Month: January 2019

The struggle never ended
by Tom Sullivan

Ernest Green, member of the “Little Rock Nine” addresses 38th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Prayer Breakfast, Asheville, NC.

Those of us of a certain age, but not quite old enough, were too young to attend the 1963 March on Washington. The march and Rev. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech influenced our era, our views, and changed the country. There are times one wishes, if only I could have been there for that moment in history. Then again, such thinking fixes the civil rights movement in time. The truth is, that struggle never ended.

Saturday morning, Ernest Green, one of the “Little Rock Nine” spoke to Asheville’s 38th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Prayer Breakfast. He retold the story of how in 1958 he and several classmates integrated Central High School escorted by 101st Airborne Division troops.

“Over 60 years ago, we arrived in the back of an army wagon at Central High School,” Green said. “I don’t think any of us thought we’d still be talking about high school 60 years later.”

They were just looking for a better education and a chance at upward mobility.

King, who followed the Little Rock effort, was little known at the time. Green said he paid King little mind because, well, King was an adult and he was 16. But King was there when Green graduated, with anti-sniper teams overlooking the football field, helicopters flying overhead, dogs sniffing for bombs, and Green’s classmates not wanting to stand too close to him.

King quoted an old hymn to Green in the car on their way, saying God wouldn’t bring you this far to leave you now.

That struggle against white supremacy never ended.

The web was flooded yesterday with images of teenage red caps taunting a native American elder on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, feet from where Martin Luther King delivered his historic speech.

Nathan Phillips, reportedly a Vietnam War veteran and Omaha tribe elder, was singing and drumming there as part of Friday’s Indigenous Peoples March. The swarm of teenagers from the all-male Covington Catholic High School were in town from Kentucky for the March for Life.

Phillips told the Washington Post a few people from the March for Life crowd began chanting, “Build that wall, build that wall,” and Phillips felt he needed to leave:

“It was getting ugly, and I was thinking: ‘I’ve got to find myself an exit out of this situation and finish my song at the Lincoln Memorial,’ ” Phillips recalled. “I started going that way, and that guy in the hat stood in my way and we were at an impasse. He just blocked my way and wouldn’t allow me to retreat.”

The white teenager stood silently, smirking, inches away from Phillips’ face as others in an assortment of “Make America Great Again” caps and shirts mocked him and his friends.

The scene reminded The Atlantic‘s James Fallows last night of the scenes from Little Rock’s Central High School Green had recalled hours before:

The young men from Covington Catholic High School should know that they will be immortalized, the way the angry young white people you see below were: as a group, a movement, a problem, beyond their identities as individuals.

If one of the priests or teachers with the Covington group today had stepped in to stop them—if even one of the students had said, “Come on, back off!”—that person would be remembered, too. But there is no sign that anyone, student or teacher or parent or priest, did.

Black students integrating Little Rock Central High School, 1957.(AP)

Others saw the parallels to white resistance to black men sitting at lunch counters:

pic.twitter.com/sdufJXxBcv— james tuskes (@jtuskes) January 19, 2019

I honestly haven't stopped thinking about that MAGA kid all day – in part because I think so many of us have been on the receiving end of the face he was making: a smug, untouchable, entitled 'fuck you'.— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) January 19, 2019

The prevalent red caps and Trump gear among the teens was no accident, as Slate’s Ruth Graham observed:

The context is key to the clash’s virality, too. It took place just days after President Trump made light of the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee to mock Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whom he often refers to by the racist nickname “Pocahontas.” More broadly, it takes place in an era in which chanting the president’s name has become a tool of racial intimidation.

The mayor of Covington issued a statement condemning the students’ behavior. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School issued their own statement. It read, in part, “This behavior is opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person. The matter is being investigated and we will take appropriate action, up to and including expulsion.”

But the damage is done. The struggle continues. History is still being made.

Women were again marching in the streets this weekend for the third straight year, claiming equality and respect too-long denied them by easily threatened men accustomed to being unchallenged and untouchable.

Mr Unpopular is a liar

by digby

The new Pew Poll’s headline is: “Trump Begins Third Year With Low Job Approval and Doubts About His Honesty”

You don’t say.

You can read the whole thing here. 

The Dom is NOT happy

by digby

Trump negotiated with Pence and Kushner and came up with a “compromise” that includes his wall and promises to hold DACA recipients hostage every three years for more ridiculous racist garbage. As Simon Rosenberg tweeted:

Trump is not going to reopen the government until he gets his immigration bill passed but offers 1) a plan which cannot pass Senate or House or 2) a path which would preclude regular order – no committees, hearings, studies, debate, votes. Process normally takes months.

And to me this is the rub – the President is literally trying to change how our democracy has worked for hundreds of years. He has to do this because his immigration plan can never pass as is, and he needs to break the system to get what he wants.

Debate isn’t really abt immigration/border it’s abt Trump and McConnell conspiring to make Trump something more than a President, an authoritarian, a Mad King. Trump made no concession today. He just changed the terms of his anti-democratic demands.

The people who run America aren’t having it anyway:

Update:

Just another night in the Freakshow

by digby

What the hell?

“Would you like to speak to the president?”

That was about the last question I expected from a stranger on a Friday night in Paris.

I was at a brasserie in the Latin Quarter, enjoying dinner with James McAuley, the Post’s Paris correspondent. We had finished the meal and were continuing our conversation as we waited for the check to arrive.

We had been talking for two hours or more, about all manner of things, including American politics, the president and the Democratic field for 2020. A man at an adjacent table, whose back was to us, turned around, cellphone in hand, and asked me, “Would you like to speak to the president?”

I was more than surprised by his words and at first wondered which president he was talking about. Because we were in Paris and had also been talking about Europe and related issues, I thought he might be talking about embattled French President Emmanuel Macron.

That made no real sense, however, as the man with the phone was clearly an American. Still, the idea that it was President Trump on the other end seemed too weird to be real.

The man asked again if I wanted to take his phone. I looked at it and could see that the Caller ID showed no telephone number. Instead it was the same identifier of calls that come from White House. Could this really be the president? I took the phone, wondering what kind of hoax was about to be played on us.

“Hello, Mr. President,” I said. The voice at the other end of the line was unmistakable. It was President Trump.

I had not spoken to Trump in more than two years, since before he was elected. Our talented White House team has the responsibility for pursuing interviews with him, and though I often write about him, I happily defer to them on that task.

But with the president on the line, whatever the circumstances, I thought I should try to elicit something newsworthy from him. I was thinking as I began to question him of the success my colleague Josh Dawsey had had when he took a call from the president in the middle of a dinner some weeks ago.

“Mr. President,” I asked, “when are you going to settle the shutdown?” He said it needed to be resolved soon but he made it abundantly clear that no discussions of any kind were underway and that his terms had not softened. He reiterated that he expects funding for his border wall.

I tried a few other lines of inquiry on the shutdown, but in the snippets of conversation, no news was being made. The disputed story about him ordering Michael Cohen to lie to Congress seemed like an unproductive avenue, given the circumstances. But my presidential questioning obviously needed work. Suggestions, Josh?

“I hear you’ve been saying nice things about me,” the president volunteered.

The statement caught me by surprise and I demurred. The man at the table next to us had mentioned in passing to the president that, even in Paris, people were talking about him. “Are they still there? Let me speak to them,” the president had said, I later learned.

Whatever had been conveyed to him about the conversation McAuley and I had been having, he seemed to believe he had a sympathetic American on the other end of the phone. But with my noncommittal response, he seemed a bit puzzled.

He asked me another question: “Are you Hillary or are you Trump?”

At that point, I realized that confusion was rampant on both ends of this telephone call.

“I’m a reporter,” I replied.

That stopped him short, and I could almost hear the wheels spinning at the other end of the line as he tried to figure out what was going on here.

“Do you know who you’re speaking with?” I asked him.

It was an unfair question to ask. Obviously he did not, as there was no way he would have recognized my voice or in any other way assumed that he was talking to anyone other than a random American who happened to be in Paris. Had he known, I wonder whether he would have agreed to have the phone handed to me.

I identified myself. He seemed to be as surprised by the fact that he had a Washington Post reporter on the line as I had been to think that a man at a table next to mine was actually talking to the president of the United States.

Trump was apparently on a speaker phone because after I identified myself, there was an outbreak of laughter over the oddity of the whole moment at the other end. The president appeared not to be alone, though he did not identify anybody else with him.

All of this transpired in less than two minutes, at which point the owner of the phone signaled that he wanted to take back the call. I handed him the phone. James and I looked at one another in amazement at what had just happened, and, we wondered aloud, who was this man with the phone?

When the man with the phone ended the call, he turned back to us with a smile. “Who are you?” I asked, though I should have realized more quickly who it was.

Though my confusion was understandable, I instantly recognized him when he told me his name and embarrassed I hadn’t picked up on it earlier. But he was out of uniform, quite casually dressed, and out of context.

“I’m Joe Kernen of CNBC,” he said.

Kernen is well-known co-anchor of the morning program “Squawk Box.” He was on his way to Davos for next week’s World Economic Summit. He was supposed to have had an interview with the president at Davos, but Trump had canceled his trip because of the shutdown.

Trump was calling Kernen to express his regrets that the interview had been scrubbed. Unexpectedly, he ended up briefly with me as well.

McAuley and I introduced ourselves to Kernen and his wife and son. I don’t know who was more surprised that we had all ended up within a few feet of one another at a Paris brasserie with the president calling.

And that was that. Just another night in a foreign capital. Just another bizarre moment and a chance encounter with the president of the United States. I wonder whether there will be another.

You have to love that Trump asks people “are you Hillary or Trump?” God,what a child…

But shouldn’t Balz have revealed to his readers why Kernan thought his comments were so positive he told the president about them? Or did Kernan just say that to lick Trump’s boots which is also relevant since Kernan is supposedly a journalist too?

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A new generation of assholes are being well trained

by digby

These MAGA high school students mocking Native Americans at the Lincoln Memorial says it all about Trump’s America:

i’ll say again that one consequence of trump will be to validate the public expression of racism and that containing this means an active effort to elevate dignity—the recognition of our common humanity—as a cardinal American virtue https://t.co/mMomhuY53O— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) January 19, 2019

Here’s another video of these kids harassing this Native American protestor. The ignorance, the bigotry, is infuriating. This is not the future of this nation.

pic.twitter.com/eKkkRb2X7c— Simar (@sahluwal) January 19, 2019

They learn this behavior from their elders, who are irredeemable:

That was a few years ago. Today, you just have to put on a MAGA hat and yell “Trump!”

A response from Nathan Philips, the Native American elder who was mocked and harassed by high school students in front of the Lincoln Memorial yesterday https://t.co/6IDyGsIsuw— Joe Heim (@JoeHeim) January 19, 2019

.

But Marcy does make the point, as she’s been making for some time, that we already know Trump DID direct subordinates to lie to congress and the authorities and there’s plenty of evidence saying so. It’s just that the news media is unwilling to lay it out starkly as the Buzzfeed piece did.

Anyway, there’s a lot to the piece and I won’t try to characterize it here. I’ll just give you this on excerpt and direct you over there to read it.

Consider that the Peter Carr the Special Counsel’s spokesman almost never comments on anything, which makes you wonder why this particular story got that attention. After all, it can’t be the only story the media has gotten wrong. Marcy speculates:

[T]he actions Carr took yesterday (and Mueller’s big-footing on Cohen’s testimony before the Oversight Committee next month) only make sense if Cohen might have to play a role in a possible trial, and not a report submitted confidentially to Attorney General William Barr. That’s what, more likely explains Carr’s response than anything else: the discrepancy between what Buzzfeed reported and what Cohen allocuted posed a risk to possible a jury trial. And that may explain another reason why Mueller is a lot more modest about Trump’s role in Cohen’s lies than SDNY is. 

Trump’s not going to be indicted by Mueller — at least not before he leaves office via election defeat or impeachment. So Mueller’s focus needs to be on the crimes of those he can charge, like Don Jr. That doesn’t rule out that the evidence he’s looking at show that Trump oversaw a series of coordinated false statements. He did! With Mike Flynn’s lies, Don McGahn’s clean up of Flynn and Jim Comey’s firings, the response to the June 9 meeting, and yes, this Trump Tower deal, nothing explains the coordinated story-telling of multiple Trump flunkies other than Trump’s approval of those lies. It is, frankly, journalistic malpractice that the press hasn’t noted that, especially on the June 9 meeting, the evidence that Trump lied and ordered others to has already been made public. Trump’s tacit (and explicit, with the June 9 statement) approval of serial false statements, to Congress, to the FBI Director, to FBI Agents, and to Mueller, is an impeachable offense. Multiple outlets have gotten solid proof of that, they just haven’t stated the obvious like Buzzfeed did, perhaps in part because they’re relying on White House sources for their reporting. 

But Mueller won’t need to allege that for his case in chief, at least not on the issue of the Trump Tower deal. Because the events that matter to Mueller’s case in chief — the events to which Cohen might have to serve as a witness — happened in 2016, not 2017 or 2018. And the guilt that Mueller would need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt if he does indict this conspiracy is not Trump’s guilt — except as an unindicted co-conspirator. It is Don Jr’s guilt. 

So outlets that are suggesting that Mueller’s pushback backs off any evidence that Trump committed a crime make no more sense than the original Buzzfeed report (and ignore the actual evidence of how Cohen’s lies evolved, an evolution in which these outlets were active participants). The only thing that explains Carr issuing such an unprecedented order is if Cohen’s ability to testify on the stand must be preserved. 

Robert Mueller has the unenviable task of needing to sustain as much credibility for a bunch of serial liars as possible, starting with Michael Cohen. Buzzfeed’s story — whether generally true or erroneous on details about Trump Organization witnesses or totally wrong — threatened that effort.

She thinks Mueller is going to indict Don Junior. I’m fairly sure Trump would pardon him before anyone ever sees the inside of a courtroom but it’s always possible that New York prosecutors could take up some aspect of the case. I don’t know where that goes.

Fox News’ Joe DiGenova took a different view:

“What you saw happen today with Bob Mueller issuing his statement is very simple: It’s called the Barr effect — the Bill Barr effect” he said later Friday evening during an appearance on Fox News’ “Hannity,”, referring to Attorney General nominee William “Bill” Barr. 

He explained that the moment Barr — who in the past has been critical of the special counsel’s investigation — is confirmed, he’s going to ask Mueller about BuzzFeed’s false report, and if Mueller responds with the wrong answer, he’s going to wind up being fired. 

“As soon as Bill Barr is sworn in, he will have a meeting with Mr. Mueller … and the first question Bill Barr is going to ask is, ‘Was that story true that BuzzFeed published?’” DiGenova  said. 

“And Mr. Mueller would say, ‘No, it wasn’t, Mr. Attorney.’ and Bill Barr would say, ‘Why didn’t you refute it?’ And Mueller would have said, ‘Well, Mr. Attorney General, we don’t do that.’ And Mr. Barr would have said, ‘Well, Mr. Mueller, you’re fired.’”

It’s hard to imagine that Mueller gamed out that specific scenario. But it’s not impossible that Barr could use such a thing as “cause” to fire Mueller.  Once Barr is in office they’re going to have to be looking over their shoulders.

I think we can be pretty sure that the media will now go quite soft on Trump, at least for a while. The combination of handwringing and smug, professional, schadenfreude among the pundits was pretty sickening last night.

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Democrats’ Catch-22
by Tom Sullivan

Impotently watching the spectacle of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and seeing him confirmed is something anyone left of Joe Manchin wants to avoid again, ever. Especially knowing time will catch up eventually with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. The beloved icon will have to be replaced on an already right-leaning Supreme Court. If it is to be more than a kangaroo version of its former self, Democrats must wrest back control of the U.S. Senate. Holding the presidency alone will not do the job of rebalancing the court. Ask Barack Obama.

As Democrats bickered during the 2016 election, I repeated that gerrymandering (and vote suppression) in the states would not be stopped from Washington. President Hillary couldn’t fix it. Neither could President Bernie. State legislatures control that, and Republicans control a majority of those. Reforming the Electoral College won’t do it either. Liberal fixation with the White House left state legislatures across the country for Republicans to plunder, and they did.

Perhaps now, finally, we can address the fact that the Senate favors Republicans, and thus a Republican-approved Supreme Court and control of the national legislative agenda. But red-state senators are red-state senators because Republicans there go largely unchallenged, and because Democrats angling for the presidency don’t think states with few electoral votes are worth their trouble. Likely, Merrick Garland and Ruth Bader Ginsberg think otherwise. Twenty or so prospective Democratic presidential candidates had better look beyond November 2020 at what being president would mean without being able to appoint justices of their choosing. That will take more than electoral votes. It requires Senate head count.

The January/February/March edition of Washington Monthly looks at how the red-blue divide arose and, indirectly, at how Democrats might regain some Senate mojo.

Daniel Block seems to trace the decline of broad, regional economic equality to Jimmy Carter’s 1978 decision to deregulate the airline industry. Ronald Reagan then ushered in a decade of laissez-faire deregulation that, ironically enough, accrued to the benefit of blue coastal cities that prospered mightily from corporate concentration. Air travel to cities such as St. Louis and Milwaukee became costlier. Coastal giants bought out heartland competitors, consolidating operations and white-collar employment in more-connected, higher-cost cities and, with exceptions for places such as Seattle — home to Microsoft cofounders Bill Gates and Paul Allen — the New Yorks and Bostons grew richer as St. Louis, Detroit and Milwaukee declined. An America built on a broad middle class and a flatter distribution of wealth began to Balkanize, and not simply because of de-industrialization, but because of economic policies that encouraged monopolies, directly and through non-enforcement of antitrust laws. As our heartland/coastal, urban/rural economic fortunes diverged, so did our politics.

The result?

“Even if you look at white non-college voters, the closer you get to the city, they tend to be more Democratic,” said Ruy Teixeira, a sociologist and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “Maybe that’s partly because they’re used to living with people who are different from them, and that produces a certain kind of outlook that’s less Republican.”

Block suggests Democrats focusing on the urban concentration will not flatten the distribution. Nor will “improving educational opportunities and getting more federal aid” to areas experiencing decline make them more competitive (emphasis mine):

Strengthening competition policy and breaking up monopolies requires a national solution. This creates something of a catch-22. To win in more places, Democrats may need to foster healthier heartland cities. But to foster healthier heartland cities, Democrats need to win in more places.

There’s the rub.

Washington Monthly‘s Claire Kelloway addresses the winning in more places side of the catch.

J. D. Scholten, a thirty-eight-year-old former minor league baseball player ran for Congress in 2018 against Rep. Steve King of Iowa (yes, that Steve King). He closed to within 3.4 percentage points in a district the last Democrat to run lost by 22.6 percent:

“I have a lot of folks calling me thinking of running for president and they want to know what their rural message should be,” Scholten says. His answer: “Talk about market consolidation.”

At 39 town hall meetings, Scholten spoke of improving the local economy by curbing agribusiness monopolies. Market consolidation may seem esoteric yet isn’t to farmers and farm communities. Their problem is not lack of technology, Kelloway writes. It’s a fair playing field:

Farmers are caught between monopolized sellers and buyers. They must pay ever higher prices to the giants who dominate the market for the supplies they need, like seed and fertilizer. At the same time, they must accept ever lower prices from the giant agribusinesses that buy the stuff they sell, like crops and livestock.

Start with how corporate concentration affects the prices farmers pay. In 1994, the top four seed companies controlled only 21 percent of the global seed market. By 2013, just the top three controlled 55 percent, with Monsanto alone controlling more than a quarter. With that increase in concentration has come a shocking increase in the cost of seed, because these giants face little pressure to compete on price. USDA data shows that the per-acre cost of soybean and corn seed spiked dramatically between 1995 and 2014, by 351 percent and 321 percent, respectively.

Today’s seeds are often genetically modified to produce higher yields, but that doesn’t translate into more net income for the farmers. Not only is the cost of genetically modified seed high, but patent monopolies often make it illegal for farmers to use a portion of their crops to produce their own seeds, as most did in the past. Moreover, even as farmers are paying monopoly prices for a diminishing selection of seed strains produced by handful of giant corporations, they also are paying monopoly prices for fertilizers and pesticides, often to the same corporations. Since 2017, the Big Six seed and agrichemical companies have shrunk to four, after Dow merged with DuPont and Bayer purchased Monsanto. The top four producers of nitrogen fertilizer controlled 34 percent of the market in 1977, but by 2015 had increased their share to more than two-thirds.

Average farmers are paying three times more on inputs per acre today than two decades ago and receiving pennies more per bushel of corn they can sell to perhaps a single agribusiness buyer in the area. Grain, poultry, hogs, cattle, same problem, leading to higher consumer prices and “confined animal feeding operations” to combat the “ruinous competition” among farmers and price fixing by processors.

“Part of that rural identity is being independent,” argues Scholten. “Now [rural communities] are reliant on a corporation rather than being self-employed, and I think that’s part of the issue.”

Breaking up monopolies is an issue that nearly won Scholten a seat in Congress held by King in a bright red state since 2003. Aggregated wealth, in effect, rules unchecked and unpunished, allowed to hoard wealth at the expense of 99 percent of living, breathing, working Americans, and they live it. The Obama administration’s kid-glove handling of financial giants that crashed the economy in 2008 contributed to the Democrats’ loss of hundreds of legislative seats across the country, to the disastrous post-2010 gerrymandering in GOP-held states, and to the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump. Maybe we should do more than hope the next Democrat in the Oval Office will fix it all?

The chart at the top from the National Conference of State Legislatures shows the current state of control at the state level. But the graphic below sums up the split. (State controls means one party holds both legislative chambers and the governorship):

And in the United States Senate, 53 Republicans, 45 Democrats, and 2 Independents. Hillary Clinton won 3 million more votes nationwide than Donald Trump in 2016, but only 19 states outright, splitting Maine. Clinton won only one state with a Republican majority legislature in both houses: Virginia. Republicans hold a majority in the Virginia House of Delegates by one seat determined by drawing.

Do the math. Democrats need to win legislatures so they can unrig gerrymandering, voter suppression measures, and build benches of candidates who can win Senate seats needed to rebalance the Supreme Court. That’s the other catch. The redder the state, the less infrastructure for supporting Democratic candidates when they arise. Having an attractive candidate with winning issues and lots of money sometimes is not enough. Scholten outspent an incumbent and lost. Skilled, local (not imported) campaign support is essential, but lacking in many places Democrats need to win back.

Image via OpenSecrets, Center for Responsive Politics.

The reason is, sadly, Democrats have no national program dedicated to local infrastructure-building. Everything is ad hoc, if it exists, as is any mechanism for passing down skills from one class of local activists to the next. The top-down focus is on campaigns for electing candidates. Under-resourced county committees run on vapors and do what they’ve always done the way they’ve always done it. It is all state party organizations in the capitol can do annually to raise the money to pay the salaries, keep the lights on, meet their statutory requirements, and maybe teach newcomers something about how a precinct works and how to pull a simple walk list from VoteBuilder. There is no Ranger School, no SEAL training for teaching county officers advanced election mechanics. Those trainings exist only for candidates and campaign staff. They come via non-party organizations like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Democracy for America, or re:power (formerly Wellstone). Legislative caucuses at the state and federal level raise their own funds and run their own operations for supporting candidates they choose. Their focus is on building legislative head count first — enough warm butts in seats to make a majority. Growing capacity at the local level for building that legislative bench is incidental. Besides, they expect locals will muck it up anyway.

Regular readers already know I don’t believe Democrats can win where they don’t show up to play, with or without winning messages about undoing about market consolidation and restoring a level economic playing field. Plus, Democrats cannot play to win when they decide to show up if they don’t have game. Nobody teaches the coordination and support skills county committees need to give lower-tier candidates a shot at winning. These are the kind of “put your pants on one leg at a time” processes activists in larger cities learn by doing from larger, better-funded, professionally run campaigns — the ones that don’t show up in remote places Democrats don’t win because Democrats don’t show up. Catch 22. I have a modest tool for teaching counties how to do more with less here. There will be a 2020 update available early next year.

If you build it, wins will come.

Friday Night Soother

Nixon is in their DNA

by digby

via GIPHY

Axios reporting on the latest Trump administration tell-all called “Team of Vipers”:

President Trump was frustrated about leaks — specifically leaks attributed to “White House officials” — that were critical of him.

Behind the scenes: Cliff Sims, a young White House communications aide who had bonded with Trump during the campaign, slipped through the private dining room and was ushered into the private study, just off the Oval Office.

As recounted in Sims’ memoir — “Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House,” out Jan. 29 from Thomas Dunne Books — the minister’s son from Alabama was soon sitting face-to-face with the man he still referred to as “DJT,” in leftover campaign lingo.

This was in 2017, when West Wing chaos was a constant storyline in the media.

Trump and Sims, then 33, had talked on the phone the night before.

Trump wanted to know who Sims thought was leaking, and said to come see him — but to come through the back, so the senior staff wouldn’t know.

As recounted in a passage from “Team of Vipers” that you’re seeing first on Axios:

“Give me their names,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “I want these people out of here. I’m going to take care of this. We’re going to get rid of all the snakes, even the bottom-­feeders.”

Only in retrospect did I see how remarkable this was. I was sitting there with the President of the United States basically compiling an enemies list — but these enemies were within his own administration. If it had been a horror movie, this would have been the moment when everyone suddenly realizes the call is coming from inside the house.

The President proceeded to name White House staffer after White House staffer. Almost no one was deemed beyond reproach—not his chief of staff, not senior aides, almost no one other than those with whom he shared a last name. He wanted me to help him judge their loyalty. How, I wondered, had it come to this?

Trump took out one of the black Sharpies that he usually carries in his coat pocket.

As Sims dished, Trump scrawled two lists on a stiff card with the White House seal at the top.

One list was people he could trust. The other was people he couldn’t, and wanted to let go.

The combined lists included about 15 people — 10 of them naughty, and five of them (all campaign alumni) nice.

The leakers formed Trump’s unofficial Enemies List — all on his own staff. Most of the targets survived, at least for a while. But Trump seemed to revel in his new inside knowledge:

The card was later spotted in the president’s breast pocket — a reminder of what he perceived as the enemies within.

Sims portrays what he describes in his author’s note as “the unvarnished Donald Trump, a man whose gifts and flaws are both larger than life, written by someone with an appreciation of both.”

“Lincoln famously had his Team of Rivals. Trump had his Team of Vipers.”

“We served. We fought. We brought our egos. We brought our personal agendas and vendettas. We were ruthless. And some of us, I assume, were good people.”

“This is what I saw. And, unlike the many leakers in the White House, I have put my name on it.”

That hardly makes him a hero.

Susan Pompeo doesn’t really care, do u?

by digby

She’s done it again:

At a time when most State Department staff weren’t allowed to travel for work and some weren’t even allowed to use their work phones, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s wife Susan embarked on an eight-day trip with her husband, requiring unpaid staffers to prepare and support her across the Middle East.

Many diplomats, already demoralized by the partial government shutdown, were angry, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation.

“Eyebrows were raised from the start, from the planning, on why is she coming, and why is she coming during the shutdown?,” one person familiar with the matter told CNN.

A senior State Department official said “This is BS. You don’t bring more people that need staffing, transportation, etc. when embassy employees are working without being paid.”

It was Susan Pompeo’s presence on the trip at a time State Department staff are working without pay that seemed to cause the furor.

There are also questions over whether the use of State Department staffers’ time to assist her violated federal regulations.

The secretary described it as a “working trip” for her — telling reporters she joined him to try to help the department “be better.”

“So she meets with the medical officers. She’ll tour housing. She will write up her thoughts and comments after that. And I wish I had time to do each of those things myself, but she is a force multiplier,” he said.

The State Department says most diplomats abroad have not been paid during the shutdown. Sources said many had to come to work anyway to handle this trip — for some requiring very long hours. It’s unclear exactly how many people on the Pompeo trip were not being paid.

According to three people familiar, Susan Pompeo was assigned a control officer who worked exclusively with her. That person was on call for weeks, the sources said, and at each of the stops, Susan Pompeo had her own staffer and her own security personnel.

Furloughed, unpaid State department employees in the various overseas embassies were called in to support the trip by the secretary of state, because his travels are considered a high priority.

Two sources familiar with the situation said that at one of the stops, a staffer and security were tasked with taking Susan Pompeo to the local market and shopping with her — an activity which caused a delay of about 35 minutes in departure to the next stop, they said.

“They felt like fools, since nearly everyone was working — working around the clock — but not being paid! And then they felt even more like fools,” one person familiar said.

A State Department official said Susan Pompeo would pay for her expenses for the trip where appropriate, and that her joining her husband meets all requirements of the Department.

Nonetheless, people “far and wide across the embassies” were “outraged” at being given these additional responsibilities during the shutdown, according to one of the people familiar.
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“No one’s pleased,” the source said. “There’s no appreciation for what everyone is doing. No acknowledgment. This is real.”
Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics, said the use of agency staff could violate conduct regulations.

Mike Pompeo’s wife has been causing trouble since Pompeo was at CIA. Remember this?

Susan Pompeo, the wife of Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo, has taken an unusually active and prominent role at the organization, and has fashioned herself as an unofficial “first lady of the CIA,” according to people with knowledge of her activities.

Pompeo, who is a volunteer at the CIA, uses office space on the seventh-floor headquarters in Langley, Va., where senior leaders, including the director, have their offices. A support staff of CIA employees assists her in her duties, although that is not their full-time job. And Pompeo travels with her husband, who President Trump nominated last week to replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, including on trips he takes overseas to meet with foreign intelligence officials.

Last year, Pompeo accompanied the CIA director on a trip to Britain, where he met with his counterpart Alex Younger, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, according to people familiar with the trip. Pompeo also went with the CIA director on a tour of Fort Monckton, a military base in southern England where MI6 trains its personnel.

While it is not unheard of for directors’ spouses to take on volunteer work, particularly advocating for families, Susan Pompeo’s presence at the agency, along with her use of office space and help from staff, has raised questions internally about the nature of her duties and why agency resources are being used to support her, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about a sensitive subject.

I guess it’s ok that she volunteers her time. But there’s something really uhm… entitled about setting up your own power center based on your spouses important job and demanding that his subordinates do your bidding. To do it when people are being forced to work for free is just creepy.

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