Mendacity Reigns
Panicky Swimmers: Trump spent the weekend
golfing, celebrating golfers and tweeting while people in Puerto Rico continued
to suffer from the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. He bragged about the great job he was doing
making Puerto Rico better and tweet attacked Carmen Yulin Cruz, the very desperate
and frustrated Mayor of San Juan for complaining that he was late to send aid
and that his efforts were inadequate. Her
comment that he wasn’t even treating Puerto Ricans “like animals but like
people who can be disposed of” must have really hit home because it inspired
Trump to tweet attack her leadership, call her a Democratic tool and imply that
Puerto Ricans weren’t helping out because they were lazy rather than hungry,
parched and suffering. He followed-up by having his communications staff send a
number of talking heads to further bash the Mayor for having the guts to talk
truth to power. Speaking to ABC’s George
Stephanopoulos, Alex Castellanos one of those pathetic surrogates, had the
nerve to compare Cruz, a graduate of Boston University with a graduate degree
from Carnegie Mellon, to a “panicky swimmer.”
Just for a moment, can you imagine how Trump would cope if he was
stranded without electricity, air conditioning, steak and ice cream, hair gel and
a twitter device for ten days. Suffice
it to say, it wouldn’t be pretty and unlike Cruz, his concerns would be purely
personal while hers remain focused on getting more assistance for her suffering
constituents. Once again, Trump missed
an opportunity to show compassion. Instead of lamenting about Puerto Rico’s
financial situation, he could have said that he felt her pain, understood her
distress and was accelerating assistance.
As to Puerto Rico’s financial issues, I have a sneaky suspicion that one
or more of Trump’s very rich supporters, cabinet members, or children has been
whispering into his ear about their Puerto Rico bond losses. It’s hard to believe that a guy that just
discovered that Puerto Ricans are US citizens and that Puerto Rico is an island
surrounded by a very big ocean knew much about investing in distressed COFINSA
or PREPA bonds before last week, or did he?
Tax Secrets and Lies: The
Trumpsters were out in force defending Trump’s tax reform plan, the one that
doesn’t really reform the tax system but does cut a lot in taxes for truly rich
people. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin who adorably manages to lie without
moving his far head, said that everyone will get a tax cut and that the plan
won’t help the wealthy. The truth is
that everyone will not get a tax cut, an analysis by the non-partisan Tax
Policy Center concluded that many middle income people particularly those in
high tax states, like New York and California, will actually see their taxes go
up which is okay by Mnuchin because he’s rich and the “Federal government
should get out of the business of subsidizing states.” That’s one statement that may come back to
haunt him when leadership tries to whip blue state Republican Representatives into
voting for the Trump plan. As to those
rich people, and by rich people we are talking very rich people, he claims they
won’t get a tax cut, first by failing to mention the elimination of the
alternative minimum tax in any of his talking points and then by saying that
the elimination of the estate tax doesn’t count as a tax cut because a “death
tax is not an income tax” and he’s only counting income taxes. Budget
Director Mick Mulvaney, the guy who famously said that society doesn’t benefit by
providing after school meals to school children or the house bound elderly,
struck out at all of the criticisms of the tax plan by saying “All I can tell
you is that no one can make real, detailed analysis of the plan yet because it’s
not finished.” He then went on to say
that Trump only cares about making sure that the middle class gets tax cuts, he
cares nothing about the top 1%. He also managed to earn some Trump bonus points
by throwing in an off topic dig at the beleaguered San Juan Mayor. Mulvaney is right to say that the plan isn’t
finished, Senator Corker who plans to retire in 2018, says that the plan is incomplete
because so far it only includes the “sugar not the spinach.” However, to say
that Trump doesn’t care about the top 1% or the impact on his own tax
liability, is a bigly lie. Mnuchin and
his cohort in tax mendacity, economic advisor Gary Cohn, both continue to
assert that the tax cuts will pay for themselves because growth will accelerate
to 3% or higher even though the vast majority of economists believe that annualized
growth will be a little under 2%. For
his part, Senator Corker says that his Republican colleagues seem to have entered
party mode, giving up their concerns about the budget deficit. He remains a budget hawk and says that with
no reelection campaign in his future he plans to stick to his guns, rock the
boat and ask the tough questions. Tax
reform is complicated, passage by year end remains unlikely.
Friday Night Lights: Shortly
before sunset on Friday, Trump said that now ex-Health Secretary Tom Price was
a good man, moments before the White House revealed that he had already accepted
Price’s “resignation.” Running up $1 million on private flights was the
purported reason for Price’s firing but in reality he was shown the exit door
for failing to get Obamacare repealed and for never bonding with Trump. Sadly for Obamacare, while Price wasn’t
particularly useful at lobbying for repeal legislation he wasn’t totally
ineffective. He did manage to put in
place a series of administrative mandates that will continue to chip away at
Obamacare’s viability long after he returns to flying commercial and insider
trading. The list of Cabinet members who’ve
played fast and loose with our tax dollars includes Mnuchin, EPA’s Pruitt, VA’s
Shulkin and Interior’s Zinke, who called the travel controversy a little B.S.,
but so far they remain in Trump’s good graces.
Going forward, travel by anything other than train, coach or horse and
buggy will require General Kelly’s approval except of course Trump’s travel, he
still gets to spend millions flying to Mar a Lago and Bedminster.
Kushner Kompromat: We haven’t
seen much of son-in-law Kushner lately, partly because of Rosh Hashanah and Yom
Kippur but also because he may be in hiding.
Revelations that a number of members of the White House staff were using private emails
even after they had received a lecture about the security risks of sending
anything over an outside server has gotten bad press both because of the
security implications and because of the extreme irony but for Kushner the
problem is bigger. He failed to mention his
proclivity for home emailing when he testified in front of the Senate Intelligence
Committee and they are feeling very burned by his omission. To make
matters worse, his highly paid personal lawyer, Abbe Lowell, foolishly
exchanged emails with a huckster, the same guy who previously tricked former strategist
Steve Bannon and White House lawyer Ty Cobb. The White House has now opened an official
investigation into the personal use of email by staff to make sure that no one
is violating the Presidential Records Act.
Over the weekend there were also a few reports that General Kelly has
been trying to “get his arms around” Kushner’s role in the White House and that
White House Counsel Don McGahn had threatened to resign during the summer
because of his concerns that Kushner and Trump were spending too much quality
time together. He feared that they were
coordinating their versions of events in anticipation of future testimony.
Nukes and Football: Secretary of
State Tillerson, who is the one cabinet member who legitimately gets to fly on
a government jet, went to China this weekend to make plans for Trump’s upcoming
Asia trip and to discuss the North Korean situation. While there he let it be known that the US has
been engaging in quiet conversations with North Korea in an attempt to defuse hostilities. For a brief moment in time it sounded like
rationality was making inroads into Trump foreign policy but the moment was fleeting,
because Trump responded to Tillerson’s nascent diplomacy by tweeting “I told
Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time
trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man….Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what
has to be done!” After threatening world
peace, Trump moved back to the really important things that keep him up at
night by again weighing in on football players, the National Anthem, and #takeaknee.
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