Chomsky: Fixation on Russia May Have Handed Trump a 2020 Win

U.S. intellectual Noam Chomsky talked to Democracy Now about how the Democratic party’s “unwillingness to deal with fundamental issues”, and rather focus on the Russiagate scandal might have handed Donald Trump a big win for the 2020 presidential election.

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“The Democrats invested everything in this issue. Well, turned out there was nothing much there. They gave Trump a huge gift,” said the renowned academic, adding that by being so unwilling to deal with real issues such as climate change, nuclear armament, or corporate deregulation, the Democrats went “looking for something on the side that will somehow give political success.”

This comes as the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election came out on March 2019. The public summary showed that Mueller did not find that any U.S. or Trump campaign officials knowingly conspired with Moscow. While it stopped short of concluding Trump had committed a crime, it did not exonerate him.

Ever since a squabble over the timing and scope of the release turned into an all-party objective to get the whole report out in the public. On April 18, the redacted report was released, with only six percent of the content blacked out, according to ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative journalism organization.

And even though, the report shows Trump’s alleged attempts to interfere with the investigation, the implications are not conclusive.  On Sunday, top congressional Democrats said that the possibility of impeachment is still open, but said they would first need to complete their own investigations into whether he obstructed justice in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.

For Chomsky, this fixation on the Russigate probe is helping Trump. “It was pretty obvious at the beginning that you’re not going to find anything very serious about Russian interference in elections. I mean, for one thing, it’s undetectable...if it existed, was very slight, much less, say, than interference by, say, Israel,” the linguist said. 

However, he is not pessimistic about the whole Democratic party, seeing in the new group of progressive lawmakers a shift that might stand against the right-wing Republicans and establishment Democrats.