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Month: May 2018

“The sentiment was that Americans wanted a royal family.”

Published by digby on May 31, 2018

“The sentiment was that Americans wanted a royal family.”


by digby

Vanity Fair has an excerpt of a new book about the Trumps. Ivanka believes America wanted the Trumps to be their royal family. When it comes to their deluded voters, she’s probably right. They seem to yearn to be subjects:

On the morning of January 20, 2017, Donald Trump’s five children formed a veritable wall around their father as he stood in the gallery on the West Front of the Capitol Building and placed his left hand atop two Bibles—one used by Abraham Lincoln at his inauguration, in 1861; the other a gift from Trump’s mother just before his ninth birthday—to recite the presidential oath of office.

It was an unprecedented political moment for America, but the scene also represented something of a domestic triumph. Trump, who had five children with three women over the course of four decades, had never quite been the Platonic ideal of a paterfamilias. As the years passed, Trump and his kids underwent various stages of entrenchment and estrangement as his empire, and personal life, oscillated between booms and busts—the divorces, the Plaza acquisition and refinancing, the Atlantic City bankruptcies, The Apprentice, the birther nonsense, 2016. “He did not know,” as his ex-wife Ivana Trump once put it, “how to speak the children’s language.” Trump had even insinuated the limits of his own capacity as a nurturer. “I want five children, like in my own family,” he once told a friend, according to a September 1990 article in this magazine. “Because with five, then I will know that one will be guaranteed to turn out like me.”

The Trumps have somewhat fancied themselves as a modern version of the Kennedys, but the inauguration brought to mind the dynamic of another sort of American first family: the Kardashians. The Trump kids had become famous, in some ways, simply for being famous—a preternatural and occasionally nauseating talent that they learned from their father. As Trump took the oath of office, Barron Trump, the president’s middle-school-aged son with Melania Trump, as well as Tiffany, his young-adult daughter with Marla Maples, fixed their eyes on Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts, who administered it. Meanwhile, Trump’s eldest three children—Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric—stood like a phalanx, their eyes fixed on their father.
[…]
The family also started preparing for the inaugural celebration. Donald Trump had appointed Tom Barrack, a private-equity billionaire who had negotiated the sale of the Plaza to Trump in 1988, to run what the family hoped would be an outsize affair. Marquee performers, from Elton John to Kiss, distanced themselves as soon as their names were floated, and organizers ended up settling for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the Rockettes, minus some dancers in the troupe who refused to participate. Barrack spun the situation by noting that the inauguration already had its star power—“the greatest celebrity in the world,” as he put it—in the form of the incoming president.

Ivanka Trump seemed particularly attuned to the stagecraft. When Melania Trump opened the White House residence to all of her husband’s children for the weekend following the inauguration, the president’s elder daughter put in a request to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom. (Permission granted.) When Melania wavered over the idea of the customary parade down Pennsylvania Avenue after the swearing-in ceremony, citing security concerns, Ivanka dug in. “It’s happening,” she told an organizer. She worked with a stylist and told friends that she wanted a “princess moment.” “I told her it’s an inauguration, not a coronation,” one friend recalled. “The sentiment was that Americans wanted a royal family.”

And get this about that feckless git, Ivanka’s post election loss plan:

The week before the election, she had submitted the manuscript for her book Women Who Work and anticipated the editing process. Executives at Portfolio, her publisher, felt that the manuscript was largely devoid of emotion. They solicited her to add personal, engaging details about her relationship with her parents—”to make her seem like she had a pulse,” one person involved with the book explained. “Like she was a human.”

I’m guessing she probably had to hire a ghost writer for that.

Obama on the morning after

Published by digby on May 31, 2018

Obama on the morning after

by digby

The Horror


This New York Times piece about former Obama official Ben Rhodes’ memoir makes me not want to read it since I think it will bring me back down to a place I don’t ever want to be again:

Riding in a motorcade in Lima, Peru, shortly after the 2016 election, President Barack Obama was struggling to understand Donald J. Trump’s victory.

“What if we were wrong?” he asked aides riding with him in the armored presidential limousine.

He had read a column asserting that liberals had forgotten how important identity was to people and had promoted an empty cosmopolitan globalism that made many feel left behind. “Maybe we pushed too far,” Mr. Obama said. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”
[…]
Mr. Rhodes describes the reaction of foreign leaders. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan apologized for breaching protocol by meeting with Mr. Trump at Trump Tower in Manhattan after the election. Mr. Obama urged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada to take on a more vocal role defending the values they shared.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told Mr. Obama that she felt more obliged to run for another term because of Mr. Trump’s election to defend the liberal international order. When they parted for the final time, Ms. Merkel had a single tear in her eye. “She’s all alone,” Mr. Obama noted.

And yet despite criticism even from former advisers to Mr. Obama, Mr. Rhodes offers little sense that the former president thought he could have done more to counter Russian involvement in the election. Mr. Obama had authorized a statement to be issued by intelligence agency leaders a month before the election warning of Russian interference, but was thwarted from doing more because Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, refused to go along with a bipartisan statement.

Mr. Rhodes called Mr. McConnell’s refusal “staggeringly partisan and unpatriotic.” But Mr. Obama, whose Supreme Court nomination had been blocked by Mr. McConnell for months, seemed less surprised.

“What else did you expect from McConnell?” he asked. “He won’t even give us a hearing on Merrick Garland.”

Still, in preparatory sessions before meetings with the news media before the election, aides pressed Mr. Obama to respond to criticism that he should speak out more about Russian meddling. “I talk about it every time I’m asked,” he responded. “What else are we going to do? We’ve warned folks.”

He noted that Mr. Trump was already claiming that the election would be manipulated if Hillary Clinton won. “If I speak out more, he’ll just say it’s rigged,” Mr. Obama said.

Rhodes writes that neither he nor the President knew about the FBI investigation into Trump’s campaign and Russia. That’s what the FBI and the Department of Justice say as well, although you’ll never convince the wingnuts that the Kenyan Usurper didn’t direct them to take down Trump (but wait until he won to do it for some reason…)

The next day, Mr. Obama focused on cheering up his despondent staff. At one point, he sent a message to Mr. Rhodes saying, “There are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the earth.”

But days later, Mr. Obama seemed less sanguine. “I don’t know,” he told aides. “Maybe this is what people want. I’ve got the economy set up well for him. No facts. No consequences. They can just have a cartoon.”

He added that “we’re about to find out just how resilient our institutions are, at home and around the world.”

The day Mr. Obama hosted Mr. Trump at the White House after the election seemed surreal. Mr. Trump kept steering the conversation back to the size of his rallies, noting that he and Mr. Obama could draw big crowds, but Mrs. Clinton could not, Mr. Rhodes writes.

Afterward, Mr. Obama called a few aides to the Oval Office to ruminate on the encounter. “I’m trying to place him in American history,” he said.

“He peddles” bull, Mr. Rhodes answered. “That character has always been part of the American story. You can see it right back to some of the characters in Huckleberry Finn.”

“Maybe,” Mr. Obama answered, “that’s the best we can hope for.”

Jesus.

I wonder if Obama knew that Trump’s only agenda would be to reverse everything he did.

It’s true that there have always been conmen and snake oil salesmen in America. Don’t stop with Mark Twain. Read Herman Melville, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald and more for a road map to this bullshit. There have been endless cults and faux “movements” led by such hustlers from the very beginning. These hoaxsters and phonies are as American as it gets.

I don’t think we ever thought that one could become president although I guess we should have figured it out. And in this case, the fault really lies with the fools who follow him. They yearned to be fed some ugly, ugly hate and they got it in spades.

Obama was obviously depressed by the result as all decent people were. But he always seems to be surprised by the fact that Republicans, including their voters, could ever be as ruthlessly nihilistic and anarchistic as they are. All the way to the end, it seems.

I worry that even in the face of this monumental clusterfuck of an administration, other Democratic officials have still not learned that lesson.

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L’etat c’est moi o’ the day

Published by digby on May 31, 2018

L’etat c’est moi o’ the day

 by digby

“When the outcome is fixed, when the system is rigged, people lose hope. They detach. Our society becomes unplugged and unhinged. When the powerful can get away with anything, because they have the money and the connections to rig the system, then the laws lose their moral authority.” — Donald Trump, 2016

Trump loves using his royal prerogative powers as King of all Real Americans. Via Think Progress:

Donald Trump announced he will pardon conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza on Thursday, erasing his political ally’s May 2014 guilty plea to a campaign finance felony. The unexpected move comes a day after meeting with Kim Kardashian to discuss the importance of “prison reform and sentencing” and as several former Trump employees mull how to deal with their own legal issues stemming from Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

Trump made the announcement via a Thursday morning tweet, once again bypassing the longstanding process of vetting pardons and commutation petitions. The president’s only justification for the “full pardon” was his claim that D’Souza was somehow treated “unfairly.” In reality, he admitted to circumventing federal campaign finance limits by reimbursing associates for $20,000 worth of contributions made in their own names to Republican Wendy Long’s unsuccessful 2012 U.S. Senate campaign in New York — a felony.

Like Trump, D’Souza earned his political fame and conservative bona fides by questioning the Americanness of Barack Obama. He is currently promoting a book which purportedly exposes “the Nazi roots of the American left.”

D’Souza marked the fourth living person to receive a pardon or commutation from Trump so far, joining fellow birther and political ally Joe Arpaio, convicted Justice-obstructer I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and former Navy sailor Kristian Saucier. Each has had distinctly political undertones.

An array of government ethics and legal experts were quick to point out that the Dinesh pardon and others appear to be a signal to former employees that he will protect them from punishment if they protect him from Mueller’s investigation. Trump tweeted on Sunday of his concern for the “young and beautiful lives (and others) that have been devastated and destroyed by the phony Russia Collusion Witch Hunt.”

Trump’s midterm strategy. Oh boy.

Published by digby on May 31, 2018

Trump’s midterm strategy. Oh boy.

by digby

My Salon column this morning is about the Trump strategy for the mid-terms. It’s not pretty:

Now that the midterm election campaign is finally rolling, we will undoubtedly start hearing a whole lot about polls again. Not to worry, Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight assures us that contrary to popular myth, polling has not fallen apart and is as reliable as it’s ever been — which is to say, fairly reliable. Silver and his crew have done a thorough analysis of the various organizations, if you are a polling junkie. The rest of us will do fine by just checking the polling averages at the various websites that aggregate them all.

But one of the difficult things to measure in standard polling is enthusiasm.

Pollsters do ask the question and try to quantify intensity, but who knows how people are going to feel months from now, right? So far, the off-year and special elections over the past year have shown a substantial advantage in enthusiasm for the Democrats, and they’ve had much greater success at the ballot box than the Republicans. Democratic voters have very intense feelings about Donald Trump and the direction of the country, and since midterms are almost always a referendum on the president, that’s probably a good sign for the proverbial “Blue Wave” that everyone is anticipating to crest in November.

But while the Democrats may be galvanized and motivated to take back Congress in order to stop Trump’s legislative agenda and provide the oversight that the Republicans have irresponsibly abdicated in order to cover up their leader’s misdeeds and malfeasance, that’s not the whole story. The GOP is deeply in thrall to Donald Trump; the base voters never waver in their devotion, no matter what he’s done. They may just not be as enthusiastic about voting for their own Congressional representative, and that’s where the president comes in.

Trump’s going to hit the campaign trail tough this fall, and if his Tennessee rally on Tuesday is an example, he’s taking off the gloves. And if those rally-goers are any example, he hasn’t lost his ability to bring them to screaming ecstasy.

Both Politico and The New York Times had stories yesterday about Trump’s campaign plans. Politico headlined theirs, “Trump’s new midterm strategy: Outrage.” They report that Trump will brag about his alleged accomplishments, of course. That goes without saying. But mostly it’s going to be about attacking the media and immigrants, with a focus on the violent street gang MS-13.

There is evidence that Trump’s attacks on the media have already born fruit, via Politico:

GOP campaign strategists say they need to close the intensity gap with Democrats, who are anticipating an anti-Trump wave. Stoking outrage has proven effective. An October POLITICO/Morning Consult poll found that 76 percent of Republicans think the news media fabricate stories about Trump. And a Poynter Institute study last year found that more than 60 percent of respondents who supported Trump believe that the media is the “enemy of the American people.”

The New York Times reported that Trump was going to target red-state Democratic senators specifically with his red-meat message:

In both his own campaign and a series of special elections since, Mr. Trump has been far better equipped to knock down a rival than to lift up an ally. The hope now is that his savage attacks, penchant for mimicry and resourcefulness in nickname creation — recall “Lyin’ Ted” and “Little Marco” — can be turned to devastating effect on the very Senate Democrats who have gone to lengths to avoid publicly breaking with him. 

“He’s the definer in chief,” said Rob Collins, who ran the National Republican Senatorial Committee when the party took back the chamber in 2014. “He comes in, defines the opponent in a way that’s unconventional and unorthodox, but it sticks.”

Calling him the “definer in chief” is a nice way to say that he comes up with puerile insults that his followers adore and repeat like parrots.

But unlike the Democrats, Trump himself is not shying away from talking about impeachment. Indeed, he is going out there and saying directly that if Republicans don’t get off the couch and vote, the Democrats are going to run him out of office. Normally, a politician would not introduce a subject like that for fear of creating a question in anyone’s mind that there might be some legitimacy to such a move. But that’s where Trump’s strategy of impugning the integrity and patriotism of the Justice Department, the Special Prosecutor, the Intelligence Community and the normal congressional oversight process comes in.

He’s already declaring the whole thing is “rigged,” just as he did during the campaign, and is even tweeting that the “13 Angry Democrats” of the Mueller investigation will be “meddling in the midterms.” As I pointed out the other day, Trump’s TV lawyer Rudy Giuliani openly admitted that their legal strategy is to delegitimize the prosecutors among Republican voters in order to taint the jury pool.

That’s already working too.

According to a recent CNN poll just 17 percent of Republicans give Mueller a positive approval rating, down from 29 percent in March. You’ll recall that the president didn’t mention Mueller’s name or the Special Prosecutor’s office until fairly recently.

If Trump’s Nashville rally on Tuesday was indicative of how he plans to campaign, we’re in for some very energetic racial demagoguery. He attacked Jay-Z for his “filthy language” (which, coming from the man on the Access Hollywood tape, is rich) and his crowds seem even more aroused by the immigration issue than they were in 2016. You’ll recall that he was criticized recently over a discussion in which he called gang members “animals” in such a slippery way that it was obviously meant as a racist dog-whistle he intended to apply to ordinary undocumented workers as well. Just last week he said of unaccompanied children at the border, “they look so innocent. They’re not innocent.”

This is not entirely new, of course. He said much the same about Syrian refugee children, and he has always engaged in the most lurid, bloodthirsty rhetoric about Muslims, undocumented immigrants and inner city gangs. He gets very intense and focused when he’s ranting about “blood-stained killing fields” and people who are “savagely burning, raping, and mutilating” in vivid detail on the stump.

But even his crowd seemed a little bit thrown by where he went with it in Nashville. Others were appalled:

Nonetheless, the crowd all dutifully yelled “animals!” when Trump introduced his sickening new call and response and spoke of our country as if he’s liberated it from an invading horde:

Whatever is wrong with America, he alone can fix it with his “big beautiful hands”:

That’s a very disturbed demagogue who is just letting his id run wild. The question is how many people Trump can inspire to get up off their couches and vote in November with this ugly message. And what will they do if they lose?

Another Letter to the NY Times by tristero

Published by digby on May 31, 2018
Another Letter to the NY Times 

by tristero

To the Editor:

Whether canceling “Roseanne” is an act of corporate bravery or just retribution, the fact remains that the public shaming of Roseanne Barr will do nothing to change her heart about her feelings about African-Americans and may in fact intensify the feeling of persecution felt by those people who share her rancid point of view. 

The real teaching moment is for liberals to stop feeling so morally superior when we stand up to racism in this way and learn that to change people’s outlook, you have to persuade them through example that they will be better people if they eschew their racist tendencies and recognize the humanity that exists in all of us. 

MICHAEL SCOTT, SAN FRANCISCO

Bullshit. It’s not I who refuses to recognize Roseanne Barr’s humanity, but Barr who explicitly refused to recognized the humanity of others. It’s not any kind of “retribution” for such dehumanization to be condemned and for the purveyors of dehumanization to experience consequences. It’s simply necessary.

Nor is it particularly brave for a corporation to have cancelled her show. It was simple human decency of the sort Barr doesn’t have.

Finally, liberals “persuade by example” not by trying to engage people who simply are too wrapped up in their bigotry to be engaged but by expressing outrage at racist remarks and insisting they have no place in public discourse.

The Dread by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 31, 2018

The Dread
by Tom Sullivan

Existential dread is such a chronic malady among white people it is surprising Big Pharma is not already marketing a colorful pill expressly for it. A dozen years long ago, Mark Steyn screamed a claxon warning in the pages of the Wall Street Journal that the West’s low birthrates relative to the Muslim world portended the end of western civilization before the century is out. Our “lack of civilizational confidence” meant slow suicide by immigration and, I guess, too much sex for recreation rather than procreation. Meaning white women needed to stop taking their monthly pills and white men needed to stock up on the little blue ones.

The Dread grew more slowly among non-readers of the Journal. It’s been out there, building slowly, subconsciously for years. White people would eventually become just another minority in the United States. Still quite a large plurality, to be sure, but, short of a parliamentary-style coalition with Others, lacking the electoral clout to rule as God intended. White people know well how this country treats minorities. They have been the ones doing the treating for centuries.

September 11 was a gut-punch to our civilizational confidence. But it was the one-two combination of electing the first black president followed by a white nationalist to unleash The Dread in the land. Donald Trump openly campaigned for president by calling it forth like Imhotep from the undead.

No wonder white people are angry and self-medicating. On the political right especially, the alphas cannot admit to feeling threatened. (It’s an authoritarian thing.) Another way must be found to treat the fear. Kicking down will do in a pinch.

A study in Social Forces released on Wednesday by researchers at two California universities puts data behind what we already knew (Washington Post):

White Americans are more likely to favor welfare cuts when they believe that their status is threatened and that minorities are the main beneficiaries of safety net programs, the study says.

In other news, the sky is blue.

Co-authors Rachel Wetts of UC Berkeley and Robb Willer of Stanford examined 10 years of data on attitudes towards race and social welfare programs. One survey found “whites’ racial resentment rose in 2008, the same year of the Great Recession and election of Barack Obama, suggesting that perceptions of increased political power among minorities were leading whites to sense a threat to their group’s status.” The data showed opposition to social welfare programs rising over the same period among all Americans, but sharply among whites whose scores on racial resentment also tracked upwards. The sociologists designed three experiments to determine if the two were linked:

White Americans called for deeper cuts to welfare programs after viewing charts that showed they would become a racial minority within 50 years. They also opposed welfare programs more when they were told that people of color benefit most from them.

Those results show that the push to cut welfare programs is not driven by pure political motives, such as decreasing government spending or shrinking government bureaucracy, Wetts said.

“We find evidence that these shifts [in sentiment against welfare programs] are specifically directed at programs people see as benefiting minorities instead of whites,” she added.

Other factors might be at play as well, Wetts admits. Anxieties over the pace of change, for example. Still, say political scientists Adam M. Enders and Jamil S. Scott. “More and more, white Americans use their racial attitudes to help them decide their positions on political questions such as whom to vote for or what stance to take on important issues including welfare and health care.”

Sean McElwee covered some of this same ground in 2015:

Similarly, in absolute terms, whites do better under Democratic than under Republican leadership. But that doesn’t really matter. People weigh their well-being relative to those around them. There is strong evidence that whites often oppose actions against inequality because of “last place aversion,” the desire to ensure that there is a class of people below oneself. Among white voters, racial bias is strongly correlated with lower support of redistributive programs. For example, research shows that opposition to welfare is driven by racial anger. Approximately half of the difference between social spending in the U.S. and Europe can be explained by racial animosity.

What people underestimate is the power of power in social relationships. As Lyndon Johnson once said, “If you can convince the lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll even empty his pockets for you.”

The Social Forces study follows others demonstrating that in a period in which they feel their position on the social ladder challenged, the last thing many white people want is to help anyone on a lower wrung move up. Even if they themselves are harmed in the process.

So in pursuit of maintaining white power requiring identity cards for voting is a popular enthusiasm among (disproportionately white) Republicans even if the laws deny the vote to their own partisans.

A 2012 survey from University of Delaware’s Center for Political Communication showed people “harbor negative sentiments towards African Americans” are more likely to support voter ID laws. (This includes Democrats who score high in racial resentment.) That such laws disproportionately impede voting by students, racial minorities, and the poor who tend to vote with Democrats is not a bug, but a feature.

But the laws drawn to bolster declining white electoral clout among Republicans impact Republican voters as well. Women, in particular.

Dahlia Lithwick speculated in 2013 that since Republican voter ID laws impact women disproportionately, the wave of new laws might be seen as “the next front in the war on women.” But since “women in red states … have much higher divorce and remarriage rates. And women in the South have especially high remarriage rates,” Republican women may be harmed as well as Democratic voters.

I found just this problem in North Carolina with the state’s VIVA omnibus voting law bill. The actuaries designing voter ID laws know this. They just don’t care:

See, GOP leaders are playing the percentages. They figure that VIVA’s voting restrictions will hurt more Democrats than Republicans — and they will hurt Republicans. Still, Republican leaders calculate that, in the end, the net result will help them hold onto power. Indefinitely.

But the real story North Carolina and the rest of the country misses is that Republican leaders consider any of their own voters hurt by these vote suppression measures collateral damage. Acceptable casualties. Expendables.

The Dread has white people both lashing out at minorities and eating their own. Coming to grips with the existential fear on a policy level means acknowledging that race and class are inextricably intertwined.

Rev. Dr. William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, told PBS NewsHour on Wednesday that racism, poverty and militarism are indeed interconnected:

We are saying there are five interlocking injustices that America has to face, because they continue to cause policy violence.

That is systemic racism, particularly seen through the lens of voter suppression, where people use voter suppression to get elected, and then, once they get elected, they pass policies that hurt the poor, mostly white women, children and the working poor.

Systemic race — systemic poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy and militarism, and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism that says, you don’t have to address those issues.

We are saying, yes, America is going to have to face these five interlocking injustices and change them.

Anat Shenker-Osorio (Don’t Buy It) tweeted in response to the Social Forces study, “This is why we must treat race and class as they are: inextricably linked. Divide and conquer is the trick they use to turn us not merely against people of color but the very idea of shared fate and with it government.”

E pluribus unum may be out of fashion on the right, but it is inevitable, Dread or no Dread.

* * * * * * * *

For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

“The greatest threat to our democracy…”

Published by digby on May 31, 2018

“The greatest threat to our democracy…”

by digby

I don’t know anything about this Democratic candidate’s politics with respect to issues. But I admire his willingness to go here:

I understand he has a good chance to beat Barbara Comstock, the odious former anti-Clinton dirty trickster from the 1990s.

So, more power to him. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

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Inauguration day 2024?

Published by digby on May 30, 2018

Inauguration day 2024?

by digby

Don’t laugh. Donald Trump is president.

I’m personally looking forward to the Real Housewives of Orange County getting the Medal of Freedom.

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The behavior of a guilty man

Published by digby on May 30, 2018

The behavior of a guilty man

by digby

About all that collusion:

The Times’ Michael S. Schmidt and Julie Hirschfield David report the encounter occurred in March 2017, shortly after Sessions first recused himself:

The president objected to his decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. Mr. Trump, who had told aides that he needed a loyalist overseeing the inquiry, berated Mr. Sessions and told him he should reverse his decision, an unusual and potentially inappropriate request.
Mr. Sessions refused. 

The confrontation, which has not been previously reported, is being investigated by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, as are the president’s public and private attacks on Mr. Sessions and efforts to get him to resign. Mr. Trump dwelled on the recusal for months, according to confidants and current and former administration officials who described his behavior toward the attorney general.

Rather remarkably, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani seemed to tacitly confirm the episode in a comment to the Times. “Unrecuse’ doesn’t say, ‘Bury the investigation,’” Giuliani said. “It says on the face of it: Take responsibility for it and handle it correctly.”

In retrospect, it makes sense that this kind of episode would exist. On that list of 49 questions Trump’s lawyers believe Mueller is interested in asking Trump, eight of them deal specifically with Sessions’s recusal. It’s been clear for a while that Trump was unhappy with that decision — and The Post has long reported Sessions has been a significant focus of Mueller’s — but some questions seemed to allude specifically to an episode such as this:
“What did you think and do regarding the recusal of Mr. Sessions?”
“What efforts did you make to try to get him to change his mind?”

That latter question was initially thought to refer to a previously reported effort by Trump to get White House counsel Donald McGahn to prevent Sessions from recusing himself. Turns out, it also seems to have been about this episode. And given Trump seems to have attempted to stop, tried to reverse and repeatedly rued Sessions’s decision, it’s not unreasonable to think there might be other episodes we simply don’t know about yet.

Other questions sure seem to point in that direction. For instance, one question was: “What did you think and do in reaction to the news that the special counsel was speaking to Mr. Rogers, Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Coats?” Trump reportedly asked Coats (in front of Pompeo) to try to help him get leniency for Michael Flynn, but this clearly isn’t that.

Another question was: “What did you think and what did you do in reaction to the news of the appointment of the special counsel?” Another was: ” … What did you do when that consideration [of firing Mueller] was reported in January 2018?” Neither are entirely clear when it comes to the events they refer to. But the fact that the mystery of the Sessions questions above had a somewhat logical solution — another potential instance of behavior that could be interpreted as obstruction of justice — suggests there are very likely to be others. Did Trump take further action to try to undercut Mueller from the get-go? The lesson from this latest disclosure seems to be that it was likely.

Former federal prosecutor Harry Littman pointed out on MSNBC today that Trump’s oft-repeated line that he never would have hired Jeff Sessions if he had told him that he would recuse himself indicates that he expected Session to pledge fealty to him no matter what happened in the future. He is the liege lord.

We have strong reason to doubt that Mueller will charge Trump with anything including obstruction of justice. (He might charge others close to him, of course.) And who knows what might happen with the conspiracy case, money laundering etc. But the obstruction case especially is likely going to end up in a report that may serve as the basis for impeachment. If he pushed Sessions to obstruct justice on his behalf, that may be an element that shakes loose some GOP senators. He’s one of them.

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