We're living in a GOP-locked (un)reality

President Trump stood on a Florida tarmac and jubilantly called the Barr report on the unseen Mueller report "a complete and total exoneration” — ignoring the Mueller statement that the report doesn’t exonerate him on obstructing justice.

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[If] this feels vaguely familiar, it should. This is the GOP playbook that was perfected during the 2000 presidential election and the Florida recount. Declare victory first and as loudly as possible (preferably on Fox) and plow through any real-world uncertainty or facts to the contrary, and make anyone — the media, Democrats — who challenges the Republican version of reality into a bitter, sore L-on-forehead loser.

Let’s be real. If the Mueller report were “a complete and total exoneration” of the president and his minions, Sean Hannity would have been waving the massive file on your TV screen Friday night. Instead, on Monday we had Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refusing to allow even a non-binding vote on making the report public, That’s a tell, and also a familiar pang of recognition for those of us who lived through moments like the Pentagon Papers, COINTELPRO or Iran-Contra. There are things our government doesn’t want us to know. Again.

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For two years, we’ve learned all the “quids” of the Trump-Russia relationship (the bizarre June 2016 meeting in Trump tower, followed in short order by hacked DNC emails and documents, the Trump Tower Moscow plans, etc., etc.) and the “quos” (a pro-Putin change in the RNC platform on Ukraine, Mike Flynn’s promises on sanctions, Trump echoing the Putin line on a variety of issues, etc). But there was never the “pro” — a conversation where Team Trump actively hatched a plan for Russia to do the hacking or the social media campaigns that it ultimately did.

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About 17 months ago, I said “the general vibe is that while the Trumpsters weren’t 100 percent sure what the heck was going on [with Russia’s hacking], they were happy to help in any way they could.”

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My overall appraisal of the Trump campaign, a year and a half ago, was in the headline: “A confederacy of dunces.” Since speculating about the unseen Mueller report is now a thing, my guess is that Mueller and his team of prosecutors pretty much found the same thing.

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Did you think Trump was a bad, dangerous president before March 24, 2019? You ain’t seen nothing yet. Emboldened by the Barr-fed Total Exoneration Myth, an energized Trump is acting exactly like the autocrat so many feared on the night he was elected. His war against press freedom has already shifted into overdrive, including a demand letter from his campaign to TV producers that could silence his political critics, a move that reeks of the worst authoritarianism.

That’s not all. In less than 48 hours, Trump’s lawyers have moved in court to kill the Affordable Care Act, threatening the health of millions of Americans. A hunger crisis in Puerto Rico is rapidly deteriorating with the president — who responded to the island’s hurricane with apathy and then contempt — not lifting a finger. It was symbolic, if not intentional, that Israel dropped bombs across Gaza at the very moment Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was meeting Trump. The world has some bad leaders in 2019, and they are feeling empowered.

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So I accept Mueller’s finding that there was no coordination that rose to the level of a crime. But I also accept the finding of a lawyer who knows Trump even better, Michael Cohen, who called his ex-boss “a racist ... conman ... cheat.” That’s exactly the president that Russia wanted, and that’s a big problem. But it’s also the president that 62 million of us wanted, and that remains the bigger problem. And the fact that 65 million of us didn’t want this — or the corruption, dishonesty, incompetence, racism and misogyny that came with it — but seem constantly thwarted from doing anything about it is the biggest problem of all.

  Philadelphia Inquirer