A Honeymoon of Hand-to-Hand Combat
It was now to be the hour of James Comey, though not in the manner that the tall publicity-seeking FBI director might have planned. On May 3 he testified before the House Judiciary Committee and said that the Bureau had not, in his time, been asked to stop or change the course of an investigation, though advice had sometimes been given, but not more than that. He laid great emphasis on the investigation of Russia’s attempted interference in the 2016 election and said that “Russia is the greatest threat of any nation on earth.” He said they would “do this again, because of the 2016 election, they know it worked.” He did not expand on this, and did not claim that Russia had determined the result of the election. He said that Russia should be made to pay a price for its interference. These assertions were all far beyond his remit—it was not the business of the federal police director to pronounce on matters of geopolitical strategy. Even J. Edgar Hoover, who directed the FBI or its previous equivalent for forty-eight years, left such determinations to the eight presidents whom he serviced.
Six days later, Comey was fired by Trump, very unceremoniously, an event he only learned of by television, as he was out of Washington and the president’s letter had been delivered to his Washington office, and given the identity of the sender, had not been opened. The FBI director was entitled to greater personal consideration. The White House initially stated that the firing was at the suggestion of the attorney general and his just-appointed deputy, Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein had been critical, in a memo to Sessions, of Comey’s conduct in the Clinton investigation. Comey had certainly been presumptuous and inconsistent, even unprofessional.
Trump let it be known in interviews that, apart from what Rosenstein and Sessions had to say about Comey, Trump was annoyed because although Comey had told him three times, as Comey subsequently confirmed, that he, the president, was not a suspect in the Russian investigation, Comey declined to make that point publicly. He was thus effectively facilitating the efforts of the Democrats to immobilize the president and compromise him internationally and feed the media smear machine by pretending that a Watergate-style evaporation of executive authority was underway. (Anti-Trump commentators were predictably eager to make comparisons with President Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre”—his firing of the attorney general and the special prosecutor in 1973. These were completely incomparable events, but very few people now remembered Nixon’s actions with any accuracy.)
Comey had asked to see Trump, had dinner with him on January 27, and made clear to the new president that he wished to remain as FBI director. Comey claims Trump asked him for loyalty and Comey, instead, promised honesty. Trump was irritated with Comey because he thought the FBI director should be doing more to apprehend and prosecute the leakers within the administration, all of the leaks being criminal offenses. On February 14, Trump allegedly told Comey that he hoped the FBI director would seek the imprisonment of reporters who were publishing classified information, which they knew to be illegal. In addition, he allegedly said that “I hope you can see your way clear to letting…[former National Security Advisor Michael] Flynn go.” Comey wrote a memo of the conversation for his own files and later testified to Congress (June 8), that he took Trump’s comments as an order to drop the Flynn investigation, though that does not accord with Trump’s alleged words or his conduct, but he did not consider that Trump was attempting to obstruct the Russia investigation. Comey asked on March 4 that the Justice Department authorize him to deny publicly that the Obama administration had tapped Trump’s telephones at Trump Tower, as Trump had alleged, but permission was denied. (And at time of writing it seems quite likely that Trump’s allegation was accurate.)
As Comey acknowledged in his testimony to Congress on June 8, he leaked his memo of the February 14 meeting, whose contents Trump disputed, to the New York Times, shortly after he was fired and said his motive was to provoke the appointment of a special counsel. This was slightly incongruous, as he did not allege that he feared Trump was trying to shut down the Russian investigation and had confirmed that Trump was not a suspect. But the differences between Trump and Comey were numerous, going back to what Trump considered his effort to deliver the election to Clinton, and including Trump’s belief that Comey was complicit in perpetuating the “made-up story” of Russian collusion by refusing to acknowledge publicly that Trump was not under investigation. Trump was also angry, with some reason, with Comey’s failure to do anything about illegal leaks from Obama holdovers in the administration, his failure (as Trump saw it) to look seriously at the dubious antics of the Clinton Foundation, and his failure to acknowledge or prevent government surveillance of Trump Tower.
On May 12, Trump tweeted that Comey should hope that “there are no tapes of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press.”1 This was a bothersome comment, although Trump may believe that it obliged Comey to be careful in subsequent accounts of their conversations. On June 22, two weeks after Comey’s congressional testimony, faced with a subpoena for production of such tapes, Trump tweeted that he had “no idea whether there are ‘tapes’ or recordings of my conversations with James Comey, but I did not make, and do not have, any such recordings.”2 A tweeted response was a calculatedly cavalier slap in the face to the militant Democrats on the committee, who reacted rather petulantly. The pugnacious Adam Schiff, Democratic congressman from Hollywood (to whose rabidly partisan and usually foolish collective views he gave unceasing voice), demanded elaboration and said Trump’s tweet had made things less and not more clear. Trump ignored Schiff, who was a constant television presence sanctimoniously implying the president was guilty of outrages almost every night, and Trump had his assistant press secretary say the president’s tweet was “extremely clear.”
On May 17, Trump met with two Russian diplomats and described Comey to them as a “nut job” and also mentioned that he had received intelligence that ISIS might try to smuggle bombs onto aircraft in laptops. This was all leaked by White House personnel to the press who then accused Trump of giving away Israeli intelligence. This backfired on the media, when it was pointed out that it ill-behooved the media to incite and publish leaks of confidential information while righteously accusing Trump of causing these indiscretions. Israeli prime minister Netanyahu dismissed suggestions that he had any concerns about what Trump told the Russians, and these complaints quickly vanished; in the Washington jargon of the times, it was another nothingburger.
Comey’s predecessor at the FBI and long-time friend and sponsor, Robert Mueller, was appointed special counsel on May 17 by deputy attorney general Rosenstein, with authority to look into all aspects of the Russian question. He took over an investigation in progress, and there were triumphant rejoicings from Trump’s enemies and groans from his supporters that this would be another endless warlock hunt such as Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski conducted against Nixon, Lawrence Walsh against Reagan over the Iran-Contra nonsense, and Kenneth Starr conducted against President Clinton with an investigation that started with Whitewater and ended with a tawdry affair with an intern. There were not normal grounds to justify such a counsel at this time, and Sessions’s recusal and the malleability of Rosenstein after only a few days in office left Trump rather isolated officially, and if Rosenstein felt compelled to name a counsel, it should not have been someone so closely associated with Comey, whose own conduct was going to require explanation.
Mueller aggravated the controversy by recruiting a group of notorious Clintonites for his legal staff, which denied the appearance of an impartial inquiry and instead made it seem like an anti-Trump fishing expedition (which it almost certainly was), though Rosenstein publicly said that he would not authorize Mueller to go beyond the logical remit of his investigation.
President Trump left Washington on May 19 with his wife and an official entourage for his first foreign trip as president amid renewed hysteria and predictions of his impeachment. Nate Silver, ABC News political analyst, said the chances of impeachment were from 25 to 50 percent on May 22, though he offered no opinion on whether such a move would succeed. The firing of the FBI director and the appointment of a special counsel encouraged the media to run with its preferred narrative of a presidency in crisis, but there was no substance to any of it, just the writhings and thrashings of the endangered and half-decapitated Washington political establishment and its media, Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley accomplices.
The president made a splash in foreign policy, first by meeting with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan on May 16 in the Oval Office, and then by traveling to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Rome—an interesting and ground-breaking trip between the three Abrahamic religious centers—before appearing at NATO headquarters in Brussels to urge a better effort by the laggard allies to fulfill their duties and military pledges.
In Saudi Arabia, the Trump party was greeted with immense deference by the country’s eighty-one-year-old monarch, King Salman, and Trump addressed a conference of the Arab states calling for a united effort against terrorism, and was well-received. The Arab world had not been charmed by Obama’s overtures to Iran, and found his foreign policy tentative and ambivalent, confusing and worrisome. The Trumps were very generously received in Jerusalem, and the president and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are old friends. Trump also met with the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, and professed cautious optimism about advancing a lasting peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. His Middle East peace representative is his son-in-law Jared Kushner, a much-criticized arrangement, but as far as could be determined, the visit went off well at all levels.
The meeting in Rome with Pope Francis was cordial and seemed to rebuild the generally good relations between the White House and the Holy See that have existed at least since the time of Pope Pius XII and Franklin Roosevelt and certainly since the time of Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan (who appointed the first American ambassador to the Holy See).
On this occasion, it came to light that Melania Trump is, in fact, an observant Roman Catholic. Her religion was revealed by the London Daily Mail, which was ironic, as it was from this newspaper that she had recently collected almost three million dollars in a libel settlement over the insinuation that she had, in effect, been a prostitute while modeling in New York. (She had the pope bless her rosary and inclined her head respectfully when shaking hands, but did not kiss the pope’s ring, as the last Roman Catholic wife of an American president, Jacqueline Kennedy had done.)
The Meeting in Brussels was a little less convivial, but Trump certainly got his message across. He was emphatic about American faith in NATO, but because he did not specifically mention Clause 5, which states an attack on one member is an attack upon all, there were loud complaints among the domestic opposition commentators that he had undercut and conditionalized the whole alliance; once again, utter nonsense. (The following clause says that each country will decide for itself how to respond to an attack.) Even the press had a hard time denying that the president and his family represented the country with dignity and success, and a fine balance between the different religious forces with whose leaders he met.
He left Chancellor Merkel and some others with the distinct impression that he would act on his campaign promises not to ratify the Paris Climate Accord, and he followed through on this on June 2, shortly after his return to Washington. There was the customary outcry of the fanatical climate lobby, claiming the end was nigh, but the president, environmental administrator Scott Pruitt, commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, and others all explained effectively that the United States was unequivocal in its fight against pollution and the spoliation of resources, but was not prepared to turn its pockets inside out to placate a large number of countries whose ecological performance had been a good deal less distinguished than that of the United States.
On May 22, while Trump was in the Middle East, there was an Islamist terrorist attack at a pop concert in the British city of Manchester, killing twenty-two people and injuring fifty-nine, many of them youngsters. On June 14, a far-left activist and Bernie Sanders supporter, James Hodgkinson, launched a terrorist attack on Republican congressmen at a baseball practice in northern Virginia, seriously wounding Republican House of Representatives whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana and several others. Hodgkinson was killed by capitol police and was the only fatality, but it shocked the political community. On May 30, comedienne Kathy Griffin conducted an imitation ISIS-style photo-shoot and sent around a picture of the blood-stained, apparently severed head of the president. This was too much even for his more strenuous enemies and she was roundly condemned as temporarily unhinged, as she oscillated between apologies, tearful lamentations that Trump had “ruined” her, and defiant statements that he was “picking on the wrong redhead” and all her life she had been hassled by “older white guys.” Trump hadn’t done anything to her, and when he commented on the incident he said, quite rightly, that Griffin “should be ashamed of herself,” especially considering that he was the father of an eleven-year-old son who was “having a hard time with this.” Melania issued a statement that called the photo “disturbing” and said it raised questions about Ms. Griffin’s “mental health,” a reasonable inference.
On June 15, CNN’s mouthy White House reporter, Jim Acosta, announced that the president had not visited Congressman Scalise after he was shot. In fact, the president and Mrs. Trump did visit him as soon as he could receive visitors. Acosta’s report was a complete fabrication, as was the media claim that Trump had moved a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. out of the Oval Office. He had left it in place, but brought back the bust of Winston Churchill that Obama had removed from the White House. There have been endless media efforts to portray Trump as a racist and sexist, sometimes subtly and often not. On June 26, three CNN journalists were forced to resign after confecting and issuing false stories on the Russia investigation. It was a war of attrition and the media shed more blood than the president in this battle, but they were dispensable and replaceable media picadors trying to wound and provoke the president. Some of the attacks on the president, like those of Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough on MSNBC, seemed almost demented.
On June 20, there was a special election in Georgia’s sixth congressional district to fill the vacancy created by the confirmation of the sitting member, Dr. Tom Price, as secretary of Health and Human Services. The national media billed the election as a referendum on Trump (such was their confidence that Trump would not pass such a test). More than $30 million poured in from outside the state to assist the Democratic candidate. But the Republican won easily enough, as Republicans did in other elections at that time, and Trump demonstrated again that those who voted for him remained solidly behind him. The sixth district special election was the most expensive election in the history of the House of Representatives.
David Gergen, knowledgeable former aide to Presidents Reagan and Clinton, but now reduced to the CNN Goebbelsesque party line, had said that “We’re in impeachment territory now,” but that the president had won a strong vote of confidence in the special election and “deserves to take a victory lap.”
By this time, two on-running dramas absorbed American political attention, one foreign and one domestic. The foreign policy issue involved North Korea. Its communist dictator, Kim Jong-Un, threatened to attack the United States territory of Guam, said his country could strike the West Coast of the United States with nuclear weapons, and claimed to have developed a hydrogen bomb. As part of his continuing provocations in the region, he periodically fired missiles over the home islands of Japan. The Clinton administration had rewarded his father, Kim Jong Il, with more than four billion dollars to discontinue his nuclear program, and he took the money and accelerated the program. The George W. Bush and Obama administrations engaged in purposeful negotiations punctuated by righteous and even minatory noises, but North Korea continued to advance to the threshold of nuclear military capability.
It was now Trump’s problem and North Korea either had to be accepted into the company of nuclear military powers or had to be discouraged from taking that step by more drastic diplomatic and economic measures than had been employed up to now, or prevented from doing so by preemptive military action. Trump, Vice President Pence, and Trump’s secretaries of state and defense repeatedly stated that they would not tolerate North Korea’s acquisition of deliverable nuclear warheads. Trump had told the Chinese president Xi Jinping, when they met in February, that the United States would prevent North Korea from achieving this capability, preferably with the collaboration of the Chinese, but if necessary unilaterally. He assured Jinping that the United States was not insisting on “regime change” in North Korea, and was not seeking a united Korean peninsula, which China opposed as it would soon be another economic powerhouse almost of the proportions of Japan. But he forcefully repeated that a nuclear military North Korea was a non-starter.
After a brief lapse, China, which had as much to fear from a nuclear North Korea as anyone, did finally turn the screws on exports and banking facilities and declared itself to be neutral in any conflict between North Korea and the United States. This was a good deal more cooperation than Beijing had furnished before, having spent decades nodding in agreement with the United States and Japan about North Korea, but impishly enabling its mischief. Though Trump’s critics were almost predicting that he would provoke war with China, his achievement of the greatest diplomatic progress in the Far East since Nixon opened up relations with China has been almost unremarked.
As always in the United States, there was the peace party calling for accommodation at any price, led by the imperishable Jimmy Carter, who thought relations would improve if the United States withdrew its forces from South Korea, and volunteered at the age of ninety-two to go to Pyongyang as American ambassador. (He also volunteered, as someone who had voted for the socialist Bernie Sanders, that national press coverage of President Trump was very unfair and unbalanced, for which acknowledgement Trump publicly thanked him.)
Trump’s enemies, of course, were not only in the media and the Democratic Party but among many members of his own party, especially those who craved media adulation. Senate foreign relations committee chairman Robert Corker, for instance, claimed to believe that Trump could be a dangerous warmonger. Even so, Trump seemed to have created a diplomatic climate for stern action against North Korea; and there was a unanimous United Nations Security Council vote for sanctions. That would certainly not in itself constrain Kim, but it was a harbinger of firming international opinion.
Inevitably, as time passed and the war of words escalated, and the United States deployed increased forces to the theater, allies, foreign and domestic, quaked audibly at the knees, but Trump led effectively and from early October, the public saber-rattling went quiet and there were hopes that China was giving Kim a tutorial on where this could lead. Trump deployed three full aircraft carrier task forces (the immense nuclear carriers Nimitz, Theodore Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan), just off North Korea, a serious show of strength.
In domestic affairs, the drama of health care consumed the first eight months of the administration. The Republicans in opposition had voted seven times to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, and been vetoed by President Obama. Now that there was a president who would sign the bill to repeal, it was more complicated. Trump, who had no background in the subject, took his Republican congressional colleagues seriously and assumed they knew what they were doing and meant what they said. Whatever the lack of rapport of many of them with him, they were presumably on the same side on this issue and Trump had been assured that his health and human services secretary, Tom Price, a doctor and a congressman, knew about health care and the state of congressional opinion. Price and Speaker Paul Ryan eventually produced a bill that rolled back the coercive aspects of Obamacare and ended the state monopolies of insurers. But it also rolled back Medicaid, which had millions of dependents and it effectively deprived a significant number of people of health insurance, while it would reduce premiums for many more and would save the federal government substantial amounts of expense over the next decade. The Democrats went at once to their default position of howling hysterically that the Republicans were pandering to the rich and greedy and throwing the disadvantaged off the train, and spent around twenty million dollars on a national advertising campaign whipping up opposition to Trumpcare, as it was instantly called, though Trump was at first only sketchily aware of the bill’s contents.
The warning bells sounded when Ryan could not bring the bill to a vote. With tweaking and arm-twisting from the White House, it eased through and went to the Senate, but there it stopped. Health care was a shambles and would have to be addressed. On July 31, Trump had the Republican senators to lunch at the White House and told them they looked like “fools” for their failure to reform health care after they had shouted from the housetops for seven years that they would effect important changes.
In modified forms it came three times to the brink of adoption. In the end, the administration could only get forty-nine votes, as John McCain defected, apparently, out of personal animus to Trump, thinly veiled behind tired pieties about cross-aisle compromise; Rand Paul was a libertarian perfectionist, but could only get forty-five votes for his own bill, and Susan Collins of Maine voted against repeal because of issues proper to her state.
The congressional Republicans were collectively exposed as frauds, cowards who had masqueraded as repealers, but folded like a $3 suitcase when it was their turn to legislate. It was a painful experience for Trump, but the game wasn’t over. (Secretary Price, having charged more than $400,000 in airplane charters, was disembarked by the president on September 29. His tenure was a disappointment. Alex Azar, former head of the large pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, replaced him.)
President and Mrs. Trump and a large entourage arrived in Warsaw for a state visit to Poland on July 5. The following day, he was thunderously applauded by a large crowd that frequently broke into chants of “Donald Trump, Donald Trump” as he praised Polish courage and patriotism, and pledged complete solidarity with his hosts, promising to deploy an anti-missile defense to protect Poland (a promise Obama had rescinded) and urging Russia to cease its “destabilizing” agitations. This was all rapturously received and it at least shut up his domestic critics who had complained that he had not explicitly endorsed the concept of “an attack upon one is an attack upon all” in his visit to the NATO headquarters at Brussels the previous month. But they immediately opened fire on another front—that because his speech included a rousing defense of Western Civilization, he was a white nationalist and racist, the usual outrageous falsehoods from a media that could not even report rationally on a well-written, well-delivered, and well-received speech.
He attended the Three Seas Conference of a group of twelve East European states that bordered the Adriatic, Black, or Baltic Seas. He proceeded on to Hamburg and the G20 meetings, which included private side meetings with many of the more prominent leaders, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Britain’s Theresa May, Germany’s Angela Merkel, Japan’s Shinzo Abe, Indonesia’s president Joko Widodo, and France’s Emmanuel Macron. He promised Mrs. May a swift passage of a free trade agreement should she wish to make one with the United States after exiting the European Union.
On July 14, he was in France to meet with Macron and review the traditional, formidable military parade the French put on along Paris’s Champs-Élysées on their national day, July 14. Chic and impeccable in Chanel and Dior couture, Melania Trump made an excellent impression; and Trump, whom the French, in their contrariness, had not greeted with as much pompous skepticism as the British and the Germans, was an exemplary visitor. Trump and Macron, populists with beguiling wives, seemed the only vital major western leaders, with Merkel and Theresa May struggling with minority governments, and Italy in its usual state of disarray. (Trump chivalrously complimented Mme. Macron on her exemplary condition—she is twenty-four years older than her husband—which was taken by the French as a gracious remark, but disparaged by Trump’s desperate enemies in the American media as verging on harassment.)
The country to which the president returned had been riled again, this time by the New York Times publication on July 9 of the news that there had been a meeting between Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., then–Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya during the campaign. Veselnitskaya had purportedly, according to the contact person, dangled damaging information about Hillary Clinton in order to get an audience with Trump’s people. The real purpose of the meeting was almost certainly to lobby for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law which has been effectively used to target and sanction close Putin allies following the death in Russian custody of Magnitsky, a reformist auditor and lawyer who alleged Russian crimes. As part of his campaign against the act, Putin rather spitefully passed a bill in 2012 banning the adoption of Russian children by American parents—a subject that evidently came up during the meeting.
The president dictated a response from Air Force One dismissing the meeting as a discussion of the adoption of Russian children in the United States. The anti-Trumpers leapt to unwarranted conclusions with great speed, Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential candidate, Tim Kaine, even suggesting the trio were guilty of “treason.” Jared Kushner, who had an in-camera but much praised meeting with the House Intelligence Committee on July 24, was fully responsive to all questions, and completely debunked any thought of collusion in the election with the Russians in his observations. This proved, in the parlance of the time, to be yet another flavorless “nothingburger.”
But there continued to be unprecedented leaks from the White House, including the contents of conversations with foreign leaders, and a good deal of semi-public back-biting among White House factions. On July 21, outspoken Long Island financier Anthony Scaramucci was announced as White House communications director, and Sean Spicer—an amiable, but not agile, and often accident-prone person—retired as press secretary. Scaramucci promised to put some order into the press function and to staunch the leaks, if need be by drastic measures. It was an auspicious start, but was blown up on July 28 by a catastrophic “off the record” interview with the New Yorker, one of the most Trump-hostile media outlets in the country, in which an apparently intoxicated Scaramucci, in the midst of the breakdown of his marriage when his wife was nine months pregnant, uttered a number of extreme and very vulgar reflections on Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, and some of his other colleagues. His comments were so intemperate and ill-considered, the media reported them almost without speculating on Scaramucci’s likely fate, waiting for the president’s response.
The press feasted on this with bacchanalian glee, and Trump finally moved decisively to clean up the White House. On July 31, Scaramucci walked the plank after only sixteen days in the job and was replaced by yet another glamorous woman of the Trump entourage, Hope Hicks, the publicity-averse but media-effective twenty-nine-year-old former model. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (daughter of former governor of Arkansas and Republican presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee) replaced Sean Spicer as press secretary. On August 18, Steve Bannon, controversial campaign strategist, was eased out of the White House (“by mutual agreement”) and returned to Breitbart, his enterprising but not always reliable news website; former party chairman Reince Priebus was moved out as chief of staff and replaced by homeland security secretary and four-star Marine general John Kelly. He ran a tight ship and the workplace atmosphere quickly improved and there was a steady decline in indiscretions.
In the midst of these tempestuous events, Trump announced that, henceforth, transgender applicants would not be allowed into the armed forces. The whole status of transgendered people had been allowed to assume proportions out of all relation to their numbers under Obama—the ultimate manifestation of the inanities of identity politics. Trump believed that endless pandering to demographic subdivisions of the population was fragmenting the country. Given concerns about morale, readiness, and medical costs associated with gender reassignment, the previous ban, he asserted, on transgender personnel, overridden by an Obama executive order, should be reinstated. Yet another activist judge intent on superseding the roll of the Executive Branch, effectively making the commander-in-chief subordinate to the federal bench, banned the enforcement of Trump’s order. After an initial appeal was unsuccessful Trump declined to take it to the Supreme Court.
On August 2, Trump announced his intention to reorient American immigration policy from giving priority to extended family reunification to a merit-based standard, where priority would be given to immigrants who would contribute well and quickly to American life. This was an emulation of the immigration policies of Canada and Australia, and while it raised Democratic hackles, it was well-received in the country. Needless to say, it was not well-received in the media, which went into collective hysterics about Trump’s allegedly turning his back on the Statue of Liberty. The media was driven to even more ferocious animosity against the president after riots erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12. What began initially as a peaceful protest by supporters of retaining a statue of General Robert E. Lee in the city’s main square—joined, fatally, by a group of white nationalists, self-proclaimed Nazis, and the remnant of the Ku Klux Klan—degenerated into violence when it met even larger numbers of counter-protesters, made up of social justice groups but infested, just as fatally, by far-left radicals (broadly referred to as Antifa), many of whom arrived armed with batons and wearing their now-familiar ninja outfits, and evidently looking for a fight. The police effort to avoid violence was understaffed and sporadic, on orders, it later emerged, from the mayor, militant Democratic “Resistance” (to Trump) leader Michael Signer.
One person died when a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of people, killing a young woman, Heather Heyer. The chief villains here, aside from the violent protesters themselves, were the mayor of Charlottesville and the governor of Virginia, former Democratic National chairman Terry McAuliffe (also a wild-eyed anti-Trumper), who had allowed the protests to escalate like this, either out of sheer negligence or in the cynical hope of reaping some political gain, as the media quickly laid the blame with President Trump.
Trump, in a series of statements, clearly condemned the violence and the extremists—and acknowledged that there were extremists on both sides. That was entirely true, but the national and international media professed to see in this moral equivalence between the two groups a comparative vindication of the Klan and the American Nazis. Numerous members of White House business and cultural advisory boards retired to protest Trump’s apparent indifference to racism. As one analyst, Don Luskin, noted, in remarks that were quoted in the Wall Street Journal, such reactions, and especially the reaction of the media, amounted to “a clinical case of mass hysteria—and one of the strangest we’ve ever seen. It’s not about the event itself. It’s about President Donald Trump’s reaction to the event….And it’s not even about whether Trump is a racist. It is self-evident that he is not….His sin is that he has failed to express his outrage at the event in a particular way—or, more precisely, that he has expressed it in a way that doesn’t kowtow to the identity politics lobby.”3
Just so, and Trump, with almost stylish contemptuousness, folded the boards and said advisory boards never accomplish anything anyway. The racist charge was still imputed to the president at every opportunity, and that and the bunk about misogyny were still all the Democrats really had to fight with. But Trump’s awareness by now of the disposition of the media to lever or fabricate anything into a club to beat him with, should have warned the president to choose his words more carefully.
Trump was constantly derided by the national media as suspect in his relations with Russia, and as a distracted president who was struggling against tightening inculpatory evidence. But there was never any corroborative evidence for any of the sinister allegations against him. CNN and MSNBC announcers periodically referred to the “drip, drip, drip” of the controversy—that was a better description of the commentators themselves—but there was no such momentum behind it; weeks went by without a damaging leak on the subject, other than to indicate improprieties by the Justice Department and the FBI.
Much of the rest of the summer after late July 2017, was taken up with arranging and distributing emergency assistance to hurricane victims in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico. The pettiness of much of the anti-Trump media was exposed by criticism of Melania Trump for boarding the official aircraft to go to Texas wearing high heels. She disembarked in running shoes to go with casual attire, suitable for visiting flood-damaged areas. Mrs. Trump has perfected the technique of rising above these tribulations with elegantly calculated disdain. (As in most good marriages, her husband could learn something from her.)
The administration was determined to avoid the public relations disaster that befell President George W. Bush over Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. (President Bush arrived late, joked about his rowdy antics as a young man in New Orleans, congratulated the emergency director, and then departed when the city was in desperate straits, with a quarter of the police having defected and thugs and vandals and looters dominating sections of it for several days and snipers shooting at rescuers and aid distributors.)
The Houston area and the middle and west coast of Florida enjoyed better local government, were better prepared, and the federal government was ready with massive emergency relief, and the president and his wife visited as soon as they practically could and came through the natural disasters with flying colors. Puerto Rico was more of a challenge because of its insularity, comparatively primitive electric and transport systems, and the relative vulnerability of much residential construction on the Caribbean island. Desperate for her ffiteen minutes of fame, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, had time to custom make a tee-shirt saying, “Help us, we are dying,” before her interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, blaming Trump for an inadequate federal government response. Geraldo Rivera, who interviewed her for Fox News, challenged her statement, saying he had been around the island and saw nobody dying. She responded, “Dying is a continuum,” making her correct in that all people die, but it was a shabby performance, though much appreciated by the anti-Trump media, which was less impressed by the much more impressive governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rosselló—who holds a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering and is a centrist liberal—who praised President Trump and the federal government for its relief efforts. Not to be left behind in the hair-trigger, blame-Trump sweepstakes, Senator Bernie Sanders cited the hurricanes as evidence of the dangers of climate change (as if there had not been hurricanes of equivalent force at least since the times of Columbus) and the treatment of the Puerto Ricans as illustrative of Trump’s racism. The Trumps’ visit to the island and the great relief effort mustered for it certainly debunked such asinine comments.
On August 23, Trump spoke to a large crowd in Phoenix for seventy-seven minutes. Outside, protestors hurled projectiles and had to be dispersed by police using tear gas. Trump, as he generally does at these political revival and inspiration sessions, excoriated his opponents and taunted his media enemies. He had made it clear, again, that he condemned racism in the Charlottesville controversy—as he had, but the antagonistic media had invested in the argument that he had not. Two days later, he pulled the media’s tail by pardoning Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the eighty-five-year old former sheriff (for twenty-four years) of Maricopa County, Arizona, who had been convicted by federal prosecutors for criminal contempt of federal laws against racial profiling and for the illegal detention of illegal immigrants. The media, inevitably, took this as another indication of Trump’s racism.
On August 30 in Springfield, Missouri, in the heart of Trump country and in between visiting hurricane sites, the president unveiled his tax reform plan and spoke for it in a series of meetings around the country through the late summer and autumn. The plan proposed a one-page tax return, the shrinkage of the escalating brackets to four levels of reduced taxation, a 20 percent corporate tax rate (down from 35), and the elimination of most deductions except charitable gifts and mortgage payments. State income taxes would not be deductible against federal tax, putting the pressure on New York, California, and Illinois, three states Trump lost by a total of seven million votes in 2016, which are all chronically strapped for cash and have raided the cookie jar of state income taxes at the federal government’s expense. The incomes of the country’s often over-endowed and educationally inadequate universities (which were almost uniformly leftist) would also be lightly taxed. It was a well-crafted Trump measure, and the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, had prepared his bill much more carefully than Tom Price had written up the Obamacare repeal and replace measure with Speaker Paul Ryan.
After seven months, the Republican leaders in the Congress were effectively acting as if they held the balance between the president and the congressional Democrats. They seemed to be waiting to see if this radically different but generally moderate (in policy terms) president would be taken down by the venomous Democratic crusade against him in the Russian collusion investigation and elsewhere. If not, and the president prevailed and seemed to be driving a bandwagon they should climb aboard, they would do so, even while holding their noses. Trump moved to break up this very tedious and irresponsible waiting game by having the Democratic congressional leaders, Senator Chuck Schumer and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to the White House for dinner on September 13, including Chinese food for which Schumer, whom Trump worked with in New York for years, had a well-known fondness. They sat, purring like tabbies on the Oval Office sofa, and agreed to $15.25 billion dollars of hurricane relief for Texas and Florida, and to extend the raise in the debt ceiling for three months.
This sent a message to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker Paul Ryan. Trump effectively seized the balance of power for himself, and made it clear that he would deal with whichever party could bring him results. The congressional Republicans had already failed him on health care, and if he could cut deals with the Democrats that would pass, he would do so. The administration’s olive branch to the Democrats was presaged by the decision of the attorney general (and presumably the president) not to indict former senior justice department official Lois Lerner for harassment of Republican Political Action Committees.
As the Mueller and other investigations chugged along, the media refused to recognize what was rapidly apparent—the Democrats had more legal problems than the Republicans. No one could now seriously believe that Trump had colluded with Russia in the election, trading promises of policy shifts favorable to Russia in exchange for cyber-leaks. It was a mad proposition and it became clear from the antics of the leaders of both parties in the Senate Intelligence committee that all they had as evidence was the discredited Steele dossier. Republicans wanted the FBI to explain its role in funding the Steele dossier and in conducting legally questionable surveillance (especially telephone intercepts) on the Trump campaign. They also wanted answers on whether the FBI was complicit in the illegal revelation to the media of the names of Trump campaign officials “unmasked” in intelligence reports. Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice, and his ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, appear to have been aggressively demanding publication of the names of Trump campaign officials in order to imply that their conduct had been improper or suspect.
It was now known that FBI director Comey had written a draft exoneration of Mrs. Clinton before she was even questioned by the FBI about her emails. He had been investigating both candidates in mid-campaign and had taken it unto himself to announce that Mrs. Clinton, despite her serious misjudgments and apparently dishonest replies to FBI questioners, should not be prosecuted, followed by the panicky interlude when the Bureau reviewed the new batch of emails discovered on the server of former congressman Anthony Weiner. Comey had already acknowledged that he told the president three times that he was not a suspect in the Russian collusion question. Trump was inaugurated four months after the FBI took over trying to chase down Steele’s sources to get to the truth, so the continued exposure of Trump to the innuendos of the hostile media and the leprous uncooperativeness of the congressional Democrats as if he were in a legal purgatory were unjustified by the legal facts. Comey’s frank assertion that he had leaked his own contested version of what had occurred about the investigation of General Flynn in his dinner conversation with the new president on January 27, was a damaging admission, though the media did not treat it so. It was a criminal act if the memo to himself is considered a government document, which is legally probable, as deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein confirmed to Congress on December 13, 2017. Comey had unwittingly contributed to the gradual shift of the balance of legal forces in favor of the administration and against the Democrats, a gradual shift that included the increasing congressional attention finally being paid to the questionable activities of the Clinton Foundation, then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and other members of the Obama administration, including, possibly, Robert Mueller who had been director of the FBI when Russia was permitted to buy 20 percent of America’s uranium extraction capacity. The transaction required the approval of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which includes representatives from sixteen U.S. departments and agencies, including the secretary of state. By the time the Committee approved the Uranium One sale, the FBI had already gathered a huge amount of evidence of bribery and kickbacks against a top official at the American subsidiary of the Russian company that was buying Uranium One. This and other evidence, including large pledges to the Clinton Foundation by parties with an interest in Secretary Clinton’s goodwill, did raise great suspicions, however much the media wanted to downplay it.
President Trump, meanwhile, had considerable success, domestically and internationally, with his forceful address to the United Nations General Assembly on September 19. He warned North Korea and its leader, whom he had nicknamed “Rocket man,” of the dangers of proceeding with his military nuclear program; he denounced the impoverishment and usurpation of freedom in Venezuela; he called for reform of the United Nations; he defined his policy of “America First” as the simple pursuit of America’s national interest; and he renewed America’s pledge to oppose terrorism everywhere. The international soft Left was repelled but domestic opinion was quite positive. The speech was well-crafted and well-delivered. The following day he met again with the president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and indicated that he would lift the embargo on military aid imposed by President Obama, which he duly did.
The sanctimonious hypocrisy of Trump’s Hollywood and media critics soon came to the forefront with the exposure of prominent movie producer, and Clinton fundraiser, Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual assault and intimidation of actresses in large numbers and over decades, which caused him to be cast out of the City of Angels like Lucifer. Weinstein was lynched on the basis of a carefully assembled article in the New York Times and a follow-up in the New Yorker. Apparently, his conduct had been notorious throughout the industry for many years, and he had banked on the assumption that his generous support of left-wing candidates and causes would insulate him from criticism, and that more donations and liberal professions would save him after he was exposed. The whole lurid story laid bare the preposterous presumption of the entertainment industry to lecture the American people on politics and morals. Hollywood is a moral and intellectual pigsty, an asylum for the stupid, the corrupt, and the vocally shallow, who possess Thespian aptitudes or a saleable appearance and manner.
On September 22, Trump denounced professional football players who kneeled during the playing of the national anthem before the games. This began with Colin Kaepernick, former quarterback of the San Francisco Forty-Niners, who remained seated during the national anthem in protest against what he considered the routine practice of white American police to shoot unarmed African Americans, preferably killing them, or, in his own words: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color….There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” The movement grew and in an address at Huntsville, Alabama, Trump threw into a stump speech for a senatorial primary candidate the opinion that players who did not stand for the anthem should be fired. (His words were: “fire the son of a bitch.”) Liberal opinion was offended and so were almost all the football owners and many of their players. Trump said anyone could protest anything they wanted but that well-paid NFL players enjoying a short working season should not hijack the National Football League and offend the sensibilities of their fans by affronting the flag, the servicemen and women who stand behind it, the national anthem, and the country generally. The exchanges escalated and he called for a boycott of the NFL. Attendance fell 20 percent in the first week after Trump’s statement, and by year-end, the NFL was suffering a serious desertion of fans (who lean conservative) and advertisers. It might have cast a damper over one of the nation’s most popular sports, but the NFL’s absurdly overpaid commissioner Roger Goodell; the grandstanding, unsympathetic, over-paid players; and the owners of the immensely overvalued teams were the real losers in public opinion.
Trump is so hyperactive that, apart from North Korea, no particular issue lingers long. He swiftly moved on to other subjects. On health care, he virtually eliminated Obamacare’s advertising budget (which had been set up to encourage public participation) and announced on October 12 that he would stop supplementary payments to insurance companies, which were meant to compensate them for the unanticipated—by the Obama administration; they were predicted by everyone else—costs of Obamacare. The Democrats tried to whip up public lamentations about short-changing those of modest means, but as it was just a pay-off to insurance companies, and was unconstitutionally conceived and imposed, the general public dismissed the Democrats’ hysteria.
On October 13, Trump declined to certify that Iran was in compliance with the six-power accord negotiated by the Obama administration. Trump recognized that the agreement, which governs fissile material, is unverifiable, and ignores both Iran’s progress toward developing a nuclear warhead and its accelerating program to develop and manufacture sophisticated long-range missiles. Foreign policy hawks applauded Trump’s realism, even as many on the Left booed Trump for lacking their sophisticated defeatism.
There were other signs that the febrile Trumpophobes were weakening, though like cornered animals their attacks became more vicious and irrational. The resistance to his tax moves was relatively temperate and usually confined to the inevitable mantra that it was just a payoff to the rich, demonstrably as false a claim as it was predictable. Senator Corker of Tennessee, chairman of the foreign relations committee, uttered a few asides and hesitant comments in late September and October to the effect that Trump was unstable and that Secretary of State Tillerson, Defense Secretary Mattis, and Trump’s chief of staff, General Kelly, were very exasperated and had to work full-time to keep Trump from doing something dangerously wrong-headed or provocative. Corker and Trump had the usual war of words, and as Corker could not be reelected in Tennessee without Trump’s endorsement, he said he would not run again. While Corker played coy with the media, which assumed his support for Trump’s tax bill was in doubt, he eventually voted for it.
Another controversy erupted, when it was reported (from anonymous sources) that Secretary Tillerson had called Trump a “fucking moron,” though Tillerson denied the report. (Had he really said that, it is unlikely he would have retained his post, or even wanted to keep it.) When asked by reporters, Tillerson, a southern gentleman, responded with “I’m not going to dignify that question,” which the press, predictably, reported as confirmation of the rumor. Trump did unceremoniously fire Tillerson on March 23, 2018, speaking well of him but confirming their partial lack of rapport. Mike Pompeo, the CIA director, replaced him.
On October 30, Mueller indicted former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his associate, Rick Gates, for financial offenses allegedly committed years before Manafort knew Trump, and on the insidious charge of “conspiracy against the United States.” Mueller had organized a pre-dawn Gestapo or KGB-style raid on Manafort’s home on July 26, with armed men barging into the bedroom where Mrs. Manafort was in her sleeping attire (as people frequently are when sleeping in their homes at night).4
The new cry after this excitement subsided was that the Twenty-Fifth Amendment (Section Four) could be applicable, by which the Cabinet could vote to remove Trump by reason of mental incompetence. This was as absurd an idea as the national publicity campaign to urge members of the Electoral College to repudiate their pledges to vote for Trump. It was the lowest depth yet plumbed by the Trumpohobes; the “Resistance” was verging on mental incapacity itself. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment was designed to deal with a severe medical failure, as in the case of President Wilson when he was incapacitated by a stroke, not with policy differences or illegalities. It was contemplated once, when President Reagan was shot, but he recovered so quickly there was no need for it. In other desperation moves, the anti-Trump forces unearthed the antiquarian and totally inapplicable Logan Act (1799), which prohibits unauthorized people from trying to conduct American foreign policy, and which they charged should be invoked against the then-presidentelect Trump and his staff for meeting with foreign officials, as if this were not common, accepted diplomatic practice. And there were repeated fatuous murmurings about the president obstructing justice when he exercised his constitutional right as chief of the executive branch to fire the inept and universally distrusted (up until Trump fired him, whereupon he instantaneously metamorphosed into the patron saint of the Democrat Party) FBI director, James Comey.
Trump’s enemies were grasping at straws.