The Crumbling Collusion Delusion

It’s all falling apart. Not the Trump administration, not Western Society (yet), but the theory that the Trump campaign colluded and coordinated with Russia in order to influence or steal the presidential election from Hillary Clinton.

Who could have seen it coming?

As I said in the link above, it’s important to start out by making the distinction between discussing whether Russia tried to tamper with the election at all and discussing whether the Trump campaign colluded with them to do it. They are separate issues. Innocence on the part of the Trump campaign, if established, would in no way clear Russia or Putin. That’s important to remember as we go through this.

But why, you may ask, do we say now that the collusion theory is falling down? Well there’s simply nothing to support it. The gravity of six months without evidence takes its toll.

Last week the anticipation for former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony was fever-pitched. The left was hot and randy, Democrats and the press were salivating and putting up countdown clocks. The volcano of resistance hungrily simmered. Yet what, with regard to collusion came of it? Nothing, except to generally indicate Trump wasn’t even personally being investigated.

For six months, Congress has investigated. The FBI longer. And yet there is still no evidence, no smoking gun. Yesterday Attorney General Jeff Sessions testified under oath before Congress. Perhaps this would be the moment. Alas, as Sen. Tom Cotton noted when he began his questions, Democrats on the committee hadn’t even directly asked Sessions, who was under oath, the pertinent question.

“Did Donald Trump or any of his associates in the campaign collude with Russia in hacking those emails and releasing them to the public?” he said. “That’s where we started six months ago. We have now heard from six of the eight Democrats on this committee, and to my knowledge, I don’t think a single one of them asked that question.”

That’s a pretty devastating point, folks. But it’s not all.

At National Review, David French gets at the same point:

1. Not only is there no evidence that Trump personally colluded with Russians or ordered anyone to collude with Russians, there’s now evidence that he hasn’t been under personal investigation by the FBI.

That’s number one of four critical points.

Sen. Rubio, too, summed things up neatly in an interview after the hearing. “I challenge you to find a single Senator who says they have evidence of collusion,” he said to reporters. There were no takers.

Lack of evidence is evidence, but it is not proof, so we are theoretically waiting and seeing. So why the word “delusion”? Because, like the notion conceived anew each and every morning in a million resistance activists’ dreams that today, TODAY will be the day Trump is finally and at long last impeached, the utter religious faith that Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, and the rest of his team literally and nefariously and espionagiously arranged for the Presidential election to be “hacked” and stolen in exchange for future favors for Putin is plainly fantasy. Which is to say, they are fantasizing that this is a known fact and we’re merely trying to establish the chain of evidence, as opposed to the reality that there are investigations into a theory and that theory isn’t panning out.

To put it yet another way, there’s no there there, despite your hopes and dreams. And what a terrible thing to hope and dream, I might add.

As Robert Mueller conducts his investigation into all things Russia, we’ll have even more statements, press conferences, questions and answers to go over. And then, when that is done, let it be done.

What should concern Americans, including those Trump loyalists (not to mention the President himself) who are deeply enamored of Russia over this on (I guess) the grounds that the enemy of my democrat is my friend, is that Russia clearly and extraordinarily tampered with or attempted to tamper with the 2016 election.

As I wrote earlier this year, this is a big deal. And there are many reasons why the stakes are higher in this case than the other (constant) cyberespionage efforts against the United States.

Democrats have repeatedly make the argument that “good” conservatives would care more about our sovereignty and security than partisan political matters, and should therefore be as fervent as they in pursuing the investigation into Trump’s connection to or collusion with Russia. Fine, but now it’s time to turn that around.

“Good” liberals would care about our sovereignty and security than partisan political gain, and should therefore focus their attention on what Russia actually did, rather than what Trump, by all appearances, did not. Focus on the right thing. It’s what a good liberal would do.

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