Trump's New Catchphrase

Shutdown Blues:  With Trump refusing to negotiate with Democratic leadership, his shutdown continues.  Though he and his disappearing, reappearing stooge Senate Majority Leader McConnell continue to point the finger at Nancy and Chuck, harping on Pelosi’s statement that Trump’s vanity wall is immoral, polls indicate that more and more Americans realize that Trump’s intransigence is the chief problem.  He yelled “you just f-cked it up” to silence Acting Chief of Staff Mulvaney when he tried to broker a deal during one of those “negotiating sessions” with Democratic leadership because the hapless Mick had the nerve to suggest that both sides give a little.  With Trump refusing to empower Mulvaney, VP Pence or even Kushner to agree to anything on his behalf, it’s no wonder that Pelosi and Schumer are holding firm, they aren’t going to concede anything to anyone who doesn’t have the power to deliver and given his unpredictability won’t concede to Trump absent an ironclad and very public concession from him. One irony of the shutdown impasse is that the Department of Homeland Security appears to be suffering more than any other agency.  Many unpaid TSA workers, who make from $30,000 to $45,000 per year, have been calling in sick some because they are angry but others because they can’t afford to pay for daycare or gas.  As a result wait times to get through airport security checkpoints have lengthened dramatically, a problem for the hoi polloi but not much of a concern for Trump so yesterday he traveled to New Orleans after mistakenly announcing that he was going to Nashville, to speak at the American Farm Bureau’s National Convention.  Though the crowd was largely receptive to his claim that the shutdown was worth the trouble, a number of farmers expressed concern about the dwindling supply of migrant laborers and a few complained about shutdown related suspensions of farm loan programs and trade relief payments, the payments intended to compensate farmers for the soybean sales that they’ve lost due to another one of Trump’s brilliant policy gambits, the trade war with China.  

Agent Orange:  Before leaving for Nola, Trump responded to a few questions from the  press.  To satisfy concerns raised by his staff many of whom were rattled by his failure to adequately deny that he was a Putin spy/tool during his weekend on air chat with Fox’s Jeanine Pirro, he answered one reporter’s question by defiantly saying that “I didn’t work for Russia,” adding  "Not only did I never work for Russia, I think it's a disgrace that you even asked that question because it's a whole big fat hoax." Despite the forcefulness of his response Trump’s denial may go down in history next to those other catchphrases: Nixon’s “I am not a crook” and Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” At least that’s what former top Department of Justice Counterintelligence Officer David Lautman implied last night when he broke his silence to warn MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that Trump has become a clear and present danger to the national security of the US.  He went on to suggest that Trump could no longer be trusted to protect the country, powerful words from someone who knows far more than he can say.  Picking up on that theme, in today’s paper the NY Times Editorial Board slams the Republican party for ignoring Trump’s behavior while summarizing Trump’s “bizarre pattern of behavior toward a Russian regime that the Republican Party quite recently regarded as America’s chief rival” going on to opine that “it’s unnerving that more people – particularly in the leadership of the Republican Party -  aren’t alarmed by Mr. Trump’s secretive communications with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and reliance on his word over the conclusions of American intelligence agencies.” As to the Republican Party’s complicity, yesterday the Daily Beast reported that the Kremlin was fully in the loop and had blessed NRA honey Maria Butina and former Russian Central Banker Alexander Torshin’s efforts to sidle up to the GOP through the NRA, noting that when Butina and Torshin brought a group of NRA bigwigs to Moscow to meet with Russian gun advocates, the group also met with some very high placed Russian officials.  The Kremlin connection is notable because it goes a long way towards explaining why the Russians have nabbed and imprisoned former Marine Paul Whelan.  Since Butina wasn’t an official Russian Government representative/spy she doesn’t have diplomatic immunity so the only way that Putin can get her home is by offering up a trade and it’s highly likely that the hapless Whelan is being positioned for an eventual swap.      

Revolving Door:  The confirmation hearings for William Barr, Trump’s choice to serve as the Attorney General, begin today.  Yesterday Barr released the text of his opening remarks, in his statement he says that he believes that it is in the  “best interest of everyone — the President, Congress, and most important, the American people” that the Mueller investigation be resolved by allowing the Special Counsel to complete his work. Assuming he sticks to his script he will go on to say that the country “needs a credible resolution of these issues and if confirmed, I will not permit partisan politics, personal interests, or other improper consideration to interfere with this or any other investigation.” Though his words sound reassuring, Democrats remain convinced that  they are subject to too much interpretation.  It’s hard to believe that Barr who is an advocate of the “unitary presidency,” a belief that the Constitution says that the president possesses the power to control the entire executive branch, is ready to concede any of those powers.  In plain speak the unitary president concept is a fancy way of saying that Trump really could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get a way with it, as least as long as he is president and if he can get away with a NYC murder, closing down an investigation or squelching Mueller’s report would most certainly be allowed.  Adding to Democrats concerns, yesterday Barr revealed that he didn’t just send the unsolicited, controversial nineteen page memo he wrote last year on why Trump, as president, can’t obstruct justice to Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, he sent it to all the members of Trump’s legal team so that “other lawyers would have the benefit of his views.”  Suffice it to say that though there won’t be any questions about beer consumption, today’s hearings will get off to a rough start and are likely to go downhill from there.  That said, unless a few Republicans express concern that Barr, who once worked with Mueller and whose wife is a member of the same church group as Mueller’s wife, is too chummy with the Special Counsel, Barr will ultimately become the next Attorney General.  In other personnel news, despite reports to the contrary Ivanka Trump is not one of the candidates to serve as the next head of The World Bank, however as crazy as it sounds, she has been invited by Treasury Secretary Mnuchin to join him on the selection committee.  On the communications front Raj Shah who previously announced that he would be leaving is leaving.  He finally managed to obtain another job, not an easy thing for a former Trumpkin. He will be joining a lobbying firm, because when Trump said drain the swamp he didn’t mean that he really was going to drain the swamp.  Additionally, late yesterday Republican leadership stripped Iowa Congressman Steve King of his committee assignments.  Notably, when asked about the controversy surrounding King, his support for white supremacy and all the truly bigoted remarks that King has made over the years Trump asserted that he wasn’t up to speed on the issue because he’d been too busy tweeting about other important things like Amazon Chief Jeff Bezo’s impending divorce, a subject that is also getting far too much attention in the National Enquirer and the Rupert Murdoch owed New York Post.  Clearly Trump, who has long been an admirer of Steve King and who may have gotten the idea for his vanity wall from King was lying but then again, as you may have noticed, he does that sometimes.