An Assault On Our Wills: Mike Flynn and the Potency of Flagrant Corruption

On Thursday weeks worth of lobbying and preparation by Fox News and Right Wing circles came to fruition as the Department of Justice dropped their case against disgraced General Mike Flynn, the former adviser to President Donald Trump who had admitted lying on two separate occasions. The case against Flynn was airtight, of course, but Attorney General Bill Barr claimed he didn’t have enough to carry through before giving a quiet nod to the role he was playing by answering a question about how history would judge his decision. “Well,” he said, “history is written by the winners. So it largely depends on who’s writing the history.”

It was yet another indignity on top of another indignity. America’s coronavirus death toll surged over 75,000. Thirty million Americans had filed unemployment claims. And Trump had all but announced he was done with the pandemic even if the pandemic wasn’t done with us. The Flynn business was corrupt politics at its worst. The usage of an institution of law like the Department of Justice to carry out a blatant and obviously bad-faith act is just a massive insult to a public that is growing used to insult.

The freeing of Flynn - as well as new reports that Trump plans on bringing him back into the administration and considers him their “Nelson Mandela” - are blatant insults with an intention to flaunt criminal activity and the impotence of systemic checks and balances to rein in that criminal activity. Flynn, as adviser to Trump, was caught dead-to-rights communicating illegally with Russia and then allegedly lying to Vice President Mike Pence, not to mention lobbying for the nation of Turkey without registering as a foreign agent. These facts in beyond dispute and Flynn himself has admitted multiple times to lying to federal authorities.

In a post-political, authoritarian state, part of the design is to carry out these crimes and insults in such a way as to harm the people’s sense of reality. This strategy makes the barrier between reality and false reality so brittle and indistinguishable that eventually the people themselves give up trying to discern the difference. In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, this phenomenon is on full display as his autocratic regime presents itself as a democratically-elected and rule-abiding administration while everyone is well aware of the corruption and fascism hiding just behind the smiling veneer. Instances of obvious corruption and manipulation, all of it it done with a knowing wink, sends a message to the populace that Putin and his cronies are beyond any control.

We have seen this play out in America with Donald Trump’s rise to political power. His numerous scandals that would have destroyed any other candidate have resulted in nothing if not the appearance of being bullet-proof. It almost leaves his critics shrugging and neglecting to put in any stock in new and more damning scandals. With the Mueller Report, Trump’s indiscretions, both in league with Russia and in defense of that collusion, were put on full display for the world to see, only for Bill Barr to obscure it in realtime in front of the entire world. Then, of course, the Ukrainian call and the impeachment crisis, in which Trump was shown time and time again to have violated laws and the Constitution, only for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to bring the trial to an end without any witnesses.

It is infuriating, enraging, and ultimately demoralizing to watch this take place. And that’s part of the design. Instances like Flynn’s freeing are meant to provide a lesson for nation’s that their autocratic regimes are beyond their control and beyond the reach of law and order. It is a message that the law is there to be used against everyone else and by them as a weapon. The flagrancy of this act is on purpose. In the parlance of Trump, it is a “win,” which means it is a loss for everyone else and the democratic order.

There will be more of these, unfortunately, more abuses of the law and the nation. This is an attack on the wills of the people and an attempt to beat them into submission. We have seen it work. We have watched it take a toll on nation’s around the world. Only by allowing them to continue without outrage, only by becoming immune to their tactics, can we let them win.

We must continue to be surprised by their heinousness.

We must refuse to become numb.

Jared Yates Sexton is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. He currently serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.