It Really is All About the Fear

Of all the commentary about the Senate trial of the current occupant of the White House, I think only Sherrod Brown has come close to identifying the reason 52 Senators failed to convict and remove him from office. Brown wrote, “For the stay-in-office-at-all-cost representatives and senators, fear is the motivator. They are afraid that Mr. Trump might give them a nickname like ‘Low Energy Jeb’ and ‘Lyin’ Ted,’ or that he might tweet about their disloyalty. Or — worst of all — that he might come to their state to campaign against them in the Republican primary.”1

I don’t think that’s the entirety of their fear, however. If it were, Lamar Alexander, I think, would have voted with Mitt Romney because he’s retiring anyway. Pat Roberts and Mike Enzi are also retiring; given the overwhelming case made on abuse of power, it’s hard to see how even the most diehard supporters of the president would risk their integrity to vote against conviction and removal if their re-election were not at stake. Given how many ads I’ve seen on the Maine TV stations calling on Susan Collins to vote to convict, and her appalling poll numbers in the state, and given that I’ve heard similar about Cory Gardner in Colorado, I think something else is going on.

It’s not fear of a President Mike Pence.

I think this because, aside from the current vice president’s milquetoast persona, he could give the most extreme members of the GOP everything for which they long: a rollback of civil rights across the board, full-throated anti-immigration laws that keep non-whites out, the end of Roe vs. Wade, and, to assure all of these things, a stacked judiciary to make all of these horribly unconstitutional things perfectly legal. And he could do so without the drama that attracts so much attention to the work from those of us who oppose such actions regardless of party, mostly because the vice president, unlike the man to whom he appears to have sworn fealty above God, knows how to work the legislative process, to build consensus, to make small compromises that make it easier for moderates to swallow the—to borrow a Bidenism—malarkey.

Sure, the president brings great entertainment. He riles up a crowd like few others today. But the vice president accomplishes the same thing if he were president without the overt slime of a man who makes fun of reporters with disabilities, insults Gold Star family members, impugns the honor of former POWs who voluntarily stayed in captivity so as not to abuse their own privilege, and selects people so incompetent to run departments that the secretary of state probably can’t fine Ukraine on a map and the secretary of education almost certainly couldn’t teach a pre-schooler how to say the ABCs with Sesame Street running to help. Pence could, almost stealthily, bring more of the middle with him in support of the most inhumane policies suggested since the internment of Japanese Americans in 1942, the passage of the AUMF for Iraq in 2002, and every single attempt to roll back the Affordable Care Act.

So why suffer through this travesty of a presidency when there’s a clear, more palatable alternative with all the right credentials next in line for the Oval Office?

I think these GOP senators are afraid of what secrets—true—or innuendo—true or not—the president and his shady enablers might release into the world to ruin them beyond what any loss of an election would or could ever manage. Given that the president has surrounded himself with unscrupulous characters and cultivated a relationship with a former KGB agent who now rules a country with a weak military but very strong esoteric communications (actual “fake news”, or propaganda so well done it’s hard if not impossible to detect) and counter-intelligence forces, it would not surprise me in the slightest if there is kompromat on every single GOP member of each house, not just the Senate (which would also explain the lack of support for the articles of impeachment in the House better than the mere fear of being primaried). 

Kompromat is exactly what it sounds like: compromising material that can be used to force a person to act in a way useful to the possessor of that material. AKA: blackmail. It doesn’t even have to be truthful to be effective; Jonathan Swift’s observation that, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it,” is truer now with social media and the internet than Swift could possibly have imagined in the era of sailing ships and horses. Imagine that a nefarious actor has cloned your personal cell phone and manipulated perfectly ordinary text exchanges between you and your loved ones to sound like evidence of an affair or illegal business deal. How would you counter it if the fake leaked? If the President of the United States made an allegation about you at a rally that was promptly “confirmed” by the exposure of “evidence”? The fact that members of Congress are seeking incriminating evidence against Joe and Hunter Biden should make us wary about anything they “find” because keeping the government of the US in a state of partisan rancor and dysfunction is key to the plan. Biden—or any Democratic president—with both houses of Congress in Democratic control is a nightmare scenario but one that can still be manipulated with some success if there’s enough minority party strength in Congress.

I don’t say this lightly. The Russians have been masters of “esoteric” communications and deep fakes for decades, if not a full century. It is far less expensive to hamstring an enemy from the inside than it is to face one militarily and we know that Russia, now almost 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, has not rebuilt its military even to the strength of the USSR in August 1991, never mind to pre-Afghanistan levels.2 It behooves Russia to have the US in turmoil while it plays for power and influence around the world, often competing with China. 

China, by the way, is fast catching up to Russia as a military power, which can’t be comforting for Putin, et al. It, unlike the United States, is a closed society with state control over information, making it a far harder target to infiltrate with kompromat. The bear and the dragon may actually have to go to war along their 2600+ mile border before the century is out, likely over natural resources. Russia has them in abundance, China not so much; it’s easy to forget that China has only about 57% of the total land mass of Russia. The US in chaos helps Russia stay a half-step ahead of China. I have no doubt that whatever KGB kompromat programs might have been waylaid in 1991 and 1992 were quickly dusted off and supplemented heavily following the succession of Vladimir Putin to the presidency of Russia just as the new millennium began because of the threat from a rising China. 

All of this is why the damage the current occupant of the White House has done to the intelligence community is a grave threat to our national security. Throughout the Cold War, our intelligence agencies worked diligently to discover and thwart kompromat missions before lasting damage could be done. We know they didn’t catch all of them any more than the GRU and the KGB caught all of our attempts to compromise the Soviets. But the undermining of the NSA, military intelligence agencies, the CIA, the State Department, and the FBI since 2017 has left the whole country vulnerable to extraordinary danger from both the big and obvious threats (yes, killing Soleimani was a stupid move in 2019 as much as it would have been in 2004 and 2009 and 2014) and these insidious machinations that could take years to play out but could erupt with deadly consequences. This administration shows no indication of restoring the professionalism of our national security apparatus and diplomatic corps while it has power, which scares the hell out of me.

For the safeguarding of our country, the current president and as many potentially compromised members of the Senate and House as possible must go in 2020. Any person who is more afraid of Russian blackmail than of disappointing the God to whom they swore to be impartial jurors—to whom they say they pray, for most the One who loves them so much as to send the Son to die on a cross for their salvation—needs to be relieved of duty as an elected official. Mitt Romney, for all I didn’t like him as Governor of Massachusetts (save for universal healthcare) or as a candidate for president (during which run he ran as far and as fast away from his success with universal healthcare in Massachusetts as he could without leaving the planet), has his priorities straight. Even if there’s kompromat out there on him (as Stephen Colbert said Wednesday night, drinking caffeinated coffee he thought was decaf), Senator Romney rose above any fear to let his conscience guide him: 

“As a senator-juror, I swore an oath before God to exercise impartial justice. I am profoundly religious. My faith is at the heart of who I am. I take an oath before God as enormously consequential….Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine….  [M]y promise before God to apply impartial justice required that I put my personal feelings and political biases aside. Were I to ignore the evidence that has been presented and disregard what I believe my oath and the Constitution demands of me for the sake of a partisan end, it would, I fear, expose my character to history’s rebuke and the censure of my own conscience.”3

It really is about the fear: fear of something much bigger than a bully with a microphone that will only be destroyed when our elected representatives aren’t in thrall to threats of real or imagined character assassination by people a whole lot more clever, a whole lot more invested, and a whole lot more patient than the bully with the microphone. Vote them out. Restore the intelligence capability of the country and restore our goodwill around the world. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s an excellent start.

1  Brown, Sherrod. “In Private, Republicans Admit They Acquitted Trump Out of Fear.” New York Times, 5 February 2020. Web. http://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/opinion/trump-senate-acquittal-impeachment.html Accessed 6 February 2020.

2 https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/m/Military_history_of_the_Soviet_Union.htm and https://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-comparison-detail.asp?form=form&country1=united-states-of-america&country2=russia&Submit=COMPARE 

3 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/us/politics/mitt-romney-impeachment-speech-transcript.html Accessed 6 February 2020.