Not every scandal is a magic bullet, and the hysteria is helping Trump
CRITICS calling for Donald Trump’s impeachment every five minutes are like the boy who cried wolf. Who will believe them if he does something to earn it, asks James Morrow.
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PREDICTION: Barring some sort of unforeseen health drama, there is a 99 per cent chance Donald Trump will serve out his first term of office.
And here’s a further bet for you: Unless American Democrats, and large sections of the US media and Washington press corps, stop baying for the president’s head in ever shriller terms, he’s not a bad chance for a second term either.
This may sound funny in a week when Australians woke to the news that Trump had, according to the armies of anonymous sources cited in the Washington Post, passed on super-duper top secret classified intel to the Russians.
But while it is certainly nice to see such concern about the proper handling of government secrets (particularly after an election when Hillary Clinton’s treatment of classified intelligence was so largely waved away) this latest attempt to bring down Trump is likely to come to naught.
The pattern of the Trump-shared-secrets-with-the-Russkies story is predictable.
As is so often the case the Washington Post, which has made itself the unofficial house organ of America’s anti-Trump establishment with its new self-regarding slogan, “Democracy dies in darkness”, kicked things off.
They did this with an article citing “anonymous sources” who claimed that the president — whether in a fit of braggadocio, stupidity, or in partial payment for Moscow’s meddling with the election the Post leaves to the reader to decide — passed on exceedingly sensitive and restricted intelligence to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister in a meeting last week.
The information was so top secret, said the Post, that America hadn’t even shared the information with key allies.
All of this conjured images of Trump letting the Russians in on something really big, like exactly when all the generals take smoko at NORAD (“I tell you Vlad, they’re out there every morning at 9:30 like clockwork. And if they’re talking about what happened on Last Resort, they’re not back at their stations for, like, half an hour, easy.”)
And it immediately set commentators abuzz, with everyone who’d just settled down over the firing of FBI Director James Comey once again demanding Trump’s impeachment, this time for grievously damaging national security.
But as so often happens, the extent of what Trump actually told the Russians reality may be a bit more pedestrian.
The information in question is now said to have been about ISIS plots to sneak a bomb on to an airliner in a laptop, a plot device easily imagined by any Hollywood TV writer or paperback spy thriller author.
Indeed, if no other allies knew about the plot, then all credit to British officials who instituted a similar ban in the wake of the US’s move to ban laptops on flights from a number of Muslim-majority countries, as well as to Malcolm Turnbull, who is also said to be looking “very closely” at putting such a policy in place for flights to Australia.
And for what it’s worth, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster has denied anything inappropriate was shared with the Russians, though whether the word of a three star general can hold a candle to unnamed sources is an open question.
This is not to defend Trump so much as it is to plead for some sense of reality on the part of his critics, who see in every scandal a magic bullet that might restore the world to the way they think it should be.
But at some point all those journalists and activists and progressives and all the other reflexive Trump-haters are going to have to stop biting at every story that comes down the pike. The weekly metaphorical slamming of palms on the table yelling “checkmate!” only to have to sit down to play another move is becoming tiresome, and it will drive voters further away from where they want them to be.
The constant high-volume hysteria, particularly among sober, responsible news outlets which should know better, is also inoculating Trump against charges that might hold water down the track: Much of the reason he won the election is because millions of Americans tuned out and stopped treating the media as a neutral observer in the political process playing it straight.
And, I might add, those who worry most that Trump or the Russians or some combination of the two are going to bring down American civil society should perhaps look in the mirror. A loyal opposition argues ideas; it does not start from the premise that the side in power is, by definition, illegitimate and needs to be taken out.
Of course all this may wind up going down in history as one of those great pundit’s predictions that don’t age well. (For examples of the form go back and see what people were saying about Hillary Clinton before the election.)
Trump may be led out of the White House in handcuffs by the end of the financial year and I’ll be working out which wine washes down a healthy serving of crow.
In which case, his detractors will surely enjoy life under the administration of President Mike Pence.
James Morrow is the Daily Telegraph opinion editor.
Originally published as Not every scandal is a magic bullet, and the hysteria is helping Trump
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