Month: December 2018

Panic 

by tristero

It’s important to remind the young ‘uns around the inter-tubes that nothing that is happening now is normal. Again, this is not normal. The president is in panic, his administration is in  panic, the economy is in panic, and much of the world is in panic.

And the worst of it is that real people are getting horribly hurt. True, it’s not not yet at the level of the Bush administration which began a pointless war that led to the death of 1 million Iraqis — but no one except Republicans can find bearable the death of children in American custody.

This, too, is not normal.

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

It turns out that Trump really does believe he knows more than the generals

by digby

Secretary of Defense Mattis resigned this afternoon over this impulsive Syria withdrawal because of the outrageous process by which Trump made the decision to withdraw troops in Syria and Afghanistan and the inevitable abandonment of the Kurdish and (reportedly) Afghan allies.

His letter of resignation is bracing. It’s clear that this is really about a rogue president whose erratic behavior is now so out of control that he cannot in good conscience enable it — and he cannot stop it.

Dear Mr. President:

I have been privileged to serve as our country’s 26th Secretary of Defense which has allowed me to serve alongside our men and women of the Department in defense of our citizens and our ideals.

I am proud of the progress that has been made over the past two years on some of the key goals articulated in our National Defense Strategy: putting the Department on a more sound budgetary footing, improving readiness and lethality in our forces, and reforming the Department’s business practices for greater performance. Our troops continue to provide the capabilities needed to prevail in conflict and sustain strong U.S. global influence.

One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships. While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies. Like you, I have said from the beginning that the armed forces of the United States should not be the policeman of the world. Instead, we must use all tools of American power to provide for the common defense, including providing effective leadership to our alliances. NATO’s 29 democracies demonstrated that strength in their commitment to fighting alongside us following the 9-11 attack on America. The Defeat-ISIS coalition of 74 nations is further proof.

Similarly, I believe we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours. It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model – gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions – to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbors, America and our allies. That is why we must use all the tools of American power to provide for the common defense.

My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues. We must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our alliances.

Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position. The end date for my tenure is February 28, 2019, a date that should allow sufficient time for a successor to be nominated and confirmed as well as to make sure the Department’s interests are properly articulated and protected at upcoming events to include Congressional posture hearings and the NATO Defense Ministerial meeting in February. Further, that a full transition to a new Secretary of Defense occurs well in advance of the transition of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in September in order to ensure stability Within the Department.

I pledge my full effort to a smooth transition that ensures the needs and interests of the 2.15 million Service Members and 732,079 DoD civilians receive undistracted attention of the Department at all times so that they can fulfill their critical, round-the-clock mission to protect the American people.

I very much appreciate this opportunity to serve the nation and our men and women in uniform.

I think we may have gone to Defcon 1. That is not a boilerplate resignation. He’s saying that Trump blowing up alliances and cozying up to dictators is bad and this latest is the straw that broke the camel’s back. We all know that Trump is unstable and this letter indicates following up on his inane move to send troops to the border, he’s now decided to play out his military fantasies with the military overseas.

These decisions were made against the advice of his entire foreign policy team, including John Bolton.

Is he losing it? Has he decided to just go for it and to hell with everyone? Is someone whispering something in his ear?

We don’t know. What we do know is that he’s starting to make military decisions with huge ramifications, without listening to any of his advisers. He is going with his vaunted “gut” because he thinks it’s smarter than all the brains in the world.

He believes this because he’s gotten away with every fuck-up, con game and catastrophe he’s overseen in his long, disastrous life. He’s now way over his head and the stakes are enormous. The question is — if he’s finally coming to his denouement, will he be taking the country and the world down with him?

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

If you can’t find the ethics officials you want, find the ethics officials you need

by digby

We knew Matt Whitaker was Trump’s mole in the DOJ as he worked for Jeff Sessions and he still is:

A senior Justice Department ethics official concluded acting attorney general Matthew G. Whitaker should recuse from overseeing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe examining President Trump, but advisers to Whitaker recommended the opposite and he has no plans to step aside, according to people familiar with the matter.

The latest account of what happened underscores the high stakes and deep distrust — within Congress and in some corners of the Justice Department — surrounding Whitaker’s appointment to become the nation’s top law enforcement official until the Senate votes on the nomination of William P. Barr to take the job. Earlier Thursday, a different official, who spoke on the condition they not be named, said ethics officials had advised Whitaker need not step aside, only to retract that account hours later.

Within days of the president’s announcement in early November that he had put Whitaker in the role on a temporary basis, Whitaker tapped a veteran U.S. attorney to become part of a four-person team of advisers on his new job, including the question of whether he should recuse from Mueller’s investigation because of his past statements regarding that probe, and his friendship with one of its witnesses, according to a senior Justice Department official.

Whitaker never asked Justice Department ethics officials for a recommendation, nor did he receive a formal recommendation, this official said.

However, after Whitaker met repeatedly with ethics officials to discuss the facts and the issues under consideration, a senior ethics official told the group of advisers on Tuesday that it was a “close call,” but Whitaker should recuse to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, the official said. Whitaker was not present at that meeting, they said.

Those four advisers, however, disagreed with the ethics determination and recommended to Whitaker the next day not to recuse, saying there was no precedent for doing so, and doing so now could create a bad precedent for future attorneys general.

Basically Whitaker didn’t like what the ethics officials told him so he appointed a different group of advisers to tell him what he wanted to hear. Who are they? He won’t say.

Nobody is surprised by this, of course. The whole reason he was chosen was that he was a demonstrated Trump toady. And it looks like Trump’s permanent replacement nominee is too:

President Trump’s pick for attorney general sent the Justice Department an unsolicited memo earlier this year questioning the appropriateness of an obstruction probe special counsel Robert Mueller is said to be conducting of certain Trump actions in the White House.

The memo, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, was sent to the Department in June 2018 by William Barr, who previously served as Attorney General under President George H.W. Bush and can be read in full below.

Barr in the memo acknowledged that he was basing his assessment on what had been publicly reported about Mueller’s investigation and he recognized that he was “in the dark about many facts.” However, he argued that Mueller “should not be permitted to demand that the President submit to interrogation about alleged obstruction.”

The memo called Mueller’s obstruction theory “fatally misconceived” and as Barr understood it, premised on “a novel and legally insupportable reading of the law.”

The nearly 19-page memo suggested that, while there are certainly examples of obstructive conduct that could be investigated — destroying or altering evidence, suborning perjury, inducing witnesses to change testimony — President Trump, as far as Barr knew, wasn’t being “accused of engaging in any wrongful act of evidence impairment.”

Nice of him to send this, out of the blue, all on his own. How generous of his to share his knowledge with the Department of Justice out of the goodness of his heart.

Yeah, not likely. It’s pretty obvious that Barr turned down the personal lawyer gig (because it’s a dumpster fire of a job) and was angling for this one. Trump got the message.

The crisis in the Justice Department continues apace. It’s almost certain that Whitaker is sharing everything he knows with the Trump team. He’s a low-level, cheap, wingnut, conman and that’s what he was put there to do. I had some hope that Barr would be someone who would see all the facts and understand that this is waaay bigger than partisan politics or some abstract battle over executive authority. Now, I think that’s a real long shot. Barr appears to be one of those conservatives who have been drinking the toxic swill of the right-wing fever swamp and he’s now willing to put his reputation and legacy on the line to support Trump. He must be a believer because he doesn’t have to do it. He’s not an elected official. He’s a volunteer and apparently so eager to help that he’s just been unsolicited opinions about the Mueller problem to the Department of Justice.

This is going to be a big mess, I’m afraid. I hope that the Special Counsel has a fail-safe lined up because these people are determined to protect this miscreant despite the fact that the country seems to have been the target of a massive foreign influence campaign to put him in the White House.

This is bad.

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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What happens when a president has zero credibility?

by digby

I’ll be honest. I’m of two minds on this Syria withdrawal that Trump impulsively announced on twitter yesterday. It’s clearly a wag-the-dog moment for him but I have to admit that if a president is going to us such self-serving tactics (he isn’t the first) I prefer such moves to be the withdrawal of troops rather than escalation. And if the president were a normal thoughtful person who understands the issues, reads all the briefing papers, has a good handle on all the geopolitical implications of his decisions, I wouldn’t object to him going against the conventional wisdom of his party and the military. Their bias in favor of military options needs a counterpoint more often than not.

But I think we all know that Trump is not that person.  We don’t know exactly why he’s made this decision but it’s fair to say that if it turns out have been a good one, it’s a total accident.  And there’s some good evidence that it’s based on something that will actually end up blowing back on the country and the world in unpredictable ways:

The White House’s announcement Wednesday of a withdrawal of troops from Syria came a week after President Donald Trump made the decision. The Republican leader informed his military officials following a call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan regarding an arms deal and a potential offensive against U.S. allies.

The New York Times reported that U.S.-backed Kurdish leaders were informed of Trump’s decision on Wednesday morning.

Turkish troops and allied Syrian rebel groups have waged offensives that have pulled Kurdish fighters away from U.S. front lines against ISIS, frustrating the coalition’s efforts at critical points in the fight. Erdogan recently threatened to wage a new offensive against Kurdish positions in northern Syria, prompting condemnation from the Pentagon and a conversation last week between the Turkish leader and Trump.

Trump was reported to have told off Erdogan on Friday, but a Pentagon source told Newsweek that it was after this discussion that the president made his intentions to withdraw U.S. troops known to officials over the weekend.

But on Monday, Erdogan renewed his threats for a Turkish offensive in the U.S.-controlled territory in northeast Syria during a speech in Turkey’s central Konya province. The Turkish president vowed that American forces would not be harmed in pending operations set to commence soon in the region.

At the same time, Congress was notified of a potential arms sale to the Turkish government of 140 Patriot surface-to-air missile variants and equipment worth $3.5 billion, according to a press release from the Defense Security Cooperation Agency.

Did he do this for arms sales? To wag the dog? Because Erdogon strong-armed him? Does he have a clue about the potential ramifications of doing this, particularly is there is a Kurdish bloodbath? (Not bloody likely.)

I suppose we could all be impressed by the fact that he is so secure that he feels no compunction about openly pleasing the Russian government with this decision even as it’s more and more obvious that he’s been unduly influenced (to be generous) by Vladimir Putin and may soon be facing very serious consequences for it. Unfortunately, it’s obvious that he’s either too dumb to understand that the optics of this move make him look even more guilty — or he has no choice, which is much worse.

This is the central problem we face with Donald Trump. He is pathologically dishonest, chaotic, undisciplined, stupid and vain and he has destroyed every norm that had, up until now, held this system together. And as a result, it’s impossible to take anything he does at face value or even allow that he might have come to the right conclusion even by accident. Because if that’s how it happens, he is incapable of managing the fallout or charting a rational follow-up.

It’s always bad when a leader makes the right decision for the wrong reasons because it rarely solves the real problem. In Trump’s case, it’s downright dangerous because he is so transparently out of his depth that it provides adversaries with a huge advantage.

I don’t know what the right response it. Syria is one of those proverbial problems from hell. Maybe this will work out. But I don’t sleep well knowing that Trump’s decision making tends to give dangerous people ideas:

North Korea said Thursday it will never unilaterally give up its nuclear weapons unless the United States first removes what Pyongyang called a nuclear threat. The surprisingly blunt statement jars with Seoul’s rosier presentation of the North Korean position and could rattle the fragile trilateral diplomacy to defuse a nuclear crisis that last year had many fearing war.

Maybe this announcement is unrelated to the news that Erdogon may have strong armed Trump into withdrawal. But would anyone be surprised if it was?

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

Trump is terrified of Ann Coulter

by digby

Earlier this week, Ann Coulter appeared on a widely circulated Daily Caller podcast and issued a warning to her “alpha-male” president:

“They’re about to have a country where no Republican will ever be elected president again. Trump will just have been a joke presidency who scammed the American people, amused the populists for a while, but he’ll have no legacy whatsoever.”

Apparently, he was so hurt by her comments that he unfollowed her on twitter:

As of Thursday morning, Trump follows 45 people on Twitter, and Coulter is not one of those people. An account that follows and alerts Trump’s Twitter activity made a post highlighting that he unfollowed her.

Sad!

His buddies in the Freedom caucus backed her up. It scared him so much he decided that he’s going to hold his breath until he turns blue:

President Donald Trump will not sign the current Senate-passed funding measure that would avert a government shutdown, House Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday.

What was once a deal to avoid a holiday government shutdown got torpedoed Thursday after conservatives and Trump unleashed fury that the agreement doesn’t fully fund a long-promised border wall.

It was a closing burst of wrath in the final days of the Republican-majority House. If Trump cannot secure the $5 billion he is demanding for the wall now, it’s unlikely he will see a spending bill that meets his requirement for at least two years as Democrats assume control.

Stewing at the White House, Trump ranted on Twitter that he’d been down a similar road earlier this year, only to find himself again in the same position.

He summoned House Republicans — who thought they’d struck a deal to avert a shutdown — for noontime talks at the White House.

“President Trump just met with Republican Members of the House. Not surprisingly, they all feel strongly about border security — stopping the flow of drugs, stopping human trafficking and stopping terrorism. We protect nations all over the world, but Democrats are unwilling to protect our nation. We urgently need funding for border security and that includes a wall,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said following the White House meeting.

The White House is following Office of Budget and Management guidelines on notifying federal employees whether they’ll be furloughed in case of a government shutdown, a senior administration told CNN’s Jim Acosta.

“Prudent management requires that agencies be prepared for the possibility of a lapse. OMB guidance states that two business days before a potential lapse, agencies need to notify employees of their work and pay status under a lapse — that is, if they are furloughed or excepted. Agencies were directed by OMB to start that notification this morning,” the official said.

The last-minute scramble came after several days of whiplash, which began last week when Trump said in a meeting with Democrats that he would be proud to oversee a shutdown if it meant securing funds for the wall.

Later, the White House signaled he was softening on that stance, indicating the President was open to a compromise that fell short of providing the $5 billion Trump is demanding.

That provided an opening for Republican lawmakers to begin proceedings on a measure that would provide funding for nine federal agencies through February. That bill passed the Senate on Wednesday evening.

But on Thursday morning, the future of that plan was thrust into question after Trump tweeted his frustration at having to swallow another spending measure that doesn’t include funds for the wall.

The plan making its way through Congress would provide funding through February 8 — after Democrats assume control of the House, making this the likely last chance Trump will have of securing a plan that provides funds for the wall.

“When I begrudgingly signed the Omnibus Bill, I was promised the Wall and Border Security by leadership. Would be done by end of year (NOW). It didn’t happen!” he wrote after a phone conversation with House Speaker Paul Ryan. “We foolishly fight for Border Security for other countries – but not for our beloved U.S.A. Not good!”

Trump remained ambiguous Thursday on whether he will sign a measure temporarily funding the government in order to avoid a year-end shutdown, as he lamented a lack of funding for his desired border wall.

He is due to depart Friday afternoon for an extended holiday stay at his Mar-a-Lago estate in South Florida. The White House has refused to say whether he would still travel there if the shutdown occurs. Included in the federal agencies affected would be the Secret Service, whose agents and officers would still work to protect the President and his family, just on an unpaid basis.

A senior White House official told CNN Friday it’s possible that Trump will decide not to back down on the wall fight as a result of growing pressure from the Freedom Caucus and conservatives.

The Dow is down 645 points as I write this.

Ann Coulter has the president of the United States by the … neck and she’s squeezing him hard. Is it any wonder that despots, tyrants and psychopaths all over the world are challenging the United States?

He’s weak and he’s stupid and this chaos is the result.

Happy Holidays. Oy vey.

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

Best Infrastructure Week yet
by Tom Sullivan

The sitting president’s week, in no particular order:

Senate passes bill to keep government open until February, undercutting Trump’s drive for border wall funding

House Intelligence expected to vote Thursday on sending Roger Stone transcript to Mueller

The stock market is on pace for its worst December since the Great Depression

Federal Judge Blocks Trump’s Policy Gutting Asylum for People Fleeing Domestic and Gang Violence

Judge denies Trump administration request for emergency halt to census citizenship trial

Mueller Ready to Pounce on Trumpworld Concessions to Moscow

Trump signed letter of intent for Trump Tower Moscow project despite Giuliani insisting he didn’t

‘I’m not hiding my disgust, my disdain’: Veteran judge upends hopes of Trump allies as he spotlights Flynn’s misdeeds

Trump shocks allies and advisers with plan to pull US troops out of Syria

Trump 2020 campaign used a shell company to pay ad buyers at the center of alleged illegal coordination scheme with NRA

Embattled Trump Foundation forced to dissolve itself under court supervision

Poll: Majority say sitting presidents should be subject to indictment

Senate report finds Russia used social media to help elect Trump, suppress black vote

The VA’s Private Care Program Gave Companies Billions and Vets Longer Waits

Following the Money: Trump and Russia-Linked Transactions From the Campaign to the Presidential Inauguration

Democrats to block end-of-year judges package

And it’s only Thursday morning.

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 stay pinned at the top of the page for a while. Please scroll down if you’ve read it already. thanks — d

The Golden Age of Blogs

by digby

Holiday Fundraiser Soother: Otter pups!

I didn’t use that term. It came from James Fallows the other day:

The wheel turns …

(Keep thinking about schemes to revive the Lost Golden Age of the Blog.)

— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) December 17, 2018

Today is the age of Facebook, twitter and Instagram so blogs like this one seem like something out of the dark ages. Time passes quickly during periods of technological innovation so it was only a few years ago that platforms like Blogger and WordPress were the very latest in online communications. And since it happened at a time of crisis, right after 9/11 and the insane crusade to invade Iraq, they were briefly an important player in national politics. There were New York Times profiles of bloggers and politicians sought our attention and favor. We became a big player in fundraising on the left (the right never really got that part together) and formed the basis for organizing around causes, protests and partisan politics. It was a heady time.

I was never in the real big leagues like Daily Kos or Crooks and Liars which had massive communities and big traffic but I’m proud of the role I played in creating what we used to call the Netroots and now simply refer to as the Progressive Movement. And the results of all that early work are coming to fruition. I would argue that the early days of progressive activism centered in the netroots is at least partly responsible for the emerging progressive majority we see in the Democratic Party and the country at large.

In recent years, online organizing and activism moved to the newer social media platforms, particularly Facebook. And it’s been enormously powerful. Facebook is now an intrinsic part of electoral politics. Unfortunately, it’s also been revealed to be a pernicious threat to our system of government. The revelations over the past year about Facebook’s (and others’) behavior and the ease with which nefarious actors have infiltrated and used it to undermine democracy is one of the scariest political stories of my lifetime. Something very dangerous is happening right before our eyes and nobody really knows what to do about it. (A good first start would be to sack every Facebook executive, starting with Zuckerberg, since they knowingly aided and abetted the misuse of their platform.) We have a propaganda problem and it’s monumental.

Anyway, I guess my point is that while the golden age of blogs is long past, and this one is certainly a relic of that early age, I suspect that single trusted voices plugging away at unraveling the day’s events may still be of some value in this confusing world. Certainly, it will never be the same as it was in the early days, nor should it be. But I think perhaps amid all the din of twitter bot craziness, Facebook arguments coming from who-knows-where and propaganda that looks like activism across all social media, a blog like this one may be a safe haven for some of you.

I’m not employed by any corporation and I don’t work for any politician. I am certainly not knowingly passing on propaganda and if it happens by accident I will correct it immediately. I am skeptical of all government and media and try to keep a clear head when analyzing the events of the day to the best of my ability. I’m also a dyed-in-the-wool feminist, progressive Democrat with all that that implies, so you know what perspective I bring to all of that.

This blog may be ugly and archaic, but you can be sure that nothing about it is fake.

If any of that is something you find valuable in all this online craziness, 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 I hope you will enjoy and find informative.

If you have 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

Trumpie has a sad

by digby

His cultists are getting restless and he just doesn’t know what to do about it:

President Donald Trump has become increasingly sensitive to criticism that he’s backing off his signature promise to build a wall along the US-Mexico border, three sources familiar with his concern tell CNN, as aides fear the administration’s chances for securing funding for it have sunset.

GOP lawmakers and Trump are set to OK a short-term funding measure to avert a year-end government shutdown and Democrats will assume control of the House in 2019, virtually assuring no additional border wall funding.

Trump’s anxiety about fulfilling his top campaign goal comes at the end of months of bitter debate inside the West Wing over how to fund the border wall between those seen as ideologues and those who consider themselves pragmatists.

White House officials were in a meeting discussing border security last August when a sudden outburst from aide Stephen Miller silenced the room. The President’s legislative affairs director, Shahira Knight, was in the middle of arguing that instead of pushing for the border fight so close to the midterm elections, the White House should hold off until after November when they would be in stronger position to fight over funding.

Miller, the immigration hardliner at the table, cut her off mid-sentence. According to two people in the room, he shot back with a list of reasons why the administration would almost certainly be in a weaker position after the elections because Republicans were guaranteed to lose multiple seats and possibly the entire House, making building the wall all but impossible.
Knight, a former aide to ex-White House economic adviser Gary Cohn with an in-depth policy knowledge, went quiet. An official described it as an “evisceration.”
[…]
Trump postponed the summer fight over the border wall when he signed a short-term spending bill in September, but the issue has resurfaced and the same disagreements that were laid bare in that August meeting still exist. The prospect of funding the wall this time around grew dim when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced Wednesday he will introduce a continuing resolution, a deal that will fund the government through February 8 but deny the President his wall funding.

In a radio interview Wednesday, Ann Coulter, a conservative who has criticized the lack progress on the wall, declared she won’t vote for Trump in 2020 if the wall isn’t built.

“They’re about to have a country where no Republican will ever be elected president again,” Coulter told the station WMAL. “Trump will just have been a joke presidency who scammed the American people, amused the populists for a while, but he’ll have no legacy whatsoever.”

It remains to be seen if his supporters will chalk this up as a loss. Trump has continued to pledge he will get his “big, beautiful wall.”

Despite aides signaling an impending concession on the border wall, the President outwardly insisted Wednesday that the wall will be built “one way or the other.”

“Mexico is paying (indirectly) for the Wall through the new USMCA, the replacement for NAFTA! Far more money coming to the U.S. Because of the tremendous dangers at the Border, including large scale criminal and drug inflow, the United States Military will build the Wall!” he tweeted.

He’s been dancing as fast as he can to convince his starry-eyed followers that they can believe him or they can believe their own eyes. He’s already said repeatedly that the wall is already being built and it’s keeping people out. This is, of course, total bullshit.

And now there’s this:

How sad. He used to have so much vision:

Oct. 3, 2015
“We’re going to build a wall, and it’s going to be impenetrable, it will be a real wall.” —

an. 16, 2016
“China built a wall that’s 13,000 miles long 2,000 years ago. My ambition is for ours to be much higher.” — Speech in Myrtle Beach, S.C. The height of the Great Wall of China averages 20 to 23 feet. Its tallest point is 46 feet.

Feb. 9, 2016
“I’m talking about precasts going up probably 35 to 40 feet up in the air. That’s high. That’s a real wall.” — Interview on MSNBC

Feb. 12, 2016
“The wall just got 10 feet higher.” — Speech in Tampa, Fla., after the former Mexican president said Mexico would not pay for it.

March 3, 2016
“But — and I used an example. And this isn’t necessarily what was said, but whatever was said, the wall’s 50 feet high. Is it going to be 45 feet or 40 feet? That could very well be. That could very well — he wants it to be higher.” — Republican presidential debate

In fairness, he’s been wanting a “see-through” wall for a while. Someone told him people were getting hurt by flying 60 pound bags of drugs:

“As horrible as it sounds, when they throw the large sacks of drugs over, and if you have people on the other side of the wall, you don’t see them–they hit you on the head with 60 pounds of the stuff? It’s over.”

Never say his thinking doesn’t evolve.

Still, he’s feeling kind of bummed that his sycophants aren’t buying this. Coulter’s a gadfly so I’m sure he doesn’t care about her. But he does feel frustrated that he can’t just order it to be done as King/Commander in Chief.

So today, he impulsively issued an order for an immediate military withdrawal in Syria without consulting anyone in order to make himself feel better. (Hey! It could have been way worse — he could have escalated it.)  But I don’t think that’s going to assauge his fans who really, really want him to build that wall — and make Mexico pay for it. It’s their fondest wish (after locking up Hillary Clinton.)

Surely their hero can deliver it. He’s the greatest builder the world has ever known, right?

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

It’s the sanctions, stupid

by digby

I’m sure you are not surprised by the fact that we are learning Mueller is homing in on the quid pro quo of election sabotage in exchange for sanctions. (With a little Trump Tower Moscow sweetener…) We’ve been talking about it here for many months.

I wrote this back in 2017:

It’s obvious at this point that there was a concerted Russian effort to infiltrate the Trump campaign. The extent to which it was successful is still unclear, although we have plenty of evidence that members of the Trump campaign were willing to talk about it. At least one, former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, may well have been working for more than one boss. There are many questions about Trump’s business dealings with Russia, mostly because he has been opaque and secretive about his finances and because the world in which he worked is rife with oligarchs and mobsters looking for people with whom to park their money. All this is worthy of a thorough investigation, particularly since Trump is so obviously unwilling to be forthcoming about any of it.

But frankly, even if none of that turns out to be true — or if the Mueller investigation finds no evidence that anyone else committed any crimes — it doesn’t much matter. Michael Flynn has admitted to calling up Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak — at the behest of other members of the incoming administration and likely the president himself — and telling him not to worry about any U.S. retaliation against Russia for its election meddling, because when the Trump team took office they’d make it all go away. He might as well have said, “Tell Vlad thanks for the help. We’ve got his back.”

Indeed, Donald Trump, who was then the president-elect, tweeted this the very next day:

Great move on delay (by V. Putin) – I always knew he was very smart!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 30, 2016

What Flynn relayed to Kislyak that day was a shocking act of betrayal by the president-elect of the United States and his team. One can only imagine what authorities at the Department of Justice thought when they figured it out.

After all, the Obama administration was not protesting the legitimacy of Trump’s victory when it imposed those punishments. Our government was sending a straightforward message to the Russians that there would be a price to pay for their audacious interference in the American democratic system and their attack on American sovereignty. And then the newly elected president, the beneficiary of that attack, secretly sent a different message saying he would make sure there was no such penalty.

The Daily Beast reported yesterday:

[T]hree sources familiar with Mueller’s probe told The Daily Beast that his team is now zeroing in on Trumpworld figures who may have attempted to shape the administration’s foreign policy by offering to ease U.S. sanctions on Russia.

The Special Counsel’s Office is preparing court filings that are expected to detail Trump associates’ conversations about sanctions relief—and spell out how those offers and counter-proposals were characterized to top figures on the campaign and in the administration, those same sources said.

The new details would not only bookend a multi-year investigation by federal prosecutors into whether and how Trump associates seriously considered requests by Moscow to ease the financial measures. The new court filings could also answer a central question of the Russia investigation: What specific policy changes, if any, did the Kremlin hope to get in return from its political machinations?

“During his investigation, Mueller has shown little proclivity for chasing dead ends,” said Paul Pelletier, a former senior Department of Justice official. “His continued focus on the evidence that members of the Trump campaign discussed sanction relief with Russians shows that his evidence of a criminal violation continues to sharpen. This has to come as especially bad news for the president.”

Mueller’s interest in sanctions arose, at least in part, out of his team’s investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. The Special Counsel’s Office noted in a court filing last week that Flynn had lied to the FBI about his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak concerning U.S. sanctions. But other portions of this court filing were left redacted.

Mueller’s team is looking closely at evidence—some of it provided by witnesses—from the transition period, two individuals with knowledge of the probe said.

“Sanctions conversations that happened after November are more serious,” said Angela Stent, a former national intelligence officer for Russia under President George W. Bush. “At that point Flynn, for example, would have already known he was going to be part of the administration and those conversations would have included plans for what might happen [next].”

And Flynn wasn’t the only figure talking sanctions during that transition period, three sources with knowledge of the probe said. Several individuals in Trump’s inner circle were developing their own plans to put pressure on other parts of the government to roll back the sanctions, which have cost the Russian economy more than $100 billion, according to Kremlin estimates.

Let’s not forget the most famous meeting at Trump Tower meeting where we know they talked about releasing dirt on Clinton in exchange for lifting sanctions.

It’s always been the obvious quid pro quo. It’s been all over the case from the beginning. Trump was more than willing to help out his pal. After all, he owed him.

Update:

The Trump administration plans to lift sanctions on companies owned by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska after he significantly reduced his ownership stake in them.

The Treasury Department announced Wednesday that it would lift financial sanctions on Deripaska’s aluminum company, United Co. Rusal, as well as En+ Group plc and JSC EuroSibEnergo in 30 days, after Deripaska agreed to reduce his ownership stake in each of the companies to below 50 percent.

Deripaska, a billionaire aluminum magnate with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, will remain sanctioned and his property blocked.

“Treasury sanctioned these companies because of their ownership and control by sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, not for the conduct of the companies themselves,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement. “These companies have committed to significantly diminish Deripaska’s ownership and sever his control. The companies will be subject to ongoing compliance and will face severe consequences if they fail to comply,” he continued.

The sanctions on Deripaska and his companies were imposed in April under a law passed by Congress to punish Russia for interfering in the 2016 presidential election, in addition to other malign activities.

You’ll recall that Deripaska is the guy Paul Manafort was 20 million dollars in hock to. Well, ok then.

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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Retire all that GOP swag. It’s officially the Trump Party now.

by digby

Not a photoshop. It’s from the 2016 RNC.

Joan McCarter at Daily Kos shares the news that the GOP is now officially dead.

It’s official: The Republican Party is now the Trump Party. There’s no running away from him now for Republicans in 2020.

The Trump campaign is getting ready to “roll out an unprecedented structure for his 2020 reelection” which entail swallowing up the Republican National Committee to make it part of one entity—Trump’s. This is the first time a president from either party has officially taken over the parallel organization of the party for a campaign. They traditionally have final say on party officials and many of the aspects of the national campaign conducted by the party organs, but the national committees have always maintained a separate structure.

Not anymore, not for Republicans, anyway. They say that the “goal is to create a single, seamless organization that moves quickly, saves resources, and—perhaps most crucially—minimizes staff overlap and the kind of infighting that marked the 2016 relationship between the Trump campaign and the party.” Also, they say, it will give Republicans and “organizational advantage” over Democrats, who are going to have a robust and probably contentious primary, because they always are.

This is going to make it much more difficult for any potential challenger to Trump, provided he’s still around to be running for reelection in 2020. For that, it’s getting blasted (indirectly) by the one guy who is talking out loud about primarying Trump. Ohio Gov. John Kasich delegated his statement to adviser John Weaver, who says “There are some people who choose for whatever reason to handcuff themselves to the Titanic,. […] Why, I have no idea.”

Isn’t that a question for the ages?

Personally, I think they like it. They are authoritarian by nature and having a cult leader to whom they can submit is a very comfortable fit. They don’t care what he says or does. It’s not about that. It’s about winning and being in charge. They don’t have to be responsible for anything. They are quite happy only following orders.

As long as he wins they will follow him. When he loses, they will say he was never a Real Conservative anyway. (Remember: conservatism can never fail it can only be failed.) And then they will regroup in the wilderness, the wingnut welfare groups will make even more money and they’ll start all over again.

The real question is whether the other side will have finally shed their own fear of the cult and learned that the authoritarian right has no principles and care about nothing but winning. That’s been true for a long time. Many of us have been screaming to the heavens about it for a very long time. But now it’s even obvious to the media that the right is not an ideological movement. It’s a warlike tribe. Until they find a way to reconstruct themselves as something else, it must be understood that compromise has no real meaning beyond doing whatever is possible to advance your goals. It is not possible to deal with them in their current iteration as if they are good faith actors because they aren’t.

They aren’t even acting in good faith toward their own voters:

The South Carolina Republican Party could cancel its marquee presidential nominating contest in 2020 in a move to protect President Trump from any primary challengers.

Drew McKissick, chairman of the South Carolina GOP, said he doesn’t anticipate Trump would face a primary challenge and emphasized that the state party executive committee hasn’t held any formal discussions about the contest, dubbed “first in the South” and usually third on the presidential nominating calendar. But McKissick would pointedly not rule out canceling the primary, indicating that that would be his preference.

“We have complete autonomy and flexibility in either direction,” McKissick told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday. “Considering the fact that the entire party supports the president, we’ll end up doing what’s in the president’s best interest.”

It’s a cult, not a party. And when Trump is finally purged as he will be, they will try to simply carry on as if it never happened. It’s up to us to ensure the Democrats don’t let them get away with it. They’ve been getting crazier and crazier for three decades and it’s long past time to stop giving them the benefit of the doubt.

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

.