Donald Trump wants you to know that, even if it wasn’t done by some 400 pound guy sitting on a bed, any interference with the 2016 election had no effect, none, less than none. So, special counsel Robert Mueller is closing in on conspiracy, corruption, and dereliction of duty, and Trump is focused on his image. That’s not surprising. Nor is it surprising that the media still just fall over in a stupor when dealing with him.
It’s the CNN syndrome: they created Trump’s candidacy as an unintended consequence, then worked to make his victory possible because of some twisted, craven interpretation of even-handedness. Now, the media are equivocating about whether the Russian attack on our sovereignty had any effect. No one is saying that it changed votes, they announce. There is no evidence that it affected the outcome, they say. We’ll never know; we can’t know, they proclaim, as if the election had run afoul of some political uncertainty principle.
The election was heartbreakingly close. Just 78-thousand votes out of 15-million spread over Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania put our nation in the peril in which we now find it. But we are just beginning to see the extent, the sophistication, and the sustained nature of the Russian attack. The question, then, is whether an attack of that magnitude could impact an election that was that close. Maybe a better question is, “How could it not?”
Every new bit of information on the Russian attack makes it look not only plausible but probable. Yet, the media think not? Do they believe that political ads and propaganda have no effect, that the professionals who threw 6-billion above-board dollars at it in 2016 are idiots? Do they believe that social media, with its emotional appeal and its amplifying effect, does not impact behavior? Do they believe that the leaked emails and the reopening of that sad investigation were little-noticed side shows?
Innumerable factors affect an election, and in a close election, any one of them could be decisive, could push a few thousand votes here and pull them from over there: any factor, including one that should not have been there. But it was there. Let’s stop pretending that the Russian attack had no effect. Let’s stop pretending that it could not easily have been decisive. Let’s stop being stupid.