From the moment we “accepted” that Donald Trump had “won” the presidency, we’ve been living inside a False Narrative — that Donald Trump won. The implications have been devastating.
From the get-go, Trump himself has defensively knee-jerked the word “legitimate” into the conversation. As in “No collusion, my presidency’s legitimate!” If Trump wasn’t a serial projector of his innermost truths, we might could get suspicious. He’s told us all along (in his own way): he did not “win” the presidency. If anything, it was stolen on his behalf.
The Mueller Report touches on this very subject on page 140.
We know that Manafort handed proprietary polling data to Kilimnik. We know Kilimnik is Russian intelligence. What’s not here in the report though is another piece of information we’ve always known: 10 days before the 2016 election, Paul Manafort — who had left the campaign because of his associations with Russia, returned to the Trump campaign with this directive: Concentrate on Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
As we know — those three blue states flipped red, stunning everyone. But here’s the thing — Trump won those three blue states by 77,000 votes combined. Talk about close. Talk about suspicious. No one, by the way, has ever done an official forensics on the machines. Unofficial audits turned up strange anomalies across Pennsylvania; for instance, counties that all voted with the exact same percentages.
But even if the machines themselves weren’t touched, if a single Russian propaganda ad placed on a Clinton-voter’s Facebook page had its desired effect — and misinformed that voter into NOT voting, the effect is exactly the same as not counting their vote.
Keeping in mind that Team Mueller’s purview was extremely limited — Russian hacking and any cooperation between Trump’s campaign and Russia — plus the attempts to obstruct justice to keep all that from getting out. Team Mueller was never charged with answering the whole Russian question — only a small part of it. Everything else they’ve bumped into, they’ve farmed out to other jurisdictions for prosecution or continuing investigation. And we still don’t know much about the heavily redacted intelligence investigation. What we already know about this story leaves absolutely no doubt that Donald Trump — and probably the bulk of the republican party — conspired with Russia to steal election 2016.
The question Trump kept putting out there — about his legitimacy — it’s a thing. A very real “thing”.
We have been living inside the False Narrative that is The Trump Presidency. It’s real, all right. But its existence is based on a lie. It shouldn’t exist at all.
False Narratives unfortunately are powerful things. They seduce with their reasonableness (relative to their environment). In Nazi Germany, it became “reasonable” that Jews were the cause of Germany’s problems. It became acceptable to burn their shops, beat them in the street, humiliate them in public. Germans were living inside a false narrative that this wasn’t barbaric.
But it was barbaric.
It was a false narrative that cannabis caused black men to rape white women so therefore should be illegalized. Parts of the country — and most of the world — still lives inside the false narrative that says any of that is even remotely true.
It was a false narrative that Jesus was a literal “son o god”, that (if he ever actually existed), he was the product of a virgin birth. It was a false narrative that Jesus turned water into wine and bread into his body. It was a false narrative that Jews killed him.
It’s a false narrative that America is a center-right country. When more Americans vote, they vote Democratic. In fact, they vote more progressively.
I could go on. And on.
We live inside plenty of false narratives. We may think it does us good — we’re living inside another false narrative if we think that.
Donald Trump is not the president of the United States. You know that is.