Every war has its camp followers — the people who tag along as soldiers move from place to place.
Similarly, there are camp followers in former president Donald Trump’s war on reality. I have no quarrel with them, some of whom traverse hundreds of miles from one rally to the next, where they absorb Trump’s substitute for wisdom. Moreover, I appreciate that they sometimes sense that something is wrong, such as during his recent CNN appearance, which was either a town hall or a disaster, the difference to be found mainly in the spelling.
I urge readers to bear in mind this subtlety: Trump camp followers are not to be confused with those who voted for Trump but, after Trump’s four years in the White House, had seen enough. They are done with him. In contrast, Trump camp followers view him as a Moses-like leader of men. That he has spray-painted “Trump” across the Ten Commandments is a triviality.
The Trump camp follower is convinced that John Durham’s probe into the FBI’s conduct in the Trump-Russia investigation has uncovered something important. They are certain that Durham has blown the lid off a teeming anti-Trump bias that was festering within the FBI. As screwy as it sounds, Trump has convinced his true believers that Durham exposed the agency as a hotbed of liberals whose years of pursuing criminals was nothing but a cover for their plot to end American democracy by undermining The Donald’s reelection.
To be sure, Durham put in four years of arduous work that culminated with one agent being sentenced to a year’s probation for falsifying something on a document. Beyond that, the report amounts to 300 pages of his opinion that the FBI should have begun its Trump-Russia inquiry with a “preliminary” investigation rather than a “full” investigation. Sure, that seems like small potatoes to the larger world. But to Trump’s camp followers, the relative smallness of wrongdoing is itself evidence of just how clever the FBI is at covering up its anti-Trump bias. Case closed.
Thus, while Trump’s followers victoriously wave Durham’s vacuous report in the air, other citizens humbly suggest that there was good reason for the FBI to open a full investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia. Start with Trump’s campaign lie that he wasn’t pursuing a Trump-Moscow Hotel. The emails revealed that he was. Next, Trump’s kids and other advisers eagerly met at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer who claimed to have dirt on Hillary Clinton.
And it was Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who provided Russia with the campaign’s internal polling data for a half-dozen swing states. Russia then used the data to bombard voters in those states with anti-Hillary propaganda. (Manafort was convicted of lying to the FBI, then was pardoned by you know who.)
But those facts are mere fluff, the camp followers tell us. They add that only the congenitally skeptical could continue to doubt that Durham found something really, really big. And when asked to explain the reasons that each of America’s 17 intelligence agencies concluded that Russia had hacked Hillary Clinton’s emails (after Trump publicly asked them to do it), they are quick with the answer: Fake news.
In the end, grateful Trump camp followers thank John Durham for the four years and $6 million it took him to get one guy put on a year’s probation. Because, somehow, that has saved America.
Now, as their faces reflect the comforting glow of embers from a fading Trump campfire, perhaps the camp followers don’t notice that their circle is growing ever smaller. Nevertheless, the Durham report has freed them to address other concerns, such as how it was possible that Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was found guilty of seditious conspiracy for the Jan. 6 Capitol breach when he wasn’t even at the scene of the crime. At no charge, I remind them, neither was Charles Manson.
Joseph Wyatt is a Gazette-Mail contributing columnist and emeritus professor at Marshall University. Reach him at wyatt
