Russian To Judgment, Con't

The plan to October Surprise the Trump regime to a win with "new bombshell revelations!!11!" about Hillary Clinton and the 2016 FBI investigation into the Trump campaign has failed miserably thanks to Trump's COVID collapse, and we're getting into a dangerous point now in American history.

 

With coronavirus running through his body in competition with a heavy steroidal dose, President Trump is frustrated that a country where over 210,000 people have died from the virus seems disinterested in the “hoax” of Russiagate.

Trump spent part of his week demanding the latest version of his Russia counter-narrative—that the intelligence officials teamed up with Democrats to invent Russian collusion in 2016—be used to prosecute his political enemies. “I say, ‘Bill [Barr], we have plenty [of evidence], we don’t need any more,” Trump told Maria Bartiromo on Thursday. On Friday, he fumed to Rush Limbaugh that Republicans are “afraid they’re going to influence the election… they don’t play the tough game.”

Providing that “evidence” to Attorney General William Barr’s special prosecutor is loyalist Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe. Intelligence veterans are seething as Ratcliffe helps Trump concoct a narrative to aid him in an election. “Everyone knows the deal here,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA officer. “They know Ratcliffe is irresponsible. It’s just everything goes.”

Yet Trump and his aides, in recent weeks, have recognized that the public isn’t captivated by the Breitbart-friendly accounts of uncovered notes from former CIA officials four years ago, according to two sources familiar with the private complaints.

“Mainstream media isn’t covering it. So most voters aren’t aware of the facts,” John McLaughlin, a top Trump pollster, told The Daily Beast. “You’re [the] first reporter who’s ever asked me and it has yet to be a question in the debates.”

Other political advisers don’t even think it’s worth the bother at this point. Some senior Trump aides have privately insisted that amplifying the inquiry from special prosecutor John Durham is a waste of time, at least electorally. “It is not going to move any votes that aren’t already in our column,” one said. 

 

And this all goes back to Trump's toxic narcissism. He sees the Russia investigation as a personal attack against him, and he's utterly baffled as to why the country that obviously loves him as its new messiah doesn't rise up in armed rage to throw down the Democrats. Trump, constantly surrounded by enablers and sycophants, believes the entire country is like his White House full of yes men and toadies.

 

“The media has worked hard to keep voters in the dark about Joe Biden colluding with Hillary Clinton to spread the Russia collusion hoax and undermining the peaceful transition of power in 2017,” Matt Wolking, the Trump campaign’s deputy communications director, said in response to a request for comment Friday.

One person who has repeatedly talked to Trump about Durham’s probe and the president’s desire to imprison many of his political enemies recounted how Trump has lamented how more people aren’t defecting from the Democratic Party for what is supposedly the “biggest scandal” in recent U.S. political history. The president also blames media outlets—including Fox—for not covering Durham-related developments as aggressively as he’d like. They’re “cover[ing] it up” for the voters and American public, Trump has said.

Another source with knowledge of the president’s griping on the matter said that there was at least one instance in the past two months when President Trump had flipped through cable-news channels looking for coverage of the probe one day, only to voice his irritation when he couldn’t find any. 

 

So this is where the danger comes in, as I've warned. When it finally penetrates Trump's shell that he's really in danger of losing this election, he's going to panic, and panicky, scared people with power do stupid, stupid things. I don't honestly know how far Trump will go, but given his documented, decades-long history of looting the place and leaving his enablers holding the bag, and his documented, decades-long history of petty retribution against everyone in a position of strength against him, the potential for a catastrophic miscalculation on Trump's part is very high.

What happens if Trump orders Barr to arrest Clinton, Biden, and Obama?

We could find out really soon.