Cave Art

The Art of the Cave: Trump caved on Friday, bigly, ending the longest shutdown, one that will forever bear his name.  At the end, bad news about the shutdown’s impact on economic growth, heart tugging stories about government workers choosing between cancer treatments and rent payments, Republican senators starting to mutiny, the usually composed FBI Director Wray circulating a videotaped message to agents saying that the shutdown had made him about as angry as he’s been in a long time,  and, the final straw, ground holds at LaGuardia, the home of Trump One, forced Trump’s hand. He called a Rose Garden press conference where he announced that he had agreed to sign a short term funding resolution, one without any money for his precious wall.  As part of the deal, a group made up of “appropriators” from both houses and parties as well as representatives of the Department of Homeland Security are supposed to come up with an acceptable plan to fund border security by February 15, or else.  In an attempt to make Trump appear presidential and to label his cave as a victory, Trump’s communication staff loaded prepared remarks into his teleprompter and for about three minutes Trump stuck to the script but then he started rambling.  After disingenuously saying that no one ever said that a 2000 mile cement border wall was necessary, that some “border slats” combined with smart technology would be sufficient he went off on his standard immigrant rant, talked about more huge caravans heading towards the border and once again threw in his usual nonsense about violent criminals making lefts, followed by rights, and then another left, whatever that’s supposed to mean, before flooring their trucks and bashing through border crossings.  Then, most likely because of some weird personal obsession, he started talking about those duct taped, tied up women locked into trunks and smuggled into the country, a description  that has the border police so confused that they actually sent out a bulletin asking their patrols to forward any records they might have concerning inappropriate use of duct tape. Maybe they should check the basements at all the Trump buildings and golf courses, starting with the ones where he employed all of the undocumented migrants for years, the ones who are now being fired despite their loyalty because, well we all know why.  By the time Trump finished his rant he was back to asserting that all 2000 miles of the border could only be protected with a full cement wall.  As expected the loons on Trump’s right, started squawking even before his speech ended, calling him out for failing to hold firm on his wall promise.  Ann Coulter announced that he had supplanted George HW Bush as the wimpiest president ever.  It didn’t take long for Trump to tweet that he’d been misunderstood, he still needs WALL and if he doesn’t get it and all the money he wants by the new February 15 drop dead date he will either close the government down again or declare a national emergency. Taking a pause from gloating, Speaker Pelosi made it clear that she still considers wall funding immoral and with her Democratic coalition standing with her it doesn’t look like she’s ready to give Trump what he wants.  Absent an acceptable resolution from the newly formed Homeland Security funding committee, one that includes something, anything that Trump can recharacterize as WALL, he will probably go the national emergency route, a declaration that will almost immediate end up in the courts.  As to deal making skills, it turns out that son-in-law Kushner’s skills are as questionable as Trump’s.  Over the weekend it was reported a confident Kushner was so sure that he could turn enough Democrats into WALL supporters that he actually believed and persuaded Trump to believe that he had the votes to get the Republican version of funding legislation passed last Thursday.  He was very wrong but did manage to keep the shutdown going for a few more days. So much for nepotism. So much for Kushner’s judgement.

Roger Dodger:  In an especially ironic plot twist, Roger Stone, Trump’s long term friend and frequent advisor, the person responsible for coming up with the WALL idea in the first place, a technique to get Trump to remember to discuss border security during his campaign pep rallies rather than a real commitment to build a wall, was arrested early Friday morning just as Trump’s team was preparing his “cave” speech.  The Stone indictments had been obtained on Thursday but were kept secret until early Friday morning to give teams of unpaid but dedicated FBI agents the time to pick up Stone at his Florida home, while also raiding his Harlem apartment and his Florida office, allowing agents to scoop up all of Stone’s electronic equipment, including his phones and laptops before he got a chance to destroy anything incriminating like encrypted WhatsApp messages and other such stuff.  The indictments charge Stone with witness tampering, obstruction of justice and false statements to Congress.  Though the indictments are what Trump’s team likes to refer to as “only” process indictments in that they aren’t about any actual “collusion” crime they reflect Mueller’s belief that Stone is the link between  the Trump campaign, possibly even Trump, WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange and Guccifer 2.0, the Russian military officer who hacked into the DNC server.  Though he denies it now, Stone previously bragged about his connections and communications with WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0.  Stone is an incredibly bizarre and nefarious character. He’s a self-proclaimed dirty trickster whose engagement in the dark art of campaign manipulation goes back to the Nixon era.  In fact, he remains so enamored of Nixon that he has a rather large tattoo of Nixon’s face on this back. He and Trump met years ago through their mutual friend Roy Cohn, the ruthless lawyer who represented Senator McCarthy during the “lets root out all of the Communists, real or not” hearings of the 1950s.  Over the years Stone has engaged in dark campaign arts for several Republican presidential candidates, he was once thrown off the Bob Dole campaign after he got caught advertising in a “swinger” magazine for a buff military type to join him and his wife in a threesome, an accusation that he initially denied but then admitted was true. Stone is also tied to Paul Manafort, the two were once partners in a political consulting/lobbying firm. Early on Stone was an official member of the Trump campaign team, but dropped off the squad, probably an effort to distance his questionable activities from Trump and the campaign. Despite stepping down from his official role he never stopped communicating with Trump.  The witness tampering mentioned in the indictment refers to his attempt to persuade another odd character, Randy Credico, a liberal radio talk show host/comedian who may or may not have served as an intermediary between Stone and WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange.  Stone wanted Credico to pull a “Frank Patangeli” (i.e. lie to the Grand Jury like a character in the Godfather) and threatened to kill him and kidnap his beloved therapy dog Bianca if he refused to comply.  Despite Stone’s threats, Credico did testify before Mueller’s Grand Jury, with little Bianca in tow.  Mueller’s long and detailed “talking indictment” asserts that Stone received direction from someone senior in the Trump campaign (Steve Bannon? Rick Gates?) who then received direction from someone even more senior (Trump?) to continue communicating with Assange about the timing of the DNC email dumps at a time when Trump was out on the campaign trail publicly calling for “Russia, if you're listening” to dump the emails. Jerome Corsi, another fairly nefarious odd ball who is the propagator of the Obama birther nonsense,  is also referred to in the Mueller indictments as another possible connection to Julian Assange.  On Friday Stone insisted that he would never testify against Trump because he loves him so much and to do so would require that he lie and he would “never” ever lie.  By Sunday he told just about every talk show host who would listen that he’d be happy to spend time in the Mueller hot seat but only to testify against everyone but Trump, “If there’s wrongdoing by other people in the campaign that I know about, which I know of none, but if there is, I would certainly testify honestly."  For his part, Corsi now says that he’ll be happy to testify against Stone.  None of these devious characters would go over well in any jury trial but they, and more notably their electronic trail, can help Mueller fill in some blanks.  Expectations, or hopes because it’s frequently hard to distinguish between the two, are that an indictment of Don Trump Jr or maybe even son in law Kushner is next.     

2020:  The RNC came out in support of Trump this weekend, no shock since he controls the RNC.  Though it’s not clear that they’ll be able to pull it off, they may be trying to cancel the Republican presidential primaries in an effort to make sure that no other Republicans challenge Trump.  The RNC may be concerned about Maryland Governor Larry Hogan who is reported to be considering doing just that.  Although one Democratic contender, West Virginia’s former State Senator Richard Ojeda, a relative unknown, did drop out of the race a number of more prominent individuals are expected to jump in shortly.  One of those is Senator Bernie Sanders, who though he is not really a Democrat, plays one every four years at presidential primary time.  His people have already starting backstabbing a number of other Democratic candidates, notably California Senator Kamala Harris and potential candidate Beto O’Rourke as not progressive enough.  Notably Harris formally rolled out her candidacy on Sunday with a rousing speech in Oakland California.  One of the ways that she is owning her past while pushing back at criticism that she was a too aggressive prosecutor is by using “Kamala for the People” as her campaign logo. In 2016, Michael Bloomberg opted to stay out of the presidential race after he concluded that a run as an independent would probably make Trump’s ascencion to power even more inevitable than it turned out to be, if he runs this time, he’ll run as a Democrat.  Starbuck’s Howard Schultz missed that message, he is now seriously considering running for president as an Independent because he views the Democratic party, particularly some of its potential candidates call for Medicare for all as too radical.  Needless to say, Democrats aren’t all that happy about the thought of Schultz running as an independent.  They believe, and they are probably right, that his candidacy would result in four more years of Trump, assuming that is that Trump isn’t otherwise detained.  Yikes.

International News:  Venezuela continues to be a mess, however at least for the moment “President for now” Maduro has lifted his expusion order against US Diplomats.  On the Afghanistan front,  over the weekend Taliban officials said US negotiators have agreed on a draft peace pact setting out the withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan within 18 months.  This morning Afghan President Ashraf Ghani seemed to confirm those remarks. So far US officials have announced only that progress towards withdrawal is being made.