Why does Julian Assange want Trump to win? An analysis
It’s a puzzle, isn’t it? Assange’s Wikileaks has been devoting pretty much all its time to publishing hacked emails to or from or about Hillary Clinton and her senior staff, obviously to the delight of the Trump campaign. But no one is asking, Why is Assange so anti-Hillary?
What is Wikileaks, anyhow? Its website describes it as “a multi-national media organization specializing in the analysis and publication… of censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying and corruption.” Founded in 2006 by Assange, Wikileaks first achieved notoriety by leaking documents about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; its biggest coup was perhaps the 2010 release of U.S. State Department cables, which led the Obama administration to talk about indicting him. In return, Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, in 2012, where he has been holed up ever since.
Most of us viewed Wikileaks with mixed emotions. We might have welcomed its efforts to expose official secrets around the world, which embarrassed governments, but seemed nonetheless in tune with the “transparency” that the public wants from its officials. At the same time, we might have felt that the U.S. government is entitled to have at least some secrets. It left us—at least, it left me—with decidedly ambiguous feelings about Wikileaks, but I never thought of it as being a tool of the Republican Party—until now.
After all, Wikileaks could easily have gone after Donald Trump, right? With their hacking ability, they could release his taxes, which he himself won’t do. They could further expose Trump’s shady business practices, the contracts he won’t honor, the details of his bankruptcies. They could no doubt hack into The Apprentice and Access Hollywood tapes to see what other incriminating things Trump has said and done concerning sexually assaulting women. Yet they have not done so, instead preferring to train all their firing power on Hillary Clinton.
Why?
To answer, we have to understand more about Assange. (And, by the way, the best reporting about him has been in the European press; the American media has held back.) He was born in Australia. He appears to be an atheist, and possibly an anarchist, although he has denied the latter. As such people often are, he is driven by his own private morality, which on the surface doesn’t sound bad: “We…expose abuses [and] proof of bad behavior,” he told an interviewer. But again, bad behavior is not limited to any one particular political party or candidate. So what’s Assange’s beef with Hillary Clinton?
Here, we have only speculation. The [London] Observor hypothesizes that he doesn’t want Hillary to be President because (quoting Assange) she “will push the U.S. into endless, stupid wars that spread terrorism.” The New York Times, calling Assange an “avowed foe of Clinton,” quoted from a 2016 interview Assange gave in which he admitted that his animosity towards Hillary Clinton is personal because, as Secretary of State, she tried to indict him. “We do see her as…a problem for freedom of the press” more than Donald Trump, he explained. In that interview, Assange also criticized Hillary Clinton for being “a liberal war hawk.”
Let us grant that some people share this view of Hillary as a bit of a Thatcheresque iron lady, anxious to rush into wars and muzzle the press. (I, myself, do not see that as the case, but that’s just me.) What about Trump? Does Assange think he’s a friend of the media? Just a few days ago, the Committee to Protect Journalists called Trump “an unprecedented threat to press freedom,” but Assange apparently disagrees. And does Assange seriously think Trump’s foreign policy would be any more benign than Hillary’s? I mean, this is the man who said “I love war.” Assange, asked this very question, replied that Trump’s foreign policy is “completely unpredictable,” meaning, I suppose, that in his mind Hillary is the Devil you know, whereas Trump is, I guess, the Devil you don’t. Assange apparently believes that casting his lot with a “completely unpredictable” narcissistic demagogue who loves war is preferable to a Hillary Clinton who, at least, has a long track record of working closely with the Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, when she was a Senator and as Secretary of State–our country’s leading diplomat. So there’s a bit of confusion here, as to why Assange—who may be an idealist—believes Hillary is more of a threat to his anti-war ideals than Trump.
But there may be something far more insidious about Assange than merely his professed idealism. In a 2010 interview with Der Speigel, the German newspaper, he said he started Wikileaks because “I enjoy crushing bastards,” a remark suggesting a streak of cruelty we might expect to hear from Donald Trump. But Assange is anything but consistent, or even honest, for that matter. In a 2010 profile of Assange, in The New Yorker, he described his concept of “scientific journalism,” by which he meant Wikileaks publishes all the information it can obtain, so that “people [can] check it, verify it”; the more information people have, Assange argues, the more informed their decisions will be.
That is a compelling case. But if Assange really were interested in offering all sides to the argument over who would make the better U.S. President, why isn’t he publishing the information on Trump he could? After all, he called both “the U.S. Democratic and Republican parties…broadly conspiratorial power groupings,” another concept many Americans might agree with. So why is he going after just Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee? Well, he’s been stuck in that Ecuadorian embassy for four years now, and by all reports his mental state is deteriorating. The International Business Times reported about “a year-long psychosocial and medical assessment” conducted on Assange that “uncovered a slew of issues with his well-being” leading to “a declining mental state.” Just last month, the website, RT, reported that “Assange’s mental, physical health [is] deteriorating under embassy confinement,” and that “sleep deprivation, [a] sedentary lifestyle” and a lack of “adequate medical care” are causing him to suffer from “obesity, cardiovascular disease, and hypertension.” Along these lines, the foreign minister of Ecuador, last June, told the British newspaper, the Telegraph, that Assange “will have to be seen by psychologists” because “four years in this [Embassy] space has taken its toll.”
So perhaps we’re nearer to an explanation of why Wikileaks has chosen to go after Hilary Clinton, not Donald Trump. Wikileaks IS Julian Assange, and clearly, Assange is no longer capable of thinking clearly. His mind is that of a deluded, unbalanced prisoner in near-total isolation, who blames the Obama administration, not his personal behavior, for his current predicament. Anger and paranoid fantasy appear to be taking over; we can only guess if there are gender issues also involved in Assange’s hatred of Hillary Clinton. (After all, he has been accused, like Donald Trump, of sexual assault.) Clearly, when considering Wikileaks and the emails, Assange’s mental condition has to be taken into account.
Now, Republicans may argue that Assange’s mental state is irrelevant—what counts is the content of the emails. I have two replies: first, so far there’s been no there there in the emails: nothing illegal, nothing anyone can pin on Hillary, except for her haters, who will characterize anything—what she had for breakfast—as evidence of a crooked character. Secondly, Cui bono?, the old legal term: Who benefits? Unless you know a person’s motive for doing something, you can’t determine the context of whatever crime they’re alleging may have been committed. In this case, there is no evidence whatsoever—zero, zilch, nada—that Hillary Clinton has done anything illegal; but as for Julian Assange, we know or suspect he’s broken multiple laws, from rape to espionage. Perhaps this digital attack on Hillary Clinton is his last, desperate attempt to make sure Hillary loses the election, in the hopes that a President Trump, to whom he’s been so helpful, will pardon him.
Like many of us who support Trump, he sees the continuation of evil and the erosion of the USA in ms clinton
Dear Mr. Book, you are entitled to your feelings. Will you be one of those teabaggers with a gun refusing to accept the election results when your man goes down to historic defeat?
While WikiLeaks has done a lot of good, Assange is a pig. The real heroes are the people who risked so much to get the ifno and pass it on — Bradley/Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. I suspect that based on their deviant personalities, Assange and Trump would get along famously.