TRUMP AGONISTES

TRUMP AGONISTES

Trump has escaped.

To the Middle East and Europe.

Trying to flee from himself.

We learned a week ago that, on the day after he fired James Comey as Director of the FBI, the President met with Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and its ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak.  In that meeting, according to reports in both the Washington Post and New York Times,  Trump  -- in an unplanned comment that was not scripted beforehand -- disclosed highly classified information obtained from Israel regarding ISIS plots to blow up airliners with bombs implanted in laptop computers.

Lavrov, Kislyak and Russian President Vladimir Putin quickly -- and predictably -- denied they had obtained anything confidential. But Trump -- as is his wont -- essentially confirmed that they had. The next day he noted that he had the "absolute right" to disclose classified material, effectively admitting that he had, and today he asserted that he had never mentioned to the Russians that  Israel was the source of his information, thus confirming that Israel in fact was the source.

For its part, Israel never gave Trump permission to disclose the secret, an act that breaches the terms under which the secret was shared with the United States in the first place.  Nor was the disclosure planned out beforehand or discussed with the CIA or National Security Agency (NSA).  Instead, it came in the course of one of Trump's signature off the cuff ad libs as he bragged to Lavrov and Kislyak about what "great intel" he, Trump, had.

For the next twenty-four hours, the "shows," as Trump calls them, were all abuzz about this "thousand palms to a thousand foreheads" moment of idiocy.  The Israelis were angry.  No doubt some spies in Syria and/or Iraq, namely, the ones who had told Israel about the plot, were very nervous, having either been outed or subject to the strong risk of such by a President whose narcissism may now be matched only by his negligence.

Trump, however, just hunkered down . . .

And sent out his minions to claim that the real villains were the intelligence "sources" who had leaked his loose lips to the press in the first place.

The President then waited for this latest storm to pass  . . .

Which it did late on Tuesday afternoon . . .

When we found out that James Comey had kept notes of his post-Inaugural meetings with the President.

In those notes, Comey states that Trump in effect  asked him, in a February meeting at the White House,  to end the FBI's investigation into General Michael Flynn's contacts with the Russians during and after the Presidential campaign. Trump's exact words to Comey were "I hope you can let this go." And though that was bad enough,  the even more damning fact was that Trump asked Attorney General Sessions and Vice President Pence to leave the room before he spoke to Comey.

That is what prosecutors call "consciousness of guilt."

For his part, Trump immediately denied asking Comey to stop any investigation.

He did not, however, deny asking Sessions and Pence to leave the room beforehand.

So inquiring minds are now wondering what it was the Donald was so eager to tell Comey on the QT that the Veep and AG had to be escorted out before it could be said.

Maybe one of those minds was Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Rosenstein has recently become famous in his own right, having authored a memo outlining Director Comey's putative malfeasance in publicly discussing last year's investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails during the summer and just before the November election. Trump initially claimed that this memo, and Sessions' agreement with it, was the reason he, Trump, fired Comey.  Trump, however, being Trump, blew that excuse up a day after it had been floated, admitting in an interview with NBC that (i) he intended to fire Comey regardless of the memo and (ii) he was doing so because of the Russian investigation, not because Comey had violated DOJ policy in the Hillary email investigation.

In any case, on Wednesday, Rosenstein set off the week's third bomb, appointing Ex-FBI Director Robert Mueller III as special counsel to take over the Russian investigation. 

The scope of Mueller's writ is broad.  The order appointing him allows him to investigate (i) any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; (ii) any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation; and (iii) any other matters within the scope of 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a). Section 600.4(a) provides that "The jurisdiction of a Special Counsel shall also include the authority to investigate and prosecute federal crimes committed in the course of, and with intent to interfere with, the Special Counsel's investigation, such as perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, and intimidation of witnesses; and to conduct appeals arising out of the matter being investigated and/or prosecuted."

Trump was given no real heads-up on the appointment, told of it only an hour before it was released.   He was also informed of the order, not asked whether it was a good idea.  

Nevertheless, Trump's first reaction was surprisingly muted. Said the President on Wednesday night:

"As I have stated many times, a thorough investigation will confirm what we already know - there was no collusion between my campaign and any foreign entity.  I look forward to this matter concluding quickly.  In the meantime, I will never stop fighting for the people and the issues that matter most to the future of our country."

Then he went to bed.

And woke up the next morning

And reverted to type.

At 7:52 am, he tweeted "This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!" By mid-morning, he was supporting this claim with the false tweet that special counsels should have been appointed to investigate "all of the illegal acts that took place in the . . . Obama Administration", oblivious to the fact that there were none. At lunch, oblivious to the fact that his own political appointee, Rosenstein, had appointed Mueller, he called the appointment an "excuse for the Democrats having lost an election that they should have easily won because of the Electoral College being slanted so much in their way. That's all this is." And later in the day, at a joint press conference with Colombia's President Santos, he was back to saying "The entire thing is a witch hunt."

He also claimed that the appointment "hurts our country terribly, because it shows we're a divided, mixed-up, not-unified country."  He's right about the division.  In fact, he is the largest cause of it, having catapulted himself into the White House on a tweetstorm of personal invective, ad hominem insult, and applauded thuggishness.

There's no division, however, on this issue . . .

Where 78% of those polled favor a special prosecutor.

On Friday, Trump left for the Middle East.  As his plane headed east, the reminder of the week that was came from the White House's own documentary record of the meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak. "I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job," said Trump to the Russians. “I faced great pressure because of Russia," he continued, "That’s taken off."

And so, in one fell swoop, the real motive for the firing -- the Russian investigation -- was again made self-evident.  As was the perverse character of the man for whom the term "low blow" knows no limit.

Trump spent the weekend basking in the adulation of Saudi princes. And for him, that was no doubt a welcome respite.

Because, of the many things we know about Donald John Trump, one is that . . .

Adulation is his tonic.

Another is that . . .

Honesty -- certainly -- is not.

COWARDS ON THE POTOMAC

COWARDS ON THE POTOMAC

Donald Trump fired James Comey as FBI Director this week.

Trump did so because the FBI is investigating Trump's fall Presidential campaign and its connections, if any, to the Russian government's interference in the national election.

After receiving news of Comey's ouster, sources within the FBI reported that Trump had summoned Comey to a dinner meeting at the White House a week after the Inauguration and had demanded Comey's loyalty.  

Comey refused.

At a number of points this past week,  people speaking on Trump's behalf -- including his press secretary (Spicer), principal deputy press secretary (Huckabee-Sanders), counselor (Conway) and Vice-President (Pence) -- denied that the so-called "Russian investigation" had anything to do with the firing of Comey.  In denying that motive, they also claimed that the firing had been caused by a report given to Trump by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. That report criticized Comey for discussing -- last July and last October just before the election -- the agency's investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails.

We now know that all of those denials, as well as the claim that Rosenstein's report caused Comey's ouster, were false.  We know this because, in an interview with NBC's Lester Holt on Thursday, Trump admitted the Russian investigation was the reason he fired Comey. As Trump put it to Holt, "When I decided to just do it, I said, 'You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.'"  We know the Rosenstein report had nothing to do with the firing because, in that same interview with Holt, Trump said that "regardless of [Rosenstein's] recommendation, I was going to fire Comey."

For those of you scoring at home, that's Lies - 8, Truth - 0.

Trump has also denied, albeit implicitly,  that he attempted to exact any loyalty pledge from Comey at that White House dinner. He did that today when he tweeted that Comey "better hope there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!" The implication was that those "tapes" would rebut Comey's claims regarding the ostensible loyalty pledge.  The implication was also that "tapes" would support Trump's assertion that Comey told Trump, again at the dinner (but also on the phone on two other occasions), that Trump was not under investigation. 

Responding to the tapes tweet, Comey  is reported to have said he hopes there are "lots of" them. He has, however, not commented on whether he ever said Trump was not under investigation.   Nor has the Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe commented on this subject (though, in testimony on Thursday, McCabe did say it was not the sort of conversation the FBI usually had with anyone). McCabe also denied that agents or other employees at the FBI had lost confidence in Comey, which rebutted claims to the contrary made by the President and his seconds repeatedly over the last two days.

Trump is a pathological liar and lives in the gutter.   

The likelihood here is that there are no tapes. And certainly no complete or unaltered ones. 

Because . . .

If there were, and if they were complete and  unaltered, they no doubt would support Comey's claims, not Trump's. 

When asked at today's press briefing whether, in fact, the White House had tapes of any Trump-Comey communications, the press secretary, Spicer,  refused to comment.  He said, "The tweet speaks for itself. I'm moving on."

It certainly does.

Trump wants his veiled threat to just hang out there.

To intimidate Comey . . .  

Or anyone else who discloses what Comey told about his conversations with Trump months ago.

Were the FBI conducting a criminal investigation, Trumps' interview with Holt and his morning "tapes" tweet would result either in a letter from a prosecutor warning Trump to stop talking to witnesses or an indictment of Trump for having attempted to intimidate them. He'd also have received a subpoena for any tapes. And meanwhile, in a normal world,  the House of Representatives would be wondering about impeachment and everyone in Congress would be demanding an independent investigation by a special counsel.

But the FBI isn't conducting a criminal investigation. It's conducting a counter-intelligence investigation, ostensibly without criminal targets.

And the world we live in ceased to be normal long ago.

Apart from the usual handfull,  there has been no unified call for a special counsel from the GOP leadership or rank and file, and certainly no mention of the I-word.  They are waiting to see who Trump will appoint to replace Comey, apparently oblivious to the reality that any independent director will suffer the same fate as Comey and anyone else will simply do Trump's bidding.

I'm reminded of Churchill's view of the British government in the 1930s.

As their world was rocked then . . .

By what is  rocking ours now.

The un-sought, the un-expected.

The un-hinged.

"So they go on in strange paradox," said Churchill,  "decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent."

We have a word for this.  It's called . . .

Cowardice.

LOOKING FOR THE PONY

LOOKING FOR THE PONY

About a decade ago, I was speaking to one of my best friends.  Like me, he is an Irish-Catholic from the middle class.  He excelled in high school and then went to a top-ranked college and an Ivy League law school.  Today, he is a partner in a major white-shoe law firm.  And all those years ago, in the course of giving some advice, he offered a pessimistic aside.

"Just remember," he said, "things can always get worse."

That's the sort of prognosis we Americans tend to reject out of hand. We see ourselves as a can-do people, constantly marching forward in an un-ending spiral of progress.  We roll our eyes at the pessimists among us, pretty much casting them aside for failing to sing from the hymnal of American exceptionalism.  We praise the optimists, those boys happily digging through the proverbial pile of horse manure on the theory that there's got to be a pony in there somewhere.

And then comes yesterday, and the "by one vote" repeal in the House of Representatives of Obamacare . . .

And, with that, my friend from all those years ago is looking more prescient than pessimistic.

Things can get worse.

In fact, they just did.

The American Health Care Act passed by the House yesterday is an unmitigated disaster, both as a matter of policy and for what it says about the sorry state of American politics.

The Act itself was born in the aftermath of the Republican Party's failure six weeks ago to bring an Obamacare repeal bill to the floor for an up or down vote.  Hard right conservatives did not like the bill that was then being proposed because it did not repeal enough of the Affordable Care Act, and some moderate Republicans did not like it because it repealed too much.  

The principal dispute between the two groups appeared to be whether insurance companies would be freed from enough requirements so that the GOP could claim premiums overall would fall.  The hard right wanted to allow states to allow companies to charge higher rates to those with pre-existing conditions, arguing that requiring subsidized state based high-risk pools for that group could be used to cover a group that Obamacare now precludes insurance companies from excluding, and that charging more for that coverage would allow companies to charge less for everyone else (or, principally, less for the younger, healthy folks who are not at as great a risk for getting sick in the first place).  The moderates claimed that those high-risk pools would not be remotely adequate to insure those with pre-existing conditions, and that an Obamacare replacement resulting in 24 million un-insured -- which is what the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said would be the result of the GOP replacement bill over time -- was unacceptable.

So, unable to corral enough Republicans in favor of replacement, no vote was taken.

This was viewed, predictably and accurately, as a major failure for the Republicans in general and for the Trump Administration in particular.  Trump himself had made a vigorous, albeit last quarter, effort to convince the GOP's hard-right Freedom Caucus to accept the bill, and when he failed, his "I alone can fix it" braggadocio took its first -- but by no means last -- direct hit.  The dealer -in-chief had produced . . .

No deal.

Now, when Trump fails, he doesn't accept it.  Instead, he assigns blame.

To everyone but himself.

And so he did here. 

The culprits he held responsible for this failure were Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, and Reince Priebus, Trump's chief staff.  The pair had been unable to herd the cats that constitute the GOP's House majority in order to vote for the repeal of Obamacare and thus honor a promise the GOP has been making for the past seven years.  

The fact that Priebus and Ryan  had to herd only Republican cats was, of course, part of the problem. No Democrats would vote for the replacement bill, or for that matter for any bill that eliminated the individual mandate and cut Medicaid expansion, both of which are the principal reasons Obamacare reduced the number of un-insured by more than 20 million over the past seven years but neither of which are or will be part of any GOP replacement.  In fact, though the individual mandate was their own Heritage Foundation's idea, and was actually turned into law in Massachusetts by none other than its Republican then-Governor Mitt Romney, once Barack Obama endorsed the mandate, the Republican Party, in an act that gave hypocrisy new meaning,  decided it wouldn't. Similarly, though Obamacare used federally-funded Medicaid expansion to cover those who would still be unable to afford policies marketed through state-based insurance exchanges, nineteen Republican-controlled states refused to accept the money in an intentional effort to make Obamacare fail.  

Thus did GOP politics trump -- and for many actually kill -- health care in those nineteen states.

As they did with the Donald in the aftermath of the failure of the House to hold a vote on repeal and replace. 

The order from His Hairness afterward was to pass a bill, any bill.  His petulance demanded it and his ego required it.

So they passed one.

Yesterday.

By a one vote margin.

After no hearings, and no CBO score on how many would lose coverage (the number was 24 million with the first bill six weeks ago).

And then all the House Republicans got in a bus and drove to the White House to celebrate.

In truth, there was nothing to celebrate.  Yesterday's bill was no better than the bill they couldn't get to the floor six weeks ago.  In fact, it is worse.  Like the first bill, it eliminates the individual mandate and rolls back Medicaid expansion.  Unlike the first bill, however, it also effectively eliminates the ban on exclusions based on pre-existing conditions.   The first bill retained the ban but eliminated the individual mandate, which was the Obamacare provision that made the ban affordable in the first place; insurance companies obtained a larger, healthier overall pool of premium paying policyholders in exchange for being required to cover everyone.  In the first bill, the GOP tried to mitigate the elimination of the mandate with subsidies and a provision that taxed those who re-applied for insurance after allowing their coverage to lapse.  It's this last subsidy and tax provision that the right wing couldn't stomach.  So they replaced it with one allowing states to allow companies to charge more to those with pre-existing conditions and then added money to the stabilization fund designed to help states create high risk pools. The subsidies, however, are not remotely adequate to fund those pools, so the net effect is that the exclusion for pre-exisitng conditions has been re-born.  

Meanwhile, it is likely that the new bill will have the same overall effect as the first one.

In other words, more than 20 million will over time lose their insurance.

We do not know for sure yet what the actual numeric loss will be because the new bill has not been "scored" yet by the CBO.  Along with the GOP's refusal to hold any hearings at all on any version of repeal-and-replace, this too, however, was intentional.  Republicans know that the CBO score will show millions losing coverage and did not want that data available as Trump, Priebus and Ryan sought a vote on a measure they knew could fail and would succeed, if at all, only by the thinnest of margins.

Trump's and the House's victory dance at the White House was, of course, obviously premature. The House bill is by no means law and the issue must now go to the Senate.  Optimists are predicting the Senate will kill the House bill;  in fact, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer yesterday said the House bill is "going nowhere fast" in the Senate.  

I, however, am not as sanguine.

We live in a country where, as a practical matter, an aggressive and strategically located minority is now governing the majority.  The last two Republican Presidents,  Bush II and Trump, have been elected only because a piece of 18th century arcana known as the Electoral College allowed the majority-vote loser to assume the office inasmuch as his votes were located more optimally than his opponent's.  Similarly, because of computer-based gerrymandering, the GOP has a sizable forty-five vote majority in the House even though it only gets about 45% of all the votes cast in House elections. Though the Electoral College has only produced a President without a popular vote victory on five occasions, two of them have come in the last sixteen years; and though gerrymandering has always existed, technology has improved line-drawing to the point where the districts themselves may no longer allow for majoritarian corrections.

In this world, anomalies such as these would not threaten democratic governance were the winners -- in this case, the Republicans -- cognizant of them and willing to tailor their program accordingly. Jefferson once said that "Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities."  And that is doubly the case when those who would do the forcing enjoy no majority at all.

And when the forced result hardly amounts to an "innovation."

Which is the case here.

60% of America likes Obamacare. And, given that more than 80% did not approve of the GOP's first replacement, yesterday's second act by the House is not likely to fare any better.  Especially in view of how bad the first measure was and the second is.

But this Republican Party is not humble.  The Senate last year literally stole a Supreme Court appointment from President Obama; the House yesterday approved a measure without a single Democratic vote, or even any effort to craft reforms to Obamacare that Democrats might have approved; and the GOP agenda going forward is all right wing all of the time  -- tax cuts for the wealthy who do not need them (including those for Trump himself, who would have paid $31 million less in 2005 had the GOP's current tax plans then been law), draconian cuts in funding for environmental protection and education, and the continuing denial of science that allows them to ignore climate change even as its consequences regularly announce themselves in hundred-year floods, dying coral reefs, arctic ice melts, species extinctions, and warmer temperatures.

And on top of all that, Trump is a fact-free President interested only in the perceived "win."  That's why he celebrated yesterday.  He didn't get a new law but he got a win and a picture.  And though Republicans showed up to stoke his ego on the White House lawn, it's not even clear he understands what is in the bill or why it is so ridiculously bad. Indeed, later yesterday evening, at a black tie press conference with Australia's Prime Minister Turnbull in New York City (where the two were meeting at dinner on the Intrepid to celebrate the American/Australian alliance during World War II),Trump launched into his usual tirade about our currently "failing" health care system, only to stop himself mid-way and turn to the Prime Minister. Said our policy-challenged President: "Right now Obamacare is failing. We have failing health care. I shouldn't say this to our great gentleman and my friend from Australia cause right now you have better health care than we do."

Trump was right about that.  Australia's system is better than ours.

Australia has Medicare for all and provides universal coverage.

Something Obamacare approached but the House bill passed yesterday does not remotely come close to providing.

In other words, something that already exists down under.

But about which Donald Trump obviously had . . .

Not a clue.

Under all these circumstance, I am having a hard time finding my inner boy . . .

Looking for that pony.