Month: January 2018

Trump is fulfilling the one campaign promise his voters really care aboutby digby

You know the one: lock her up

Crooked Hillary Clinton’s top aid, Huma Abedin, has been accused of disregarding basic security protocols. She put Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents. Remember sailors pictures on submarine? Jail! Deep State Justice Dept must finally act? Also on Comey & others

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2018

Trump has been blathering on about Hillary Clinton being the “real Russia colluder” for a while now.And the wingnuts in congress are still pushing hard on emails and the Clinton Foundation.

Going after her is obviously going to be their main strategy to keep the angry base in the Trump camp and somehow equalize Trump’s criminality. AG Sessions now seems willing to do Trump’s bidding so as to save his job and carry out his dream of turning the nation into a 21st century version of the confederacy. He had promised to recuse himself from all Clinton business during his confirmation hearings but he’s learned his lesson and now he’s more than prepared to be Trump’s Roy Cohn.

And there are people in the FBI who are undoubtedly happy to go along. I think we know that despite the protestations of the right wing that the FBI is a hotbed of Clinton worshipers, there are more than a few members who are happy to follow Dear Leader’s instructions to lock her up.

Anyway there are now several new “old” Clinton probes in the works at Trump’s department of justice since Trump made his demand that they do so. One assumes this is their way of appeasing him. (Who cares if they’re persecuting some woman who isn’t in politics anymore, amirite? Nobody ever liked her anyway.)

They are going after the emails again and the Clinton Foundation, both of which have been amply investigated and found to have no criminal liability. They are also going hard at the Steele dossier which they are characterizing as a Clinton put-up job to harm Dear Leader.

When we saw this last fall it seemed like just another one of his stunts. (I think maybe we all got a little distracted by the constant sniffing that made him sound like a coke addict.) It’s was disgusting that anyone would vote for a man who would behave this way but I suspect nobody thought he’d actually do it.

He’s doing it.

And all Clinton has standing between her and more persecution over bullshit is Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions.

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A rat’s patootie
by Tom Sullivan

Platform Gail, Sockeye Offshore Oil Field, near Santa Barbara, Southern California. Photo Public Domain.

Palmetto State lawmakers this week winced at the prospect of oil drilling off South Carolina’s rsort-lined shores and its “Grand Strand” beaches after the current administration lifted an Obama administration ban. The plan allows oil and gas drilling along nearly all of United States coastal waters.

South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsay Graham told reporters from U.S. News “there are ways to drill offshore that would not hurt tourism,” but did not elaborate. Tim Scott, the state’s other Republican senator, urged buy-in from coastal communities first.

Months earlier, when federal officials barred oil drilling off the Atlantic Coast, Rep. Tom Rice — whose district includes Myrtle Beach, the heart of South Carolina’s $19 billion tourism industry — said that, given discoveries of more onshore oil using technologies like hydraulic fracturing, “tapping new reserves in the Atlantic has become less and less feasible.” On Thursday, Rice reiterated his previous opposition to drilling off South Carolina’s coast.

Republican Gov. Henry McMaster, a Trump supporter, joined governors from North Carolina, Florida and Virginia in opposing the proposal.

California Gov. Jerry Brown and other West Coast officials are not fans either:

“For more than 30 years, our shared coastline has been protected from further federal drilling and we’ll do whatever it takes to stop this reckless, short-sighted action,” Brown said in a joint statement with Oregon Gov. Kate Brown and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee.

Sen. Kamala Harris called it “an incredibly harmful move.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Trump’s “reckless ‘drill, baby, drill’ approach threatens our oceans and coasts.”

The Golden State has come under assault by a flurry of policies of the sitting president. Permitting offshore drilling adds to the list:

“We’re the pot smoking state of gun regulations, and they want to criminalize pot, and they want to … let people run the streets with guns, so I think it’s a different perspective,” said Robin Swanson, a Democratic political consultant in Sacramento. “I think we need to remind the federal government that one in 10 Americans lives here in California, so if they want to pretend that California is an island and push us off as an island of misfits, they’re going to be without the economic engine that is California driving it.”

Trump, said Swanson, “has written off the state of California.”

For a state heavily steeped in the tradition of the environmental movement — and recollections of the 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara — Trump’s proposal to open stretches of federal waters to oil and gas drilling was especially galling. Support for offshore drilling here hit a record low last year, with just 25 percent of Californians in support, according to a Public Policy Institute of California poll.

California has already moved to blunt the effects of the tax bill’s $10,000 tax deduction cap on state property owners. Senate leader Kevin de León introduced a measure on Thursday not unlike credits other states offer for donations of conservation easement or private school scholarships. The bill would allow a donation to the California Excellence Fund in exchange for a dollar-for-dollar tax credit:

“The Republican tax plan gives corporations and hedge-fund managers a trillion-dollar tax cut and expects California taxpayers to foot the bill,” De León, also a candidate for U.S. Senate, said in a statement Thursday. “We won’t allow California residents to be the casualty of this disastrous tax scheme.”

California Republican state senator Andy Vidak asserted Thursday that Trump’s policies are really “pro-United States of America,” not anti-California. Responding to his Democratic colleagues complaints, Vidak added, “Do you really think that Speaker Ryan, [Mitch] McConnell and President Trump really give a rat’s patootie?”

Democratic minority legislators here in the Tar Heel State are well familiar with the rat’s patootie dynamic. Republicans have the power — they know not for how long — and plan to leverage it to the hilt to pass bills that favor their friends and punish their adversaries as well as fellow citizens who dare vote for them, where Republicans still allow them to.

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Friday Night Soother: Turtles!by digby


Tucker the turtle is a-ok:

Perhaps turtles are not as cute and cuddly as some animals, but the tale of Tucker the turtle’s travels is a spirit lifter.

The turtle, who was brought to the Seattle Aquarium near death a year and a half ago, suffered from a host of problems and became the first non-human to be treated in a hyperbaric chamber at Virginia Mason Hospital and Medical Center.

But earlier this month he was released, along with two other turtles, into the ocean waters off the coast of San Diego.

And since then he, and his two female companions — who were all tagged so that researchers could track their travels — have made it down to Mexico.

His story is one of resiliency and will.

“Turtles don’t get a lot of attention but they need some, and we need a little good news in this world,” said Amy Olsen, the Seattle Aquarium lab specialist who helped nurse him to health.

Tucker was found sick and dying on the Oregon coast in 2015. In fact, he was so sick that the only way people knew the olive ridley sea turtle was even alive is that he tucked his tail in when touched, hence his name.

Tucker was brought to the Seattle Aquarium, our state’s only turtle rehabilitation facility, after folks at the Oregon Coast Aquarium first found him.

Tucker’s internal temperature measured about 40 degrees when he arrived in Seattle, about half what it should be.

This release of baby turtles into the sea will also make you smile:

WATCH: Mexicans release thousands of baby turtles into the sea. See more from @ReutersTV: https://t.co/jTj0gLuOxP pic.twitter.com/BQFfbjfUxK— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) January 1, 2018

Sayulita — Watched by tourists, activists and a helpful guard dog named Lulu, a new generation of olive ridley sea turtles plod across a short stretch of sand and into the warm Pacific, to grow and eventually return to the same beach someday to lay their own eggs.

The tiny turtles head with single-minded determination to the sea, guided by natural instinct — but they are helped along by humans who have delivered them by the pan-full, the bucket-full, some 35 000 this year alone.

It started a decade ago, when an American couple living in the Mexican beach town of Sayulita, Erik and Odette Jorgensen, noticed during strolls on the beach in the fall that sea turtles were crawling up onto the sand to lay their eggs — but soon after the pair would see signs that the nests had been looted by humans.

“I started the programme back 10 years ago after seeing 15 turtles come up and very close to the front yard here, and within two days every nest had been opened up and robbed of the eggs,” Erik Jorgensen said.

“So I decided this wasn’t a good idea and started the programme to bring the nests into here to protect them.”

When turtles are detected laying eggs in the second half of each year, volunteers quickly scoop up the eggs and relocate them to a protected, taped off, guarded area in front of Jorgensen’s bar, where Lulu, a mid-sized white and brown cocker mix, watches over them when no humans are around.

There they incubate for about 45 days until they hatch, are counted and freed.

“Every year we protect approximately 300 to 400 nests,” said Maria Alejandra Aguirre, a marine biologist who works with the project.

“In five years where we have a formal record, (there were) more than 2 000 nests. During this season, we have a record of 35 000 hatchlings,” she said.

It’s a race to protect the endangered turtles: Illegal nest raiders can carry off 100 eggs per nest, and earn as much $50 per nest doing so. Sea birds and other predators can easily pick off the young hatchlings.

Sayulita’s turtle camp is now part of a civil association known as Red Tortuguera AC that has five similar turtle camps in different parts of Nayarit, but the camp is entirely dependent on volunteers and donations.

Ana Fernandez, a Mexican tourist visiting Sayulita, attended one of the releases with her son.

“It is a very important lesson for the children, so they learn the cycle of life, and how we can cooperate with it instead of hindering it,” said Fernandez.

Enjoy your evening everyone. 🙂

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Oh, heck. It turned out Trump is a far right authoritarian? Who could have guessed?by digby

Apparently a lot of people thought Trump (Trump!) was a moderate.

More voters viewed Trump as liberal than any incoming GOP president since at least Ronald Reagan, and fewer voters viewed him as conservative than any Republican since at least Reagan. That stood in stark contrast to Clinton, whom the clear majority of voters saw as liberal. Trump’s ideological positioning relative to Clinton’s may have been one of the reasons he was able to pull off a slim Electoral College victory against her.

Before Trump moved into the White House, he took a mix of liberal and conservative positions. He was, for example, vehemently against illegal immigration but in favor of infrastructure spending. He was against gun control, but he claimed to be stronger than Hillary Clinton on LGBT rights. When you totaled up Trump’s ideological score on economic and social issues from the website OnTheIssues — which assigns an ideological grade to politicians’ statements and votes on a scale that we’ve converted to go from -5 (very liberal) to +5 (very conservative) — he came in at +42.5. His score was closer to 0, perfectly “moderate,” than any incoming president of the past 40 years except George H.W. Bush.

This proves that these ideological compasses are completely useless. And a lot of voters have the analytical power and human instincts of doorstops.

All you ever had to do was listen to his violent, authoritarian, racist, xenophobic, ignorant demagogy to know that he was no moderate. He is a right wing fascist. (I know I’ve said it before, but Hitler was a big infrastructure guy. He built the autobahn…)

I’ll never understand in a million years how anyone could listen to this man’s rhetoric and think he was “moderate” about anything. Or frankly even ideological about anything. He’s just id. Nothing more.

The good news is that a majority of people have now wised up and understand him as a conservative. Better late than never I guess. But please, regardless of the “issues” which he only had the thinnest of even when it pertained to things he was allegedly passionate about like trade, it’s clear that he had developed a rap like the drunk guy at the end of the bar some time in the early 80s and he just kept recycling it year after year. There was never anything there, one way or the other except celebrity, chutzpah and narcissism.

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By the way, Jared is dumb as a brick tooby digby

That’s how Steve Bannon described Ivanka Trump. But it’s not just her or her daddy. Recall this from November:

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough, a conservative who once enjoyed a friendship with President Donald Trump and the first family, railed on Jared Kushner as an unthinking, uninterested simpleton on his Wednesday MSNBC broadcast. 

Scarborough described moments from along the 2016 presidential campaign trail in which he said he observed the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser displaying a lack of regard for international policy matters, despite his role as the president’s Middle East peace envoy. 

“I have spoken with him a lot, I like Jared, but any time he tried to explain the history of the Middle East, he didn’t want to, he didn’t want to hear it,” Scarborough said Wednesday. “He said, ‘I’m tired of the talking. We don’t need to read history books.’ Here is a guy — how old is he, 34, 35? — I’m sure he’s great in real estate and everything else, but the point is that this entire administration has shunned experts.”

By the way, I’m glad Scarborough has come around to the side of sanity. But I can’t help but remember how he kissed Trump’s hem over and over again during the campaign until Trump finally turned on him too. He was an insider at one point and he knew all this stuff about Trump. By the time he started talking about it it was way too late. Unlike other GOP apostates (who have their own demons to purge) Scarborough was a friend of Trump’s and knew what he was.

But anyway, about Jared, he’s a lot like his father-in-law:

My book exposed a grubby secret of American higher education: that the rich buy their under-achieving children’s way into elite universities with massive, tax-deductible donations. It reported that New Jersey real estate developer Charles Kushner had pledged $2.5 million to Harvard University in 1998, not long before his son Jared was admitted to the prestigious Ivy League school. At the time, Harvard accepted about one of every nine applicants. (Nowadays, it only takes one out of twenty.)

I also quoted administrators at Jared’s high school, who described him as a less than stellar student and expressed dismay at Harvard’s decision.

“There was no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard,” a former official at The Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey, told me.

“His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought for sure, there was no way this was going to happen. Then, lo and behold, Jared was accepted. It was a little bit disappointing because there were at the time other kids we thought should really get in on the merits, and they did not.”

This is the guy Trump put in charge of solving the Israeli-Palestian problem and bringing middle east peace, NAFTA renegotiation, diplomacy with Mexico and China, the opioid crisis, reforming the criminal justice system, overseeing veterans care, making the government work like a business.

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QOTD: Donnie “Tiny Hands” Trump
by digby

Trump with mobster Robert LiButti whom he insisted he’d never met

Via “Fire and Fury”

“Comey was a rat,” repeated Trump. There were rats everywhere and you had to get rid of them. “John Dean, John Dean,” he repeated, “do you know what John Dean did to Nixon?”

Yep. Rats everywhere. Thousands of them.

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Don McGahn, Tom Delay’s defense attorneyby digby

The New York Times story from last night pretty much concludes that the White House counsel, Don McGahn, conspired with the president to obstruct the Russia investigation when he went to the Attorney General to tell him not to recuse himself from the Russian investigation because the president expected him to protect him — “where’s my Roy Cohn?”
Anyway, this should not come as a shock. McGahn is a a hardcore right wing political operative whose expertise was as an election lawyer specializing in GOP cheating.

I wrote about him when he was first named for Salon:

President Barack Obama tried to warn Trump that he needed to find a White House counsel who would give him strong, unbiased advice and help him navigate these treacherous ethical waters. Trump clearly didn’t listen. In fact he went out of his way to name as his chief counsel one of the most notorious lawyers in Washington, Don McGahn, the man best known as the ethics lawyer to corrupt former House whip Tom “The Hammer” DeLay, a man who pretty much filled the swamp Trump promised to drain. As the architects of the “K Street Project,” which strong-armed lobbyists into hiring only Republicans if they wanted to do business with the government, DeLay and McGahn were instrumental in institutionalizing GOP self-dealing and corruption during the George W. Bush years.
DeLay had Texas tear up its 2000 redistricting plan after Republicans won the majority in 2002, and McGahn defended him when DeLay was tried for illegally funneling campaign cash into a PAC to help Republicans win. (He lost the case, but it was reversed on appeal.) Of course, McGahn also had been the lawyer who advised him that the scheme was legal in the first place. 

McGahn helped DeLay with a Russian pay-to-play scheme and a subsequent Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act lawsuit. As the in-house counsel for the National Republican Campaign Committee, McGahn oversaw the raising of more than $625 million from 2000 to 2008 with almost no oversight and no rules. The scheme finally ended when a Republican congressman insisted on an audit and the FBI indicted the treasurer on embezzlement charges. 

Naturally, George W. Bush then made McGahn a member of the Federal Election Commission, where he did everything in his power to undermine the campaign finance laws — and succeeded — after which he went to work for the Koch brothers — of course. In 2016 he joined the Trump campaign, and he will now be White House counsel. 

The idea that this man is going to give Trump guidance on how to deal with conflicts of interest in an ethical manner is laughable. His career has been spent counseling his clients on how to do the opposite. Like Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn and Jeff Sessions, it’s yet another example of Trump hiring the worst person in America for the job. It’s almost as if he’s trolling America, just messing with our heads for the fun of it. And like nearly all forms of trolling, it’s not funny at all.

As Ellen L. Weintraub of the Federal Election Commission wrote back in December of 2016:

Agency dysfunction was not a byproduct of McGahn’s approach — it was the goal. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, McGahn vetoed proposed rules aimed at ensuring disclosure of the sources of political spending, barring employees from being coerced to support their bosses’ political choices, keeping foreign interests from influencing our elections and addressing the new political powerhouses known as super PACs.

I have served on the FEC for 14 years, with 14 commissioners. While disagreements are nothing new at the FEC, commissioners on both sides of the aisle used to understand that serving on a commission composed of three Democratic and three Republican appointees required compromise and that it was our job to make the agency work. No other commissioner has been as intransigent, as hostile to other points of view and as determined to undermine the law and the commission as McGahn was. The example he set hampers the agency to this day.

I’m sure he was asked for and gave Trump the required loyalty oath. But the White House counsel is supposed to serve the administration, not the president. Now it appears he helped the president obstruct justice. That’s what he was hired to do.

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Good little soldiers, betraying their country for their Dear Leader
by digby

I wrote about how the Republicans are enabling a traitorous imbecile for Salon today. (And this was written before the latest disgusting betrayal which I will write about in a later post.) 
Dozens of columns about Michael Wolff’s new book “Fire and Fury” have already been published and we can expect many more to come. It’s a fascinating look into TrumpWorld and anyone who’s been following the saga over the past couple of years cannot help but devour all the juicy details. Even if only half of it were true (and evidently Wolff has tapes and witnesses to back up many of the conversations he relates) it’s still a gripping story.

But none of this is really a shock, is it? After all, we have the evidence of unfitness right before our eyes whenever Trump speaks or tweets or gives interviews to the newspapers. Plenty of leaks and gossip from the White House has made its way into the media over the past year. Tens of millions of people in this country have been watching this debacle unfold before our eyes since June of 2015, seeing very clearly who Donald Trump is. Nothing in Wolff’s book changes what we already knew.

Still, as James Fallows points out in this insightful piece for the Atlantic, Wolff’s colorful details about Trump’s childish behavior and incompetence, along with on-the-record comments from insiders, takes this to a new level that can be compared to the gusher of information after the dam burst on sexual harassment in entertainment and media. Once people came forward it became clear that the behavior of Harvey Weinstein and other powerful men were an open secret in their respective communities. At that point the question became why other people in power didn’t do anything about it or, in many cases, why they actually covered up the crimes with payoffs and threats.

That’s a reckoning we have yet to see happen with Donald Trump. In fact the people in power, the Republicans, appear to be circling the wagons tighter around Trump by the day, even as reports filter out from members of the press that they are well aware of Trump’s unfitness for the job. Consider this piece by David Brooks in the New York Times from a couple of months ago, describing Republican senators giving Trump a standing ovation, even though they saw a president “so repetitive and rambling, some thought he might be suffering from early Alzheimer’s.”

Republicans have embraced conservative activist Grover Norquist’s maxim that in order to achieve their dreams, the GOP could “pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States,” Elected officials of that party have abdicated their duty as surely as the board of Fox News or the Weinstein Company abdicated theirs. Since the duty of duly elected members of Congress is to protect the entire country and assure the survival of our planet in the nuclear age, the stakes are substantially higher.

Nevertheless, Republicans persist in protecting a man they all know to be unfit to lead, and possibly even compromised by a foreign adversary. On Thursday, Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, charter members of what was once considered to be the most principled conservative organization in the Congress, the House Freedom Caucus, took to the pages of the Washington Examiner to demand that Attorney General Jeff Sessions resign. Why? Because the Russia investigation must be shut down.

It’s seems like an odd request considering that Sessions is recused from that probe but Meadows and Jordan suggest that the attorney general is allowing FBI and Department of Justice employees to leak false stories to the media, and that unless he’s willing to take those agencies in hand he must step down. They blow a bit of smoke about the details of the George Papadopoulos case relayed to the New York Times last week, and pretend that they are concerned about the integrity of the FBI. But since it’s an open secret that Trump is still fulminating about Sessions recusing himself from the Russia investigation, it’s obvious they are doing the bidding of their unstable leader by keeping the pressure on Sessions. Maybe they hope he’ll take some action to rein in Robert Mueller’s investigation, despite his recusal. Or maybe they’re just trying to make Trump feel better.

On Thursday night, the New York Times published a new bombshell shedding light on that Sessions recusal and various attempts to smear former FBI director James Comey. Trump had asked White House counsel, Don McGahn to ensure that Sessions didn’t take that step despite his promise during Senate confirmation hearings, but DOJ officials had made it clear that Sessions would have to recuse himself. This was the reported response of the man these allegedly principled defenders of the Constitution still support:

Mr. McGahn was unsuccessful, and the president erupted in anger in front of numerous White House officials, saying he needed his attorney general to protect him. Mr. Trump said he had expected his top law enforcement official to safeguard him the way he believed Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general, had done for his brother John F. Kennedy and Eric H. Holder Jr. had for Barack Obama.

Mr. Trump then asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” He was referring to his former personal lawyer and fixer, who had been Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s top aide during the investigations into communist activity in the 1950s and died in 1986.

One might be tempted to dismiss such a quote as hyperbole, but just last weekend, Trump said much the same thing about Holder in an interview with the Times. He believes to this day that the attorney general is supposed to be the president’s personal protector and he holds a grudge against Sessions for failing to keep the FBI from investigating his Russia ties.

Everyone knows Trump is undisciplined and inept. According to Wolff, people in his administration quit over it (although they failed to speak out). It’s obvious by now that he’s hiding something, is disrespectful and ignorant of the rule of law and has blatantly obstructed justice. At least one person in the administration quit over that too.

But no matter what comes out next, the Republican Party is still supporting him. Meadows, Jordan and other members of the Freedom Caucus are even willing to force a “purge” of the Department of Justice to protect him. House Speaker Paul Ryan just backed discredited Trump follower Rep. Devin Nunes, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, in a dispute with the Department of Justice, causing the DOJ to cave.

In some ways these Republican enablers are more guilty than Donald Trump is. In the wake of the revelations in the Wolff book, there is a lot of talk about Trump being seriously impaired in some way. Wolff writes that “almost every member of the senior staff” in the White House repeatedly described Trump as “like a child.”

OK then — but what excuse do congressional Republicans have?

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Yes, they all know he’s an ignoramusby digby

After acknowledging that Wolff often plays fast and loose with journalistic ethics, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei,  new Village elders, had this to say this morning about the book:

In the past year, we have had many of the same conversations with the same sources Wolff used. We won’t betray them, or put on the record what was off. But, we can say that the following lines from the book ring unambiguously true: 

How Trump processes (and resists) information: 

“It was during Trump’s early intelligence briefings … that alarm signals first went off among his new campaign staff: he seemed to lack the ability to take in third-party information.”

“Or maybe he lacked the interest; whichever, he seemed almost phobic about having formal demands on his attention.”

“Trump didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. … [H]e could read headlines and articles about himself, or at least headlines on articles about himself, and the gossip squibs on the New York Post’s Page Six.” 

“Some … concluded that he didn’t read because he just didn’t have to, and that in fact this was one of his key attributes as a populist. He was postliterate — total television.” 

“[H]e trusted his own expertise — no matter how paltry or irrelevant — more than anyone else’s. What’s more, he had an extremely short attention span, even when he thought you were worthy of attention.” 

Instinct over expertise: 

“The organization … needed a set of internal rationalizations that would allow it to trust a man who, while he knew little, was entirely confident of his own gut instincts and reflexive opinions, however frequently they might change.” 

“Here was a key Trump White House rationale: expertise, that liberal virtue, was overrated.” 

Ill-preparedness: 

“[T]he president’s views of foreign policy and the world at large were among [his White House’s] most random, uninformed, and seemingly capricious aspects. His advisers didn’t know whether he was an isolationist or a militarist, or whether he could distinguish between the two.” 

“He was enamored with generals and determined that people with military command experience take the lead in foreign policy, but he hated to be told what to do.” 

“In the Trump White House, policy making … flowed up. It was a process of suggesting, in throw-it-against-the-wall style, what the president might want, and hoping he might then think that he had thought of this himself.” 

Low regard by key aides: 

“He spoke obliviously and happily, believing himself to be a perfect pitch raconteur and public performer, while everyone with him held their breath. 

“If a wackadoo moment occurred on the occasions … when his remarks careened in no clear direction, his staff had to go into intense method-acting response. It took absolute discipline not to acknowledge what everyone could see.” 

“At points on the day’s spectrum of adverse political developments, he could have moments of, almost everyone would admit, irrationality. When that happened, he was alone in his anger and not approachable by anyone.” 

“His senior staff largely dealt with these dark hours by agreeing with him, no matter what he said.”

Why doesn’t somebody do something?
by Tom Sullivan

A running joke at home is that an exasperated, “Why doesn’t somebody do something?” often leads to more personal cost and responsibility. If you’re somebody, you do something. Would that more of our leaders on Capitol Hill did. The “personal responsibility” people, especially, seem fresh out.

James Fallows wrote yesterday in The Atlantic that the revelations in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury are no surprise to anyone in Washington, D.C. or to anyone in political journalism: “Who and what Trump is has been an open secret.” The problem is that answer to “Why doesn’t somebody do something?” seems to be that those with the power to (the Republican majorities in Congress) have neither the guts nor the integrity. Nor the devotion they solemnly claim to this country.

Fallows writes:

They know what is wrong with Donald Trump. They know why it’s dangerous. They understand—or most of them do—the damage he can do to a system of governance that relies to a surprising degree on norms rather than rules, and whose vulnerability has been newly exposed. They know—or should—about the ways Trump’s vanity and avarice are harming American interests relative to competitors like Russia and China, and partners and allies in North America, Europe, and the Pacific.

They know. They could do something: hearings, investigations, demands for financial or health documents, subpoenas. Even the tool they used against the 42nd president, for failings one percent as grave as those of the 45th: impeachment.

They know. They could and should act. But they don’t.

We are watching the political equivalent of the Weinstein board paying off the objects of his abuse. We are watching Fox pay out its tens of millions to O’Reilly’s victims. But we’re watching it in real time, with the secret shared worldwide, and the stakes immeasurably higher.

Wolff writes that those serving in the Trump White House believe the president is incapable of doing the job to which he was elected. In temperament, in maturity, in intellectual capacity, hell, in literacy.

Joe Scarborough writes in the Washington Post about an interview with Trump in which he bluntly asked the candidate for president if he could read:

Mika Brzezinski and I had a tense meeting with Trump following what I considered to be a bumbling debate performance in September 2015. I asked the candidate a blunt question.

“Can you read?”

Awkward silence.

“I’m serious, Donald. Do you read?” I continued. “If someone wrote you a one-page paper on a policy, could you read it?”

Taken aback, Trump quietly responded that he could while holding up a Bible given to him by his mother. He then joked that he read it all the time.

I am apparently not the only one who has questioned the president’s ability to focus on the written word. “Trump didn’t read,” Wolff writes. “He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate. Others concluded that he didn’t read because he didn’t have to . . . He was postliterate — total television.”

That’s the catch with a system of government relying on established norms almost as much as rules. The Constitution requires a president these days to be “a natural born Citizen” and thirty-five years-old. It says nothing about emotional maturity or being literate. Those are assumed. An informed citizenry is also assumed, as is voters having the wisdom and maturity to elect someone who is intelligent, developmentally fit, and literate.

The reason the majority in Congress cannot be entrusted with removing a semiliterate, authoritarian, emotional toddler from the Oval Office is how closely they reflect the voters who put him there.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.