Month: December 2018

A “natural instinct for science”
by Tom Sullivan

Photo by Greenland Travel via Flickr.

Mocking laughter erupted in the conference room as a White House adviser promoted burning coal before 200 people gathered at the UN climate summit in Katowice, Poland on Monday, the Washington Posts reports:

Monday’s presentation came after a weekend in which the U.S. delegation undercut the talks by joining with major oil producers Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in blocking full endorsement of a critical U.N. climate report. The report, by some of the world’s leading scientists, found that the world has barely a decade to cut carbon emissions by nearly half to avoid catastrophic warming.

Vanuatu foreign minister Ralph Regenvanu called out the United States and other developed countries for climate denialism and for frustrating efforts to address climate change that threatens not just the economies of small island nations, but their very existence:

Regenvanu was part of a cohort of small island states in the Pacific and Indian oceans that urged greater global action on limiting global warming to 1.5C; leaders from Kiribati, Samoa, Tuvalu, the Cook Islands and the Maldives argued their countries faced an impending existential threat from climate change.

On Tuesday, the 13th year, NOAA’s Arctic Report Card warned rapid changes in the Arctic are “driving broad change in the environmental system in predicted and, also, unexpected ways.” A sampling:

• Surface air temperatures in the Arctic continued to warm at twice the rate relative to the rest of the globe. Arctic air temperatures for the past five years (2014-18) have exceeded all previous records since 1900.
• In the terrestrial system, atmospheric warming continued to drive broad, long-term trends in declining terrestrial snow cover, melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and lake ice, increasing summertime Arctic river discharge, and the expansion and greening of Arctic tundra vegetation.
• Despite increase of vegetation available for grazing, herd populations of caribou and wild reindeer across the Arctic tundra have declined by nearly 50% over the last two decades.
• In 2018 Arctic sea ice remained younger, thinner, and covered less area than in the past. The 12 lowest extents in the satellite record have occurred in the last 12 years.

NOAA acting administrator Tim Gallaudet could not tell reporters whether anyone at his agency had ever briefed the sitting president on climate change.

Trump, who claims a “natural instinct for science,” told CBS’s “60 Minutes” in October, “I think something’s happening. Something’s changing and it’ll change back again. I don’t think it’s a hoax, I think there’s probably a difference. But I don’t know that it’s man-made.”

As Vanuatu and the others sink beneath the waves.

“There are really two elections in America every two years…”


by digby

Andrew Cohen at the Brennan Center made a smart observation about the SDNY sentencing document in the Cohen case:

This paragraph, from page 23 of the sentencing memo filed by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York in the Cohen case, frames the issue as succinctly as any journalist or legal analyst ever has. It ought to be part of the prosecution’s opening statement should the president ever be impeached or simply become a criminal defendant.

Why does Donald Trump’s Justice Department — and not just special counsel Robert Mueller — want Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer to serve “substantial” time in a federal penitentiary? Here’s why:

First, Cohen’s commission of two campaign finance crimes on the eve of the 2016 election for President of the United States struck a blow to one of the core goals of the federal campaign finance laws: transparency. 

While many Americans who desired a particular outcome to the election knocked on doors, toiled at phone banks, or found any number of other legal ways to make their voices heard, Cohen sought to influence the election from the shadows. 

He did so by orchestrating secret and illegal payments to silence two women who otherwise would have made public their alleged extramarital affairs with Individual-1. In the process, Cohen deceived the voting public by hiding alleged facts that he believed would have had a substantial effect on the election.

This passage (it’s one graph in the actual filing) summarizes the investigation into the Trump team’s Russia ties and does so in a way that ought to resonate with voters who are not versed in the language of the law. It is a beautiful bit of legal writing because it makes the broader point about why, prosecutors say, what Trump and company have done here is not just immoral and unethical but illegal. Their efforts, the government alleges, have been aimed at ensuring that there are really two elections in America every two years. One for honest voters, the suckers like you and me, and the other for guys who hire guys like Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort.

The passage above explains not just the motive behind the hush money payments said to have been made by Cohen on Trump’s behalf to silence two women with whom the president allegedly had extramarital affairs. It explains not just what it says was the Trump team’s collaboration with Russian officials at a time when we know the Russians were actively seeking to interfere with our elections. It explains not just what prosecutors say was the president’s firing and hiring of FBI and Justice Department officials to try to obstruct the investigation into all of this. It also explains the broader Republican effort to undermine elections by suppressing the votes of people unlikely to vote for them.

Before the sun had set on the sentencing memos, Trump’s defenders were pitching the argument that every election is manipulated from “the shadows,” that campaign finance laws are too broad anyway, and that what Cohen and Manafort did here was not much different from what political operatives do in every campaign. The Washington Post referred to this reaction as a “shrugged shoulders” strategy by White House officials even as they prepare for “siege warfare” once Democrats take over control of the House of Representatives and start issuing subpoenas for testimony and documents. I call it cynical with gusts up to delusional. “Totally clears the President,” Trump Tweeted.

This was not ordinary political chicanery before the 2016 election. The Russians came for a reason, because in Trump they believed they had a guy they could work with — and it hasn’t been an ordinary cover-up since. There is nothing ordinary about agents of a foreign power trying to manipulate an American election or about a president using his sweeping executive power to protect himself from accountability with the executive branch itself. Besides, Cohen and Manafort committed their crimes, along with others as yet unidentified, at a time of particularly lax campaign finance laws (thanks, in part, to Citizens United).

The laws are complex. So were the machinations of the president’s men. But at the center of all of this is a simple story that we now know is based on evidence federal prosecutors would test in court. These guys broke the law to hide the truth about the 2016 election and then, when they were caught, they lied to cover it up. In so doing, they diminished the voting rights of the rest of us, undermined the integrity of our elections, gave aid and comfort to a foreign power, and sought to evade the rule of law through the obstruction of justice. That’s the signal here. The rest, from Individual Number 1 especially, is now and forever just the noise.

I’m not sure that half the country cares about any of that. We’re in one of those “win by any means possible” periods, fed by a blatantly immoral, powerful, propaganda machine that is making a large portion of this population lose their souls. Look what’s happening in the states — they lose and instead of regrouping to fight in the next election they just nullify the one that just happened by reducing the power of the incoming party.  We’re going to see how well our legal institutions hold up this time. So far, it’s not all that encouraging.

.

e. coli Conservatism supercharged by alleged germophobe


by digby

Making America Great Again — like back in the 1960s when rivers used to catch fire from all the pollution

“I want clean air. I want crystal clean water. And we’ve got it. We’ve got the cleanest country in the planet right now.” — Donald Trump

We’re not the cleanest country on the planet, not by a long shot. And it’s about to get worse:

The administration on Tuesday initiated the biggest rollback of Clean Water Act protections since shortly after the statute became law in 1972, proposing to remove federal pollution safeguards for tens of thousands of miles of streams and millions of acres of wetlands.

The EPA’s proposed rule would overwrite a stricter Obama-era regulation, in yet another attack on the legacy of President Donald Trump’s predecessor. But the rollback would go much further than just erasing Barack Obama’s work.

The Trump proposal represents the latest front in a decades-long battle over the scope of the landmark environmental law, whose requirements can impose major costs on energy companies, farmers, ranchers and real estate developers. Reversing Obama’s water regulation was one of Trump’s top environmental priorities — he signed an executive order directing the new rule barely a month after taking office, even as he repeatedly said he wanted “crystal clear water.”

Geoff Gisler, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, called the proposal a “sledgehammer to the Clean Water Act.”

“Out of all the anti-environmental attacks we have seen from this administration, this may be the most far-reaching and destructive,” he said in a statement.

The new proposal embraces a view that industry groups have pushed for years:that the law should cover only major rivers, their primary tributaries and wetlands along their banks. Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said this will save regulatory costs for industries such as mining and homebuilding, while arguing it will have little impact on the health of the country’s waters.

“Our new, more precise definition means that hard-working Americans will spend less time and money determining whether they need a federal permit, and more time upgrading aging infrastructure, building homes, creating jobs and growing crops to feed our families,” Wheeler said on a call Monday with reporters to unveil the proposal.

Meanwhile, I haven’t had a romaine salad in months.

I just don’t know what to say…

Read this piece from few years back by Rick Perlstein in which he coined the apt term “e. coli conservatism.”

.

QOTD: Pelosi

by digby

Many commentators are clutching their pearls over this but I think it’s just great. She just presided over a win of 40 seats and Trump instinctively tried to demean her like she is a weak sister who has no power because some idiots in the caucus staged a little hissy fit that nobody cared about. He is wrong.

She flexed her muscle in the meeting this morning and said this to the Democratic caucus afterward.

“Trump “must have said the word ‘wall’ 30 times.”

“It’s like a manhood thing with him — as if manhood can be associated with him. This wall thing.”

I gotcher weak sister for ya, rightchea.

Trump’s potted plants

by digby

The Senate Republican Caucus

I’m talking about the elected Republicans who would rather go down with his sinking ship than even save themselves. This article by the AP comes with this headline:

Some Trump allies starting to worry about investigations

Ya think?

Republicans are still coming to terms with their drubbing in last month’s House elections and looking for someone to blame. The departure of John Kelly as White House chief of staff has set off a disorganized search for a replacement who could stay in the job through the 2020 campaign. After Trump’s top choice, the vice president’s chief of staff Nick Ayers, passed on the job, few of the remaining candidates have political experience.

Also, Democrats will soon take control of the House of Representatives, wielding subpoena power and potentially exploring impeachment proceedings. Meanwhile, financial markets have been jittery, in part because of Trump’s trade wars and concerns that higher borrowing costs could ultimately trigger a recession.

Facing pressure from Mueller and an impending onslaught of Democratic investigations, Trump could hew even further to the right, catering exclusively to the base of voters he is concerned about losing, according to a Republican close to the White House who has consulted on the early re-election efforts. That instinct would echo the president’s double-down, scorched-earth response to the crises that hit his 2016 campaign, including the “Access Hollywood” tape about forcing himself on women, and could make it harder to woo the independent voters or disaffected Democrats he may well need.

Could Trump face a primary election challenge from within his own party? He doesn’t seem concerned.

The president is eager to unleash his re-election machinery and begin to collect pledges of loyalty from across the GOP to quell any hint of an insurrection, according to a campaign official and a Republican familiar with the inner workings of the campaign but not authorized to speak publicly.

The Trump team has discussed the possibility of a challenge from someone such as outgoing Ohio Gov. John Kasich or Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake. A week after the midterm elections, Kasich traveled to New Hampshire for a public speech and private meetings with prominent Republicans.

Flake, who has tangled repeatedly with Trump, isn’t making any personal commitment, but his feelings about a challenger are clear.

“Somebody needs to run” against Trump, he said Monday. “I hope somebody does.”

While some Democrats eying the White House are expected to announce campaigns in the first few weeks of 2019, a Republican challenger could move more slowly, according to two GOP operatives who have been involved in hypothetical discussions about taking on Trump. Waiting until early spring, for example, could give Republicans time to assess whether Trump will be weakened by Mueller’s investigation or a downturn in the economy.

One leading House Republican said the situation surrounding Trump remains volatile and has urged colleagues to wait for the Mueller report, which some believe could emerge early next year. That Republican, who demanded anonymity to assess the situation candidly, has urged fellow GOP lawmakers to not defend the indefensible but to also not believe every charge. The lawmaker expressed hope that the special counsel’s findings come out sooner rather than later so there will be more time before the 2020 elections.

For all the private and not-so-private party worries, many close to Trump predict he not only will survive the Russia investigation but will be re-elected in two years. They point to his remarkable ability to shake off scandal, the sway he continues to hold over his base of GOP voters, the fear his Twitter account has instilled among many Republican elected officials and what they believe is the lack of top-shelf talent among Democrats who could face him in 2020.

Echoing the president, they contend the special counsel has come up empty-handed in his efforts to prove Russian collusion and is ready to settle for a campaign finance charge they believe is minor and will be ignored or not understood by most voters.

The president has said the lesson of the 2018 midterms is that Republican candidates abandon him at their own peril. And the Republicans who remain in Congress after that election aren’t likely to back away from him.

He’s innumerate so he can’t look at the results and see that he lost in a landslide that will result in his defeat if it’s replicated. He thinks, as Chuck Schumer indicated this morning, winning Indiana and North Dakota Senate seats means he’s omnipotent.

They are still in denial. And they are now turning over all responsibility for oversight to the House Democrats, hoping that if the worst happens they can quietly slip back into office in 2020 without having to defend their actions.

If you want to know what defending the indefensible really looks like, this abdication of all responsibility for oversight of this criminal miscreant is at the top of the list.

.

Person of the year: The Guardians

by digby

Trump recently said that there was really no choice but to choose him for TIME person of the year.

They didn’t. And I’m sure he doesn’t approve of the choice — the so-called Enemy of the People:

The stout man with the gray goatee and the gentle demeanor dared to disagree with his country’s government. He told the world the truth about its brutality toward those who would speak out. And he was murdered for it.

Every detail of Jamal Khashoggi’s killing made it a sensation: the time stamp on the surveillance video that captured the Saudi journalist entering his country’s Istanbul consulate on Oct. 2; the taxiway images of the private jets bearing his assassins; the bone saw; the reports of his final words, “I can’t breathe,” recorded on audio as the life was choked from him.

But the crime would not have remained atop the world news for two months if not for the epic themes that Khashoggi himself was ever alert to, and spent his life placing before the public. His death laid bare the true nature of a smiling prince, the utter absence of morality in the Saudi-U.S. alliance and—in the cascade of news feeds and alerts, posts and shares and links—the centrality of the question Khashoggi was killed over: Whom do you trust to tell the story?

Khashoggi put his faith in bearing witness. He put it in the field reporting he had done since youth, in the newspaper editorship he was forced out of and in the columns he wrote from lonely exile. “Must we choose,” he asked in the Washington Post in May, “between movie theaters and our rights as citizens to speak out, whether in support of or critical of our government’s actions?” Khashoggi had fled his homeland last year even though he actually supported much of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s agenda in Saudi Arabia. What irked the kingdom and marked the journalist for death was Khashoggi’s insistence on coming to that conclusion on his own, tempering it with troubling facts and trusting the public to think for itself.

Such independence is no small thing. It marks the distinction between tyranny and democracy. And in a world where budding authoritarians have advanced by blurring the difference, there was a clarity in the spectacle of a tyrant’s fury visited upon a man armed only with a pen. Because the strongmen of the world only look strong. All despots live in fear of their people. To see genuine strength, look to the spaces where individuals dare to describe what’s going on in front of them.

In the Philippines, a 55-year-old woman named Maria Ressa steers Rappler, an online news site she helped found, through a superstorm of the two most formidable forces in the information universe: social media and a populist President with authoritarian inclinations. Rappler has chronicled the violent drug war and extrajudicial killings of President Rodrigo Duterte that have left some 12,000 people dead, according to a January estimate from Human Rights Watch. The Duterte government refuses to accredit a Rappler journalist to cover it, and in November charged the site with tax fraud, allegations that could send Ressa to prison for up to 10 years.

In Annapolis, Md., staff of the Capital, a newspaper published by Capital Gazette Communications, which traces its history of telling readers about the events in Maryland to before the American Revolution, press on without the five colleagues gunned down in their newsroom on June 28. Still intact, indeed strengthened after the mass shooting, are the bonds of trust and community that for national news outlets have been eroded on strikingly partisan lines, never more than this year.

.

You can’t handle the truth!

by digby

This morning just featured a screaming match between Trump, Pelosi and Schumer in an Oval Office photo-op. He blathered on as usual, lying and ranting about bullshit and when he turned the floor over to Pelosi he interrupted and argued and screamed at her and it went downhill from there.

Commentators like Panetta are blaming Pelosi and Schumer because they should know how he is by now and shold take care not ot provoke him. That’s not how our system of government works and he knows it. Trump is a disrespectful asshole and sitting there taking it will not work.

They ended up getting Trump to pretty much admit he ordered the Code Red:

Trump: "If I needed the votes for the wall in the house, I would have them in one session. It would be done."

Pelosi: "So go do it."

Josh: "Next two years are going to be amazing." pic.twitter.com/tNFmnnFjUl— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) December 11, 2018

Now Chuck slaps Trump around. pic.twitter.com/Bl5XCgybte— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) December 11, 2018

As the meeting devolves into an argument, SCHUMER points out to TRUMP that his talking points about the border are incoherent — he's taking credit for securing the border while hyping a purported crisis there. pic.twitter.com/zUbqxUVPyT— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 11, 2018

As the meeting devolves into an argument, SCHUMER points out to TRUMP that his talking points about the border are incoherent — he's taking credit for securing the border while hyping a purported crisis there. pic.twitter.com/zUbqxUVPyT— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 11, 2018

Good Lord, Chuck baits Trump into "proud to shut the government down" quotes, also Trump changes face Pantone from Grifty Orange to Boily Red on live video. pic.twitter.com/wk0RgbbuP8— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) December 11, 2018

The greatest negotiator in history …

Update: Here’s the whole thing. Note how he condescends to Pelosi:

WATCH: Full video of Trump's heated meeting with Schumer and Pelosi https://t.co/AoA5Zduq2o— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 11, 2018

.

The new Nullification
by Tom Sullivan

“Once you start down the path of diluting, obviating, nullifying the results of an election, it’s very hard to pull back from that,” Norman Ornstein tells NBC News. Ornstein, an American Enterprise Institute scholar, responded to the domino-like chain of events in states from North Carolina to Wisconsin to Michigan in which controlling parties seen to have lost ground in the last election quickly moved to undercut the powers of the incoming electeds — governors of the opposing party, most notably.

Two years ago, Republicans in control of North Carolina’s state House and Senate used the lame-duck session to “kneecap” the incoming governor, Democrat Roy Cooper, after he defeated Republican Pat McCrory. That tactic has now spread to Wisconsin and Michigan.

Dennis Dresang, emeritus professor of public affairs and political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says this flies in the face of Wisconsin’s traditions:

“In the 1970s and ‘80s, for example, vacancies have explicitly been left open so the newly elected governor [of a different party] could fill them,” Dresang said. “When Scott Walker was elected governor in 2010, his predecessor, [Democrat] Jim Doyle, did not proceed with a grant of $810 million from the federal government for high speed rail because during the campaign Walker said he opposed the project.”

Those days are gone. Lame-duck sessions are now tools Republican legislatures employ to salt the earth and poison wells ahead of advancing political opponents.

The actions speak to a growing attitude that government’s role is to advance the interests of tribe and one’s cronies rather than for civic purposes like improving the nation and the lot of its people. For the grifter class, Matt Taibbi once wrote, government is “a tool for making money.” And now, it seems, for denying rivals’ access to it.

Since its 19th century struggles with slavery, states lacking the leverage to work their wills in Washington have claimed the right to nullify laws they felt disfavored them. As if they, not just presidents and governors, held veto power over popular sovereignty. That sentiment long held by the sovereign citizen movement now manifests itself among state legislators seeing their grips on power erode. Of late, they are Republicans. Their faith in democracy is unshakable so long as they win.

So too with the rule of law, writes Catherine Rampell in the Washington Post. “Tough on crime” Republicans go soft when the criminals have white collars. Prosecution of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is political, argues Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.). Former federal prosecutor Joseph diGenova (appointed under Ronald Reagan) complains Manafort has “no criminal record.”

Rampell explains wryly:

By this logic, absent an extant criminal record, no one — not even pre-prosecution Al Capone — should ever get charged with a crime. Never having been in jail becomes a Get Out of Jail Free card.

Rampell cites a short list of “well-heeled, well-connected” persons who have “found the quality of Republican mercy unstrained.” For the poor there are long sentences and/or crippling fines even for minor offenses.

Citing an adage of Latin American strongmen, Rampell writes: “For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.”

As California goes….? (We hope)

by digby

This piece by Daniel Donner at Daily Kos about the amazing death spiral of the GOP in California is fascinating. An excerpt:

The high point for the California GOP came with the re-election of Pete “I Am Not A Racist” Wilson as governor as he campaigned for the indisputably racist Proposition 187, in 1994, the year of the Angry White Male (oh, hindsight). Prop 187 coincided with a shift in the political preferences of Latinos even more toward Democrats, and an increase in Latino political participation; while causation is difficult to prove, alternate explanations are hard to come by.

Since then, there has been neither a will nor a way for California Republicans to reverse course to any meaningful extent. Addicted to their hateful rhetoric, they have effectively sent themselves into a death spiral as the demographics of the electorate have changed.

Which brings us to this year. In January there will be fewer House Republicans from California than there were in the 1920s, when California only had 11 representatives total.

Orange County, the conservative paradise, has been wiped clean of House Republicans. A brief survey of recent writings about the GOP’s fate in California yields the terms “wipeout,” “irrelevance,” “dead,” “toxic,” “debacle,” “annihilation,” and “devastation.”

That’s a far cry from the sunny conservative optimism of the ‘80s. Let’s rewind the clock a little and take a look at the 1984 presidential election:

Ronald Reagan, a former California governor, easily carried the state with nearly six in ten of all votes cast. Southern California is painted entirely red. Yet even on this map, one county stands out for its conservatism: Orange County, where three of every four voters cast their ballots for Reagan.

On the left, the standard map shows several counties with support nearly as strong. The map on the right, however, where county size is shown proportional to the number of votes cast, shows these other counties have few votes overall. The state is dominated by the bulbous population centers in Southern California, the Bay Area, and Sacramento; of the darkest red counties, only Orange County has a substantial population—the anchor of Reagan’s support.

Fast-forward to 2016, and fortunes have changed severely. Southern California is entirely blue, including, yes, Orange County, which voted Democrat for president for the first time since 1936. Fear not, though, my stouthearted Republican holdouts: Lassen County voted for Trump by nearly as much as Orange County voted for Reagan. Never mind that it’s home to just 31,000 souls.

How did such a thing happen? In short, 1984 was a high point (presidentially speaking) in the total number of votes for the Republican candidate, both in California and in Orange County. This high point was (barely) exceeded in 2004, but the problem for the GOP is that the number of Democratic votes simply has kept growing and growing—and growing.

Donald Trump won fewer votes in California in 2016 than Nixon did in 1972, but Hillary Clinton had 2 1/2 times the number of votes for George McGovern. (During that time, the state’s population climbed from 21 million to 39 million.) In Orange County, Trump managed to earn a handful more votes than Nixon, but Clinton won more than three times the number of votes for George McGovern.

There’s more at the link. The old saying was “as California goes, so goes the nation.” Let’s hope it does in this case. These Republicans are batshit and they simply have to be stopped. They simply are incapable of sobering up until they hit bottom.

.

Javanka in charge and in great danger

by digby

Tim O’Brien at Boomberg does a nice job analyzing the White House Chief of Staff situation:

The president of the United States couldn’t convince a relatively unknown 36-year-old political operative to be his White House chief of staff, despite spending months wooing the young tyro for the post and securing his daughter and son-in-law’s help with the recruiting effort.

A number of other candidates may be in play, as my Bloomberg News colleagues Margaret Talev and Jennifer Jacobs detail here. But it doesn’t appear that Donald Trump has any obvious candidates to turn to now that Nick Ayers said no to the job and John Kelly’s final few weeks as chief of staff will remind other potential replacements that playing the role of presidential gatekeeper means that you often wind up being a punching bag.

All of which is to say that chaos in the Trump administration isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Here’s a video I made with our commentary team in March 2017 — “Who’s Really Running the White House?” — which highlighted the chaos back then and speculated that advisers like Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus and Rex Tillerson would never have the staying power or presidential access that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump enjoyed. And given that Javanka lacked experience, depth, sophistication and self-awareness, we predicted that all of this would produce “chaos, from day to day to day.”

Still, it’s something to behold. In February 2017, just a month after Trump was inaugurated, General Tony Thomas, who runs the U.S. military’s Special Operations Command, said he was disturbed by mismanagement and instability in the federal government. “Our government continues to be in unbelievable turmoil,” he said at a military conference. “I hope they sort it out soon because we’re a nation at war.”

They didn’t sort it out soon. They still haven’t sorted it out.

Earlier this year, NBC News reported that Kelly “portrays himself to Trump administration aides as the lone bulwark against catastrophe.” (Kelly disputed the account.) But Kelly’s self-appraisal as the indispensable man with his finger in the dike made it into other news accounts. Bob Woodward, in his book “Fear,” quotes Kelly as describing the Trump White House as “Crazytown.” It turns out that Kelly, Crazytown’s sheriff, was only able to stand watch over the asylum for about 18 months.

Kelly may have been doomed from the moment he signed on as Trump’s chief of staff in July 2017. Kelly had to reassure then Attorney General Jeff Sessions that his job was safe (it ultimately wasn’t), fire the brand new and carnivalesque White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci (the Trump team continues to showcase a communications effort that is alternately comically befuddled and willfully misleading), monitor the kind of information that got to Trump and exercise tight control over who had access to the president.

“John Kelly knows the challenges he is facing,” Leon Panetta, a former chief of staff to Bill Clinton, told Politico just days into the former Marine’s new job. “He’s not going to just stand to the side and watch the White House fall apart piece by piece.”

As it turned out, Kelly didn’t have to stand aside. He was pushed aside — by Trump. The president, who is 72, has never really taken advice from anyone other than his late father over the last five decades, and he certainly wasn’t going to begin doing so with Kelly. By trying to put Javanka in a corner, Kelly also set himself up for the same demise that befell Steve Bannon after he clashed with Kushner.

Whether he’s managing his company or occupying the Oval Office, Trump always puts family ahead of other business, political and personal loyalties. In that context, as I noted shortly after Trump was inaugurated, “Trump adviser” is a contradiction in terms. Trump isn’t patient, self-confident or strategic enough to take guidance from talented or experienced people, which leads him to make unfortunate, and frequently misguided, appointments. It also has created a record turnover rate in Trump’s White House — which is likely to accelerate in the new year as the president is greeted by a House of Representatives controlled by Democrats and by possibly disastrous battles with law enforcement authorities.

Ayers, who reportedly rose in the president’s estimation because he physically resembled (at least in the president’s eyes) a young Trump, may have grown wise about the fate awaiting him should life in the White House later turn sour: “Diminished public standing after an ugly parting with a mercurial president who often insults his former aides on Twitter,” as the New York Times put it.

That leaves the president, now, in greater thrall to Javanka.

If Trump really loved his daughter he would tell her to go back to New York, hire a good lawyer and divorce Kushner in order to save herself. Kush is in grave legal danger and she could be too, although I’d imagine she is the one who could most easily escape.

But Trump only loves himself and so he’s drawing her closer rather than letting her go. I guess he will pardon her. And she’s probably ruined anyway. But he’s a piss poor father for putting his allegedly beloved daughter in this position.

Oh, and by the way, Jr and Eric are in other crosshairs. It’s very likely they are going to pay for Daddy’s crimes too. Some of them are state charges and he has no power to change that.

.