Tantrum in the Rose Garden

Hissy Fit:  Trump should really stop pretending that he wants to do anything about the country’s infrastruture, that is anything outside of that very beautiful slat wall on the Mexican border.  Yesterday during a meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and their traveling squad of senior Democratic leaders that was supposed to be a follow-up to the meeting that they had a few weeks ago, the one where he freaked out budget tightwad Mick Mulvaney and Senate Majority Leader McConnell by agreeing to spend $2 trllion that he didn’t have and that they didn’t want to give him on infrastructure, Trump threw a bigly hissy fit.  His temper tantrum was purportedly in response to statements made by Speaker Pelosi during and immediately following an earlier morning meeting that she had with House Democrats.  In that meeting she pressed her crowd to go slow on the whole impeachment thing and then told the press that “We do believe that it’s important to follow the facts. We believe that no one is above the law, including the president of the United States, and we believe that the president of the United States is engaged in a cover-up.”  Claiming that he was outraged by her cover-up accusation, because after all no one is as transparent and forthcoming with information as he is or at least so he wants us to believe, Trump showed up late for the meeting with the Democrats, greeted no one, never sat down, told them that he wouldn’t cooperate with them on any future legislation unless they ended all those investigations into his misdeeds,  and then stormed out to the Rose Garden where he then gave what his staff insisted was an impromptu tirade, one in which he incoherently expressed  his outrage about Pelosi’s cover up assertion, again asserting, contrary to all available evidence, that he was the most transparent president ever and publicly repeating that he wouldn’t cooperate on anything going forward until all those investigations were halted. Despite that staff assertion that his speech was unplanned, he was conveniently surrounded by large signs emblazoned with his “no collusion, no obstruction” mantra as well as a few inaccurate statistics about the Mueller investigation, proof that his hissy fit was totally orchestrated.  Getting back to the reason for the staged fit, though Nancy’s cover-up accusation was annoying because who likes to be accused of engaging in a cover-up, it’s the specter of his finances getting closer to seeing the light of day that’s really causing him angst.  To that end, citing passages from Washington DC judge Amit Mehta’s decision that upheld the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena for a trove of Trump’s financial information,  New York federal judge Edgardo Ramos ruled in favor of Congress in another case involving Trump and his company’s Deutsche Bank and Capital One records at the same time that the New York State Legislature passed their “share Trump’s tax returns with Congress bill.”  Trump’s lawyers have already appealed the Washington court decision  and are expected to do the same in response to the New York one, but the writing is on the wall, that transparency that Trump likes to brag about is on its way.  In fact some of it is already here, Congresswoman Maxine Water’s Financial Services Committee has already received records from TD Bank and Wells Fargo and yesterday, the Justice Department agreed to share much of the disputed “redacted” sections of the Mueller report as well as a lot of the back up material about the related counter intelligence investigation into Russian election interference with Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee in exchange for getting Schiff to drop his promise of pursuing contempt charges against Attorney General Barr.  Moving back to infrastructure, the stated but mostly phony reason for Trump’s temper tantrum, there will be no projects of note because there is no money in the budget.  Between the tax cuts, the increases in military spending and all the entitlements, all funds are already allocated so the only way to pay for infrastructure is with tax increases and Mitch McConnell will not allow any of those to happen, not on his watch and not in the run up to the 2020 election because despite Lousiana Senator John Kennedy’s lament that the Senate has done zilch other than confirming all of those uber conservative judges, McConnell likes it that way.  As to that threat to never cooperate with Democrats again, it will prove hollow.  Trump needs Nancy’s support to get his renamed  NAFTA treaty passed, a budget approved, an Agriculture bill passed and they all need to cooperate to get the debt ceiling raised. Bottom line, histrionics aside it was just another day in the Trump altered universe.

What Else?  The Pentagon wants to send 10,000 more troops to the Middle East to beef up defenses against Iranian threats even though it’s not all that clear that the threats coming out of Iran are any higher than they were last month or last year which is to say Iran is a problem, it’s just not clear that they are a bigger problem than usual, although if Trump and his John Bolton inspired policy continue they probably will be.   Secretary of Agriculture Perdue has come up with a solution on how to deal with statistics that contradict Trump administration policy related to things like climate science and the impact of Trump deregulation.  His plan is to disrupt statistical collection and analysis by moving as many of those troublesome research scientists away from Washington.  Sadly in response many of those long term dedicated government professionals have started jumping ship, which is the whole point of Perdue’s plan.  A 10-year-old girl from El Salvador died in US custody last year, a previously unreported case that brings to six the number of migrant children known to have died after being detained by border authorities in eight months.  That’s not normal, before 2018 no children had died while in Customs and Border Protection custody in a decade.  Just another one of those “problematic” statistics?  Beyond sad.