Mr. Chaos vs. The Swamp

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. (WSJ)

March 5, 2019 7:26 p.m. ET

Without Russia collusion, Democrats have only hatred of Donald Trump.

In the small favors department, Donald Trump can be thankful for how his renegade lawyer Michael Cohen chose to oblige committee Democrats by fanning the dying embers of Russiagate.

His tale about Roger Stone was refuted before it left his mouth thanks to Robert Mueller’s indictment, which strongly indicated that Mr. Stone’s alleged WikiLeaks connections were so much vaporware that Mr. Stone peddled to the Trump campaign to make himself appear important.

Likewise Mr. Cohen’s vague and untestable “suspicion” that Mr. Trump knew in advance about a Russian lobbyist’s visit to Trump Tower. It is best understood as a consolation prize offered up to Democrats after the crushing discovery that Don Jr.’s postmeeting phone calls weren’t to his father after all.

“Donald Trump is a man who ran for office to make his brand great. . . . He had no desire or intention to lead this nation,” revealed Mr. Cohen.

This is news only to anyone late to the plot. We pointed to Mr. Trump’s telltale unhappy face on election night. As he would have understood, nobody has an incentive to spend unlimited sums investigating and destroying the wealth of the guy who finishes second in a presidential race.

The smart money has known all along that the question would become: What indictments related to his tax and business dealings would Mr. Trump be facing once he leaves the White House? That’s where we are today.

“Look for the next several months to be a nonstop pageant of subpoenas, hearings and court challenges,” chortles one New York Times writer. “The question of Trump’s criminality [will be] at the center of political life,” chortles another.

Of course, if Mr. Trump never wanted to be president, blown up is the theory that he engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Moscow to make himself president. The veteran Washington Post correspondent Karen Tumulty acknowledged as much, calling this the “silver lining” in Mr. Cohen’s testimony. And Jerrold Nadler, the lead Democratic inquisitor in the House, all but announced that he was launching his sweeping investigation, targeting 81 people and entities tied to Mr. Trump, to counter an anticlimactic Mueller report.

Let us understand: If Mr. Trump’s approval ratings were 60% rather than 43%, a lot of House Democrats in unsafe seats would not be in favor now of an opportunistic hunt through his business career for whatever venalities might be found. Politics is a rough game. And Mr. Trump chose to conduct his presidency in a polarizing way.

At the same time, I wonder if Democrats realize how much incentive this gives him to pulverize his way to re-election. Or if they understand how apparent their cynicism will be to millions of middle-of-the-road voters.

Mr. Trump is a legitimate president even if he wishes he were still hosting his NBC show. By one casual standard, he may even be the most legitimate president we’ve ever had. No candidate was better known to voters or came less wrapped in false advertising. In office, he has been a freak of democratic candor. What he thinks may not be accurate, but he compulsively lets voters know he thinks it.

The Russia conspiracy Democrats flogged for so long at least painted him as an impostor and traitor. Now Democrats are attacking him for being exactly the guy voters knew they were electing. Americans, after hearing Russia, Russia, Russia for 24 months, will not fail to notice that Mr. Trump is being assailed over routine financial and tax matters that nobody thought worth investigating before he became president.

Add it all up, and the end result of Democratic efforts may be only to reinforce the public’s sense that something is seismically out of whack in Washington and that Donald Trump remains the available antidote.

Which brings us to the most important point of all.

If Mr. Trump didn’t set out to be president, his accidental and involuntary servitude throws into sharper relief the story the press ignores. The deus ex machina that delivered him to the White House may well have been the antic and improper interventions of FBI chief James Comey, driven (as we belatedly learned) by a questionable Russian spy document left by Kremlin trolls where our so-called intelligence community could find it.

So maybe Russia did have a “useful idiot” operating on its behalf in the 2016 election. It wasn’t Mr. Trump. It was Mr. Comey.

The chances of getting to the truth may not be great but they won’t get better if Mr. Trump is no longer president. From a long view, putting up with the chaos-creator-in-chief might even be a small price to pay for exposing and repairing the constitutional wrongs of 2016.

Appeared in the March 6, 2019, print edition.