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The question I always ask myself when this topic comes up is, Trump and Russia colluded to do what? I want to be clear that, if Trump's campaign in any way wor

• ModernMech 5y ago
  If any of this is shocking to you, please I implore you to read in full the Mueller Report and the Senate Intel report I linked earlier. These reports are nonpartisan and bipartisan respectively, and were directed by Republicans who were appointed and/or elected by Republicans. Read the raw text without any media filter or paraphrasing, especially the Mueller Report Vol I and the Senate Intel Report on Russian Active Measures Vol. V. > I think a logical leap which is often made, and which it appears that you may me making, is that ... working with Russia caused Trump to win the election. I can assure you I'm not under any delusion that this is the cause of Trump winning. I'm not even sure it helped that much. I believe the proximal cause of Hillary's loss was actually the Comey announcement that happened mere days before the election. If you look at the polls, you can see her favorability dropped significantly after that announcement but then started to bounce back (but not quite to the level it was at before the announcement). Given how tight the contest was, and how that announcement visibly affected polling, there's a big question in my mind that had Comey not done that, she might have won. > Trump and Russia colluded to do what? Here's what the Mueller report says: [T]he investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts. It goes on to say: [T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities. So we know why they were engaged in this relationship; Russia didn't want a Clinton presidency, and Trump wanted to be President. While the Mueller report "did not establish" that the Trump campaign "conspired" with Russia to do this, it's important to note that: 1. Conspiracy is a technical legal term, this was always an unlikely scenario and not at all what the mainstream and serious jurists were alleging. It's worth noting that the directive to focus the investigation on "conspiracy" came from Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, who also intoned to Trump privately that he would "land this plane", referring to concluding the Mueller investigation in a light favorable to Trump. When the report was released, it was AG Bill Barr who released the second quote above and withheld the first one from the public, a move that a federal judge wrote lacked "candor". 2. "The investigation did not establish members..." is not the same as "The investigation established members did not...". Most of the media and all of the GOP read the former and pretended it was the latter. This is especially disturbing because the reason the Muller report says it could not establish these facts was in part because witnesses lied, destroyed evidence, and obstructed the investigation, hence the entire second volume of the report (this is why obstruction is a crime on its own, because if you are allowed to obstruct an investigation with impunity, you can get away with almost anything). This is where the Senate report picks up and fills in more details about actual coordination between Trump and Russia via Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort. > In this scenario, what exactly is Russia doing which is aiding the Trump campaign which any Super PAC would not be able to do? They hacked the Democratic National Committee and handed the hacked materials over to Wikileaks for distribution. PACS can't do that. Also unlike PACS, the Russian GRU isn't subject to any American campaign finance laws which are in place to provide transparency to the electoral process. > Trump was, with his message, able to convince a large enough share of the population to take the electoral college, to vote for him. In other words, Trump is the primary reason Trump got elected. Russia at best put a finger on the scale, or added a little bit more fuel to a fire which was already burning. I'm definitely not going to deny that! Trump is certainly able to convince people to follow him on his own. But that's not what happened so we have to consider everything in context. For instance, what was Trump's message during the latter part of the campaign? He spent a lot of time talking about "Crooked Hillary" and the primary evidence he had to point to regarding her "crookedness" was "her e-mails". And then what would he do? He would pivot to Wikileaks and talk about how much he loved Wikileaks. He would talk about how much corruption is in the hacked e-mails, when really they were quite banal. Nonetheless, there was a conflation that happened between Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server and the DNCs hacked e-mails. This made "Hillary Clinton's Hacked E-mails" front page news for weeks before the election. A lot of people I know just flat out assumed they were e-mails from her State server and that they revealed massive corruption, without ever reading them or investigating it past a headline or soundbite. And let's not forget when the first e-mails from John Podesta were released by Wikileaks: just 1 hour after the Trump access Hollywood "pussy grabbing" tape was released by the Washington Post. This provided a nice distraction for everyone who didn't want to confront Trump's on-camera admission of his proclivity to rampantly sexually assault women. So is that a finger on the scale? Yeah it is. Is anything about this illegal? Some of it, not all of it, and not the worst parts. And even the stuff that is illegal is almost impossible to prove. So there's no criminal case to bring here. More than anything it proves that some laws should be passed to codify some norms. Honestly, the Trump-Russia issue is pretty moot at this point. I used to worry about what it would mean for future elections. Here, a candidate colluded with a foreign government to circumvent our standard electoral process in order to gain an advantage on his opponent. He then won and leveraged his power to hide what he did, and he got away with it. This just incentivizes the commission of crimes to gain power. Once you gain power, you're beyond prosecution, so why wouldn't you engage in this behavior, when the plus side is becoming the leader of the most powerful and richest nation on Earth? But back to something you said: Trump was, with his message, able to convince a large enough share of the population This is why I am so concerned right now, because you are so right. Trump is able to convince a large portion of the population through his words alone of almost anything. His message right now is that elections are rigged. The DNC did the rigging during the 2020 election and that was in effect a coup against the US government, which he conflates with himself. And people are convinced of that. They are so convinced of that they were happy to assault the Capitol a year ago. Now it seems like the whole idea of elections is quaint. Campaign finance laws seem quaint. Voting seems quaint. They've figured out they don't need any of that; they even realized they don't need to campaign on a platform. All they need to do is control state elections boards, and just ignore the result of the vote in a few key states. Cause a contested election, and kick it to the House delegations where Republicans are a majority. Anyway, I'm sorry to give you this wall of text but you kept responding to me so you asked for it :P
  • skohan 5y ago
    Again I just don't think any of this is particularly relevant. Trump didn't get elected by colluding with Russia. Trump got elected because he articulated a salient message which resonated with many Americans. If you think Hillary Clinton's emails had more to do with the result of the election than NAFTA's effect on the rust belt, the opioid epidemic, the skyrocketing costs of healthcare and education, and the handling of the 2008 financial crisis then I would have a lot of trouble understanding your reasoning. I just don't think it's productive at all to fixate on Trump as some sort of bogeyman. He's merely a symptom of our dysfunctional government. The endless pearl-clutching and regurgitation of Russia-gate and January 6 is not particularly interesting to me. If we don't want another trump, the best thing we could do is reform elections to combat minoritarian rule, reform the legislature so it can actually function, and pass some simple, obvious reforms to improve the material conditions of working people.
    • ModernMech 5y ago
      I don't think it's relevant either, not at the moment anyway, not after 1/6. But the collusion happened and we need to stop pretending it didn't. > If you think Hillary Clinton's emails ... I would have a lot of trouble understanding your reasoning. I would say all of those things you listed would be my personal list of grievances against Hillary Clinton. I think it put her toe-to-toe with someone fundamentally unfit for office. But when I talk to Trump voters, their grievances include almost none of the points you listed. In order they are almost invariably: 1. E-mails, 2. Benghazi, 3. her proximity to Bill Clinton. That's just my experience anyway, maybe it's not generalizable. But it's not surprising, as this is roughly the proportion of time spent on each topic in the media, particularly on Fox News. They didn't focus on the cost of education or the opioid crisis. They did focus on NAFTA a bit, but more so than anything it was e-mails they focused on. Just look at the peak here of search terms that drop off after the election: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2016-01-01%202017-01-01&geo=US&q=NAFTA,emails,opioids,benghazi https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2016-01-01%202... > The endless pearl-clutching and regurgitation of Russia-gate If you think the reaction to the events laid out in the Mueller Report and the Senate Intel report amount to "pearl clutching", then you admit it's above-board to work in lock-step with a foreign government to hack your electoral opponents, and that it's fine to then leverage your privileged position to cover it up. If that's your stance, say so. That's fine. What's not fine is to minimize what happened as "pearl clutching". A thing happened and it has serious implications that drive directly at the dysfunction of our government. We have to be lucid about those implications. Just don't be surprised when a Democrat does it in the future, I wouldn't put it past them. That's what normalization of this stuff does. > If we don't want another trump, the best thing we could do is reform elections to combat minoritarian rule, reform the legislature so it can actually function, and pass some simple, obvious reforms to improve the material conditions of working people. I know you said you've been out of the country for almost a decade, so maybe you have not followed how dysfunctional things are now. None of what you suggest will be signed into law. Maybe some election reforms will squeak through, but even then they might just patch a 19th century old electoral count act, and even that is going to be a massive ask. Meanwhile, Republican state legislatures are removing all of the barriers that caused their "Green Bay Sweep" plan to fail on 1/6, giving themselves full partisan control of state election boards, which used to be nonpartisan. Again, you can call that uninteresting pearl clutching, but at the same time I will note that you are living in a functioning democracy, whereas we here in the homeland are currently classified as a backsliding democracy due to the GOP agenda. It's very interesting to those of us who are still here. I'd be very interested to hear the take of older Germans you know about 1/6, as to whether they also think the consternation is pearl clutching.