No matter how bad reality makes him look, Donald Trump has mastered the art of pretending that defeats are victories.
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When you make up your own reality, even the most stinging defeats can be turned into victories. Over the course of his political career, Donald Trump has been a master of this tactic.
For example, a bipartisan Senate report determined that the “Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election,” and detailed the many steps that Vladimir Putin’s regime took to help get Trump elected.
These included efforts to hack into the emails of the campaign of Hillary Clinton and then leak them to a compliant media, as well as an extensive disinformation campaign.
The so-called Mueller report found the same thing. In addition, it outlined the numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian agents and described that the campaign welcomed the assistance.
Finally, former FBI Director Robert Mueller and his team also described ways in which the then-president may have hamstrung the investigation and made it clear that they did not absolve Trump of obstruction of justice but also decided against bringing criminal charges.
Both reports did not establish that the contacts between the campaign and Russia amounted to “collusion.”
In other words, a bipartisan committee and a special counsel investigation showed that Moscow committed illegal acts to get Trump elected, that its agents met with and directly tried to assist the campaign, that this assistance was welcome, and that the then-president tried to trip up the investigators.
As a result of Mueller’s investigation, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was convicted of financial crimes, and political operative Roger Stone was found guilty of obstructing the congressional Russia probe. More than 30 other individuals, most of them Russians, were either indicted or convicted.
Trump would pardon them both.
So, what is all of this called in MAGA speak? The “Russia Hoax.”
Even though Trump was explicitly not exonerated, it is absolutely certain that Putin tried to get him elected, and a mountain of damning evidence was unearthed, the president-elect and his allies falsely claim that he was vindicated and nothing untoward was found.
Since it worked so well in this case, Trump has used this tactic over and over… including multiple times since his election victory last month.
First, when special counsel Jack Smith asked a federal judge to dismiss the criminal case against the former president for staging a coup, he only did so because there is a standing Department of Justice (DOJ) policy to not prosecute sitting presidents.
As WhoWhatWhy reported, Smith specifically stressed that his decision to let Trump off the hook was unrelated to “the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the Government stands fully behind.”
In other words, the only reason why the president-elect does not have to stand trial is a technicality… and because the DOJ could apparently not envision that the American people would elect such a criminal.
Of course, Trump falsely claims that the motion to dismiss shows that he did nothing wrong, and that the prosecution was just a partisan witch hunt from the beginning.
Next up was an internal DOJ investigation made public last week that found absolutely zero evidence that the FBI was involved in instigating the deadly January 6 insurrection.
No FBI agents worked undercover in the mob, according to the report, and the only people the bureau asked to partake were three sources tasked with keeping an eye on suspected right-wing terrorists. Furthermore, an additional 23 confidential human sources participated in events surrounding the insurrection, including three who entered the Capitol.
According to the former president and his cronies, that just shows that the federal government (which Trump headed at the time), somehow instigated the raid of Congress.
The last example came just this weekend, when news broke that ABC had settled a defamation lawsuit with Trump stemming from an on-air segment in which anchor George Stephanopoulos said multiple times that a jury had found Trump “liable for rape.”
That was false — because the jury had “merely” found him guilty of sexually abusing author E. Jean Carroll and awarded her $5 million for that attack and another $83.3 million for defaming her.
Here is what the presiding judge, Lewis Kaplan, had to say about that.
As is shown in the following notes, the definition of rape in the New York penal law is far narrower than the meaning of “rape” in common modern parlance, its definition in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal statutes, and elsewhere. The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was “raped” within the meaning of the New York penal law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump “raped” her as many people commonly understand the word “rape.” Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.
Essentially, what this means is that Stephanopoulos chose his words poorly, but that the thing he said hardly constituted “defamation” because it was largely true.
Of course, Trump’s hangers-on are celebrating the settlement as some kind of monumental victory over a biased media, as though the former president wasn’t held liable for sexual abuse at all.
All of this is just nuts.
It doesn’t matter what kind of evidence is presented against Trump, what the facts say, how bad it all makes him look — if there is some kind of technicality or detail that he and his supporters can latch onto, they will try to turn even the most damning defeats into a victory… and the right-wing mediaverse is only too happy to spin it like that so that the alternate reality they all have created continues to make sense for low-information voters.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
