Month: September 2018

Saturday Night at the Movies

Through the looking glass – Fahrenheit 11/9 (***½)

By Dennis Hartley

On occasion, like any self-respecting lefty cuck, I will “hate-watch” Fox or “hate-read” Breitbart. Today Breitbart has a post entitled “MICHAEL MOORE’S 11/9 TANKS AT BOX OFFICE” (barely 24 hours after the film opened wide…but whatevs). As I skimmed through, risking a bout of vertigo from eye-rolling, this bit caught my attention:

We go to the movies to see what we cannot see at home; so, what can Moore possibly offer in a world where a Jake Tapper is topping him daily, a world where Moore’s dishonest and shameless leftism runs wild 24/7… and is just a click away?

Dismissing the predictable tribalism, the OP raises a legit concern; one I admit consumed me yesterday, even as I forked over my hard-earned $13 (and an additional $7.50 for a goddam SMALL popcorn). Now I loves me some Michael Moore, and I feel duty-bound to cover this film, which could well be our final beacon of hope in these dark, dark times.

But I fear that Trump Fatigue threatens to overtake me. In my private despair (which I labored to hide beneath a brave face, for the sake of my fellow dedicated graying Seattle libs scattered throughout the sparsely attended 3pm matinee showing) I indeed pondered what insight Moore could possibly offer at this point, in a world where anybody who still gives two shits about our Democracy is on 24-hour Trump watch…and just a click away?

Was I in for 2 hours of Trump-bashing? I would nod in agreement, while thoughtfully stroking my chin. But to what end? The credits would come up, I’d go home, turn on the news, and…he’d still be in office. That’s the bad news (he’s still in office). The good news is that Moore’s film is not necessarily all about President Donald J. Trump himself.

It’s about us. According to Moore, we all had a hand in this (consciously or not).

In my 2011 review of the documentary Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today, I wrote:

“Crimes against humanity” are still perpetrated every day-so why haven’t we had any more Nurembergs? If it can’t be caught via cell phone camera and posted five minutes later on YouTube like Saddam Hussein’s execution, so we can take a quick peek, go “Yay! Justice is served!” and then get back to our busy schedule of eating stuffed-crust pizza and watching the Superbowl, I guess we just can’t be bothered. Besides, who wants to follow some boring 11-month long trial, anyway (unless, of course, an ex-football player is involved). 

Or maybe it’s just that the perpetrators have become savvier since 1945; many of those who commit crimes against humanity these days wear nice suits and have corporate expense accounts, nu? Or maybe it’s too hard to tell who the (figurative) Nazis are today, because in the current political climate, everyone and anyone, at some point, is destined to be compared to one.

Let’s dispense with this first. Yes, Michael Moore goes “there” in his latest documentary Fahrenheit 11/9…at one point in the film, he deigns to compare Trump’s America to Nazi Germany. However, he’s not engaging in meritless trolling. Rather (as Moore slyly implies), don’t take his word for it-listen to what one of his interviewees has to say here:

“Taking [immigrant] babies away from their mother [at the U.S. border] and locking up one or the other and separating them because they did no harm to anybody…they just didn’t comply with the stupid regulations…that’s a crime against humanity in my judgement.”

OK, so that’s one man’s opinion. You would be perfectly within your rights as a healthy skeptic to counter with “and what makes this guy such an expert on what constitutes a “crime against humanity”? Unless the gentleman in question happened to be the last surviving Nuremberg trials prosecutor…which he is. 99-year-old Ben Ferencz’s appearance recalls the scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen “just happens to have” Marshall McLuhan on hand to call out an insufferable blowhard waiting in a movie line.

So how did we get here? It’s complicated. Following a brief (and painful to relive) recap of what “happened” on 11/9/16, Moore’s film accordingly speeds off in multiple directions As he has always managed to do in the past, he connects the dots and pulls it together by the end. In a nutshell, Moore’s central thesis is that Trump is a symptom, not the cause. And the “cause” here is complacency-which Moore equates with complicity.

Specific to 2016, it is the complacency of the 64% of eligible American voters who sat out the election. But Moore does not lay the blame squarely on disenfranchised voters, many of whom have valid reasons to be disillusioned and fed up with politicians in general. He cites a number of examples, and he spares no one. In fact, he lays into a few sacred cows of the Left; the DNC, President Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama.

The most dangerous kind of complacency is what happened in Michigan, and enabled Governor Rick Snyder to essentially seize despotic control of the state under the guise of “emergency powers”. Moore traces the political machinations that led to the water crisis in his home town of Flint, and it’s chilling. Using comparisons with how a democratic, liberal Germany handed power to the Nazis in the 1930s, Moore envisions how easily Trump could take a page from Snyder’s playbook and implement it on a national scale.

If this is all beginning to sound dark and despairing…well, it is. However, this is Michael Moore. He knows exactly when to interject levity and hope into an otherwise sobering treatise (e.g. he drives a truck full of Flint water up to the gates of Governor Snyder’s mansion and proceeds to water his lawn with a high-pressure hose). He reminds us that there is a grassroots movement afoot that hopefully continues to catch fire; from the nationwide teacher strikes that began in West Virginia to the blue wave of progressive candidates in this year’s midterm primaries. He spotlights the passion and determination of the student activist groups that organized in the wake of the Parkland school shootings.

If you’re a Michael Moore fan, you will not be disappointed. If you a Michael Moore hater, this film likely won’t change your opinion (although I am flattered that you’ve chosen this post as your daily “hate read”). The rest of you can play amongst yourselves; but do me (and the country, and our Democracy) one favor? Please, please vote this time.

Previous posts with related themes:
Michael and me in Trumpland

More reviews at Den of Cinema
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–Dennis Hartley

The Imperialist Whine

by digby

This thread about Brexit has been making the rounds on twitter and I thought I’d just share it here for the record. I think it’s quite profound:

Brexit makes sense for a nation that feels sorry for itself, but the mystery is how Britain as a modern prosperous nation came to define its political future through self pity.

The higher we think of ourselves the more we can feel sorry for ourselves when we don’t get what we believe we deserve.

Self pity combines a deep sense of grievance and a high sense of superiority. Passionate nationalism has taken two antagonistic forms – imperial and anti imperial.

Brexit wants to be both imperial and anti imperial.

Brexit is an insurgency and needs to imagine that it is a revolt against intolerable oppression.

Britain historically entitled to a grudge. 1971: Colin Wilson argued that a grudge had built up over 25 years due to disappointment at the results of the war.

By no means ridiculous to feel that the British had deserved much but received little.

Fintan O’Toole does not begrudge the British their national grudge.

Postwar loss of sense of superiority led to British self pity.

Psychological power of Brexit: fused superiority and inferiority into a single emotion. Both enormously hard done by and enormously grand.

British sense of disappointment that joining EEC will lead to a new era and resolve all problems – added to previous sense of postwar loss.

Welfare state functioned as a bulwark against self pity. Consolation for decline is the notion that Britain is doing something radical and profound.

Erosion of welfare state from Thatcher onwards, then becomes regarded nostalgically as part of a lost golden age.

Need for a new scapegoat for failure – non white immigrants

Overt racism shifts out of respectability (until recently) after accession to the EEC.

Without parallel? A functioning Western state starts to see itself as fundamentally oppressed.

England now starts to imagine itself not as an empire but as a colony.

Importance of the word “humiliation” – including in today’s headlines. (What happened? Just that May didn’t get her way.)

Robert Harris’s Fatherland written against backdrop of German reunification. NB also Len Deighton’s SSGB.

Harris’s alternative history invokes an alternative Treaty of Rome – Britain forced into a European trading bloc.

While Harris was writing Fatherland in 1990, Nicholas Ridley compared EEC to the Nazis.

Attraction of this kind of self pity is that it allows a fantasy of the emergence of a future heroic English resistance.

EU as oppressor has to be invented by the English to facilitate dark invasion fantasy.

This is a way of dealing with post imperial guilt: we are not responsible for anything because we are being oppressed.

Patrick Melrose novels speak to the masochistic fantasies of a ruling class that has lost its power.

In the Melrose novels the image of the Irish famine is evoked very directly.

This type of storytelling part of a larger narrative oppression. Boris Johnson contributes to this – Johnson the journalists invents EU oppression. Started with the threat to prawn cocktail flavour crisps. The more absurd the examples, the less easy it is to deal with them.

Stories about straight bananas exist in the same realm as fiction.

Favourite Brexit form of discourse – imagine we’re the Irish Free State. Dominic Raab as Michael Collins. Hannan: get agreement than throw off the conditions as a Free State did after 1922.

Note the breathtaking reversal of self image: we are now the Irish in 1921, EU is Lloyd George Government.

Maybe there is a last stage of imperialism when zombie imperialists have one last thing to appropriate from their former colonies – which is their pain.

I think you can see the echoes in our own situation.

One of the most unbearable aspects of Trumpism and the conservative movement writ large is this constant whining about how they are the “real victims.” Trump’s rhetoric is more childish but it comes from the same place. It informs his whole ignorant worldview about trade and defense and alliances.

I have long said that he’s not an isolationist as much as people yearn to believe it. He is actually an imperialist — a simple-minded one to be sure — but an imperialist nonetheless.

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A searing indictment

by digby

Watch this ad all the way to the end. Devastating …

BY the way, this is the goof who told Peter Strzok in that combative hearing that he could read body language because he’s a dentist.

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Money moving around that Trump Tower meeting

by digby

I don’t know what this means but I’ll bet Robert Mueller does:

On June 3, 2016, Donald Trump Jr. received one of the most striking emails of the presidential campaign, offering dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of the Russian government’s “support for Mr. Trump.”

Trump Jr. responded 17 minutes later: “if it’s what you say I love it.”

That email led to a meeting at Trump Tower that has become a central focus of the investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.

But the very day that email was sent, another exchange was taking place behind the scenes.

Documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News show that $3.3 million began moving on June 3 between two of the men who orchestrated the meeting: Aras Agalarov, a billionaire real estate developer close to both Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump, and Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze, a longtime Agalarov employee once investigated for money laundering.

That money is on top of the more than $20 million that was flagged as suspicious, BuzzFeed News revealed earlier this month, after the money ricocheted among the planners and participants of the Trump Tower meeting. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, which has been investigating whether any individuals colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election, is examining the suspicious transactions, four federal law enforcement officials said. A spokesperson for Mueller’s office declined to comment.

There is a lot more detail at Buzzfeed.

I don’t know if it’s related but this struck me as interesting:

To Goldstone, the most important line came toward the end: “Would you be able to speak to Emin about it directly?” he wrote. His goal was to separate himself from this request and get Agalarov and Trump Jr. talking directly.

“If it’s what you say I love it,” Trump Jr. responded.

Phone records provided to Congress show Trump Jr. and Emin Agalarov spoke briefly three days later as the singer stepped off a concert stage in Moscow.

Trump Jr. testified to Congress that he has no memory of a call. Balber said Agalarov has only vague recollection that they spoke.

The next day, Trump Jr. emailed Goldstone to say that he had invited Jared Kushner, his brother-in-law, and senior campaign official Paul Manafort to attend a meeting with the Russian lawyer set for June 9.

Trump Jr. testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee he did not know what to think of Goldstone’s email, but saw no problem with exploring whether he had important information. “I didn’t think that listening to someone with information relevant to the fitness and character of a presidential candidate would be an issue,” he said.

Goldstone said he concluded that Trump Jr. had been impressed by whatever Agalarov told him on the phone.

By any means necessary
by Tom Sullivan

Botham Jean

Every July 4th, America celebrates its declaring independence from rule by hereditary royalty and landed gentry. These days it seems our problem wasn’t with being governed by hereditary royalty and landed gentry, so much as that our British overlords were so … foreign.

John Cassidy of The New Yorker observes that if Brett Kavanaugh takes a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, it will be the second time in 18 months a scion of “the Washington governing class” from Georgetown Preparatory School has received a lifetime, taxpayer-funded job on the court. After obtaining a law degree from Harvard, it goes without saying. (Or Yale. Yale would do, too.) Kavanaugh faces allegations of sexual assault committed while attending Georgetown Prep:

The idea that members of the “law-and-order party” would appoint someone to the highest court in the land while he is facing an accusation of this nature, and before it has been fully investigated, is outrageous.

As is the the idea that a reprobate under investigation for financial crimes and conspiracy with a foreign government can nominate him before that has been fully investigated. Privilege has its privileges.

After noting the school’s $60,280 annual tuition for boarders and its graduates’ proclivity for landing “upper professional class” employment, Cassidy writes:

My point is a broader one about social class, privilege, and the intergenerational transmission of high status. It is bad enough in a country with hundreds of law schools that seven of the current Justices graduated from just two of them—Harvard and Yale—and that Kavanaugh would make it eight. (Ruth Bader Ginsburg transferred from Harvard to Columbia University’s law school.) If the United States is going to start reserving positions like Supreme Court Justice and chair of the Federal Reserve for folks who have attended the most exclusive private prep schools and the most prestigious Ivy League graduate schools, it might as well go the full hog and change its name to England. Olde England.

Donald J. Trump, the self-styled working-class hero born into wealth, nominated Kavanaugh. Trump fawns over “winners,” meaning those who, like himself, measure winning in stacks of hundreds, stock portfolios, and property deeds. The land of opportunity for America’s home-grown ruling class is one in which Americans not of their stature wear “sucker” written across their faces as in a Looney Tunes cartoon. The unpunished — that is, essentially state-sanctioned — pillaging of America by Wall Street that led to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and a grotesque widening of the wealth divide proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt. This is their country and they mean to keep it by any means necessary.

It is not that the concept of noblesse oblige is entirely dead, Adam Howard, a professor of education at Colby College, told NPR’s Here and Now. Elite schools pride themselves on instilling “courage, compassion, care, concern and all of that.” But that is not the main reason parents send children there. They send them to “make sure that they maintain and hopefully even advance their class position.” What students take away from their time in these elite settings is not always what the brochures advertise:

“But those same values, also there’s another side. They also encourage win-at-all-costs attitudes, unhealthy levels of stress, deception, materialism, competition and so forth, selfishness and greed. So there’s a different side to it.”

Just as the wealthy measure themselves against one another by their net worth, as measured against fellow Americans, their elite upbringing convinces some they are entitled to supplemental privileges. Such as being able to treat women like chattel and walk away protected by maleness and money. In a sense, the Tories never really went away. We just replaced one set for another.

It is a different America for others supposedly created equal: for women, for people of color, for the poor. Twenty-six year-old Botham Jean, black and unarmed like many before him, died from police gunfire in his Fort Worth apartment while watching football.

Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (another Harvard Law graduate) considers pointing out the wrongness of that something to hold up for ridicule:

In Beto O'Rourke's own words #TXSenateDebate pic.twitter.com/uUzW7DSqgo— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) September 21, 2018

[h/t N.A.]

* * * * * * * * *

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

Friday Night Soother

by digby

We need a red panda baby this week:

The Milwaukee County Zoo recently announced the birth of their first Red Panda cub! The yet unnamed female was born June 6, and she now shares a birthday with her father, Dash.

The cub was born to first time mother, “Dr. Erin Curry” (also known as Dr. E.). Mom is 3-years-old and is originally from the Cincinnati Zoo. First time father, Dash, is 6-years-old and originally from the Granby Zoo in Quebec, Canada.

Because the youngster is still getting acclimated to her new surroundings, animal care staff is allowing her plenty of time to become comfortable and bond with mom before her introduction to visitors. It’s the Zoo’s hope she will make her public debut in the next few weeks.

In the wild, Red Pandas live in the mountains of Nepal, northern Myanmar and central China. Red Pandas are considered endangered due to deforestation, poaching and trapping. With an estimated adult population of less than 2,500 and an approximate mortality rate of 86 percent, every Red Panda birth is very important.

Red Pandas are solitary animals, only interacting during mating season. Youngsters develop at a slow rate, spending the first year or more with mom. Blind for the first

21 to 31 days after birth, mothers keep cubs hidden in nests for the first two to three months. Mothers then teach the cubs how to climb and hunt.

Red Pandas rely on bamboo for most of their diet, specifically the most tender, young shoots and leaves. But, they are only able to extract one-fourth of the nutrients from the bamboo. They can spend up to 13 hours a day searching for and eating bamboo. During the summer months, they supplement their diet with fruit and insects. Cubs stop nursing around 13 to 22 weeks old.

Adult Red Pandas weigh up to 14 pounds and are around 2 feet-long, but their tails add extra length of up to 18-inches! This new addition weighed 166 grams at 3 days old and could fit in the palms of her keeper’s hands! She is now about 2,538 grams (5 pounds) and keepers say it takes both hands to pick her up.

Red Pandas are easily identifiable by their reddish-brown color, white face markings and speckling of black around their ears and legs. They begin to get this adult coloration around 50 days old, which acts as a camouflage. The fur covering their bodies also covers the pads on their feet. This helps Red Pandas keep the heat in their bodies during the cold winter months.

Zookeepers report that the new cub is doing very well, and first-time mother, Dr. E, is doing a great job raising her first cub. Details of her debut will be coming soon!

Good Riddance 

by tristero

Ben Carson:

“The fearful part [Because of the Kavanaugh accusations] is that good people will be afraid to serve their government. They won’t want to take the chance of their reputation being sullied,” he said while speaking at the Values Voter Summit.

If, by “good people,” does Carson mean people like Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump, Clarence Thomas, Rob Porter, John Bolton, Stephen Miller, Jeff Sessions, Scott Pruitt, and Carson himself? Are those the people he thinks are being discouraged from serving in government now?

Awesome. 

We must be doing something right.

Another good reason to flip the Senate

by digby

Tapper: “If the Democrats win back the House and/or the Senate, Democrats will investigate what happened, the charges that Professor Ford is laying out, even if that means investigating a [sitting] Supreme Court justice?”

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: “I am confident of that.”

BREAKING: CNN: Sen. Whitehouse: “This is such bad practice that even if they were to ram this guy through as soon as Democrats get gavels we’re going to want to get to the bottom of this…”
Tapper: “We’re out of time, but I want to make sure you understand what you just said.” pic.twitter.com/z12gu2KGzK

— Evan Rosenfeld (@Evan_Rosenfeld) September 20, 2018

He also said he wants to know why the FBI “stood down” which is interesting …

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Did Rosenstein really “suggest” wearing a wire? Not likely

by digby

The New York Times has reported out some gossip from inside the Justice Department back in May of 2017 around the time of the Comey firing in which a meeting between former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, Rod Rosenstein and others discussed the fact that Trump was a cretinous moron (my words not theirs). According to the Times, Rosenstein said he could talk to Kelly and Sessions about invoking the 25th Amendment declaring Trump incompetent and that he could wear a wire to record the president.  Apparently, he was also upset about being used by the president to write that silly memo rationalizing the Comey firing which you have thought he could have seen coming a mile away.

All of this is based upon second and third-hand information from anonymous sources who say they saw notes of the meetings — no direct participants spoke either on or off the record. We don’t even know if any of them aside from McCabe (whose notes seem to be what some of these people are basing their gossip on) work in the Justice Department.

On the other hand, the Washington Post reports, (NBC confirmed as well) that their sources say the meeting took place but that Rosenstein was being sarcastic responding to McCabe by saying “what do you want me to do Andy, wear a wire?” which sounds a lot more plausible.

Nobody has reported on why Rosenstein would have said he would talk specifically to Kelly and Sessions about the 25th Amendment since Kelly at the time wasn’t the Chief of Staff but rather the Director of Homeland Security and both men were known to be loyal Trumpers even if Sessions had recently recused himself.

Let’s just say this is a very weird story.

The point of it is obviously to give Trump cause to fire Rosenstein, although I don’t know exactly how he can prove anything based upon a “failing New York Times” story. But Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair is reporting that this is former Fox News president and current White House communications director Bill Shine’s baby and he is planning to roll out a major “fire Rosenstein” propaganda campaign.

I would guess it’s also designed to take some of the pressure off the Kavanaugh confirmation scandal in order to keep the public from bearing down too hard and precipitating a move for him to withdraw the nomination.

I think we all know Trump is likely to fire Sessions and Rosenstein after the midterms no matter what. This might just be more building of the groundwork or they may have decided they need to push it up for other reasons having to do with the investigation. (That Manafort plea has got them reeling.)

Anyway, it looks as though the New York Times is likely being a pawn in their game. Of course it wouldn’t be the first time.

Update —
Emptywheel:

I’d like to point out something strongly suggested by the stories based on gossiping about Andrew McCabe memos. These stories portray what people not at a meeting that took place just after Comey’s firing think happened at the meeting based off hearing about memos memorializing them. From the WaPo’s far more responsible version of the story, we know that Lisa Page was also present at the meeting.

Another official at the meeting, then-FBI lawyer Lisa Page, wrote her own memo of the discussion which does not mention any talk of the 25th amendment, according to a second person who was familiar with her account.

And the WaPo’s version of the “wire” comment puts it in context, making it clear that Rosenstein was questioning how they could investigate the President.

That person said the wire comment came in response to McCabe’s own pushing for the Justice Department to open an investigation into the president. To that, Rosenstein responded with what this person described as a sarcastic comment along the lines of, “What do you want to do, Andy, wire the president?”

Now go back to earlier in the week, to the frothy right rehashing some texts Page and Peter Strzok sent, talking about opening an investigation into … someone, while Andrew McCabe was Acting Director. (Apologies for the Fox slurs about Page and Strzok.)

Text messages from disgraced FBI figures Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, discussing whether to open a “case” in a “formal chargeable way” after Director James Comey was fired, are under fresh scrutiny after Page told congressional investigators there was no evidence of Russian collusion at the time, according to three congressional sources.

Two hours after Comey’s termination became public on May 9, 2017, Strzok, a now-former FBI agent, texted Page, his then-colleague and lover: “We need to open the case we’ve been waiting on now while Andy is acting.”

“Andy” is a reference to then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe who temporarily took over the bureau until Christopher Wray was confirmed as director in August 2017.

Page, a former FBI attorney, replied to Strzok: “We need to lock in (redacted). In a formal chargeable way. Soon.”

Strzok concurred. “I agree. I’ve been pushing and I’ll reemphasize with Bill,” believed to be Bill Priestap, the head of the FBI’s counterintelligence division.

Finally, here’s the WaPo version of Michael Bromwich’s description of the memos.

McCabe’s lawyer, Michael Bromwich, said in a statement that his client “drafted memos to memorialize significant discussions he had with high level officials and preserved them so he would have an accurate, contemporaneous record of those discussions. When he was interviewed by the special counsel more than a year ago, he gave all of his memos — classified and unclassified — to the special counsel’s office. A set of those memos remained at the FBI at the time of his departure in late January 2018. He has no knowledge of how any member of the media obtained those memos.”

These are “significant memos” and went right to Mueller when he was appointed. The kind of memos that might back investigative decisions, such as whether to open an investigation into the President.

So what the NYT spin of the story is about is suggesting that at the moment when DOJ opened an investigation into the President, the guy who opened it was “acting erratically.” Presumably based off the third-hand opinions of people like Jim Jordan, who knows a bit about acting erratically. It’s also about whether a discussion of removing the President took place at the same meeting where a discussion of investigating him did.

Likely, the messages are muddled, because they always are when getting laundered through Jim Jordan’s feverish little mind.

Nunes, Hannity and Dobbs must be so disappointed in Dear Leader today

by digby

They had “advised” him that this was the best course and he trusts their judgment implicitly, so much that he had issued the order without having any clue what was in the classified documents he ordered released:

I met with the DOJ concerning the declassification of various UNREDACTED documents. They agreed to release them but stated that so doing may have a perceived negative impact on the Russia probe. Also, key Allies’ called to ask not to release. Therefore, the Inspector General…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 21, 2018

….has been asked to review these documents on an expedited basis. I believe he will move quickly on this (and hopefully other things which he is looking at). In the end I can always declassify if it proves necessary. Speed is very important to me – and everyone!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 21, 2018

If I had to guess, I’d say that someone told him that the information in the documents made him look bad. That’s really the only reason he would do this. Unless Vlad was unhappy, of course.

Mark Warner had earlier warned Trump, “be careful what you wish for…”

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