016 never really ended. In her first post-election interview Hillary Clinton declared herself "part of the resistance," rather than the customary "loyal opposition." If Trump had lost and declared himself part of the anti-Clinton "resistance", Coulter notes, there would have been demands to put him in jail. "He's issuing a call to violence! 'Resistance' is a military term! It's a 'dog whistle' to the militias and the KKK!" Touché.

This attitude is simply a continuation of liberal hysteria during the campaign. Remember the Access Hollywood tape, somehow not a sleazy "October surprise" by the partisan media, which made no secret of its loathing of Trump? In spite of what was repeatedly claimed, there was no endorsement of sexual assault on the tape. Unless you are using a weapon, "they let you do it" means consent. Trump was simply uttering truisms about celebrity culture, not glorifying rape. Notes Coulter: "His whole point was to cite something axiomatically unacceptable - grabbing women by the P-word - in order to say that celebrity culture was so out of whack that a celebrity could get away with it." One could quibble with the "out of whack" part of the comment, as on the tape it appears that Trump in fact found this benefit of fame both natural and desirable. What needed to be explained was not this reaction of a life-long egomaniac, but the shocked indignation of the corporate media: after all, who knew that billionaires and other mega-stars enjoy sex on demand from beautiful women? Right, everyone. And as Coulter points out, Trump used the identical approach in saying his popularity was so great that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing voter support. "That's not a confession, notes Coulter, "it's hyperbole." Nevertheless, she goes on, "Nexis can't perform a search for all the publications that have accused Trump of admitting to 'sexual assault,' because it retrieves too many documents." Long live fake news.

And while we're on the subject of fake news, how long has it been since Trump was last accused of being a racist? Five minutes? Surely we can do better than that. Don't let up for a minute on claims that he's giving aid and comfort to "white nationalists" and therefore obligated to condemn David Duke every three minutes and defend himself against the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has warned of an imminent neo-Nazi-KKK take-over of the U.S. on a more or less constant basis for nearly four decades.

The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville a year ago has been regarded as the definitive proof of Trump's racism, though a New York Times reporter tweeted direct from the melee that left-wing Antifa protestors were just as aggressively violent as the racist right. Nevertheless, Trump's observation that there was violence (and "good people") "on both sides" has been used as confirmation of his alleged white supremacist sensibilities. By now, official memory has it that Antifa violence wasn't violence, and only "Nazis" were guilty of such.  In one of her book's best lines, Coulter notes, "The more the rally recedes in time, the fresher a memory it becomes," which is an excellent description of all kinds of propaganda induced "memory." With all due regret for the death of Heather Heyer, we still don't know anything about the state of mind of the man who ran over her, who may have been in fear for his life, and few "journalists" are even curious about the matter.

But on to the alleged Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 elections that is the main focus of Coulter's book. The basic allegation is that Trump, according to liberals a boundlessly incompetent buffoon, somehow managed to engage in a byzantine international conspiracy with Russian intelligence to steal the 2016 presidential election from Hillary Clinton. The original claim was that Russia hacked the e-mails of the DNC (after allegedly being invited to do so by Trump in a presidential debate with Clinton) and Hillary's aide John Podesta, then gave them to WikiLeaks, and that this somehow predictably benefited Trump. But why the Russians would have hacked the DNC to retrieve "lost" e-mails that were no longer on their server is difficult to explain. Furthermore, how could the Russians have had any assurance that the Podesta e-mails would end up helping Trump? That leak mostly hurt the DNC chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was forced to resign.

More to the point, the Russian election meddling theme is simply a joke. The U.S. meddles in elections all the time, and when that fails, overthrows unwanted governments by force, often assassinating their democratic leaders as well.  At William Blum's excellent archive at www.killinghope.org, you can read until your eyes bleed about the C.I.A. undermining democratic elections around the world going back seventy years. In recent years George Soros alone has repeatedly manipulated election outcomes in Georgia, the Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, variously called the Orange revolution, the Tulip revolution, and the Rose revolution. And while we like to wax self-righteous about Russia interfering in our elections, we tend to forget that Boris Yeltsin would not likely have become president of Russia without a major intervention by the U.S. But perhaps the most ludicrous notion of all is that a relative handful of Russian bots posting on Facebook handed the election to Trump, which is like saying that a coke poured in the water supply prevented us from curing our diabetes epidemic.

The origin of the story alone should make us extremely skeptical about any Trump-Russia collusion, even apart from the absurd pretense that the U.S. has the moral standing to accuse others of such anti-democratic practices. Hillary Clinton invented the Russian collusion story in the summer of 2016 because she needed to neutralize the DNC's e-mails having shown up on WikiLeaks. This was a classic Clinton maneuver: whenever she is caught in a scandal she diverts attention to all-pervading imaginary enemies -  misogynists, unscrupulous political opponents, racists, a vast right-wing conspiracy, and now, Russia and Donald Trump.

So Clinton campaign chairman Robby Mook went on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos to tell the world about the Russian conspiracy on July 24, 2016, the eve of the Democratic National Convention. "Experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, took all these emails and now are leaking them out through these Web sites . . .. And it's troubling that some experts are now telling us that this was done by - by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump." The anonymous reference to "some experts" has not been cleared up to this day. 

Of course, Hillary Clinton would have preferred to spin a web of conspiracy around Trump and ISIS or Trump and North Korea, but Trump didn't have business interests with either of them, so she revved up a new Cold War instead. She somehow managed to convince herself that the press was dead set against her and her Russia-connection conspiracy, even though only two of the fifty-nine largest newspapers in the country had failed to endorse her.  Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald were among the few liberal skeptics of the fantastic story.

In any event, by September 2016 The New York Times conceded that the consensus among government intelligence agencies was that WikiLeaks had no ties to Russian intelligence.

 Two years and dozens of breathless claims later we still have zero evidence for the alleged Trump-Russia collusion. The FBI never investigated for the simple reason that the DNC wouldn't allow the Bureau to examine its computers.  As Glenn Greenwald noted in The Intercept, "there is no evidence . . .  just CIA assertions over and over . . . " 

Initial media response found the claim of a Russian conspiracy "remarkable," and this held true until Hillary lost the election. Then it suddenly became a news story worthy of Watergate, replete with Congressional investigations, saturation media coverage, and an "independent" counsel.  Obama reacted by meekly telling Putin to "cut it out," but he imposed no sanctions, issued no major rebuke, and refrained from retaliation. This for something Thomas Friedman compared to Pearl Harbor and 911. In other words, after mild initial reaction, two years of intensive searching by the nation's top investigative journalists and up to 100 FBI agents has yielded nothing like collusion.

What has passed for evidence in the case is a dossier authored by Christopher Steele, a British spy who offered Hillary Clinton and the Democratic national Committee dirt on Trump from the Russians. Did Hillary recoil in shocked outrage at this treasonous plot? Of course not. She paid Steele for the information. Yes, that's right. Hillary Clinton colluded with the Russians to discredit Trump, but Robert Mueller isn't interested in that collusion. He's looking for collusion between Russia and the victim of the plot.

Explains Coulter: "Hillary's campaign and the DNC hired Steele, using a Seattle law firm as a cutout. The law firm hired Fusion GPS, which in turn hired the British spy, who paid current and former Russian government officials for incriminating information on Trump." 

Steele revealed his motive to Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, saying he was "desperate that Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president." OK, but motives aside, did he come up with anything? Not if you believe the New York Times, which says that the information in the Steele dossier "was not corroborated, and the New York Times has not been able to confirm the claims." And remember that The New York Times, like the press in general, loathes Trump, and would gladly have reported substantiation of the claims in the Steele dossier had they found any. 

In fact, so eager was The Times to discredit Trump that it flat-out stated that his firing of F.B.I. director James Comey had "echoes of Watergate,"when in fact it did not. For Comey himself admitted under oath to Senator James Risch (R-Ohio) that the FBI hadn't been investigating Trump at the time he was fired, so Trump couldn't have been "obstructing justice" in an ongoing case against him. In point of fact, Trump fired Comey precisely because he wouldn't stop publicly insinuating that Trump was under investigation when in fact he wasn't. Meanwhile, journalists simply assumed that Trump was guilty of colluding with Russia, and that firing Comey was a transparent attempt to cover up criminal activity. 

In short, the mountain keeps laboring, but brings forth but a mouse. The charges to date are a complete farce. Here's a partial list:

National Security Adviser Michael Flynn: He talked to Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition period between the Obama and Trump administrations, and then didn't disclose it on security clearance paperwork, which is not customary because such meetings are routine.  

Paul Manafort - Briefly Trump's "campaign" chairman, he was originally accused of violating the same (unenforced) lobbying registration law that ensnared Michael Flynn, but has since been charged with setting up offshore accounts to avoid taxes, which could make him guilty of practicing capitalism. In October 2017, journalist Ken Silverstein wrote that "I can say with certainty that the law, which Manafort is accused of violating, known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, is a complete joke." The article in which this comment appeared was entitled, "I've Covered Foreign Lobbying for 20 Years and I'm Amazed Manafort Got Busted." In any event, Manafort's guilt or innocence hasn't been demonstrated to have anything to do with Trump. 

Carter Page - a non-entity whose name Trump appears to have lifted out of a hat when confronted by media claims that he didn't have any establishment certified national security advisers on his team. Page was subsequently slapped with a FISA warrant, which proves he is appallingly guilty of something. For as Ronald Reagan's former Attorney General Ed Meese memorably informed us, "If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect." What could be clearer?

Attorney General Jeff Sessions: He also met with Russian ambassador Kislyak, when he was a senator, and then didn't record the dastardly deed on security clearance forms, which the FBI doesn't want because such meetings are routine.

But wait! Didn't former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen pay Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about her affair with Trump? That's a violation of campaign finance laws! Possibly, but such violations are a dime a dozen, and if we run every politician who has paid off a mistress out of office Washington will be a ghost town.

There is much, much more in Coulter's book, but check it out of the library rather than buy it, since Coulter herself is equally prone to slipping into political hysteria when the topic is Communism or Islam. She insists, for example, that Martin Luther King was under the control of Moscow when he made his (accurate) claim that the "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world [is] my own government." And, of course, many of us remember her advice for dealing with the Islamic world following the 911 attacks, when she said, quite subtly, that "we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." 

American politics is a tale of two hysterias. Rationality has been driven from the stage.