Who's Deranged Now?

Welcome to January:  Trump’s New Year’s message is that we should all “calm down and enjoy the ride” and stop suffering from Trump derangement syndrome, in other words we need to chill because he’s not crazy, we are.  That may be his message but signs of his madness are all of the place.  Notably the partial shutdown continues, the toilets at the national parks are overflowing, rent is due and the consequences of not getting those bi-weekly paychecks is becoming very real for 800,000 government workers, the thousands more who get their pay from government contractors and all of the smaller local shops who depend on government workers to keep their businesses solvent.  Trump didn’t have a strategy going into the shutdown and doesn’t appear to have one to get out of it. Although she won’t be officially crowned Speaker of the House until tomorrow, Nancy Pelosi does have a strategy, in fact she has a few.  She plans to pass two pieces of legislation, one that funds all government agencies except for Homeland Security through to the September 30 end of the fiscal year, the second would fund Homeland Security at current levels through to February 8, keeping border funding at its current $1.3 billion level until some form of security funding compromise can be worked out, one that doesn’t fund a wall.  Having already been burned by Trump’s failure to sign off on the funding legislation that the Senate passed unanimously in December, the very complicit Senate Majority Leader McConnell who faces a tough reelection battle in 2020 is not expected to bring Pelosi’s legislation up for a Senate vote.  Although everyone in the White House has admitted, either on the record or on background that even he knows that the wall is pointless and won’t do much if anything to solve border security problem concerns, Trump continues to insist that he needs the wall, he’s even insisting that it be made of concrete again, a step back from those very attractive slats that he was advocating as recently as last week.  In an attempt to dig himself out of the hole that he and only he created, Trump has “invited” Republican and Democratic leaders to the White House for a “negotiating” session, one where he plans to lay out just how dire the security situation at the Mexican border really is.  Exhibit 1 will probably be pictures of the fifty or so migrants lifting their kids over border spikes yesterday as border patrol guards sprayed them with pepper spray and tear gas, with pictures photoshopped to place moustaches on the kids to make them appear suitably threatening.  It’s not clear what if anything will come out of the meeting.  Taking a page from Senator Lindsay Graham and former Congressman Newt Gingrich, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board suggests that Trump offer up a DACA solution in exchange for the $5 billion he so desperately wants, a solution that they believe that Pelosi and Schumer would find hard to resist, but even the WSJ doesn’t think that Trump will heed their advice.  For now at least with the toilets overflowing Trump isn’t doing much to make America great but he is doing a fine job of turning the nation into one of those sh-thead countries.

The Outspoken:  Its never a good idea to take on your generals, but Trump appears to be doing just that.  He’s knocked former Chief of Staff Kelly, former National Security Advisor McMaster and former Defense Secretary Mattis and has even taken on the heroic Admiral McRaven, the person responsible for capturing Osama bin Laden.  Over the holiday he attacked retired Army General Stanley McChrystal, who in a recent interview indicated that he would never be able to join a Trump administration because he thinks the president is “immoral.” Trump who had to have the last word tweeted that President Obama had fired McChrystal “like a dog” and that McChrystal is known for his “big, dumb mouth,” and that he is, horror of horrors, a “Hillary lover!”  Trump also broke with tradition by failing to participate in what is usually a formal ceremony by leaving Mattis to turn his command over to the now Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan over a phone call.  How comforting that the person “temporarily” presiding over Defense, the largest employer in the world, the department responsible for protecting the country is someone with no relevant military or management experience but who, as Trump has proudly remarked, has really good equipment purchasing skills.  Shanahan could be acting for some time to come, reports are that though Trump has approached a number of people including right flank Senator Tom Cotton, no one seems all that interested in joining his administration.  On Syria, the issue that finally broke former Defense Secretary Mattis’s back, Trump seems to have backed down from withdrawing all 2000 US troops at once.  He still plans to bring the soldiers home, but now will be doing it more slowly, possibly because someone explained to him that calling everyone home overnight could have dire consequences for the last man out and that visions of all of those Kurds who thought they were US allies being slaughtered wouldn’t play well on national TV.  Turning back to the Senate, last night the Washington Post posted an Op-Ed by incoming Utah Senator, one time and maybe future presidential aspirant, Mitt Romney.  Romney pretty much hammers Trump’s character, calling him out for his lack of honesty and integrity and for the damage that he has done to the US’s reputation abroad at a time when moral leadership is needed more than ever.  At the same time Romney did endorse many of Trump’s policies, because at the end of the day Romney is all in on the conservative agenda, he just hates Trump’s mendacity and lack of style.  Romney promises to continue to call Trump out when he does morally repugnant things, the bigger question is whether he distinguishes himself  or just follows the former Senators Flake/Corker model of being all kvetch and no action.  As a first step, albeit a small one, he could push McConnell to hold that vote to reopen the government and then vote accordingly.

Other News:  North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is back to saber rattling.  Vladimir Putin has been busy too, he detained an “American Spy” named Paul Whelan who may or may not be just an innocent American who was visiting Russia to attend a wedding.  On its face it appears that Putin snatched Whelan to trade him for NRA honey Maria Butina before she spills too much more to federal authorities, however its also reported that Whelan is a known Russophile and a vocal Trump supporter so there may be more to this story.  Lastly, the race for 2020 is on.  Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warner announced that she has set up an exploratory committee for a presidential run and that she is on her way to Iowa.  In response to a question about whether or not she could win, Trump refrained from calling her Pocahontas instead telling the reporter to call her psychiatrist because derangement is always on his mind or in his mind.  For their part the press is now dissecting Warren’s likability quotient, not her views, not her competency, just her likeability because that’s what they do and that’s part of how we ended up with Trump in the first place.