FRIDAY ON MY MIND

It’s a White House tradition to delay the release of unpleasant news until late Friday, in the hope that everything will blow over by the time they return to work on Monday morning.  Yesterday’s Friday afternoon news dump may have set some sort of record. 

On the spousal abuse front, the White House Chapter of the He-Man Woman Haters Club took another hit, no pun intended, when one of Trump’s speechwriters, David Sorensen, was outed as a domestic abuser.  As we all know, Donald Trump hires only the best.  He’s hired enough men with conspicuous anger management issues (e.g., Steve Bannon, Anthony Scaramucci, Seb Gorka, Corey Lewandowski, and Rob Porter) to suggest that “demonstrated ability to show women who’s boss” is one of his preferred characteristics.   

Lewandowski and Porter have “dated” Hope Hicks, the current White House Communications Director, and Donald Trump's chief pants steamer.  I’m not trying to slut-shame her; her love life is her business. 

But it’s interesting that, uniquely among members of Trump’s inner circle, Hicks had avoided the spotlight.  Now it appears that someone has decided that it’s her time in the barrel.  Or maybe they’re trying to save her from a beating at the hands of Rob Porter.  

Porter’s whistleblower might have been one of his exes, trying to protect Ms. Hicks.  Perhaps it was Corey Lewandowski, her former lover, seeking revenge against the man who took his place.  Another, perhaps less likely, revenge scenario is that the FBI leaked the information as a warning that they don’t intend to be Donald Trump’s punching bag.  Of course, in order for such a subtle warning to be effective, there’d have to be someone in the White House smart enough to interpret the message.  It’s not clear that any such person is employed by Donald Trump.  Men who beat women tend not to be subtle.

The ultimate casualty in the Porter affair may turn out to be John Kelly, who defended Porter and lied about his own role in Porter’s dismissal.  Kelly has turned out to be a more disciplined version of Donald Trump, which is not a compliment.  Trump is reported to have told Ivanka and Jared to find him a new Chief of Staff, and is meanwhile plotting ways to make Kelly’s job miserable enough to induce him to resign.  It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, as far as I’m concerned.      

It’s easy to mock the disarray in Trump’s White House.  But while the clown car rolls along, two much more consequential pieces of news were released late Friday.  First, Trump refused to release the memo written by Democrats on the House Select Committee on Intelligence.  No surprise there.  Trump surely didn’t read the memo – reportedly he no longer reads much of anything – and he’d certainly never approve the release of information that would show him in a bad light. 

But the most important news of the evening may have been the resignation of Rachel Brand, Associate Attorney General, third in command behind Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein.  She’d been on the job for only nine months.  It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that she’s leaving because she suspects, or has even been told, that Donald Trump intended to fire Rosenstein (and maybe Sessions as well), promote Brand, and then ask her to fire Robert Mueller. 

Maybe the Trump equivalent of the Watergate Saturday Night Massacre started yesterday.

"THE PRESS WAS TO SERVE THE GOVERNED, NOT THE GOVERNORS"

Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote that about the Pentagon Papers court case.  His statement was quoted in Steven Spielberg’s THE POST, which I saw a few days ago and quite enjoyed.  But while the film’s narrative (all the drama behind the publication of the Pentagon Papers) was compelling, I knew the good guys were going to win.  What really struck me was the attention to detail that Spielberg put into recreating the newspaper world of the early 70s. 

I was an adult, albeit a young one, during the Nixon Administration, but THE POST reminded me that there were aspects of life during that era that now seem practically medieval.  Everybody smoked.  Newspapers had to be typeset with chunks of metal that Gutenberg would have recognized immediately.  And it took a real effort to speak to someone on the phone, because people on both ends of the conversation were shackled to rotary phones on landlines.

The film ends (spoiler alert here) on an ironic note.  Spielberg fast forwards almost exactly one year after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the publication of the Pentagon Papers.  As we hear Richard Nixon plotting his revenge against the Washington Post, we see a night watchman in the Watergate office complex discover an apparent burglary. 

Nixon didn’t know how good he had it in 1971.  You can watch ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN for the rest of the story.

The period from 1971-1975 (the end of both the Nixon Administration and the war in Vietnam) was a golden age for American journalism, or at least for mainstream media.  But it didn’t last long, and Spielberg’s film shows us at least two reasons why.

The financial risks inherent in rocking the boat are front and center in the film.  Less obvious, but probably equally important, is the fact that inside the Beltway, bigshots in the press and bigshots in the government have a symbiotic relationship.  Whether or not they like each other (the film notes the cordial relationship that Ben Bradlee had with JFK, and that Katherine Graham had with Robert McNamara), they always need and use each other.  The press gets access to power and inside information, off the record or otherwise.  In return, they protect their sources in the government, which allows politicians and bureaucrats to shape the news (or further grudges) anonymously.

As most things do these days, THE POST got me to thinking about Donald Trump’s relationship with mainstream media, by which I mean the broadcast networks plus MSNBC and CNN; as well as the New York Times and the Washington Post.  MSM has been covering Donald Trump intensively for over two years as candidate and president, and they still struggle to talk about him honestly. 

They’re a lot better than they used to be, but they still can’t look their audience in the eye and say “the President lied again today.”  They watch clowns like Devin Nunes tout “memos” they know are bogus, and instead of ignoring him, or saying “here comes Devin Nunes with more bullshit,” they cover his nonsense with a straight face. 

Their reporters know better, but their editors and publishers instinctively defer to power, and the corruption of today’s Republican Party is alien to their worldview.  That has turned them into useful idiots in the ongoing Russo-Republican disinformation campaign.

I first wrote about this phenomenon back in September, 2016.  A year and a half later, we’re watching a showdown between Donald Trump and American democracy.  Since press coverage will have an impact on the outcome of the battle, I’m going to expand upon what I said back then. 

The Republican primaries revealed two of Donald Trump’s big strategic advantages.  First, he won by refusing to play fair.  He relied on insults and lies, and when he’s challenged, he either doubles down on his original statement or moves on to a new set of lies and insults.  And the press was completely flummoxed. 

They couldn’t even fall back on their old reliable theme of calling Trump’s lies and insults gaffes, because there are no gaffes in Trump’s world.  Trump is shameless; all publicity is good publicity.  All during the campaign, the press gave Trump a free ride while focusing their criticism on Hillary Clinton.  Clinton is not shameless, which was a huge strategic disadvantage in 2016.  You can talk all you want about Hillary’s deficiencies as a candidate, but the truth is that any conceivable Democratic nominee – Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren – would have been at a similar disadvantage.  Democrats care about the truth.  They keep bringing fact checkers to a barroom brawl.

Donald Trump’s second big advantage also defied conventional wisdom.  He is corrupt, ignorant, misogynistic, bigoted, and narcissistic.  And he won not in spite of those characteristics, but because of them.  That’s an uncomfortable truth, and journalists didn’t (and still don’t) know how to talk about the elephant in the room.  Their silence in 2016 turned many of them into Trump’s accomplices.

As Jay Rosen put it, “asymmetry between the major parties fries the circuits of the mainstream press.”  For veteran political reporters and commentators, whose worldview insists that both parties are comfortably within the American mainstream, people like Donald Trump and Devin Nunes just don’t compute.

And now Donald Trump is president.  Earlier this week, I was on a stationary bike at a gym, watching MSNBC while I pedaled.  A panel of talking heads were discussing one of Donald Trump’s transparently false tweets, and the host asked a panelist, “are you saying that the president is a liar?”  And the poor fellow began to sputter, and finally said something like “I’m not going to call the President of the United States a liar, but what he said wasn’t correct.”

Let me make it clear.  I’m not asking mainstream media to become a Democratic version of Fox News.  I just want them to tell the truth in plain English.  Their failure to use the L-word distorts the record.  Trump isn’t mistaken.  He’s lying.  So are his Republican enablers.  And they’re going to lie a lot more in 2018, about matters critical to the survival of the Republic. 

Those lies are part of a deliberate political strategy, and they’re killing people.  From ICE deportations to health care cuts to rescinding environmental regulations to ignoring climate change, people will die because Republicans lie. 

Once upon a time, the press cheered Hugo Black’s opinion.  Here’s more of it.  “In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.”

But freedom of the press is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition.  Back in the early 70s, a free and unrestrained press was instrumental in helping to end the war in Vietnam and send Watergate criminals to prison (well, all but one of them).  In 2018, a new generation of journalists is faced with a comparable challenge.  I hope they’re up to it.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-gop-and-big-lie-politics

GOTTA MAKE HIM A HAND, WHEN YOU'RE WORKIN' FOR THE MAN

GOTTA MAKE HIM A HAND, WHEN YOU’RE WORKIN’ FOR THE MAN:  The last man standing from this iconic photo is standing no more.  Rob Porter (circled and arrowed, one of Jared Kushner’s main allies and a favorite of John Kelly), resigned as White House Staff Secretary today after reports surfaced that he physically abused two of his ex-wives.  The other members of America’s Least Wanted are Seb Gorka (wanted in Hungary on weapons charges), Omarosa (fired when nobody could figure out what her job was supposed to be), the foul-mouthed Anthony Scaramucci (who lasted ten days as Sean Spicer’s replacement), and parade marshal Cory Lewandowski.  Lewandowski is styling in his one-button-low, but he’s giving mixed signals about the direction he wants his troops to take.  Maybe it’s a “you take the high road and I’ll take the low road” thing.

Trump fired Lewandowski as campaign manager in June, 2016, and replaced him with Paul Manafort, who is under indictment for twelve charges of money laundering and conspiracy, confirming Donald Trump’s boast that he only hired “top, top people,” “only the best and most serious people.”

ALL THE TIME THEY WERE PLAYING, THE QUEEN NEVER LEFT OFF QUARRELLING WITH THE OTHER PLAYERS

ALL THE TIME THEY WERE PLAYING THE QUEEN NEVER LEFT OFF QUARRELLING WITH THE OTHER PLAYERS:  Donald Trump projects like mad.  When he attacks and insults his political enemies, he invariably accuses them of his own sins, of which he has an inexhaustible supply.

And now, as Robert Mueller closes in on the Trump crime family, the godfather escalates his rhetoric.  At one of his never-ending string of campaign rallies yesterday, Trump used the word “treason” to describe congressional Democrats.  How did these vile traitors betray their country?  By refusing to applaud his State of the Union speech, like a bunch of Benedict Arnolds.  Off with their heads!

Oh, and guess who else is in legal trouble.  Robert Mueller, that’s who.  NBC reports that Trump has told his friends that he wants Jeff Sessions to prosecute Mueller.  Not just fire him, not just disband his investigation, but try to put him in jail.  NBC was uncertain as to what charges Sessions might bring against the Special Counsel.  Perhaps he failed to applaud the State of the Union message.   Off with his head!

There are those who believe that this is a grand strategy on Trump’s part.  He knows what he’s doing, they argue, and could behave differently if he chose.  I disagree.  He’s always been a narcissist, and now his cognitive capacity is diminished.  He’s become a 71 year old child, a mean little kid who wants what he wants, and wants it now.

The people who know better are Trump's enablers in the Grand Oligarch Party.  I used to wonder how long Republicans would put up with Donald Trump.  Now I know:  as long as they can get away with it.

 

WHERE HAMBURGERS SIZZLE ON AN OPEN GRILL NIGHT AND DAY

And speaking of eyes and prizes, treason-weasel Devin Nunes is now claiming that Donald Trump never met George Papadopoulos, the man whose loose lips in London in June, 2016, provided the impetus for the FBI’s investigation, FISA warrants, and the revelation of all the other high crimes and misdemeanors Trump committed earlier and later.  Alas for Nunes, there’s photographic evidence that he’s a liar.   Papadopoulos is the young guy, in the middle, on the far side of the table, staring intently at Jeff Sessions.  You will recognize the guy at the far end of the table as one Donald Trump.  The same Donald Trump who called Papadopoulos “a great guy” and named him to his foreign policy team.

Rack up another nothing burger for Devin Nunes.  Try harder next time, Devin.

WHAT MAD PURSUIT? WHAT STRUGGLE TO ESCAPE?

WHAT MAD PURSUIT? WHAT STRUGGLE TO ESCAPE?   Despite the best efforts of the Republican echo chamber, the most common descriptions I’ve heard of the Devin Nunes memo have been “nothing-burger” and “dud.”  True Believers gonna true-believe, but I’m not aware of a single non-partisan source that has found “The Memo” persuasive.  Of course, I get most of my news from the Deep State Ministry of Agitprop.  They report, I decide.

Face it, Deplorables.  When even Trey Gowdy, the Lion of Benghazi, says there’s nothing in The Memo that reflects badly on Robert Mueller’s investigation, it’s a pretty clear indication that Nunes was trying to cover up the truth rather than to reveal it.

I agree with Matt Yglesias of Vox Media, who tweeted Sunday that: “The FBI kept an open counterintelligence probe of the GOP nominee secret at McConnell’s behest while the Director twice violated DOJ guidelines to hit Clinton’s campaign. Everyone saw that happen and the people pretending to believe otherwise don’t deserve the time of day. You can mount a plausible defense of each of the Bureau’s choices in isolation. You can mount a less plausible defense of the consistency between them. But there’s no plane of reality in which they were out to stop Trump. If they had been, he’d have been stopped!”

Republicans have obviously never read John Keats’ poem, “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”  If they had, they might have understood that as long as it remained secret, The Nunes Memo had a certain mystical aura which gave it some potency.  Keats was right: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.”  But Republicans are tone deaf.  They have no use for melody.  They only listen to the voices in their own heads. 

Trump even used The Memo to declare himself totally vindicated, and labeled the Special Counsel’s investigation “an American disgrace!”  Some reasonable people believe that Trump will use The Memo as an excuse to gut the Justice Department, fire Mueller, and disband the investigation.  Bill Kristol, a #NeverTrump Republican, tweeted his version of the worst-case scenario on Saturday:

“Trump endgame: Refuses to testify and takes 5th; fires Rosenstein and/or Sessions and/or Mueller if useful for delay or impeding investigation; pardons key players; avoids or survives impeachment because it seems partisan and there’s no (he hopes) smoking gun. Clinton/OJ model.”

Any of those things would be bad, but survivable.  The real worst-case scenario would be that Republicans kept their majorities in the House and Senate in the 2018 elections.  The good news is that right now, Republicans aren’t acting like they expect that to happen.  Instead, 35 incumbent House Republicans and 2 incumbent Senate Republicans have announced their retirements.  By way of comparison, only 16 Democrats in the House and zero in the Senate are retiring (data for both parties current as of February 5). 

Some retirements at the end of each term are to be expected, but Republican retirements this year have already exceeded Watergate-era levels.  Historically, when there’s a big spike in majority party incumbents opting for retirement, it means that a shift in the balance of power is coming.  

Still, it won’t do for the good guys to get overconfident.  Remember that Republicans don’t play fair.  Gerrymandering has given them a structural advantage, and vote suppression in key states will do the same.  We can also assume that Vladimir Putin will do whatever he can get away with to help his pal Donald in 2018, just as he did so successfully in 2016. 

As if that weren’t enough, there are reports that one of Trump’s advisors (Matthew Pottinger, National Security Council senior director for Asian affairs) said privately last week that a “limited” war with North Korea “might help in the midterm elections.”  It’s always helpful to have subordinates who think proactively.

Now comes my usual exhortation.  Whether Trump fires everyone or no one, whether he pardons everyone or no one – the key to saving American democracy is to win back (at a minimum) the House of Representatives in 2018.  The election is on November 6.  We can rest when the polls close.  Until then, let’s keep our eyes on the prize.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE JUNGLE

The natives are restless.  The jungle drums are beating.  Pundits sense that something big is about to happen, but they’re not sure what.  In other words, it’s another Friday in Trumpworld.  

Donald Trump himself continues to build his fantasy world, one in which Senator Orrin Hatch told him that he was the greatest president in the history of this country, and in which his State of the Union address got the best TV ratings ever.  Neither of those claims are true, but that doesn’t matter to Donald Trump, for whom reality is whatever suits him in the moment.

If I had to bet, I’d wager that Trump is about to release some version of the bogus Devin Nunes memo, even though rational people understand that it’s both dishonest (because it cherry-picks information that suits its false conclusion) and dangerous (because according to the intelligence community, it will reveal sources and methods that will no longer be viable in the future).  Word on the street is that the release of the memo will be the beginning of an effort to “cleanse” the FBI and the Justice Department (whose leaders are all Republicans, appointed by Donald Trump).  If that happens, it will be interesting to see how the intelligence community responds.

The American intelligence community is not without friends.  Most of what it knows about the connection between Russia and the Trump family is also known to the intelligence services of our allies, none of whom are fond of Donald Trump.  The truth will come out, whether via Robert Mueller, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, or leaks from foreign governments.   

People with lots of dirty secrets – like for instance, Donald Trump – would be smart not to provoke people who know many of those secrets.  On the other hand, nobody ever said Donald Trump was smart.  Well, except for Mr. Very Stable Genius himself.

It appears that the game is afoot. 

THEY'LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE, SAID HE

Terry Rex Duling responded to my Friday afternoon post by asking what would happen if Trump simply fired Mueller, disbanded the investigation, and pardoned everyone he cared about.  “Would we,” he asks, “be able to successfully handle what happens next without the wheels truly coming off?”

I think there’s at least a fifty-fifty chance that Terry’s scenario will happen.  A variety of things could happen next, including the wheels falling off.  But that isn't inevitable. 

First, Trump’s timing is crucial. The longer he waits, the better.  Not long ago, I was impatient for Robert Mueller to finish his work.  Now, I’m happy that things will come to a head closer to the 2018 midterms.  The fresher the scandal is, the more likely it will be to help Democrats take back the House and Senate.

Second, I hope that Trump (like Nixon before him) discovers that it’s not as easy as he imagines to find someone willing to go down in history as the person who fired Mueller and disbanded the Special Counsel’s team.  The more principled people there are, the worse Trump will look.  At this point, it appears that Trump’s immediate target is Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (appointed by Trump himself), whose replacement would then supposedly fire Mueller.  The more people Trump has to fire, the better.

The third crucial factor would be who Trump decides to pardon.  I wonder what legal advice he’ll be getting.  I have the sense that Don McGahn is already heading for the exit.  If Ty Cobb and John Dowd have any sense, they’ll quit before they’d allow their names to be forever tied to such a world-historic political scandal.  Michael Cohen is Trump’s fixer, a guy who helps Trump settle business lawsuits and divorces.  He’d be in way over his head on matters of constitutional law.  I’m sure Trump will find someone with a law degree to give him the advice he wants to hear.  I hope it’s one of those fake Fox News “experts.”

If and when Trump decides to issue pardons, he’ll have a choice to make.  He could pardon everyone even remotely connected to the scandal, but that would mean pardoning dozens of people, and the sheer numbers might be embarrassing.  But this is Trump, who has no conscience, so a mass pardon is still in play.  Or he could pardon a much smaller group of people he actually cares about (primarily his family and himself), and let everyone else – especially those he suspects of betraying him – twist slowly in the wind.  His instinct would probably be to save his family and screw the traitors. 

For a pardon to be valid, it must be accepted, and accepting a pardon is understood to amount to a confession of guilt.  That wouldn’t bother Trump’s hard-core Kool Aid drinkers, who will hang in there with him through porn stars and election rigging.  Richard Nixon, after all, still had a 24% approval rating on the day he resigned in disgrace.  But Trump – and congressional Republicans who support him – would pay a heavy price with independents and swing voters.

And that leads us to the last big question in this hypothetical scenario, which is whether any significant number of congressional Republicans would turn on Trump if he fired Mueller and began issuing pardons.  Right now, there are 238 Republicans and 193 Democrats (with 4 seats vacant) in the House of Representatives.  Are there 23 Republican House members who’d turn against Trump and join Democrats in voting articles of impeachment?  I wouldn’t bet money on that outcome, but it’s not impossible.  That would be the best-case answer to Terry’s question – a bipartisan impeachment in the House.

More likely, in my view, is that all but a handful of Republicans would stay loyal to Trump, which in my view would cost them control of the House in November.  The new Democratic majority would be sworn in next January, and one of their first orders of business would be impeachment.  If the Senate is also in Democratic hands, I’d bet on a deal between Trump and Pence – resignation in return for a full pardon (just in case the courts decided that a self-pardon wasn’t kosher). 

A Trump-Pence deal could happen even if Republicans narrowly hold onto the Senate, because there are a handful of mavericky Republican senators who just might be willing to join Democrats in voting to convict Trump if the House sent a bill of impeachment their way in 2019.

Finally, just because Trump has the power to pardon federal crimes doesn’t mean that he and his co-conspirators would be home free.  The Trump and Kushner financial empires are located in New York, where NY AG Eric Schneiderman is waiting for them.  There’s a good article in American Progress (link below) that features this quote: “A close look at the record suggests that The Trump Organization arguably behaved a great deal like the organized crime syndicates, which have been targeted as criminal conspiracies in the past.”

I lived through Watergate, and there were many times I thought Nixon would get away with it.  It took a while, but the posse finally caught up with him and rode him out of town on a rail.  I believe that the same dynamic will play out with Donald Trump, who isn’t nearly as smart as Nixon was. 

In the meantime, what we can do is remember the (paraphrased) words of Joe Hill:  don’t mourn – organize.  Our most important job is to make sure that Democrats take back the House in the November elections.              

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/security/reports/2017/12/07/443833/donald-trump-criminal-conspiracy-law/

THE NOOSE AROUND US IS SLOWLY TIGHTENING

Last June, I was worried that Donald Trump was about to fire Robert Mueller.  Actually, I worry about that fairly frequently.  When I’m worried enough to write about it, I sometimes wonder if I’m straying into “the little boy who cried wolf” territory.  But the failing New York Times reported yesterday that there was reason to be concerned last summer.

Obviously, Trump didn’t fire Mueller in June, but according to the Times’ story, it wasn’t for lack of trying.  He ordered one of his attorneys, Don McGahn, to do the deed.  To his credit, McGahn refused, and threatened to resign.  In other words, Trump tried to obstruct justice, and failed.  When one of his underlings stood up to him, he backed down.  Among other things, this story makes him look weak, and he must be furious that it has come out. 

While it’s good to have my earlier suspicions confirmed, the Times story raises a couple of new questions.  I wonder who decided that this was a good time to leak this information to the press, and why now.  The most logical “who” is McGahn himself.  As to why now, a couple of possibilities come to mind, which are not mutually exclusive.  Perhaps Trump is again threatening privately to fire Mueller, and his attorneys want to scuttle the plan to keep him from committing blatant obstruction of justice. 

But it’s also possible that McGahn knows the jig is up, and has decided to engage in an off the record PR campaign to save his own reputation.

It's worth noting that McGahn hired his own lawyer last fall, former federal prosecutor William Burck.  Not coincidentally, Burck also represents former White House bigwigs Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, and Steve Bannon.  That’s a little unusual, because if any of Burck’s clients contradict each other in response to questions from Mueller’s team, it would be awkward for Burck, to say the least.  Therefore, my guess is that all of Burck’s clients are cooperating with Mueller.  If true, this is bad news for Donald Trump. 

Part of proving the charge of obstruction of justice is establishing intent.  McGahn, Priebus, Spicer, and Bannon were all around at times when Trump was venting.  They could shoot down any claims that his motive for firing James Comey, for instance, was motivated purely by concern for FBI morale.

Trump himself has vacillated about whether he’d agree to be interviewed by Mueller’s team, although his most recent comment was that he’d be willing do it.  Trump’s attorneys (McGahn, plus Ty Cobb and John Dowd) must sweat bullets at the thought of Donald Trump being interrogated by the Special Counsel’s investigators.  Press reports suggest that Mueller has given Trump’s lawyers a list of topics they want to ask about.  But even if Team Trump knew not only the topics, but the exact questions; and even if they had a month to coach their client about what (and what not) to say, Trump would blow it. 

He is incapable of sticking to his script for longer than a minute or two.  Sooner rather than later, he’d begin to wing it.  He’d start making stuff up, and contradicting himself.  He can’t help himself, really.  Liars gonna lie.  The last thing the White House legal team needs is perjury charges on top of everything else.  I’d be surprised if Donald Trump voluntarily submitted to an interview with Mueller’s team, unless one of his lawyers was glued to his side.

Two other recent pieces of news on the Trump-Russia conspiracy front are worth noting.  We learned earlier this week that Rick Gates, Paul Manafort’s lieutenant, has hired a new lawyer.  Word on the street is that this means he’s flipped, and is negotiating a deal with Robert Mueller.  If that’s true, Manafort is toast.  He was probably toast anyway, but if Gates testifies against him, he’s looking at the prospect of dying in prison unless he cooperates with Mueller.  Or, it must be said, unless he’s pardoned by Donald Trump.  But even then, he’d still have to answer to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.  It’s not a good time to be Paul Manafort.

And finally (for the moment), it turns out that in 2014, the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service penetrated a Russian cyber warfare operation known as Cozy Bear, which – along with a similar group known as Fancy Bear – was responsible for hacking the DNC servers in 2016.  The Dutch not only made themselves at home in Cozy Bear’s servers, but they even hacked a security camera at the entrance of Cozy Bear headquarters near Red Square.  Of course, Robert Mueller has access to the Dutch findings.  If any members of the Trump campaign or the Republican National Committee (including their contractors) were in communication with Cozy Bear, Mueller knows about it.

While much of this information was new to the American public, it’s all stuff that Robert Mueller has known for a long time.  When Mueller and his team interview White House staff, for instance, they already know the answer to the questions they’re asking, via friendly witnesses, wiretaps, or other electronic eavesdropping.  If Trump’s people lie, as some of them have been dumb enough to do, Mueller can charge them with perjury, giving him additional leverage.

While increasingly desperate congressional Republicans spin bogus conspiracy theories in an attempt to discredit him, Mueller and his team have been quietly putting the pieces of the puzzle together.  In classic fashion, they’ve built cases against relatively minor players, persuading several of them to flip.  Then they’ve used the new information to tighten the noose around the Trump family kingpins. 

People close to Trump are finally figuring out that Mueller holds all the cards. The rats are deserting the sinking ship.  Or maybe the ship is deserting the sinking rat.

KEEPIN' ALL MY SECRETS SAFE TONIGHT

#ReleaseTheMemo - that's the latest Russian twitter bot campaign.  It seems that Republican treason-weasel Devin Nunes has written a top-secret memo.  His fellow Republicans claim that the memo exposes the existence of a Deep State plot, a “secret society” in the FBI which conspired to rig the 2016 presidential election by using the now-famous Steele Dossier to sabotage the Trump campaign.

There’s one teensy problem with this theory – the inconvenient truth that no Democrat, not even arch-villains Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, used the information in the Steele Dossier during the campaign, when it might have made a difference.  That’s quite a conspiracy - collect damaging information on your opponent and then don't use it!  How fiendishly clever!

Of course, the FBI did intervene in the election, in the form of James Comey’s bizarre last-minute insinuations about Hillary Clinton’s email issues, which may well have been the key to Donald Trump’s narrow Electoral College victory.  If the Deep State was trying to help Hillary, they screwed up royally. 

I’m on record as loving a good conspiracy theory, but this one just doesn’t pass muster.  It could work with a little tweaking, though.  What if the Deep State decided that the best way to ruin Donald Trump was to make him president?  Maybe the Deep State Strategic Planning Committee said, “Let’s put this minor league grifter in the spotlight and watch him commit impeachable offenses out of sheer stupidity.  And while we’re at it, let’s show America how corrupt and incompetent the Republican Party really is.  Let’s give them control of the government and watch them trip over their own feet.  We'll expose Evangelicals as such big hypocrites that they’ll never be able to criticize the personal character of a Democratic candidate again.  This’ll be the last election Republicans will ever win!”

As conspiracy theories go, that one’s actually not bad, if I do say so myself.  Feel free to share this new rumor with your Deplorable acquaintances.

The other peculiar thing about Nunes’ memo is that Republicans are simultaneously demanding its release, and refusing to release it.  Since they wrote it, they could release it anytime they wanted.  Donald Trump could declassify it.  The House Intelligence Committee could declassify it.  Any member of Congress could legally read the four-page memo out loud on the floor of the House or Senate.  Or they could make it public the old-fashioned way, by leaking it to the press.  As of this writing, they haven’t done any of those things.   

Instead, they speak darkly of scandal and treason without providing a scintilla of evidence for any of their claims.  That being the case, the prudent assumption is that the Nunes Memo is bullshit.  It’s just Nunes doing what he always does, running interference for Donald Trump.

In short term, that may be a good sign, since it means Trump and his Republican enablers know they’re in trouble, and that, for the time being at least, they’ve decided that it’s too risky to fire Robert Mueller.  Instead, they’re spinning conspiracy theories in a preemptive effort to discredit Mueller, the FBI, the press, and everyone else who’s trying to learn the truth about what went on during the 2016 presidential campaign.  Whatever Mueller and others reveal about Trump and his crime gang, they’ll call it a Deep State conspiracy, and claim that it’s the investigators who should be investigated.  They’re already calling their political opponents traitors and threatening to lock them up. 

Remarkably, the Republican Party is doing its best to undermine the legitimacy of the very government it now controls.  They’re trying to dismantle democracy one piece at a time, and it’s not impossible that they’ll get away with it.   The longer Republicans remain in power, the more damage they’ll do. 

I know I sound like a broken record here, but the stakes in the 2018 congressional elections couldn’t be higher.  We have to register, vote, contribute, campaign – maybe even form a secret society or two.  Do whatever it takes to make America great again. 

PUT THE WEIGHT RIGHT ON ME

PUT THE WEIGHT RIGHT ON ME:  It’s been a week since I last posted.  In the past seven days, my wife was in an automobile accident (rear-ended by a hit and run driver; she’s OK, but our insurance company is still debating whether her car is worth repairing) and our dog died (he was 14 and failing, but we miss him a lot).   I apologize for being AWOL while so much is happening.  I’ll use this post to catch up on some political news.

I love a good conspiracy theory.  They’re usually more interesting than the boring facts.  It’s no surprise, then, that I’ve become a “Girther.” I am absolutely convinced that there’s something fishy about Donald Trump’s medical exam, which lists his height as 6’3” and his weight at 239 lbs.  Tim Tebow, who played both professional football and professional baseball, is also 6’3” and weighs 236 lbs.  If they’re the same height, or even if Trump is an inch or two shorter than he claims, Trump sure looks more than three pounds heavier than Tebow. 

At that same physical exam, Trump reportedly also aced the Montreal Cognitive Assessment.  Good for him, but the MCA is a pretty low bar – check it out at the link below.  If you have trouble with those questions, you’re ready for an assisted living facility. 

BRING BACK THAT SUNNY DAY:  Donald Trump’s porn star paramour has confirmed the Wall Street Journal’s story that she was paid $130,000 in hush money right before the election.  Trump’s lawyer set up a shell company in Delaware to buy Stormy Daniels’ silence.  The most important question remaining is where that money came from.  The least likely option seems to be that Trump paid out of his own pocket.  He never spends his own money if other sources of income are available.  And even though this is a minor peccadillo compared to conspiring with Russia to steal the election, I hope Robert Mueller’s team investigates the bribe to determine whether Russian money was involved.   Another possibility is that he used campaign donations, which might also land him in legal trouble. 

YOU KNEW DAMN WELL I WAS A SNAKE BEFORE YOU TOOK ME IN:  I’m enjoying one piece of the fallout from the whole sordid Stormy Daniels affair.  By continuing to support Trump, Evangelical Christians forfeit any claim to the moral high ground, including their right to criticize Bill Clinton for his liaison with Monica Lewinski.  People like Franklin Graham, James Dobson, Robert Jeffress, and Jerry Falwell Jr. stand exposed as godless hypocrites.  Jesus (Matthew 23:33) referred to hypocritical religious leaders as a “generation of vipers.”

CAN’T DO SIXTY NO MORE:  Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are trying their best to blame Democrats for their failure to fund the federal government.  Trump has repeatedly tweeted complaints that it takes 60 votes in the Senate to pass a budget.  But the Constitution requires only a simple majority.  The 60 vote requirement is just a Senate custom.  It has been waived in the past (the so-called “nuclear option”), and it could be waived again.    

BUDDY GONNA SHUT YOU DOWN:  The truth is that Donald Trump and the Republican Party are responsible for this shutdown.  Democrats like government, and want it to work.  Republicans, going back to the Newt Gingrich era, are the ones who thump their chests and brag about wanting to blow up the bureaucracy.  Their attempts to shift the blame show that they know this shutdown is going to be unpopular.  Unfortunately for them, everyone knows that Republicans control the Senate, the House, and the presidency.  If they can’t come up with a budget, the weight of that failure should land squarely on them.   

http://dementia.ie/images/uploads/site-images/MoCA-Test-English_7_1.pdf

TAKE IT OFF, TAKE IT OFF, CRIES A VOICE FROM THE REAR

It’s been a quiet week in America, where all the men are strong, all the women are good looking, and all the presidents are very stable geniuses.  The week began with FIRE AND FURY and ended with talk of shitholes and porn stars. 

I don’t have much to add to the chorus of opprobrium that greeted Donald Trump’s shameful “shithole countries” comment.  Just as the problem with “grab ‘em by the pussy” was “grab,” not “pussy,” I hope everyone is clear that the problem with calling Haiti, Africa, and El Salvador “shithole countries” isn’t the word “shithole.”  The language Trump used to make his racist point is irrelevant.  The problem is the racism itself.  Trump is a racist.  His defenders are racists.  His party is racist.  This is known. 

As usual, Republicans in Congress don’t care.  Most of them will remain silent, while a few of the ones who fancy themselves as bold mavericks will tut-tut before letting the moment pass.  But it’s possible that this particular bit of racism, though it is of a piece with many other things Trump has said on the campaign trail and as president, could have some serious consequences in spite of the apathy of congressional Republicans.  Here is some interesting demographic information. 

·        The Republican road to the presidency goes through Florida, which (according to Florida Republican media strategist Rick Wilson) is one of a handful of states that Republicans MUST win in order to keep the White House in 2020.

·        There are approximately 300,000 Haitians living in Florida.  Campaigning in 2016, Trump promised to be their champion.  Now he’s calling Haiti a shithole country and trying to keep Haitians out of the country.  Not all of those 300,000 Haitians are eligible voters, but my guess is that those who are will vote Democratic in 2018 and 2020.

·        Similarly, there are over a million Puerto Ricans living in Florida.  At least 200,000 of them have arrived since Hurricane Maria devastated the island last fall.  Puerto Ricans are American citizens, and can vote in Florida if they register there.  My guess is that many of them will, and that they’ll remember Trump’s sadistic treatment of Puerto Rico when the 2018 and 2020 elections roll around. 

·        There are fewer people from El Salvador in Florida – c. 55,000, mostly in the Miami/Ft. Lauderdale area – but they too are unlikely to look kindly upon Republicans in light of Trump’s shithole remark.

·        Remember that Donald Trump won Florida by only 120,770 votes.  Republicans don’t have much margin for error, and they’ve been making a lot of errors.   

In other news, on Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Donald Trump paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 in October, 2016, to keep quiet about an affair (or maybe a one-night stand) in 2006.  Trump, of course, denies that any such thing happened.  On the other hand, Michael Wolff, in his FIRE AND FURY book, quotes Steve Bannon as saying that Trump’s personal lawyer had paid off “a hundred women.” 

Since Donald Trump lies about everything, I’ll take his denial as confirmation of the truth of the story. That’s what happens if you lie all the time.  All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall.

While we wait for next week’s adventures, here’s an article about the origin of the word “shithole.”    

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/01/great-moments-in-shithole-literature/550472/

BACK IN THE USSR, DON'T KNOW HOW LUCKY YOU ARE

On Saturday, I wrote that there were sinister connections between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. In a comment, Dennis replied, “sinister to whom,” arguing that Putin is a basically a Christian populist who became a mob boss only because that’s what you have to do to be a leader in Russia. As I understand his argument, he’s suggesting that if Putin interfered in our election, it was on behalf of international populism.

That leaves open the question of whether Putin thought Donald Trump would bring populism to the United States, or whether he inflicted Trump on America to destroy us, thereby advancing populism elsewhere in the world. Either way, such a defense of Russian interference in our election on behalf of populism begs the question of whether populism is a good thing.

Here’s what I think.

As to Vladimir Putin, I’ve seen no evidence that he cares about the teachings of Jesus, although I don’t doubt that he’s willing to use the Russian Orthodox Church as a fig leaf to fool the gullible, much in the same way Trump uses American Evangelicals. What is not in dispute is that Putin rose to power through the ranks of the KGB, which rewards ruthlessness, not faith, hope, and charity. In the KGB, nice guys don’t finish last – they finish dead.

Appearances can be deceiving, but Putin looks to me like nothing more than a modern Joseph Stalin. His two primary interests seem to be enriching himself at home while doing his best to help Mother Russia screw over its traditional enemies, including us. From Putin’s perspective, helping elect Donald Trump made perfect strategic sense. The whole world, allies and enemies alike, are laughing at us now. That’s good for Russia (and China).

Is Donald Trump a populist? In the aftermath of his victory, mainstream media flirted with that narrative. They published way too many think pieces arguing that Trump supporters constituted “the real America.” Clinton voters were presumably less real, even though there were three million more of us.

But once Trump was sworn in and actually begin implementing policies, the talk of populism began to fade. He campaigned on “draining the swamp,” but instead filled his Cabinet with generals and Goldman-Sachs tycoons. His so-called tax reform will enrich him and his fellow plutocrats, at the expense of most the voters who trusted him. Sooner or later, they’ll figure out that Trump isn’t going to bring back King Cotton, King Coal, King Blacksmithing, or any of the other legacy industries that were once engines of American prosperity.

The only way you can honestly describe Trump as a populist is by assuming that populism is essentially nothing more than white nationalism. Trump’s “populist” base is comprised of people like the Nazis and Klansmen who rallied in Charlottesville, and the know-nothings in Alabama who supported child molester Roy Moore. All of them are white, and they skew older and less educated. The one thing they have in common is a fear of the future.

Older folks, and particularly less educated older folks, often mourn the passing of the old days and the old ways. I’m 70 myself. I can relate. But let’s not kid ourselves. Thanks to cable TV, iTunes, satellite radio, and streaming services, I could, if I chose, marinate myself in TV shows and music from the Eisenhower era. But once I step outside, it’s still going to be 2018. Until it’s 2019. The arrow of time moves in only one direction.

Trump-style populism is based on an US vs. THEM world view. If you’re an American citizen with European ancestors and a Judeo-Christian faith, you’re a member of US. Racial, ethnic, and religious minorities are THEM, and that’s true even if some of THEM happen to have been born in the good old USA. As far as Trump’s populists are concerned, Latin America and the Middle East can keep their damned poor, their huddled masses yearning to breathe free. We’re in the process of shipping the wretched refuse of their teeming shore back where they came from. Unless they die in custody first.

American democracy, on the other hand, promises liberty and justice for all. Of course, liberty and justice for all has always been more of an aspiration than a statement of accomplishment. Sometimes we take one step forward and two steps back. If we’re lucky, Donald Trump, the very stable genius with a bigger button, will take us only two steps back.

Meanwhile, I’ll take a pass on populism. Like communism, fascism, and all those other 19th and 20th century isms, it strikes me as a solution for the past, not the future. There is, however, at least one piece of ancient advice I’m trying to follow: love they neighbor as thyself.

I suspect that concept is incomprehensible to populists.

 

 

IN ALL THE TIME I'VE KNOWN YOU I STILL DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN

IN ALL THE TIME I’VE KNOWN YOU I STILL DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN:  If, as Karl Marx famously suggested, history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, we’ll die laughing at the next Donald Trump. 

Let’s say, hypothetically, that everyone around you – your colleagues, your friends, even your family – thinks you’re an idiot.  Is there a more effective way to prove them right than issuing a tweet in which you insist that you’re “a very stable genius”?  

I can’t think of one.  Even coming right out and admitting that you’re not the sharpest tool in the shed would be smarter. 

A number of commentators have compared that tweet to what Fredo Corleone said to Michael Corleone in GODFATHER II: “I can handle things. I’m smart! Not like everybody says, like dumb. I’m smart and I want respect!”

As David Frum (link below) points out, the Corleone family was smart enough to keep Fredo on the sidelines, away from a leadership position.  American voters?  Not so much.

I can’t come up with a better conclusion that Frum’s so I’ll close by quoting him:

“Who and what Donald Trump is has been known to everyone and anyone who cared to know for years and decades. Before he was president, he was the country’s leading racist conspiracy theorist. Before he was the country’s leading racist conspiracy theorist, he was a celebrity gameshow host. Before he was a celebrity gameshow host, he was the multi-bankrupt least trusted name in real estate. Before he was the multi-bankrupt least trusted name in real estate, he was the protege of Roy Cohn’s repeatedly accused of ties to organized crime. From the start, Donald Trump was a man of many secrets, but no mysteries. Inscribed indelibly on the public record were the reasons for responsible people to do everything in their power to bar him from the presidency.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/donald-trump-goes-full-fredo/549875/

BOUND TO BE THE VERY NEXT PHASE

2500 years ago, Sun Tzu, in THE ART OF WAR, wrote “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”  So I keep plugging away, trying to understand Donald Trump and the Republican Party. 

Understanding Donald Trump has been the easier of the two tasks, and I won’t belabor points I’ve made in previous posts.  Michael Wolff’s instant best seller, FIRE AND FURY, confirms what we knew or suspected all along.  Trump wasn’t that bright to begin with; he knows (and cares) less about government than most American teenagers; he ignores moral and ethical boundaries; and he’s clearly suffering from serious cognitive impairment. 

When he won the election last November, Donald Trump had spent seven decades doing whatever he damned well pleased.  His father’s money and influence kept him out of Vietnam, financed his career, and when he went broke, financed a fresh start.  His money allowed him to ignore or buy off creditors, business partners, and ex-wives.  He hadn’t planned on winning the election, but he wasn’t going to let a little thing like being President of the United States change his lifestyle.  It was going to be business as usual, and screw any laws, regulations, or customs that stood in the way. 

It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s not hard to understand. 

Republican behavior, on the other hand, has confounded my expectations.  Between Trump’s election and his inauguration, I speculated that quite a few mainstream Republicans, especially those Trump insulted during the campaign (McCain, Cruz, and Rubio, for instance), would happily turn on him if he made a misstep.  Boy, was I wrong. 

Trump’s first year in office was nothing but missteps.  He is less popular than any other first year president in the history of opinion polls.  Elections in late 2017 appear to show that his endorsement, whether in a swing state like Virginia or in the reddest state of them all, Alabama, isn’t enough to guarantee that his handpicked candidate will win.   

And yet despite these signs of weakness, congressional Republicans have rallied behind the man that many of them ridiculed in private.  Senators like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, who were mavericky in the summer and fall, turned out to be merely summer soldiers and sunshine patriots.  They, like gadflies Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, and Lindsey Graham, all knelt before the throne as autumn gave way to winter. 

Jim Wright, in his Stonekettle Station blog (link below), theorizes that national Republicans know that the they’re going to lose control of Congress in next year’s elections, and they’ve decided to give themselves golden parachutes to soften the blow.  That makes sense as far as it goes.  It explains the unanimous Republican support for the abominable tax bill.  They don’t expect to be around when the chickens come home to roost.

But it doesn’t explain why Republicans are doing their best to abort investigations into the Russian sabotage of the 2016 election, or why they’re so desperate to undermine the FBI, or why they can’t let go of their dream of prosecuting Hillary Clinton.  The more obvious it becomes that there are sinister connections between Trump and Vladimir Putin, the harder Republicans work to prevent the truth from being revealed.  As Yul Brynner sang in THE KING AND I, “Is a puzzlement.”

One obvious possibility is that there are a fair number of congressional Republicans who got their hands dirty during the campaign, either as members of the Trump transition team (for instance, Devin Nunes and Trey Gowdy), or simply as recipients of campaign contributions from Russian sources.  It is an inconvenient truth that taking cash or accepting assistance from foreign sources are against the law.  And indeed, THE HILL reports that Robert Mueller has questioned members of the Republican National Committee about using data from Russian hacks in their digital campaign last fall.    

I hope Wright’s theory is correct.  What worries me is the possibility that congressional Republicans do not, in fact, expect to lose control of the House and Senate after the 2018 elections.  Maybe they have some tricks up their sleeve.  They have one built in advantage because many of the Senate seats being contested in November are already held by Democrats, so there won’t be as many opportunities to pick up new seats, even if they hold on to the ones they currently have.  That’s just the luck of the draw.

But Republicans will also benefit from gerrymandering in many states, dividing the Democratic vote in ways that guarantee a lot of safe Republican seats.  That give them a big head start in retaining control of the House of Representatives.  A few months ago, a polling group estimated that Democratic candidates could win 54% of the combined nation-wide votes for the House and still wind up with only 47% of the seats.

Republicans are also using a variety of techniques to suppress voter turnout among likely Democratic sympathizers (e.g. minorities and students). Between now and November you can bet that they’ll do their best to disenfranchise even more people. 

I suspect the recent Senate election in Alabama has suggested a new tactic – simply refusing to concede a loss in any close election.  Roy Moore didn’t have the credibility to pull it off, but my guess is that in November, less odious Republican candidates who lose by a narrow margin will claim fraud and refuse to accept the results.  And they could get some traction – at least in the court of public opinion, if not in an actual court of law.  And since Trump is rapidly appointing right wing mediocrities to the federal bench, it’s not inconceivable that the judiciary will soon be as corrupt as Congress.

Corruption, I think, is their real goal.  They’re trying to build an oligarchy that looks enough like our historic democracy that no one notices the change until it’s too late.  Republicans aren’t trying just to suppress votes.  They’re trying to suppress reality itself. 

That’s why they want to ignore the Russian election hack and use the FBI to persecute their political enemies.  It’s banana republic stuff.

Can they get away with it?  Absolutely – unless Democrats understand what’s going on and figure out effective ways to fight back.  They can start by rejecting the conventional wisdom that Democrats can only win by being more like Republicans. 

That’s a good way for Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  Harry Truman put it well in 1952: “If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article every time.”

The only way Democrats can win majorities in Congress is by doing what Ralph Northam did in Virginia and Doug Jones did in Alabama.  Use voters’ frustration with Trump and his Republican enablers to maximize turnout among registered Democrats and progressive independents. 

In 2018, Democrats need to be Democrats. 

 http://www.stonekettle.com/2017/12/lemonade.html

WHEN WORDS COLLUDE

Once again, I quote Winston Churchill:  “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”  

I don’t know how much longer Robert Mueller’s team will need to finish their work, assuming they’re allowed to do so.  But I agree with Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo (link below):  There is no longer any question that the Trump campaign worked with Russia in 2016 to defeat Hillary Clinton.  Even Steve Bannon says so.  

The shorthand term most often used to describe the relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia is collusion.  “Collusion” is an accurate description of what happened, but its use is also unfortunate, because it gives Republicans the opportunity to say that there’s no law against collusion.  They’re technically correct, but it’s a straw man argument. 

It’s illegal for presidential campaigns to accept assistance, either in the  form of money or services, from foreign governments.  It was illegal for Russia and its surrogate, WikiLeaks, to hack DNC email servers.  Money laundering (definitely including foreign campaign contributions) is illegal.  Failing to register as an agent of a foreign government when you’re taking their money and doing their work is illegal.  Lying to the FBI about your involvement in any of those crimes is itself a crime.  Conspiring with others to commit those crimes is also a crime. 

How can we be sure there’s no innocent explanation of all those Trump/Russia interactions?  First, because everyone involved took great pains to keep them secret.  Second, every time one of these crimes became public, Trump and his people lie about it.  Third, in some cases (e.g., Don Jr.’s meeting with Russian spies) Trump’s people collaborated on an attempted coverup.  (That particular coverup, the White House has admitted, was led by Donald Trump himself.)  And fourth, their “trump card” (pun definitely intended) has been obstruction of justice, which has include firing people who were investigating their crimes (e.g. U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and FBI Director James Comey) and trying to intimidate others (e.g. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller).

Trump supporters can play semantic games all they want, but they’re whistling past the graveyard.  Laws were broken, and indictments are coming.

Speaking of collusion, excerpts from Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire And Fury, have made quite a splash.  Wolff claims to have taped his interviews, but given his track record, it’s prudent to wonder whether his sources have been quoted verbatim or whether he’s created a docudrama with dialogue based on real interviews but massaged by Wolff for maximum impact. 

The excerpts I’ve read (the book itself comes out on January 9) don’t so much break new ground as add colorful details to a story that has been clear to most of us for several months.  That story includes:

·        Trump and his people didn’t expect to win.  Instead, their plan was to come close enough that Trump and could get a ton of mileage out of being the leader of a “Crooked Hillary” resistance movement.  

·        Some members of Trump’s entourage, and particularly Mike Flynn, Don Jr., and Jared Kushner, took foolish risks during the campaign on the theory that President Hillary Clinton would be inclined just to move on, and no one would look too closely at the losing campaign.

·        When they won, they had no idea what to do.  Trump simply kept on making campaign speeches, and various cronies moved into the power vacuum.  Dysfunction set in from the very beginning.

·        Trump, contrary to his reality show persona, lacks the skill and the motivation to run a business, much less a government.  He’s a brand, and what he enjoys is being famous – that, and having people kowtow to him.

·        Those closest to him have figured out that treating Trump like a child is the best way to manage his mood swings and cognitive decline.

·        Members of Trump’s inner circle hate each other.  “Rivalry” doesn’t begin to describe it.  As they jockeyed for power, they’d stab each other in the back in a heartbeat.  What’s more, Trump enjoys the spectacle. 

Steve Bannon, of course, was at the center of many of those rivalries, and it has been Bannon’s takes that have provided the headlines in the early coverage of Wolff’s book.  But even those comments are simply colorful statements of things that have been obvious for months.  For instance:

·        Don Jr. and Jared were incredibly stupid to have met with Russians during the campaign.

·        It’s hard to believe, given that the meeting took place in Trump Tower, that Don Jr. didn’t introduce his Russian guests to Trump himself after the meeting broke up.

·        This meeting was “treasonous.”

·        Trump is frightened of what Mueller will find when his team looks at Trump’s financial records in the run up to the campaign.  Spoiler alert:  what they’ll find is that Trump ran a Russian money laundering operation for years.

If you can’t wait until January 9, Wolff himself summarized his book in the Hollywood Reporter (second link below).  It’s worth a read.  I’ll use his conclusion to finish this post.

“Donald Trump's small staff of factotums, advisors and family began, on Jan. 20, 2017, an experience that none of them, by any right or logic, thought they would — or, in many cases, should — have, being part of a Trump presidency. Hoping for the best, with their personal futures as well as the country's future depending on it, my indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.”

“At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends.”

“Happy first anniversary of the Trump administration.”

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-end-of-the-beginning

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/michael-wolff-my-insane-year-inside-trumps-white-house-1071504

IN VINO VERITAS

It had not been clear to me why Donald Trump and his surrogate in Congress, Devin Nunes, were so obsessed with discrediting the Steele Dossier, so I was grateful for the recent New York Times article that helped me understand their strategy, and in the process also pulled the rug out from under this particular effort to derail efforts to learn the truth about what really happened in the 2016 presidential campaign.    

As we might have suspected, this was another instance of Republicans playing Calvinball, making up rules as they go along, in an effort to shut down the investigations into the Trump-Russia scandal.  In the case of the Steele Dossier, they ignored the only important question, which is whether the information in it is accurate.  Instead, they made an ad hominem argument – the Dossier must be bogus because it was funded by the Democratic National Committee. 

The Republican conspiracy theory goes like this.  The Steele Dossier was the thing that persuaded the FBI to launch the investigation into collaboration between Russia and the Trump campaign.  Since the Dossier was produced by Democrats, that makes the entire investigation a Democratic witch hunt.  Therefore, the investigation should focus on Democrats, especially Hillary Clinton, who surely orchestrated the whole plot.  With Republicans, everything comes back to Hillary Clinton eventually.  

There are a couple of major non-sequiturs in this theory, but its biggest flaw is that the premise upon which everything else follows is simply incorrect.  The Times article revealed that the Steele Dossier was NOT, in fact, the impetus for the FBI’s investigation.  Instead, it came from a land Down Under.

The truth is that one of Trump’s own campaign advisors triggered the investigation.  George Papadopoulos, foreign policy advisor to the man who would be king, was in London, schmoozing with various diplomats.  After several glasses of wine, he bragged to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer that Russia had offered the Trump campaign some dirt on Hillary Clinton, in the form of hacked emails. 

Downer grasped the import of what he was hearing, so naturally he shared the details of the conversation with Australian intelligence.  They, in turn, passed the information along to their counterparts in America when Wikileaks released the hacked DNC emails.  That’s when the FBI began its investigation.  No Steele Dossier involved, no Democrats, no Hillary Clinton, no deep state coup.  It was just another clown from Trump’s circus, running his mouth when he should have kept quiet.  Loose lips sink ships, as the saying goes.

The whole incident is yet further proof that Trump and his crew are incompetent – for which we should be grateful.  They’ve done serious damage in their first year in power, and they’ll certainly do more before we can get rid of them, but their arrogance and stupidity will eventually bring them down.  

Let’s pray that it happens in 2018.  Actually, let’s do more than pray.  We’re now in an election year.  Let’s do everything in our power to throw the rascals out and replace them with Democrats who will impeach Donald Trump’s sorry ass.

I'D JUST HIT TOWN AND MY THROAT WAS DRY

Back in 1969, Richard Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell said “Watch what we do, not what we say.”  His words took on an ironic connotation when he was convicted of perjury (as well as conspiracy and obstruction of justice) in the wake of the Watergate scandal. 

It probably wasn’t the point John Mitchell was trying to make, but it’s smart to assume that all Republicans are liars.  Except for Donald Trump.  Trump is certainly a liar, but he’s also ignorant and cognitively impaired, so with him, it’s harder to pinpoint the exact reason he says things that are untrue. 

If you haven’t read it, I urge you to take a look at Michael S. Schmidt’s interview with Donald Trump in the New York Times (first link below).  Schmidt has taken some flak for not challenging Trump on the facts, and I can sympathize in theory.  But Trump was in rare form, and interrupting him would have been like fact-checking Lewis Carroll because parts of Alice in Wonderland didn’t make sense. 

This is such a revelatory interview.  Trump is like a kid, obsessed with who likes him and who doesn’t.  He repeats words and phrases over and over, circling back to the Russian collusion issue over a dozen times.  He says things that are plain crazy – e.g. “Virtually every Democrat has said there is no collusion,” and “I know the details of taxes better than anybody.  Better than the greatest C.P.A.” 

The sheer volume of the crazy is surreal.  Today’s insanity can overwhelm the memory of yesterday’s weirdness.  But think back to early December, at the end of Trump’s announcement that he planned to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.  He began to struggle with his words, seeming to lose the rhythm of his breath, and working his mouth oddly.  At the very end, he was slurring his words.  Check out the second link below if you haven’t seen it.

Initial speculation ranged from a minor stroke to a denture malfunction (though it’s not certain that Trump wears dentures).  Other observers suggested that his symptoms are consistent with chronic stimulant abuse, noting Trump’s use of Tenuate Dospan in the 1980s. 

The next day, the White House claimed that the problem was caused by a dry mouth.  Trump had a similar moment on November 15 (third link below), so that explanation is at least plausible.  But it seems odd that dry mouth syndrome suddenly keeps popping up.  Trump may be a novice politician, but he’s a veteran public speaker.  You’d think he’d have learned to recognize the early signs of dry mouth and take discreet sips of water during his speech before the problem got bad enough to make him garble his words. 

Trump’s water breaks are anything but discreet (again, see the third link).  He grabs his water bottle with both hands.  It doesn’t look natural. 

In the article at the fourth link below, a neurologist looks at the evidence and concludes that Trump is suffering from a progressive neurocognitive disease.  He cites Trump’s speech patterns, which are “increasingly repetitive, fragmented, devoid of content, and restricted in vocabulary, [including] overuse of superlatives like tremendous, fantastic, and incredible [which] are filler words reflecting reduced verbal fluency.”  He also notes a decline in Trump’s ability to interpret how others will respond to his words (e.g. using “Pocahontas” as an insult when honoring the Navajo Code Talkers).  Add those symptoms to Trump’s lack of affect, his lack of inhibition, and his short attention span, and it’s hard to reach any conclusion other than cognitive decline. 

The theory that Trump is suffering from mental deterioration isn’t new, of course, but it was helpful for me to see the symptoms outlined systematically by an expert, rather than as a collection of observations by a lay person like me.  It’s also nice to see medical and psychology professionals speaking up when they recognize symptoms of a serious problem, rather than remaining silent in the face of evidence that everyone can plainly see.

So far, all our information about Trump’s health has come from his own camp.  He’s scheduled to have his first official presidential physical exam on January 12, and it will be interesting to see what the Navy doctor at Walter Reed has to say.  In fact, it will be interesting to see if Trump even goes through with the appointment. 

Donald Trump’s mental deterioration will be the biggest wild card of 2018.  Republican politicians can pretend not to notice, and MAGA fanatics may not know the difference, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious to everyone else.  Trump is on a collision course with reality, and I’m betting on reality to win.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/us/politics/trump-interview-excerpts.html

http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/06/health/did-trump-slur-his-speech-bn/index.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04XIy6Owk2M

https://www.statnews.com/2017/12/07/donald-trump-brain-specialist-disease/

THERE'S SOMETHING HAPPENING HERE, WHAT IT IS AIN'T EXACTLY CLEAR

The jungle drums have been beating for a while now, and the natives are clearly restless.  Beginning a couple of weeks ago, congressional Republicans and Fox News launched a series of specious attacks on Robert Mueller’s credibility, which quickly escalated to encompass Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as well as the entire FBI.  Yesterday, Senator Mark Warner delivered a blistering speech on the floor of the Senate, accusing Republicans of trying to shut down Robert Mueller’s investigation.    

Speaking of shutting things down, in a perhaps unrelated development, the federal government will have to shut down at midnight on Friday unless Congress passes a budget or (more likely) another continuing resolution to fund operations until after the holiday recess.

The rest of this post is just a compilation of seemingly outlandish rumors, so take them with as many grains of salt as you like.  Empty your salt shaker.  In better times than these, I’d say they were crazy.  But in Year One of the glorious reign of God-Emperor Trump, first of his name, they’re at least plausible.  I hope they don’t turn out to be true, and I’m even hesitant to post them, though obviously I’ve overcome that hesitation.  With those caveats, here goes. 

Citizen journalists say that the Beltway is abuzz with rumors that Donald Trump has already issued secret pardons to people targeted by Mueller’s investigations.  They say there’s no law that requires presidential pardons to be public.

They also report a rumor that Trump plans to fire Robert Mueller late Friday afternoon.  Speculation is that he’d begin the process by firing Deputy AG Rosenstein, and appoint Rachel Brand (currently third in command at Justice) as the new Deputy AG.  As her first official act, Brand would immediately fire Mueller.  Meanwhile, Trump flies off to Florida for the holidays.  

A variant of this theory suggests that Republicans will also decline to extend the continuing budget resolution, so that the government shuts down at midnight.  Chaos ensues, and chaos is Donald Trump’s natural element.

Of course, if I’ve heard this rumor, so has Robert Mueller.  Given what happened to James Comey, Mueller has known from his first day on the job that Trump might eventually get rid of him.  I have faith that Mueller has a backup plan.

If anything like this were to happen, it would precipitate a constitutional crisis the like of which this country has never seen.  It would remove all doubt that Trump was guilty of obstruction of justice.  No one could maintain with a straight face that Trump and his family were innocent of conspiring with Russia to steal the election.  It would also implicate Rachel Brand (or whoever fired Mueller) in the crime, which ought to give anyone pause, even with Trump’s assurance of a pardon.

What puzzles me about this rumor is that at this point, I’m not sure what simply firing Mueller gets them, except a lot of bad publicity and more legal trouble.  Maybe “fire Mueller” is shorthand for “disband the entire investigation,” or “replace Mueller with a Trump stooge who will effectively neutralize the investigation.”  But either of those options would constitute more obstruction of justice. 

It may be that this is a real plan, designed and advocated by some of Trump’s more wild-eyed advisors, but that cooler heads will prevail and he’ll abandon it in favor of some angry tweets and a golfing holiday at Mar-A-Lago. 

Here are some possible counter-moves on the part of the good guys.  It’s possible that the legality of the Rosenstein firing might be challenged in the Supreme Court on the grounds that it was part of a plot to obstruct justice (although I’m not sure who would have standing to bring that suit). 

It’s possible that the Senate could hire Mueller in some investigative capacity to continue his work under their auspices. 

It’s possible that Mueller’s team could pack up and move to New York, continuing its work under NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, beyond the reach of Trump’s pardon power. 

It’s possible that on his way out the door, Mueller could unseal the multiple grand jury indictments that he’s reportedly been holding back, letting the world know what he and his team have learned about the Trump-Russia conspiracy.

It’s also possible that this is just another internet rumor.  I hope that’s what it turns out to be, and I apologize in advance if it’s a false alarm, even one that came heavily caveated. 

We’ll know soon enough.