Post date • MONDAY, APRIL 3
Trump is panicking.
About Russia.
It is often hard to be sure what you are actually seeing when you look at him. There is so much going on. So little of it makes sense to ordinary, sane eyes. But this? This is obviously panic. And the reasons he is panicking may include a man named Mikhail Kalugin, also a growing understanding that the key to Trump’s fatal Russian scandal is less about fake news and more about hacking the voter registration rolls in about twenty different states before the election.
First, the panic. Twitter, bright and early in the morning. Turning to his private intelligence service, Fox & Friends. Can’t stop bringing up spying. Can’t stop bringing up Russia. But now unable to find anything else to deflect whatever his people did by invoking Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman’s brother’s company’s legal lobbying. For a bank, for $28,000 a month. And then: panicking, defined:
“Did Hillary Clinton ever apologize for receiving the answers to the debate? Just asking!”
You wouldn’t get the answers to a debate.
You’d get the questions.
*
There are times when Donald Trump must make no sense even to Donald Trump. And in two other tweets, less than twenty-one hours apart over the weekend, he contradicted himself, first applauding news reporting based on government leaks to anonymous sources, then condemning news reporting based on government leaks to anonymous sources.
But the panic wasn’t limited to Twitter. Common sense would dictate that Trump should never mention any of the following things again: surveillance, wiretapping, intel, leaking, Russia, or, say, “outside things changing the course of a presidential race.”
Trump, Sunday, talking to the Financial Times about the French presidential race:
Question: “In France, Marine Le Pen has a very similar message to you, not identical. Do you think a victory for her would validate what you have done here?”
Don’t answer it / don’t answer it / don’t answer it / don’t hint about Russian interference / don’t hint about Russian interference / don’t hint about Russian interference.
“I don’t know what is going to happen. I know that some outside distractions have taken place which have changed that race. . . . You know, some outside things have happened that maybe will change the course of that race.”
What’s the French word for “panic”?
*
Trump is not panicking solo.
The Devin Nunes story—a Profile in Panic if ever there was one—is now well documented: that the supposedly exculpatory surveillance intel Nunes rushed to the White House to loudly share with Trump was reportedly shared with him the night before at the White House by two or three White House lawyers.
And you may have seen a couple of Sean Spicer’s Baghdad Bob news conferences last week, in which he twisted himself into such knots that—as the former Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller put it—“according to Spicer, Hillary Clinton has such close connections to Russia that they intervened in the election to elect her opponent.”
That’s panic. From Trump. From his White House. From his pet congressman. Because of somebody named Mikhail Kalugin? Head of the economics section at the Russian embassy in Washington, Kalugin went home to Russia last August after a six-year stint in this country. Last week, the impeccable BBC reporter Paul Wood reported that U.S. officials have confirmed that Kalugin was, in fact, “a member of one of Russia’s spying organizations, the SVR or GRU.” And so what? There are a lot of spies here under diplomatic cover from a lot of countries—except Mikhail Kalugin may have been the only one who was first identified as a spy in a little thing called the Christopher Steele dossier, the one with Trump and the Moscow prostitutes and the bathroom stuff and all that. “A leading Russian diplomat, Mikhail Kulagin,” Steele wrote in the dossier, getting the man’s name wrong, “had been withdrawn from Washington at short notice because Moscow feared his heavy involvement in the U.S. presidential election operation . . . would be exposed in the media there.” In other words, it appears that the investigation James Comey of the FBI confirmed at the House hearing two weeks ago has not only nailed Kalugin as Russia’s key man in Washington working on the American election, but in so doing confirmed yet another critical detail in the Steele dossier.
And if that story by itself didn’t cause Trump or somebody close to him to fly into full-scale existential panic, something else Wood of the BBC reported must have: “The U.S. government identified Kalugin as a spy while he was still at the embassy. . . . A retired member of a U.S. intelligence agency told me that Kalugin was being kept under surveillance before he left the U.S.”
Surveillance?
Of the Russian operative in Washington trying to help Trump win the election? Dates of meetings, transcripts of conversations, maybe recordings? Last August and earlier? Oops. Who else would be on those transcripts or recordings?
*
And then there’s what Wood of the BBC—and several other, less mainstream news sites—report that American intelligence has finally figured out about what the Russians were actually trying to do to help Trump win. Remember the mysterious news last August that hackers had accessed the computers containing voter registration records in Arizona and Illinois? And then the ABC report that this was tried in at least twenty different states? And then the director of national intelligence said there had been probing and scanning of registration rolls, “in most cases originated from servers operated by a Russian company,” and we were all left wondering: why just scan the voter polls? Just to prove you could hack the computers? A test run for something?
No.
The voter rolls were the goal.
Copying them.
The Russians probing and scanning and copying the names of American voters. The names, the email addresses, the party affiliations of voters. Each could then be sent—by email, on Facebook, in a tweet—only the stories most likely to keep them from voting for Hillary Clinton. Stories based on materials the Russians had already hacked from the Democratic National Committee. Stories based on materials hacked from the emails of John Podesta. Stories not based on anything.
Microtargeting, it’s called. But this would be microtargeting with the best, most specific list of registered voters that a political campaign could ever get: the actual official government list of registered voters. The kind of stuff that would be gold to a political data-mining company like, say, Cambridge Analytica, whose vice president and board member is, or was, Steve Bannon. Cambridge Analytica—up to $5 million of the equity of which is or was owned by Steve Bannon. Cambridge Analytica—which has its headquarters in New York, eight blocks down from Trump Tower.
Moscow’s man in Washington in charge of trying to help Trump win. Wiretapped, to borrow somebody’s favorite phrase. Along with whoever he talked to. Evidence that Russians hacked the names and online identities of voters in twenty key states. And did so to steal the data that companies like the one Steve Bannon was vice president of would kill for.
Ohhhhhh, Donald . . .
This is bad.
I’d panic, too.
Post date • TUESDAY, APRIL 4
Perhaps the most crucial break in Trump’s Russia scandals comes to us fresh from the pages of The Strand Magazine and its new issue for December 1892.
Inspector Gregory of Scotland Yard asks Sherlock Holmes, “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes replies: “To the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.”
Gregory states: “The dog did nothing in the nighttime.”
Holmes concludes: “That was the curious incident.”
*
Publicly, the attorney for General Michael Flynn—agent of the Turkish government, Russian television contributor, and not-briefly-enough national security adviser in this shambles of a presidency—publicly, Flynn’s attorney volunteered Flynn to testify to the intelligence committee of the Senate or the House or both and confirmed discussions about testifying and even revealed that he might not be asking for full immunity for his client . . .
And by the following morning he and Flynn had been turned down.
First, a “senior congressional official” said off the record that the Senate committee viewed Flynn’s bid as “wildly preliminary,” and that immunity was “not on the table,” and a second source added, “at this time.” By the next morning, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, in essence said, “too soon,” and after Trump’s crazy tweet suggesting Flynn should seek immunity from what Trump wants us to believe is a fake-news witch hunt, Schiff added, everybody should meet Flynn’s offer with skepticism. The headline here is not so much Flynn’s offer—but the reaction to it from both intelligence committees.
In short: The dog did nothing in the nighttime.
That was the curious incident.
Because other, similar dogs, in other, similar nighttimes, have barked the house down. In 1973, as the unraveling of the Watergate cover-up began to accelerate, White House counsel John Dean realized he was being set up as the scapegoat. President Nixon asked Dean to write a report summarizing everything he knew about the scandal. Dean—then, as now, no dummy—quickly figured out that Nixon could use the document as a shield and say the report was the first time he had heard these details, and also as a spear against Dean by noting that it was odd that Dean knew all this stuff, when he, Nixon, didn’t. Dean knew he needed to make a deal—with somebody. His lawyer initially approached federal prosecutors with Dean’s offer to testify—in exchange for immunity—testify not against the president but against his immediate supervisors. As Dean’s attorney Charles Shaffer colorfully quoted Dean: “We can’t talk about ‘The P!’” The feds thought about it, and turned him down.
Then Nixon fired Dean.
Dean’s lawyer then went to the new committee that the Senate had formed to investigate Watergate, which also had the right to request immunity for its witnesses. When Dean told them he was now ready to “talk about ‘The P,’” Dean got his immunity.
He got it immediately.
He also got something else immediately—he went right into the Federal Witness Protection Program. They moved him out of his home. They moved him to another state. The day two months later when the Senate committee found a witness willing to confirm Dean’s suspicion that Nixon had secretly taped all the conversations in the Oval Office? Committee counsel Sam Dash had to get Dean to come back from a secure, undisclosed location in Florida just to tell him and get his reaction. Starting in the spring of 1973, John Dean spent a total of 540 days as a protected witness.
Those dogs didn’t just bark the house down.
They barked the White House down.
*
But Flynn’s offer didn’t get so much as a tail wag.
I had breakfast with John Dean last Saturday morning. I’ve known him for nearly twenty years and consider him both a friend and a true American hero. Happily, we had so much to talk about that Michael Flynn barely took up five minutes—but as usual, John made the most of them. Yes, the obvious reaction to Flynn’s offer to make a deal is the suspicion voiced by Adam Schiff and reinforced by this child Trump’s tweet. His lawyer may have offered nothing and demanded everything. Less obviously, these unusually public comments—by the attorney and by Congressman Schiff—could be opening gambits, each man staking his ground for the battle to come over what Flynn testifies to, and what he gets for it.
Except that Flynn’s lawyer is named Robert Kelner, and his bachelor’s degree was in politics and Russian studies, and he wrote his thesis on the black sheep of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky, and he was a Never-Trumper, and in June he tweeted, “Spy novel script: Russia hacks #DNC for @realDonaldTrump oppo. Trump says nice things about #Putin. Hmmm.” And three weeks before the election, Kelner blasted Trump for claiming the voting was rigged, saying, “The only real threat to this election is the reported effort by Russian intelligence services to hack election systems, which is something that Trump himself has failed to condemn.”
Not only does that not sound like a lawyer offering nothing and demanding everything, but Kelner’s letter sounds like he’s not asking for everything. It ends: “No reasonable person, who has the benefit of advice from counsel, would submit to questioning in such a highly politicized, witch hunt environment without assurances against unfair prosecution.”
“Unfair.”
Not “assurances against prosecution.” Assurances against unfair prosecution.
John Dean reminded me that even he didn’t get blanket immunity and didn’t ask for it. He got “use” immunity—they can’t use what you say while testifying against you, but everything else you’ve done is still fair game.
So Flynn’s offer to testify is made by an anti-Trump, Russian-conspiracy-believing student of Russian history, whose law firm biography identifies his areas of expertise as including: “Federal and state campaign finance, lobbying disclosure, pay to play, and government ethics law . . . the Federal Election Campaign Act, Lobbying Disclosure Act, Ethics in Government Act, Foreign Agents Registration Act, and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.” In short, it sounds as though Mr. Kelner was born specifically to represent Michael Flynn. And the Senate and House intelligence committees aren’t climbing over each other to make a deal with Flynn and his anti-Trump lawyer?
*
John Dean smiled.
It may be very simple, he said. You immunize somebody to get him to testify against somebody bigger. Flynn would not be given any kind of immunity to testify against Paul Manafort or Carter Page, probably not even against Jared Kushner. The only person bigger than Flynn in this scandal is Donald Trump. Why wouldn’t they jump at a chance to get a witness to testify against Trump, even if they had to let Flynn get away with whatever he did?
The likeliest reason?
They don’t need him to make the case against Trump.
They don’t need anybody to make the case against Trump.
They may have made the case against Trump already.
Turns out the dog may not be doing nothing in the nighttime.
He may be reading through all the transcripts and listening to all the recordings of the Russian embassy economist whom American intelligence has reportedly identified as the spy Putin put in Washington to supervise Russian efforts to get Trump elected.
And it may also turn out that the witness vital to convicting Donald Trump is actually Donald Trump.
Post date • WEDNESDAY, APRIL 5
So.
New election?
Our last one was influenced by a foreign power, coordinated with the victorious presidential campaign—influenced and coordinated, that is, barring the most extraordinary and unexpected vindication, one so sweeping that not even Trump’s most ardent supporters have successfully hinted at it, let alone articulated it.
So—new election?
Obviously, it will be impossible ever to prove that Russian cyberwarfare, an internationally managed disinformation campaign, targeted marketing tied to hacked and stolen voter registration records, and maybe even laundered money caused the seventy-seven thousand Americans who decided the Electoral College count to actually vote the way they did, and that they otherwise would not have voted. We cannot examine the brains of every voter in the country, and Lord knows that with the ones who voted for Trump we wouldn’t have much to examine anyway.
But the mechanics of the interference—and let’s call it what it was: a Russian act of war, a virtual invasion of the United States, with the collaboration and support of Americans who would be, by legal definition, traitors to this country—the mechanics of how that war was successfully waged against our election and our freedoms and our way of life: that can be proved.
So . . . new election?
Not only are those who oppose Donald Trump getting closer to connecting every link in that chain, but each time he opens his mouth about how he was “wiretapped” and how his campaign was spied upon, he is also connecting every link in that chain. Humpty Dumpty over there is simply so focused on his unquenchable, existential need to make himself the victim that he has begun to resemble the proverbial defendant charged with killing his parents who complains he is being persecuted even though he’s an orphan.
So: new election?
There is no philosophical construct in which, were the Russian conspiracy proved and Trump impeached and removed from office, the Republican Party should be rewarded with continued control of the White House. The Republicans not only had ample opportunity to derail Trump’s nomination, and even his victory in the Electoral College, but he gave them a dozen reasons and opportunities to do the right thing. They did not. To hell with them.
*
So—new election?
Well, we don’t do it that way. We have had a presidential vote of some kind every fourth year since 1788. We have held a presidential election when nobody knew what the rules were and only six states had popular voting. We have held a presidential election while the British were forming a blockade of our ports. We have held a presidential election in the middle of the Civil War.
Every. Four. Years.
You want a new election? You’ll get it. In 2020.
*
And none of that is in the Constitution.
Article 2, section 1, clause 6. It is amazingly vague. It was later clarified by the Twenty-fifth Amendment—but the pertinent part is as vague today as when the Framers wrote it: “In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what Officer shall then act as President, and such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected.”
“Until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected”? Not “until the term of the elected president shall expire.” The Constitution specifies that an elected president serves four years. In the scenario in which the elected president is out . . . it specifies . . . nothing. No “every four years.” No serving out the term. That’s just the custom. And in fact, the first time a president did not make it to the end of his term—when William Henry Harrison died after just thirty-one days in office in 1841—there were those who argued that the vice president, John Tyler, should act as caretaker in chief until another election could be held. While this was being debated, Tyler simply had himself sworn in as president and basically told his opponents to try to do something about it.
That—“the Tyler Precedent,” as they call it—is the entirety of the reason that President Mike Pence would presumably finish Trump’s term. Or that President Paul Ryan would presumably finish Trump’s term if Trump and Pence were both swallowed up by the Russian scandal. Or President Orrin Hatch, who’s third in line. Or President Rex Tillerson, who’s fourth. Or President Betsy DeVos, who’s fifteenth.
President Betsy DeVos!
So—new election?
A new presidential election before 2020 is entirely constitutional, though presumably politically impossible, because some legislation would have to be passed by the Senate or the House and presumably affirmed by the Supreme Court, and all three bodies would have to be hit by lightning simultaneously to knock enough patriotism and morality into the Republicans who control them to get them to actually hold a 2017 or 2018 presidential election.
However.
This could be opening Pandora’s box, like turning off all the gravity. If we somehow were able to break the tradition—the Tyler Precedent—the industry into which we have made politics and government could conceivably generate a new presidential election every six months. Elect a president, swear him in, impeach him and his successors, pass legislation for another new election, lather, rinse, repeat. I mean, imagine what the Republicans would do with this.
Well, of course, we kind of already know. If a Democratic president had been elected as part of a secret Russian war against this country—the Republicans would impeach that president and the vice president and everybody on the Democratic chain of succession and embrace the cry of “New Elections Now” rising from the streets—Wall Street and K Street, specifically. Hell, in 1998, Newt Gingrich reportedly had dreams that he would impeach and remove Bill Clinton, then President Al Gore would pardon Clinton, and Gingrich could then impeach Gore for pardoning Clinton. That would have made the Speaker of the House—Newt Gingrich!—president. Instead of what he is now: a guy whose last presidential campaign defaulted on debts of $4.6 million.
You missed the sunrise today because somebody put something in your drink last night? You can’t go back in time to see it, and you can’t declare a second sunrise at four p.m. You have to wait. But you don’t have to wait three and a half years.
So—new election??
It would be unprecedented and dangerous. And unprecedented and dangerous is where we are now, with this disloyal punk in the White House. Thus, to me, we should keep a new election on the table. Despite the risk, and, more obviously, despite the near impossibility that it would be, politically.
However, if you want a guaranteed new election to take the government out of the hands of these thugs; if you want, after Trump’s removal, to keep our freedoms safe from the fourteenth in line to succeed him—that’d be President Rick Perry, who would serve just before President Betsy DeVos; if you want a new election—you’ve got a bunch of them this November. I don’t care if it’s the two state governorships up for grabs or the mayoralties in twenty-one major cities, or balloting for the head of whoever in your city government supervises the Visiting Nurse Association. Throw the Republicans who profited from this—and they have all profited from this, and they all knew who they signed on with—throw them out and put their party out of business this fall, and next year in the midterms.
Concentrate on voting out every single Republican from the House and Senate in 2018.
Run them into the ground.
So—new election?
That’s your new election.
Matter of fact—that’s your new sunrise.
Post date • MONDAY, APRIL 10
Trump’s bombing raid in Syria was a stunt.
The heartfelt policy change? The secrecy? The element of surprise? The retaliation? The neutralization? The mission itself? . . . A stunt. And much of the news media and who knows how much of the public believed every stupid word! Swallowed it like mother’s milk. Object: distraction. And they fell for it.
The Trump Gang publicly confirmed that the Russians were warned in advance, per the terms of a deconfliction agreement. ABC News reports that the Syrians guessed, or knew far enough in advance to move personnel and equipment out of the targeted air force base. How in the hell could that have happened? Maybe the Russians told them? And while the Russians knew, and the Syrians knew, did Congress know? Did the American people know? They didn’t even tell the State Department.
It. Was. A. Stunt.
And what do you call a stunt in which the Americans make sure the principal ally of the targeted nation knows in advance that it’s coming, but our own Congress and State Department don’t? It’s called Collusion with the Enemy. It was a stunt—a glorified fireworks show—which did nothing to impede the Assad regime from again using chemical weapons against its own people. It was a stunt that did nothing to impede the Trump regime from using propaganda weapons against its people.
Four years ago, Trump sent out a fistful of tweets about Syria, condemning exactly the stunt he just pulled in Syria. Two months before Trump’s stunt, he banned refugees from Syria from coming here—so the kids and the adults who died such horrible deaths had one fewer place to run to, because of Donald Trump. And four days before Trump’s stunt, his government said removing Assad wasn’t the plan anymore. And three days before Trump’s stunt, as the children still lay there choking to death, he blamed Barack Obama for it.
And two days before Trump’s stunt, he cut the U.S. contribution to the United Nations Population Fund by nearly half and threatened to cut it completely, and last year 48,000 pregnant women in Syria were able to deliver their babies in safety because of that funding Trump just cut, so don’t tell me he had some kind of change of heart because of the video of those dying kids, because by the end of the year, more children may have died in Syria because of Donald Trump than because of Bashar al-Assad!
And less than twenty-four hours after the last of the bombs hit the ground, the Syrians were running more missions out of the same base. Bombing more civilians. We dropped a reported $94 million worth of bombs, and we didn’t even put a hole in the runways, and nobody noticed, because seventy-eight senators publicly said that this stunt—this meaningless, dangerous, cynical, exploitative, bullshit stunt that didn’t even slow Assad’s bombers down—was a good thing.
And then Trump also claimed it was the plan. “The reason you don’t generally hit runways is that they are easy and inexpensive to quickly fix (fill in and top!)” Right. When you bomb air bases, you never try to destroy the runways to keep the planes from taking off. And the media bought all of this. A TV anchor giddily quotes Leonard Cohen lyrics about the beauty of the video of the missiles. A TV analyst says, “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States last night,” which is exactly what another analyst on the same network said a month earlier, after Trump’s speech to the House and Senate, because every time this idiot Trump doesn’t crap his pants or pay one of his companies another million dollars of taxpayer money, apparently that makes him Abraham Goddamned Lincoln. The retired anchormen who won’t go away and the ex-generals making TV per diem and the war correspondents who have nothing to do if there’s no war congratulated Trump on getting “away with this one without having an escalation of the conflict,” and USA Today wrote about Trump’s “successful week” and asked if he would continue his “winning ways.”
Just like in the three years after 9/11, the news media in this country is right now suffering from a kind of journalistic post-traumatic stress disorder. Everything around them is so outside their own experience, so different and alarming and real, so existentially threatening, that none of their clichés fit anymore and none of their default story lines work anymore, and by God, when something vaguely familiar happens—like American missiles taking off and blowing stuff up in the Middle East without congressional authorization—they feel like the tiny little world inside the Beltway, the only thing simple enough for them to digest and regurgitate and pretend they know what the hell they’re talking about, they feel like that’s back—that the unique nightmare of a president who has something wrong with his brain and tells you he’s been in office thirteen weeks when it’s only been eleven is finally pivoting—just like they predicted!—into an ordinary president who just blows stuff up, and they can revert to rewriting what they wrote in 2010 or 1996 or 19-goddamned-12!
It was a stunt!
And the media believed every stupid word! Object: distraction! And they fell for it!
Let me fully explain the media in two rules.
Rule one is: “Bombs = Easy to Understand.” Swoosh, kaboom, “boots on the ground,” Greatest Generation? Easy to understand.
Rule two is: “Russian Cyberwar ≠ Easy to Understand.”
Disinformation, collusion, hacking, voter registration rolls, microtargeting? Not easy to understand.
And what did those corners of the political media miss while they fell for it? They missed nearly four dozen tweets from Trump in 2013 and 2014—virtual messages in a bottle from the Trump of Christmas Past to the Trump of Christmas Present, like this one:
“Again, to our very foolish leader, do not attack Syria—if you do many very bad things will happen and from that fight the U.S. gets nothing!”
And they also missed all of Trump’s 2017 cheerleaders, in the Senate, in the House, in the media, praising him for this stunt when they condemned Obama for even proposing action four years ago. Sean Hannity, September 2013: “Glad our arrogant Pres. is enjoying his taxpayer funded golf outing after announcing the US should take military action against Syria.”
And in falling for it—again—much of the media missed the real lessons of Trump’s Syria stunt. Less than twenty-four hours later, what was the pro-Trump super-PAC Great America—the one run by the eternal Republican Ed Rollins, a man who told me to my face that I was right, that Trump is crazy—what was that PAC doing? Fund-raising off the children dead in Syria from sarin gas, and off Trump’s stunt!
Fund-raising off a stunt that accomplished nothing except make the stupid people of this country fall for it just like they fell for it in Iraq in 2003 and just like they’ll fall for it next time, because the actual outcome of the Syrian stunt was that Trump learned that whenever he can convert true international outrage and heartbreak into a publicity photo-op stunt, he will get applause and support and prestige—and people from all around the nation willing to pretend he’s a president and not an unstable egomaniac; people willing to pretend he’s a leader and not a charlatan who, while in the middle of being investigated for electoral collusion with Russia, decides it’s the perfect time for military collusion with Russia by staging a phony bombing run that saved no children, delivered no message, drew no line, showed no leadership, provided no hope, resolved no crisis, and did not even produce potholes in the runways!
*
Author’s note: Just after this piece was recorded and posted, Eric Trump told Britain’s The Telegraph, “If there was anything that Syria did, it was to validate the fact that there is no Russia tie.”
Post date • WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12
(Voiceover announcer: “And now a message to the President of the United States.”)
You are a jackass.
There have been many words used to describe you during these first two and a half months of this human waste treatment plant of an administration of yours, and I’ve used most of them: demagogue, liar, idiot, despot, simpleton, traitor, schmuck, asshole, buckpasser, puppet, lunatic, toddler, fascist, jerk, schmo, schnook, dope, dipstick, lamebrain.
But after prolonged consideration . . .
You are a jackass.
You are President Jackass.
Who else but a jackass would look at the dying children of Syria and, as your first reaction, blame your predecessor when your predecessor did exactly what you urged him to do at least forty-seven different times just on Twitter?
Who else but a jackass would, as your second reaction, do nothing—just stick to the policy that most benefits Russia?
Who else but a jackass would, as your third reaction, put the international balance of power at risk in case our troops happened to kill a Russian in Syria because your daughter—the schlockmeister one who tries to turn everything she can touch into a marketing opportunity—she ran to Daddy and said she was heartbroken and you should go kill some people?
Who else but a jackass would, as your fourth reaction, warn Russia that our planes were coming, knowing that Russia would warn Syria, and then put the lives of American service personnel at risk so they could run a farcical stunt attack on an air base, with instructions that they should not try to destroy the runways from which the Syrian jets carrying the sarin gas that killed those kids took off?
Who else but a jackass would, as your fifth reaction, when America finally woke up to the nauseating reality that you put our people’s lives at risk to run a phony photo-op bombing raid that didn’t bomb anything, tweet that everybody knows when you bomb an air base you never bomb the runways because they’re so easy to fix.
You are a jackass! You are President Jackass!
Who else but a jackass would rely on his nitwit son-in-law to do anything on behalf of the American government, when he just happened to fill out the forms for the top-secret security clearance he doesn’t deserve in a million years and he came to question 20B.6, which asks about substantial meetings with foreign governments, and he forgot to mention his meetings with the Russian ambassador to the United States?
Who else but a jackass would trot out this Kushner, this triumph of double nepotism, after this? To borrow names from Louise Mensch’s Twitter feed: Oliver Northface somehow acting in the name of our democracy, wearing Flaks Fifth Avenue and a pair of Jamokely Sunglasses?
Who else but a jackass would say how many weeks he’d been in office—and get it wrong by a margin of 15 percent?
Who else but a jackass would accuse Susan Rice and Barack Obama and the intelligence community of crimes, without one shred of evidence among them, but continually defend Vladimir Goddamned Putin?
Who else but a jackass would claim that an eleven-term Democratic congressman from Baltimore had told you, “You will go down as one of the great presidents in the history of our country,” and leave off the part where he said that to perhaps become great, first you’d have to stop dividing and harming the country and start truly representing everybody?
You are a jackass!
Who else but a jackass would demote a man like Steve Bannon not because he has no business being involved in running anything more important than a popsicle stand, but because you reportedly were embarrassed that Saturday Night Live made him look like your boss, and you weren’t—quoting, of all places, Fox News—“happy with the way Bannon had been grabbing the limelight”?
Who else but a jackass would let Homeland Security try to trample the First Amendment to unmask one of his critics on Twitter?
Who else but a jackass would have escaped disaster during the campaign after the Access Hollywood sexual assault tape, yet still publicly defend a serial sexual harasser like your pal Bill O’Reilly and claim he had done nothing wrong?
Who else but a jackass could accuse a New York Times reporter of being the PR person for Hillary Clinton, and when she replies, “Mostly by you, though,” you say, “No, no, no, mostly by a lot of people,” like you’re twelve freaking years old?
Who else but a jackass could have a collection of pet television hosts, propagandists so stupid that they would try to delete four-year-old tweets that prophesied your nitwitted policy? “Glad our arrogant Pres. is enjoying his taxpayer funded golf outing after announcing the US should take military action against Syria.”
You are a jackass!
President Jackass!
And worst of all, worst of all, maybe worse than everything else combined: who but a jackass would approve his first military mission, and see a Navy SEAL named Ryan Owens lose his life while fulfilling that mission, and exploit his widow during a speech to both houses of Congress, and then say, “This was a mission that was started before I got here. This was something that was, you know, just, they wanted to do. . . . My generals are the most respected that we’ve had in many decades, I believe. And they lost Ryan.”
Jackass.
You worthless jackass.
You President Jackass.
Post date • MONDAY, APRIL 17
The British may have already nailed Trump on Russia.
On tape.
No—not that tape.
It was the thirty-fourth and final paragraph in a long and pretty staid review of the role British spies have played in connecting the dots between the Trump presidential campaign and the Russians. And then, as if it were merely the best available way for Britain’s newspaper The Guardian to end its useful but modest story, came paragraph thirty-four: “One source suggested the official investigation was making progress. ‘They now have specific concrete and corroborative evidence of collusion,’ the source said. ‘This is between people in the Trump campaign and agents of [Russian] influence relating to the use of hacked material.’”
Oh.
Shouldn’t that have been presented, I don’t know, a little more prominently? “Specific and corroborative evidence of collusion . . . between people in the Trump campaign and agents of Russian influence . . . relating to the use of hacked material.”
Not only did the Republic not grind to a halt, but nobody, not even The Guardian itself, followed up with the appropriate screaming headlines. No screaming headlines, even in light of what Eric Trump told another British newspaper, The Telegraph, in the wake of his father’s impotent missile attack against that Syrian air base. “If there was anything that Syria did,” the Trump spawn protested, too much, “it was to validate the fact that there is no Russia tie.”
No screaming headlines as a British magazine—Prospect—quoted that nation’s former chief spy Richard Dearlove as speculating, “What lingers for Trump may be what deals—on what terms—he did after the financial crisis of 2008 to borrow Russian money when others in the west apparently would not lend to him.”
No screaming headlines, even as The Washington Post reported that the FBI did indeed get a judge to issue a FISA warrant (permission under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) to track the actions of and communications with Russians by Carter Page, who was the second name Donald Trump ever gave when asked who his foreign policy advisers were.
No screaming headlines, even though the story that the FBI had sought, and gotten—a FISA warrant of some kind against somebody directly linked to Trump and/or his campaign—had been widely reported in nontraditional media ever since the former British member of Parliament Louise Mensch published a sourced story before the election.
No screaming headlines, even though the essence of Mensch’s November 7 story was that, while looking at suspicious Russian banking activity, foreign intelligence services had tripped over contacts between the Russians and the Trump team, and the FBI needed that FISA warrant because without it they couldn’t even read what, say, the British had come up with. “It is thought in the intelligence community,” Mensch wrote in November, “that the warrant covers any ‘US person’ connected to this investigation, and thus covers Donald Trump and at least three further men who have either formed part of his campaign or acted as his media surrogates.”
Mensch’s report was not so much dismissed as ignored.
Now Ms. Mensch is back. On her own blog, Sunday night: “Sources with links to the intelligence community say it is believed that Carter Page went to Moscow in early July carrying with him a prerecorded tape of Donald Trump offering to change American policy if he were to be elected, to make it more favorable to Putin. In exchange, Page was authorized directly by Trump to request the help of the Russian government in hacking the election.”
Well, you have to admit, a tape of Donald Trump personally saying he would trade American policy decisions in exchange for nefarious Russian intervention in the election would probably fit The Guardian’s thirty-fourth paragraph about “specific and corroborative evidence of collusion . . . between people in the Trump campaign and agents of Russian influence . . . relating to the use of hacked material.”
Mensch also identifies three Trump associates named in the FBI FISA warrant application—Russian-born reportedly ex–Trump TV spokesman Boris Epshteyn, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, and Carter Page. “A recording exists of all three men discussing the possibility of Page taking the tape of Trump to Moscow as an earnest of good faith. There is a minor dispute over whether Trump himself is also on that tape . . .”
So, if Mensch is correct, there may be two tapes of Trump personally making a promise to a foreign government, to help it out if that foreign government broke American laws in order to get him elected.
In the abstract—in the theoretical—that would be treason.
On tape.
Where Ms. Mensch has been again dismissed, three criticisms have been raised. First, that she was not exactly right when she was the first to report that the FBI had gone to the extreme lengths of seeking FISA warrants against the Trump team, before the entirety of the world’s mainstream media was even close to the story The Washington Post just got last week.
Second, there is the disbelief that anybody would be stupid enough to not just leave “specific and corroborative evidence of collusion,” of Trump saying, “Let’s make a deal,” but to actually, deliberately create that evidence.
If you have seen Carter Page interviewed, you should have no doubt that he is stupid enough to have done something exactly like this. In one interview on the question of whether or not he had ever met the infamous Russian ambassador Kislyak, he managed to contradict himself about five times in about five minutes before confessing with the immortal words “I may have met him—possibly. It might have been in Cleveland.”
And of course, if you have ever heard Donald Trump talk, and forget which country he attacked the day before but remember what kind of cake he was eating while he was telling the premier of China about the attack, you should have no doubt that he, too, is stupid enough—and, more relevant, so convinced of his own invulnerability—to have done something exactly like this. And indeed this underscores my repeated contention here that democracy has survived less because of the hard work and dedication of people like you and me who are committed to its preservation, and more because of the unfailing and eternal stupidity of those who would destroy it.
But last, and most important, Louise Mensch’s story has been criticized because no matter how unfailing and how eternal that stupidity may be, who could ever rise to the position of president of the United States, no matter how insane, or paranoid, or certain that the ordinary odds that they might get caught did not apply to them?
No president would be stupid enough to put it on tape.
Richard Nixon?
Post date • TUESDAY, APRIL 18
Lost in the cacophony of launched missiles in Syria and dropped bombs in Afghanistan and rattled sabers in Korea; drowned out by the clamoring dissonance of conflicting policies about China and Assad and NATO; shouted over by the crises of Sean Spicer and Paul Manafort and Eric Trump; and always—forever—distracted from by the little whir and click sounds of a recorder switching on and off, supported by the remorseless background drumbeat of the Russian election scandal, there is a terrifying new fact: The president is getting crazier.
This statement is somewhat akin to rhetorically asking if today here in hell it is hotter than it was yesterday. But in the last week—just in the last week—the featherlight grip on reality of Trump’s tiny hands has seemingly gotten much looser—and much looser, much faster.
The most obvious, though hardly the most disturbing, evidence of some kind of deepening illness or damage or madness or what-does-the-cause-matter-any-longer was the latest barrage of tweets, like the “Fake Media (not Real Media)” tweet Monday morning, but especially the string of them on Easter.
In eighty-three short minutes, Trump started with a simpleton’s rationalization of his complete 180 on Chinese currency manipulation to boasting about his election as if it were the answer to everything, to using that election as an excuse for reneging on one of his campaign promises, to paranoid fantasies about paid protesters, to then insisting that his election should not be the answer to everything, to a random boast about American military strength, which, if it were connected to the previous tweet, could easily and terrifyingly be read as a tacit threat to suppress American protesters with American military force.
The president is getting crazier.
It is possible that this string of five “word explosions” could be only that. Merely a sign of a lazy, damaged, unfocused mind wandering off on its own—again. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or adult attention disorder, or not-really-an-adult sanity disorder, taking a stroll on a lazy holiday weekend. But this wasn’t a lazy holiday weekend. Literally twenty-four hours earlier, there was urgent reason to think we might be bombing North Korea. There had been no accord. There had been no stand-down. And had there been no Korean missile self-destructing and dropping impotently into the sea, there would have been no relief from the crisis.
And the next morning, the quote-president-unquote was obsessed about how many votes he got in the Electoral College five months ago, as if anyone, anywhere, at any time—besides him—thinks that his weak victory there is by itself an explanation for his broken promises about releasing his taxes.
And North Korea? North Korea went from inspiring a joke on Saturday Night Live—with Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer suggesting we should eat all the chocolate eggs we want, because it was to be our last Easter on earth—to being relegated to almost an afterthought to the real Trump’s rationalizations about his other broken promises about designating China as a currency manipulator. In the disordered mind of the commander in chief, North Korea had been figuratively, if not literally, the end of the world. Overnight, it was reduced to being not nearly as much of a threat as the Trump tax return protesters.
The president is getting crazier.
And it’s not as if he had spent the preceding week—or even the preceding seventy-two hours—focused just on North Korea. In our collective national trip inside the kaleidoscopic, roller-coaster mind of this unstable man, does anybody even remember the MOAB? The 21,000-pound Mother of All Bombs dropped in Afghanistan? Or the stunt attack on the Syrian missile base that didn’t even disable the Syrian missile base? That was one week before Syria. The MOAB was Thursday. Thursday has apparently become Blow-Stuff-Up Day.
And of course, Trump had already forgotten into which country he had those missiles fired. “So what happens is, I said ‘We’ve just launched fifty-nine missiles heading to Iraq, and I wanted you to know this.’ And he was eating his cake. And he was silent.” And Maria Bartiromo, who used to be a journalist, interrupts and says, “To . . . Syria—”
“Yes. Heading toward Syria. In other words, ‘We’ve just launched fifty-nine missiles heading toward Syria.’”
No.
Those aren’t “other words.” Those things—“We’ve just launched fifty-nine missiles heading to Iraq” and “We’ve just launched fifty-nine missiles heading toward Syria”—are not two different descriptions of the same thing. They are two different things with two utterly different, world-changing sets of consequences. And they are two things that a president says in an interview in which he also expresses his amazement about the unmanned missiles, as if there were manned missiles, and the only thing he says with clear conviction or unmuddied memory is “We had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen.”
They are two things a president says when he is getting crazier.
Only a president who is getting crazier would admit going into a meeting with the premier of China with a long-standing assumption that the Chinese could just wave a magic wand and stop North Korea, but figuring out this was not true after only ten minutes of conversation, while not realizing that there are ten-year-old children in this country with a better grasp on North Korea than he has.
Only a president who is getting crazier would flip-flop on the Export-Import Bank. And flip-flop on NATO. And flip-flop on his own promise on Chinese currency manipulation. And flip-flop on his own promise on his tax returns. And flip-flop on his Syria policy. And flip-flop on his top adviser. And all of that in just barely over a week, while bombing two countries and threatening a third, and correctly remembering only two of their three names!
*
We don’t like to admit this, but it has often served our purposes, just as certainly as it has served Kim Jong-un’s, to have leaders, or indeed even commanders in chief, who verged on seeming madness. Kissinger used to tell the Russians that Richard Nixon was a madman. Ronald Reagan let the same country believe he viewed it as the “evil empire” from Star Wars. Barry Goldwater wouldn’t rule out nuking North Vietnam, and George Wallace’s vice presidential candidate was an ex-general who wanted to nuke Vietnam, Russia, and China, and the Russian records from the Cuban Missile Crisis suggest that Khrushchev thought John F. Kennedy might have been literally insane.
It can be a tactic. But it can work only if there remains the likelihood that the president really is not crazy. And with every passing week and every passing day and every passing hour, there is less and less evidence that this president really is not crazy.
What is rapidly becoming the paramount fact of the twenty-first century, the event overshadowing everything else from 9/11 to climate change, continues to be largely ignored—ignored even though it is an existential threat to the future of mankind. There are millions of Americans, millions of others around the world—even millions who despise these policies and hate that man—who are standing so close to the bark, they can’t see the trees, let alone the forest.
President Let-Me-Eat-Cake over here is crazy, and getting crazier, and he will descend quickly into full-on hallucinatory, meet-my-invisible-friend, why-do-we-have-nukes-if-we-don’t-use-them crazy, while our only hope to remove him, our political system—destroyed by twenty-five years of utter partisanship and complete denial and the placement of a price tag on virtually everything and everybody in our country—is no longer capable of even pulling off a successful White House Easter egg hunt.
He is getting crazier.
Post date • THURSDAY, APRIL 20
The president of the United States insists on being brought to Buckingham Palace alongside the queen of England, in a golden coach drawn by six royal white horses.
Like goddamned Cinderella.
Like a man unaware of the security nightmare he will create. Like a man unaware of the massive public protest that all the king’s—or, in this case, queen’s—men and all the queen’s horses might be able to keep nonviolent, might be able to contain, but cannot keep from happening.
When The Times of London reported this latest evidence of the nexus of narcissism and madness meeting inside the addled brain of the demented man a minority of voters have cursed us with, it caused barely a ripple here, because it was only the fifteenth- or sixteenth-craziest thing Trump has done this week. Reminder: the newspaper reporting this, quoting security sources and making references to London’s Metropolitan Police and the U.S. Secret Service, is owned by Trump’s latest hanger-on, Rupert Murdoch. This is not a story designed to harsh Trump’s buzz. This is reality so real that even Murdoch gets it. The Times reported that “the White House has made clear it regards the carriage procession down the Mall as an essential element of the itinerary for the visit currently planned for the second week of October.”
The story, by its crime-and-security editor, dripped with warnings. As recently as 2003, Vladimir Putin’s state visit saw the foreign leader and the queen ride the seven-tenths of a mile with the carriage top down. Six years ago, President Obama had the presence of mind to thank the British for the option of the ceremony but ride in his own armored limousine.
Even when the president of Mexico and the Chinese premier visited—separately—in 2015, each had the common sense to ride in a closed carriage. It is not clear that Trump has even agreed to that. “If he is in a golden coach being dragged up the Mall by a couple of horses, the risk factor is dramatically increased,” The Times quoted its primary security source. “There may well be protections in that coach such as bulletproof glass, but they are limited. In particular it is very flimsy. It would not be able to put up much resistance in the face of a rocket propelled grenade or high-powered ammunition. Armor-piercing rounds would make a very bad show of things.”
But we’re not even talking about those scenarios. This is a president who would not throw out the ceremonial first pitch at the Washington Nationals’ Opening Day baseball game, obviously out of fear that he would be booed. This is a president who has yet to appear anywhere in public in which he might not be loudly cheered. This is a president who collapses into paranoid accusations of paid agitators when protesters, demanding he release his tax returns, force him to alter his motorcade route, from his fantasyland of a golf course he owns but can charge the taxpayers each time he uses it, to his other fantasyland of a country club he owns but can charge the taxpayers each time he uses it.
This is the world’s ultimate snowflake living inside the world’s ultimate snow globe of his own creation to prevent the slightest chance that his delusion that he is universally beloved will come into violent contact with the reality that he is hated—insisting that he ride to the palace in a golden coach moving so slowly that he would have to hear and see at least some of those who despise him, for as long as ten minutes.
Twenty years ago, I had a stalker, and while I worked, ironically, for Rupert Murdoch, the woman appeared to be getting crazier and crazier. For everything else they do wrong, Fox does protect its employees from stuff like this. Murdoch gets a serious death threat a day, his head of security—a former Scotland Yard chief—told me when he flew from London to Los Angeles to coordinate a game plan to keep me safe. He had assessed my case on the plane, and he said that while he did not suspect the woman was going to turn to violence, he wanted to enact several protective measures, because her behavior reminded him of the story of a prominent actor being stalked by a woman fan.
This woman’s delusion about the actor was different from most. She didn’t need to actually inject herself into his life. She was content to simply mirror his life. If he spent the weekend in, say, Miami, she would weasel the information about where he was staying and what he was doing—something at which stalkers are adept—and she would go to Miami herself. She’d stay at a hotel near his, follow him at a discreet distance, and never once interact with him, but on Monday morning she could go home and go to work and say, “Mike”—we’ll call him that—“Mike and I were in Miami. We went to South Beach. We even saw that funny game you bet on, jai alai.”
When it was all over, her coworkers were absolutely astonished. Everything she had told them was factually correct and rich in detail. They never realized it was only literally correct. “Mike” had indeed gone to Miami and South Beach and jai alai, and this woman, his stalker, had gone to Miami and South Beach and jai alai, and the parts she left out were that she had stayed a hundred yards away from him at all times, and he never knew she existed. The stalking ended, Murdoch’s head of security told me, in Minneapolis or somewhere, when Mike left his hotel on foot and his stalker followed at a safe distance—and then suddenly Mike realized he’d left something at his hotel and turned around to go get it.
And the stalker was faced with disaster. Mike was now approaching her. She couldn’t run away—that would be admitting to herself that Mike wasn’t actually her boyfriend. She couldn’t cross to the other side of the street. She couldn’t stop him and introduce herself. She certainly couldn’t let him walk past her without so much as looking at her. The entire elaborate, self-delusional fantasy was about to crash down upon her.
Unless . . .
Murdoch’s man said that as soon as Mike got to within a few feet of her, this woman, whom he had never met and who had never contacted him, but who had built a complete and intricate and expensive relationship with him, saved herself from the confrontation with reality—the end of her world—in the only way left to her. She reared back and punched him in the face. She could now smile and explain—to the police, to her coworkers, to herself—that she and Mike had had a fight, and they had broken up.
*
In our little nightmare, of course, Donald Trump is Mike’s stalker. And Mike is the reality in which Trump the Stalker is failing and old and paunchy and fooling a thousand fewer people right now than he fooled an hour ago, a reality in which the world mocks him and the politicians use him, and his judgments are entirely wrong, and those closest to him try to calculate the exact date it becomes to their advantage to sell him out over Russia and impeach and jail him.
And mostly, Mike is the public that hates Trump the Stalker.
The public that Trump the Stalker has decided to expose himself to, from a slow-moving golden carriage on the way to Buckingham Palace in October. What happens when reality approaches Trump and he cannot avert that confrontation?
What kind of punch to the face does a thwarted stalker throw when he has nuclear weapons?
Post date • TUESDAY, APRIL 25
It went by so quickly and in such a cacophony of five interviewees all on at the same time, that its importance seemed to go right past everybody, maybe even the man who was saying it. “There is serious belief, in the FBI, in the congressional committees in the House and the Senate, that there is an active cover-up going on, involving trying to keep investigators from finding out what happened in terms of the Trump campaign—Trump associates near the top of the campaign—and what happened in their associations with Russians, and that there is an active cover-up going on . . . One of the things that the congressional committees are very concerned about, as is the FBI, is that they don’t have the resources to conduct a proper investigation, and the White House is taking advantage of it.”
An active White House cover-up to keep the FBI and Congress from finding out what the connections between All the Trump’s Men and Russia really mean. It is a startling conclusion, it was attributed by the CNN guest to FBI and Capitol Hill sources, and it was said by who?
Carl Bernstein.
*
Being dead right about Watergate forty-three, forty-four, and forty-five years ago doesn’t mean he’s automatically right about Trump and Russia. But it does mean Bernstein’s reporting gets a faster and more durable benefit of the doubt than anybody else’s. And while Bernstein underscored that there yet may prove to be nothing to the Trump-Russia links, the unalterable fact of history is that Richard Nixon was forced from office not by the Watergate break-in but by the cover-up.
People went to jail during the infamous Teapot Dome scandal not because of the oil or the money, but because of the cover-up! They got Big Tobacco because of the cover-up. Iran-Contra. The Dreyfus Affair! And even Bill Clinton was impeached not based on what he said or did or didn’t say or didn’t do, but because of the cover-up. And Bernstein says FBI and Capitol Hill sources believe there is an active cover-up being undertaken right now by the Trump administration. If that’s true, the cover-up by itself might be impeachable—even if there is no Russian smoking gun, or it is never produced.
What would it look like? What would the signs of a cover-up be? I mean, apart from the nuclear-detonation-size obvious ones like the Jeff Sessions recusal, or the self-defenestration of Congressman Devin “You Haven’t Heard from Me Lately, Have You” Nunes.
Well, how about the principals all backing away from one another? Like, oh, the new head of the CIA branding WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” Or like WikiLeaks tweeting, “Trump’s breach of promise over the release of his tax returns is even more gratuitous than Clinton concealing her Goldman Sachs transcripts.” Or the Justice Department reportedly seeking to charge Julian Assange and even perhaps trying to pry him from his hidey-hole at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he’s visited by Nigel Farage and Pamela Anderson. Separately—please, God. Or maybe Vladimir Putin’s primary TV mouthpiece, Dmitry Kiselyov, telling his Russian viewing audience, “Trump is more impulsive and unpredictable than Kim Jong-un,” and “more dangerous.” Or the younger of the moron twins, Eric, telling a British newspaper, of the missile strike in Syria, “If there was anything that Syria did, it was to validate the fact that there is no Russia tie.” Or, most recently, Trump telling the Associated Press that in 2016 “WikiLeaks came out . . . never heard of WikiLeaks, never heard of it.” Except that on December 2, 2010, asked by this Fox clown, “You had nothing to do with WikiLeaks?” Trump said, “No, but I think it’s disgraceful. I think there should be like death penalty or something.”
So Trump denounces WikiLeaks and WikiLeaks denounces Trump and Trump threatens to arrest Assange and the Russians denounce Trump as more dangerous than Kim Jong-un and Eric Trump makes it look like Daddy fired fifty-nine missiles just to show he’s not a Russian marionette and then Trump never heard of WikiLeaks until last year, except he did in 2010.
Boys, don’t everybody run out of the room at the same moment—you’ll all get crushed trying to get through the exit.
Cover-up!
There are other, slightly more subtle signs. Notice that odd story that turned up on CNN? “The FBI gathered intelligence last summer that suggests Russian operatives tried to use Trump advisers, including Carter Page, to infiltrate the Trump campaign, according to US officials.
“The new information adds to the emerging picture of how the Russians tried to influence the 2016 election, not only through email hacks and propaganda but also by trying to infiltrate the Trump orbit.”
See what they’re doing there? Carter Page is no longer a Trump foreign policy adviser—the second one he ever mentioned. Page, who has denied all wrongdoing, is also no longer an alleged courier carrying a reported audiotape of Trump to Vladimir Putin in an offer to swap Russian-friendly policy changes for election-roll hacking by the Russians so Steve Bannon could microtarget American voters. He’s no longer a possible traitor. Now he’s the victim.
“U.S. officials.” That’d presumably be current U.S. officials, you know, like Trump, or somebody appointed by Trump—suggesting the Russians tried to infiltrate the Trump campaign by using people too dumb to realize it, like Carter Page. And thus Page becomes not a conspirator but the injured party—the way, if Trump or his buddies are indeed on tape because they happened to be talking to Russians that foreign intelligence services were spying on, Trump and the Trumpettes are not disloyal monsters willing to sell out this nation; they were the victims of wiretaps and Barack Obama and Susan Rice and maybe the Devil himself.
Carl Bernstein’s comments last Friday about serious belief at the FBI and the House and Senate intel committees that Trump is, at this moment, perpetrating an active cover-up of his people’s ties to Russia underscore the necessity of an independent prosecutor—a necessity so important that Democratic candidates for the House next year ought to run on it and pin down their Republican opponents on it by waving the flag and asking: Who is running this country—us or the goddamned Russians?
And another thing about Bernstein and Watergate and trying to make Page and Trump—and whoever is next—into the victim rather than the perpetrator. Early in the Watergate cover-up, Richard Nixon tried to make it look like the whole thing was John Dean’s idea, that Nixon was the victim, that there was a witch hunt. McCarthyism. Communists. We ran out of gas! We got a flat tire! We didn’t have change for cab fare! We lost our tuxes at the cleaners! We locked our keys in the car! An old friend came in from out of town! There was an earthquake! A terrible flood! Locusts! It wasn’t our fault, we swear to God!
It’s a cover-up.
Post date • THURSDAY, APRIL 27
The Trump Gang, already shaming us for all of history by rounding up good, honest, law-abiding Americans without criminal records and with families who they have started and raised here, and forcibly sending them back to countries they barely know or do not know at all, may shortly begin rounding up judges and forcibly sending them to the immigration detention camps at which our neighbors are being scapegoated and uprooted from our country so Trump can fulfill his credo of hate, sadism, and barbarism.
Literally forcing judges out of their homes so they can throw Americans out of their homes—for the sake of Trump’s pointless, racist brutality. This is being done in our name. Shame on us!
The day this was reported by the Reuters News Agency, it largely slipped under the radar: a letter, from the Department of Justice, asking for fifty immigration judges to volunteer to go—the word used is “deploy”—to New York, L.A., Miami, New Orleans, San Francisco, Baltimore, the Twin Cities of Minnesota, El Paso and Harlingen, Texas, Omaha, Phoenix, and Imperial, California, and perhaps elsewhere, so as to dispense with due process as quickly as possible. Start deporting scapegoats at six a.m., continue deporting scapegoats until ten p.m., on split shifts. For a month or two at a time.
Not enough volunteer judges? Quoting Reuters: “If the department cannot find enough volunteers, the department would assign judges to detention centers, the sources said.” What are we doing? What are we doing?
You’ve heard the horror stories already: Mothers. Mothers-in-law of military veterans. Grandmothers. Parents. Natives of Puerto Rico—and their captors are too stupid to realize Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States. Crime victims. People outside homeless shelters. Roberto Beristain, described by its mayor as one of the model citizens of South Bend, Indiana; a restaurant owner there; a criminal because at Niagara Falls one time, he accidentally crossed into Canadian territory. And the husband of a Trump voter. Trump fooled her. “He did say the good people would not be deported, the good people would be checked.” Madam, he lied to you. Your husband was deported because he was easy to find.
What are we doing?
What are we doing to Catalino Guerrero, who got a sixty-day extension before what is still a scheduled deportation next month? He’s been here more than twenty-five years, has two jobs, owns his own home in New Jersey, pays taxes, has four children, four grandchildren, has type 2 diabetes, recently had a stroke, has heart problems, uses a cane, and has no criminal record. In fact, he has been the victim of a crime in our country—a home invasion.
Why is Trump’s ICE trying to deport him? Guerrero claims he got bad legal advice and filed for asylum. And if you file for asylum and don’t get it, you have to leave. He filed for asylum in 1992, and the ruling against him came seventeen years later. On May 22, we may throw him out because he’s replicating what my great-great-grandfather did. Making his way here—because in 1992, as in 1854, we were the light of the world. Because both Catalino Guerrero and Friedrich Olbermann wanted freedom and better lives, maybe not in time for themselves, but for their children. Catalino Guerrero and Friedrich Olbermann and how many of your ancestors? And how many of the ancestors of the unthinking humanoids who are cheering the Trump raids? And how many ancestors of Trump?
And we are now relocating judges to the concentration camps, with instructions to speed it up. What are we doing? What are we doing?
Exactly what we are doing has been expressed poignantly a thousand times through history, but never more so than by a thirty-six-year-old man who faced expulsion from the country he had called home for half his life but whose government now insisted he was illegal. He was not a professional writer, and the plea he made to the prince of his home region was not written in English. A historian found it last autumn, 111 years after it was written. The translation is by Austen Hinkley of Harper’s Magazine, and I have made minor edits to the text for simplicity and clarity and to remove the fluffy flattery toward that royal prince.
It is painful. But in its own way, it is also beautiful. And it should be heard by everyone in this country—as long as this purge goes on in our name.
My parents were honest, plain, pious vineyard workers. They strictly held me to everything good—to diligence and piety, to regular attendance in school and church, to absolute obedience toward the high authority.
After my confirmation, in 1882, I apprenticed to become a barber. I emigrated in 1885, in my sixteenth year. In America I carried on my business with diligence, discretion, and prudence. God’s blessing was with me, and I became rich. I obtained American citizenship in 1892. In 1902 I met my current wife. Sadly, she could not tolerate the climate in New York, and I went with my dear family back [home].
The town was glad to have received a capable and productive citizen. My old mother was happy to see her son, her dear daughter-in-law, and her granddaughter around her; she knows now that I will take care of her in her old age.
But we were confronted all at once, as if by a lightning strike from fair skies, with the news that the . . . Ministry had decided that we must leave our residence . . . We were paralyzed with fright; our happy family life was tarnished. My wife has been overcome by anxiety, and my lovely child has become sick.
Why should we be deported? This is very, very hard for a family. What will our fellow citizens think if honest subjects are faced with such a decree—not to mention the great material losses it would incur. I would like to become a . . . citizen again.
In this urgent situation I have no other recourse than . . . the most humble request that the highest of all will himself in mercy deign to allow the applicant to stay.
It is signed: “Your most humble and obedient, Friedrich Trump.” Trump’s grandfather. He was, in his native Bavaria, deemed “illegal”—and rounded up, and deported, and sent back to New York with his pregnant wife, Elizabeth, where, literally within months, she gave birth to Donald Trump’s father, Fred.
From the grave, Friedrich, Elizabeth, and Fred Trump, and Friedrich Olbermann and millions of deportees and exiles and refugees and millions more who had nowhere to turn but here, are asking us: What are we doing? And they are asking Donald Trump: What are you doing?
Post date • FRIDAY, APRIL 28
As we hit the hundred-day benchmark of the Trump “presidency,” let’s review his accomplishments. Not by our standards—not by human standards—just by the stuff he promised to do for those greedy, hateful, and/or naive people who voted for him. Let’s list all he’s done—for them.
(Author’s note: Forty seconds of silence follow.)
Yep.
In “the first hundred days”—he’s gotten nothing done for them. With a Republican House and a Republican Senate and a Russian election in “the first hundred days”—he’s gotten nothing done. With the great nationwide—worldwide—liberating effects of the populist wave to throw the baby out with the bathwater . . . in “the first hundred days”—he’s gotten nothing done. With one television network dedicated to lying on his behalf, to deliberately falsifying reality to make it fit his addled mind as he sits in a bathrobe watching it, with other networks wasting live coverage on his public speeches—his garbled, nonsensical stream of semi-consciousness—as if they were actually news in “the first hundred days,” he’s gotten nothing done.
This truth—utter impotence—is, of course, his greatest fear.
He confessed it, on Twitter, last Friday: “No matter how much I accomplish during the ridiculous standard of the first 100 days, & it has been a lot (including S.C.), media will kill!” You don’t need to be a psychoanalyst to decode the sense of failure in that, though it helps to remember the context of that phrase “the ridiculous standard of the first 100 days.”
Who set the ridiculous standard of the first hundred days?
He did.
Here is candidate Trump’s Contract with the American Voter, his “100-day action plan to Make America Great Again.” Contract—his word. Just sign here, like you were enrolling in Trump University. There’s lots of LOL-worthy failure on the first page. Column one ends with “THIRD, I will direct the Secretary of the Treasury to label China a currency manipulator.”
“Why would I call China a currency manipulator,” he asked on Twitter, “when they are working with us on the North Korean problem?” Well, because you put it in the contract that you would—in the first hundred days. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. (By the way, for the uninformed, you’ve just gotten a taste of doing business with Trump: “But it’s in the contract!” “So? Sue me.”)
The second column ends with “suspend immigration from terror-prone regions where vetting cannot safely occur. . . .” Yeah—how’s that going for you, Sparky?
What’s funny is, the thing he boasted about in that desperate tweet? “It has been a lot (including S.C.).” The “S.C.” part, of course, is the confirmation of Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Wow. A Republican president got a Republican Senate to approve a Republican nominee because the Republican majority leader is such a craven turtle that he destroyed two pillars of the democracy. Getting that new nominee confirmed? That isn’t even in the Trump contract! Only: “begin the process of selecting a replacement for Justice Scalia . . .”
As I said, there are some good laughs on this front page of yet another worthless Trump contract, about all the things he guaranteed he would do during his “ridiculous standard of the first 100 days”—that he’s just outright failed at.
But it’s the back page where the fun really begins. Here’s all the legislation he was going to, at minimum, get introduced into Congress: A bill to create 25 million new jobs. Nope. A bill to punish sending jobs out of the country. Nope. A bill to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure. Nope. A bill to give parents total choice on schooling, even religious schooling, presumably at government expense. Nope. A bill to repeal Obamacare. And how’s that going for you, Sparky?
Why, when I think of him threatening to defund Obamacare unless Democrats support the border wall—why do I get an image of Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles holding a gun to his own head and saying, “Hold it! The next man that makes a move, the . . .”
Moving on. A childcare and eldercare act that hasn’t been written. A bill to fund that wall that not one congressman or senator from the states where the wall would be has said he’ll support. An anti-gang bill. A bill preventing international cyberattack. (Yeah, kinda “swing and a miss” right there.) And finally, the “Clean Up Corruption in Washington Act. Enacts new ethics reforms to Drain the Swamp and reduce the corrupting influence of special interests on our politics.” Presumably, that was to be commemorated by a series of “Ivanka Trump Signature Brand Drain the Swamp Formal Wear and Accessories,” manufactured in China and available exclusively at the “Spa by Ivanka Trump,” at Trump Old Post Office Hotel for Wayward Diplomats, Washington, D.C., 20004.
He’s. Gotten. Nothing. Done.
And remember—nobody, nobody said to him, “You have to do this in the first hundred days or you’ll be a failure.” He said that! So what do you do when the homework has to be handed in, in the morning, and you haven’t even found your textbooks yet?
You claim there was no such homework: “I think the hundred days is, you know, it’s an artificial barrier. It’s not very meaningful. . . . Somebody, yeah, somebody put out the concept of a hundred-day plan.”
You put it out!
The somebody with the concept of a hundred-day plan was you!
That’s your name, moron—moron! T-R-U-M-P, moron!
So what do you do when your denial that there was homework fails utterly? You claim the teacher got the due date wrong! “The hundred days is just an artificial barrier. The press keeps talking about the hundred days . . .”
“I’ve only been working on the health care, you know, I had to get like a little bit of grounding, right? Health care started after day thirty, so I’ve been working on health care for sixty days . . . we’re very close.”
See, this isn’t really one hundred days.
This is only sixty days.
Who you gonna believe?
Me? Or your lying calendar?
*
If ever you needed additional confirmation that this man’s brain does not work, there it is.
At the hundred-day mark that was so important to him that he wrote up a phony contract predicated on it, he is such a failure that he is blaming the hundred days on the media, and actually claiming that it isn’t really a hundred days anyway. “No matter how much I accomplish during the ridiculous standard of the first 100 days, & it has been a lot (including S.C.), media will kill!”
His greatest fear. So let’s help him celebrate the hundred-day mark. He doesn’t desperately search Twitter for compliments as much as he used to—but it’s clear he still does it once in a while. Let’s flood it with tweets congratulating him on having completely failed at everything in the first hundred days—including counting to a hundred days. Let’s have him, figuratively, wading knee-deep in tweets at the White House. And don’t forget! Since he claims this isn’t really a hundred days, but only sixty—we get to flood Twitter again and congratulate him on even more failure on the “Hundred-Day Mark in Alternative-Facts Land,” which I calculate to be Thursday, June 8.
Mark your calendars.
Unless by then he’s ordered that we change all the calendars. Which would make that date Trumpday, the third of Trumpvember.