7 ways Trump and his cabal are using government to
corrupt the election
Opinion by
Columnist
September 14, 2020 at 9:33 a.m. CDT
At a
packed indoor rally in Nevada on Sunday night punctuated by spittle-spraying
cheers and jeers, President Trump ran through his greatest hits: He
absurdly treated the coronavirus as
largely defeated. He vowed to make an issue out of Joe Biden’s
son Hunter.
He claimed the “only way” he’ll lose in
November is in a rigged election. And he insisted former president Barack Obama
got caught “spying” on his campaign, which unleashed a chant of “lock him up!”
Quick:
What do all these things have in common?
The
answer: In all these cases, Trump isn’t just stating claims. He and his cronies
are also corruptly manipulating the levers of your government
to make them into truths, or inflate them into issues that will garner news
coverage that helps him in some way, or both.
Because
the crush of governmental manipulation to serve Trump’s personal and political
ends is so relentless, we often focus only on isolated examples as they skate
past.
But we
need to connect the dots. Taken together, they tell a larger story that is
truly staggering in its levels of corruption:
Rushing
coronavirus treatments. The New York Times just reported that scientists inside Trump’s
own government are warning that the White House is laying the groundwork to
increase pressure to approve a vaccine before Election Day, “even in the
absence of agreement on its effectiveness and safety.”
This
manipulation is already happening: Trump pushed top health officials to approve a
plasma treatment for the coronavirus without the full vetting some officials
wanted, and in a way that resulted in officials wildly overstating its
benefits.
Trump
has explicitly tied the vaccine to his
reelection timetable and has lashed out at scientists, saying they’re
slow-walking the process to hurt him politically, which tells them meeting that
schedule is to be a priority.
Interfering
in public health messaging. Politico reports that political appointees have been relentlessly intervening to
soften language in official communications from the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, to align them with Trump’s rosy claims about the coronavirus.
They’ve had some success.
This
comes even as the Department of Health and Human Services is seeking to award a $250 million
contract to an outside communications firm in part to package a message of
“hope” about the coronavirus. Democrats are investigating whether this is a
taxpayer-funded “political propaganda campaign.”
This is
a reasonable fear, based on other manipulation we’ve already seen: A White
House model created to support overly optimistic
coronavirus death projections, and White House efforts to edit CDC school reopening guidelines to downplay risk.
Twisting
intelligence to support campaign agitprop. A Department of
Homeland Security whistleblower has revealed that top officials pressed
for findings about civil unrest to be revised to downplay white-supremacist
violence and pump up the illusion of an organized leftist domestic terror
threat.
Numerous
of Trump’s top law enforcement and national security officials have used their government positions to lend validation to
unsupported claims bolstering that narrative, which has figured
heavily in Trump’s campaign messaging.
Helping
cast doubt on Russian electoral sabotage. Attorney
General William P. Barr may reportedly release an interim report
on his department’s ongoing “review” of the origins of the Russia investigation
before the election. Barr reportedly wants the U.S. attorney doing the review
to move faster.
Importantly,
this is not merely about the 2016 election, or about validating Trump’s bogus “Obamagate”
narrative. It’s about this election, too: Barr wants to discredit the special
counsel’s findings about Russian interference in 2016. This
won’t just make Trump’s last win appear less tainted. By downplaying Russian
culpability, it could also facilitate another round of it now.
Limiting
disclosure of knowledge of Russian sabotage. Meanwhile, Trump’s
intelligence officials have announced an end to in-person
congressional briefings on what they’re learning about ongoing Russian efforts
to sabotage this election.
This,
too, risks further facilitating those efforts, by limiting understanding of
them among Congress and voters. It comes after Trump privately raged over previous steps by
intelligence officials to inform Congress about them.
Meanwhile,
the statements that intel officials have released about Russian interference
are extraordinarily circumspect and muddy the waters with
false equivalences about Chinese and Iranian efforts, which mislead the public
and thus further facilitate it.
Discrediting
vote-by-mail. Barr is also cranking out false public statements to
discredit vote-by-mail, whether it’s falsely claiming it’s vulnerable to a
massive foreign-engineered conspiracy or blatantly misrepresenting actual domestic cases of fraud.
This
isn’t just about helping Trump mislead. By using his position as chief law
enforcement officer to lend validity to these lies, Barr is creating cover for
Trump’s coming effort to try to invalidate countless mail ballots against him,
which he has already telegraphed.
Validating
fake narratives about Hunter Biden. Trump’s Republican
Senate allies still continue to pursue a phony investigation designed to fake-validate a
series of smears about Hunter Biden’s activities in Ukraine.
These
have been thoroughly debunked, and the Treasury
Department just issued sanctions against a foreign
official pushing similar narratives, calling him a Russian agent pushing
Russian disinformation. (Here one part of government is doing the right thing
against Trump’s Senate cronies.)
But the
Senate GOP probe is plainly being pursued with the goal of releasing a report
to generate news both-sides stories that cast a miasmic pall of corruption over
both Bidens.
The
bottom line: Trump isn’t trying to persuade a majority of U.S. voters to
support him. Instead, he’s trying to get within what you might call cheating
distance of pulling another electoral college inside straight even while losing
the popular vote, just like last time.
He’s
not there yet. But many top Trump officials and congressional allies have
placed their official duties and the levers of your government at the disposal
of Trump’s reelection effort, which depends on closing that gap.
