Today’s FFS: Ivanka is leading the search to replace President Kellyby digby
Via Gabriel Sherman, Trumpie’s pissed over Kelly’s comments to Fox News about him “evolving” on the wall. So he’s got Ivanka looking for a replacement.
Trump’s anger at Kelly’s immigration comments is the latest flare-up in a relationship that has been deteriorating for months. A four-star marine general, Kelly was never going to be an easy fit in a West Wing with a Lord of the Flies office culture. Staffers have bristled at Kelly’s rectitude, nicknaming him “the Church Lady,” a former official said.
Trump has increasingly been chafing at the media narrative that he needs Kelly to instill discipline on his freewheeling management style. “The more Kelly plays up that he’s being the adult in the room—that it’s basically combat duty and he’s serving the country—that kind of thing drives Trump nuts,” a Republican close to the White House said. In recent days, Trump has fumed to friends that Kelly acts like he’s running the government while Trump tweets and watches television. “I’ve got another nut job here who thinks he’s running things,” Trump told one friend, according to a Republican briefed on the call. A second source confirmed that Trump has vented about Kelly, mentioning one call in which Trump said, “This guy thinks he’s running the show.” (A White House official said “it’s categorically false that Trump is unhappy with Kelly. “He’s only ever referred to him as the general, tough, can be rough, and commands respect.)
Kelly, in turn, has expressed frustration with Trump’s freewheeling management style and habit of making offensive statements. In August, when Trump incited outrage with his Charlottesville comments, Kelly complained to a colleague that he was “holding it together.” The next month, cameras captured Kelly’s infamous facepalm at Trump’s U.N. speech when Trump called Kim Jong Un “rocket man” and threatened to “totally destroy North Korea.” The New York Times reported that Kelly has threatened to quit numerous times.
Same old shit.
But this is truly delusional:
Trump, for his part, is frustrated that he’s not getting more credit for positive news like the booming stock market and low unemployment numbers. In recent days, he told a longtime friend that the national polls, which put his approval numbers in the low 30s, are under-representing the real number. Trump insisted his approval rating is in the high 50s. The friend challenged him, but Trump didn’t want to hear it. He soon ended the call.
He believes his approval numbers are in the high 50s.
“Very nice and very humane” mass deportationby digby
I wrote this in October of 2015. Trump couldn’t have been clearer about what he wants:
Last week he even explicitly went back to the 1950s and evoked the Eisenhower era program “Operation Wetback,” which he characterized on “60 Minutes” as “very nice and very humane.” (It wasn’t.) He said “Did you like Eisenhower? Did you like Dwight Eisenhower as a president at all? He did this. He did this in the 1950s with over a million people, and a lot of people don’t know that…and it worked.”
“You know, Dwight Eisenhower was a wonderful general, and a respected President – and he moved a million people out of the country, nobody said anything about it. When Trump does it, it’s like ‘whoa.’ When Eisenhower does it, ‘well that was Eisenhower, he’s allowed to do it, we can’t do it.’
That was also in the ’50s, remember that. Different time, remember that.
That’s when we had a country. That’s when we had borders; you know, without borders you don’t have a country, essentially. We don’t have a country. Without borders, you just don’t have it.
But Dwight Eisenhower, this big report, they used to take them out and put them on the other side of the border and say, ‘you have to stay here.’ And they’d come right back, and they’d do it again and again, so they said ‘Wait a minute, this doesn’t work.’ And they took them out and moved them all the way South; all the way. And they never came back again; it’s too far. Amazing.
And I’m not saying this in a joking way — I’m saying this happened. It wasn’t working, they were coming back, and then they literally – literally – moved them all the way. A lot of the politicians – they never came back, it was too far. They’d put them on boats and move them all the way down South, and that was it.”
A month later he repeated this in a nationally televised GOP presidential debate:
Let me just tell you that Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president, people liked him. “I like Ike,” right? The expression. “I like Ike.” Moved a 1.5 million illegal immigrants out of this country, moved them just beyond the border. They came back.
Moved them again beyond the border, they came back. Didn’t like it. Moved them way south. They never came back.
(LAUGHTER)
Dwight Eisenhower. You don’t get nicer. You don’t get friendlier. They moved a 1.5 million out. We have no choice. We have no choice.
The latest Economist/YouGov poll reveals that Donald Trump is viewed as the GOP candidate Republicans trust most to handle immigration. What’s more, the margin by which they prefer him is extremely wide, and it’s grown substantially since he entered the race in July:
This was Trump unfiltered and totally himself.
Everyone says he doesn’t know what he wants in a deal.
Is that right?
Katy Tur on MSNBC wisely noted that Trump’s fundamental instinct is to turn toward the loudest applause line. When he said that he wanted to round up immigrants and drop them off in the Sonoran desert hundreds of miles from the border, the crowd went wild.
We have scenes like this happening every single day:
After years living in the U.S. for 30 years, a 39-year-old immigrant in metro Detroit was deported this morning to Mexico. Escorted by ICE agents, he said bye to wife and 2 kids before boarding. He was brought to US from Mexico when he was 10-yrs-old, too old to qualify for DACA: pic.twitter.com/KFPeweaMbG— Niraj Warikoo (@nwarikoo) January 15, 2018
The Trump cult wants a white America. And they want to accomplish this by ending all immigration from non-white countries, mass deportation of brown people and Muslims and putting African Americans in jail.
All Republicans don’t agree with that but they vote for people who do and they support a president who has taken this idea of ethnic cleansing into the mainstream. So they are on board too.
Trump has lost confidence in his legendary Wall Street shark Wilbur Ross because he says he doesn’t know anything:
Early in Trump’s presidency, Ross was his go-to negotiator, helming the administration’s trade talks with the Chinese. After a few months, though, Trump concluded he was doing a terrible job.
In a series of Oval Office meetings about six months into his presidency, Trump eviscerated Ross, telling him he’d screwed up, and badly.
“These trade deals, they’re terrible,” Trump said, according to a source in the room for one of the meetings. “Your understanding of trade is terrible. Your deals are no good. No good.”
Trump told Ross he didn’t trust him to negotiate anymore. Ross had tried in the early months of the administration, before Robert Lighthizer was confirmed as the U.S. Trade Representative, to take the lead on several crucial trade conversations. Once Lighthizer arrived there was a tussle for control over several issues. But after Ross botched — in Trump’s eyes — his dealings with China, he decided Lighthizer would be the lead negotiator on all trade issues.
During this period, Trump humiliated Ross in front of his colleagues, per three sources, and questioned his intelligence and competence.
The Financial Times reported in August that Trump rejected a China steel deal that Ross thought he’d closed. But nobody has reported the extent of Trump’s castration of Ross. Trump has effectively taken his Commerce Secretary — who he once called a “killer” — off the playing field.
One example: Ross made a deal to open the U.S. market to cooked Chinese chicken, in exchange for the Chinese opening their market to American beef. Ross told reporters it was a “herculean accomplishment,” and “more than has been done in the whole history of U.S.-China relations on trade,” per the AP.
But Trump wasn’t impressed with this deal — at all — and told our sources he found Ross’s boasting to be laughable and ridiculous.
Ross’s propensity to doze off in meetings — which senior Capitol Hill aides have noticed — hasn’t helped.
Why this matters: Ross entered the administration as one of Trump’s favorites, poised to be a power player. Trump has known Ross since the bankruptcy tycoon helped keep him financially afloat in the early 1990s. Trump was proud that Ross — this billionaire Wall Street legend — wanted to work for him.
“Wilbur is so famous on Wall Street he only needs one name,” Trump said in an early meeting with White House visitors, according to a source in the room. “You don’t even need to say his last name; you just say Wilbur and they know who you’re talking about.”
[…]
Ross bottomed out with Trump midway through last year. Since then, Ross has spent months trying to rebuild alliances within the administration, courting his colleagues over dinners, but he’s never fully regained his stature in Trump’s eyes.
However, he is in a much a better place with the boss than he was in July, and remains an active participant in the weekly trade meetings. He’ll be a primary player in the debates over possible steel and aluminum tariffs and recently hand-delivered reports to the president on the national security findings on both metals.
But sources close to Trump say he’ll never again trust the 80-year-old to be his “killer” negotiator. The recent Forbes article — revealing that Ross vastly exaggerated his net worth — did not help his internal standing.
“Wilbur’s been sucking up for months, trying to get back in the president’s good graces,” said a source close to Trump.
He’s got a way to go.
Sucking up is a good start. But what he needs to do is start talking up a global trade war with no plan except to strut around saying the US isn’t going to be laughed at anymore. If he can do that, he’ll be Trump’s very good boy again.
Recently, I wrote about the outrageous stunt the NY Times pulled, turning over their entire editorial page to pro-Trump letter writers. But that’s not all they’re up to when it comes to normalizing the abnormal, as the Columbia Journalism Review reports:
[James Bennet, editorial page editor at the New York Times] says the Times is actively looking for Trump supporters to write regularly for its opinion section…
Great. Just what we need, more affirmative action for conservatives at the Paper of Record. There’s just one teensy, tiny problem:
…but that there’s a short supply of writers who would live up to the rigorous standards the section demands.
In May of last year, President Donald Trump said “our country needs a shutdown.” Over the weekend he got his wish. After a tumultuous couple of weeks in which the president said he would agree to a clean DACA bill “of love” and then ranted about not wanting any more immigration from “shithole” countries, the Republican House majority voted for a stopgap spending measure to keep the government funded. But the Republican Senate couldn’t muster more than 51 votes and it needed 60.
As I write this, all non-essential government services are closed and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is promising a vote on DACA if Democrats agree to a stopgap measure lasting until Feb. 8. He has scheduled a vote for noon on Monday. Of course they’ve been kicking this can down the road for months. McConnell promised the same thing in December and never delivered the DACA vote, but maybe he really means it this time.
The sticking points are a fix for DACA recipients, enhanced border security including the Trumpian border wall, newly introduced draconian restrictions on legal immigration and funding for the Childrens’ Health Insurance Program. The DACA issue and the CHIP program basically involve young people and sick children being held as hostages by Republicans to get their extreme immigration policies enacted.
The best description of what the negotiations have been like over the past three days came from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in a speech on Saturday when he said working with Trump was “like negotiating with Jell-O.” He said Democrats had capitulated on the wall and in return Trump told him he would push for a measure to keep the government open for four or five days so they could hammer out the details. Then:
“Several hours later he called back. He said, ‘So, I hear we have a three-week deal.’ I said, ‘No, Mr. President, no one is even talking about a three-week deal,’” Schumer recounted.
“Then a few hours later they called back again, ‘Well we’re going to need this, this, this in addition,’” Schumer said. “Things they knew were far, far right and off the table.”
Basically, every time the parties reach an actual agreement, the right-wingers demand more.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who foolishly believed he had seduced the president into adopting a moderate stance on the issue, was more or less with Schumer on the character of the negotiations. Graham said on Sunday, “As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we’re going nowhere. He’s been an outlier for years.”
The malevolent Miller, a White House policy adviser, may be an outlier but he’s been a pretty successful one. He and his former boss Jeff Sessions (then in the Senate), along with Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, were responsible for the failure of the last big push for comprehensive immigration reform back in 2013. Miller seems to be good at currying favor with his xenophobic bosses.
Sessions himself worked tirelessly to ensure the DREAM Act was never passed, which was why DACA was required in the first place. Back in 2010 Sessions made the casethat young people who were brought to the U.S. by their parents and were in all respects but paperwork American citizens should be sent back to countries many could not remember. He called the DREAM Act “amnesty” for uneducated, unproductive criminal welfare recipients and said it would cost “hard-working Americans” vast sums of money. That was, of course, a lie, but Sessions managed to get the votes to scuttle the bill.
Trump made that man his attorney general. Immigration is the issue most closely associated with Trump’s campaign. His closest advisers on the issue, from Steve Bannon to Miller to chief of staff John Kelly, are hardcore anti-immigration zealots. The president himself blew up the negotiations over the notion that people from “shithole” countries were coming into the United States legally. Why, if we didn’t know better you’d think they don’t really want a deal at all.
The GOP revealed its true strategy over the weekend with this repugnant message:
The White House tried to distance the president from the ad but the fact that it concludes with the words “I’m Donald Trump and I approve this message,” disproves that claim. Trump also tweeted several times that the Democrats have shut down the government because they care more about “illegal immigrants” more than they care about the American people. His secretary of homeland security backed him up:
Benefits for millions of illegal immigrants instead of paying Americans who put their lives at risk daily to protect ours? I don’t think so. Most Americans don’t either. Fund the government and then negotiate. #endtheshutdown
Characterizing this issue as one of conferring “benefits” on “illegal immigrants” is code for the dreaded “amnesty,” which leads directly to the racist trope that they are all on welfare. The administration is now consciously demagoguing against DACA recipients by conflating them with criminals.
Yes, the polls all say that there is a bipartisan majority in favor of helping the Dreamers. Even many Republican voters aren’t so heartless that they think it makes sense to deport 800,000 young people simply because their parents broke the immigration laws when they were small children. years old. Everyone knows that it’s the Democrats who are trying to help them. That would explain why party officials and the White House are purposefully conflating Dreamers with criminal gang members in that ad. They have to keep their voters confused and angry.
It’s obvious from the Keystone Kops nature of the so-called negotiations that Trump isn’t strategizing. His racist id and his desire to get a “win” are being pulled in opposite directions, depending on whom he listens to at any given time. His lack of understanding of the issue or how laws are actually made makes him a hindrance to deal making. But we know what Trump wants. He’s said it many times during debates and on the stump during the campaign:
We either have a country, or we don’t have a country. We have at least 11 million people in this country that came in illegally. They will go out. Some will come back, the best, through a process. They have to come back legally. They have to come back through a process, and it may not be a very quick process, but I think that’s very fair, and very fine.
Yes, he’s hedged on the Dreamers from time to time. But seriously, all you have to do is look at his rhetoric from the moment he announced his candidacy to understand what he really, deep down, wants to do. It was the central promise of his presidential campaign from day one.
So yes, I think it’s probably true that as president he’s being manipulated in the negotiations by the odious Stephen Miller and probably by Kelly and Sessions too. They know what buttons he really likes pushed. And some ambitious Republican hardliners like Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and members of the ever-cunning House Freedom Caucus are riding the Trump zeitgeist as well.
But let’s not pretend it’s all Trump and his courtiers. The Republican majority in Congress has been playing Russian roulette with the Dreamers for years now. They have blocked every single solution to the problem, and it’s irrational at this point to believe they are acting in good faith.
It’s clear as a bell to most of the country that the Republicans have created an ungodly mess. And, as the marches this weekend made visible, it’s also clear that much of the country is utterly disgusted with them. So, as surely as night follows day, the NY Times presents not one but two op-eds urging Democrats to back down, compromise with Republicans, and cater to anti-immigrant white people.
Thanks, Michael Tomasky and David Leonhardt for reminding us that pressing the advantage when you have both the moral and political high ground could lead to total disaster – like a return to FDR-style liberalism or something.
And the cherry on top? On the same page in the printed edition, conservative Arthur Brooks, whose movement is on the ropes, urges us to empathize with our political foes. Funny how conservatives rarely take up the cause of empathy for liberals when conservatives are winning politically. If you were being uncharitable, you’d think Brooks was begging for mercy.
Anniversary Women’s March on Asheville – 2018. Photo credit: Jill Boniske, a.k.a. Arty Chick of Chickflix.net
You won’t like them when they’re angry.
Jennifer Mosbacher cried in her doctor’s office the day after Trump’s election. McClatchy reports her anger quickly turned into activism:
I don’t think you come out of that experience of awakening and close your eyes again, right?” she said. “I don’t know how you can do that.”
Mosbacher’s transformation is at the heart of an unprecedented movement inside the Democratic Party. Dubbed “The Resistance,” it has — in the year since Donald Trump’s inauguration — turned countless apolitical women and men into firebrand activists set on remaking the political system.
Like Mosbacher, thousands of others cannot close their eyes again. More than 22,000 women have contacted Emily’s List about becoming candidates. Over 120,000 people across the country protested misogyny, racism, xenophobia and Donald Trump Saturday on the one-year anniversary of his inauguration. Protests continued into Sunday.
Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards addressed the rally in Las Vegas, “When our country was in free fall, the Women’s March got us out of our despair and out of our homes and into the streets, and ever since that day, women have been shaking the foundation of America.”
This level of activism is likely to mold our politics “for the foreseeable future,” McClatchy’s Alex Roarty believes:
“What we saw in 2017 was an unprecedented revival of grassroots democracy,” said Joe Dinkin, spokesman for the liberal Working Families Party. “People want to participate, not just in protest, but in changing who holds power. That’s everything from knocking on doors to stepping up to run for office. That newly awakened spirit won’t just shape 2018 — it could shape the identity, beliefs and activism of a generation of voters.”
Let’s hope Dinkins is right. After the weeks we’ve had, read the rest for a little inspiration. It has been in short supply.
* * * * * * * *
Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.
This is a great piece and a really exceptional insight from Josh Marshall. He talks about how Michael Wolff got into the White House through flattery and setting himself up as an adversary to Trump’s adversaries only to stab him in the back. It’s true. And it worked. But this is the insight that made my ears prick up:
Wolff is, in a word, vicious. He played Murdoch and then knifed him, all out in the open. And then he did more or less exactly the same thing to Trump a decade later, with the added bonus that Trump was talking to Murdoch regularly while Wolff had the run of the White House and was laying the ground work to shiv him as he had his new friend Rupert. None of this is terribly surprising given the Trump we know. But it wasn’t only his narcissism and neediness. The lack of any experienced staff and the organizational disarray that was particularly marked before John Kelly took over as Chief of Staff allowed Wolff to always be saying that he had the run of the place because someone else said it was okay. Because he was Trump’s best friend. Because Trump thought it was great. Because … well, didn’t you know that other person …
As I said, Trump got just the kind of vicious, shameless and canny biographer he deserved. “Joyously nasty” seems to capture it – precisely the person you want to write the book about someone you already despise.
But we don’t have to stop there. It is impossible not to look at the Wolff story and see many of the patterns we are now reading about which occurred over the course of 2015 and 2016 as various Russian nationals, cut-outs and intelligence officers inveigled their way into the Trump orbit. A key lure was the same: flattery. Another more amorphous draw was greed – whether for money or for damaging campaign material or positive press for a White House drowning in the worst press imaginable and abysmal public support. In both cases, the Trumpers were dealing with people who knew how to read a mark. And the Trumpers were easy marks.
Disorganization also clearly played a key role.
Earlier this month I wrote about what I see as the biggest question we face in trying to understand the Trump/Russia story. We know President Trump had longstanding ties to Russian capital, oligarchs and organized crime. These might be binds of greed or compromise or maybe both. But they run deep. This seems obviously tied to his and his minions’ machinations during the 2016 campaign. And yet the clearest threads we’ve found out about which point to collusion don’t suggest a organized conspiracy or a tight relationship so much as cold approaches, often to secondary members of the Trump entourage. As I noted in that January 8th post, there are various potential explanations for this seeming lack of fit. I’m still not sure what the explanation is. For our present purposes though what is key is that same role of inexperience, disorganization and greed…
It’s chaotic settings with corrupt individuals who always attract spies and grifters looking for an angle and a mark: the desperate and the greedy, the corrupt and the stupid. Similarly, they look for chaos and disorganization.
And, by the way, wily foreign leaders aren’t the only ones who would see the opportunity. Cunning domestic manipulators like Stephen Miller and Tom Cotton obviously have his number. And Lindsey Graham, who made the mistake of thinking that his naked attempt to flatter his golf swing and appeal to his “good side” were the kinds of flattery that makes him tick. Sure, he likes to be told that he’s a great athlete and a wonderful, generous man of the people. But what he needs is to be told that he is smart and tough and powerful.
“The base” would love to see the nuclear optionby digby
I’m talking about the only base that matters, Trump voters. And I’m guessing that applies to North Korea as well as ending Democrats’ ability to filibuster Republican bills. (You know they wouldn’t want to end it if the Democrats were in charge.)
Trump knows his people:
Great to see how hard Republicans are fighting for our Military and Safety at the Border. The Dems just want illegal immigrants to pour into our nation unchecked. If stalemate continues, Republicans should go to 51% (Nuclear Option) and vote on real, long term budget, no C.R.’s!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 21, 2018
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is against using the so-called “nuclear option” to end a budget stalemate and reopen the federal government, despite President Donald Trump’s urging.
“The Republican Conference opposes changing the rules on legislation,” a representative for McConnell said in a statement Sunday morning.
I don’t know how he can make this argument with a straight face. They insist that it’s the Democrats who are killing people by failing to vote for this CR. They nuke it for the Supreme Court after basically vomiting all over the constitution by holding the seat open until they could get a Republican in there. What’s the excuse?
Oh, right. He can’t get to 50 Republican votes either.
