Rudy Giuliani-- The Gift That Keeps On Giving-- Mueller Couldn't Have Imagined He Could Get This Lucky

No love lost, but late yesterday, Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Josh Dawsey, wrote that Señor Trumpanzee's management of the shutdown, which they are kind enough to remind us is his first foray in divided government, has exposed as never before his shortcomings as a self-proclaimed great dealmaker. Fuckface "has been adamant about securing $5.7 billion in public money to construct" his vanity wall but has been incapable of winning congressional approval despite his shutdown antics and shameless hostage-taking. They wrote that "The 30-day shutdown-- the impacts of which have begun rippling beyond the federal workforce into everyday lives of millions of Americans-- is defining the second half of Trump’s term and has set a foundation for the nascent 2020 presidential campaign. The shutdown also has accentuated several fundamental traits of Trump’s presidency: His apparent shortage of empathy, in this case for furloughed workers; his difficulty accepting responsibility for a crisis he had said he would be proud to instigate; his tendency for revenge when it comes to one-upping political foes; and his seeming misunderstanding of Democrats’ motivations."

My favorite new neocon website, The Bullwark-- basically a new name for the Weekly Standard-- featured an essay by-- who else?-- William Kristol Sunday morning, Trump’s Slippage in Support is Real. Click bait? How about this: "The president is losing support-- not just among independents, but from his evangelical and white-male base, too." Nothing all that new here, just more about the Marist poll everyone else covered last week. There's slippage (anticipated) for Trump's standing due to the shutdown. "The slippage is the worst kind-- the slow erosion of support from key blocs: swing voters (independents and suburbanites) and those who put Trump over the top (blue collar white men and Republicans over 60). It’s been registering in a cross section of polling data, not just one poll. Trump’s job approval rating is down to 31 percent among independents in Gallup. His approval ratings in Rasmussen are down from the 48-49 percent range of late last year to the 43-44 percent level of the past week or so. The Marist data for PBS shows a drop of 10 percent in job approval among Republicans and a decline of 11 percent among white evangelicals and 17% among suburban men. And Trump continues to enrage the Dem base while this erosion in his base continues to progress. Blue collar white men being turned off from Trump shouldn’t surprise anyone, for they know the difficulty of living paycheck to paycheck. This, plus the skew of the tax cut package, spells political trouble for Trump long term, especially if a slow down, much less a recession, looms in 2020."

So those are the #NeverTrumpers. Then there are the actual fascists. They're mad at him too. Even the basest part of the base!

This erosion of support is coming at the worst possible moment for Trump-- unless you consider every moment the worst possible moment for Trump-- because of the Putin-Gate scandal. The video up top is Giuliani speaking with Jake Tapper on CNN and the video below is Giuliani on Meet The Press, both interviews yesterday. Does anyone understand how Trump keeps this clown on his team? He keeps giving more and more away. Today it was that the Trump Organization kept negotiating with Russia to build a Trump Tower Moscow right into November of 2016. Previous to that, all that had been dragged out of Trump was that there was some communication about the project until the spring but not beyond.

Chuck Todd had Mark Warner (D-VA), co-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on afterwards. Warner seemed pretty surprised Giuliano spilled the beans. "That is news to me, and that is big news. Why, two years after the fact, are we just learning this fact now when there’s been this much inquiry? I would think most voters... that knowing that the Republican nominee was actively trying to do business in Moscow, that the Republican nominee at least at one point had offered, if he built this building, Vladimir Putin, a free-penthouse apartment, and if those negotiations were ongoing up until the election, I think that’s a relevant fact for voters to know. And I think it’s remarkable we are two years after the fact and just discovering it today." The CNN show with Tapper was much worse (for the Trumpists). When Tapper pushed him on whether or not Trump was instructing Cohen how to answer congressional questions about the deal, Giuliani, who seemed frazzled and defensive throughout the interview, said "I don't know if it happened or didn't happen. It may be attorney-client privilege if it happened, where I can't acknowledge it. But I have no knowledge that he spoke to him, but I'm telling you I wasn't there then... So what if he talked to him about it?"

Yeah! So what! Sounds "perfectly normal" to me! You? I'm assuming that Cohen secretly recorded this perfectly normal conversation (which is considered a no-no but isn't illegal unless Individual 1 suggested what Cohen should say. Then it's illegal... and impeachable.