Donald Trump fears any acknowledgement that Russian
tampering impacted the 2016 election renders his election illegitimate. He
should. That’s exactly what happened. Putin elected a U.S. president.
Trump earned a right-wing political reputation making
unfounded and unsupportable claims that Barack Obama wasn’t a U.S. citizen.
But, unlike Trump’s campaign to delegitimize President Obama, actual evidence supports
the fact that Trump is an illegitimate President.
There is, admittedly, no scientific process for measuring
the impact of Russian hacking on the results of the race, but give me a break.
Doing the math and applying common logic leads rational minds to an inescapable
conclusion.
Start with Trump’s claim that he won a landslide victory. Of
course, he didn’t. Set aside the unfortunately-irrelevant fact that Clinton
defeated Trump by more than 2.8 million votes. Trump won because he received
306 electoral votes to Clinton’s 232.
Hillary Clinton would have been President, and Trump’s
juvenile Tweets would not be unsettling the world, if she had received 38 more
electoral votes. She would have added 46 electoral votes with a shift of a
total of 53,555 votes of the 13 million cast across Michigan, Wisconsin, and
Pennsylvania, Clinton would be President. It was that close.
Don’t tell me the Russian hacking didn’t impact at least
that many votes. To believe otherwise you have to ignore the findings of the
CIA, the FBI, and the Director of National Intelligence. Their report, “Assessing Russian Activities and
Intentions in Recent US Elections,” concludes all U.S. intelligence agencies
have a high degree of confidence the following statement.
“We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered
an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election. Russia’s
goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton,
and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess
Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for
President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in
these judgments.”
Don’t
stop there. Remind yourself what you heard throughout Trump’s campaign. One example
is this report in the Washington
Examiner, a newspaper not unfriendly to the GOP nominee.
“Donald
Trump spent most of his Panama City, Fl., rally Tuesday night hitting Hillary Clinton over details about her campaign
that have emerged in more than 5,000 hacked emails made public by WikiLeaks
since last Friday. Twenty-four hours after Trump said "I love
WikiLeaks" at a separate campaign event in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., the
Republican presidential nominee continued to slam his Democratic opponent using
material found in the trove of illegally obtained emails from her campaign
chairman, John Podesta. The leaked emails confirmed that ‘Hillary is a vessel
for the corrupt global establishment that is ruining the sovereignty of our
nation,’ Trump charged in the first 15 minutes of his evening rally.”
Trump was a broken record. To heavily rely on this information as
the backbone of his campaign and then say it had no impact is disingenuous.
Familiar
with the Spanish water torture used during the Inquisition? Victims were
strapped down. The torturer slowly dripped water on the victims’ forehead over
a long time, slowly driving him/her mad.
Trump’s
campaign was Russian water torture. Without it, she’d have weathered the email
server problem and even the Comey letter. But, day after day, drip by drip, the
media obsessed with those leaks. Often they were meaningless, sometimes embarrassing.
But they were constant and they were strategically employed by Trump to prop up
his narrative that Hilary Clinton was a crook who represented everything wrong
with Washington and should be locked up.
There’s
an old cowboy saying. “Don’t pee on my boots and tell me it’s raining.”
The
Russians intended to help Trump win. They succeeded. But Trump and all
Americans should be unnerved by another finding in the report. Hillary wasn’t
their only target. The report says, “Russia
collected on some Republican-affiliated targets but did not conduct a
comparable disclosure campaign.” Not yet anyway.
Anyone concerned about what the Russians have on
Trump and how they might use it?
No comments:
Post a Comment