How to understand what Mr. Trump wanted from Ukraine regarding the 2016 election.
I imagine that most of those of you who follow my rants already understand this, but it has been eating at me lately and I thought I would just bring us all up to date regarding this.
To understand this request it is necessary to go back to the election in 2016. Mr. Trump never imagined that he would ever actually win, but once he did, he needed to give it the “Trump Treatment”. It has always been with him that the Trump Brand and the Trump person are inexorably linked. The Brand has been always sold as the best, the greatest, the most luxurious. The properties acquired, built or licensed have always needed to be “trophy” properties. That is why he bought the Plaza Hotel, built the Trump Tower on 5th Avenue, built the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, the towers in Chicago and Istanbul, and bought the golf courses all named Trump National, International, etc.
When he won the Presidential election, it became critical that the “Trump Presidency” be the biggest, best and most important Presidency ever. This was clear from the day after the inauguration when he sent the poor little Sean Spicer out to the press pool wearing a baggy suit to proclaim that the crowd was the largest EVER to see an inauguration. Easily proven false, it was part of a continuum of claims designed to prove that the Trump Presidency was supreme.
He claims to have had a “landslide” victory with the largest electoral college margin in the last 50 years. Although easily disproven by a quick search, that claim became the largest electoral college margin of any Republican. This is a surprise to the families and supporters of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.
Having lost the popular vote by the largest number and largest percentage of any elected President in the history of this Republic, he immediately tried to claim that this was actually fake news because those 3 million extra votes for the Democrat came from illegal, fraudulent undocumented immigrants. When this could not be proven he tried to create a White House Panel to investigate, which fell flat on its face.
What we see here is that the need for Mr. Trump to frame his Presidency as another Trophy, he needs to rebut any thread of evidence that in any way reduces his claim to the greatest Presidency in the history of the country, even greater than that of Lincoln.
This brings us to Russia. It is clear that Russia and its agents worked very hard during the lead up to the 2016 election to influence the outcome. They did NOT do this by trying to hack into the ballot boxes, rig the count of the votes or change vote totals. They DID do this by feeding false information, conspiracy theories and rumors to people whose opinions might be changed through social networks, blogs and internet sources. To understand how this works, just do a Google search on something unusual, say look at sites that sell “yak sweaters”. Over the next few weeks, every time you open a browser or a site, you will see ads for yak sweaters. The very same tools that allow those vendors to find you are the ones that allowed the Russians to find the voters that could be manipulated.
These “bots”, blogs and rumor mills peddled information destructive to Mrs. Clinton; information so false and skewed that they could never be released by Mr. Trump’s election committee, the RNC or any of the legitimate PACs that supported Mr. Trump.
And if you don’t believe that this effort influenced the election, that peddling the false information, scandalous rumors or lies changed any individual’s vote, then you must also believe that all of the information paid for by candidate advertisements on TV, Radio, social media or Print Media is useless also.
Now, back to Ukraine. Mr. Trump has needed to validate and defend his election. He wants to claim that his electoral victory margin was huge; he wants to claim that he actually WON the popular vote; that his support in the country is monumentally high; and that what happened by Russian meddling in voter influence efforts did NOT affect his victory margin.
DO NOT BE CONFUSED. Unlike the statements by Republicans over the past few months, echoed last week by Senator Kennedy that Russia MAY have meddled in the election, but that it may also have been Ukraine. The point that Mr. Trump wants to make here is NOT that Ukraine was the source of the DNC hacking, false rumors and support of Mr. Trump in the black web. NO. The point is that Ukraine tried to work to help Mrs. Clinton. If he can develop a counter-narrative to the Russian meddling, that there was equal and opposite meddling to support the other side, then the two efforts wash, the two efforts negate each other and his election is validated.