The case against Donald Trump: volume 3258

An entertaining canter through the canon of Donald Trump’s alleged presidential crimes.

Donald Trump and special counsel Robert Mueller. When Mueller ‘drew up his famously prolix and turgid report, the language was so opaque that it enabled Trump to claim exoneration.’

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Donald Trump’s a lying, cheating, corrupt, dishonest narcissist. He has abused the sacred office of the presidency to suborn the institutions of the US federal government in service of his vanity. His term of office is among the darkest moments in American history.

If you have spent the past four years under a rock, or have just emerged from one of those clinics you read about in science-fiction novels where your recent memory has been erased, this might come as news to you. For the rest of us, a book by a journalist recounting the essential malignity of the 45th US president is as fresh as a “how to survive lockdown” manual.

The list of these philippics grows by the week. So why one more?

The cynical answer, I suppose, is that they sell. No one asked why Abba kept putting out albums that seemed to reproduce the same combination of music and lyrics year after year. Like pop music, most modern journalism and current affairs book writing isn’t about broadening minds or deepening understanding.

Our political views are increasingly like our tastes – we want to indulge them. The vast number of people who fear and loathe Trump want those emotions stoked and amplified so they can reaffirm their convictions about the state of the world.

This latest volume by Jeffrey Toobin – a clever lawyer turned clever writer for The New Yorker, as well as the author of Run of His Life, which was turned into the TV series The People v OJ Simpson – does the trick nicely.

Toobin’s contribution to the genre is a fast-paced and engaging canter through the canon of Trump’s alleged presidential crimes. There’s nothing much new here, but Toobin chronicles the familiar territory with a writer’s eye for drama and character.

CNN and New Yorker legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin. Source: CNN

The narrative centres on the two highest peaks of scandal in the expansive mountain range that is Trumpland: the allegations of collusion by the Trump campaign with Russia in the 2016 election and the subsequent investigation led by Robert Mueller, the special counsel; and the attempt in 2019 by Trump to get the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden, an intervention that led to the President’s impeachment by the House of Representatives (and acquittal by the Senate) this year.

Toobin finds the link between these not in the geographic propinquity of the two states that have dominated American conversation these past few years, but in how the failure to nab Trump for the former seemed to embolden him to unleash his forces on the latter.

The author blames Mueller for this state of affairs. He says it was clear that Trump broke the law in obstructing justice by interfering in the Russia investigation. But Mueller would not or could not bring himself to collar him.

The reason, Toobin offers, is that the special prosecutor was an old-school Washington good guy (ex-marine, ex-FBI director) who insisted on playing by the book against an opponent with the scruples of a mafia don. Toobin’s eye for character captures the contrast between the two protagonists – born a couple of years apart, but whose lives could not have been more different.

“At every turn Mueller chose public service over private gain; Trump did the opposite. Mueller earned a reputation for honesty and rectitude; Trump became infamous for his dishonesty and greed. Mueller had one wife and many lifelong friends; Trump had three wives, many business associates and few friends.”

It was, in the famous phrase of the Sean Connery character in The Untouchables, a case of bringing a knife to a gunfight.

So Mueller declined to interview Trump – Toobin clearly feels that it might have impaled the President on his own mendacity – because it would not have been fair. And when he drew up his famously prolix and turgid report, the language was so opaque that it enabled Trump to claim exoneration.

As for the Ukraine incident, Toobin notes that the infamous phone call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian President, in which the US President hinted to his counterpart that he might withhold military aid unless Kiev opened an investigation into Biden’s connections in the country, occurred the day after Mueller had testified before Congress, all stiff-collared and stiffer-lipped, in effect shutting down the last remnants of the investigation.

Again Toobin’s eye for details is entertaining. He reports that the Ukrainian plot of which Trump was accused had been hatched at the White House Chanukkah party in December 2018 when Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s trusted lawyer, told him of his conspiracy theories about Ukraine, the 2016 election and Biden. Soon Giuliani was leading a weird triumvirate of emigres trying to dig up dirt on Trump’s opponents.

His accomplices were ” almost comically unfit for the assignment, lacking the knowledge, wisdom and values to undertake a project of this magnitude. Their motives … were dubious and obviously so. Failure, even fiasco, was preordained.” It’s all good, comically dark stuff.

The problem, though, is that, like almost all Trump-era journalism, it starts from the premise that the President committed crimes, perhaps even treason, and got away with it. Yet the more we learn about the Russia investigation that started this entire story, the less it seems there was to it. True, Trump and his campaign seemed more than happy to acquiesce in the Russian intervention that occurred in the 2016 election, but there has never been any evidence – as Mueller concluded – that they engaged in any kind of collaboration.

Unfortunately for Toobin, in the few months since the ink dried on his manuscript we have learnt even more about the FBI’s investigation of the Trump presidential campaign.

It paints a more troubling picture. Not of a treasonous, Putin-loving Republican candidate whooping it up with Kremlin buddies, but of rogue elements in the Department of Justice and FBI determined to get the Bad Orange Man at whatever cost.

Even if that meant doctoring documents used to obtain surveillance warrants on Trump team members doing perfectly legal things, trapping Trump officials into lying to investigators about unrelated matters and zealously pressing ahead with an investigation long after it was clear it was going nowhere.

This was aided and abetted by an enthusiastic media – which included Toobin, who fed the public for three years a story about Trump-Russia collusion that wasn’t true.

As for the Ukraine impeachment saga, Toobin knows only too well, and glancingly acknowledges, that the Democrats pressed ahead with impeachment at a pace that was inconsistent with a proper consideration of the law and the facts, for the political expediency of wrapping it up in time for their presidential primary campaign in early 2020.

With the very last words in the book Toobin offers an unwitting rebuttal to all the efforts over four years to have Trump removed from office over questionable behaviour. “For Trump his presidency was more about him than what he could accomplish. For this reason, the only verdict that has ever mattered to Trump is the one rendered on Election Day.”

The irony is that it was Toobin and many of his media friends who declined to accept the electoral verdict four years ago and have spent almost every day since trying to undo it. In a few months it will once again be the voters – as it should be – who will get to deliver their verdict.

True Crimes and Misdemeanours: The Investigation of Donald Trump by Jeffrey Toobin (Bodley Head, 482pp)

The Times