Hapless and Grubby

The Blimp is Back: Trump is in London, there to reinforce the importance of US relations with the UK, commemorate the 75^th anniversary of D-Day and visit the Royals.  He’ll be meeting and dining with the Queen and her family, that is everyone other than Meghan Markle who will be staying home with baby Archie, convenient given that she is no fan of Trump’s.  Before leaving, Trump gave a taped interview to the London Sun tabloid during which he called Meghan nasty.  After the interview he then denied that, causing the tape of his remarks to go viral.  Because interfering in other countries elections is very much his thing, he weighed in on who he’d like to see as the UK’s next Prime Minister, saying that he really likes Boris Johnson, the Conservative London ex-Mayor who is seeking to replace outgoing Prime Minister Theresa May whose failure to implement Brexit kneecapped her political career. And of course Trump’s been engaging in a tit for tat with Sadiq Khan, the current Mayor of London who said that Trump doesn’t deserve red carpet treatment because his presidency is “one of the most egregious examples of a growing global threat from the far-right to liberal democracy.” Trump never one to ignore a slight, responded to that by comparing Kahn to NY’s Mayor Bill Di Blasio and calling him a “stone cold loser who should focus on crime in London, not me.  Though Trump was saved from the indignity of seeing John McCain’s Air Force Carrier during his trip to Japan, he will be confronted by the comical Trump baby blimp on this trip as Mayor Khan has given local demonstrators the right to fly it above London.  As to that McCain Air Force Carrier, over the weekend Acting Chief of Staff Mulvaney admitted that the orders to obfuscate it did come from a member of the White House advance team, saying that was okay because “The fact that some 23 or 24-year-old person on the advance team went to that sight and said ‘Oh my goodness, there’s the John McCain’ we all know how the president feels about the former senator, maybe that’s not the best backdrop, can somebody look into moving it, that’s not an unreasonable thing to ask.”  Acting Defense Secretary Shanahan disagrees with that one, he had his chief of staff tell the White House to stop putting the defense department in political situations. Good luck with that one.  In any case, the Navy claims that though they got the request they didn’t act on it, that the fact that the McCain name was hidden by a tarp was just a convenient coincidence and that the denial of shore leave to all those sailors sporting caps with the McCain names was just due to run of the mill shore leave limitations.  While saying that now isn’t a good time to discuss gun control because, you know, people are mourning in Virginia Mulvaney defended Trump’s newest tariff war, the one against Mexico, blaming the need to slam Mexico with tariffs on the Democrat’s failure to act on illegal immigration because Mulvaney like everyone else in Trump’s White House has conveniently forgotten that Trump’s party controlled both houses of Congress for the first two years of his administration and never tried to do anything constructive then. That tariff thing, which has many in Congress, industry and in border states up in arms is another one of those gifts from Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration guru and though it’s not clear that the Mexico tiff is the reason that he’s leaving, it’s probably not a total coincidence that Trump’s somewhat affable top economic advisor Kevin Hassett who was the White House Council of Economic Advisors Chairman announced on Sunday that he is leaving his post.  Also leaving is Emmet Flood, the White House lawyer who guided Trump through the Mueller investigation, or at least the second half of the investigation.

Kushner Talks:  Jared Kushner rarely provides camera interviews but for some inexplicable reason he gave a rather lengthy one to Axios Political reporter Jonathan Swan.  Suffice it to say that the pale faced Kushner who looked more like a Madame Tussauds figure than a real person should probably go back to refusing on camera appearances.  The interview started off nicely enough, with Swan attempting to bond with Kushner over their shared heritage but that bar mitzvah moment didn’t last very long before the whole interview went severely off the rails.   Among the “highlights,”  when asked about Trump’s abortion position, Kushner responded he’s not the one who was elected, he’s just there to “enforce” his father in law’s positions, very much his excuse for everything else that he’s doing that’s despicable.  Kushner saw nothing odd about talking about his grandparents miraculous escape from the Nazis and the opportunities that immigration to the US provided them while at the same time defending the cutback on the number of refugees being allowed in to the country under the Trump regime.  Swan pushed him on Trump’s advocacy of birtherism, asking him if that had been racist.  Rather than answering that question, Kushner kept saying “I wasn’t involved in that,” adding that was “a long time ago.” He also refused to say that Trump’s campaign pledge to ban all Muslims was at all bigoted saying instead “Look, I think that the president did his campaign the way he did his campaign, and I think he’s here today and I think he’s doing a lot of great things for the country, and that’s what I’m proud of.”  He swatted back criticism of his as yet undisclosed Middle East peace plan and his failure to engage with Palestinian leadership by implying that he’s had many secret conversations with ordinary Palestinians, just none that he’d be willing to talk about and none with any decision makers.  And of course he tried very hard to side step any suggestions that Saudi Arabian Prince Mohammed bin Salman was anything other than a loyal ally and all around wonderful guy.  As to that peace agreement, during what was supposed to be an off the record meeting with the Council of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations Secretary of State Pompeo someone released a tape where Pompeo pretty much admitted that it wasn’t likely to go very far by saying  that “one might argue: that the plan is “unexecutable” and it might not “gain traction.”  He went on to say that the plan "may be rejected" and that critics would call it "not particularly original." When asked about Pompeo’s remarks, Trump who previously called the plan the "deal of the century," conceded that Pompeo “may be right."

Mueller, Mueller, Mueller:  Everyone’s out criticizing former Special Counsel Mueller these days.  Trump is back to questioning his ethics and neutrality, and his Republican surrogates are now suggesting that he didn’t do his job because he failed to rule on that whole obstruction thing.  Rudy Giuliani told Judge Jeanine Pirro that he wants to sue Mueller for $17 million for that “failure.”  Democrats aren’t all that pleased with Mueller either.  Speaking for many House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said he’s disappointed, with Mueller’s “profound reluctance to testify.”  He believes that Mueller has “one last service to perform” because it’s not enough for him to merely speak for ten minutes, he’s got to speak in front of the American people in public because that’s the only way that most will understand what’s been going on.  To that end, Washington Post columnist  EJ Dionne called for Mueller to go before Congress and do “what comes naturally to you,” tell the truth because that’s the only way to deal with Trump and Attorney General Barr’s efforts to  “tear” the law, truth and you apart.  As to Attorney General Barr, when asked whether he has any concerns about his legacy, the one he’s destroying by twisting and misrepresenting the law and the Mueller report conclusions,  he shrugged and said “Everyone dies and I am not, you know, I don’t believe in the Homeric idea that you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know?”  Democrats continue to torture themselves over the whole to impeach or not to impeach thing, with the number of pro-impeachment advocates, or at least public advocates, growing slowly.  Louisiana Republican Senator Kennedy, the homily guy, said Democrats should “go hard or go to Amazon and buy a spine and just do it” so we, and presumably by we, he means the Republicans who have passed nothing but tax cuts and confirmed really conservative judges can get back to business.  One time Republican speech writer Peggy Noonan has one solution, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed she’s pushing for censure, calling impeachment too heavy a lift particularly since it would never go anywhere in this Senate.  She goes on to say that the “harrowing part of the Mueller report is part 2, on obstruction of justice. Reading it, you feel sure the president would have loved to subvert the investigation but wasn’t good at it and was thwarted by his staff. There are seemingly dangled pardons and threatened firings. There’s a hapless small-timeness to it, a kind of brute dumbness, and towering over it all is a grubby business deal in Moscow. It’s unseemly.”  The censure thing will probably go nowhere too, it’s not likely to satisfy those in the Democratic party who think that impeachment is the only answer but she did hit home with one person, Trump, who of course tweet called her a “simplistic writer for Trump Haters all,” who is “stuck in the past glory of Reagan and has no idea what is happening with the Radical Left Democrats, or how vicious and desperate they are. Mueller had to correct his ridiculous statement, Peggy never understood it!”    

2020:  Two Republicans, Maryland Governor Hogan and former Ohio Governor Kasich both announced that even though he stinks, they won’t challenge Trump in the primaries.  No Democrats have dropped out yet, but one animal rights activist gave Kamala Harris a big scare, jumping on stage and grabbing her microphone at a California Move On forum this weekend leaving petite commentator Karine Jean Pierre as the only person on stage defending her, that is until a few men including Harris’ really angry husband jumped on stage to drag the loony tune away.  Security failure, you think?