My point is, this is the first time I have seen America's issues actually manifest in material ways. Political alienation is concerning, but it's not all that powerful on its own. Political alienation plus the degradation of material conditions is absolutely how wars are started.
The craziest voices claimed he was a Russian plant, but the mainstream claim was always collusion, which was proven by the Senate Republicans in volume 5 of their report on Russian Active Measures. The report established that the Trump campaign, through its chairman, was funneling internal campaign data to a Russian Intelligence Officer, as Russian Intelligence was running a psyops campaign against American citizens [0]. So yes, there was smoke and it was coming from a fire. There was collusion, and there was obstruction. It's been proven and documented.
When we look at the transition of power, yes it's true that there have been issues in past elections and that's what I mean when I say this has been going on for a while. There was actual violence in the 2000 election (the Brooks Brothers Riot). But at the same time we are someplace new when an actual coup plot is formed and executed by the sitting President of the United States.
And I hear you about material conditions, but at the same time the people who stormed the Capitol flew there in planes. They stayed in expensive hotels. They captured their crimes live on their expensive cell phones. They included doctors, lawyers, and business executives, and politicians. This isn't about economic anxiety. That's a narrative that's been going on since 2016, and it's just hard to find real evidence of that. It's true that there have been some temporary shortages of specific items, but in general I can go out and buy cream cheese today, and really anything else I would like. Material conditions are fine in America.
> Political alienation plus the degradation of material conditions is absolutely how wars are started.
Wars also start when leaders deliberately lie to masses of people, claiming their votes are being stolen when they aren't. Sometimes wars just happen because of conditions, and sometimes powerful people and groups take a situation and tip it over because they would like to see a war happen, because it's preferable to the alternative. That's where we are in America.
[0] https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
And collusion with a foreign nation doesn't exist as a specific crime, but in a more sane time it would have been easy to see it was what was intended by "high crimes and misdemeanors".
Try to look at it objectively.
There may have been some Russian involvement in the 2016 election, but the effort has always been to blame Russia for Trump's election. In my opinion this has been very damaging to American politics. It gave liberals and democrats an out to ignore the very real reasons for which Trump attracted a very real base of support leading up to that election. If you remove Trump's nationalistic rhetoric and racial dog-whistling, his populist messaging was not all that different form Obama's.
If you ask me, a lot more good would have been done by actually reckoning with the fact that something like 30-40% of the voting population genuinely wanted him to be president rather than trying to live with the fantasy that Putin is so all-powerful that a few hundred thousand dollars worth of Facebook ad-buys were able to overthrow American democracy.
> But at the same time we are someplace new when an actual coup plot is formed and executed by the sitting President of the United States.
I agree that the events of Jan 6th were unprecedented, and uniquely disturbing. I think the leaders of the movement should have been brought up on treason charges.
> Wars also start when leaders deliberately lie to masses of people, claiming their votes are being stolen when they aren't.
Hasn't this been the exact claim of the Clinton campaign post 2016? That the election results are illegitimate?
> It's true that there have been some temporary shortages of specific items, but in general I can go out and buy cream cheese today, and really anything else I would like. Material conditions are fine in America.
I hope you are right, and that I was just particularly unlucky to encounter a series of market failures in a single 3-week period due to extraordinary circumstances.
...no, I don't believe the Clinton campaign has ever claimed that.
They do believe that Russia put its thumb on the scale, at that the Trump administration—even as beneficiaries, yes—should have punished Russia diplomatically for their behavior.
> If the election had been on October 27, I would be your president
In reference to WikiLeaks making her private emails available.
I will grant you this is not exactly the same as claiming the results of the election were not legitimate. But it does seem to directly blame foreign interference for her loss.
To me the question of foreign interference is way less important than the question of why this election was even close, or indeed why Trump even made it as far as the nomination.
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-blam...
But I think that's a very important distinction! If a foreign power attempts to influence our elections through underhanded means, the US should retaliate diplomatically, regardless of who won. Note, that doesn't mean the winner should be called into question.
> To me the question of foreign interference is way less important than the question of why this election was even close, or indeed why Trump even made it as far as the nomination.
I think they're both important. I also think that foreign interference is one part (key word) of the answer.
We live in an adversarial world, and America will always have enemies. If we are so fragile that a 3rd rate hack can get a tin-pot dictator elected, the fragility is the problem, not the attack itself.
Oct 28 was the day FBI Director James Comey made his announcement that the FBI had reopened its probe into the Clinton campaign based on a laptop it received. It quickly determined all of the e-mails were duplicates of ones they had already seen, and reversed course, but the damage was done. I think she's really saying that was the proximal cause, and I agree with that assessment.
DNC hacked e-mails were released on Oct 7, the same day that the Washington Post published the Trump Access Hollywood tape.
She blames both, but I think everyone pretty much realizes that the FBI director tanked her chances hard with that move.
But I will say this much because it relates to my previous post directly:
> trying to live with the fantasy that Putin is so all-powerful that a few hundred thousand dollars worth of Facebook ad-buys were able to overthrow American democracy.
I will note that the Russian GRU was able to hyper-target Facebook advertisements in large part because they were receiving updates on who to target from the Trump campaign. I think it's a fantasy to suggest that Putin can overthrow democracy this way, but that's not really what happened. Trump and Putin coordinated through public channels and behind closed doors through intermediaries (let's not forget that Trump's son, son-in-law, and aforementioned campaign manager turned GRU liaison, met with a Russian spy at Trump's residence to discuss an explicit cooperation deal). Putin couldn't have done what he did alone -- he needed a willing, like-minded, yet distant partner in one of the two major political parties in America, and he found one in Trump.
> Hasn't this been the exact claim of the Clinton campaign post 2016? That the election results are illegitimate?
It's was entirely warranted to question the results of our electoral system, and honestly it was Trump's right to do so after the 2020 election as well. I think it is important to probe weaknesses in our system and to fix them where appropriate. But after that probing is done and the vote is certified legitimate, the questioning needs to cease.
However, when a candidate has exhausted all legal remedies, they can't continue to call into question the results of the vote. That's where this all fell apart. Trump lost his claims in 62/63 cases and that should have been the end of it. But it wasn't, and look where that got us.
I think no one should listen to Clinton anymore, and I never wanted her to be President, but she has a point about Trump's legitimacy. The legitimacy of a leader in the US is usually established by the results of an election, but what if material crimes are committed to win the election? And once a leader is elected, are the legitimate for their term or can they lose that legitimacy through abuse of their power?
Trump aided and abetted the hacking of his opponent and then lied about his campaign's direct involvement with the organization that did the hacking, both to the American people and the FBI. He lied about the fact that at the time, he was in talks with Putin about building a Trump Tower Moscow, with a penthouse gift dedicated to Putin. After he was sword into office, he swiftly used the authority granted by the American people to quash the investigation into that very malfeasance. He also obstructed the subsequent Special Counsel investigation by destroying evidence, lying to investigators, and attempting to quash it as well. This behavior is not the legitimate exercise of trust placed on our leaders, it's a pattern that more closely resembles a prolific serial criminal covering his tracks.
I want to be clear that, if Trump's campaign in any way worked with a foreign power for the purpose of furthering it's electoral interests, that is something which is quite shocking, and anyone involved should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
However,
I think a logical leap which is often made, and which it appears that you may me making, is that if 1) Trump worked with Russia for the purpose of winning the election, and 2) that Trump in the end did win the election, that 3) working with Russia caused Trump to win the election.
This last part is where we run into a bit of trouble.
Returning to the original question: Trump and Russia colluded to do what?
Let's take it for granted that Trump's campaign met with Russian government agents, talked strategy, and funneled information which could be used for targeted advertising and other purposes.
In this scenario, what exactly is Russia doing which is aiding the Trump campaign which any Super PAC would not be able to do? The answer is not very much. It's not like Russia hacked into the voting system and changed votes. Trump was, with his message, able to convince a large enough share of the population to take the electoral college, to vote for him. In other words, Trump is the primary reason Trump got elected. Russia at best put a finger on the scale, or added a little bit more fuel to a fire which was already burning.
To make an analogy: let's say that I made my house out of matchsticks, and you came along and set it on fire with a magnifying glass and sunlight. Yes you might have committed an act which triggered this event, but who is primarily responsible for my house being burned down?
> I think a logical leap which is often made, and which it appears that you may me making, is that ... working with Russia caused Trump to win the election.
I can assure you I'm not under any delusion that this is the cause of Trump winning. I'm not even sure it helped that much. I believe the proximal cause of Hillary's loss was actually the Comey announcement that happened mere days before the election. If you look at the polls, you can see her favorability dropped significantly after that announcement but then started to bounce back (but not quite to the level it was at before the announcement). Given how tight the contest was, and how that announcement visibly affected polling, there's a big question in my mind that had Comey not done that, she might have won.
> Trump and Russia colluded to do what?
Here's what the Mueller report says:
[T]he investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.
[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.
1. Conspiracy is a technical legal term, this was always an unlikely scenario and not at all what the mainstream and serious jurists were alleging. It's worth noting that the directive to focus the investigation on "conspiracy" came from Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, who also intoned to Trump privately that he would "land this plane", referring to concluding the Mueller investigation in a light favorable to Trump. When the report was released, it was AG Bill Barr who released the second quote above and withheld the first one from the public, a move that a federal judge wrote lacked "candor".
2. "The investigation did not establish members..." is not the same as "The investigation established members did not...". Most of the media and all of the GOP read the former and pretended it was the latter. This is especially disturbing because the reason the Muller report says it could not establish these facts was in part because witnesses lied, destroyed evidence, and obstructed the investigation, hence the entire second volume of the report (this is why obstruction is a crime on its own, because if you are allowed to obstruct an investigation with impunity, you can get away with almost anything). This is where the Senate report picks up and fills in more details about actual coordination between Trump and Russia via Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort.
> In this scenario, what exactly is Russia doing which is aiding the Trump campaign which any Super PAC would not be able to do?
They hacked the Democratic National Committee and handed the hacked materials over to Wikileaks for distribution. PACS can't do that. Also unlike PACS, the Russian GRU isn't subject to any American campaign finance laws which are in place to provide transparency to the electoral process.
> Trump was, with his message, able to convince a large enough share of the population to take the electoral college, to vote for him. In other words, Trump is the primary reason Trump got elected. Russia at best put a finger on the scale, or added a little bit more fuel to a fire which was already burning.
I'm definitely not going to deny that! Trump is certainly able to convince people to follow him on his own. But that's not what happened so we have to consider everything in context.
For instance, what was Trump's message during the latter part of the campaign? He spent a lot of time talking about "Crooked Hillary" and the primary evidence he had to point to regarding her "crookedness" was "her e-mails". And then what would he do? He would pivot to Wikileaks and talk about how much he loved Wikileaks. He would talk about how much corruption is in the hacked e-mails, when really they were quite banal. Nonetheless, there was a conflation that happened between Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server and the DNCs hacked e-mails. This made "Hillary Clinton's Hacked E-mails" front page news for weeks before the election. A lot of people I know just flat out assumed they were e-mails from her State server and that they revealed massive corruption, without ever reading them or investigating it past a headline or soundbite.
And let's not forget when the first e-mails from John Podesta were released by Wikileaks: just 1 hour after the Trump access Hollywood "pussy grabbing" tape was released by the Washington Post. This provided a nice distraction for everyone who didn't want to confront Trump's on-camera admission of his proclivity to rampantly sexually assault women.
So is that a finger on the scale? Yeah it is. Is anything about this illegal? Some of it, not all of it, and not the worst parts. And even the stuff that is illegal is almost impossible to prove. So there's no criminal case to bring here. More than anything it proves that some laws should be passed to codify some norms.
Honestly, the Trump-Russia issue is pretty moot at this point. I used to worry about what it would mean for future elections. Here, a candidate colluded with a foreign government to circumvent our standard electoral process in order to gain an advantage on his opponent. He then won and leveraged his power to hide what he did, and he got away with it. This just incentivizes the commission of crimes to gain power. Once you gain power, you're beyond prosecution, so why wouldn't you engage in this behavior, when the plus side is becoming the leader of the most powerful and richest nation on Earth?
But back to something you said:
Trump was, with his message, able to convince a large enough share of the population
Now it seems like the whole idea of elections is quaint. Campaign finance laws seem quaint. Voting seems quaint. They've figured out they don't need any of that; they even realized they don't need to campaign on a platform. All they need to do is control state elections boards, and just ignore the result of the vote in a few key states. Cause a contested election, and kick it to the House delegations where Republicans are a majority.
Anyway, I'm sorry to give you this wall of text but you kept responding to me so you asked for it :P
If you think Hillary Clinton's emails had more to do with the result of the election than NAFTA's effect on the rust belt, the opioid epidemic, the skyrocketing costs of healthcare and education, and the handling of the 2008 financial crisis then I would have a lot of trouble understanding your reasoning.
I just don't think it's productive at all to fixate on Trump as some sort of bogeyman. He's merely a symptom of our dysfunctional government.
The endless pearl-clutching and regurgitation of Russia-gate and January 6 is not particularly interesting to me. If we don't want another trump, the best thing we could do is reform elections to combat minoritarian rule, reform the legislature so it can actually function, and pass some simple, obvious reforms to improve the material conditions of working people.
> If you think Hillary Clinton's emails ... I would have a lot of trouble understanding your reasoning.
I would say all of those things you listed would be my personal list of grievances against Hillary Clinton. I think it put her toe-to-toe with someone fundamentally unfit for office. But when I talk to Trump voters, their grievances include almost none of the points you listed. In order they are almost invariably: 1. E-mails, 2. Benghazi, 3. her proximity to Bill Clinton. That's just my experience anyway, maybe it's not generalizable. But it's not surprising, as this is roughly the proportion of time spent on each topic in the media, particularly on Fox News. They didn't focus on the cost of education or the opioid crisis. They did focus on NAFTA a bit, but more so than anything it was e-mails they focused on. Just look at the peak here of search terms that drop off after the election: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2016-01-01%202...
> The endless pearl-clutching and regurgitation of Russia-gate
If you think the reaction to the events laid out in the Mueller Report and the Senate Intel report amount to "pearl clutching", then you admit it's above-board to work in lock-step with a foreign government to hack your electoral opponents, and that it's fine to then leverage your privileged position to cover it up. If that's your stance, say so. That's fine. What's not fine is to minimize what happened as "pearl clutching". A thing happened and it has serious implications that drive directly at the dysfunction of our government. We have to be lucid about those implications. Just don't be surprised when a Democrat does it in the future, I wouldn't put it past them. That's what normalization of this stuff does.
> If we don't want another trump, the best thing we could do is reform elections to combat minoritarian rule, reform the legislature so it can actually function, and pass some simple, obvious reforms to improve the material conditions of working people.
I know you said you've been out of the country for almost a decade, so maybe you have not followed how dysfunctional things are now. None of what you suggest will be signed into law. Maybe some election reforms will squeak through, but even then they might just patch a 19th century old electoral count act, and even that is going to be a massive ask.
Meanwhile, Republican state legislatures are removing all of the barriers that caused their "Green Bay Sweep" plan to fail on 1/6, giving themselves full partisan control of state election boards, which used to be nonpartisan. Again, you can call that uninteresting pearl clutching, but at the same time I will note that you are living in a functioning democracy, whereas we here in the homeland are currently classified as a backsliding democracy due to the GOP agenda. It's very interesting to those of us who are still here.
I'd be very interested to hear the take of older Germans you know about 1/6, as to whether they also think the consternation is pearl clutching.
> None of what you suggest will be signed into law.
> Republican state legislatures are removing all of the barriers that caused their "Green Bay Sweep" plan to fail on 1/6, giving themselves full partisan control of state election boards, which used to be nonpartisan.
These are real problems. If you ask me, you homelanders should avoid spending one minute longer clutching your pearls over a tin-pot dictator who was only a symptom of the problem, and focus 100% on trying to find solutions for real problems.