Wow. It’s been some week so far, eh? Time, perhaps, to resurrect an old moniker and start calling The Donald “Tricky Trump”? Not quite as sharp as the Nixonian “Tricky Dick” with its hints of ribaldry and ratfucking, but certainly accurate for the guy who has been squatting in the White House since January 20. “Tacky Trump” would also be accurate but without the political edge.
It’s been reported that White House staffers have collected clippings of the response to Trump’s firing of FBI chief James Comey. Perusing those seems likely to contribute to his increasing isolation and nursing of grievances because the man can’t handle reality. He’s made a pretty big mess of surreality, too. Given that almost every day produces another instance of the Trump regime forcing our jaws to plunge all the way to floor, it’s a wonder we have any teeth left.
A political observer with a magic lamp would be hard-pressed whether to wish he or she could be a big-earred fly on the wall of Trump’s meetings or a passenger in a time machine that could speed ahead to see where this all ends. I would go for the latter, if only to see in advance how bad President Pence may be.
Bruce Shapiro at The Nation writes—Comey’s Firing Is Worse Than the Saturday Night Massacre. At least during Watergate officials inside the administration refused to collude with Nixon’s orders:
James Comey is out at the FBI, and comparisons to Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre are in—but that’s exactly the wrong comparison. In Washington, people get fired all the time; what distinguished the Saturday Night Massacre was refusal. It began with Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox’s refusal to compromise in his demand for Nixon’s Oval Office tapes; and then refusals by Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus when Nixon demanded that Cox be fired.
Thus far, the Comey story is the exact opposite: It is all about collusion—the endorsement of Trump’s action by Attorney General Jeff Sessions; the thin, just-following-orders support memo by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein; and the muted response of Senate Republicans, at least in the first hours after Comey’s firing. Collusion in formerly unimaginable words and deeds has defined the Republican leadership’s relationship with Trump from the moment he seized the party’s nomination, and if the firing of Comey is any indication, the limits of the palatable have just moved outward another yard. [...]
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—Trump Is Insulting Our Intelligence:
[T]o pretend now that Trump is outraged by Comey’s mistreatment of Clinton simply boggles the mind. It is not to be believed.
Truth be told, the incessant lying by this president and the elaborate apparatus he has built in the White House to bend reality to meet those lies means that nothing they say is to be believed anyway, but this is of a different nature. This says to America: I’m going to tell you a lie that is so outrageous that you will want to believe that some part of it is true, to preserve your faith in truth, democracy and mankind.
They are using our own human nature against us. We want to believe that people’s natural default is toward truth and good, because the alternative is untenable: Moral anarchy? Well, the alternative is upon us.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Mitch McConnell may be making the most important mistake of his career:
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is one of the shrewdest politicians of his generation. But by speaking Wednesday on the Senate floor in defense of President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James B. Comey, McConnell made what is likely to stand as the most important mistake of his long political career.
The Kentucky Republican, who is measured and calculating about everything, should have known better. He chose to ally himself with a man who becomes unhinged whenever the subject of his campaign’s possible collusion with Russian interference in our election arises. [...]
By contrast, many of McConnell’s Republican colleagues have begun disentangling their party from a presidency that is likely to end in a train wreck. Sen. Jeff Flake (Ariz.) said he spent “several hours trying to find an acceptable rationale for the timing of Comey’s firing. I just can’t do it.” Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (N.C.) said he was “troubled by the timing and reasoning of Director Comey’s termination.” Sen. Ben Sasse (Neb.) joined in calling the timing “very troubling.”
Someday, McConnell will wish that he sounded more like Flake, Burr, Sasse and similarly minded Republicans.
Frank Rich at New York Magazine writes—The Comey Firing May Be the Beginning of the End of the Trump Administration:
The axing of James Comey will not be the end of the Russia investigation. But it may be the beginning of the end of the Trump administration.
Let’s assume the worst immediate scenario for the moment. That the Vichy Republicans in D.C. — whether Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, or the big-bark-no-bite John McCain and Lindsey Graham — either block or pocket veto the Democrats’ calls for an independent prosecutor. And that somehow Trump and Jeff Sessions (who claims to have recused himself from all matters Russian, but clearly has not) ram one of their personal toadies through the Senate as the next FBI director: Rudy Giuliani perhaps, or Michael Mukasey, or, heaven knows, Jeanine Pirro. Nonetheless, the new director’s attempts to further derail the ongoing investigation will be met with revolt by the career professionals within the organization — an unwinding that may already be happening. There will be chaos. There will be leaks. There will be resignations. There will be synergy, clandestine or otherwise, with the Senate and House investigations into Trump and Russia. There will be blood. After the news of the firing broke last night, McCain called the scandal “a centipede” and made an unassailable prediction: “I guarantee you there will be more shoes to drop, I can just guarantee it. There’s just too much information that we don’t have that will be coming out.”
Anyone in criminal jeopardy will be out to save his or her own butt, not to protect Donald J. Trump. This includes Michael Flynn — whom Trump is trying to hush up by continuing to sing his praises in public, presumably because Flynn knows enough to blackmail Trump (just as Russia knew enough to blackmail Flynn). My guess is that Flynn, who took such delight in calling for Hillary Clinton to be locked up, does not want to go to prison.
Jeet Heer at The New Republic writes—It’s Now Up to Democrats to Save American Democracy:
Comparisons between the current political crisis and the Watergate scandal are now flying fast and thick, with many parallels drawn to Richard Nixon’s firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox in the so-called Saturday Night Massacre. Yet these analogies miss a crucial distinction: While firing Cox accelerated Nixon’s spiral toward resignation, there is every reason to believe that Trump’s firing of Comey will in fact buy him more time, and might even help bury the Russia scandal for good. [...]
The lay of the land is clear: By firing Comey, Trump will successfully stall the FBI investigation. After all, is any Trump-appointed director likely to ask for the significant increase in resources that the investigation apparently requires? Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress will run interference for Trump. The only hope for a full investigation, then, is for Democrats to take back the House of Representatives, and possibly the Senate, in 2018. Control of either chamber would give Democrats the leverage needed to revive the investigation—and to start checking Trump’s wider abuses of power.
Democrats need to make Trump’s attempts to quash the Russia investigation a key campaign issue, one that implicates not just the president but also his party. Until now, there was good reason to avoid making the investigation so pivotal. For the sake of its long-term health, the Democratic Party needs to rebuild its status as a champion of average Americans, by focusing on issues like health care and the minimum wage. But Trump’s scorn for democratic norms has become so prominent a feature of his presidency that it can’t be avoided.
Emily Atkin at The New Republic writes—Should We Call Climate-Change Deniers “Dismissives” Instead? A renowned scientist proposes an alternative to a contested word:
NPR’s Rachel Martin had a fascinating interview on Tuesday with Katharine Hayhoe, a renowned climate scientist and evangelical Christian, in which they discussed the toxic nature of the world “climate denier”—a word that environmental reporters, including me, use all the time to describe people who don’t accept the scientific consensus that climate change is real, man-made, and dangerous. Hayhoe argued that calling people deniers is “a good way to end the conversation,” and that it’s actually more accurate to use the word “climate dismissive.”
“I think that’s the perfect term,” Hayhoe said, “because a dismissive person will dismiss any evidence, any arguments with which they’re presented, because dismissing the reality of climate change and the necessity for action is such a core part of their identity that it’s like asking them to almost cut off an arm. That’s how profound the change would be for them to change their minds about climate change.”
Dani McClain at The Nation writes—This Mother’s Day, Black Lives Matter Activists Will Give More Than 30 Women Their Freedom:
This week, black women in more than a dozen jails across the country will receive a Mother’s Day gift from the Black Lives Matter movement: their freedom. These women are among the 62 percent of people in jail who are there not because they’ve been convicted of a crime but because they can’t pay to get back to their lives as they await trial. Organizers with Southerners on New Ground (SONG), the Movement for Black Lives, ColorOfChange, and other groups have reached their goal of raising more than $250,000 for what they’re calling National Mama’s Bail Out Day, and are continuing to raise more. These groups will pay for the release of women whose pretrial detention illustrates much of what’s wrong with the criminal justice system. Many of the women who will be freed are in jail for low-level offenses such as loitering or small-scale drug possession. Nationwide, nearly a third of all women in jail have serious mental health issues, and the racial disparity is clear: Black women make up 44 percent of women in jails.
The idea for the Mother’s Day bailout, which will free at least 30 women in Atlanta, Houston, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and other cities nationwide, came out of a January gathering of representatives from 25 black-led organizations that wanted to collaborate on bail reform. The groups wondered how they might begin to put into action the vision outlined in the Movement for Black Lives policy platform released last summer.
Lawrence Douglas at The Guardian writes—By firing James Comey, Trump is continuing the work Putin started:
Whether there was actual collusion between the Russians and members of Trump’s election team is, at present, impossible to say.
We do know that the FBI had sufficient concerns to launch a probe. We know that the man named by then president-elect Trump to serve as his national security adviser , Michael Flynn, apparently sought to assure the Russians that they would suffer no adverse consequences as a result of their attack on our democracy.
Whether Flynn acted on his own renegade initiative or at the behest of Trump is just one of the many questions that remain unanswered. And these are the questions that Trump now hopes will never be answered. [...]
Even if innocent of collusion, Trump has done something almost as bad – he has undermined investigative independence, a mainstay of rule-based governance. The Russians need no longer expend their energies trying to subvert the integrity of our political system. Now they have our president to do that job.
Richard Wolffe at The Guardian writes—Swap 'Clinton' for 'Trump' to see just how bad the Flynn scandal is:
Listening to the impeccable testimony of Sally Yates before the Senate on Monday, as well as the astonishing Republican questions, it’s hard to escape this conclusion: Trump’s Washington stinks.
It stinks from the top of Capitol Hill to the luxury hotel lobby on Pennsylvania Avenue, all the way to the depths of Foggy Bottom. It stinks from the Oval Office to the press office, and you don’t have to stop at the counsel’s office to check on the stench. A rank raincloud of lies, spies and bribes hangs over the nation’s capital ready to release its unusually golden shower.
When the acting attorney general first told the White House counsel Don McGahn about Michael Flynn’s relationship with the Russians, the reaction was almost as astonishing as a John Le Carré plot.
Trump’s lawyer first wanted to know how Flynn had fared under FBI questioning. “Mr McGahn asked me how he did and I declined to give him an answer to that,” Yates explained. “And we then walked through with Mr McGahn essentially why we were telling them about this and the first thing we did was to explain to Mr McGahn that the underlying conduct that General Flynn had engaged in was problematic in and of itself.”
Sarah Jones at The New Republic writes—Stop promoting liberal conspiracy theories on Twitter:
Louise Mensch is experienced in three areas: Writing chick lit, marrying famous music managers, and quitting a political career. Notice that Russian politics is not one of these areas. She has no degree in any subject that would grant her anything close to expertise on Russian politics. And she tweets things like this:
[...]
Louise Mensch doesn’t know anything about the Russia investigation. No one sane would leak any valuable information to a person who isn’t a journalist and whose only moment of public self-awareness occurred in 2012, when she appeared on the BBC’s Question Time and announced: “I did serious drugs and it messed with my head.”
David Horsey at the Los Angeles Times writes—Donald Trump is too inept to conduct a successful coverup:
It is significant that Trump sent his own private bodyguard to deliver the dismissal letter to Comey at FBI headquarters — that shows how personal it was to him. Unfortunately, nobody bothered to check on Comey’s whereabouts. As it turned out, the director learned he was out of a job when he looked up at a TV screen while talking with FBI staff in Los Angeles.
That little detail alone shows the ineptness of Trump and his team. Their amateurishness is further evidenced by their apparent surprise that Comey’s firing sparked a firestorm of criticism. Apparently, they thought Democrats would be happy to see Hillary’s nemesis depart and did not expect Republicans to care much at all. Maybe they believed no one was actually serious about the Russia investigations. But, just as Nixon’s attempts to stifle the probe into his coverup led to congressional investigations, Trump’s ham-fisted actions have only enhanced chances that a special prosecutor will be appointed to look into the shadowed corners of the Trump campaign.
It is entirely possible Trump is completely innocent, but he appears unable to stop doing dumb things that make him look as if he’s got something to hide.
William Hartung at Lobelog Foreign Policy writes—Ignoring the Costs of War:
Even on the rare occasions when the costs of American war preparations and war making are actually covered in the media, they never receive the sort of attention that would be commensurate with their importance. Last September, for example, the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute released a paper demonstrating that, since 2001, the U.S. had racked up $4.79 trillion in current and future costs from its wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria, as well as in the war at home being waged by the Department of Homeland Security. That report was certainly covered in a number of major outlets, including the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, and U.S. News and World Report. Given its importance, however, it should have been on the front page of every newspaper in America, gone viral on social media, and been the subject of scores of editorials. Not a chance.
Yet the figures should stagger the imagination. Direct war spending accounted for “only” $1.7 trillion of that sum, or less than half of the total costs. The Pentagon disbursed those funds not through its regular budget but via a separate war account called Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO). Then there were the more than $900 billion in indirect war costs paid for from the regular budget and the budget of the Department of Veterans Affairs. And don’t forget to add in the more than half-trillion dollars for the budget of the Department of Homeland Security since 2001, as well as an expected $1 trillion in future costs for taking care of the veterans of this century’s wars throughout their lifetimes. [...]
That cost, in fact, deserves special attention. The Veterans Administration has chronic problems in delivering adequate care and paying out benefits in a timely fashion. Its biggest challenge: the sheer volume of veterans generated by Washington’s recent wars. An additional two million former military personnel have entered the VA system since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began. Fully half of them have already been awarded lifetime disability benefits. More than one in seven — 327,000 — suffer from traumatic brain injury.