by Thomas Farman
The people who thirst for justice over Washington’s continued attempts to deny Donald Trump the power of the presidency make a mistake in treating Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe as an actual whodunnit.
If this were an Agatha Christie novel, it would have ended with the revelation that the investigation was sourced in Hillary Clinton opposition research renamed for dramatic effect “the Steele dossier.”
The “who” that “dunnit” was none other than Barack Obama’s CIA and FBI turning that facial absurdity into probable cause to go fishing into the life of Donald Trump to find something, anything, that might damage him.
The object of the Mueller probe was never to investigate collusion because nobody could possibly believe something so idiotic. It was to create suspense in stupid people by generating headlines about Russia.
The following definition of “suspense” is sometimes attributed to Alfred Hitchcock:
Suspense is a feeling of pleasurable fascination and excitement mixed with apprehension, tension, and anxiety developed from an unpredictable, mysterious, and rousing source of entertainment.
Hitchcock distinguished between suspense and the whodunnit. Suspense is a dramatic device to engage distracted people who lack sufficient intellectual curiosity to bother with actual causal connections.
The resulting intrigue might even be irrelevant—a McGuffin that simply drives the characters.
That is why the Mueller report will fail to connect the dots and instead continue to stoke suspense. This crew is not going to let go of the hold Russia has had on the uncritical, including some notable pundits on the Right.
Look for the ol’:
The dedicated public servants on our team have tirelessly chased leads and turned stones. We are, however, limited by the boundaries imposed by geography and the constitution not to mention the genius of Putin and Trump to cover their tracks. We were disappointed that the president refused to speak to us but understand that it is his constitutional prerogative to hide evidence. We are proud, however, of our lots and lots of indictments, guilty pleas and convictions that have nothing to do with Russian collusion.
It is not all bad, however.
Republicans, in their wisdom, have reached into the shallow pool of hoteliers and reality show hosts to pluck out someone who understands the dramatic arc of American information consumption in the social media age.
President Trump has made the deliberate choice not to play this as a whodunnit, and instead to treat it like the fake wrestling match that it is.
Why take control of your own Justice Department when you can straddle the corner ropes in a red, white and blue singlet swinging a chair?
The president knows that declassifying documents would prove, once and for all, that this entire charade was hatched in the fertile mind of ex-CIA Director John Brennan, seeded to foreign intelligence services, and returned to American soil upon the ambitions of the FBI’s best and brightest, bucking for position in the Hillary Clinton Administration.
There’s already plenty of evidence that proves that, though. It has not mattered. The hysteria-fueled witch hunt has proceeded apace.
Not to mention that somewhere in the declassified documents, there is likely a fabricated story about Trump fathering a bastard son with a beauty pageant contestant or something just as dumb that would hit the news cycle like a tornado.
Whatever phony irrelevancy is still buried, once disclosed it would dominate reporting, and the deep state scheme to steal the presidency would be further obscured by the bad faith of CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.
Declassification is a better move after the report drops and the dominant media is forced, for the first time, to spend a couple of moments at least considering the lack of evidence that will be the buried lede in Mueller’s magnum opus.
The most amazing thing about this coup attempt, really, is that it has not worked. For that, thank the tactical ingenuity of Donald Trump, because Ted Cruz would be in jail by now.
Twitter and characteristic brashness have allowed the president to create his own pleasurable fascination and excitement mixed with apprehension, tension, and anxiety, to borrow from Hitchcock’s definition of suspense.
He may be its target, but President Trump has won the Russia probe.
Many people who ordinarily don’t care about politics (i.e., most Americans) have developed a grudging respect for this guy who trolls corrupt and powerful forces trying to destroy him—a modern measure of courage.
His supporters have been both affirmed and re-engaged by these attempts to nullify their votes, meaning they are not going anywhere in 2020.
And, too, the patina of doubt present in Trump’s first run—Is this guy for real?—has been dissipated by the most thorough federal investigation ever conducted.
If these bastards had found somewhere in his personal lawyer’s files (which they obtained in a nighttime raid) that he used less than spec cement on the bathrooms in Trump Tower, he would be facing the biggest construction fraud referral ever submitted to the Southern District of New York.
Trump is for real, and his persistence against this onslaught not to mention all the other guff he beats back from friend and foe alike proves it.
Good show, President Trump. Keep achieving world peace and economic prosperity while radicalizing your opponents over phony witch hunts, turning them into a bunch of socialists.
That is the best path to victory in the next election.
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Thomas J. Farnan is an attorney in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His writing has appeared in Forbes and he is a regular contributor to Townhall.com and the Observer.
Photo “Robert Mueller” by James Ledbetter. CC BY-SA 2.0.
