Trump 2020: The Campaign Plan?
The evidence of the Trump Campaign’s likely collusion with Russia is not yet totally clear, but any unbiased prosecutor anywhere in America would be highly suspicious to say the least. And we all should be as well. The multi-million dollar connection between Trump’s one time campaign manager, Paul Manifort with the Russians and their close allies is unquestioned. The long-term friendly relationship between Manifort’s former partner Roger Stone and Donald Trump has been known about for years and is heavily documented. Roger Stone has acknowledged his ties to Wikileaks publisher Julian Assaunge and gleefully telegraphed Wikileaks pending release of Clinton emails before they were published online. Rudy Giuliani, a senior Trump Campaign official also had knowledge of data dumps before the fact. Where did their information come from? General Flynn’s close relationship with Putin and the Russians ultimately made him such a serious security risk that it cost him his job. What was his role in this sordid mess?
And still Donald Trump refuses to acknowledge what every Intelligence official in our government knows as hard fact, that Putin and his Russian allies massively hacked our election, weighing in at every opportunity to tilt the election to Donald Trump. Trump fired the US Attorney who was investigating the matter, asked other senior intelligence officials to try to persuade James Tomey, the Director of the FBI to drop the Russian investigation. When Tomey would not drop the investigation, he too was fired.
Congressional Committees run by Republicans are reluctantly looking into the matter with little enthusiasm and have not yet devoted the necessary resources to properly fund impartial investigations.
Trump is so reluctant to criticize Russia and its leaders despite the mounting evidence of their attack on our democratic system that he gives the appearance of condoning their actions. Even more ominous, the Trump Administration has taken no steps to prepare America to resist another intrusion into our elections in 2018 and 2020.
The whole affair smells to high heaven. Public officials of every political stripe still are reluctant to voice what seems so obvious. Trump operates as if he is guilty of something pretty serious. The old adage “if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is…” seems to fit.
If Trump won’t criticize the Russians or try to thwart their future efforts to corrupt our elections, there is a reason. Whatever the Russians have on him, whether it is something from the months and years before his campaign began or it’s just the threat that they could reveal his campaign’s collusion last year with their attack on our democracy, he is effectively immobilized with respect to the Russians. But the Russians certainly are not immobilized with respect to him, as they forcefully indicated just yesterday, signaling a coming veto for Trump’s UN Resolution to put sanctions on North Korea following their ICBM test.
As for the Robert Mueller led investigation that may reveal what really happened, Trump’s bobbing and weaving, desperately hoping to bottle up the truth. What is he willing to do to save his skin? Will he fire or force the firing of the Special Prosecutor? Will he offer pardons to Manifort and Stone and Flynn and God-knows-who-else to insure their silence?
Or is Trump’s soul so dark that he will quietly bargain away America’s national interests in exchange for Acts II and III of the Russian attack on American Democracy in 2018 and 2020? Is that what Chris Kobach’s outlandish request for comprehensive and critical personal election data and voting history of every registered voter from all fifty states is all about? Is Kobach’s ambitious and misleading “voter fraud” campaign to suppress the voting rights of minorities, the elderly, and college students really worth the risk of assembling a massive national database of registered voters susceptible to one stop shopping by Russian hackers? Or is that just another part of the plan? And why when it’s needed most, is the Republican Congress moving to defund the Election Assistance Commission, the only Federal Agency that makes sure that voting machines can’t be hacked?
In the face of the massive and growing rejection of Trump and his agenda that is emerging throughout the American Electorate, are Trump and his Russian cronies becoming convinced that the only way for him to maintain power is to open up American voting machines and voter records to Russian hacking? Are these the real elements of the GOP Campaign Plans for 2018 and 2020?