MY RIFLE, MY PONY, AND ME

Earlier this year, the domestic terrorist group that calls itself the National Rifle Association admitted that it accepted money from Russia.  Last week, we learned about one such generous donor – Alexander Torshin, deputy director of Russia’s central bank, and coincidentally, a life member of the NRA.  Who knew that the 2nd Amendment meant so much to Russian oligarchs?   Ypa 2A!

Torshin was on the radar screen of Spain’s Centro Nacional de Inteligencia, who recorded some conversations between him and convicted Russian money launderer Alexander Romanov.  What were Torshin and Romanov discussing?  Surprisingly, the conversation was not about well-regulated militias and the right to keep and bear arms.  Jose Grinda, a leading Spanish anti-mafia prosecutor, offered a clue: “Mr. Trump’s son should be concerned.”  Spain has turned the tapes over to the FBI, so Robert Mueller now knows whatever it is that Trump Jr. should be concerned about.

Meanwhile in New York, another Russian was making news.  Taxi medallion billionaire Evgeny Freidman was in deep trouble, and facing a hundred years in prison for tax fraud and grand larceny.  Mirabile dictu, Freidman, a Russian émigré, cut a deal with the New York Attorney General’s office last week – no jail time at all, in return for his full cooperation with any and all state and federal prosecutors. 

Golly, why might prosecutors in New York have offered such a generous deal? 

Well, when you think New York and taxis, you just naturally think of Michael Cohen.  Sure enough, Freidman was in business with Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former fixer/attorney.  It sure seems like this deal is an attempt to put the screws to Cohen.  Freidman can tell the Feds how Russian money made its way into New York, and into Cohen’s hands.  Cohen, in turn, knows how Russian money made its way into Donald Trump’s bank account.  No wonder Donald Trump is rattled.

There is a famous legal aphorism, sometimes attributed to Carl Sandburg: “If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.”  Team Trump is now yelling like hell.  

Both the facts and the law will condemn Donald Trump.  In response, he has adopted a defense strategy that might have been designed by Lewis Carroll:  create a counterfactual world in which your supporters can believe six impossible things before breakfast.  Neither the facts nor the law are important.

A lot of assumptions I made right after the election were wrong.  For instance, I thought at least a few Republicans might have principles.  How naïve!  But I was right about at least one thing.  I wrote Facebook on November 16, 2016, that the most important difference between Trump supporters and the rest of us was what I referred to as a reality gap.

Pro- and anti-Trump people live in separate realities. We look at the same phenomena and see vastly different things. We can’t discuss, debate, or negotiate because even though we’re using the same words, we aren’t speaking the same language.

Disinformation is a deliberate strategy on the part of Donald Trump and his henchmen. They use incoherence as a weapon. They are trying to confuse people.  They have a multi-billion-dollar Republican propaganda industry led by Fox News, talk radio, etc., to help them deny the truth and promote lies.  And they’re good at it. 

Winston Churchill put it this way: “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”  And by that time, there’s a new lie out the door and into the world. 

We can, and should, demand that legitimate news outlets document this dishonesty.  But we can’t rely on the truth to set us free. You don’t bring fact checkers to a knife fight. 

Trump’s current line of defense is that the Obama Administration inserted a spy into the Trump campaign.  Therefore, they say, if Mueller’s investigation finds what appears to be proof of collusion with Russia, it’s only because that spy planted bogus evidence for Mueller to use against Trump and his family.  Never mind that Mueller’s appointment wouldn’t happen for another year.  Obama’s Deep State had been planning this entire operation for decades, even before Obama became president.

As #NeverTrump Republican Rick Wilson puts it, Trump will soon claim that he and his family have “no business in Russia, didn't collude with Russia, didn't coordinate with Russia, never borrowed money from Russians, didn't accept dirt on Hillary Clinton from Russia, don't know any Russians, have never met any Russians and have never heard of the country of Russia.”

Sane people know that’s bullshit.  But there are a lot of insane people in America these days, and Donald Trump is doing his best to produce more of them.