Jerusalem Syndrome

The Chosen:  Every year a couple of people visiting Jerusalem are so overwhelmed by the experience of being so close to so many religious sites that they become psychotic, some even convince themselves that they are Jesus. Psychiatrists in Israel have a name for this break with reality, they call it Jerusalem Syndrome.  Well Trump wasn’t in Israel yesterday but he appears to be suffering from the syndrome.  He went so far off the rails during an especially long and steamy press Q & A session that a reporter from The Guardian said he “swept away all previous Trumpian benchmarks for incoherence, self-aggrandizement, prevarication and rancor in a presidency that has seemed before to veer loosely along the rails of reason but may never have come quite so close to spectacularly jumping the track.” During his half-hour rant, he “trucked in anti-Semitic tropes, insulted the Danish prime minister, insisted he wasn’t racist, bragged about the performance of his former Apprentice reality show, denied starting a trade war with China, praised Vladimir Putin and told reporters that he, Trump, was the “Chosen One” – all within hours of referring to himself as the “King of Israel” and tweeting in all caps: “WHERE IS THE FEDERAL RESERVE?” For good measure the dramatic Trump looked to the sky while making that “chosen one” claim.    Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes responded to Trump’s performance by pointing out that the last president to compare himself to the Messiah was Andrew Johnson and that the letters of impeachment against him cited his “intemperate, inflammatory and scandalous harangues.”   

Nasty, Nasty, Nasty:  Of course, during his Denmark diss, Trump called Denmark Prime Minister Nette Frederiksen nasty, because aren’t all assertive, competent and powerful women nasty? Not satisfied that he’d adequately insulted a valuable ally, he later tweeted more criticism, this time about the inadequacy of Denmark’s contribution to NATO, again slamming NATO, leading to increased concern that he will follow-up on his earlier threats to pull out of the alliance, a real concern since most, if not all of those who convinced him to stay in NATO last time he said he was pulling out are long gone from his administration. Getting back to his hot rant, he also whiplashed on policy, this time saying that he was no longer considering either payroll or those “elitist” capital gains tax cuts that he had said he had been considering on Tuesday, adding, however, that he was back to considering more gun background checks, a statement that few if any believe.  On the immigration front, he defended the decision to try to upturn the rules governing the treatment of migrants detailed in the Flores Settlement, because why shouldn’t he be able to throw migrant families into detainment cages for indeterminate periods of time.  And then for good measure, he added that he was also again focusing on getting rid of “birth right” citizenship, a bigly problem since doing so would violate the Constitution.

2020:  Last night Washington Governor Jay Inslee announced he is no longer running for president.  Though he’d drawn wide praise for bringing climate change to the forefront of the campaign and had raised enough money to qualify for the next debate he hadn’t been able to break through in any of the polls, another one of the debate participation criteria. He teased that he had another big announcement coming up and followed up very early this morning by announcing that he will run for a third term as Governor.  Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, another presidential dropout, has announced that he too is running, not for Governor but for the Senate.  Though he still has to make it through a crowded state primary, he’s polling way ahead of Senator Cory Gardner who is viewed as the Republican party’s most vulnerable sitting Senator.  In Arizona another one of those vulnerable Republicans, Senator Martha McSally, is now polling five points behind former astronaut Mark Kelly, the Democrats' most likely candidate for the Arizona Senate seat.  With Alabama Doug Jones’ seat considered very vulnerable largely because he only won his Sessions-filler seat in red Alabama because his opponent was a pedophile, the Democrats will need to win in Colorado and Arizona and in a few more states like Maine and North Carolina to take Senate control away from Moscow/NRA Mitch and his Republican party.

The Rasputin Effect:  During his steamy rant Trump insisted that the economy was doing great however, though it’s not in the tank, or at least not there yet, things aren’t as copacetic as he’d like us all to believe.  Yesterday the Labor Department revised down total job gains from April 2018 to March 2019 by 501,000, the largest downward revision in a decade.  One economist said that the mystery had been “how the economy was continuing to get 200,000 jobs a month," adding now that we know that growth was a more modest 170,000 month, that’s “less of a mystery now."  Additionally, the federal deficit is growing faster than expected because it turns out that all of Trump’s tax cuts combined with the impact of all of his tariffs are forcing the Treasury to borrow increasing sums of money.  The deficit is now expected to reach $960 billion for the 2019 fiscal year ending September 30, widening to $1 trillion for the 2020 fiscal year.  Referring to trade advisor Peter Navarro as Trump’s Rasputin, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board says that the best way for Trump to prevent a recession would be to cut the “trade-uncertainty tax,” their term for his tariffs.  He could also drop a few of his other Rasputinesque advisors and try to leave #25thAmendment territory, but that’s not likely to happen.