1000 Days and Counting

RIP: As I was writing this morning, news that House Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings, the son of sharecroppers who went on to be active in the civil rights movement before joining Congress passed away overnight. The 68 eight year old Cummings, who had his aortic valve replaced earlier this year, died from “complications concerning his long term health challenges.” Times like this call for more people like Elijah Cummings. He and his brilliant, balanced oratory will be sorely missed.

Back to the Saga:  We’ve reached the part in this extended mini-series from hell where the protagonist cracks; it’s happening in real time. Tuesday night Trump hosted the parents of a the teen age British motorcyclist who died after the wife of a US diplomat, driving in the wrong lane, crashed into him outside of a Royal Air Force base in  Northamptonshire, England.  Claiming diplomatic immunity, the woman subsequently flew back to the US.  The victim’s parents flew to Washington this week to pressure US officials, most importantly Trump, to send the driver back to the UK to face legal proceedings.  To their surprise Trump had them invited to the White House.  They report that their meeting started off well, that Trump said the right words and appeared to “feel their pain,” at least until he tried to ambush them by forcing them to meet the driver who he had stashed away in an adjoining room.  Apparently, reality show Don thought that the best way to treat the grieving parents was to pull a Jerry Springer moment on camera, perhaps seeking some video clips he could use to wow his fans and further prove his presidential prowess at tonight’s rally in Dallas.  The parents refused to meet with the driver and fled the White House.  That was the high point of the insane 24 hours that made up Trump’s one thousandth day in office.  During the day, Trump greeted Italian president Sergio Mattarella, holding one of those joint press conferences that we’ve sadly grown used to.  He screeched about how all those members of NATO aren’t paying their share of the organization’s budget, went off on a tangent about FBI “lovers” Lisa Page and Peter Strzok and blamed Obama for the 2016 election meddling, while everyone present stared at him in disbelief.  Among the stunned gapers was the Italian translator whose contorted face provided some diversionary amusement.  She had a hard time turning Trump’s incoherent English prattle into a sensible string of Italian, especially his claims about those promises that he alleges Turkey’s Erdogan made to him about how he wouldn’t attack the Kurds right before the Turks launched their assault. Did I mention that Trump complimented Turkey, saying that it was the one NATO member who had fully funded its defense, or should I say offense, obligations?

Oval Office Meltdown: Later in the day, Trump hosted Congressional leaders at the White House.  The stated purpose of the meeting which was set up at his request was to address the situation in Syria.  Trump began his speech by yelling at the bipartisan group of leaders for calling for the meeting that they didn’t call for and then shared the wacky, juvenile October 9th letter that he wrote Turkey’s Erdogan.  He genuinely thought that the letter which began with the words “Let’s make a deal” was proof that the series of horrible events occurring in Syria aren’t his fault because he had asked Erdogan to be nice to the Kurds or else face the consequences.  Suffice it to say, Erdogan ignored the letter, especially its ending note “let’s talk soon.” Speaker Pelosi than stood up and informed Trump that the House had just passed a bipartisan resolution condemning his “acquiescence to a Turkish assault against the Kurds,” our allies in the fight against ISIS.  All but 60 House Republicans voted for the resolution. That’s when things got nasty.  The irate Trump went postal, calling Pelosi out as a third rate politician, dumped on former Defense Secretary General Mattis, saying he was inept because he said it would take years to get rid of ISIS but that he, Trump had done it in just a few months.  Somehow or other, Trump gave no credit for that win to the Kurds who did all the fighting but, borrowing one of Erdogan’s talking points, he did manage to call them out as a band of terrorists far worse than even those despicable ISIS guys. Trump also failed to note that ISIS is once again gaining traction. The words continued to fly, with things getting so bad that Pelosi and a number of the other Democrats including Senate Minority Leader Schumer walked out after twenty minutes with Pelosi reporting that Trump was in a meltdown.  Trump then posted a picture of a standing Pelosi speaking in the meeting claiming she was the one having a meltdown.  Apparently, he thought that the picture proved that she was the nasty/crazy one.  Pelosi responded by making the picture, where for the record she looked like she was fully in control, the face of her Twitter page.  Score one for Nancy, negative a million for the rest of us.  Somewhere in the mix of all of this Trump said that he could care less about the Middle East because it’s 7000 miles away, a distance that didn’t prevent the World Trade Center attacks.  At some point in the day we bombed our own facility in Syria to prevent it from falling in to Turkish hands.  VP Pence is now off to Turkey to meet with Erdogan in an effort to stop the fighting and contrary to earlier reports Secretary of State Pompeo is with him.  It’s hard to believe that they’ll accomplish much in light of Trump’s last comment that he could care less about the region.  

Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine:  Yesterday during his five hours of testimony Pompeo’s former senior advisor Michael McKinley said that he quit his job last week out of concern about the mistreatment of career US diplomats and the “alarming allegations” related to efforts to pressure Ukraine’s president into investigating Trump’s political rivals because he “was disturbed by the implication that foreign governments were being approached to procure negative information on political opponents.” He added that his concerns “culminated” with the recall and treatment of former Ukraine Ambassador Yovanovitch, the respected diplomat whose reputation was trashed by Giuliani, his buddies Lev and Oleg, and the three amigos Treasury Secretary Rick Perry, Ambassador Gordon Sondland and Envoy Kurt Volker, who took over responsibility for Ukraine diplomacy and related mudslinging.  Today, Sondland, the billionaire real estate tycoon who is Trump’s Ambassador to the EU, is due to testify. Among other things he is expected to claim that he knew nothing about Trump’s efforts to muddy the Bidens, words that could get him into trouble because according to NBC News,  Fiona Hill, one of the earlier testifiers, asserted that she heard him talk about Hunter Biden’s role in Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, during what was supposed to be a discrete “after” meeting with two of Ukraine President Zelensky’s senior aides.  It was her report about that conversation that caused former national security advisor John Bolton to tell her to report her concerns to the NSC’s lawyer. Hill also said that she believed that Sondland was a counterintelligence risk because he was in too deep and didn’t know what he was doing. In other news, the White House is now engaging in its own in- house investigation of the “Ukraine call” affair raising concerns that they are looking for a fall guy and for the moment, the winner of that contest could be the NSC lawyer John Eisenberg, because someone not named Trump has to be blamed.   

Rudy, Rudy, Rudy:  Rudy also may be a counterintelligence risk or at least that’s one of things that the US Attorneys from the Southern District of New York are looking into.  One of Rudy’s cohorts, a Florida man named David Correia,  another friend of Lev and Oleg, turned himself in to the FBI yesterday.  And Energy Secretary Perry, one of the aforementioned three amigos confirmed that he “sought out Rudy” this spring at Trump’s direction to talk about alleged Ukrainian corruption though he continues to insist that he didn’t know that corruption was Trump and Giuliani’s code word for “get dirt on the Bidens and find the DNC server.”  As if that’s not enough, its also reported that Giuliani, like former security advisor Mike Flynn before him, lobbied Trump to send Fethulah Gulen, the Turkish cleric who  Erdogan views as a state enemy, back home for “appropriate” treatment.

Other News: Both the EU and the UK’s Boris Johnson are now claiming that they’ve reached a “fair” deal on Brexit although it hasn’t been voted on so don’t assume anything is done until it is.