Flynn Redux

Roger Berkowitz

In an earlier post about Michael Flynn, I linked to Matt Taibbi’s essay arguing that Flynn was mistakenly prosecuted by an overzealous FBI. Now Eli Lake has published a detailed and devastating account of the way the FBI railroaded Flynn. The importance of these stories is that the resistance to Trump continues to put its faith in the FBI and other institutions and to base its case against President Trump on the trustworthiness and transparency of what the President calls the “deep state.” Without taking a position on the deep state rhetoric, it is simply the case that when those on the left continue to insist that it is a sign of authoritarianism and injustice to ask that the charges against Flynn be dropped, they are both flying their own ideological blinders and giving President Trump a gift—the gift of showing his own conspiratorial rejection of the common world to differ from our own simply by degree. 

I am often asked, what would it take to get through to Trump supporters and bring them back to the factual world. It may not be possible for some who have dropped down a conspiratorial rabbit hole. But for many, the first step is for those committed to facts and reality to admit that some of the criticisms the President and his supporters make—about the deep state, about the dangers of bureaucracy, and about the ideological disdain many in the political and media establishment have for large numbers of Americans—are meaningful. There is no question that the President and his Twitter feed lie with abandon. He is corrupt in business and politics and his Presidency is corrupting the country. But what enables the President to succeed is the very real corruption, ideological conformity, and supercilious sense of entitlement held by too many in the establishment. 

One way to start is to recognize that for all of President Trump’s manifold shortcomings, collusion with Russia was not one of them. And alongside that recognition comes, as Lake writes, the admission that too many on the left have sought to delegitimize his election on false pretenses rather than organize democratically to beat him at the polls.