Six hours of testimony from special prosecutor Robert Mueller highlighted the dilemma facing the Democrats in the run-up to the 2020 US election. Answering questions with lawyerly precision, Mueller refused to deliver the knockout blow so many had hoped for, referring instead to his published findings and repeatedly insisting that the indictment of a sitting president lay beyond the scope of his powers. Mueller did nothing to prevent Republicans from spinning his responses to Trump’s advantage, allowing them to falsely claim that the report had cleared the president of collusion and obstruction.
At this stage, impeachment proceedings seem more of a political tactic than a genuine antidote to the excesses of the Trump presidency. Most Democrats know it has little chance of complete success, but they also grasp the value of embarrassing the president with the many unsavory facts in the report before the election campaign is fully underway.
Mueller, a former FBI director, was unusually forthcoming on one issue: the question of Russian interference. His report found that in 2016 Russian hackers had infiltrated election systems in two Florida counties. Asked whether something like this could happen again, Mueller said “They’re doing it as we sit here.” Although Russia’s interference was heavily weighted towards Trump, it seems to have been more focused on undermining the electoral process itself rather than simply guaranteeing a winner, in the same way that Russian bots continually seek to roil social media conversations, and make them more heated and divisive, rather than promote a coherent set of political beliefs.
Mueller’s concern on this point contrasts strongly with Trump’s indifference. Just last month, when pressed on the subject at the G20 conference in Japan, Trump jokingly turned towards Vladimir Putin and said: “Don’t meddle in the election, please.” As ever, this counterintuitive move cast further doubts on Trump’s 2016 solicitation of intelligence on his opponents, his campaign’s long record of shady associations with the Kremlin, and his apparent readiness to trust Putin’s denials of interference over the expertise of American intelligence. Revealingly, when democratic congressman Peter Welch asked Mueller whether the events of 2016 had “established a new normal [in which] future campaigns, aware that a hostile foreign power is influencing election, [have] no duty to report that to the FBI or other authorities?” he replied: “I hope this is not the new normal. But I fear it is.”
At a moment when the new British Prime Minister has been chosen, effectively in private, by less than a tenth of a percent of the population and America is slouching towards another divisive election, our own electoral woes seem well attuned to the zeitgeist. Britain and the United States are now led by blustering opportunists, con men surrounded by yes men, and although in both countries the machinery of parliamentary democracy goes through its motions, it seems less and less able to contain the whimsical improvisations for which Trump and Johnson are best known.
In the New York Review of Books, Fintan O’Toole puts it this way: “the two central questions about Johnson—does he believe any of his own claims, and do his followers in turn believe him? In both cases, the answer is yes, but only in the highly qualified way that an actor inhabits his role and an audience knowingly accepts the pretense. Johnson’s appeal lies precisely in the creation of a comic persona that evades the distinction between reality and performance.” O’Toole also describes Johnson as someone who “claims the privileges of the clown while exercising the power of a politician.” Both descriptions apply equally well to Trump and they perfectly capture the hollow politics which has overtaken both sides of the Atlantic and threatens to take root in many other places.
In a famous letter, John Adams warned that “democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself … It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy … [because those] passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.” Adams’s point was not, necessarily, that democracy is doomed to failure, so much as a warning that its institutions are just as vulnerable to erosive passions as those in other form of government, and if they are not defended by an engaged citizenry, they tend to wither and die.
