Month: June 2019

Getting what you pay for (or don’t)
by Tom Sullivan

House Democrats late Monday delayed a vote on a bill providing a pay increase to members of Congress. “At least 15 Democrats” opposed going on the record for supporting a pay raise, Politico reports. Many are freshmen from competitive districts who fear opponents would use the vote as a cudgel against them in their reelection. A similar number of Republican members joined them in opposition.

Congress once passed annual cost-of-living adjustments after both parties agreed to a truce on not using the issue against each other, The Hill adds. Those days are over. Mostly.

But having “average” Americans serving in Congress brings a non-elite perspective to the pay issue. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is not exactly average, however. She achieved star status even before arriving in Washington. Before that, she was a bartender and a waitress. She favors the pay increase:

The effort got a significant boost Tuesday when House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) offered support for a pay bump, saying he doesn’t want Congress to be a place where only the wealthy can afford to serve.

Freshman progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), meanwhile, forcefully made a case to her nearly 4.5 million Twitter followers, defending giving members of Congress the cost-of-living adjustment.

Those outside the Beltway might find McCarthy’s statement disingenuous. He is a career politician who came up through the ranks starting as a Young Republican. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (AOC) rise is less traditional, with less opportunity to become institutionalized by the system.

AOC agrees with Matt Stoller on the pay issue, although it’s not immediately clear she knows Matt Stoller’s history on Capitol Hill.

Yep. Voting against cost of living increases for members of Congress may sound nice, but doing so only increases pressure on them to keep dark money loopholes open.

This makes campaign finance reform *harder.*

ALL workers deserve cost of living increases, incl min wage workers. https://t.co/fCdgHKx4G1— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 11, 2019

What this does is punish members who rely on a straight salary, and reward those who rely on money loopholes and other forms of self-dealing.

For example, it incentivizes the horrible kinds of legislative looting we saw in the GOP tax scam bill.— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 11, 2019

AOC’s Instagram videos of her new life in D.C. provide a view of serving in Congress much less shiny than movie and TV imagery. Those who make working on Capitol Hill a life goal tend to be people whose family backgrounds or financial means make it possible, she notes below. It’s tougher for people like her.

Yep, it’s not just about cost of living adjustments, we’re also fighting for a living wage for interns + for strong staffer salaries, too.

DC is teeming w staffers whose parents subsidized their low-wage (or no wage) jobs.

That’s partly why many policies are out of touch. https://t.co/Rh39BDiqZx— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 11, 2019

Going into government service out of raw, do-gooder passion is beyond the means of most people not avaricious enough or power-hungry enough to turn government service into a grift. AOC sees making government service more affordable to people without trust funds a democratizing force and a hedge against corruption. There is getting big money out of politics and then there is putting enough in to keep influence peddlers and self-dealers out.

“There are really two Americas, one for the grifter class, and one for everybody else. In everybody-else land … government is something to be avoided … In the grifter world, however, government is … a tool for making money,” Matt Taibbi wrote in “Griftopia.”

Conservative demonizing of taxes has left government by public servants sucking wind and opened the doors to government by parasites. Lobbyists sell public-private partnerships, for example, as market-based improvements on supposed government inefficiency. Plus a way for politicians to deliver something for nothing, i.e., no new taxes. But to the grifter class, government inefficiency is government not putting enough money into their pockets fast enough. Anti-tax fervor results in collapsing bridges, crumbling roads, for-profit prisons and migrant concentration camps, sell-offs of public infrastructure, and starving public education to line the pockets of those who hate everything about government of, by, and for the people except the cash flow.

AOC is trying to play the inside-outside game. She is still fresh enough to see the corruption and has gained enough power to have some influence over national policy. The trick will be not to get so steeped in the culture of power over time that creeping group-think renders her out of touch. It happens to the best of them when they stop seeing themselves as citizen-legislators and start thinking of themselves as legislators first. It doesn’t happen to everyone. But it happens slowly, almost imperceptibly, until even the best are captured.

Watch Chernobyl, learn the cost of climate crisis lies 

By Spocko

I wrote to my niece about HBO’s Chernobyl:

Hey Niece:

As the smartest woman I know who has been to Russia, I thought of you when I saw the Chernobyl mini-series. If you haven’t seen it I would highly recommend it.

 The Chernobyl mini-series is the best and most important show on TV right now.It’s about people in power lying, covering up the truth and the cost of those lies.

It also shows outstanding heroism. The Chernobyl podcast series link it is an excellent companion to the show. It explains a lot of the reasons for why the story was written as it was.

In the podcast the author talks about the power of narrative and truth. The last episode, is about the scientists’ obligation to the truth, and what it cost them.

The marked section below is from the first Chernobyl Podcast with the author Craig Mazin.

He talks about the cost of lies from that incident and how the Soviets handled it, and compares it to today’s climate crisis and climate emergency deniers.

Mazin says we can get away with a lie for a very long time, but the truth just doesn’t care.

Here’s the clip of him explaining this is from 7:32 to 9:17

I was blown away by the writing, the structure of the story and the acting. Even the music soundtrack is excellent and adds to the show.

The obvious parallel between this incident and the climate crisis is clear.

I made a clip of the Emily Watson character and added the subtitles.

This scene shows a lot of what the show is about a female scientist vs. male Soviet official. I see your intelligence, strength and compassion in her character.

Hope you are well.
LLAP,
Uncle Spocko

The Bromance is unbroken

by digby

Just remember, when we’ve moved beyond Trump someday, Republicans will pretend they always thought he was a fool. Don’t let them. When he made asinine, embarrassing, dangerous comments like this, they said nothing:

"I just received a beautiful letter from Kim Jong Un, and I think the relationship is very well … I can't show you the letter, obviously, but it was a very personal, very warm, very nice letter," President Trump tells ABC News' @karentravers https://t.co/AfEIFrfeM5 pic.twitter.com/2z8PQ0PIKQ— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) June 11, 2019

Also this:

Trump now claims his secret deal with Mexico that's in his pocket but that he refuses to show to reporters contains an "option" that "will go into effect when Mexico tells me it's okay to release it."

"If they bring the numbers way down, we won't have to use it," he says. pic.twitter.com/loOfRjX2F8— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 11, 2019

It contains a vague promise from the Mexican government “to take all necessary steps under domestic law to bring the agreement into force” if the US determines that they "have not sufficiently achieved results in addressing the flow of migrants to the southern border." https://t.co/RrDXFI7Pnh— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 11, 2019

They’ve defended this nonsense. They can never be allowed to forget it.

Trump installs his immigration soulmate at DHS

by digby

Ken “the Cooch” Cucinelli (yes, that’s his real nickname…) is an immigration extremist. And he’s now in charge of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service:

Former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli’s long-rumored role as a top coordinator of the Department of Homeland Security immigration policy finally has an official title. According to an email sent to staff at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on Monday, the longtime border hawk has been named acting director of the agency, whose 19,000 employees orchestrate the country’s immigration and naturalization system.

“We must work hand in hand with our colleagues within DHS, along with our other federal partners, to address challenges to our legal immigration system and enforce existing immigration law,” Cuccinelli wrote in an email to his new colleagues. “Together we will continue to work to stem the crisis at our southwest border.”

The note also previews an escalation of Trump’s crackdown on the asylum system, with Cuccinelli vowing to “work to find long-term solutions to close asylum loopholes that encourage many to make the dangerous journey into the United States so that those who truly need humanitarian protections… receive them.”

As Virginia’s top law enforcement official and in his years serving in the Virginia state senate, Cuccinelli laid a long track of aggressive anti-immigrant policies intended to restrict access to public services, employment, and even citizenship from migrants and their families. That record, combined with his vociferous defense of President Donald Trump on cable news and in conservative media outlets, puts Cuccinelli firmly in line with an administration that has made combating undocumented immigration its top domestic policy goal.

In his new role at Homeland Security, Cuccinelli will be one of the Trump administration’s top bosses on immigration-related matters, a portfolio that has felled other senior administration officials in recent months as the president has grown dissatisfied with stubbornly high rates of illegal entry into the United States.

If his record on immigration issues is any indication, Cuccinelli will embrace that role with relish. While his support for President Donald Trump may be relatively newfound, his championing of hardline Trump-style immigration policies is more than a decade in the making.

Although Cuccinelli first drew national attention during his time as Virginia’s attorney general for his attempts to keep laws against oral sex on the books, he also became a staunch advocate on behalf of aggressive immigration policies in other states. In 2010, Cuccinelli filed an amicus brief in support of S.B. 1070, an Arizona law that allowed police officers to investigate the immigration status of any person arrested or detained by law enforcement based on a “reasonable suspicion” that they were in the country illegally. That same year, he released a legal opinion expanding a similar policy to include any suspected undocumented immigrant stopped by law enforcement for any reason.

“Virginia law enforcement officers have the authority to make the same inquiries as those contemplated by the new Arizona law,” Cuccinelli wrote in the opinion. “So long as the officers have the requisite level of suspicion to believe that a violation of the law has occurred, the officers may detain and briefly question a person they suspect has committed a federal crime.”

Cuccinelli told reporters at the time that any police officer had the authority to question potential undocumented immigrants “so long as they don’t extend the duration of a stop by any significant degree.”

Those stances on illegal immigration appear tame compared to other proposals that Cuccinelli had backed before becoming attorney general. During his eight years in the Virginia state senate, Cuccinelli was the chief patron—the body’s version of primary sponsor—of a rash of bills targeting undocumented immigrants in the commonwealth.

One proposed law would have allowed employers to fire employees who didn’t speak English in their workplace, and stipulated that any employee so fired would be “disqualified from receiving unemployment compensation benefits.” Another bill would have allowed businesses to sue competitors that they believed to be employing undocumented immigrants for economic damages, plus $500 “for each such illegal alien employed by the defendant.”

In one case, Cuccinelli championed one of Trump’s most aggressive immigration policies before Trump himself did. In a 2008 bill, Cuccinelli urged Congress to call a constitutional convention to amend the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution “to clarify specifically that a person born to a parent who is a U. S. citizen is also a citizen of the United States,” to the exclusion of the children of undocumented immigrants who are born in the United States.

Immigration advocates called Cuccinelli’s appointment as acting head of the nation’s top immigration agency “deeply troubling.”

“Whether Ken Cuccinelli’s appointment is lawful remains to be seen,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, noting that the appointment appears to sidestep the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. “Cuccinelli’s track record of anti-immigrant stances and statements is deeply troubling. In the end, we need unifying solutions and smart policy on immigration, not further polarization. Cuccinelli’s installation doesn’t bode well.”

Cucinelli doesn’t qualify for the role without Senate confirmation and even the GOP Senate balked at installing him. So they just did it anyway:

As I’ve explained at rather embarrassing length before, the FVRA, when not superseded by other statutes, gives the president a choice of three options with which to temporarily fill vacancies in senior government positions. The president may choose the “first assistant” to the vacant office, choose anyone currently holding a Senate-confirmed position in the executive branch, or choose a non-Senate-confirmed senior employee who has been serving in the same agency as the vacant office for at least 90 of the previous 365 days. Congress thereby gave the president far more flexibility than it probably meant to (and certainly more than it needed to), perhaps assuming that presidents would act responsibly—and that politics would prevent the president from taking advantage of the broad flexibility provided by the statute as a structural end-run around the Senate’s constitutional advise-and-consent role.

Enter, President Trump. We’ve already seen … creative … interpretations of the FVRA (especially as it relates to other agency statutes) with regard to the appointment of Mick Mulvaney as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Robert Wilkie as acting secretary of veterans affairs, and Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general (not to mention how Kevin McAleenan became acting secretary of homeland security). But the Cuccinelli appointment is taking advantage of an entirely different—and more problematic—loophole.

Although the director of USCIS holds an office created by statute, the same does not appear to be true of the deputy director. Instead, that position is an internal position created by executive branch regulation (and currently held by Mark Koumans, who, as the “first assistant” until now, had been serving as acting director of USCIS for the past week). Apparently, Cuccinelli has been named to the brand-new position of principal deputy director of USCIS, a role that, so far as I can tell, did not exist before today. Presumably, the new staff position of principal deputy director will supersede the deputy director as the first assistant for purposes of the FVRA. (Some statutes expressly identify which position in specific agencies is the first assistant, but no such statute does in this case.) In other words, through nothing other than internal administrative reshuffling—creating a new position and deeming it the first assistant—the Trump administration was able to bootstrap Cuccinelli into the role of acting director, even though, until today, he had never held any position in the federal government.

Needless to say, the Senate will just say “thank you sir, may I have another” and that will be that.

This is going to be very bad.

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Climate change is awesome

by digby

Your Secretary of State, ladies and gentlemen:

The top diplomat claimed that the climate “always changes,” and so “societies reorganize, we move to different places, we develop technology and innovation.”

Pompeo also suggested that the risks of climate change wouldn’t be so bad anyway.

“If waters rise — I was just in the Netherlands, all below sea level, right?” Pompeo said. “Living a wonderful, thriving economic situation.”

“The world will be successful. I’m convinced,” he continued. “We will figure out responses to this that address these issues in important and fundamental ways.”

In May, Pompeo praised rising sea levels caused by climate change as a boon for trade opportunities.

“Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways and new opportunities for trade,” Pompeo said during a speech at an international summit on environmental protection. “This could potentially slash the time it takes to travel between Asia and the West by as much as 20 days.”

I wonder how Pompeo will feel when everyone moves to his home state of Kansas.

This is such a thick-headed way for a Secretary of State to speak. Doesn’t he know that mass migration caused by climate change is likely to cause untold misery and even war? It’s all too dumb to even think about.

18months18months18months18months …

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Tucker goes full Orbán

by digby

Tucker Carlson: “I think people don’t really understand the degree to which George Soros is successfully remaking this country” pic.twitter.com/8oUn1CaE3v

— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) June 11, 2019

If you want to understand Tucker Carlson you have to read about Viktor Orbán:

Like Pol Pot or Josef Stalin, Orbán dreams of liquidating the intelligentsia, draining the public of education, and molding a more pliant nation. But he is a state-of-the-art autocrat; he understands that he need not resort to the truncheon or the midnight knock at the door. His assault on civil society arrives in the guise of legalisms subverting the institutions that might challenge his authority.

CEU is a private university, accredited in both the United States and Hungary, and for that reason it has posed a particular challenge to the regime. The school was founded by the Budapest-born financier George Soros, whom Orbán has vilified as a nefarious interloper in Hungary’s affairs. Soros had conceived the school during the dying days of communism to train a generation of technocrats who would write new constitutions, privatize state enterprises, and lead the post-Soviet world into a cosmopolitan future. The university, he declared, would “become a prototype of an open society.”

But open society is exactly what Orbán hopes to roll back; illiberal democracy is the euphemism he uses to describe the state he is building. The prime minister and his allies did their best to make life unpleasant for CEU. Then, in April 2017, Parliament passed a law setting conditions that threatened to render CEU’s continued presence in the country illegal. All of Ignatieff’s hopes of settling into a placid academic life dissipated. Eighty thousand protesters filled the streets.

The effort to evict CEU rattled liberals across the world. Academic freedom—a bloodless term, but a concept at the core of all that the West professes to treasure—seemed to be slipping away in a country where it had looked firmly established. Universities rushed to declare their solidarity; 17 Nobel Prize winners signed a letter of support. Even the United States, run by a president who is no fan of George Soros, offered to help the university.

And so, for much of the past two years, CEU has been the barricades of a civilizational struggle, where liberalism would mount a defense against right-wing populism. The fate of the university was a test of whether liberalism had the tactical savvy and emotional fortitude to beat back its new ideological foe.

Here’s more on Orbán. I would bet money this is where Carlson is getting his newfound “populism” rap. I have no idea if he really believes it. He’s a right wing performer without any discernable authentic philosophy.

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Democracy’s grave-digger and his wife are as corrupt as Donald Trump

by digby

Last week we learned that Mitch McConnell’s wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, has been doing a very lucrative family business in China with her family while her husband is the Majority Leader and she serves in the Trump administration.

Now this:

The Transportation Department under Secretary Elaine Chao designated a special liaison to help with grant applications and other priorities from her husband Mitch McConnell’s state of Kentucky, paving the way for grants totaling at least $78 million for favored projects as McConnell prepared to campaign for reelection.

Chao’s aide Todd Inman, who stated in an email to McConnell’s Senate office that Chao had personally asked him to serve as an intermediary, helped advise the senator and local Kentucky officials on grants with special significance for McConnell — including a highway-improvement project in a McConnell political stronghold that had been twice rejected for previous grant applications.

Beginning in April 2017, Inman and Chao met annually with a delegation from Owensboro, Ky., a river port with long connections to McConnell, including a plaza named in his honor. At the meetings, according to participants, the secretary and the local officials discussed two projects of special importance to the river city of 59,809 people — a plan to upgrade road connections to a commercial riverport and a proposal to expedite reclassifying a local parkway as an Interstate spur, a move that could persuade private businesses to locate in Owensboro.

Inman, himself a longtime Owensboro resident and onetime mayoral candidate who is now Chao’s chief of staff, followed up the 2017 meeting by emailing the riverport authority on how to improve its application. He also discussed the project by phone with Al Mattingly, the chief executive of Daviess County, which includes Owensboro, who suggested Inman was instrumental in the process.

Recall this as well:

Rusal, the aluminum company partially owned by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, announced plans to invest around $200 million to build a new aluminum plant in Kentucky just months after the Trump administration removed it from the U.S. sanctions list. 

The new aluminum plant, slated to be built in the home state of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, will be the biggest new aluminum plant constructed in the U.S. in decades. Rusal will have a 40 percent stake in the facility.

Deripaska was the Russian oligarch to whom Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, allegedly owed 20 million dollars.  He’s also the Russian suspected of receiving that polling information from Manafort for reasons about which we can only speculate. He’s reportedly very close to Vladimir Putin.

Maybe McConnell is obstructing all that election protection legislation for reasons beyond protecting Donald Trump.

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All about the base

by digby

Jamelle Bouie has some smart observations about the Democrats and their base:

If the triumph of Trumpism is the most important recent development in American political history, then the second most important is the mobilization of liberal and left-wing voters to challenge the president’s authoritarian politics.

This mobilization drove the Women’s March, where a day after Trump’s inauguration, hundreds of thousands came to Washington to protest against his nascent administration. Millions of others joined them in cities across the country — a remarkable demonstration of opposition to a new president. It stiffened Democratic resolve to oppose the president at a time when some of the party’s leaders were looking for bipartisan cooperation. It helped halt the Republican drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act — peeling critical support away from Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader — and last year powered an electoral wave that gave the Democratic Party its first majority in the House of Representatives since 2010.

If Democrats can be confident ahead of 2020, it’s because of grass-roots activists who have strengthened the party’s political position time and time again. And yet key Democratic leaders are still reluctant to follow their lead.
[…]
I think there’s a deeper divide, between a politics that sees the grass roots as an asset to use and cultivate versus one that treats it as a complication to manage. It’s a “leader knows best” approach that may squander the Democratic Party’s advantage of enthusiasm and drive against a corrupt and unpopular president. It even seems as though for Democrats like Pelosi, the only political actions that truly matter are either in the legislature or at the ballot box. It’s an understandable view for a leadership class whose political memories stretch back to the devastating Democratic losses of 1968 and 1972 (to say nothing of 1980 and 1984). But it’s also bred of a deep aversion to risk-taking, even when circumstances warrant bold action.

If the Trump era has revealed anything about the state of American politics, it’s that the realm of possibility is far greater than previously recognized. There are still limits and obstacles, but there are also opportunities to fundamentally shift the terms of political conflict and debate. There are Democrats outside of the grass roots who understand this and have adopted a tactical and strategic boldness that suits the moment.

Backed by the base of the party, liberal candidates like Doug Jones in Alabama and Stacey Abrams in Georgia have run aggressive campaigns in ostensibly hostile territory, making unheard-of gains in the process. Presidential contenders like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have aimed their campaigns at that grass-roots sense of possibility with expansive policy programs and a transformative vision. Exemplified by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, younger lawmakers are speaking to and amplifying the grass roots, building powerful public platforms in the process. But Democratic leaders in Congress remain skeptical, seemingly stuck in an era when Democrats were on the defensive and backlash politics ruled the day.

Then again, Pelosi and Schumer are shrewd politicians with decades of experience. Perhaps their resistance to grass-roots Democrats, and to impeachment in particular, will pay dividends. But we should consider the reverse as well: that a Democratic Party that plays with excessive caution — and keeps its base at a distance — is one that might demobilize its voters and produce the same conditions that helped Trump win in the first place.

This has been true for a very long time. Indeed, one of the main differences in political strategy between the two parties is that the Republicans fetishize their base to the point of worship while the Democrats do everything in their power to keep theirs at a far distance, while they chase the elusive swing voters under the assumption their most loyal voters have nowhere else to go. We should at least take some heart in the fact that the Democrats aren’t currently engaged in actively insulting their base voters as they did for years but it’s only a slight improvement.

I’ve been watching this dynamic for years, and it does feel as if the Dem leadership believes Democrats will never vote for Trump so there’s no reason to take any chances on their behalf if they can slide through without taking any risk. Maybe they’re right. But in this environment having an enthusiastic, fired-up base seems like a cheap insurance policy.

BY the way:

Democrats are increasingly in favor of impeaching President Donald Trump, with 76 percent saying they support the move to oust the president from office, according to a new CNN poll. That marks a seven-percentage-point increase from April when support for impeachment stood at 69 percent among Democrats, according to the poll conducted by SSRS.

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Leavin’ on his mind
by Tom Sullivan

The insult tweet is on its way. It’s only a matter of what presidential poo Donald Trump will fling with it.

Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) has left the House Freedom Caucus. “I didn’t want to be a further distraction for the group,” Amash told CNN Monday night. The 39-year-old libertarian is one of the founding members of the caucus and the only House Republican so far to decide Donald Trump’s “pattern of behavior” calls for impeachment.

The Democrat-led House Judiciary Committee on Monday began hearings on the the findings of the Mueller investigation. With the White House stonewalling on having current or former staff appear, Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) began by inviting former Nixon White House counsel John Dean. Dean’s prepared statement drew “remarkable parallels” between the Watergate scandal and the Trump-Russia investigation. “More Nixonian than Nixon,” Dean called the evidence of Trump’s actions. Democrats probed the panel’s opinions on Mueller’s evidence. Republicans spent the afternoon impugning Dean.

The sitting president (a student of Roy Cohn) branded Dean a “sleazebag attorney” Sunday night. Just before the hearing began, he tweeted again, “Can’t believe they are bringing in John Dean, the disgraced Nixon White House Counsel who is a paid CNN contributor. No Collusion – No Obstruction! Democrats just want a do-over which they’ll never get!”

Yeah, he’s not worried a bit. To the top of his Twitter feed he’s pinned a meme based on a Rasmussen poll showing himself with a 50 percent approval rating. Just below “Phony Witch Hunt.”

Trump’s team is already preparing to use impeachment as a reelection weapon against the drip-drip of impeachment news. “They’ll be looked at as maniacs,” says Trump Trump legal adviser Joseph diGenova tells Politico:

It’s shaping up to be a classic Trump scheme — counterattack, demean the opposition, predict absolute victory, reduce the argument to a few talking points, and never, ever, cede ground. And it’s a messaging strategy born of necessity. Since Trump and his team have no say in whether Democrats launch impeachment proceedings, they’re trying instead to bend the chatter around the issue to their advantage, knowing the topic will dominate the national conversation as the 2020 election ramps up.

Asked Monday afternoon about the prospects of his impeachment, Trump went out of his way to refute any similarities to Richard Nixon:

“We have no collusion, no obstruction, no anything,” Trump said during an event honoring this year’s Indianapolis 500 champion, Simon Pagenaud, and Team Penske. “When you look at past impeachments, whether it was President Clinton or — I guess President Nixon never got there. He left. I don’t leave. A big difference. I don’t leave.”

Transparent as glass, Trump already has leavin’ on his mind.

Now that they’re calling Trump’s bluff …

by digby

… what happens next? Tim O’Brien has an idea:

Any remaining thoughts that President Donald Trump has been playing three-dimensional chess while everyone else around him is engaged in less sophisticated pursuits should perish with his sudden abandonment of tariff threats against Mexico.

The only thing Trump got from this stunt was yet another round of abundant attention as everyone tried to decipher the riddle of “what-is-this-unusual-and-loopy-man-up to-this-time-because-he’s-breaking-the-norms-of-generally-accepted-presidential-behavior?” For Trump personally, the opportunity to generate and then bask in that kind of media buzz is, of course, far from nothing. Self-aggrandizement and self-preservation have motivated almost all of his thinking for decades; first as an unknown outer-borough tyro, then as a closely-watched developer and carnival barker, finally during his years as TV celebrity and now president.

Trump certainly grabbed the spotlight last week. After all, by unexpectedly threatening, via Twitter, to impose onerous tariffs on Mexico if it failed to help solve the immigration and humanitarian crisis spilling over from Central America and into the U.S., Trump set the global business and political communities on edge.

And how many of us get a chance to pull off something that cool ourselves? Not just anybody can look and act the part of a Bond villain. Trump once told me, while driving together to one of his golf courses, that his favorite Bond villain was Auric Goldfinger, the chunky thug who wanted to wreck the global economy and help China and his own fortunes by tainting the U.S.’s gold supply at Fort Knox. “I thought Goldfinger was just a great character,” Trump said. “To me, he was the best of all the characters. Semi-believable.”

So over the course of a week, Trump got into character and played chicken with global trade, the economy, the southern border of the U.S., the lives of migrants and the financial security of tens of millions of people — before having to cave once the costs and peril of all of this became apparent. Trump’s enablers in Congress helped put an end to the madness because something more important (to them) than the rule of law, civility, ethics, equality, global stability, mature policymaking, and the environment was at stake: money.

By Friday evening, Trump had to close down his show, taking comfort on Twitter the following day that “reviews” of his role-playing “have been very good” — with the exception, he said, of the movie critics populating the “Fake and Corrupt News Media” at NBC, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

The truth of the matter is that Mexico, other than stepping up its own role policing the southern border in accordance with an earlier agreement, has conceded nothing — as Michael Shear and Maggie Haberman pointed out in the Times. After so much noise and distress, the author of “The Art of the Deal” was left empty-handed. “The decision marks a victory for Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, whose administration had been pressing Trump to drop the tariff threat,” noted Bloomberg News reporters Josh Wingrove, Nick Wadhams, and Shannon Pettypiece.

But let’s not kid ourselves that this is an end to the White House play-acting. This has happened before and will happen again. Trade negotiations with Japan and the European Union are coming and tortuous head-butting on trade and tariffs is already underway with China. There’s lots of room for Trump to turn incendiary in all of that. He knows little about policy but a lot about how to stoke the passions and resentments of his base. And he’s content to fabricate things to seduce his supporters into accepting the idea that he never loses and that he always has a secret card to play.

Unfortunately, he seems to have persuaded some Democrats and members of the media of that as well. Ascribing magical powers to him is a mistake. He is a lucky guy, but he’s always dancing as fast as he can to get our of one mess by creating another. That’s not magic. It’s a con game.

“We have been trying to get some of these Border Actions for a long time, as have other administrations, but were not able to get them, or get them in full, until our signed agreement with Mexico,” he wrote on Twitter on Sunday. “Importantly, some things not mentioned in yesterday press release, one in particular, were agreed upon. That will be announced at the appropriate time.”

Aha. There’s a “not-mentioned” that can be uncorked “at the appropriate time.” Hmmm. While nobody other than the president seems to know what that secret agreement might be, he also warned that should Mexico not play ball the way he wants in the future, there will be hell — and tariffs — to pay. In the meantime, everyone should remain off-balance. “We can always go back to our previous, and very profitable, position of Tariffs,” he concluded on Twitter. “But I don’t believe that will be necessary.”

This is a man flailing, much as he did several months ago after threatening to keep the U.S. government shut down unless he got the funding to build a wall along the southern border. More experienced and deft politicians than him torpedoed that gambit and the government reopened.

Trying to govern by threat and blunt force isn’t really governing at all, and if enough bluffs get called, the players on the other side of the table tend to stiffen their spines. That’s not a good scenario for anyone involved, because a predictably unpredictable person lacking self-confidence, restraint and principled, courageous advisers may eventually try burning things down just to prove his point.

The president of the United States isn’t playing chess. But, like a kid with matches, he’s only too happy to play with fire.

A lot could go wrong. A whole lot. He’s tearing up trade deals and threatening to impose tariffs in what’s basically a global war using trade as the shot across the bow — usually done out of personal pique, to change the storyline or for his friends and family to make some money by taking advantage of inside information. And it’s dangerous. I agree that Trump could start burning things down. So could any number of other people in places like India, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran Venezuela, Mexico etc. Someone could easily make a misjudgment in such an unstable situation.

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