Mind-bending

Whiplash: There’s an old song that says that it’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind, who knew that Trump had a feminine side? First he ordered retaliatory bombing strikes against Iran in response to the shooting down of one of our drones.  Then shortly before those bombs were due to drop he changed his mind, cancelling the mission.  The exact timing of events remains somewhat vague, Trump claims that he never formally gave the go ahead and didn’t learn that the bombing raid could kill up to 150 Iranians until the last minute and then only found out about the possibility of casualties because he, and only he, thought to ask if there would be any.  Clearly that’s just another Trumpian fabrication, the military always provides the commander in chief with casualty estimates before asking for mission approval. Trump says he then cancelled the strike because as much as it crushed him to lose an expensive drone, he didn’t think that leaving 150 people in the dust was a fair response.  That sounds great but experts and quite a few leakers say that he knew all along that there was a good chance there would be casualties, that the 150 number was  intentionally exaggerated by some of his generals, who hoped to convince him to scuttle the mission because of their concerns that bombing Iran would dangerously escalate an already fraught situation into a regional conflagration.  In any case, Trump’s spinners are now saying that he should be celebrated for showing prudent restraint.  The restraint part is commendable, the prudent part probably an accident, one that almost came too late.  Trump has also put his plans to start deporting thousands, if not millions of undocumented migrants on the back burner, at least for now.  He says that he’s giving Congress two weeks to change the asylum laws that even he knows won’t be changed, threatening that if they, and by they he mostly means the Democrats, don’t act he’ll go all in on those deportations. Like the planned Iran attack, it’s hard to get to the bottom of Trump’s decision process.  Speaker Pelosi did call Trump to press him not to go into deportation mode, but he generally doesn’t listen to her so it’s hard to believe that her pleas were the cause of his change of mind. Some members of his team say that he retreated because the deportation plans were “leaked” before details were worked out, of course they failed to note that Trump was the leaker, that ICE “only” had plans to arrest a few thousand, nowhere near the numbers Trump claimed and in any case the whole immigration system is at a breaking point, there’s nowhere to house people as they await deportation, especially families with children.  Complicating matters a video of a Justice Department attorney arguing to a stunned panel of somewhat elderly, thought they’d seen it all,  9^th Circuit Federal judges that it was okay for government funded facilities to deny children basics like soap, toothpaste, and bedding while feeding them nothing more than uncooked frozen food has gone viral.  Maybe Trump or one or more of his advisors realized that initiating mass arrests just days after that was a step too far, even for this crowd.  Or maybe it was the reports from a team of lawyers advocating for the migrants who forced the transfer of four seriously ill children to a hospital for critical care after seeing that the children’s situation was being ignored by staff at another facility. Or maybe some White House spin master realized that raids and round-ups so close to this week’s Democratic debate-a-thon would give the twenty Democratic candidates an additional reason to focus their attacks on Trump instead of each other. Or maybe, just maybe, Trump realized that his planned Fourth of July celebration, the one that he’s morphing into a Trump/MAGA rally, would be subject to even more ridicule if it was aired next to split screen pictures of migrants kids being pulled from their parents arms.  As to Trump’s feminine side, on Friday we learned that he does have a penchant for women’s lingerie so much so that he flirtatiously said he would try one particularly sexy item on in order to lure long time Elle Magazine advice columnist E. Jean Carroll into a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room where, according to her, he grabbed her Access Hollywood style and raped her. In a NY Magazine article that includes an excerpt of her soon to be published book Carroll says the assault took place in the mid-1990s. She also reports that she told two close friends shortly after the incident occurred.  Though neither of those friends are identified by name, both women confirmed to her publisher, NY Magazine and CNN that she did in fact confide in them.  At that time, one of the women encouraged her to go to the police, the other told her that given Trump’s power and position there would be no point in that since they wouldn’t take her word over his. She decided to take the second woman’s advice, did not report the attack, but shades of Monica she kept the dress she was wearing at the time and a current photograph of her in it is on the NY Magazine cover.  Of course Trump denies that her accusation is true, he says that she’s just trying to goose book sales and he also denies ever knowing her, despite a photo that shows him schmoozing with her back in the day.  This being Trump, it’s unlikely that he will suffer any consequences but it would be nice, to say the least, if the two women Carroll confided in contemporaneously would emerge from the shadows to corroborate her version of events.  

International Charades:  Jared Kushner’s Middle East peace plan appears to be going over like a lead balloon with its intended beneficiaries. He’s in Bahrain for a summit on the plan, however neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis are present.  The plan which calls for $50 billion in economic investment in infrastructure and tourism in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip, and in the neighboring countries of Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon reads like a real estate term sheet which isn’t all that surprising since real estate is Kushner’s forte, well more or less.  Turkey’s President/strongman Erdogan plans to take back control of Istanbul aren’t working out all that well either.  Erdogan forced a do over election there for no particular reason except that he didn’t like that his party had lost the earlier one.  Despite his best efforts his party lost again and this time it appears that the results will stick; his iron fisted rule may be approaching his expiration date, well maybe.

Other News:  Trump is expected to block Annie Donaldson from answering the House Judiciary Committee’s written questions about her tenure as White House deputy counsel by once again pulling out his questionable executive immunity card. Her detailed notes about all the times that Trump tried to get former White House Counsel Don McGahn to help him obstruct justice are featured prominently in the Mueller Report but since few have actually read the report, few know who she is and why her notes matter.  Trump wants to keep it that way.  On the Supreme Court front, decisions on partisan gerrymandering and the census citizenship question are due out during the week but another less attention grabbing decision announced last week in a property rights case is alarming.  By a 5-4 vote SCOTUS ruled that property owners can go directly to federal court with claims concerning state and local regulations that they believe deprive them of the use of their property.  Though the subject might be less attention grabbing than something like abortion rights, the decision is particularly notable because the conservative wing of the court showed that it has no problem overturning decades of precedent, raising concerns that the same crowd would be willing to do the same when Roe v Wade gets challenged.