Can’t Shake a Collusion Investigation? Then Make a Game of It

WASHINGTON — Have you heard the one about the collusion? Nobody can seem to find it!

It was about halfway through President Donald Trump’s speech to thousands of supporters last week in West Virginia — right after referring to “fake news and the Russian witch hunt,” as if it were an ironically named rock band — that he breezily posed the question.

Spreading his arms in mock confusion, as if half expecting to find it hidden, like a particularly elusive Easter egg, somewhere near the lectern bearing the presidential seal, Trump issued the challenge again.

“Find some collusion!” the president bellowed, making the notion of uncovering a conspiracy with a foreign power to sway a presidential election sound more like a scavenger hunt — a kind of “Where’s Waldo?” for undermining American democracy.

“We want to find the collusion!”

Had his audience in that civic center in Charleston seen it? (A smattering of boos and thumbs jamming downward in response indicated that they had not.) Had anybody? What about Robert Mueller, the special counsel in charge of the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections, and whether Trump’s campaign team sought to help?

The answer Trump was going for, of course, was no. With legal troubles mounting for some of his closest former associates and Mueller’s investigation still looming as an existential threat to his presidency, he has distilled the scandals surrounding him into a comic book-like drama, with a reality showman’s instinct for cliffhanger and competition.

The mantra of “no collusion” has emerged for Trump and his team as a shield and a talisman. It is the answer to every question, the nonresponsive parry to every thrust of a question about the president’s credibility and actions, the ultimate rejoinder to any hint of wrongdoing by Trump.

The president’s fondness for the phrase has inspired its share of ridicule. Stephen Colbert recently riffed on it on his late-night television show, joking that “no collusion” was like the president’s version of “aloha — it means both ‘hello’ and ‘I’m guilty.'”

In fact, collusion is defined as a “secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others.” The federal criminal code does not contain a crime called “collusion,” which may be one reason that Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, uttered the eyebrow-raising statement last month that “my client didn’t do it, and even if he did it, it’s not a crime.”

In Trump’s case, it refers to the specific allegation that members of his campaign worked with Russia to sway the 2016 election in his favor. But he has adopted it as a shorthand to encompass any allegation against him, making it into the sought-after object in his own kind of morality tale.

In it, there are villains: Mueller and his “17 angry Democrats,” as Trump is fond of calling the special counsel’s team, as well as Jeff Sessions, whom he casts as the weak-kneed attorney general who has allowed biased prosecutors to run amok with their “witch hunt.” Michael Cohen, his longtime lawyer who pleaded guilty last week to campaign finance crimes and implicated Trump in the scheme, has also recently joined this team, as the president made clear in several tweets after his plea.

There are heroes, such as himself and the “brave” Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman, who was convicted of multiple counts of fraud on the same day as Cohen’s bombshell. Trump lavishly praised Manafort for refusing to “break” and cooperate with federal investigators.

And then there’s the Ultimate Prize — the collusion — that nobody seems to be able to lay their hands on, like so many children at a Passover Seder hunting for the afikomen, the hidden piece of matzo at the end of the meal that fetches its finder a reward of a dollar or so. Who can find the collusion, kids?

Nobody yet, even as the buzzer of the midterm congressional elections draws closer.

On Tuesday in West Virginia, collusion hide-and-seek appeared to be little more than a way for the president to shrug off a series of damaging developments; Trump quickly moved on to other subjects. But his rhetorical questioning also revealed how Trump, a president facing the most serious of threats, has sought to minimize and trivialize what is happening in and around his White House, and in the process, to desensitize his supporters to grave charges.

“There is an entertainment aspect to this, and this tease of ‘Who’s going to win? Who’s going to be the bad guy?’ and Trump has a demonstrable instinct for this,” said Mary E. Stuckey, a professor of communications at Penn State University who has written extensively on presidential communication. “It keeps people watching, and it puts the attention where he wants it, which is, ‘Where is the shiny object?'” There is a strategy behind Trump’s framing, intentional or not. It’s a way of mocking what is in fact a serious allegation, of muddying the waters of what is a clear-cut question that Mueller is working to answer. Legal experts have said a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russians to break election laws could, indeed, be a crime.

If the issues looming over his presidency are a kind of game, then perhaps voters will consider themselves nothing more than popcorn-munching spectators in a drama, rather than people deeply invested in the outcome. That could be vital to Republicans’ chances of keeping Congress in the midterm congressional elections in November, when a Democratic takeover of the House would lead to a rash of Democratic-led investigations of Trump, and potentially impeachment proceedings against him.

“If it’s entertaining, then it can’t be serious, because those things don’t exist in the same box,” Stuckey said.

Trump’s aides have adopted his approach, albeit with less apparent enthusiasm.

“The president has done nothing wrong, there are no charges against him, there is no collusion,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, intoned dutifully three separate times in a news briefing on Wednesday.

During a contentious interview on CNN on Thursday night, Kellyanne Conway, the counselor to the president, got into the game as well, when asked whether the president had lied.

“Where is it?” Conway demanded of the host, Chris Cuomo. (The collusion, she meant.)

“You’ve been talking about collusion and promising it to your viewers,” she added.

For Trump and his team, the idea of an endless find-the-collusion game may be having its desired effect. Public polls have shown a slight decline in support for the continuation of Mueller’s inquiry since last year. Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, said that was in part because of Trump’s persistent harping on the idea that the prosecutors have not found their Holy Grail.

“There is a point where the public starts getting tired,” Murray said. “It’s not necessarily that they distrust Mueller, but it’s, ‘OK, this thing has been going on for a long time. Show your cards now or go onto something else.'”

Until then, as Trump told reporters Tuesday, sounding as if he was announcing the next episode of a game show, “We continue the witch hunt.”