Month: October 2023

When he was mocked on the cable networks for getting the lowest vote count in history, he pulled the plug.

ABC’s Jonathan Karl writes:

In reporting for my upcoming book, “Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party,” I learned that Trump had secretly plotted to be elected speaker back in January, when he was publicly supporting Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who was struggling to get the votes he needed.

The idea of Donald Trump serving as speaker was first proposed on the day he left the White House — Jan. 20, 2021 — by a pro-Trump activist named Rogan O’Handley, who went by the name “@DC_Draino” on social media. The idea was soon aggressively pushed by Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist in the White House. At first Trump had no interest in the job, but that all changed as he watched McCarthy fail in vote after vote on the House floor in early January of this year.

The prime-time drama surrounding the seemingly endless voting for House speaker in January caught the attention of the former president, who was soaking up every minute of coverage from his perch in Mar‑a‑Lago. The must-see television spectacle briefly revived an idea Trump had dismissed long ago: that he could become speaker of the House, the only congressional leadership post you can be elected to even if you are not a member of Congress.

“He saw the power of television,” a close Trump adviser told me. “[He saw] how galvanizing it was, how mesmerizing it was — everybody was watching it, right? That’s when Trump realizes it’s the biggest reality show in America. He could sit up there like The Celebrity Apprentice. It’d be ‘The Apprentice’ with him with a big-ass gavel.”

Although the idea of Trump as speaker of the House had been kicking around for months, Trump had previously expressed no interest in it.

He considered the role to be beneath him. Why would he want to leave Palm Beach to spend his days in Congress? The only time anybody paid attention to what was going on in the House, he figured, was during the State of the Union address — and even then, all eyes are on the president, not the speaker. “It never got any traction,” a Trump adviser said of the idea. “He had literally no interest.”

But with the nation’s attention focused on the McCarthy drama on the House floor, Trump began to have second thoughts. And when, on the seventh ballot, Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz stood up and announced his vote for speaker — “Donald John Trump” — the former president was mildly amused. Until, that is, he saw the final vote tally being broadcast on all the news networks:

-212 votes for Hakeem Jeffries

-201 votes for Kevin McCarthy

-19 votes for Byron Donalds

-1 vote for Donald Trump

Gaetz called Trump after the balloting concluded, congratulating him on becoming the first former president since John Quincy Adams to receive a vote for speaker. But Trump wasn’t pleased — he was embarrassed. When the House clerk read off the vote totals at the end of the round — “the Honorable Donald J. Trump of Florida has received one” — laughter could be heard in the House chamber. Democratic lawmakers and progressive commentators were mercilessly mocking his lackluster support.

The ridicule only grew louder when Gaetz pulled the same stunt in the next round and the result was the same. “One vote,” tweeted Don Lemon, who was then a CNN anchor. “That’s it. That’s all #Trump got for speaker of the House. #onevote.”

Gaetz eventually realized his stunt was upsetting the former president and switched his vote to GOP Rep. Kevin Hern of Oklahoma for the next two rounds of balloting. But during that time, Trump, still stewing, told at least two people the real problem was that Gaetz had not formally nominated him for speaker. If Republicans realized he was a real candidate for speaker, Trump thought, they would have overwhelmingly voted for him.

Word of Trump’s thinking quickly reached Gaetz, and the Florida Republican acted accordingly.

“For what purpose does the gentleman from Florida rise?” the House clerk asked Gaetz before the eleventh round of balloting kicked off.

“To place a name in nomination for the position of speaker of the House,” he replied.

And with that, Trump was officially nominated as a candidate for speaker. One Republican close to both Gaetz and Trump later told me Gaetz ran the idea by the former president and got his approval before making the move. Another said Trump had proactively asked Gaetz to do it. Either way, the former president’s name was formally placed in contention — with Trump’s blessing.

With that all sorted out, Gaetz had a speech to give. “My friends, when Donald Trump was president, taxes were cut, regulations were slashed, energy was abundant, wages were rising, capital was returning from overseas to fund the dreams and ambitions of our fellow Americans, and the economy was roaring,” Gaetz began. As he spoke, the murmuring and heckling — mostly from Democrats — grew so loud the clerk had to bring down her gavel and demand the House be in order.

But Gaetz kept going: “I nominate President Trump because we must make our country great again. And he can start by making the House of Representatives great again.”

When Gaetz finished his speech, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado was the only person in the entire chamber to applaud.

The result was exactly the same. Donald Trump received just one vote — from Matt Gaetz — for speaker of the House. And once again, the cable networks rubbed it in, plastering a measly “1” next to Trump’s name as commentators mocked the former president’s pathetic vote total.

That was the final straw. “Once CNN and MSNBC started mocking him, that he had the lowest vote count in history,” a Trump confidant — who was in touch with the former president throughout the process — told me, “all of a sudden, he was like, ‘Get me out of there!’ “

He is the greatest sore loser in history. Nobody comes close. And so he lies and the right wing media enable it. It’s actually more their fault than his.

Karl was on Deadline White House today and also revealed that Trump screamed at the top brass of the military “I know more about nuclear than you do!!!” because his uncle taught at MIT.

He is insane.

He’s been spilling even more nuclear secrets but his hand-picked judge in Florida continues to protect him by slow-walking the trial

A delay to consider how long to delay the trial. Trump’s documents case, in Judge Cannon’s hands, is going nowhere fast. https://t.co/GxcTZhkqK0

— Steven Mazie (@stevenmazie) October 6, 2023

We just learned that Donald Trump has been whispering American nuclear secrets in the ears of his Mar-a-lago members and they’ve been spreading them around to anyone who will listen.

Torri Otten at TNR reminds us of all the other times he’s done this:

Trump allegedly told Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt in April 2021 that Australia should start buying its submarines from the U.S. Trump then told Pratt the supposed exact number of nuclear warheads a U.S. sub can carry, and how close it can supposedly get to a Russian sub without being detected, ABC News reported late Thursday, citing anonymous sources.

Pratt then told at least 45 other people—including six journalists, 11 employees at his company, 10 Australian officials, and three former Australian prime ministers—about Trump’s comments before he was approached by special counsel Jack Smith’s team.

Smith’s team was looking into whether Trump had mishandled national security secrets after leaving the White House. Pratt told investigators he didn’t know if Trump’s comments were true or just showing off, but investigators told him to stop sharing the numbers, “suggesting the information could be too sensitive to relay further,” ABC wrote.

Smith indicted Trump two years later for hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Of the 40 total charges against Trump, 32 are for willful retention of national defense information. He is accused of keeping an array of classified national security material after leaving the White House, despite being unauthorized to do so.

The incident with Pratt is far from the first time that Trump shared classified information with people unauthorized to hear it. In May 2017, Trump shared highly classified information with the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador to the United States that the U.S. hasn’t shared with some of its closest allies. Current and former U.S. officials warned that Trump had jeopardized a crucial intelligence source on the Islamic State group.

Later that month, Trump told then-Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte that the U.S. had positioned two nuclear submarines off the Korean peninsula. The locations of nuclear subs are meant to be kept secret, as a matter of national security. In fact, only the captains and crews know the sub’s exact location.

Then, in July 2017, CNN reported that the U.S. was forced to extract a spy embedded in the Russian government after concerns that Trump had shared classified information that could have exposed them.

Rather than learn his lesson, Trump met privately with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the G20 summit (also in July 2017). Trump confiscated the interpreter’s notes at the end of the meeting, an unusual move that led intelligence officials to believe he had shared more classified information.

Trump tweeted a video in December 2018 of the Al Asad Airbase in Iraq, exposing a SEAL team’s faces and location. The next year, he bragged about U.S. nuclear weapons capabilities to reporter Bob Woodward and tweeted photos that revealed the location of U.S. spy satellites.

And of course, it didn’t stop after he left office. One of the documents he allegedly kept detailed a plan to attack Iran. He is accused of waving the paper around in front of people.

I guess it’s pointless to mention that he’s the putative GOP nominee for president again which suggest that his voters think this is all just fine. Either they think everyone is lying about these incidents or they believe that Dear Leader knows best and that sharing nuclear secrets with an Australian rando is some kind of savvy, high level strategy. Or maybe they just don’t give a damn about American national security.

Either way, it’s pretty frightening. Their idol is simply too stupid to keep his mouth shut and may very well have given/sold equally valuable secrets to those “friends” of his who have a keen interest in getting them. And there doesn’t seem to be any way to persuade them that this is a problem despite their shrill, shrieking denunciations of Hillary Clinton for sending emails of far, far less value to our adversaries over a private email server. But then, they are shameless so that argument is completely pointless too.

Speaking of which, the right wing is having a full-blown meltdown over her comments yesterday suggesting that the right may need a “formal de-programming.” She’s right. It’s a cult. Nothing shows it more than the Republican party’s indifference to the fact that their leader is under indictment for 91 felonies, is on trial for fraud, has been found liable for rape, is credibly accused of stealing classified information and sharing it with unauthorized people and trying to overturn a legitimate election. If that isn’t a cult, I don’t know what is.

The dynamics in the House make it very difficult to see how they get the funding bill passed. The best hope may be that Trump wants to save the issue for himself.

It’s been quite a week in the US House with MAGA superstar Matt Gaetz, R-Fl., leading a small band of incoherent revolutionaries to topple Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy just to show they could. Then all day Thursday the media was overwhelmingly excited at the rumor that Donald Trump was going to heroically run to the rescue of the House Republicans and save them from themselves by stepping in as the House Speaker. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene enthusiastically endorsed him and it was announced that he would be travelling to the Capitol for the first time since January 6th, 2021 within days.

Sadly, late last night, Trump himself stuck a shiv in that trial balloon by announcing that he was endorsing Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio for the job which will likely assure his victory.

Before McCarthy was defenstrated he managed to get an extension on the budget deadline passed, averting another government shutdown, but with all the fireworks around his ousting and the jostling to replace him, not to mention the enormous ill will Gaetz and his friends have caused in the caucus, it appears that clock may tick all the way down again without much being resolved before the next deadline. The House Republicans have a long wish list of extreme policies they want to pass in this new budget and nobody seems to have told them that they don’t have a majority in the Senate nor do they have the White House, which means that their dream agenda is dead on arrival anyway.

They want radical cuts in spending, process changes that are unconstitutional, a total reversal of American foreign policy and they seem determined to hold their breath until they blow up the country if they don’t get their way. There’s little reason to believe that Trump’s endorsee Jim Jordan will be able to deal with this insoluble problem any better than McCarthy did and even less reason to believe he wants to. He may not have joined the rebels in this instance but he’s just as extreme as they are.

The most pressing of all the issues on the table is the continuation of American aid to Ukraine. There is still a bipartisan majority in congress that supports the policy but a large and growing faction with the GOP is against it and with that small number of hard right troublemakers determined to have their way, McCarthy was apparently only able to get the extension passed by eliminating that funding.

That was a huge victory for McCarthy’s favorite wingnut, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has made the defunding of Ukraine aid her signature issue. According to this voluminous fact check, she is very confused about the recent history of the region and seems to have absorbed a lot of Russian talking points to back up her opinions. Last spring she spoke at a white nationalist event where they cheered the Russian invasion with chants of “Putin, Putin, Putin!” so perhaps that’s where she got some of her ideas on the subject. But the most likely influence is former Fox News celebrity Tucker Carlson who has been leading the American opposition to Ukraine.

Russia has shown its appreciation by featuring him heavily on their state owned propaganda media:

As a result, there has been a non-stop drumbeat coming mostly from the right, but also some voices on the left, suggesting that the US should withdraw support for the Ukrainian war effort. It’s said by some that we can no longer afford it because we need the money to start a war with Mexico while others believe that it would be more compassionate to allow Russia to take over the country in the hopes that they will stop bombing, committing war crimes and abducting Ukrainian children. Some think the US caused the problem by promoting NATO expansion so it’s wrong for it to help Ukraine, the logic of which is still obscure to me.

Public opinion has shifted a bit as a result of these arguments. According to the Reuters/Ipsos poll, six months ago 46% supported sending arms to Ukraine while 29% opposed and the rest were unsure. As of this week, only 41% support it, 35% disagree and the rest are unsure. It’s not exactly a groundswell but the opposition is growing among Republicans especially and it’s giving oxygen to people like Greene in the House and Senators like Tommy Tuberville, R-Al., and Missouri’s Josh Hawley who parrots Trump’ tiresome line that Europe is freeloading (which is not true at all) and insists we need the money for our own border war.

At the moment it’s just a handful in the Senate but last week 117 members of the House voted against training and equipping Ukrainian military. As Greene reminded everyone, the Hastert Rule (named after the disgraced, Republican pedophile speaker Dennis Hastert) requires that no bill can be allowed to come to the floor if it does not have a GOP majority. Since Jim Jordan was one of those who voted against it, it’s hard to see how this funding is going to happen if he does become Speaker. (He told the media that he wouldn’t support bringing it to a vote but his office “clarified” it later, so who knows?)

Those of us who oppose military invasions of other countries, whether it’s by Russia or the United States, are morally clear on America’s obligation to help Ukraine. It’s not even a hard call. And the stakes of allowing an emboldened Vladimir Putin successfully expanding Russia’s borders by force in the region are enormous. As the NY Times’ Paul Krugman points out the amount the US is spending on humanitarian aid and military equipment is nominal and the positive consequences of doing so are already being felt.

So why are these right wingers, who not so long ago were ready to send American troops abroad at the drop of a hat suddenly refusniks when it comes to helping Ukraine? Some of it is an affinity with Vladimir Putin and the Russian system he currently oversees. It’s an authoritarian, white, Christian regime that has no use for gays or racial minorities or dissent. It’s their kind of place.

And it also springs from a trollish pretense that fatuously declares that Democrats are the warmongers while they just want to give peace a chance. (It’s not the first time they’ve done this. They did it in the 1990s during the Balkan War as well. )It’s nonsense of course. They’re more bloodthirsty today than they’ve ever been. Whatever the motives, at this moment it’s hard to see how anyone can thread this needle and it’s particularly difficult to see how Jim Jordan can do it. He’s an ideologue not a deal maker.

Perhaps the best hope those of us who don’t want to abandon Ukraine have is that Donald Trump will tell Jordan and Greene and the rest of his House sycophants that they need to fund Ukraine until the election. He has a secret plan to end the war you know, and it’s the best plan in the history of secret plans. They should at least keep things going until the very stable genius can get back in the White House and fix the whole thing up properly, don’t you think? Not even Marjorie Taylor Greene could object to that.

Salon

Democrats were the adults in the room when they agreed to vote for a CR without Ukraine funding. Saving McCarthy was a bridge too far.

Greg Sargent on this irritating notion among much of the punditocracy that the Democrats are at fault for the mess in the House because they failed to step up and save Kevin McCarthy from the monster he helped create:

Because Republicans are such firm believers in benevolence toward political foes, they are furious with Democrats for failing to save Kevin McCarthy. After Democrats voted en masse this week to remove the California Republican as House speaker, his fellow Republicans responded by revoking some of Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol office privileges. They are reportedly planning more acts of retaliation.

But Democrats were right not to save McCarthy. With the forces unleashed by former president Donald Trump and the MAGA movement damaging the House GOP caucus, Democrats absolutely shouldn’t have stepped in, because so doing would help Republicans erase their own culpability for nourishing those forces for so long.

Republicans believe Democrats should have joined most of them to vote against the motion to vacate the speakership that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) brought against McCarthy, which would have enabled him to survive despite eight GOP insurgents voting to remove him. As Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman reports, Republicans intend to “exact revenge for a long while.” McCarthy himself was reportedly behind the retaliation against Pelosi.

All of that is absurd, but it’s also revealing. In a sense, what Republicans really wanted from Democrats is help in solving a problem that’s grown intractable for them: At critical moments such as these, there’s nothing holding the House GOP majority together.

If the shoe were on the other foot, I think we all know what the Republicans would have done.

The adults stepped up to keep the government open and they did it with great regret that these monsters had put them in that position. But they did it to spare the American people of the suffering the Republicans were prepared to inflict if they didn’t get their way. 91 Republicans voted against it anyway. There was no good reason at that point to do anything to help the GOP caucus resolve their internal differences.

This is part of a much bigger dynamic. Every time the Republicans get in office they blow up the budget, start wars, slash important programs and otherwise fuck everything up. Then the Democrats are called in to clean up their messes, they clean them up and then the Republicans come in and ride their success until they fuck everything up again. It’s happened over and over again.

A president has only limited control over the economy. And yet there has been a stark pattern in the United States for nearly a century. The economy has grown significantly faster under Democratic presidents than Republican ones.

It’s true about almost any major indicator: gross domestic product, employment, incomes, productivity, even stock prices. It’s true if you examine only the precise period when a president is in office, or instead assume that a president’s policies affect the economy only after a lag and don’t start his economic clock until months after he takes office. The gap “holds almost regardless of how you define success,” two economics professors at Princeton, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, write. They describe it as “startlingly large.”

Annual GDP rate:

What, then, are the most plausible theories?

First, it’s worth rejecting a few unlikely possibilities. Congressional control is not the answer. The pattern holds regardless of which party is running Congress. Deficit spending also doesn’t explain the gap: It is not the case that Democrats juice the economy by spending money and then leave Republicans to clean up the mess. Over the last four decades, in fact, Republican presidents have run up larger deficits than Democrats.

That leaves one broad possibility with a good amount of supporting evidence: Democrats have been more willing to heed economic and historical lessons about what policies actually strengthen the economy, while Republicans have often clung to theories that they want to believe — like the supposedly magical power of tax cuts and deregulation. Democrats, in short, have been more pragmatic.

And yet for decades the Republicans have been seen as “the grownups” largely because of outdated hippie bashing left over from the 1960s. They have never been “grown-ups” at least not since Eisenhower’s time. They’ve been increasingly radical know-nothings dependent on grotesque grievances and racism to keep their voters happy and it’s been depressingly successful. But the news media’s insistence that because they insist on a formal dress code or pretend they go to church they are the mature adults has contributed largely to their ability to win elections.

If there is one bright spot in all this mess it’s that this myth may have finally been dispelled. No one can claim that the party of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz is the party of mature adults. They are nihilistic anarchists.

And you need to hear it too

Greg Gutfeld says “elections don’t work” and “society is in peril and chaos because our elections don’t matter” while urging for a new American civil war.

In the following tweets, I will transcribe everything he says in this clip, because it goes into some very dark territory. pic.twitter.com/2FLCz5ptCP

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) October 5, 2023

This is not a joke, even though Gutfeld presents himself as a comedian. It’s not funny. It’s terrifying. And it’s exactly what the Trump cult is being fed day in and day pout. It’s not just him.  It’s the entire right wing media universe. Between Trump, Fox, the lesser cable newsers, the internet, Steve Bannon and his ilk etc., they’re managing to brainwash tens of millions of Americans.: 

“Only certain people get criminal mulligans and Jan. 6 protestors, they don’t get criminal mulligans and here’s why. They’re the oppressor. So the oppressed get criminal mulligans. The people who are complaining, like us, we’re actually oppressors and we’re losing power so that’s why we are upset. I just got a job at MSNBC.

So let’s compare the rights between criminals and victims, ok? Criminals get a mulligan, they can steal up to $900 worth of stuff, they can loiter, sleep, and shoot up in public area including playgrounds, they can loot and burn and call it social justice. They can pile up dozens of arrests and never do time. Meanwhile, what about us? Well we have to change our lives to accommodate risk wherever we go.

We have to move out of cities for the sake of the safety of our families and our own safety. That’s what’s happening. We are being driven out of cities by the oppressed, so I return to my imperfect analogy from yesterday. We had a war over slavery. We knew slavery was inhumane and immoral, but somehow we couldn’t solve slavery peacefully. It was an evil, but one side refused to acknowledge it was evil because it was too big of an admission for them to make.

Doesn’t that feel that way now? That this defiant refusal to reverse this decline argues against the survival of a country.”

“What does that leave you with? It leaves you with you need to make war to bring peace because you have a side that cannot change. Because then that means the admission that their beliefs have been corrupt all the time. So, in a way, you have to force them to surrender.”

Jesse Watters: “Or we can make love not war.”

Greg: “Ugh, I tried that once–”

Harold Ford Jr.: “Or we can have an election.”

Greg: “–I had to go to a doctor.”

Martha MacCallum: “Yeah, elections!”

Greg: “No, elections don’t work. We know that. We know they don’t work!”

Harold: “They do work.”

Greg: “Look what we have! We had a moderate president and we have crime exploding everywhere. We had a Democrat president promise that he was going to be moderate, promise that he was gonna unite the country and now we have a terrible education system.”

Greg: “We have no border. We have crime everywhere. Every facet of society is in peril and in chaos because our elections don’t matter.”

Harold: “No, elections do matter. We don’t need to go to war for it, we go to the election booth and vote the people out…”

The End.

Set down your coffee cup before reading

Daily Beast:

The judge who doomed Donald Trump’s family business last week took an aggressive and preemptive step on Wednesday to ensure the former president can’t secretly shift assets to salvage his real estate empire.

In an order that was posted on the fourth day of the former president’s bank fraud trial, Justice Arthur F. Engoron commanded that the Trumps identify any corporations they have—and come clean about any plans to move around money in an attempt to hide or keep their wealth.

Seriously? And Engoron expects Trump to comply?

Sure, it’s something the case demands. But this is Donald J. Trump and family we’re talking about.

It’s a powerful maneuver meant to counter the sort of underhanded moves Trump has displayed so far during the three-year investigation.

Trump, sons Don Jr. and Eric, and two other top executives were ordered to tell the court about “any other entity [that] is controlled or beneficially owned” by them, “any creation of a new entity to hold or acquire the assets,” and “any anticipated transfer of assets.”

The judge also empowered a court-appointed monitor currently babysitting the Trump Organization, a former federal judge named Barbara Jones, to manage this phase until someone can be appointed to disintegrate Trump’s companies.

Yeah, good luck with that, Barbara.

I’m running out of W’s T’s and F’s

Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel) last night responded to a Daily Mail article. (Yeah, I’m wondering about that too.) The post:

BREAKING: While IRS was pursuing felony charges against addict Hunter Biden, they were pursuing a mere lien against addict Rudy Giuliani.

I’m sorry, what?

The IRS has placed a lien on Rudy Giuliani’s $4.5 million penthouse after accusing the fallen attorney of owing more than half a million dollars in unpaid taxes, DailyMail.com can reveal.

The federal tax agency claims the 79-year-old former New York City mayor owes $549,435.26 in unpaid income taxes for 2021, according to a notice filed in court in Palm Beach County, Florida.

The IRS placed a lien on Giuliani’s penthouse in Palm Beach, just three miles north of former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

If Giuliani doesn’t pay up, the September 1 lien allows the IRS to seize some of the profits from Giuliani’s condo if it were to be sold.

Surely Venezuelan software in the IRS machines is responsible.

There are “rich and famous” photos of the apartment included. Who cares?

No additional details as of this writing that would explain the difference between the two tax delinquents.

We interrupt regular broadcasting to relay the news that the IRS slapped a lien on Rudy Giuliani for $550k in unpaid taxes. pic.twitter.com/L92S7pqDh7

— mrs panstreppon (@mrspanstreppon) October 5, 2023

CNBC follows up:

Last month, Giuliani’s former lawyers sued him over allegations that he had not paid legal fees that they said amounted to $1.36 million. Giuliani responded to the lawsuit by saying the dollar amount being sought was excessive.

Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, also faces a $10 million lawsuit filed by Noelle Dunphy, a woman whose allegations included Giuliani’s harassing her and discussing the selling of presidential pardons after she was hired in 2019. Giuliani has denied the claims.

In August, a federal judge found Giuliani liable for defaming two election workers in boosting former President Donald Trump’s stolen election claims.

Oh, Rudy must miss the good old days of smoking cigars with Lev and Igor.

There is so much going on here.

It’s a photo of Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas & Igor Fruman. On their phones. At a London cigar bar. In July (aka in midst of Ukraine escapades). Which he emailed to John Solomon. With the subject line “Smoke Filled Room Pre-Game Ritual.” pic.twitter.com/auke0BrUoA

— Vera Bergengruen (@VeraMBergen) November 12, 2019

Apparently, he has a great fear that someone is going to poison him.

Cassidy Hutchinson is still on her book tour. And she has some more tea (or, should I say, condiments)on Trump’s bizarre phobias and obsessions. He isn’t just an authoritarian monster, he’s also filled with weird paranoid neuroses:

Cassidy Hutchinson is not done airing out the sordid, amusing, sometimes confounding things she witnessed while working under Donald Trump. The former White House aide, whose book Enough is leading American sales, stopped by Jimmy Kimmel Live and spent much of her time explaining, of all things, the former president’s apparent inability to eat lunch like a normal person.

Hutchinson’s testimony during last year’s January 6 hearings instantly went viral and, as Jimmy Kimmel put it on Wednesday night, “cast serious doubt on the highly professional, by-the-book reputation of the Trump administration.” Among other damning accusations, Hutchinson recalled a time when Trump threw his lunch against the wall in a fit of rage.

But apparently, that’s not even the half of it; even Trump’s ketchup allegedly has to pass muster.

“He does have a very potent fear of being poisoned,” Hutchinson told Kimmel. “… so he uses and prefers the small Heinz glass ketchup bottles because he likes to hear his valet—whoever is serving him his meal—he likes to hear the pop.”

What inspired this fear, Hutchinson’s host wondered—his ex-wives? Maybe, as the former staffer humorously suggested, it’s the whole Russia thing? Either way, it seems the former president’s staffers had a lot to worry about once the plates hit the table.

Returning to the moment in her testimony when she alleged that Trump had hurled his lunch at a wall, Hutchinson said, “Sometimes it would happen once or twice a week, sometimes more. Sometimes there would be a week or so lull, but then there would be a bad news story. But it wasn’t just launching the food and the plates and the porcelain at the wall. Sometimes it was just flipping the table.”

Although she says she’s now had a change of heart, Hutchinson told Kimmel she went to work for Trump after seeing him at a campaign rally and feeling a kinship with the crowd.

“Something clicked for me—like, that he was there to represent people like I was accustomed to growing up around,” Hutchinson said. “It was just this magnetism that I felt, and at the same time I did feel a draw to public service.”

When it came time for Hutchinson’s summer internship on Capitol Hill, she says, “naturally, things progressed for me.”

At this point, Hutchinson told Kimmel, she doesn’t regret her service in the Trump Administration.

“I used to say I was in the right place at the right time, and that’s how I got elevated to my role you know. Now I’m, was at the wrong place the wrong time? Wrong place at the right time? I don’t know.”

Analysts predict a massive drop in prices over the next few days and weeks. We’ll have to see if the media notices.

Over the past few weeks there has been non-stop hysteria over the gas price spike on the news. There has been lots of speculation about how it’s the death knell for Biden’s presidency , of course. Will they report this?

After spiking to alarming levels just last week, oil prices are suddenly in free-fall mode. The dramatic reversal should bring relief to drivers (and nervous central bankers) very soon.

US oil prices plunged by 5.6% to $84.22 a barrel on Wednesday, marking the biggest one-day decline in a year. Crude dropped even further Thursday, sinking as low as $82.24 a barrel, a five-week low.

This is quite the U-turn, even for the notoriously boom-to-bust oil market. As recently as last week, US crude briefly touched $95 a barrel and Wall Street banks were predicting $100 or higher amid Saudi Arabia and Russia’s aggressive supply cuts.

Now, gas prices are already starting to retreat and experts predict sharper drops to come.

The national average for regular gas dipped to $3.77 a gallon on Thursday, according to AAA. That’s 11 cents below the 2023 peak set last month when gas prices experienced an unusual post-Labor Day jump.

Gas prices will tumble to nearly $3.50 a gallon nationally over the next few weeks, Andy Lipow, president of consulting firm Lipow Oil Associates, told CNN.

Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at the Oil Price Information Service, told CNN he expects an even bigger tumble — to as low as $3.25 a gallon by Halloween. Pointing to sinking wholesale prices, Kloza said retail prices should drop each day by between 1.5 cents and 2.5 cents a gallon going forward.

“People at cocktail parties will finally be talking about gas prices in a good way,” Kloza said in a phone interview. “No doubt, it’s welcome news for the consumer portion of the economy.”

It’s welcome news. And most people will notice that the price has come down. But without media attention it won’t have the political salience it should have.

That first hearing was a train wreck. Is there any possibility that the next ones will be better?

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer did not cover himself with glory in the hearings and the Republicans are not happy. They seem to think it was just a bad performance (which it was) but the real problem is the total lack of any evidence justifying an impeachment.

The Bulwark’s Joe Perticone has the details:

The House Oversight Committee’s impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden didn’t begin with the bang Republicans had wanted. The first hearing, one week ago today, was seen by many impartial observers as disorganized and rudderless. No surprise there: This has been the case throughout the past several months of the Oversight Committee’s sprawling probes into the president and the business dealings of his son, Hunter Biden.

The backlash was everywhere, on Capitol Hill and in conservative media. You can even see the skepticism in polling of Republicans. According to a new Monmouth University poll, just three in ten Republicans put a lot of trust in the fairness of the impeachment inquiry. Half of registered voters have no confidence in the probe’s fairness, with an additional 33 percent claiming to have only “a little” confidence. Just 15 percent overall put a lot of trust in the fairness of the inquiry.

This has landed Comer in the doghouse. Republicans bemoaned his inability to find credible witnesses with any firsthand knowledge of the Biden family’s alleged corruption, and the ones his committee did bring forward made clear they do not believe there is sufficient evidence to impeach the president (yet³).

Now, there are whispers that a “reset” is needed and that Comer might have to hand over control of the inquiry to someone Republicans think might be more capable, like House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan. Jordan, a former Freedom Caucus chairman, has been much more aggressive in his own hearings on Judiciary and the Weaponization of the Federal Government subcommittee, and he has significant allies in the right wing of the House Republican conference. But he’d still have to deal with the same evidence, or lack thereof, that Comer has. So it’s unclear what problem he could fix.

There is also the issue of a House without a speaker. While Republicans insist that they can continue their work, everything will be sidelined until the speaker question has been settled. If Jordan assumes the role, then he won’t take the reins from Comer, but he could also steer the impeachment with a stronger hand than McCarthy ever did.

The role of Oversight chairman during Republican-controlled Congresses is primarily that of a showman. Marquee hearings and explosive revelations are how they move the needle in upcoming elections. If Comer wants to follow in the footsteps of his predecessors.⁴ then he needs to demonstrate the ability to change public perception and create headlines. So far, he’s done the opposite—and his friends and colleagues are taking note.

1-There are about 100 of these little secret offices in the Capitol building set aside for use by senior members and are often granted as a courtesy so they don’t have to travel through the tunnels back to the adjoining office buildings like many of the rank and file members.

2-Among Republicans, of course, not the whole House.

3-This is a big caveat. Republicans and conservative media place a high priority on staying a member of the team. There is a strong likelihood that skeptics might come around as this inquiry progresses, even if no new bombshell evidence or smoking guns are produced.

4-The past two Republican chairmen of the Oversight Committee, Reps. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), are now paid Fox News contributors.

I think the inquiry will continue. Whether a vote to impeach passes the House largely rests on how tainted the GOP moderates are with right wing craziness at the time. That could go either way. But I’ll be shocked if this fizzles. It’s one of the animating issues on the right and it’s hard to see how they’ll give that up. Also, Dear Leader wants it very badly.