If the Mueller Report TOTALLY EXONERATES Donald Trump, wouldn't he be parading it around the White House lawn like his ISIS map? And please, spare us the idea he cares about releasing any classified intel that might be in it. If the report fully vindicated him from the vicious Witch Hunt, he would have had his toady attorney general release it the second it arrived on his desk. Instead, William Barr wrote a four-page summary of the report in which he contradicted his own definition of obstruction of justice. Yet none of this has stopped Trump, his aides, and the right-wing infotainment vortex from using The Barr Letter to trumpet victory while tamping down calls for the actual Mueller Report to be released. Most of the reality-based media has gone right along with it, unwilling or unable to discern the difference between the two.

The Trump 2020 campaign really kicked things off, with a first draft of an Enemies List that was sent to various news outlets suggesting a number of presidential critics should be banned from their airwaves. "Does this guest warrant further appearances in our programming," an employee of Donald Trump suggested news producers ask themselves, "given the outrageous and unsupported claims made in the past?" Now that's shameless, considering the president said something false in public 15 times a day last year. But are you even really surprised?

Even that seemed classy, however, compared to the victory lap from White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, someone who's never made outrageous or unsupported claims, of course, but who did share this with the world:

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Mueller Madness! Which of the angry and hysterical @realDonaldTrump haters got it most embarrassingly wrong? #YouDecide pic.twitter.com/IkzUesDdub — Kayleigh McEnany (@PressSec) March 26, 2019

Thank you, Madame Secretary! It is very cool indeed that we pay this person with our tax dollars.

Again: The Mueller Report has not been released. We don't actually know what's in it. All we have is the word of Donald Trump's hand-picked attorney general, who wrote a 19-page memo before he was chosen for the job in which he attacked the Mueller probe. This guy is now interpreting the findings, the right-wingers are yelling, and the mainstream media is just accepting this state of affairs, cowed into obedience by the sheer ferocity of the effort. As historian Julian Zelizer put it on Twitter, this is beginning to have the hallmarks of the 2000 presidential election: Republicans declare victory, the political media falls in line, dissenters are cast as sore losers for asking what actually happened, and "the GOP then tries to force an ending to the controversy by running out the clock."

Except the infotainment sphere supporting the Republican line is a whole new bag of worms this time around. If you thought the Enemies List was a dramatic description of the Trump campaign's memo, check out what Fox News host Laura Ingraham—seen previously delivering monologues that got stirring praise from David Duke—has been up to:

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This matches up pretty closely with the Trump campaign Enemies List. Democratic Congressmen Nadler, Schiff, Blumenthal, and Swalwell made both. Ingraham is not just out to shame these individuals. She has repeatedly called for "consequences" or, in all-caps, THE RECKONING. Surely, in these calm and reasonable times, this will all end well. Just ask Lou Dobbs, the fascistic Benjamin Button over at Fox Business:

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Lou Dobbs last night targeting "the radical Dems, the national left wing media, the RINO establishment, the deep state" for "their constant unrelenting efforts to subvert the Trump presidency, to overthrow President Trump and this republic." pic.twitter.com/K9aQPahtWb — Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) March 26, 2019

Again, we have not seen the Mueller Report. Sometimes it's hard to remember over all the trumpets blaring. That did not stop a Dobbs chyron from referring to the investigation as a "coup." This is also a nice list of Enemies, and Dobbs's claim they tried to overthrow "the republic" had a nice ring to it later in the program:

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And here's Lou Dobbs asking of the SDNY investigation, "can that be shut down by Barr?" pic.twitter.com/wRZC8RxW7F — Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) March 26, 2019

Here's Dobbs hosting two Clinton impeachment ratfuckers to discuss whether the president's new attorney general—the one whose summary of the Mueller Report everyone has based their conclusions on to this point—should interfere in other investigations into Dear Leader. You might have forgotten, but there are also investigations into the Trump Organization, the Trump inaugural committee, Trump's possible campaign-finance violations, the Trump administration...the list goes on. Possibly this is because the president is crooked, but maybe these state and federal prosecutors—some of whom Trump himself nominated—are part of the Deep State plot against him. All of these need to be shut down now, according to Lou Dobbs, by the guy who won't release the Mueller Report. It's almost like Dobbs doesn't care about The Republic or the rule of law that sustains it. He cares about The Leader and his divine strength and the ratings he generates for Dobbs.

There is a general movement now on the right-wing towards investigating Hillary Clinton, or her emails, or The Server, or the FBI, or how the counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign got started, or of course, the Fake News Media. It's the politics of backlash, and it's not the first rodeo for these folks. This is what we got from Sean Hannity, who seemed to swallow the words a bit when he said his "sources" had told him the following:

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Sean Hannity: "My sources are telling me it's all about to come cascading down. This all started when they rigged the investigation into Hillary's email server. ... That horribly flawed investigation into [her] now must be reopened if we are to ever have justice in this country." pic.twitter.com/zWFjiSfhgY — Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) March 26, 2019

It's always a battle to go on offense. Having blasted Mueller as hopelessly biased and leading a Witch Hunt, Trump and his allies in government and the media are now presenting Mueller's findings as a complete and legitimate exoneration—and as reason for the Enemies to be investigated. It's almost like their view of the investigation was solely dictated by how it impacted The Leader. And by the way, we haven't actually seen the findings.

But never mind that! It's time to fire up the resentment machine. You've got to cross your T's, and Tucker Carlson—another one with some interesting fans—presented the final stage. He referred to Barr's letter as "Mueller's summary" while suggesting viewers could read it for themselves to come to their own conclusions, a classic Fox lie that encourages fans to Do Your Own Research, You Free Thinkers all while guiding them to one conclusion. And then he embarked on a long tear blasting CNN, suggesting it should not be allowed to call itself a news network. He also called CNN media reporter Brian Stelter a "eunuch" repeatedly.

But then he got to the real stuff:

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Tucker Carlson: "I don't think [what the Russians did] hurt the country, actually. I really don't. I think it's a total lie." pic.twitter.com/eWDLFXM0pa — Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) March 26, 2019

Now Russia's meddling in our election doesn't matter at all! Now that is covering all your bases. Never mind that they won't let us see the report, which focuses heavily on Russia's efforts and how the Kremlin might try to subvert our democracy next year. It was no big deal!

You can trust William Barr, the Iran-Contra guy, on this. In fact, there's no need to see the actual report on any front!

There was no criminal charge of conspiracy, so there's no need to see what connections there were between Trump associates and Russians, which is a totally normal thing for an American presidential campaign to have a lot of. No gray area exists between outright conspiracy with a foreign government and total innocence, after all.

There's no need to get Mueller's findings on the Trump Tower Meeting between Trump's campaign manager, son, son-in-law, a Kremlin-linked lawyer, the head of a Russian oligarch's real-estate firm, and a Russian-American lobbyist. It doesn't matter that Trump and his associates lied about it at every stage, or that Trump's lawyers admitted he dictated his son's misleading statement on the matter.

There's no need to get Mueller's take on the Trump Tower Moscow deal, which Trump and his associates reportedly pursued throughout the campaign—as Trump sought the presidency and with it the power to, say, roll back sanctions against Vladimir Putin and his oligarch cronies—and lied about relentlessly to the American people.

There's no need to see why Trump's campaign manager was passing campaign polling data to an associate linked to Russian intelligence services, and there's no reason to wonder whether an attorney general who got the job after saying Mueller's obstruction-of-justice investigation was illegitimate made an objective decision on obstruction-of-justice charges.

Just don't worry about it. NO COLLUSION! Go back to sleep.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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