The Cliffs of Mueller

Trump before a rambling 2-hour speech at CPAC

Remember back in 2014 and 2015 when Donald Trump was still flirting with a presidential campaign simply as a gimmick to increase his leverage as a reality TV star with NBC and possibly launch his own media network?

Back when he was still fanning the flames of discredited, racist "birther" theories about President Obama on Fox News and demanding that the former constitutional law professor produce academic transcripts from Columbia to prove that he'd graduated.

This of course was well before Michael Cohen revealed publicly under oath that Trump had ordered his attorneys to send letters to the University of Pennsylvania, the College Board (SAT's) and other schools he attended threatening them with legal action if they released his own academic transcripts to the media. 

Such mind-boggling hypocrisy hardly mattered to then-candidate Trump, who never actually expected, or wanted to win the 2016 presidential race - despite his ceaseless stream of hot-air TV soundbites, juvenile insults and crackpot, pseudo-political rhetoric.

He was in the race simply because he thought it was a cool way to line his pockets.

As journalist Michael Wolff noted in an excerpt of his 2018 book 'Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House' published in the January 8, 2018 issue of New York magazine:

"As the campaign came to an end, Trump himself  was sanguine. His ultimate goal, after all had never been to win. 'I can be the most famous man in the world.' he had told his aide Sam Nunberg at the outset of the race. His longtime friend Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News, liked to say that if you want a career in television, first run for president. Now Trump, encouraged by Ailes, was floating rumors about a Trump network. It was a great future. He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful brand and untold opportunities."

Stunned Hillary Clinton supporters on 11/8/16 

No need to rehash that surreal November 8, 2016 election night, we all know what happened and it seems like we've been waking up to the aftermath everyday since.

According to Wolff, Melania Trump cried when she heard the news that her husband won, not because she was happy either.

Don Jr. allegedly later told a close friend that his father "looked as if had seen a ghost." 

The rest, as they say is history.

Two years after Trump's inauguration was overshadowed by the largest nationwide protests in American history, the fallout from the conclusion of Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation has landed in Washington, D.C. with a thud.

For millions of Americans, the release of the widely-anticipated special counsel report was like an excruciating end to a seemingly endless two-year wait.

Because, in part, we now know it could still be weeks before a heavily-redacted version of the report is released to the public so politicians and people alike can read it for themselves and form their own conclusions about its contents.

Instead of having to endure the current Attorney General Bob Barr trying to substitute his own, edited 4-page summary of the Mueller report for the real thing.

Which, Barr insists, absolves Trump of any wrongdoing.

The Navy patrol boat reaches the scorched
ruins of Kurtz's camp in Apocalypse Now

Which isn't all that surprising of course, and not just because Barr is a longtime Republican.

He's the former AG under George HW Bush who, well before he was nominated to replace Jeff Sessions, famously sent a memo to the Department of Justice detailing his belief that a sitting president cannot be indicted while in office due in part to his sweeping executive powers.

There are times when it seems as if Trump's emergence onto the national political scene was like the beginning of a long, ominous trip up a dark, unknown river.

And I've begun to feel like one of the doomed crew members on the battered U.S. Navy PBR patrol boat making its way up the Nung river towards the Cambodian border in director Francis Ford Coppola's epic 1979 masterpiece Apocalypse Now.



Only instead of the delusional and dangerous former U.S. Army Colonel Kurtz waiting in his creepy jungle fortress at the end of the journey, he's been inside the boat the whole time.

I suppose I wasn't the only one who secretly hoped the Mueller report would somehow derail Trump's train wreck presidency - who knows, there may be more inside the report than we know.

Mueller is nothing if not painstakingly thorough, and the actual contents of the allegedly 300-puls page report are still unknown.

But in the meantime like many Americans, I'll just have to be patient and endure Trump's smug preening and inaccurate claims that he's been "totally exonerated" by a report no one in the White House or in Congress has even read yet.

Hopefully the Mueller report gets released sooner rather than later so the court of public opinion's ruling can be decided by the public instead of Bob Barr.

He can keep his partisan Cliff Notes - I want to read it for myself.