Which Is Sillier? What Trumpanzee, Jr. Wants Or What Kris Kobach Wants?

Two silly propositions: Mayor Trumpanzee, Jr. or King Kobach. Let's start with Fredo. According to Cindy Adams, Junior is telling acquaintances he wants to run for mayor. Staten Island doesn't have a mayor. Neither does the part of south Brooklyn from Brighton Beach east which is lousy with Russian immigrants. Junior could probably win in either of those places. His father did. But, basically, New York City was not Trump country in 2016. This was his Papa Trump's borough breakdown:

• Bronx- 9.6%
• Brooklyn- 17.9%
• Manhattan- 10.0%
• Queens- 22.1%
• Staten Island- 57.2%

Donald Trump Jr. by Nancy Ohanian

How about this NY Times headline? A Would-Be Trump Aide's Demands: A Jet On Call, A Future Cabinet Post And More? Both Trumpanzees, Sr. and Jr., will soon be insisting Maggie Haberman's report is fake news. Republicans are desperate to keep the colossally unpopular former-- as in defeated-- Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (missing a "K"), from running for the Senate. He could probably win a primary for Pat Robert's open Senate seat and would almost definitely lose a general election, where Democrats, independents and mainstream Republicans would team up to defeat him, like they did last year when he ran for governor and was beaten by Democrat Laura Kelly, 506,727 (48.0%) to 453,645 (43.0%). Remember, Kansas is one of the reddest state's in the Union. The PVI is R+13 and Hillary only managed to take 36% of the vote, winning just two of the state's 105 counties.

McConnell asked Trump to give him a job so that he doesn't run for the Senate and imperil the Republican majority. But not a job that has to be confirmed, because most senators don't want to go on record confirming a highly visible confirmed racist zealot. So Trump offered him a made up position, "immigration czar," he thought would appeal to Kobach's desire to end immigration into the U.S. from anywhere other than Scandinavia. Haberman reported that he demanded "access to a government jet 24 hours a day; an office in the West Wing, plus guaranteed weekends off for family time. And an assurance of being made secretary of homeland security by November."

Those were among a list of 10 conditions that Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, has given to the White House if he is to become the administration’s “immigration czar,” a job President Trump has been looking to create to coordinate immigration policy across government agencies. The list was described by three people familiar with it.

Mr. Kobach, who once served as an adviser to the hard-line immigration Sheriff Joe Arpaio and helped write an Arizona law requiring local officials to verify the citizenship of anyone they had “reasonable suspicion” to believe was an unauthorized immigrant, said he would need to be the main television spokesman for the Trump administration on immigration policy. And he said he wanted a guarantee that cabinet secretaries whose portfolios relate to immigration would defer to him, with the president mediating disputes if need be.

The list was submitted by Mr. Kobach in recent weeks as he discussed his interest in the job. Other conditions included having a staff of seven reporting to him, “walk in” privileges to the Oval Office, a security detail if deemed necessary and the title of assistant to the president.

He would need access to the jet, he said, for weekly visits to the border and travel back to Kansas on the weekends. The existence of the list has become known among officials in the Trump administration, some of whom were taken aback by what they regard as its presumptuousness.

...While [serving as Kansas Secretary of State] he was picked by Mr. Trump to lead a voter fraud commission after the president insisted that the 2016 election was marred by millions of illegal votes.

The commission was disbanded in 2018, with one expert on election law, Richard L. Hasen, describing its chairman as “a leader nationally in making irresponsible claims that voter fraud is a major problem in this country.”

The same year, Mr. Kobach, a former chairman of the Kansas Republican Party, also ran for governor, losing to a Democrat, Laura Kelly. He lost a race for the House in 2004.

The list underscores the clout Mr. Kobach hopes to have in a job that would not require Senate confirmation, but could drive Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda. One of its main objectives was to minimize the influence of cabinet officials, who have at times been targets of Mr. Trump’s ire, or have jostled for his ear.

After Kirstjen Nielsen, the former homeland security secretary, resigned in April, Mr. Trump met with Mr. Kobach about the possibility of succeeding her. Mr. Kobach, according to people familiar with the meeting, brought with him a detailed and plan to crack down on asylum seekers entering the country. He told Mr. Trump that the only way for him to complete the mission was to be able to fly down to the border at a moment’s notice.

Apparently having grown fed up with Kobach and his absurd demands, the NY Times reported this afternoon that Trump game the job to another xenophobic maniac, Ken Cuccinelli, a failed Virginia Republican extremist. I wish I could report that McTurtle was so distraught that he committed suicide but, so far, not reports about how he's taking the potentially disastrous news.