Almost Saturday Night

With news breaking in The New York Times that Donald Trump attempted to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller last June, the comparisons between Mueller’s investigation and Watergate became that much greater. It can be said that the nation narrowly missed a second “Saturday Night Massacre” when Trump’s White House Counsel, Don McGahn, threatened to resign instead of carrying out Trump’s order, and while that statement carries a patina of truth, what the superseding months have shown is a political landscape far different than the one Richard Nixon inhabited in October 1973.

As told in Leon Neyfakh’s mesmerizing podcast Slow Burn, the Saturday Night Massacre was directed at a person who almost seemed like a caricature of a Nixon antagonist. Archibald Cox was a member-in-good-standing of Nixon’s despised “east coast liberal elite” - a tweed-coat-and-bow-tie wearing Harvard Law School professor who had worked for Nixon’s 1960 election opponent, John F. Kennedy and gone on to serve in the Kennedy Administration as Solicitor General. Cox’s aides were young and liberal, but with a deeper enmity for Nixon and less respect for institutions than the World War II veteran they served. 

But here’s the thing - in light of Cox’s political leanings, looked at through the lens of our current political culture, that Nixon directing Cox’s firing (because the latter rejected the former’s faux-compromise on turning over tapes of conversations Nixon had surreptitiously made in the Oval Office) would be the tipping point that led to Nixon’s resignation, is surprising. And that is what makes Trump’s actions and those of his allies in Congress far more dangerous.

Nixon’s firing of a liberal prosecutor and former Kennedy aide drew bipartisan outrage and the swift appointment of a replacement, Leon Jaworksi, who would go on to lead the investigation through guilty pleas of many Nixon aides and the President’s resignation itself. Can we say with any confidence that the same would happen today? What is particularly striking is the fact that unlike Cox, whose political leanings could not have been less similar to Nixon’s, Mueller is a Republican, a career Department of Justice official appointed as FBI Director by President George W. Bush and as special prosecutor by another Republican, Rod Rosenstein, who had himself been appointed a U.S. Attorney by Bush, held over by Obama, and then picked as the number two in DOJ by Trump. 

Unlike Cox, Mueller’s team is not made up of wet-behind-the-ears young prosecutors just starting their careers. Rather, his are deeply experienced career DOJ attorneys who have prosecuted everyone from terrorists to Enron executives. And yet, Trump’s aides show no compunction about attacking Mueller and his team as rank partisans on a witch hunt against the President. Indeed, their efforts have been rewarded. While approval of Mueller hovers around 50 percent, it has fallen somewhere between 10 and 15 points (depending on the poll you read) as Trump’s allies have chiseled away at his credibility. 

We may have avoided a Saturday Night Massacre II last June, but the intervening months have allowed Trump and his allies to salt the earth beneath Mueller’s feet. Nixon’s downfall was due in large part to the release of tapes, the “smoking guns” that proved Nixon was actively involved in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in, among other things. Will the same be true of Trump? Will people accept the admissions he made about firing FBI Director James Comey to get rid of the Russia investigation as clear evidence of obstruction of justice? Are there emails and testimony of aides who flip on him that will show collusion or obstruction? And as importantly, will it matter? Or will it all be dismissed as “fake news” by Trump’s allies, whose media echo chamber on Fox News and elsewhere will provide the needed cover to protect him? It is impossible to know, but, like Watergate, it will not end well, regardless. 

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Trump’s First Year Was A Huge Success

“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” - Les   February 29, 2016

During an election year that seemed to move at the speed of light, the above quote from CBS chairman Les Moonves was barely a one day story. The context of Moonves’s quote related to the record ad revenue his company and other media outlets were collecting and of course, the needle moved even more when Donald Trump was on their air. His comments were echoed by CNN President Jeff Zucker, who called 2016 “the best year ever” for cable news, and it was not because they were doing deep dives on the fine points of tax policy. Showtime aired a series about the campaign dubbed The Circus and an after-action report conducted by the Columbia Journalism Review found that in a six day period near the end of the campaign, the New York Times filed as many stories about Hillary’s email as they did in the final sixty-nine days about her policy positions. 

With Trump’s victory last November, one would have hoped the media writ large would course correct. While The Washington Post boldly placed “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on its homepage and The New York Times brags about skyrocketing revenue from new subscribers drawn in by its purportedly aggressive coverage of Trump, 11 months into Trump’s first term in office, he has succeeded in waving many shiny objects in front of reporters’ faces even as the federal government, and its role in our daily life, has been radically altered.

For all the spinning on cable news that Trump has been a failure, I would argue that a week from now, when, in all likelihood, Trump has a splashy signing ceremony for the Republicans’ massive tax cut for corporations and the wealthy, he will have achieved as much in his first year in office as Barack Obama, and, over the long run, potentially much more. Here’s why:

Trump Is Reshaping The Federal Judiciary For The Next 20 Years: The top line here is the seating of Neil Gorsuch, a 50-year-old conservative jurist who may serve until the 2040s, on the U.S. Supreme Court, but it goes beyond that - Trump is one retirement (Anthony Kennedy) away from locking in that majority with a replacement who, like Gorsuch, may serve for 25-30 years. A worst case scenario where either Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Stephen Breyer (or both) retire before 2020, would be cataclysmic. 

But Trump’s influence extends well beyond the Supreme Court. After all, while it does render decisions of great consequence, it also issues fewer than 100 opinions a year. The real action is in the twelve circuit courts of appeal, and there, Mitch McConnell has used the Senate as a turnstile, approving more of Trump’s nominees (twelve) in his first year in office than any President in history. 

Republicans Are Dismantling Wide Swaths of the Regulatory State: Do you care about the environment? Sexual assault investigations on college campuses? Consumer protection against heavy-handed (or illegal) actions of major financial institutions? Having unfettered access to all corners of the Internet? I have bad news for you. All of those things are under assault, a two-pronged assault in fact, that has rarely been seen in Washington. 

The first prong was predictable - Trump installed many regulated-industry friendly leaders as Cabinet Secretaries and administrative agency heads to either reverse or stay implementation of Obama-era regulations in many of the areas (and others) mentioned above. The other, less so. Republicans in Congress have utilized something called the Congressional Review Act, which grants Congress power to overturn, by simple majority vote, any regulation passed in the last 6 months of a prior administration. In total, Congress overturned 12 Obama-era regulations, including an FCC rule on Internet privacy protections, an SEC regulation that required energy companies to disclose payments to foreign governments, and a Department of Interior stream-protection rule, which prevented coal companies from dumping waste into stream valleys. 

The Tax Cut Bill: The idea that we would borrow at least $1.5 trillion and hand that money to corporations and the wealthy at a time when income inequality is already at a level unseen since the 1920s is bizarre enough without considering several other things. 

First, the tax cut bill is more expensive than advertised because the personal income tax cuts in the bill have a sunset provision in 2025. The Bush tax cuts had a similar sunset provision and were (mostly) made permanent when they lapsed, adding trillions in long-term debt. So too here. Some future Congress and President (not Trump) will be put in the position of trying to raise taxes or borrow even more to make the tax cuts “permanent.” WONDER WHICH ONE THEY WILL CHOOSE?! Second, the tax cut bill will increase the deficit. We have seen this movie before - first under Reagan and then under Bush 43 - tax cuts do not pay for themselves and the growth of government will result in a deficit that is already nearing $700 billion a year, swelling even more. This crowds out our ability to invest in things like research and development, infrastructure, and other social goods. Ultimately, interest rates will also increase, making it harder (and more expensive) to buy a home, a car, or other goods and services. Finally, the tax cut bill includes a repeal of the individual mandate under Obamacare. This will result in fewer healthy Americans purchasing insurance, resulting in insurance companies raising premiums on the rest of us. The repeal, along with other, subtle tactics that have undermined the ACA (smaller enrollment window, no marketing to get people to enroll, etc.) is further eroding this salutary public good. 

What makes these changes so pernicious, is that they largely happen in the background, not all at once. Three or four years from now, politicians will fuzzy up the next economic crash or trillion-dollar budget deficit (remember, Republicans argued that Bill Clinton was somehow to blame for the 2008 market crash because he signed legislation that overturned the Glass-Steagall Act (which had largely been rendered moot anyway) and not the Bush Administration’s reckless tax and monetary policy and indifference to regulation.) Climate change is something that is felt over time, Miami is not going underwater tomorrow, and people will debate whether job growth or loss was due to policies enacted (or reversed) without a clear cut answer. 

Even more consequential is how difficult it will be to undo the damage. As noted, the Supreme Court is one retirement away from having a conservative majority locked in for years to come. Regulations take a long time to promulgate and become effective (and that is before legal challenges that can slow things down even longer). Corporations, already awash in trillions of dollars, now have a green light to further consolidate, which affects everything from what we watch on TV, read in the newspaper, and view on the Internet, while giving them even more money to lobby for laws and regulations that benefit them. Had you told a Republican politician that in Trump’s first year in office, all of the above would be accomplished, I suspect they would be quite happy.

Of course, what also helps is the media’s disinterest in focusing on these issues. It is far easier (and profitable) for them to gorge on controversy instead of considering whether allowing coal companies to dump run off into freshwater is good public policy or not. Media conglomerates are also not neutral referees. They must be responsive to shareholders, not the public interest, and the more money that is shoveled their way, the more “the circus” plays on in Washington, adding to their advertising revenue and ratings, the less their incentive to be fair-minded arbiters of the public good. And for those small corners of cable news or the print/web media that are reporting on these ills, left-wing outrage is just as profitable as the right-wing version even though little can be done to change things. 

Even if Trump resigned tomorrow or was impeached, even if Democrats take back one (or both) houses of Congress in 2018, the effect of the last 11 months will be felt for decades. It may not be good for America (or democracy), but hey, at least Les Moonves is happy. 

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Why 18 Days May Prove Trump Obstructed Justice

The latest in the Mueller investigation is that the Special Counsel is zeroing in on the 18 days between when then-Acting Attorney General Sally Yates warned White House Counsel Don McGahn that Michael Flynn had been compromised and Flynn’s resignation as National Security Adviser. 

Slowly but surely, the pieces are starting to fall into place as to what transpired not just in those 18 days, but more importantly, how they relate to what happened a month before, in late December when, we now know, Flynn had several conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak about dropping sanctions that President Obama had imposed after the election. 

It appears things went down something like this: Flynn spoke with Kislyak around Christmas about the Obama-imposed sanctions and reported back on those conversations in real time to Trump’s team at Mar-A-Lago. Unbeknownst to Flynn, law enforcement was also listening in on his conversations with Kislyak. 

Flynn was interviewed by the FBI on January 24, 2017 and lied about his interactions with Kislyak. Two days later, Yates warned McGahn that Flynn had been compromised by the Russians. The next day, Trump invited Comey to a one-on-one dinner where Trump asked for Comey’s “loyalty.” 

About two weeks later, after the Washington Post reported on Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak, Flynn quit under fire, for (allegedly) lying to Mike Pence about his interactions with the Russians. The next day, Trump again had a one-on-one meeting with Comey (after kicking his other advisors out of the room) and asked Comey to drop the Flynn investigation now that he had resigned. Comey refused and was fired about three months later.

The most plausible explanation for all this is basically as follows: the Trump team, and probably Trump himself, knew about Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak and Flynn reported back in real time about what they talked about. Sometime after the new year, Flynn found out the FBI wanted to talk to him. Flynn told someone (or someones) about the interview and the decision was made that Flynn would lie to the FBI about his interactions with the Russians, assuming the lie would not be discovered. 

Two days after the interview, Yates warned McGahn, who may (or may not) have known about the Christmas week conversations. McGahn warned Trump, who DID know what Flynn was up to and decided to lean on Comey, who demurred. The story leaked to the press a few weeks later, Flynn quit, and Trump tried to get Comey to drop the investigation because he knew it would incriminate him or people close to him. 

And that is why Mueller is so focused on those 18 days between Yates’s White House briefing and Flynn’s resignation, because the most plausible explanation for all that went on is that Trump or people very close to him were either aware or told Flynn to lie about his discussions with Kislyak. In other words, Trump or people in his inner circle may have tried to obstruct the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s role in our election and/or to suborn perjury - in short, to break the law. But now, Flynn is a cooperating witness and the true answer will (hopefully) be told. 

Reporters sometimes get tripped up because they assume a level of sophistication or subterfuge that just does not exist in the Trump world. These are not smart conspirators, just arrogant ones who thought they would get away with it. 

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Republicans and Racism

It is unsurprising, but very dispiriting to watch members of the Beltway media class fall all over themselves congratulating Republicans for denouncing Nazis and white supremacists. Never mind that few of these Republicans will call out their leader by name for his callousness and attempts to blame “many sides” for the violence that occurred last weekend in Charlottesville, or that “denouncing Nazis” is literally the lowest bar one can hurdle in politics, the real danger in all this slurpage is the gas lighting of the now decades-long effort by Republicans to court racists. Just because someone like Paul Ryan says the Republican Party is not a party of racists does not make it so. In fact, the record shows the opposite to be true. 

Let’s face it, Republicans were never particularly shy about their tactics. Indeed, no less a media outlet than the New York Times published an article way back on May 17, 1970 in which a Nixon advisor named Kevin Phillips discussed the so-called “southern strategy” of appealing to white voters by playing on their racial prejudices. Nixon coded some of his message in language that Donald Trump has tried to appropriate (“law and order,” “silent majority”), but whatever subtlety he used was jettisoned by the late 1970s when Ronald Reagan made his own run for the White House by railing against “welfare queens” and “strapping young bucks” on government assistance that were clear attacks on African-Americans. 

It should therefore not be surprising that Reagan began the general election of 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, but he was not there to honor the three dead civil rights workers who were murdered during the Freedom Summer of 1964, rather, he touted “states rights,” a rallying cry of white supremacists and segregationists that Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were fighting against when they were killed. As President, Reagan went on to veto a bill that would have imposed sanctions on the apartheid leaders in South Africa and his administration launched a “war on drugs” that disproportionately impacted minority communities. 

In 1988, the tide of the race to succeed Reagan began to turn when George H.W. Bush’s campaign ran an ad about a Massachusetts state prisoner named Willie Horton, who skipped out of a weekend furlough program and proceeded to rape a woman and seriously injure her fiancé. Horton was black, the victims white. Bush 41’s under qualified Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas was accused of sexual harassment but flipped the script by accusing Senators of conducting a “high tech lynching” even as those same Senators refused to allow witnesses to testify who would corroborate his accuser’s story and treated her with skepticism at best and downright hostility at worst.

In the 2000s, Bush 43 could not be bothered to deal with Hurricane Katrina, leading Kanye West to famously opine that “George W. Bush does not care about black people.” Trent Lott was forced from his position as Senate Minority Leader when he was caught on tape saying that if the segregationist Strom Thurmond had been elected President in 1948, we would not have many of the problems we have today (don’t feel bad for old Trent, his tone deaf comment might have cost him his Senate leadership, but he has made millions as a lobbyist). 

Of course, this was all prelude to the odious “birther” movement that sprung up upon Barack Obama’s election as President. The claim that Obama was born in Kenya was touted by none other than the man who would succeed him as President, who continued trafficking in this ugly smear long after Obama produced his so-called long-form birth certificate. Trump did not even acknowledge Obama’s Hawaiian birth until years later and even then, grudgingly so. 

But Trump was no outlier. As recently as last year, polling showed 41 percent of Republicans did not think Obama was born in America and another 31 percent had their doubts. Of course, “birtherism” was of a piece with a deeper vein of racial antipathy toward Obama. One need not look far on the Internet to find images of Tea Party protestors holding photos of Obama portrayed as an African witch doctor complete with a bone in his nose and more than a few Republican officials throughout the country were caught making crude racial comments comparing the Obamas to apes and monkeys. 

The beat goes on. Voter ID laws have been passed in many states even though the problem it claims to address (in person voting fraud) is vanishingly rare. These laws have been proven to impact the poor, minorities, and the elderly disproportionately. Indeed, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals noted that North Carolina’s Voter ID law attempted to disenfranchise African-American voters with “surgical precision” and the U.S. Supreme Court struck down two of that state’s congressional districts because of racial discrimination. Ohio has tried to scrub their voter rolls of inactive voters (action supported by the Trump Administration in a case that will be heard by a Supreme Court that has retained its conservative bent thanks to the blocking of Merrick Garland last year) and Wisconsin’s Voter ID law affected 300,000 voters, an unknown number of whom were then unable to vote in 2016. 

Racism is not a bug in the modern Republican Party, it is a feature. Attempts by their party leaders to gas light their actions should be called out, loudly and firmly, by members of the media. 

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This Is Not How A Presidency Ends

When Frank Rich was at the New York Times he was the best columnist in America. Now that he is at New York magazine, he is the best long form essayist in America. He is a superior writer whose gifts extend to placing contemporary political events into historical context and he writes with precision and insight that is rare among his peers. His cover story for New York entitled “How A Presidency Ends” is certainly eye-catching, but his thesis, which is that Trump’s disregard for basic political norms and the rule of law will create a critical mass so great Republicans in Congress will eventually toss their leader overboard in order to secure their own political survival, is unrealistic.

Rich connects many dots between Nixon and Trump’s behavior. It is entirely possible that like Nixon, Trump will be undone by a cover-up (firing Jim Comey to snuff out the FBI’s investigation into Russia and potential ties to the Trump campaign) and not a crime. And there is a lot of smoke around Trump’s actions toward Comey, no more damning than the fact that two of the meetings Trump held with Comey look suspicious — the first was held the day after Acting Attorney General Sally Yates advised White House Counsel Don McGahn that Michael Flynn had been compromised and the second took place the day after Flynn resigned as National Security Adviser. In the former meeting, Trump supposedly asked for Comey’s loyalty and in the latter, that he drop the investigation into Flynn. 

But that is public record and while a few Republicans harrumphed over the timing of Comey’s dismissal, none suggested this rose to an impeachable offense. And short of evidence being produced showing Trump directing or being involved in Russia’s hacking of the DNC and Clinton Chairman John Podesta’s email accounts (a la Nixon’s recorded direction to cover-up Watergate) there is no chance a majority of Republicans in the House, much less two-thirds of Senators would remove Trump from office. 

But there is a larger divergence between Nixon and Trump that eludes Rich’s usually scrupulous eye. Trump’s crude attacks on the press are an uglier version of Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativity,” and the amen corner both he and Nixon preached to has an ingrained suspicion of and disdain for east coast elites at the New York Times and Washington Post. But unlike Nixon’s time, when right wing media was still in its embryonic phase, Trump is buttressed by a legion of genefluctors from Fox News to online Reddit trolls who protect him. 

He and his communications team have effectively neutered the White House press corps by limiting on-air press briefings, seeding the press room with more right wing voices, and keeping their boss away from anyone but sympathetic journalists in the Fox News-iverse for interviews. Trump has only conducted one solo press conference since being inaugurated and shows no signs of caring that he is stiff arming the press. When he needs to get his message out, he can always pick up the phone and call one of his preferred reporters (Bob Costa or Maggie Haberman) who will dutifully act as stenographer and put his words and thoughts on the front page of their respective papers. 

The spread of right wing media outlets also serves to discredit so-called mainstream media outlets who do themselves no favors when they have to retract salacious stories (as CNN did recently) and inoculate Trump among the faithful by throwing out red herrings like pointing out that lawyers working with Special Counsel Robert Mueller have made political donations to Democrats. They also serve to solidify antipathy toward the same elites Nixon railed against and rile up the base so they do not rest on their laurels, as Democrats did in both 2010 and 2014. 

This accrues to the benefit of Republicans on Capitol Hill. Not only is the party more conservative (and largely purged whatever moderates it once had), but state legislatures effectively gerrymandered Congressional districts in 2010 to such an extreme that in 2012, Democratic candidates in the House of Representatives won 1.2 million more overall votes than their Republican opponents yet that only translated into an eight vote swing, well short of what was needed to put Nancy Pelosi back in the Speaker’s chair. In 2016, Hillary Clinton bested Donald Trump by more than 3 million votes but House Democrats only picked up six seats. 

And while it is true that there are twenty or so congressional districts that elected a House Republican while going for Hillary Clinton, voters have yet to reach a tipping point where Republican candidates have to fear being associated with Trump. Further, the 2018 Senate map is challenging for Democrats, who will probably lose a few of their 48 member caucus because unlike the apathy shown by Democrats in recent off-year elections, the few races held this year suggest Republican enthusiasm is close enough to the Democrats to protect their turf. 

And there is one other thing progressives and liberals need to be wary of. Just as right wing media has hustled conservatives with fevered dreams of faked birth certificates and nefarious dealings in backwoods Arkansas, progressives need to be attuned to, and temper, expectations that Trump’s departure from the White House will be forced. Hashtag 25th-the-45th all you want, the similarities between Watergate and whatever is going on with Trump only stretch so far. And this is not to suggest Rich is a charlatan — far from it; however, the reality is that today’s GOP is a far cry from its 1974 iteration. For all the hand wringing about Trump’s tweets, his attacks on the media, and general disdain for political norms and the rule of law, these are precisely the things his most ardent supporters like about him and unless and until Republican voters indicate they will punish their Congressional representatives for it, Trump is not going anywhere.

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Comey's Credibility Is A Problem For Trump

Former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee set official Washington aflame. The bombshells dropped left and right, from Comey calling the sitting President of the United States a liar on multiple occasions to his intimation that the current Attorney General may have had (another) undisclosed meeting with Russian officials. With so much to unpack, it is easy to get lost in the weeds. But by the end of the day, the President’s lawyer had distilled this politically (and legally) explosive event into something much easier to understand - a “he said/he said” credibility contest between Comey and Trump as it relates to the question of whether Trump asked Comey to end his investigation into the activities of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

And it is easy to understand why this matters. If it can be proven that the President directed Comey to end the investigation, it would be a clear case of obstruction of justice that any first-year law student could prosecute. Republican partisans have chosen to make two arguments - first, that Trump did not “order” Comey to end the investigation, just that he “hoped” he would end it; and second, (and this is the excuse used by Paul Ryan) that Trump is simply naive about the ways of Washington and politics and did not understand the gravity of what he was doing. No big deal, no harm, no foul.

But here is the thing. This is not a “he said/he said” situation where it is simply one person’s word against another’s. The public record we have indicates that the conversation in question, which happened the day after Flynn resigned, happened only after Trump cleared the room of his Vice President, his Chief of Staff, his son-in-law (who is also his adviser), and the Attorney General. Hardly the type of action of a babe in the woods but definitely the type of action of someone who would not want anyone else to able to corroborate what happened behind closed doors. 

Further, Trump may not have expected Comey to create a contemporaneous record of that meeting, but Comey did. That is very significant because contemporaneous notes are considered so credible, they can be admitted into evidence as an exception from the hearsay rule. (See, FRE 803). In other words, a contemporaneous memo written by someone at the time or immediately after an event occurs that describes that event is considered so reliable it is admissible in court to prove the truth of the matter asserted therein. 

But it is not just Comey’s testimony about that meeting or his memo that should be considered. As he stated before the Senate, he also shared the subject matter of his conversations with the President with at least five of his closest aides, including his Deputy Director and Chief of Staff. All of those men (and they are all men, which is another story for another time) could (and should) be called to testify about what Comey told them.

On top of all this is the context in which Trump's meetings with Comey took place. Sally Yates testified before Congress that she warned White House Counsel Don McGahn on January 26th that Michael Flynn had been compromised by the Russians. Less than 24 hours later, Trump had a private dinner with Comey where he (Trump) attempted to extract a "loyalty" pledge from Comey (according to Comey). Flynn resigned on February 13th. Trump's one-on-one with Comey, the meeting where Trump sent out everyone else from the room and asked Comey to drop the investigation occurred, you guessed it, less than 24 hours later - on February 14th.

The near-contemporaneous connection between disclosures about Flynn and his resignation and Trump's meetings with the man investigating those indiscretions belies the idea that Trump is some naive newcomer unversed in the ways of Washington. The temporal connection also suggests motive - we don't know (yet) whether McGahn shared what Yates told him with Trump, but it is hard to imagine a White House Counsel keeping such information to himself. Assuming McGahn shared what Yates told him with Trump, the idea of his asking Comey for "loyalty" does not seem far fetched. Similarly, once Flynn was turfed out (purportedly for lying to the Vice President about his meetings with Russian officials) it is not hard to connect that dot to a request by Trump to drop any further investigation into Flynn - the poor guy had suffered enough <eye roll>. 

On top of Comey’s testimony, his memos, and the statements he made to his senior advisors and aides is reporting by the Washington Post that Trump asked Dan Coats, the Director of National Intelligence, and Admiral Michael Rogers, the Director of the National Security Agency, to speak with Comey about scuttling the Flynn investigation. Neither Coats nor Rogers would answer questions posed by Senators about the veracity of the reporting, but importantly, the Post reporting indicates that Coats shared the substance of his conversation with Trump with his own aides and Rogers created a written record. Coats’s aides should be called to testify and Rogers’s memo subpoenaed. 

And if all of that was not enough, of course you have the coup de grậce - Trump fired Comey and then went on national television and said the reason for the firing was the FBI’s continued investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. 

The idea that Trump simply expressed a “hope” to Comey that the case could be closed is belied by the extensive after-the-fact action Trump took with Coats, with Rogers, and ultimately, in firing Comey when he refused to stand down. And against that mountain of evidence that Trump sought an end to the FBI’s investigation into Michael Flynn - which is itself a greater interference in a criminal investigation than what the House of Representatives deemed obstruction of justice during Watergate - you have a man who settled a fraud case less than a week before he was sworn into office, has been sued thousands to times, and whose lies are so voluminous reporters have tallied hundreds in the less than six months he has been in office. All Trump has is his oft-repeated phrase “believe me.” Believe him? Hardly.

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Trump's Firing Of Comey Is A BFD

President Trump’s firing of James Comey has created a shit storm in Washington, D.C. that should be lighting everyone’s hair on fire. Comey’s protectors in the media are quick to rush to his defense, both generally, and specifically as to his actions over the past year. But here’s the thing. If you’re James Comey, you don’t rise to some of the most politically sensitive positions in government (U.S. Attorney for the S.D.N.Y. - the pre-eminent U.S. Attorney’s Office in the nation, Deputy Attorney General and FBI Director) without some savvy. The media’s willingness to constantly give him the benefit of the doubt lacks credulity, but at the same time, people need to understand that Democrats who were outraged at his actions during the campaign can also be outraged that his firing appeared to be a pre-textual (and pre-emptive) effort by a sitting President to shut down a criminal investigation into his campaign (and possibly Trump himself). 

It should be said that neither Clinton nor Trump was entitled to preferential treatment by Comey, but by the same token, they should not have been given worse treatment, which is what happened in Hillary’s case. When Comey gave a press conference in July 2016 to announce there would be no recommendation of charges against Hillary, he tiptoed near the line of impropriety - it is rare for an investigation that results in no charges being filed to be announced publicly; however, if you accept that in the public interest it made sense to say something, his editorializing went well beyond his charge and was, naturally, turned into convenient sound bites for political attack ads and ad nauseum coverage on cable news. Comey’s intervention just eleven days before the election was even more egregious, both because it flouted clear DOJ guidelines on making public statements so close to an election, but also because it was done without having facts behind it that might have mattered. 

The media’s willingness to give Comey a pass - bemoaning the “impossible” position he was in - has turned out to be too cute by half. The prudent course for Comey, had he treated Hillary like any other person under investigation but never charged, would have been to keep his mouth shut the entire time. Indeed, prosecutors do this for two primary reasons - (1) so an innocent person’s good name isn’t sullied if he or she is never charged with a crime; and (2) to avoid tainting the investigation. When word leaked after the election (curious timing, no?) that the FBI had an open and active investigation against the Trump campaign dating to last summer, his actions looked even more partisan and indefensible and the media’s defense, laughable. 

So why is that his termination by Trump is so offensive? After all, Comey blurred the lines (or eradicated them entirely) during the campaign. But here’s the thing - with an active investigation into Trump’s associates (and possibly Trump himself) going on, for Trump to remove Comey is precisely the type of malfeasance post-Watergate changes were designed to protect against, including the “wall” between the White House and the Department of Justice as it relates to criminal investigations and the 10-year term (which was established after Watergate in 1976) the idea being the FBI Director should, to some degree, be insulated from the political process. 

If it turns out that Trump removed Comey in an effort to sideline or stop an investigation into his campaign’s contacts with agents of the Russian government or, worse, actively collaborated with them, that itself would be grounds for impeachment; whatever else may be discovered would simply be icing on the cake. There are few agencies in our government more important to the functioning of our nation than the Department of Justice; thus, injecting politics into the DOJ is particularly fraught with peril. One of the reasons an independent counsel makes sense is because the nature of the Trump/Russia investigation is so sensitive and the appearance of a conflict so apparent, someone who cannot be removed by the President or Attorney General is needed. Once upon a time, Republicans believed in this concept; conveniently, it was when some guy named Bill Clinton was President. My, how times have changed. 

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Hillary's Walk of Shame

As the long slog of election season comes to a close and Hillary Clinton gets ever closer to achieving something never before done in politics, instead of taking a victory lap or even getting a moment to savor her anticipated triumph, she is being dragged through the gutter by Donald Trump and shamed by a mainstream media pre-programmed to dislike her. For reasons unclear to me, Hillary is being subjected to something akin to Cersei’s “walk of shame” at the hands of the High Sparrow. But contra Cersei, whose crime was fornication, Hillary is being humiliated for the temerity of running for President and her punishment is being forced to expose her campaign’s inner workings to the public.

Trump’s shaming has been as bald-faced as it is reprehensible. Tagging Hillary as “crooked” seems quaint now that he brought women who accused her husband of sexual misconduct to a debate, stalked her onstage, and has accused her of everything from being on drugs to lacking the stamina for the job, mocked her physical appearance and threatened to imprison her. And just when you thought he could go no lower, he has now begun ranting about a rigged election that is setting up a situation where millions may simply not accept a Clinton win.

While Trump’s actions are predictable, the media pile on has been equally embarrassing. Has a candidate for high office ever had the inner workings of their office so thoroughly exposed? Reporters practically “Mean Girl”-ed Hillary’s State Department email, culling through thousands of missives to find such plums as what shows the Secretary wanted DVR’d while ignoring an ocean of substantive policy work she engaged in during her time in Foggy Bottom. We are now living through a second round of email shaming with the selective leaking of email from her campaign chairman, John Podesta. Putting aside the fact that we do not even know if these communications have been tampered with, the supposed scandal of these email is really just the 101s of politics – managing the competing interests of groups that support you, cultivating relationships, and assessing the pros and cons of various policy positions.

Hardly the stuff of controversy, but no Presidential candidate has ever had so much information about their internal process so publicly exposed. Indeed, I hazard to guess that the same behind-the-scenes machinations would be found if anyone stole and leaked email from any candidate running for national office, but because it is Hillary, the media narrative gets reinforced that she is somehow duplicitous or scheming, that her actions are in some way nefarious or two-faced. The media can now pick apart the after-action report on an early campaign visit to a Chipotle in Ohio but cannot be bothered to report on a major policy initiative she announced on decreasing poverty in the heat of Trump’s carpet bombing of her.

It is sad, really. What should be a final sprint to the finish line of election day that is filled with equal parts exhilaration and trepidation will instead by a sort of Bataan Death March of gloom and doom, fearing some suspicious email leak even as Trump conditions his most rabid supporters to deny a Clinton victory as some rigged conspiracy between her and the media. Instead of celebrating the accomplishment of electing the first woman President, she is being publicly humiliated and debased, her opponent denying her the fair victory she will win and the media teeing up stories that she will lack a mandate and would have lost but for the uniquely noxious opponent she beat.

Such an outcome is an insult to her millions of supporters, the campaign team that worked tirelessly to elect her, and to Hillary herself. But instead of complaining (and lord knows if she did, she would never hear the end of it from the mainstream media) or shaking her fist at the indignity of her singular accomplishment being minimized and delegitimized, this former First Lady will follow the advice of the current one – when they go low, we go high.

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Donald Trump - Political Suicide Bomber

Last night, Donald Trump strapped on a political suicide vest and pulled the trigger in front of 80 million people on television. There was no glory in Trump’s despicable acts last night. What he did was live out the fantasy of every right-wing conspiracist who has spent the last quarter century with an unremitting hatred for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Trump gave voice to every ugly rumor, innuendo, and debunked theory trafficked in the underbelly of the Internet, on conservative talk radio, and the echo chamber of Fox News. He put the human manifestations of every lurid belief about Bill Clinton in the audience and slashed Hillary Clinton as “the devil,” a woman who had “hatred in her heart” and would be in jail if he were elected (that last one elicited a lusty applause from the audience). 

Trump went after Bill and Hillary Clinton viciously, personally, and often falsely, but that will matter little to people who have been fed a steady diet of Clinton conspiracies for the last 25 years. If you believe that the Clintons ran drugs in Arkansas, faked Vince Foster’s suicide, or sold cattle futures for huge profits there is a direct through line to believing Hillary deleted incriminating emails off her private server, handed out favors to Clinton Foundation donors, and would be in prison but for the good graces of an FBI Director who served as the number two official in the George W. Bush Justice Department.

Trump’s dissection was done with a butcher’s knife not a scalpel, but it mattered little. He stalked the stage ominously and audibly sucked in air as he leveled one false claim after the other, the politics of personal destruction fed to him by his top campaign officials who have made their careers smearing the Clintons and their work. What little he shared in the policy arena was non-sensical. Merely removing barriers to health insurers will magically replace Obamacare, his tax policy won’t blow a massive long-term hole in the deficit (not to mention what it will do to our debt), and beating ISIS will merely require bombing the shit out of them. 

It is tired pablum uttered by someone who knows little about the issues but a lot about how to foment discontent. Trump’s actions will not win him votes but I fear it will harden opposition to Clinton if she becomes President in a way that will make the Tea Party revolt against Obama look mild in comparison. Trump is creating a lynch mob of such radicalism that no Republican will risk running afoul of it for fear of losing their precious seat in Congress. James Carville famously said that “politics ain’t beanbag,” but you would hope it is not whatever we saw on stage in St. Louis either.

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Three Weeks That Might Have Cost Hillary The Presidency

If Donald Trump wins the Presidency, we will likely look back at the roughly three week period between late August and September 11th as the reason why. As you will see, a confluence of bad reporting and tactical decisions by both candidates conspired to change a race that was heading in the direction of a Clinton landslide to a coin toss proposition.

The weeks following both parties’ conventions were not good to Donald Trump. His was a four-day spectacle of oddballs and charlatans and party officials conspicuous by their absence. Her’s was a murderer’s row of validators along with ordinary Americans who testified to Hillary’s compassion, hard work, and decency. What had been a neck-and-neck race before the two conventions quickly turned in Hillary’s favor and she opened large leads in national polls and battleground states while edging within the margin of error in reliably red states like Arizona and Georgia. On August 19th, Trump’s campaign chairman was pushed out after revelations about millions in off book payments he received from the pro-Putin former President of Ukraine became public and in his place Trump promoted a pollster named Kellyanne Conway to campaign manager and the editor of the alt-right website Breitbart.com, Steve Bannon, as his campaign “CEO.” This was the second major shake up of Trump’s campaign in just a few months. His chances of winning the Presidency hovered in the 10-15 percent range on Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com website.

But then the worm started to turn. On August 23th, the Associated Press published a “bombshell” report about the number of donors to the Clinton Foundation who were able to get meetings with Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State. Never mind that the headline was slanted, the data cherry picked, and some of those donors included Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus and U2 singer Bono, this story dominated cable news for days. When emails showed Clinton Foundation staffer Doug Band trying to get various “favors” from the State Department (all of which were denied), the story crystallized - somehow a Foundation getting HIV drugs to poor people in Africa, clean water to Haitians and myriad other philanthropic efforts was being portrayed as some sort of sleazy pay-to-play machine for rich people trying to curry favor with the federal government. 

It would take members of the media a week or more to unwind and fact check these salacious headlines (the AP’s false tweet touting the story was quietly deleted some two weeks later), including one that had to do with Band trying to expedite diplomatic passports for Foundation staffers trying to travel with President Clinton to North Korea to help extricate two Americans being held there. But the damage was already done. Hillary’s schedule was fundraiser-heavy and while she was doing some public events and one-on-one interviews, as the wave of Foundation stories was cresting, reporters started ginning up stories about how long it had been since she had a “formal” press conference. At the exact time the media horde was doubling down on stories that “raised questions” about Hillary’s conduct in public life, she and her team chose not to aggressively knock down the stories. This would prove to be a big mistake.

On the Friday before Labor Day, the FBI released dozens of pages of notes on their interview with Mrs. Clinton regarding her email server. This continued with their highly irregular actions with regard to this investigation that began with a public statement by FBI Director Comey just before the Fourth of July holiday that Clinton would not be prosecuted, but criticizing her actions. Of course, typical procedure is that people who are not indicted for crimes are not publicly excoriated by the FBI, much less have the notes of their interview released publicly, but hey, Hillary, am I right? Another predictable round of media hand wringing ensued and again, she and her team were not nearly as aggressive as they should have been in response. 

The capstone to this was the one-two punch of Hillary calling half of Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables” followed two days later by her getting dehydrated and having to be helped to her vehicle at a 9/11 ceremony, resulting in her disclosure that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia a few days earlier. More “questions were raised” about her secretiveness and her alleged “insult” of Trump supporters (never mind that it was arguably a factual statement but at worst a poor choice of words - “half” as opposed to “some” or “many”). The pneumonia story in particular was too perfect for reporters - it reinforced their belief that she is too secretive (because she did not disclose the illness) and the cell phone video of her wobbling was replayed incessantly on cable news channels. 

While all this was happening, Trump was quietly (for him) retooling his message. Luckily for him, a credulous press corps was ready to throw his insults to a Gold Star family, John McCain, Judge Gonzalo Curiel, all Mexicans, all non-American Muslims, and of course, his birtherism down the memory hole because he decided to do some African-American “outreach” in a largely white suburb of Milwaukee. Trump then made a last-minute visit to Mexico City where because he did not throw up on his shoes at a brief media availability with Mexican President Pena Nieto, the press deemed a success (even “Presidential.”) The “basket of deplorables” comment gave Trump the opportunity to feign outrage at an insult to his supporters and after questioning Hillary’s health in the preceding weeks, the video footage of her stumbling into her motorcade needed no embellishment. 

While there was some investigative reporting being done about Trump and his business dealings, the coverage was dwarfed by the tsunami of coverage given to the Clinton Foundation, the FBI notes, and Hillary coming down with pneumonia. To take the most glaring example, while there was no proof the Clinton Foundation engaged in any illegal (or even unethical) conduct, the Trump Foundation was found to have violated federal law by giving $25,000 to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi - they even paid a fine! But for some reason, this very apparent act of influence peddling (Bondi’s office dropped an investigation into Trump University several days after the donation was received) was not given nearly the attention paid to the Clinton Foundation, where no quid or quo was even remotely shown. Similarly, Trump continued getting a pass on releasing his tax returns, his health records, or information on his Foundation even as the media portrayed Clinton, who had released 40 years of tax returns, the names of all donors to the Clinton Foundation, had 30,000 emails made public, and released detailed medical information, as the one with the transparency problem. 

How did all of this end up impacting the race? Bigly, as Trump might say. On August 25th, Clinton was leading Trump nationally by amounts ranging from four points (right-leaning Rasmussen) to seven points (Reuters-Ipsos) to ten points (Quinnipiac). Six days later, Hillary’s lead had been cut to one in the Reuters poll and the following day, Rasmussen had Trump ahead by one. On August 29th, Nate Silver gave Trump a 19 percent chance of winning. Today, Trump is a slight underdog at 40 percent. In state polls, Trump has gone from high single digit deficits in places like Florida and Ohio to small single digit leads and he has solidified his standing in those red states that just a month ago appeared to be slipping from his grasp.

The after action report of this time period will be interesting. Much of the hysterical reporting on the Clinton Foundation ended up being much ado about nothing, but it allowed the media to reinforce its preferred narrative - that Hillary is untrustworthy, even though she did nothing wrong. They “Swift Boated” a charitable organization and Hillary erred in the same way John Kerry did when the same thing happened to him in 2004 - she did not respond. Of course, in his case, the attacks were coming from the Republicans. Hillary got done by the very media that is supposed to objectively report on the candidates. At the same time, Trump’s mouth was (mostly) under control and because he continues to refuse to release any information about his business dealings, reporters are left to public records requests to try and piece together how he operates. 

These are not small points, particularly because many in the media refuse to take ownership for their part in normalizing Trump, failing to hold him to the same standard they do Clinton (some reporters do not even bother pretending the two candidates are held to the same standard - they readily admit the two are not), or admitting they do much to drive certain stereotypes that are not actually based in fact. This would not be a big deal but for the fact this is happening in a situation where we are picking the person who will take on the most important job in the world.

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Trump Pulls The Trigger

Donald Trump once famously said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose his supporters. While he has not gunned anyone down on the streets of Manhattan, his campaign-wide pivot of the last week is the metaphorical equivalent of that.

Trump rose to prominence through stream of consciousness rants, attacks on immigrants, and insults hurled willy nilly at everyone from the Pope to crying babies. He mocked the use of Teleprompters, dismissed competitors who relied on corporate campaign donors, and did not spend a dime on polling. He was going to build a wall on the U.S./Mexico border and deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. He retweeted images posted by anti-semites and feigned ignorance of David Duke.

And all of that was leading him to what was going to be the worst electoral loss in a generation. Trump said he was going to put non-traditional states in play, and it turns out he has – except instead of Democratic strongholds like Wisconsin or Michigan, his singularly awful campaign has given Hillary Clinton openings in Georgia, Arizona, and Missouri.

So Trump has metaphorically taken out that gun and pulled the trigger. His campaign is now run by a pollster who feeds him lines he reads off a Teleprompter. He raises millions of dollars from big ticket contributors at the same closed-door fundraisers who once derided. He has uttered words of conciliation (without specific targets of apology) while claiming sudden interest in the plight of poor African-Americans and Hispanics. Most amazingly, that big wall he was going to build and that deportation force he was going to amass to round up all those awful “illegals” have been replaced with nods to "softening" language and letting people stay in the country if they have been law abiding and tax paying – ideas he once ridiculed.

In short, he is daring his most ardent supporters to rescind their support by disclaiming everything they liked about him and hold dear. He is relying on them to maintain their belief that he is uttering these poll-tested lines because that is what he needs to do to win. That it is ok if he reads off the dreaded Teleprompter. That it does not matter if he is no longer self-funding his campaign and is accepting money from monied interests, because deep down, he still believes Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers, that all Muslims should be banned from visiting America, that Second Amendment people may need to get involved if Hillary appoints Supreme Court justices, and that he alone can make America great again (for white people).  

Donald Trump has become what he once mocked. He has become a politician, and a bad one at that.

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Hillary Clinton Is Not The Lesser Of Two Evils

Of the most frustrating caricatures of Hillary Clinton, the idea that progressives should vote for her simply because she is the “lesser of two evils” is among the most disappointing (and inaccurate). The vast right-wing conspiracy has effectively portrayed her as Machiavelli in heels for more than 25 years, but anyone who has been watching, really watching the Democratic National Convention, much less taken the time to look into the work Hillary has done on behalf of others for the past 40 years, should know better.

During the DNC, I have been particularly struck by the testimonials provided by Anastasia Somoza and Ryan Moore, two Americans with disabilities. Each spoke of meeting Hillary as children and at events that many politicians simply use as photo ops to make them look good. But not Hillary. She befriended these young people whose struggles are far greater than most of us can imagine, not because it helped her politically, but because she cared. Hillary’s work to pass legislation to help children secure health care, traveling to poor areas to fight housing discrimination, and tireless advocacy for women’s rights are foursquare with progressive ideals that many of us share. 

Hillary does not have her husband’s natural political gifts or President Obama’s unparalleled ability to lift people through his words, but instead of lauding her for the strengths she possesses – of inclusion, collaboration, and yes, listening – the media focus invariably lands on the skills she does not have, not the ones she does. Make no mistake, this has been an editorial decision that dates back decades to when she had the temerity to defend her right to have a career and not be a homemaker and has carried on from one generation of reporters to the next, who lean into the idea that she is an insular paranoid distrusted by Americans. 

That she now has to “reintroduce” herself to a populace the media claims does not know the “real” Hillary is an indictment of their choices from 1991 to the present. Her biography has been out there for any reporter interested in learning it. Her speeches as First Lady show a woman who was well ahead of her time in advocating for causes that are now considered mainstream. Her time as Secretary of State is now chronicled in the release of more than 30,000 emails that show her granular level concern for everything from delivering clean water to tiny African villages to getting an Illinois small business’s gefilte fish delivered to Israel. 

For the media to portray a vote for Hillary as some sort of hold-your-nose moment for Democrats, Sanders supporters or anyone else insults her decades-long commitment to others. She is a hard-working woman who has spent the better part of her adult life advocating on behalf of many whose voices are rarely heard in our democracy. That her work has often been behind the scenes and she has not tried to brag about her accomplishments shows a humility and selflessness journalists claim they want in politicians but penalize them for showing. The person she is running against is a know-nothing charlatan who has spent much of his adult life using others for his personal gain. There are clear differences between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, but the lesser of two evils is not one of them.

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Trump Had A Terrible Convention And It Won't Matter

If you are a Republican hoping the Trump for President campaign would get its shit together, your just-concluded convention must have left you wanting. The week started with Trump’s campaign chairman dissing the Governor of Ohio and ended with the candidate reviving conspiracy theories about Ted Cruz’s father being involved in the JFK assassination. In between, Trump’s wife was accused of plagiarism, Ben Carson suggested Hillary Clinton consulted with Lucifer, and Antonio Sabato, Jr. called the President a Muslim. Through it all, the animating emotion was rage, the favored chant a full-throated “LOCK HER UP” in reference to Hillary Clinton, egged on and abetted by prominent Republicans like Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani.

Once upon a time, Republicans leavened their fear-mongering with a patina of sunny optimism. Homages to lower taxes, less regulation, and a strong military could be relied upon to make their message go down smoothly. Reagan’s “Morning in America” and George H.W. Bush’s “Thousand Points of Light” have descended into Trump’s paranoid imagery of a country fraying at the seams. 

From the inner cities in the 1960s to the Soviet Union in the 1980s and terrorists in the 2000s, there was always some “other” to fear, but that has curdled into a sense of white grievance that now vilifies immigrants, people protesting police shootings, and of course, the twin evils of maybe-not-born-in-America Barack Obama and she-belongs-in-prison Hillary Clinton. Trump’s ranting acceptance speech - clocking in at 75 minutes, had the feel of a tinpot dictator, not a serious candidate for elective office, much less the highest one in the land. 

So why doesn’t any of this matter? It is really quite simple. Any Republican running for President starts off with 102 electoral votes from states they have won in the past six elections, 56 from states they have won five of the last six elections, and about 40% of the vote. The GOP has suffered four major landslide defeats in the last six elections, yet only George H.W. Bush failed to cross that minimum threshold and that was because Ross Perot, a third-party candidate, got 19% of the vote. Bob Dole (also hindered by Perot’s presence), John McCain, and Mitt Romney were all crushed, but they received 41%, 46%, and 47% respectively, of the popular vote. 

Trump’s problem is that securing the other 10% necessary to win the Presidency is both hard and expensive and he has not shown an inclination to do the work or raise and spend the money necessary to win. He is woefully ill-informed about the basics of governing, has no use for the analytics and get-out-the-vote effort that is needed on Election Day and is late to the game in fundraising. The Republican National Convention exposed the amateur-hour level of his organization and major donors are not opening their wallets as they have in previous years. Instead, he is relying on Twitter and appearing on cable TV to make up for his unwillingness (or inability) to generate the money needed to run a legitimate campaign for President. 

But again, none of this really matters because the race will be close simply because the electorate is not what it was in 1964, 1972, or even 1984 when huge swaths of one party’s voters abandoned ship and voted the other way. In 2008, the conditions for a Democratic landslide were about as favorable as they will ever be: the economy was in free fall, we were involved in two unpopular wars, and George W. Bush’s favorability rating hovered in the 20s. And even with that, McCain still scratched out 173 electoral votes and 46% of the vote. It was not a close race, but it was not the 49 state landslide that both Nixon and Reagan won or LBJ’s 44 state romp. 

What we will get for the next 100 days or so is an odd, mutually beneficial arrangement. Trump will pretend he is running an actual campaign for President even though he has none of the basic building blocks to do so and the press will pretend he has a serious chance of winning because to do otherwise would both expose his fraud, drain the contest of any suspense and destroy ratings. Enjoy!

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Trump Has A SINO Problem

I will never be mistaken for President of the Chuck Todd Fan Club, but I will give the host of Meet The Press his due. Politics has a lexicon all its own and Todd recently created a worthy new entrant to that nomenclature: “SINO” – a “Supporter In Name Only” of Donald Trump. The SINO phenomenon has been seen with regularity among Washington’s political class: tepid endorsements, the he-who-must-not-be-named treatment by people like Mitch McConnell, and twisted-into-a-pretzel justifications being used by those who once deemed him a “cancer” or a “con man” for their change of heart.

But the problem with SINOs is that they are sort of like the sell swords on Game of Thrones – they have no loyalty to you and as soon as the worm turns, they run away. As Trump’s attacks on people based on their religion, ethnicity, and gender have intensified, he is in danger of becoming a man without a country. The SINOs who grudgingly siddled up to him are now distancing themselves.  

Consider the reaction to Trump’s inflammatory comments about Judge Gonzalo Curiel. Not only is no one in Trump’s own party rising to his defense, they are stepping over each other to criticize the real estate mogul’s comments. When Hillary Clinton dropped a foreign policy speech that peeled the paint off Trump’s spray tanned façade, no one in the Republican Party rushed to his defense – there was no rapid response, no surrogates parachuting onto cable television to defend him, no point-by-point rebuttal, just Trump and a few lame tweets.  

This should surprise no one. Politicians are, if nothing else, pragmatists. As Trump’s star fades, Republicans will continue distancing themselves from him. After all, why should they lose their cushy jobs and stellar perks for a guy who will not be remembered one second after the polls close on November 8^th? More importantly, why should they risk the future of their party by being associated with a man who is single-handedly alienating every voting group critical to its future; they are doing a good enough job of that without Trump’s help.

But political survival is one thing, upholding the tenets you claim to revere is another. If SINOs truly valued country over party, they would do more than issue hyperbolic press releases denouncing their own standard bearer – they would come out and renounce their support of him and confess a dirty little secret many of them have long known: far from being a Rush Limbaugh-tarred-Femi-Nazi, Hillary Clinton is a roll-up-her-sleeves policy wonk who likes to get things done. In the Senate, she helped pass bi-partisan legislation and as Secretary of State, she took an active interest in the smallest of issues, like a gefilte fish company in a Republican Congressman’s district that was having trouble getting its shipment to Israel.

Of course, the problem in admitting this fact is the electoral support that has sustained many members of Congress and the ocean of money that has flowed into political consultants’ coffers for the past 25 years would dry up immediately and the bald-faced lies that sustain the vast right-wing conspiracy against Hillary would be exposed. Instead, SINOs will retreat from the dumpster fire in order to protect themselves and prepare for battle with another President Clinton.

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Tough Talk

News of the downing of EgyptAir Flight 804 had barely crossed the wire before Donald Trump hopped on Twitter to declare the incident an act of terrorism. The strong man routine fits his profile, after all, his “foreign policy” includes “knocking the hell” out of ISIS, which is an applause line, not a strategy. The media is quick to bolster his tough guy image but we have seen this movie before and the bark is always worse than the bite.

In Nixon’s time, it was called the “madman” strategy – Nixon wanted his adversaries in China and North Vietnam to think he was such a loose cannon, he might unleash nuclear weapons to settle the Vietnam War. The only people who suffered were the innocent Vietnamese people, who were subject to a bombing campaign unseen in the history of war, and the soldiers on both sides who died in the jungles of Southeast Asia. When the bombs failed to work, “peace with honor” and “Vietnamization” became a rebranding effort for admitting a victory could not be won. For all his bluster, the peace treaty Nixon agreed to in 1973 was no better a deal than had been offered five years previously.

Less than a decade later, another swaggering cowboy named Ronald Reagan rode into Washington, D.C. promising to stand tall against the Commies. After-the-fact mythologizing claims the Iranians so feared Reagan they released our hostages the day he was sworn in, but in reality, the deal had been cut weeks before, the hostages were held until Carter left office as a final humiliation to the one-term President not because the mullahs were afraid of Reagan. 

Indeed, just a few years later Reagan was selling arms to the Iranians to get hostages freed in Lebanon; this, after tucking tail and running from Beirut after our embassy was bombed in 1983. As detailed in Rachel Maddow’s book Drift, Reagan’s team could not even invade Grenada properly. The mission was bungled so badly, dozens of soldiers died. 

And if the old saying “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” applies, it is uncertain what happens when we are fooled a third time, but that is exactly what happened when George W. Bush came into office. An Ivy-League educated son of privilege, “W” packaged himself as a Texas cowboy who loved nothing more than spending his down time (which was considerable) clearing brush at his ranch. Of course, he and his aides ignored warnings about Al Qaeda and even after September 11^th, standing amid the rubble of the World Trade Center, his chesty proclamations would end up being largely hollow. Well before Iraq turned into a quagmire, he had failed to capture or kill the perpetrator of 9/11. Ultimately, he slinked out of office with record low approval ratings, the country trillions in debt and scarred by his actions.

Now, here comes Trump. A man who avoided serving in the Vietnam War and whose knowledge of the military could fit comfortably in a thimble. His rhetoric makes Bush’s “dead or alive” threats to Bin Laden and “axis of evil” non-sense look both sober and tame in comparison. Will Americans fall for the tough guy routine again?

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