Trump's Decision Making Is A Different Kind Of Swamp

Jonathan Bernstein's question for Bloomberg readers was compelling enough-- Where Does Trump Get His Odd Ideas? "Understanding how a president thinks can help make sense of his decisions," he wrote. "Trump’s case is harder than most." [At the bottom of the page, please take a look at how Randy Rainbow deals with this question.] Bernstein wants to know how Trump learns things (or-- let's face it-- more to the point, why he doesn't). Earlier we looked at the horrifyingly dangerous example of Trump's Climate Change denial. Is it just a matter of listening to voices that serve his personal self-interest?

Trump doesn't read briefings, on politics or anything else. He doesn't appear to have absorbed the basics of public policy, whether on health care or national security or even issues, like trade, that he cares about. Instead, he seems to pick up fragments of information in conversation or, more often, from cable television. Often, it's partisan talking points, which isn't surprising since much of what airs on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC consists of partisan talking points. Trump then extracts some fact or detail he finds useful from that input, and comes up with his own way of expressing it. Usually, he pretties it up, smooths out any nuances and exaggerates significantly. Then he tests it out, on Twitter and especially at his rallies, working for the wording that gets the biggest reaction. And then? As far as I can tell, Trump winds up believing the final version of whatever it is he has produced. Once it's in there, it seems to stick, although sometimes the original 'fact' winds up growing more distorted over time.

This works on just about everything. For example, the facts contained in special counsel Robert Mueller's report were in fact devastating for Trump, especially on obstruction of justice. But for the president, it's simply become 'No Collusion. No Obstruction.' He took Attorney General William Barr's version of the report, or more likely the Fox News version of Barr's version, removed any complications or caveats, and created a new talking point. Does he really believe it? There's no way to know but he certainly brings it up all the time as if it were accurate.

You can well imagine, that he might have read Justin Amash's latest well-reasoned tweet storm Tuesday, which incapable of absorbing anything at all from it other than Amash, a Michigan Republican, being an enemy. This is a bit of a tangent, but let me pause for a second to transcribe the actual tweet storm; believe me, you'll enjoy it and I'll get back to Bernstein in a moment:

Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented key aspects of Mueller’s report and decisions in the investigation, which has helped further the president’s false narrative about the investigation. After receiving Mueller’s report, Barr wrote and released a letter on March 24 describing Barr’s own decision not to indict the president for obstruction of justice. That letter selectively quotes and summarizes points in Mueller’s report in misleading ways. Mueller’s report says he chose not to decide whether Trump broke the law because there’s an official DoJ opinion that indicting a sitting president is unconstitutional, and because of concerns about impacting the president’s ability to govern and pre-empting possible impeachment. Barr’s letter doesn’t mention those issues when explaining why Mueller chose not to make a prosecutorial decision. He instead selectively quotes Mueller in a way that makes it sound-- falsely-- as if Mueller’s decision stemmed from legal/factual issues specific to Trump’s actions. But, in fact, Mueller finds considerable evidence that several of Trump’s actions detailed in the report meet the elements of obstruction, and Mueller’s constitutional and prudential issues with indicting a sitting president would preclude indictment regardless of what he found. In noting why Barr thought the president’s intent in impeding the investigation was insufficient to establish obstruction, Barr selectively quotes Mueller to make it sound as if his analysis was much closer to Barr’s analysis than it actually was:

Barr quotes Mueller saying the evidence didn’t establish that Trump was personally involved in crimes related to Russian election interference, and Barr then claims that Mueller found that fact relevant to whether the president had the intent to obstruct justice. But Mueller’s quote is taken from a section in which he describes other improper motives Trump could have had and notes: “The injury to the integrity of the justice system is the same regardless of whether a person committed an underlying wrong.” None of that is in Barr’s letter.

As a result of Barr’s March 24 letter, the public and Congress were misled. Mueller himself notes this in a March 27 letter to Barr, saying that Barr’s letter “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions.” Mueller: “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.” To “alleviate the misunderstandings that have arisen,” Mueller urged the release of the report’s introductions and executive summaries, which he had told Barr “accurately summarize [Mueller’s] Office’s work and conclusions.” Barr declined; he allowed the confusion to fester and only released the materials three weeks later with the full redacted report. In the interim, Barr testified before a House committee and was misleading about his knowledge of Mueller’s concerns:

Barr was asked about reports “that members of [Mueller’s] team are frustrated…with the limited information included in your March 24th letter, that it does not adequately or accurately necessarily portray the report’s findings. Do you know what they’re referencing with that?”

Barr absurdly replied: “No, I don’t…I suspect that they probably wanted more put out.” Yet Mueller had directly raised those concerns to Barr, and Barr says he “suspect[s]” they “probably” wanted more materials put out, as if Mueller hadn’t directly told him that. In subsequent statements and testimony, Barr used further misrepresentations to help build the president’s false narrative that the investigation was unjustified. Barr notes that Mueller did not “find any conspiracy to violate U.S. law involving Russia-linked persons and any persons associated with the Trump campaign.” He then declares that Mueller found “no collusion” and implies falsely that the investigation was baseless. But whether there’s enough evidence for a conviction of a specific crime which Mueller thought was appropriate to charge is a different and much higher standard than whether the people whom Mueller investigated had done anything worthy of investigation.

In truth, Mueller’s report describes concerning contacts between members of Trump’s campaign and people in or connected to the Russian government. For instance, Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner took a meeting with a Russian lawyer whom Trump Jr. had been told worked for the Russian government and would provide documents to “incriminate Hillary,” as part of the Russian government’s “support for Mr. Trump.”

It’s wrong to suggest that the fact that Mueller did not choose to indict anyone for this means there wasn’t a basis to investigate whether it amounted to a crime or “collusion,” or whether it was in fact part of Russia’s efforts to help Trump’s candidacy.

Barr says the White House “fully cooperated” with the investigation and that Mueller “never sought” or “pushed” to get more from the president, but the report says Mueller unsuccessfully sought an interview with the president for over a year. The report says the president’s counsel was told that interviewing him was “vital” to Mueller’s investigation and that it would be in the interest of the public and the presidency. Still Trump refused. The president instead gave written answers to questions submitted by the special counsel. Those answers are often incomplete or unresponsive. Mueller found them “inadequate” and again sought to interview the president. Ultimately, the special counsel “recogniz[ed] that the President would not be interviewed voluntarily” and chose not to subpoena him because of concerns that the resulting “potentially lengthy constitutional litigation” would delay completion of the investigation.

"Anyway," wrote Bernstein, "there are dozens of examples like this. Trump's insistence that the Iran deal would’ve allowed the regime to develop nuclear weapons quickly, for one. Or his odd ideas about aircraft carriers. Or his infamous contention that foreign nations-- not companies, but nations-- pay for the tariffs he has imposed.The last president who had a habit of believing things that were not true was Ronald Reagan; his staff would work hard to prevent him from, for example, telling stories from movies as though they were actually from his own life. And yet Reagan knew a lot about how government and world affairs worked, and certainly had strong ideological beliefs that he really understood. He also was perfectly happy to be stage-managed, understanding that it suited his long-term interests. He was criticized for this quite a bit at the time, but he accepted that the presidency was a joint operation, not a one-person show. Trump, of course, hasn’t followed Reagan's example, in this regard and many others.

...[U]nderstanding a president's thinking helps make sense of his choices. There are places to look for clues, including party, promises made, skill level, the structure of the office and (when it comes to foreign affairs) the demands of national interests. But sometimes presidents act in ways that appear to defy all those explanations, and in those cases, it helps to know something about the person occupying the office. And Donald Trump, more than most presidents, frequently does things that scream out for a personal explanation."

As Australian activist and blogger Caitlin Johnstone wrote yesterday, "In a system where money both (A) translates directly to political power and (B) comes most abundantly to whoever is sufficiently cold and unfeeling to do whatever it takes in order to become immensely wealthy, we naturally find ourselves in a world ruled by sociopaths. These plutocratic rulers use their political influence to amass more power/money for themselves and create a system that is more and more favorable to the immensely wealthy, and they buy up media outlets to manufacture public support for that system. This ongoing propaganda campaign is what I see as the key weakness in the armor of their machine, and it’s the point I spend my energy attacking here. Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Understand this key point and you’ll understand why plutocrat-controlled media outlets are constantly smearing Julian Assange, why they never fail to fall in line to support a US-led military agenda, why they pay massive amounts of attention to some political candidates while completely ignoring others, and why they put so much energy into keeping everyone arguing over the details of how the status quo should be maintained instead of debating whether it should exist at all. The unelected power establishment uses its control over politics and media to determine what the public believes about what’s going on in their world in order to keep them from rebelling against a status quo which does not serve them; without the ability to effectively propagandize the masses in this way, they cannot rule."

And that brings us directly to... Randy