Month: December 2018

Doubling down on a losing strategy

by digby

According to The Daily Beast Trump’s plan to win the shutdown is “a noun, a verb, and ‘caravan'”

One senior administration official described their shutdown comms strategy as a “caravan redo”—in reference to how Republicans spotlighted and demonized a group of migrants coming traveling to the U.S. southern border in the lead-up to the midterm elections. (The strategy failed to stop the blue wave that occurred.) The official said that Trump and the Republican Party would “draw contrasts” between their draconian immigration policies and the Democrats’ more inclusive approach.

According to two administration officials, the White House intends to send advisers and surrogates throughout the shutdown standoff out on national television to hammer Democrats and to accuse them of wanting illicit drugs, terror, and “trafficking” pouring over the southern border.

“I think the key for the president is to make it abundantly clear to the incoming [Democratic] majority in the House that he is going to blame them for each and every [migrant] caravan, for each and every rushing of the border, for the violence that occurs as a result of illegal immigration” Matt Schlapp, a prominent Trump surrogate and lobbyist whose wife Mercedes Schlapp is a senior White House official, told The Daily Beast. “The game is on. He is going to go after them… It is going to be their fault and they will own all of it.”

That’s quite the fever dream. CNN’s Harry Enten points out that immigration didn’t work for Trump last November and it’s unlikely to help him now. Not that he cares. As long as Ann Coulter is happy, it’s all good. He thinks.

The midterm elections were just a test about whether Trump could use harsh immigration rhetoric to rally voters to his side. Immigration may have saved Republicans a deep red Senate seat for the Republicans, but in the House (where all voters got to cast ballots) it was a disaster.

According to a report compiled by David Winston, a Republican pollster, the focus on immigration instead of the economy resulted in late deciders breaking for the Democrats by double-digits points in 2018. Winston’s findings line up with what Democrats saw in their own polling per the Washington Examiner’s David Drucker.

Trump may like to believe that the midterm outcome was somehow not a reflection on his policies. Remember, though, that the 2018 midterm was the most presidential-centric in modern history. A higher percentage of those who approved of the President’s job performance voted for the President’s party than ever before in a midterm. A higher percentage of those who disapproved of Trump’s job voted for the opposition party than ever before in a midterm.

The overall House result was that Democrats won a plurality of the vote in states, making up 329 electoral votes to the Republicans’ 206. This calculation, done by Catalist, a data company that works with Democrats and others, importantly takes into account how seats where there was either no Democrat or no Republican on the ballot would have voted if there had been one. Democrats “won” a plurality of the House vote in almost all the swing states that Trump won in 2016, including Florida, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

I wouldn’t expect the shutdown to play out differently with regard to immigration. In the Quinnipiac poll, only 34% of voters favor a shutdown because of disagreements over funding for the wall. When asked who would get blamed for a shutdown, 51% said congressional Republicans and the President, compared with 37% who said congressional Democrats. A Suffolk University poll out this week came up with similar results

The shutdown may please the base. It looks like a political loser overall, however. Perhaps more worrisome for Republicans, it doesn’t look like Trump learned a single thing from Republicans losing in the midterms.

He can’t learn. He is going with his gut which tells him, rightly, that he has permanently alienated everyone in the world except his cult. So he’s giving them what they want.

As I write this, the Republicans have thrown up their hands and are now saying this is a negotiation between the Democrats and the President. (The Senate is nothing more than a rubber stamp for Trump’s appointments, nothing more. I hope everyone keeps that in mind as we go forward in the new congress.)

At the moment the press says they can’t find anyone who’s going up to the White House for a negotiation. I guess it will be led by Chuck Schumer?

Oh.

If you find what we write here every day to be valuable, I hope you’ll consider putting some change in the Hullabaloo holiday stocking. Your support buys me the time to spend my days wading through the muck of the day’s political stories to bring you highlights and analysis that I hope you will enjoy and find informative.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

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This is what you signed up for fellas

by digby

And here everybody said those Big Money Boyz were the smart guys:

President Donald Trump has discussed firing Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell as his frustration with the central bank chief intensified following this week’s interest-rate hike and months of stock-market losses, according to four people familiar with the matter.

Advisers close to Trump aren’t convinced he would move against Powell and are hoping that the president’s latest bout of anger will dissipate over the holidays, the people said on condition of anonymity. Some of Trump’s advisers have warned him that firing Powell would be a disastrous move.

Yet the president has talked privately about firing Powell many times in the past few days, said two of the people.

Any attempt by Trump to push out Powell would have potentially devastating ripple effects across financial markets, undermining investors’ confidence in the central bank’s ability to shepherd the economy without political interference. It would come as markets have plummeted in recent weeks, with the major stock indexes already down sharply for the year.

White House spokespeople declined to comment, as did Fed spokeswoman Michelle Smith.

Trump’s public and private complaints about members of his administration have often been a first step toward their departures — including former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and outgoing chief of staff John Kelly.

It’s unclear how much legal authority the president has to fire Powell. The Federal Reserve Act says governors may be “removed for cause by the President.” Since the chairman is also a governor, that presumably extends to him or her, but the rules around firing the leader are legally ambiguous, as Peter Conti-Brown of the University of Pennsylvania notes in his book on Fed independence.

Such a move would represent an unprecedented challenge to the Fed’s independence. Though he was nominated by the president, Powell was thought to be insulated from Trump’s dissatisfaction by a tradition of respect for the independence of the central bank.

That separation of politics from monetary policy is supposed to instill confidence that Fed officials will do what’s right for the economy over the long term rather than bend to the short-term whims of a politician.

Trump’s frustration with Powell has greatly intensified in recent days, said two of the people. Though Trump’s aim is to stop interest rate increases that slow economic growth, such a move could backfire by roiling already turbulent financial markets.

Even routine changes at the top of central banks create uncertainty in markets as investors try to assess how tough a new leader may be in preventing the economy from overheating and accelerating inflation. Another problem with dismissing a sitting Fed chief may be finding a replacement who wants assurance that he or she won’t succumb to the same fate as Powell.

Trump is in the midst of a rolling shake-up of his administration. Since the November midterm elections, he’s announced the exits of Sessions, Kelly, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Defense Secretary James Mattis. At the same, a partial federal government shutdown has added to the sense among investors of disarray in Washington.

Krugman comments:

And that lethal, disease riddled caravan.

There is no sector of the government he hasn’t trashed. And he’s taking a meat ax to the private sector too. But then, everything he’s pretty much destroyed everything he’s ever touched, including his father’s fortune.

Until now he’s managed to wriggle out of any accountability. It is his one true talent and the reason he’s so sure of his stable genius. In a way, you can’t blame him. He’s the personification of the Peter Principle:

The Peter Principle is an observation that the tendency in most organizational hierarchies is for every employee to rise in the hierarchy through promotion until they reach the levels of their respective incompetence.

No one has ever “failed up” as spectacularly as Donald Trump. It’s made him believe he is omnipotent. He’s totally inept and knows about five things, all of which are wrong. And yet he became the most powerful man on the planet. It makes you wonder if there isn’t some kind of flaw in the system, doesn’t it?

If you find what we write here every day to be valuable, I hope you’ll consider putting some change in the Hullabaloo holiday stocking. Your support buys me the time to spend my days wading through the muck of the day’s political stories to bring you highlights and analysis that I hope you will enjoy and find informative.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

What about impeachment?

by digby

Hullabaloo Holiday soother: a rare endangered wild fishing cat and her kitten

It’s getting harder and harder to avoid the fact that Donald Trump must be impeached. It’s true that the Democratic leadership in the House is refusing to say that definitively. But if you read between the lines of various comments by incoming House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff and incoming House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, it’s pretty clear that they are going hard after him on the Russia probe and obstruction of Justice, paralleling the Mueller investigation. Others will be looking at his personal finances, his company, his campaign finance criminality, his emoluments practices, the corruption of his cabinet and all the rest. It’s inevitable that this will end in an impeachment trial. I don’t think its avoidable.

But to have credibility, they have to build the case in a way that will pull together all these strands in a way a majority of the American people can see. Impeachment is a nuclear option and it should require thoughtful, deliberate investigation and conclusions. (This is why nobody should listen to Ken Starr or Republicans in congress — they showed how not to do it.)

I have little hope that the Republicans will vote to remove him. It’s possible that they’ll sober up enough under the weight of their own issues with his policies and the evidence amassed by Mueller and the House Democrats. But at this point, I still wouldn’t bet on it. If that’s the case, then it will be up to the voters in 2020 to get the job done.

But that should not suggest that impeachment is a waste of time. The Democrats must compile all the evidence against this president in one place. They must present that evidence to the American people in an impeachment indictment. And they must challenge the Republicans to fulfill their duty. If they refuse so be it. The American people will be the ultimate judge and jury in the next election.

I think people like us overestimate the amount of in-depth knowledge most Americans have of this epic dumpster fire. They are busy, they have other interests, other concerns. We know the Fox and hate radio viewers are completely deluded by right-wing propaganda. But many others don’t watch any news at all or just catch a few headlines. Some are inadvertently propagandized by sophisticated social media tactics from various nefarious actors. It’s going to be up to the congress, the media and those of us who follow politics and current events with a discerning and informed eye to make sure the truth gets out over the next two years in a way that will make sense to the average person.

I’ve posted before about what I wrote for Salon on the morning after the election in 2016, having stayed up all night in a stunned stupor wondering what I could possibly say. This is what I wrote:

We wake up today to a fundamentally different world than the one in which we woke up yesterday. The nation our allies looked to as the guarantor of global security will now be led by a pathologically dishonest, unqualified, inexperienced, temperamental, ignorant flimflam man. Things will never be the same. And we have no idea at the moment exactly what form this change is going to take, which makes this all very, very frightening.

I’m sorry to say that it’s even worse than I expected.

This may be the most consequential two years in modern memory. If Trump somehow slithers out from accountability and is re-elected I honestly don’t know what will happen.

I do know that my colleagues and I will be following it as closely as we can, trying to keep it all straight, telling the truth as we see it and dingo what we can to turn this ship away from the iceberg. If you think this will be of value to you I hope you’ll consider putting a little something in the Hullabaloo Holiday stocking to help keep this blog afloat.

If you’ve already donated, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you haven’t and would like to help support this blog for another year, the paypal buttons are on the sidebar and below as is the snail mail address.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

A hopeful requiem
by Tom Sullivan

“The swamp,” that crusty, unresponsive Washington establishment people love to hate. Donald Trump was going to drain it as president, return it to the people — his people. And here we are after the most tumultuous week in memory. Investigations. Convictions. Chaos. Treason, or suggestion of it, from a federal judge. Allies betrayed. The stock market in free fall. Topping it off, a Christmas shutdown of the government over funding for a ridiculous border wall.

“The Democrats are trying to belittle the concept of a Wall, calling it old fashioned,” Trump tweeted, later tweeting a cartoon image of an allegedly “totally effective” Steel Slat Barrier. “The fact is there is nothing else’s that will work,” Trump went on, “and that has been true for thousands of years. It’s like the wheel, there is nothing better. I know tech better than anyone…..” His will be a beautiful wall. A great wall. (He knows China better than anyone too.)

There is light in the darkness even now.

One aspect of the swamp that makes Washington Washington is the types of people drawn to the allure of power for its own sake, not to mention to the money that flows like Potomac through the town. The institution’s ballast is the rules and protocols surrounding seniority and how long it takes both to learn the rules and to gain a firm legislative foothold and real power. It takes years and the kind of patience that, in normal times, wrings the idealism out of many of the players willing to serve in the trenches long enough to eventually direct the battles.

I wrote of the Democratic variety:

Young politicos jump into the game the same way the New Agers did: to pursue a passion. They begin as Young Democrats and interns. They cannot wait to attend political functions and rub elbows with high-profile elected officials. They angle for selfies with the “poohbahs,” as one friend put it, and can’t wait to get the pictures up on Facebook to show family and friends just how connected they are. Perhaps they graduate to a legislative assistant position for some state representative or senator. They transition to employment with another one. Or perhaps, even to a permanent position with a committee in the legislature or Congress.

By the time they decide to run for office themselves, they have an established network of party friends, colleagues, and former employers with endorsements and fundraising lists to kick off their first campaign. Unless a party insider smoother, better looking, or better connected enters the race, they become their party’s default candidate right out of the gate. As a known quantity and trusted, they are already an establishment candidate and haven’t seen the first dollar of PAC or lobbyist money. Although this is not true of everyone, the need to maintain those professional relationships and a team-player image limits the range of policies they can entertain.

Thus, spreads the swamp. However idealistic they may have started, many — and by no means all — whose ambitions tempt them to acclimate, to learn the swamp’s rhythms, to be seduced by power’s soothing burble, slowly become the kind of politicians people love to hate. And once they achieve power, they’re not leaving. You see that in the faces of those still there after decades.

So, the promising news. A whole crew of new sheriffs is coming to town in January. With them comes the promise of reformatting the game.

Think Progress reports, noting Democrats’ aging leadership:

Of the 59 newly-elected Democrats who will be joining Congress for the first time next month, only 18 have previous experience holding some kind of elected office.

The election brought the most flips for Democrats “in nearly 50 years.” A few have experience in state or city government. Three are returning to Congress after a “hiatus.”

Nevertheless, the vast majority of that incoming class — approximately 70 percent — will be assuming elected office for the first time. In fact, only six of those 41 new members even had prior experience running for office.

Days after the November election when Democrats’ projected gains in the House still numbered 30, Lisa Desjardins of PBS “NewsHour” observed the average age of newly elected members is under 40, including the first two women ever elected to Congress under 30.

“Overall, this new group of members of Congress, their average age is 10 years younger than the members of Congress sitting now,” Desjardins said. There were still another 10 Democrats to add to her count.

With veterans soon to step aside, a new, younger class of leaders brings with it at least the possibility of changing how the game is played. The torch will be passed to a new generation tempered by #Resistance, disciplined by a hard and bitter economic recovery.

And just like that, GOP discovers $5.7 billion for a wall.

$5.7 billion

What if we instead added $5.7B in teacher pay?
Or replacing water pipes?
Or college tuition/prescription refill subsidies?
Or green jobs?

But notice how no one’s asking the GOP how they’re paying for it. https://t.co/jXdm1w9bpy— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) December 21, 2018

Opposing these new leaders, a political culture that grinds idealism into conformity and a swamp that only deepened when Donald the Huckster came to town.

At The Atlantic, contributing editor Eliot A. Cohen of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies offers a requiem for the tenure of James Mattis as Trump’s defense secretary. Mattis, who announced his resignation this week, is “animated by sentiments Donald Trump could not understand,” Cohen explains, a warrior known for saying, “Engage your brain before you engage your weapon.” From a generation that signed up first to serve and wound up leading, and finally struggled to affirm “values of fairness and legality” in an administration that respects neither.

Alone among Trump’s coterie of sycophants, Mattis “refused to curry favor, to pander at the painful televised Cabinet sessions, or to praise someone who deserved none of it.” In the end, Mattis could not serve both Trump and his country, Cohen sighs:

Henceforth, the senior ranks of government can be filled only by invertebrates and opportunists, schemers and careerists. If they had policy convictions, they will meekly accept their evisceration. If they know a choice is a disaster, they will swallow hard and go along. They may try to manipulate the president, or make some feeble efforts to subvert him, but in the end they will follow him. And although patriotism may motivate some of them, the truth is that it will be the title, the office, the car, and the chance to be in the policy game that will keep them there.

They may think wistfully of the unflinching Sir Thomas More of Robert Bolt’s magnificent play about integrity in politics, A Man for All Seasons. But they will be more like Richie Rich, More’s protégé who could have chosen a better path, but who succumbed to the lure of power. And the result will be policies that take this country, its allies, and international order to disasters small and large.

That is the swamp. May our 116th Congress write its epitaph.

If you find what we do here to be helpful in understanding what’s happening around us in this wild political era, if stopping by here from time to time gives you a little sense of solidarity with others who are going through their days as gobsmacked by events as you are, I hope you’ll find it in your heart to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking to help me keep the light on for another year.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

More good news for Trump’s base

by digby

Julia Davis, who follows Russian media for the Daily Beast reports that while some of us here in the US are a little discombobulated about the latest news from the Trump administration, there are others who are downright ecstatic:

The Kremlin is awash with Christmas gifts from Washington, D.C. and every move by the Trump administration seems to add to that perception. On Wednesday, appearing on the Russian state TV show “The Evening with Vladimir Soloviev,” Director of the Moscow-based Center for Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies Semyon Bagdasarov said that the U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis is “struggling to keep up” with the flurry of unexpected decisions by the U.S. President Donald Trump. The news that Mattis decided to step down sent shock waves across the world, being interpreted as “a dangerous signal” by America’s allies.

Meanwhile, the Mattis departure is being cheered in Russia. Konstantin Kosachev, head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Upper House of the Russian Parliament, has said that “the departure of James Mattis is a positive signal for Russia, since Mattis was far more hawkish on Russia and China than Donald Trump.” Kosachev opined that Trump apparently considered his own agenda in dealing with Russia, China and America’s allies to be “more important than keeping James Mattis at his post,” concluding: “That’s an interesting signal, and a more positive one” for Russia.

Jubilation was even more apparent on Russia’s state television, which adheres closely to the Kremlin’s point of view. The host of the Russian state TV show “60 Minutes,” Olga Skabeeva asserted: “Secretary of Defense Mattis didn’t want to leave Syria, so Trump fired him. They are leaving Syria.”

President Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Sanders, remarked: “The idea that Putin is happy about this [Trump’s decision to withdraw US forces from Syria] is ridiculous. It puts them at a greater risk, so I think that’s just silly.” To the contrary, the idea of an American withdrawal from Syria is being widely perceived in Russia as “a total dream come true” if it truly takes place.

State TV host Olga Skabeeva surmised that Americans are “losers, since Putin has defeated them in every way.” With a theatrical sigh, her co-host, Evgeny Popov, added: “Trump is ours again—what are you going to do?” Every member of the sizeable audience enthusiastically clapped.

While these statements are decidedly sarcastic, Russian opinion makers recount the Kremlin’s victories with unmistakable glee. Popov smirked: “It seems to Americans that we won on every front: the U.S. Secretary of Defense has been removed, we unquestionably secured a complete, unconditional victory in Syria.” Skabeeva chimed in: “They’re also planning to leave Afghanistan.”

Popov pointed out: “On top of that, Rusal sanctions have been lifted with Trump’s hands.” Panelists of the show, including Russian lawmakers, couldn’t hide their satisfied grins. The reference was to the announcement that Trump’s Treasury Department intends to lift sanctions against the business empire of Oleg V. Deripaska, one of Russia’s most influential oligarchs, sanctioned for Russian interference in the U.S. elections.

Texas Representative Lloyd Doggett told The New York Times that the move to lift Rusal sanctions amounted to Trump “sliding another big gift under Vladimir Putin’s Christmas tree.” The gesture is certainly being interpreted that way in Russia. Deripaska’s attorneys are reportedly mounting an aggressive campaign to pursue the removal of personal sanctions from the Putin-linked oligarch as well.

Discussing the planned departure of the U.S. from Syria, state TV host Olga Skabeeva pondered why Trump suddenly decided to leave at this point in time: “Americans say, it’s because he is beholden to Putin. Is that logical? Yes, it is.”

It’s nice to know that somebody in this world is happy on this Christmas week-end. Bless their hearts.

If you find what we do here every day to be valuable, I hope you’ll consider putting some change in the Hullabaloo holiday stocking. Your support buys me the time to spend my days wading through the muck of the day’s political stories to bring you highlights and analysis that I hope you will enjoy and find informative.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

A childish, absurd, terrible, human being

by digby

It’s been reported that Trump’s unhappy with his new chief of staff-designate, Mick Mulvaney, ever since he saw that footage of him saying that he’s a terrible human being.

Here it is, if you haven’t seen it:

He’s not going to like this either:

“Donald Trump says, build a wall. Deport all illegal immigrants. Rules are rules. You either play and stay or you cheat and you get deported. What challenges does this plan pose?” Patti Mercer asked in the August 25, 2015, interview on WRHI radio in South Carolina.

“A bunch,” Mulvaney responded.

“The fence doesn’t solve the problem. Is it necessary to have one, sure? Would it help? Sure. But to just say build the darn fence and have that be the end of an immigration discussion is absurd and almost childish for someone running for president to take that simplistic of [a] view.”

The White House said that the “terrible human being” comment happened before Mulvaney got to know Trump. One imagines they may also say that he’s changed his mind about the wall.

But they can’t make Trump unhear these words from his new chief of staff. He will never fully trust him. Mulvaney should withdraw and just let Javanka take the job. We are rapidly coming to the point where will be the only ones who will take it anyway.

You have to admit, however, that Mulvaney’s sycophantic bootlicking as a member of the administration is a perfect illustration of the moral and ethical bankruptcy of 95% of the Republican congress. It’s stunning how willing they are to sell out themselves and the country for purely artisan purposes.

They are unabashed cowards.

If you find what we write here every day to be valuable, I hope you’ll consider putting some change in the Hullabaloo holiday stocking. Your support buys me the time to spend my days wading through the muck of the day’s political stories to bring you highlights and analysis that I hope you will enjoy and find informative.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

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How he made the decision. (hint: it was terrifying)

by digby

I think it’s pretty clear that Trump’s impulsive decision to withdraw from Syria has little to do with anything but his emotional need to assert his power in a political environment in which he’s being buffeted by scandal and his own ineptitude. This AP tick-tock runs down exactly how it happened and it’s terrifying. He capitulated to Erdogan on the spot, in defiance of every one of his national security counselors, and even more disturbing, when Erdogan realized that Trump had taken his at face value instead of negotiating some kind of agreement (at best) he too urged the president to back down.

He refused.

Here’s the story:

President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops from Syria was made hastily, without consulting his national security team or allies, and over strong objections from virtually everyone involved in the fight against the Islamic State group, according to U.S. and Turkish officials.

Trump stunned his Cabinet, lawmakers and much of the world with the move by rejecting the advice of his top aides and agreeing to a withdrawal in a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week, two U.S. officials and a Turkish official briefed on the matter told The Associated Press.

The Dec. 14 call, described by officials who were not authorized to discuss the decision-making process publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, provides insight into a consequential Trump decision that prompted the resignation of widely respected Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. It also set off a frantic, four-day scramble to convince the president either to reverse or delay the decision.

The White House rejected the description of the call from the officials but was not specific.

“In no uncertain terms, reporting throughout this story is not true,” National Security Council spokesman Garrett Marquis said. “It is clear from the context that this false version of events is from sources who lack authority on the subject, possibly from unnamed sources in Turkey.”

The State Department and Pentagon declined to comment on the account of the decision to withdraw the troops, which have been in Syria to fight the Islamic State since 2015.

Despite losing the physical caliphate, thousands of IS fighters remain in Iraq and Syria, and the group continues to carry out insurgent attacks and could easily move back into territory it once held if American forces withdraw.

The Dec. 14 call came a day after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu agreed to have the two presidents discuss Erdogan’s threats to launch a military operation against U.S.-backed Kurdish rebels in northeast Syria, where American forces are based. The NSC then set up the call.

Pompeo, Mattis and other members of the national security team prepared a list of talking points for Trump to tell Erdogan to back off, the officials said.

But the officials said Trump, who had previously accepted such advice and convinced the Turkish leader not to attack the Kurds and put U.S. troops at risk, ignored the script. Instead, the president sided with Erdogan.

In the following days, Trump remained unmoved by those scrambling to convince him to reverse or at least delay the decision to give the military and Kurdish forces time to prepare for an orderly withdrawal.

“The talking points were very firm,” said one of the officials, explaining that Trump was advised to clearly oppose a Turkish incursion into northern Syria and suggest the U.S. and Turkey work together to address security concerns. “Everybody said push back and try to offer (Turkey) something that’s a small win, possibly holding territory on the border, something like that.”

Erdogan, though, quickly put Trump on the defensive, reminding him that he had repeatedly said the only reason for U.S. troops to be in Syria was to defeat the Islamic State and that the group had been 99 percent defeated. “Why are you still there?” the second official said Erdogan asked Trump, telling him that the Turks could deal with the remaining IS militants.

With Erdogan on the line, Trump asked national security adviser John Bolton, who was listening in, why American troops remained in Syria if what the Turkish president was saying was true, according to the officials. Erdogan’s point, Bolton was forced to admit, had been backed up by Mattis, Pompeo, U.S. special envoy for Syria Jim Jeffrey and special envoy for the anti-ISIS coalition Brett McGurk, who have said that IS retains only 1 percent of its territory, the officials said.

Bolton stressed, however, that the entire national security team agreed that victory over IS had to be enduring, which means more than taking away its territory.

Trump was not dissuaded, according to the officials, who said the president quickly capitulated by pledging to withdraw, shocking both Bolton and Erdogan.

Caught off guard, Erdogan cautioned Trump against a hasty withdrawal, according to one official. While Turkey has made incursions into Syria in the past, it does not have the necessary forces mobilized on the border to move in and hold the large swaths of northeastern Syria where U.S. troops are positioned, the official said.

The call ended with Trump repeating to Erdogan that the U.S. would pull out, but offering no specifics on how it would be done, the officials said.

Over the weekend, the national security team raced to come up with a plan that would reverse, delay or somehow limit effects of the withdrawal, the officials said.

On Monday, Bolton, Mattis and Pompeo met at the White House to try to plot a middle course. But they were told by outgoing chief of staff John Kelly and his soon-to-be successor Mick Mulvaney that Trump was determined to pull out and was not to be delayed or denied, according to the officials. The trio met again on Tuesday morning to try to salvage things, but were again rebuffed, the officials said.

The White House had wanted to announce the decision on Tuesday — and press secretary Sarah Sanders scheduled a rare briefing specifically to announce it. But the Pentagon convinced Trump to hold off because the withdrawal plans weren’t complete and allies and Congress had not yet been notified, according to the officials. The first country aside from Turkey to be told of the impending pull-out was Israel, the officials said.

Word of the imminent withdrawal began to seep out early Wednesday after U.S. Central Command chief Gen. Joseph Votel started to inform his commanders on the ground and the Kurds of the decision.

Following the official announcement the White House emphasized that the U.S. will continue to support the fight against IS and remains ready to “re-engage” when needed. But in a tweet, the president said U.S. troops would no longer be fighting IS on behalf of others.

“Time to focus on our Country & bring our youth back home where they belong!”

Maybe his lunacy will have a sort of “madman theory” effect and cause Erdogan to rethink his strategy vis-a-vis the Kurds. I don’t know. But if this story is true, our worst fears are coming to pass. Trump is forming national security policy on the fly based on emotion contrary to any kind of protocol or understanding. Obviously, this is why Mattis finally decided he had to take a stand.

He’s decompensating.

It may be that this capricious “gut” call won’t result in a worse catastrophe (it might) but if anyone thinks that his “gut” is going to always tell him the right thing to do, I would respectfully suggest you get your head examined.

Completely irrational national security decision-making by the leader of the worlds most powerful country is a nightmare.

If you find what we write here every day to be valuable, I hope you’ll consider putting some change in the Hullabaloo holiday stocking. Your support buys me the time to spend my days wading through the muck of the day’s political stories to bring you highlights and analysis that I hope you will enjoy and find informative.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

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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.

Soon to be Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, last week live from the Oval Office, that the Republicans didn’t have the votes for Border Security. Today the House Republicans voted and won, 217-185. Nancy does not have to apologize. All I want is GREAT BORDER SECURITY!

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

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”

We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2018

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:

Does the USA want to be the Policeman of the Middle East, getting NOTHING but spending precious lives and trillions of dollars protecting others who, in almost all cases, do not appreciate what we are doing? Do we want to be there forever? Time for others to finally fight…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 20, 2018

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.

….Russia, Iran, Syria & many others are not happy about the U.S. leaving, despite what the Fake News says, because now they will have to fight ISIS and others, who they hate, without us. I am building by far the most powerful military in the world. ISIS hits us they are doomed!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 20, 2018

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?

If you find what we write here every day to be valuable, I hope you’ll consider putting some change in the Hullabaloo holiday stocking. Your support buys me the time to spend my days wading through the muck of the day’s political stories to bring you highlights and analysis that I hope you will enjoy and find informative.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

A pimped-out pauper?
by Tom Sullivan

Rumored U.S. president Donald J. Trump set the world reeling Wednesday and announced without warning and by tweet he had defeated ISIS and would withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. On Thursday, Defense Secretary James Mattis announced his resignation in a pointed letter that omitted the usual pleasantries proffered on such occasions. No it has been an honor serving with you, not even a “Sincerely yours.” Mattis schooled Trump on what he believed the nations’s role in maintaining international order is and should be — in respectful cooperation with the country’s allies — and, in doing so, made clear Trump shares none of those views. Mattis is done with him.

“Mattis was perhaps the only Trump administration official who had the unconditional trust of America’s closest allies,” write Greg Jaffe and
Karoun Demirjian in the Washington Post. Allies abroad shuddered. Trump listens only to Trump.

Except for “Fox & Friends,” Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh. Branding him a “gutless president,” ordinarily Trump-friendly pundits grew livid at Trump’s caving to Congress on approving a continuing resolution to keep the government open. The bullies bullied the bully into reneging on his agreement to sign the Senate-passed CR without border wall funding. Trump renewed his threat to shut down the government over border security. “I would ask for wall. We need wall,” DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told a House committee Thursday.

The Post reported:

Inside the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump was in what one Republican close to the White House described as “a tailspin,” acting “totally irrationally” and “flipping out” over criticisms in the media.

An unnerved stock market continued its slide. Russia celebrated, and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Trump ordered 7,000 troops to leave.

The country picked a helluva week to stop sniffing glue.

At her emptywheel blog, Marcy Wheeler exercised “bloggers prerogative” in jotting down assorted thoughts at the end of a tumultuous day: Mattis’s diplomatically toxic assessment of Trump’s Syria decision; threats by Turkey’s Erdogan to massacre America’s Kurdish allies; Robert Mueller’s endgame; reports that temporary DOJ chief Matt Whitaker has evaded recommendations from ethics officials to recuse himself from overseeing the Mueller investigation; and more.

But the most tantalizing clue to what is driving Trump besides his own demons is Wheeler’s suggestion that Trump is hopelessly in debt to Russia, Turkey perhaps, “and whatever bank is fighting a demand from Mueller that it turn over evidence of Trump’s graft.” For every favor they’ve done him, they expect a return.

“Trump knows he’s screwed. He’s just not sure whether Putin or Mueller presents the bigger threat,” Wheeler wrote in August.

Why is anyone surprised that Trump's willing to shut down our government when it's clearly not the one he works for?— Stephen Colbert (@StephenAtHome) December 21, 2018

Marcy continues:

Nevertheless, at the moment where it has become increasingly clear that Mueller knows much of whatever blackmail these partners have over Trump, Trump has chosen, instead, to alienate the Senators who might keep him from being impeached by evacuating from Syria and, later reports make clear, Afghanistan.

Trump is, on a dime and without warning to our closest allies, rolling up the American Empire. And he’s doing it not because he’s a peacenik — as far too many self-described progressives are trying to claim — but because ruthless, committed authoritarians have convinced him he needs their continued approval more than he needs the approval of even the Republican hawks in the Senate.

Donald J. Trump has spent his life sustaining the fiction that he is smart, savvy and successful. He has done it by evading the law, by having his father bail out his many failures, by intimidating those he has cheated, and by trading on a brand juiced with hot air and relentless self-promotion. But as sitting president he faces career justice officials who cannot be bought or intimidated, and powerful foreign oligarchs whose safety deposit box keys he can only dream of fondling.

Now the law is at last closing in. Trump’s foundation has been ordered closed, its assets turned over to charity. New York state recognizes no federal pardon to absolve state crimes. Soon enough, Trump’s tax returns will no longer be secret. And if Wheeler is right, his foreign handlers are calling in their chits and Trump is scrambling to pay up. It’s December 21 in New York. In Moscow, in Ankara, and in Beijing it is already Christmas.

The only sources of cash for sustaining Trump’s shaky enterprises and inflated self-image are Russian banks and, investigations may reveal, money laundering. Trump’s patrons can end him.

Is it possible the one thing keeping the air from bleeding out of the Trump Organization is foreign autocrats’ money, that he has none that isn’t theirs, and that the law Trump has evaded his whole life doesn’t frighten him as much as being revealed as a pimped-out pauper?

If you find what we do here to be helpful in understanding what’s happening around us in this wild political era, if stopping by here from time to time gives you a little sense of solidarity with others who are going through their days as gobsmacked by events as you are, I hope you’ll find it in your heart to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking to help me keep the light on for another year.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

This post will reamin pinned at the top of the page for a while. Please scroll down if you’ve already read it.

Let’s keep an eye on the right wing noise machine. They’re in charge.

by digby

Holiday fundraiser soother: a baby polar bear

I’m not sure if Donald Trump actually believes that a majority of Americans are his base or if he thinks they are so powerful that they can overcome the fact that a majority can defeat him in 2020. (You couldn’t blame him for thinking the latter since that’s how he won in 2016.) But either way, it’s clear that he is terrified of making them angry.

This is not the way it usually works. Every once in a while the right-wing propaganda machine will break from the GOP president and it often works for both parties by showing a little independence for the partisan media and gives the president some breathing room to compromise. It was all kabuki but each party would keep its place in the fever swamp and could pretend they had their separate power centers. That’s not true in this case. While the conservative evangelicals will believe anything the president says, it’s obvious that the right wing media has clout and they aren’t afraid to use it.

I wrote this morning about Ann Coulter upsetting him so much with her criticism of his lack of progress on building the wall that he unfollowed her on twitter. (A big deal for him since he only follows 47 people.) Today we find out that he is calling around to lick a few important boots to ensure that the real heavy hitters stay on his team.

Here’s Rush:

“The president got word to me 20 minutes ago that if it comes back to him without money, if whatever happens in the House and Senate comes back to him with no allocation of $5 billion for the wall than he’s going to veto it,” Limbaugh told his listeners on his radio show just moments after Trump met with members of Congress on Thursday.

Limbaugh spent most of his program on Wednesday and Thursday urging the president to shut down the government over the wall funding issue, despite Democrats refusal to include extra funding for border security.

“Veto this thing and then head down to Mar-a-Lago,” Limbaugh said, referring to Trump’s vacation plans. “I will meet you on the first tee wherever you want to play golf, whenever, and this will end up being resolved in your favor.”

This is not the first time that a president has called Rush, of course. Trump himself called in to congratulate him on the 30 year anniversary of his Reign of Radio Hate. Recall this one from a few years back:

RUSH: What are…? (interruption) Interrupting for what?

THE PRESIDENT: Hello!

RUSH: Oh, jeez. The president?

THE PRESIDENT: Rush Limbaugh?

RUSH: Yes, sir, Mr. President.

THE PRESIDENT: President George W. Bush calling to congratulate you on 20 years of important and excellent broadcasting.

RUSH: Well, thank you, sir. You’ve stunned me! (laughing) I’m shocked. But thank you so much.

THE PRESIDENT: That’s hard to do.

RUSH: (laughing) I know, it is.

THE PRESIDENT: I’m here with a room full of admirers. There are two others that would like to speak to you and congratulate you, people who consider you friends and really appreciate the contribution you’ve made.

RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much. Put ’em on.

THE PRESIDENT: How you doing? This is my swan song? If this is all you got for me, I’m moving on.

RUSH: (laughing) No! The show’s yours; take as much time as you want.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I’m just calling along with President 41 and the former governor of Florida. We’re fixing to have lunch here, and I said, “Listen, we ought to call our pal and let him know that we care,” for you. So this is as much as anything, a nice verbal letter to a guy we really care for.

RUSH: Well, thank you, sir, very much. I’m overwhelmed. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this and how much you’ve surprised me.

Click the link for the whole conversation, but be sure you have a barf bag handy.

You’ll note that back then it was Rush doing the bootlicking, not the other way around.

Trump is making it clear now that he’s planning to outsource his legislative strategy to Rush Limbaugh and the Freedom Caucus. I hope the Democrats are paying attention. Happy talk about compromise and bipartisanship is totally off the menu and they’d better be prepared.

As you can see from the above link from 10 years ago, I’ve been writing about this right-wing noise machine and the toxic movement over which it has undue influence for a long time on this blog. I suspect we all may have thought it would have to have run its course by now but the truth is that it’s more powerful than its ever been. It has a president completely in its thrall.

I’ve spent years following this phenomenon, going all the way back to the beginning when Rush was named an honorary member of the class of 1994 Gingrich revolutionaries. And he’s not the only one, of course. They have a strong, well-funded wingnut network that maintains a huge audience of cultists. I think it behooves us to take them seriously, especially now.

I’ll keep writing about the merger of this sophisticated GOP propaganda operation with the Trump cult over the next year as we live through this unprecedented political moment. It’s vastly important that we try to keep a clear head and a rational perspective, no matter how hard it is to do so. And we can’t put our heads in the sand, no matter how much we may want to.

I hope you will continue to stop by here from time to time for a little analysis, entertainment, humor, and just plain relief that you haven’t gone crazy — yes it is as outrageous as it seems. We’re here to document it for you seven days a week.

If you’ve already thrown a few bucks into the Hullabaloo holiday stocking to keep this blog afloat for another year I truly appreciate the support. If you haven’t and you’ve a mind to, you can find the donate buttons and the snail mail address below.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

.