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Stop Trying to Make Mueller Happen

One day, browsing Tinder, imagine that you come upon the profile of an obese, orange-haired real estate magnate and proud, raging racist. The first line of his bio: “Mexicans are rapists.” Formative business experience: Not renting to blacks. One of his profile pictures is a hand drawing of the continent of Africa across which he has scrawled the word “shithole.” Muslims: Don’t let them in. Jews, he tolerates, because sometimes you need a lawyer or an accountant, but he will also give a fair hearing to the very fine people who hate Jews. For this guy, anyone of color should be viewed always and entirely through the lens of that color, laboring permanently under a cloud of suspicion: Check their birth certificate. Hold them in cages. Send them back.

I know what you’re thinking: What’s the catch?! Seems like a reasonable, candid, levelheaded gent, and so rich and good-looking, too! Are there any hidden red flags? Is he divorced or something?

Yes, several times, but enough about his accomplishments. Here’s the real problem: Word on the street is, there is … a report. It’s long. It’s legalistic. Very few people have read it, and technically it doesn’t come down either way on much of anything. Still, if you manage to get through it, you’ll find a very troubling suggestion that our otherwise perfect Tinder hunk may recently have — oh, it is too terrible even to contemplate — he might have … obstructed justice. And it gets even worse, because the guy who wrote the report just went on TV and said something truly devastating. He said our man was “not exculpated.”

I’m sorry! Take a breath! I should have warned you that we were dealing with someone truly beyond the pale here. Swipe left!

It has often been noted that the chief political mechanism of the Trump era is gaslighting. There is a racist in the White House — a man who ran on a platform of dividing the country by race and has since governed at every turn on a platform of dividing the country by race — who is nevertheless lauded by tens of millions of supporters and nearly every elected member of his party for his equanimity and fair-mindedness. Three years of daily dissembling and distraction from the unrelenting cause at the core of his presidency — the marshaling of state power against minorities and the elevation of white people above all others — would have been difficult enough to deal with.

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But what is less obvious, and what truly breaks my brain, is the degree to which even President Donald Trump’s political opponents have joined in the gaslighting. It is their obsession with Robert Mueller and his tedious investigation — an investigation all but irrelevant to the racist agenda that animates Trump’s political project — that is the primary vehicle through which we’ve all been duped. Or, I should say, through which we’ve duped ourselves.

Some pundits are getting flak on Twitter for saying this week’s Mueller show was a political bust for Democrats because the “optics” of the hearings were bad — that Mueller’s case is complex and kind of boring, lacking sizzle. But the disappointed pundits are actually understating the case: The hearings were a political disaster for Democrats not just because the optics were bad but because the substance was, too.

Implicit in the hearings was the suggestion, perpetuated by the mainstream media and much of the Democratic establishment for the entirety of the Trump presidency, that the really damning gotchas are still to come. That despite what we know of Trump already — despite the fact that he has assembled a political coalition under the banner of racism and has whipped up that coalition not with a dog whistle but an air horn — we have not yet seen anything fatal to Trump’s presidency.

For that, we were told, first, to wait for Mueller’s report. When that fizzled, it was these hearings that would do him in. And when that fails, I guess we could try a Netflix special, a Broadway show with musical numbers or maybe a traveling trapeze act. If we just get the medium right, the theory goes, Mueller will produce the goods, and then the American people will finally realize that Trump is bad news, and all will be healed.

This is madness. We should stop trying to make Mueller happen, not because the special prosecutor’s findings are unimportant but because they are so very beside the point. The president just told four American members of Congress to go back to where they came from and then presided over a rage-soaked white-power rally that would have made Leni Riefenstahl proud. Why, after that, are we still looking for reasons to impeach this man? And why are we holding televised hearings into something completely different?

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Sure, I get it: Obstruction of justice is A Very Big Deal. In an ordinary political climate it could be the undoing of a president, especially obstruction in the service of derailing an investigation into foreign election meddling. Russia ran a bunch of divisive Facebook ads and hacked Democrats’ emails. Someone should probably do something.

Fine, but shouldn’t we first make sure racism has no place in the White House? How about we begin impeachment proceedings on that urgent question: Is it OK to have a racist president? And, indeed, how about we start not today but two years ago, when Trump praised the Nazis who marched on Charlottesville? Or when his administration lied to everyone about the racist impetus for adding a citizenship question to the census? Or when he started separating immigrant families at the border? Or during his first month in office, when he put into place an executive order codifying his Muslim ban?

You might argue, as some constitutional scholars did last week, that racism is not an impeachable offense. The theory seems to be that Trump has a First Amendment right to racism, and presidents are entitled to their preferred policy, even if they’re bigoted. In this view, Mueller’s findings are a better way to do Trump in — like getting Al Capone for tax evasion, they’re a means, if not an end.

But that’s a failure of imagination. Constitutional scholars also note that impeachment is a political act, and that the Constitution’s language about “high crimes and misdemeanors” has in the past been interpreted to cover a wide range of acts that politicians of the day deemed unacceptable. Indeed, one of the articles of impeachment against President Andrew Johnson went directly to his language. In a series of election rallies, Johnson had engaged in racist and demeaning rhetoric against blacks in general and several members of Congress. He’d suggested hanging abolitionists Thaddeus Stevens and Wendell Phillips. “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government for white men,” he declared.

Johnson was impeached by the House, but, by a single vote, was saved from removal from office by the Senate. It is time, now, to relitigate that history. We should have a political debate about whether or not racist federal governance should endure in America. It is not as if we don’t have enough evidence to make the case that Trump’s politics are racist. And if Republicans want to argue that Trump isn’t a racist or that racism isn’t disqualifying, let them make the case. Make them go on record, again and again, over months of hearings, defending all the tweets they claim not to have read. Talk about bad optics.

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Last week, Rep. Al Green of Texas attempted to make just this case in a resolution calling for Trump’s impeachment on the grounds of racism. “The Mueller testimony has nothing to do with his bigotry. Nothing. Zero. Nada,” Green told reporters. “We cannot wait.”

Nearly 100 lawmakers signed on to Green’s resolution, but Nancy Pelosi led the vote to table it. Her argument? Let’s wait for Mueller.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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