Good King Trump

[The Man]

I’m not surprised that people are talking about treason charges now (for instance, Tim Kaine [warning: autoplay video] mentioned the T-word today); as people may recall, I predicted this less than two months ago. I am surprised that it happened this quickly, though.

The election itself pretty much scrambled everything I thought I knew about politics. However, I’m surprised at how many of my suspicions regarding this administration’s conduct have been accurate, and I’m even more surprised at how quickly they’ve been made public knowledge. This administration is far more incompetent than I ever suspected possible, but other than that, they’re behaving more or less exactly how I predicted they would.

At this point, I think it’s clear that very nearly the president*’s entire administration is complicit in far more than obstruction of justice. I’m not a lawyer here, so take what I say on this with a grain of salt, but I see a justifiable case for at least espionage charges (even the Rosenbergs were apparently executed for espionage rather than treason; I don’t believe anyone has been convicted for treason in this country absent a declared state of war); the case for obstruction is also cut-and-dry and there are quite a few other offences that will probably also be proven, not least of which is likely to be money laundering for the Russian mob. Pence seems to be a serial perjurer, and I’m pretty sure at least Ryan and McConnell are guilty of various forms of collusion and conspiracy. This is almost certainly why they are attempting to stonewall investigations going forward, but given the apparent incompetence of very nearly everyone in the president*’s orbit, I don’t expect their collusion to go uncovered anymore than I expect the president*’s to.

I do have a couple of questions, though. Charlie Pierce adequately sums up one: what, exactly, do the Russians have on the president*? There’s good reason to believe that the president* doesn’t even want the job. So why the fuck did he run? The only explanation I’ve heard that makes any sense is Russian blackmail. They certainly have a lengthy track record of this kind of thing, and it certainly would be terrifying to be the victim of it, given how many whistleblowers against Russian actions have wound up dead. There’s substantial evidence suggesting that the president* is in hock up to his eyeballs for Russian loans. Again, I posted about this a few months back. The report made so little of a national impression that I wasn’t even aware of it for a few months after it came out, but I’m certain Mueller and Schneiderman (NY AG) know a lot more than was in Horton’s report.

The second is: Were the 2016 results even legitimate? I honestly never fully bought them. When it was revealed that the Russians tried to penetrate our electoral systems, I wasn’t surprised. Our electronic voting machines are heinously insecure, and some don’t even leave paper trails; IT professionals have been warning about this for decades. If I were going to try to undermine faith in the integrity of American elections, I could think of no better way to do this than by tampering with voting machines.

We have no proof that the Russians successfully tampered with our voting machines. But we have no proof that they didn’t, either. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed that it has not run an audit on voting machines to ensure they weren’t tampered with, and given the nature of some of these machines, they very likely can’t. There are some data security principles such as non-repudiation, authentication, integrity protection, and so on that can be used to safeguard electronic storage to a certain extent, but these machines appear to have employed few to none of those principles, and when they did employ them, they seem to have done so poorly. And many of these machines leave no paper trail. So in several crucial states (including Pennsylvania, Florida, South Carolina, Georgia), what we have, essentially, is a collection of 1s and 0s. There is little to nothing that can be done after the fact to ensure that these 1s and 0s have any resemblance to actual vote tallies.

So again, I ask: what assurance is there that Clinton even lost in 2016? Indeed, given the president*’s long, established history of accusing political opponents of doing things he himself either was already guilty of or proceeded to do in the future when he had the opportunity, the fact that he continually accused the election of being rigged in Clinton’s favour seems like a smoking gun. He is essentially psychological projection incarnate. Maybe he was accusing the election of being rigged for Clinton because he knew it was rigged the other way ’round.

So if it’s true that 2016’s results weren’t legit, what gets done about it? Do we hold a new election and remove the fraudulent victors from office? There is no mechanism in the Constitution for invalidating a past election, because it was simply taken for granted that elections wouldn’t be given on fraudulent grounds.

And perhaps more importantly, how do we ensure future elections aren’t rigged? There is still precious little being done about these machines. I’ve written about this, too, before (quite recently, in fact), but people still aren’t discussing it much. Even if the Russians (or other malign actors) didn’t successfully infiltrate our voting machines this time, that doesn’t mean they won’t try in the future; indeed, various authority figures from James Comey to Richard Clarke have warned that this will likely recur. We ignore their warnings at our peril.