Donald Trump is morphing into a hybrid of two of the people he hates most — Bill and Hillary Clinton. His presidency looks set to describe a Clintonian arc of endless scandal, doubt and hostility, while his supporters grow more convinced that he is persecuted.
The charging of his former campaign manager Paul Manafort, and his associate Rick Gates, and the guilty plea by former adviser George Papadopoulos show once again that special prosecutors always run amok and do enormous damage to the administration that appoints them.
Which underlines how dumb Trump was to sack FBI director James Comey — that led directly to the appointment of special prosecutor Robert Mueller.
The presidency of Bill Clinton, and the presidential candidacy of his wife, were paralysed by scandal. But somehow they always just failed to bring either of the them down.
But because these scandals never resulted in a conviction for either Clinton, they had three destructive consequences for US politics.
First, the people who opposed the Clintons became convinced they were not just the champions of bad policy but were at the heart of a criminal conspiracy.
Second, Clinton supporters came to the opposite view — that they were being persecuted by a “vast right-wing conspiracy”.
And third, because the scandals were never resolved they never went away. The Clinton wars became a kind of theological divide in US society, a never-ending source of conflict and comfort, a generator in perpetuity of mind-numbing palaver.
Enter Trump. Yesterday’s revelations were both big and small. According to Mueller’s charges, Manafort and Gates earned $US18 million from the Ukrainian government and forgot to mention it to US tax authorities.
Manafort and Gates say they are pleading not guilty. The charges are not yet proved. But even if they are convicted, this information doesn’t involve Trump or his campaign doing anything illegal. All Manafort’s income from the Ukrainians predates his period as Trump’s campaign chairman.
Of course, it’s unseemly at best. Manafort seems to be a right-wing version of the disreputable types the Clintons surrounded themselves with.
The Papadopoulos case is in some ways more intriguing. He seems to have been marginal in the Republican campaign, although there is one photo of him in Trump’s presence.
His effort to set up some kind of deep link between Trump and the Russians looks to have been rebuffed by the Republican campaign.
No smoking gun is apparent as yet.
It is also instructive that Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
Having watched and reported an endless series of these special prosecutor cases, it is instructive how often people are convicted not for a substantive offence but for misleading investigators.
This is an easy charge to level and the mere threat of it terrifies any normal citizen who faces potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and even a stint in prison.
The special prosecutor has enormous leverage over anyone who is not fabulously wealthy.
A number of these sorts of convictions have been uncontroversially pardoned later by presidents, and some people who have suffered such convictions have come back to work in sensitive national security posts.
That’s not remotely to declare Papadopoulos innocent. But it would be well to withhold judgment on all this for a bit.
If this is as far as Mueller’s charges go, it won’t hurt Trump too much. In fact it will strengthen him in his base.
But special prosecutors are like dedicated hunters. They thirst after the big prey.
If this turns out to be Mueller’s base camp as he ascends Mount Everest, Trump may have a lot of trouble.
Either way, it has for the moment the unmistakeable whiff of the Clintons.
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