The Situation: The Lies of Tulsi Gabbard

The Situation on Saturday took a look at the president’s latest pressure tactic lawsuit against the media—his libel suit against the Wall Street Journal.

And it came to pass, in the days that followed the Wall Street Journal’s story about the president’s birthday wishes to the pedophile financier, that the director of national intelligence (DNI) declared that “a treasonous conspiracy” had been “committed by officials at the highest level of our government” and that “[t]heir egregious abuse of power and blatant rejection of our Constitution threatens the very foundation and integrity of our democratic republic. No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to ensure nothing like this ever happens again.”

And it came to pass—only today, actually—that the president raged that his predecessor as president—the one whose middle name is Arabic in origin and which middle name the current president bothered to articulate clearly—was guilty of treason and should be prosecuted for nine-year-old conduct for which all statutes of limitations will have passed and for which Barack Hussein Obama would anyway be immune.

I am not going to spend this column rebutting the substance of the allegations the DNI makes in her very silly press release. Suffice it to say that it is—like the CIA director’s earlier effort to gin up an investigation of former intelligence leaders by lying about the review he ordered—a package of false rhetorical claims wrapping a set of findings that do not actually contradict what the intelligence community found in 2016 and do not remotely support the claims.

Even to rebut these claims requires giving them further attention, and life is short. I don’t want to spend more of it than I absolutely have to arguing with dilettantes and liars. Yes, it makes it complicated that, in this case, the lying dilettantes in question are the president of the United States and his director of national intelligence, who is discussing her supposed findings in an official statement and on an official U.S. government website. Such are the times we live in.

But acknowledging the awkwardness, I don’t argue with people about whether vaccines prevent infectious disease; I don’t argue with people about whether climate change is happening; and I’m not going to argue with people—even senior-level officials—anymore over whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

I am also not going to freak out about the supposed “investigation” of Obama and the other supposed conspirators that will likely get announced now that Fox News has dutifully reported that the Justice Department has “received” the DNI’s referral. Yes, it is disgusting. It is an abuse of law enforcement. It is profoundly dangerous to use both the law enforcement and intelligence communities in this fashion. That said, as I wrote back when the CIA director pulled the same stunt a couple of weeks ago,

I don’t believe there is an investigation—not a real one, anyway.

There is an announcement of an investigation. There may be a paper investigation that gets closed quickly because there’s no evidence that anyone committed any sort of crime, the statute of limitations of which would have run anyway. There may be a decision not to close anything and to feed occasional further stories to Fox News or like-minded news outlets because having an investigation open—like opening it in the first place—is politically useful.

But an actual investigation? Come talk to me when a grand jury issues a subpoena or hears from a witness. Come talk to me when an actual agent is deployed to make an actual inquiry of someone.

The only reason to talk about this issue at all—and not just ignore it—is that it’s important to understand the play the administration is making here, which is not just about distracting from the Epstein controversy. There’s a reason why the distraction takes the specific form of harkening back to what Trump has trained an entire movement of people to call the “Russia hoax.” There’s a reason why, when confronted with the fact that he and his top aides promised to release the so-called Epstein files and then reneged, he falls back on the false claim that the Obama administration made up the Russia collusion narrative nearly nine years ago.

That reason is that the Russia story is the ur-text of all of Trump’s anxieties about his perceived legitimacy. Made to face genuine questions about his untoward relationship with the Russian power elite, which genuinely intervened on his behalf in 2016, Trump concocted a defense mechanism that was remarkably successful. He labeled it all a hoax, the intelligence community which investigated it a treasonous cabal, and the whole investigation a witch hunt. And whenever new allegations would arise, on any subject—some connected, some not—he would treat them all as an extension of the “Russia hoax.” It was all a single witch hunt endlessly in search of a subject matter over time, and it all came back, always, to “Russia, Russia, Russia.”

So now Trump confronts a different sort of scandal, one that’s a little awkward for him. It’s not, after all, a scandal that Democrats or career bureaucrats have ginned up against him. It’s actually one that his supporters ginned up against Democrats—or at least thought they did.

But sometimes, the arrows that one looses against one’s enemies turn around midair and head back one’s way. And while the cry to “release the Epstein files” began as a call to expose the supposed liberal elites who were allegedly operating as some kind of pedophile cabal, it turned out that Trump’s own relationship with Epstein was perhaps the bigger story in those files. And in any event and for whatever reason, the new Justice Department and FBI leadership weren’t able to deliver the goods that Epstein was murdered to protect the pedophilia cabal. 

All of which is pretty hard to sell as an extension of the witch hunt that began with Russia.

But Trump is trying anyway, and why shouldn't he? Running this playbook has never failed him before—not with his base, anyway—and reminding people that the cabal his supporters loath has always been out to get Trump and, indeed, that getting Trump is such a priority for this malevolent clique that its members even take a break from their satanic child-exploitation rituals to do it is thus not as crazy as it may seem in the information ecosystem that Trump cares most about.

Decoded for the mainstream information consumer, Trump and Gabbard are saying this: We know you’re mad, but if you give oxygen to these allegations, you’ll be helping the people who have been after Trump the entire time he has been fighting for you against the deep state. You’ll be siding with Obama and Comey and Brennan and effectively admitting that they were right all along. So we’re reminding you who the bad guys are. We’re reminding you that Trump is the guy who stands against them. We’re reminding you that they are treasonous. And we are asking whether you are sure you want to be on their side?

If you think I’m drawing connections here between unconnected threads, I promise it’s not me who’s doing so. It’s Trump himself.

Trump’s rant today began not in response to questions about Gabbard’s findings. It began in response to a question about whether it was appropriate for the Justice Department to reinterview Epstein sidekick Ghislaine Maxwell.

Trump responded: “I didn't know that they were going to do it. I don't really follow that too much. It's a—it's sort of a witch hunt, just a continuation of the witch hunt. The witch hunt that you should be talking about is they caught President Obama, absolutely cold, Tulsi Gabbard, what they did to this country in 2016, starting in 2016, but going up all the way going up to 2020 in the election.”

A continuation of the witch hunt.

I’m done engaging the substance of the lie. There’s nothing new to be said. As Renee DiResta eloquently put it the other day, “the truth remains: Russia interfered in the 2016 election. It did so to help Trump and hurt Clinton. It relied on both trolls and hackers, memes and leaks, real-world events and digital manipulation. This conclusion was not remotely controversial at the time. And it isn’t controversial now.” 

The only way I know how to respond to the barrage of lies emanating from the highest levels of America’s intelligence apparatus is to go meta—to explain how the lies work and how I think they are designed to operate on the minds of the president’s supporters.

To explain, in other words, how the lies help ensure that The Situation continues tomorrow.