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This septum horribilis isn’t over yet

Published by digby on December 21, 2018

This septum horribilis isn’t over yet

 by digby

My column this morning:

On Thursday night, over a chyron that said “Trump plunges Washington into chaos: Mattis resigns, shutdown looms, market dives,” CNN’s Don Lemon said, “right now there’s not a permanent attorney general, defense secretary or chief of staff. The government is on the verge of a shutdown because the president wants money for his border wall. Stocks are having the worst December since the Great Depression. And Robert Mueller has indicted multiple members of Trump’s inner circle. Is this administration melting down?”

I’m not sure why they were being so subtle about it. This may have been the single worst week of the Trump presidency. And it was only Thursday.

Earlier in the week we saw that astonishing Flynn sentencing hearing in which a federal judge, having read a pile of classified documents, excoriated Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn for “selling out his country” and potentially committing treason. This judge is the first person outside the Mueller team to see this evidence and it obviously shook him to the core. One imagines his reaction had a similar effect on Donald Trump who went uncharacteristically quiet about the issue.

Meanwhile, even though the president had said he would be “proud” to shut down the government if he didn’t get his border wall, cooler heads seemed to be prevailing. On Wednesday the Senate passed a continuing resolution to keep the government funded until February and the president was said to be willing to sign it. But then all hell broke loose on right-wing media. Ann Coulter declared his presidency a joke if he didn’t demand full funding for his wall. Rush Limbaugh compared him to Obama. Even Fox and Friends turned on him.

So he finally decided to take a stand and do the right thing: he unfollowed Ann Coulter on twitter. That was the end of that little rebellion. He got word to Limbaugh that he was reneging on the deal and called Paul Ryan up to the White House to instruct him to get that vote so he could show up Nancy Pelosi. And, as usual, they obediently complied to make him happy.

The Senate won’t pass that House bill and everyone knows it, even Trump. So, as I write this we are looking at a shutdown over the holidays. House Freedom Caucus chair Mark “Ebenezer” Meadows told the millions of federal workers who won’t get paid, “you signed up for this.” At least they can say Merry Christmas again.

The markets were not amused. The Dow is now at a 14 month low — it’s 5-day loses are more than 1700 points. The stock market commentators kept repeating the words “blood on the floor” over and over again. Trump is said to be concerned that he won’t be able to tout the best economy the world has ever known during a bear market. I’m not sure I believe that. A man who can look into a television camera and say that a non-existent border wall is already partially built is not exactly tethered to reality.

We also found out that Trump’s hand-picked toady to be the Acting Attorney General had been cleared by the ethics office of the Department of Justice of any conflict on interest so it’s perfectly fine for his not to recuse himself and oversee Rod Rosenstein’s management of the Mueller probe. At least that’s what they said. It turned out that the ethics officials had actually recommended he recuse himself because of the obvious appearance of a conflict of interest. So he conferred with his own unnamed advisers who told him he shouldn’t.

And as it happens, the man nominated to succeed him as a permanent Attorney General, William Barr, sent a private memo to the White House and the Justice Department railing against the Special Counsel’s office Obstruction of Justice investigation against the president. Presumably, he too will be cleared by the same unnamed advisers.

All these headlines had Trump tweeting furiously about sundry random subjects over the past few days. But no tweet startled the entire world more than this one, in which he announced “Mission Accomplished”

Trump seems to have been so rattled by his base’s reaction to his inability to ram through his promised wall that he’s decided to exercise his executive authority as Commander in Chief. His own government was startled by the news. Most of them knew nothing about it. It was later revealed that he’d made a similar order of withdrawal of Afghanistan.

This is a totally legitimate policy if pursued thoughtfully and strategically but I think everyone knows by now that those are not characteristics of the way Trump makes decisions. The Syria pullout seems to have been precipitated by a call from Turkish president Erdogon who told Trump that he was ordering troops to attack the Turkish Kurds in northern Syria, who happen to be the American allies in that misbegotten war. He made the decision on the spot. Even people who agree that America should not have sent those 2,000 troops to the war zone in the first place are terribly concerned about what will happen next.

Trump is not one of them. He says they’re ungrateful anyway and it’s time for them to finally fight:

Certainly, there will no care taken for the allies the US is leaving behind. After all, Trump is currently deporting Vietnamese refugees who’ve been in the US for decades.

And he lied egregiously, of course.

He inexplicably continues to think that his alleged “isolationism” makes sense in light of his mammoth military build up.

Russia, Iran, Turkey, and all other authoritarian governments on the planet were very happy to see him make this decision, especially the way he did it — capriciously and recklessly. His BFF Kim Jong Un was so pleased to see how he reacted to Turkish threats to attack US allies that he issued an ultimatum that he wouldn’t denuclearize until the US pulled out of South Korea. It’s a good week for despots.

But it’s not a good week for America. On Thursday Defense secretary James Mattis went to the White House to try to talk the president out of his abrupt withdrawal from Syria and ended up resigning in protest. He circulated his resignation letter and it said it all. He couldn’t continue to work with a president who didn’t “align” with his philosophy which he described, in a nutshell, as believing in supporting American allies and standing up to American adversaries. He didn’t praise Trump or offer any thanks, merely said that he was glad to have served the American people. It was the most stunning rebuke of this president from any high ranking official in his administration.

Mattis was one of the very few competent bureaucrats in the administration. As far as we know the Pentagon hasn’t been corrupted by the extremist grifter class that permeates the rest of the executive branch so his loss will be felt even by those who disagreed with his national security policy. Even Mitch McConnell seems shaken.

Trump seems happy to see him go.  Is he melting down? Well, yes, but what else is new? The problem this time is that his method of reasserting his hold is to start micromanaging the military. What could go wrong?

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cheers — digby

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