Quality

Donald Trump Jr's release today of an email exchange is stunning on many levels. The exchange suggests he understood that Russia wanted to support Donald Trump's presidential campaign with damaging information about his opponent Hillary Clinton. Younger Trump, along with Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, then campaign manager, met with a Russian attorney proffering the information in June 2016. After the meeting was proposed in an email, Donald Jr's response was quick: "If it’s what you say, I love it, especially later in the summer.” The response suggested he had little doubt about the type of support and few concerns about the source of such opposition research.

The lawyer, wanting to help the campaign, insinuated that Russians had been funding and supporting the Democratic National Committee, but had no proof. Trump Jr noted that the lawyer was "vague" and "made no sense" with "no meaningful information." He did not alert authorities like the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Instead, he and perhaps the other two took it upon themselves to determine the information was meaningless.

By all accounts, this is a clown show, and we may not ever really know all what was said during the meeting. The US president's response,  according to a statement read by the deputy White House press secretary: "My son is a high-quality person and I applaud his transparency."

The statement resonates with sarcasm considering that Donald Jr has revised descriptions about the meeting several times and is among Trump campaign officials, some who still work for the US government, forced to revise lists of meetings with foreign nationals.

Collusion, election fraud, lying to American voters should not be a surprise with this young presidency, not after the wearying campaign. What is surprising is that Donald Jr released these emails himself, as if he saw nothing wrong. As US Senator Mazie Hirono put it on Twitter, "When @realDonaldTrump said show us the evidence of collusion, I have to say, I didn't expect his son to answer."

One who may be a party to the patterns of a possible crime - a growing list of events being investigated by Robert Mueller and congressional committees - should not be praised for transparency after rushing to beat reporting by the New York Times. 

This is neither a track record of competence nor "high quality" - a disturbing and tasteless phrase, one that signals division, otherness, marginalization, insecurity and reflects troubling policy proposals that target large groups of people like Muslims and immigrants. Another son, Eric, echoed such a sentiment about Democrats during an interview: "I've never seen hatred like this. To me, they're not even people. It's so, so sad. I mean, morality is just gone. Morals have flown out the window. We deserve so much better than this as a country."

The campaign capitalized on deeming common courtesy as "political correctness" and some spokespeople even fed the resentment and encouraged scapegoating. Supporters - from emotion or a lack of education - did not question shallow reasoning or quick fixes. The media honed in on supporters' crude signs, bullying and fist fights at campaign rallies. Hillary Clinton called out the alarming behavior, using a phrase that eventually came to haunt her:

"We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic - you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people - now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks - they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America." Her remarks included another age-old signal - "Right?" - so often alerting skeptical and doleful listeners to the possibility of discriminatory words and feelings that will only cause woe to the one who dares utter them, even if only once, even though followed by swift apology.

Back to "high quality" people, a phrase that suggests that some people for are innately better than other people and deserve more - money, leeway, chances, support, opportunity to complain, cut corners, make mistakes, cheat and lie. There are better descriptors. Consider an article by Forbes - "5 qualities of charismatic people: How many do you have?" The qualities: self-confidence, including optimism; the skill to tell stories; body language that is open and approachable; relying on conversation about others and being a good listener.Those who assign labels like "high quality" may think that only they can decide rules, who must follow and need not, when perpetrators should be exposed and punished or forgiven. Those who use the phrase are insecure, desperate to be regarded as better of others, deserving of a higher standard of justice even while they make mistake after mistake after mistake.

And this is a pillar in intervening and disrupting medical decisions for British infant Charlie Gard, diagnosed as terminally ill by his doctors - assuming this represents kind, magnanimity and justice - blind to any contradictions with policies blocking thousands of refugee families from Syria many with their own infants.

Russia intervened in the US presidential election, and the United States was conned, a reflection of many voters' failure to follow the news and apply critical thinking and logic to wild populist claims designed to infuriate without delivering viable solutions..

As Nicholas Kristof notes for the New York Times, it is a sad day for the country. It's also a sad day for democracy and the globe.
 

Patience and vigilance

Robert Mueller, former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has been appointed as a special counselor by US Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein "to ensure a full and thorough investigation of the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election."

A sense of relief is sweeping throughout the country that a professional investigation will pursue the rattling claims of disruptions to US democracy.  

US intelligence officials earlier released a report concluding that Russia was behind leaks, and a stream of fake news aimed at interfering in the US presidential election, specifically to benefit Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.

The interference though the spread of outlandish stories was obvious and reported before the election. Yet most analysts underestimated the power of fake news in a developed nation, assuming that citizens with a basic education - 88 percent of US adults hold a high school degree and more than half with some college education - would apply critical thinking skills and ignore bizarre and unsubstantiated reports.

But no and a prime example was Pizzagate, a false tale that Clinton and her colleagues were running a child trafficking ring in various restaurants, including the basement of Comet, a pizza shop in Washington DC. The stories inspired a Carolina man to storm the store with weapons, firing shots and announcing he was there to save the children. The young man was arrested and pled guilty, and he will be sentenced in June. Far-right conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones of Infowars, who make a living by fomenting rage, pounced on the bizarre stories. Jones has since apologized. 


Since January 22, reports and concerns emerged about connections with Russia for the Trump campaign, Trump associates and Trump businesses. The Mueller investigation will pick up on the investigation already launched by the FBI, in addition to investigations from each branch of Congress. Concern intensified after reports suggested that Trump had asked former FBI director James Comey to pledge his loyalty - an affront to the constitution - and also to pull back on an investigation of his former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, who had failed to report payments received from Russia and work performed for Turkey. Shortly afterward, Trump fired Comey. A day later, at the request of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump met with the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador. Reports suggested that highly classified information was referred to at that meeting. And today, The New York Times reports that Flynn had advised the Trump transition team that he was under investigation for failing to report his lobbying work for Turkey in early January before Trump took office

The investigation will proceed and follow complex financial trails, and in the meantime the motives of this administration are under a microscope: "An uproar has emerged with worries about politicized law enforcement, a US president installed by a hostile foreign power, who then goes on to oppose science and education initiatives that truly empower the United States while favoring the problematic coal industry over alternative energies and other policies that reduce US competitiveness. Russia supported Brexit to weaken the European Union, but failed in boosting far-right candidates in the Netherlands, Bulgaria and France. The United States may no longer be a trustworthy world leader, and even allies may doubt US motives until an independent investigation is pursued and the many disturbing questions are settled."

We must be patient and vigilant in monitoring over US politics never forgetting that voters choose these leaders to work for all of us.

Photo of Robert Mueller III, courtesy of Wikimedia.