"There's No Redacting The Truth Of Trump," Frank Bruni

Wednesday, April 17, 2019 https://www.nytimes.com/FrankBruni » "There's No Redacting The Truth Of Trump"

President Trump. Nicholas Kamm/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images   Frank Bruni Opinion Columnist I have an odd request, and it concerns Robert Mueller’s report, a redacted version of which will be released by the Justice Department tomorrow. Please ignore it. Maybe not “ignore” — I’m overstating my case — but please stop treating or at least talking about it as the referendum on Donald Trump’s presidency. Please stop casting or letting others cast it as some definitive judgment about the wrongness or rightness of his ascent to the White House, as some binding verdict on whether his behavior there has gone beyond the pale. Do you — does anyone — really need the work of Mueller and his team to come to a conclusion about that? How important is evidence not yet revealed when so much of what Trump does is conspicuous, when the essence of his character is proudly unhidden? You know it from his words, spoken and tweeted and intemperate to the point of viciousness. You know it from his aides, current and former, whose nagging senses of patriotism and propriety lead them to leak about the extreme requests that he has made and that they have thwarted. You know it in your bones. And that’s the problem with the Mueller obsession. It implies that Trump is defined by whether he actively conspired with Russian officials to attain power. It suggests that the jury on his integrity is out, that the puzzle of his full nature is unsolved. Are there missing pieces, without which exact degrees of malfeasance can’t be determined? Yes. And some of them will probably be missing forever. But they’re not necessary, not to appraise him morally as opposed to criminally. From his spasmodic activism before he formally entered politics, from his furious campaign for the presidency and from his two and a quarter years in office, you have the truth of Trump. You need nothing more to decide that he has been persecuted and is no worse in his way than other presidents were in theirs, or to take a darker view, which I do. To discuss the Mueller report as some climax and turning point is to empower various partisans — the president and his supporters chief among them — in their efforts to parse and characterize it to their liking and turn it into propaganda for that small but pivotal minority of Americans whose votes in 2020 aren’t foreordained. That lets political gamesmanship and public relations eclipse common sense. And it’s no way to make America sane again.