If next year is any stranger than this year, I will be forced to wonder if we potentially have reached some sort of nadir in human evolution and we can expect to begin devolving back into monkeys.
Or perhaps even further.
But before you decide I’ve gone completely off my rocker, bear with me here for a moment.
I was amused, amazed and just a little disgusted to read recently about a new conspiracy theory that reportedly is circulating around the White House (which some now refer to as the Monkey House, in reference to a common caricature depicting President Donald Trump as the orangutan in residence there).
As reported by White House correspondent Brian Karem (Playboy, CNN — and, no, I’m not making this up) and others, someone in the White House has been floating the idea that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton deliberately lost the 2016 election to Trump, with the assistance of Russian hackers, in order to set Trump up to be impeached at a later date.
This bit of manic fluff has actually been echoed by different news sites, such as the Huffington Post.
And while it has been derided as ludicrous, the mere fact that it is being mentioned offers a glimpse into how positively unbelievable our political dilemma in this country has become.
We have a president who did not really want the job (his real goal was to get famous enough to start his own television network), did not believe he would get it and then was flummoxed when he did despite making it quite clear on the campaign trail that he was in no way prepared for or suited to the position.
Apparently convinced by the fact that he won, despite a campaign that by rights should have failed spectacularly, he then reached the obvious conclusion that he could do anything he wanted for the next four years and get away with it … and maybe even be re-elected to a second term if he played his cards right.
Oh, wait, the Russians hacked our election on his behalf, providing enough distractions and lies and misinformation that the American electorate went off the rails and put him in office?
Well, fine, he thought back then, even going so far as to invite the Russian hackers to find the mythically missing 30,000 Hillary Clinton emails that would prove she was playing fast and loose with our state secrets. In case you don’t recall it, he did just that in a news conference in July 2016, and on that same day a mysterious group of Russian hackers tried to hack into Clinton’s email server, according to our intelligence community and the U.S. Department of Justice.
Fast forward to July 24 after Special Counsel Robert Mueller spent nearly two years investigating the Russian election interference and testified before Congress that while he had not found sufficient evidence to charge Trump with coordinating with the Russians in hacking the 2016 election, neither had he found enough evidence to clear the president of any such accusations.
And on the very next day Trump, in a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zalensky, tried to get Zelensky to announce a Ukrainian investigation into U.S. presidential hopeful Joe Biden and Biden’s son, Hunter, who once served on a Ukrainian energy company’s board, just to smear the Biden name and help Trump squeak by in a second sham election.
And not only that, Trump invited officials in China to investigate the Bidens, based on Trump’s claims (without any evidence, as many of his claims are) that Joe and Hunter Biden were somehow shaking down the Chinese government for billions of dollars in return for supposed favorable treatment in trade deals with the United States. Again, no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens has emerged.
But this kind of thing, I must point out, is exactly the sort of shady dealing that Trump himself has been involved with over the years in his role as a supposed real estate mogul. Unfortunately for Trump, mostly he bungled the deals and ended up in serial bankruptcies, which were fixed only through massive infusions of cash from Russian oligarchs.
And that is the source of the Trump-Russia connection, in my view: Our president is deeply in debt to Russian billionaires, all of whom are friends of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and that is why he is fighting tooth and nail to prevent the public from getting access to his tax records and other financial information.
So, he and his crew of miscreants make up stupid conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton in order to distract the world from his fraudulent and likely criminal dealings with his Russian pals. It worked in 2016, after all — remember Pizzagate?
Yes, it is ridiculous, and yes, it is pathetic.
But he is our president, and he got there in part by distracting us from his history of corruption, greediness and lies.
And if we let this kind of political chicanery work again, allowing him to stay in the White House after 2020 and wreak further havoc on our government and our world, we have to ask ourselves: Who, in truth, is the monkey in this little drama?
Email at jbcolson51@gmail.com.