Pre-Helsinki, Hillary Clinton asked Trump “Do you know which team you play for?” Post-Helsinki, her answer is “Well, now we know”.
The linked article takes that to allude to Trump’s stance on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Russian interference has been made into a tempest in a teapot, blown up out of all proportion by anti-Trump forces and by Clinton’s refusal to accept her own role in producing her electoral defeat.
Trump knows that his campaign didn’t “collude” with Putin or Putin agents, that he didn’t collude, and that whatever hacking occurred had no known, measurable, probable, likely or significant impact on the election outcome. The making up of American minds and the casting of votes were influenced by many factors. James Comey had a measurable impact. A Russian state effort to sway votes toward Trump has not been established factually, much less showing that such an effort, if it existed, had anything but an infinitesimal impact on votes cast.
The team that Trump is playing for is America and Americans, as he has consistently stated for years. At the Helsinki press conference, Trump re-iterated his stance: “As president, I will always put [first] what is best for America and what is best for the American people.” Clinton’s team is the national security state, a different thing altogether than the American people. Yes, now we know again what we knew before when Clinton identified a large portion of the American people as “deplorables” and when she took such pleasure at the murder of Gaddafi that she had brought about. Her team is not the American people.
Trump has critics who are left-wing and right-wing. On the right is McCain, who is an überhawk. On the left are people with absurd ideas like Janai Nelson and Jill Wine-Banks.
Ms. Nelson thinks that it is “absolutely insane to think that he [Trump] can make a lifetime appointment to one of the most significant and important institutions in our democracy [Supreme Court] in this moment when his entire authority is really suspect.” She’s a lawyer, and yet she’s ready to throw away the Constitution and an election result that back up Trump’s authority, because she places greater weight on suspicions that have no known merit. She values control over an actual Supreme Court appointment more highly than the democratic procedures employed to place an appointee in office. Ms. Nelson’s attitude belies her talk of “our democracy” and its “important institutions”. She does not really hold them or the Constitution in high regard or in higher regard than expediency. In fairness, she’s not alone. The same has been true of Congress, the Executive and Supreme Court judges, or we could not have arrived at this stage of government size, scope and power.
Then we have Ms. Wine-Banks. Her statement is incredible, yet it tells us how far anti-Trump leftists have departed from reality. She said that in 2016 “…we were burglarized, this time, by foreign agents. And it’s just as serious to me as the Cuban Missile Crisis, in terms of an attack, or the 9/11 attack. The president [at Helsinki] is taking the side of the people who attacked us instead of trying to prevent a future attack. He has done nothing to make sure that the elections four months away [November, 2018] are going to be safe. And I would say that his performance today will live in infamy as much as the Pearl Harbor attack or Kristallnacht.”
In this case, Ms. Wine-Banks elevates suspicions of foreign election influence into realities, and in her mind these have become major realities, literally the stealing of the 2016 election — a burglary. And she tells us that this has grown in her mind to be as serious a matter as the 9/11 attack. This is an amazing revelation of her own madness. This is despite evidence of any impact that this “burglary” took place, or who instigated it; or if it did take place, the effect that this “burglary” had on votes or the election outcome. And for obvious reasons, she ignores the far more important role of Comey and the FBI. Then she accuses Trump’s press conference of being at the same level of infamy as Pearl Harbor or Kristallnacht. Were Trump’s comments really that wicked?
The comments of Ms. Wine-Banks are irrational. A good deal of anti-Trump rhetoric is of this caliber.
10:28 am on July 17, 2018
