Wave Is Comin'-- And There Are Some Messy Races Out There

When I talk about Beltway pundits and prognosticators being "conservative," I don't mean they're Republicans or Blue Dogs or partisan at all. It's more like dressing the way people dressed in the '50s-- although it's not that either. It's being overly cautious and always being a follower instead of a leader. I used to say that the only time the Cook Report was worth reading was on the day after election day. That was unkind and an exaggeration. In fact, Charlie Cook himself has been relatively on top of it this cycle. He's certainly been insistent that the Big Blue Wave is coming and that nothing is likely to stop it. His column at the NationalJournal Thursday noted that the only real hope for Republicans and [the honorable Señor Trumpanzee] is if the economy keeps growing and they get credit for it.

He-- like anyone to the left of Alex Jones-- puts a lot of credence in the mammoth swings away from the GOP in dozens of local special elections since people figured out what the real Trump story is... and started seeing the Republican Party as a little more than a gutless pack of flatfooted enablers. It's not just the 35 state legislative seats they're down but also that though Señor T's "job-approval ratings have ticked up a couple of points to 40 percent... that is still by far the lowest of any president a year into his first term and 10 points short of the number where past White House occupants have managed to prevent midterm-election losses. The Democratic advantage in national generic-ballot test polls is still at about a half-dozen points, half of where it was a couple of months ago but still very much in danger territory for the GOP."

Private polling from both parties shows some pretty grisly numbers in individual states and districts. Democratic candidate recruiting in House races is going spectacularly well-- in fact, some worry it’s gone too well, with too many contested primaries. Fundraising for Democratic challengers is going very well (and you should ignore Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee fundraising numbers, which are some of the most irrelevant midterm indicators in all of American politics). All of these signs support the very clear historic pattern of midterm-election losses for the party in power.

A disclaimer is necessary at this point: The election is 271 days away, so things can certainly change, but that is precisely the point-- things would have to change for the GOP to hang on to their majority. As of now, I’d put the odds of Democrats winning a House majority at about 60 percent, and winning the Senate a much lower 25 to 35 percent.

...[T]he view of the economy is up, and Trump’s numbers are up a bit, but the GOP is still in trouble. For now, the wave still appears to be coming.

Cook mentioned in passing that "Democratic candidate recruiting in House races is going spectacularly well-- in fact, some worry it’s gone too well, with too many contested primaries." Too many contested primaries? Sure, the Democrats aren't defending too many seats-- but the Republicans are. Very few Republican incumbents have contested primaries, although the seats where incumbents have fled for the hills do have primaries, even if--- at least in swing districts-- they're largely between 2nd and 3rd tier candidates, 1st rate candidates aware of the low odds in a wave year of winning in swing districts. In safe red seats, on the other hand, competition between Republicans is fierce. So in TX-05, where Jeb Hensarling in retiring to work at a Wall Street lobbyist (PVI is R+16), in TN-02 where John Duncan is leaving (PVI is R+20), in TN-06 where Diane Black is running for governor (PVI is R+24), and in AZ-08, where Trent Franks was virtually kicked out of Congress (PVI is R+13), the GOP primaries like as wild as the Democratic primaries in swing districts:

• AZ-08- 13 Republicans, but too soon to get a read on fundraising
• TN-02- 7 Republicans, 3 already raising 6 digits
• TN-06- 4 Republicans, 2 in 6 digits
• TX-05- 9 Republicans, 3 in 6 digits

It's like swingy Orange County, California, which is probably where Cook was thinking about:

• CA-49- 5 Democrats, 3 in 7 digits, and 5 Republicans
• CA-48- 9 Democrats, 5 in 6 or 7 digits, and 2 Republicans and about to possibly see a 3rd
• CA-45- 7 Democrats, 6 in 6 digits
• CA-39- 8 Democsrats, 5 in 6 or 7 digits, and 4 Republicans

And something hilarious: yesterday's L.A. Times mentioned psychotic neo-Nazi blogger, Mike Cernovich, a prominent Putinist on the fringes, is "considering a bid for Congress" against Rohrabacher in CA-48 and the other lunatic Republican and the 9 Democrats. So, Charlie, don't blame all the wild primaries on Democrats. You don't remember Cernovich? He was the one who propagated the Russia-invented Pizza-gate conspiracy theory (Hillary offering underage prostitutes out of the basement a DC pizzeria (which didn't have a basement). Another Trumpist moron, Edgar Maddison Welch, a 28-year-old man from North Carolina, took Cernovich seriously and shot up the pizzeria with an AR-15 assault rifle. Welch stands by the story but hasn't;'t been asked to join the Trump cabinet (yet) and isn't running for Congress, perhaps because he's serving 4 years in prison. Neither Alex Jones nor Cernovich was arrested., but for their role, but Michael Flynn Jr and his father were hauled into Mueller's office for their roles in the case.

Cernovich says he may not run against Rohrabacher but instead run against Paul Cook, whose district is nowhere near Cernovich's home in Laguna Niguel. Since Cernovich is certifiably insane, there's no telling what he'll actually do, although, nothing is the most likely for this silly publicity hound.

“Can I take on the Republican Party machine? Get real. No. Zero percent,” said Cernovich, who is registered as an independent. “But if there are 10 people running in the primary and the establishment is split among them, I’m competitive in a 10-way knife fight. Then we’re in the game.”

Cook, who has served three terms, raised less money than a Democratic challenger last quarter and had $828,000 in the bank at the start of the year.

In a follow-up tweet, Cernovich said running for Congress would be “utterly taxing emotionally and financially” and that he would only run if “there’s a play to win.”

Cernovich was supposed to headline last year’s “Free Speech Week” in Berkeley before plans fell apart, and is said to be attempting to buy defunct website Gawker.

The Exploitation Of The #MeToo Movement For Money And Politics-- From Michael Cernovich And David Brock To Kirsten Gillibrand

Cernovich and Gillibrand-- exploiters gotta exploit

The minute a lifelong opportunist and careerist like Kirsten Gillibrand wrapped herself around the #MeToo Movement and decided to try to ride it to the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, it became more than clear that the legitimate cause of brave women protesting millennia of abusive patriarchy was about to take a back seat to self-serving exploitation. It is, after all, the story of Kirsten Gillibrand’s life— and why I’ve been calling on her to resign from the Senate and retire from politics. On Sunday Kenneth Vogel made the case that exploitation of the #MeToo movement goes way beyond Gillibrand and that it’s already “a thing,” political partisans “exploiting the moment, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to support accusers who come forward with charges against President Trump and members of Congress, even amid questions about their motivation.”

Happy when a conservative gets accused but outraged when it’s a liberal? Did you see the Minnesota poll showing that the only people who thought Al Franken— the victim Gillibrand’s dirty little lynch party— should resign were Trump voters (and imbeciles pushing Gillibrand for president)?

All the political low-life profiteers from across the partisan spectrum, from Mike Cernovich and Jack Burkman on the fringes of the far right to David Brock and Kirsten Gillibrand from the discredited Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, are looking for ways to make the moment pay off for themselves. The sticky palms are out.

“There is a danger in this environment that unsophisticated individuals who have been abused by powerful people could be exploited by groups seeking partisan advantage, or by lawyers seeking a moment in the limelight,” said Debra Katz, a Washington lawyer who has brought sexual harassment cases against politicians from both parties.

The lawyers and operatives behind the most politically charged cases brush off those concerns.

“I approach this with a pure heart,” said Jack Burkman, a flamboyant Republican lawyer known for right-wing conspiracy theories who is seeking to represent sexual harassment victims. “I don’t want to see it politicized, even though, in a democracy, you see the political weaponization of everything.”

Gloria Allred, a high-profile women’s rights lawyer and Democratic donor, is raising money to fund a lawsuit against Mr. Trump by a woman who says he sexually assaulted her. The woman, Summer Zervos, has filed a defamation suit against the president that could force Mr. Trump to respond to sexual misconduct accusations made in the closing weeks of the campaign by a raft of women.

And a nonprofit group founded by the Democratic activist David Brock, which people familiar with the arrangements say secretly spent $200,000 on an unsuccessful effort to bring forward accusations of sexual misconduct against Mr. Trump before Election Day, is considering creating a fund to encourage victims to bring forward similar claims against Republican politicians.

Activists on the right are also involved. In November, the Trump-backing social media agitator Mike Cernovich offered to pay $10,000 for details of any congressional sexual harassment settlements, and said on Twitter that he would cover the expenses of “any VICTIM of a Congressman who wants to come forward to tell her story.” Shortly before posting that offer, a source provided Mr. Cernovich with a copy of a sexual harassment settlement that led in December to the resignation of Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, until then the longest-serving member of the House.

And Mr. Burkman, who has suggested that Russian hit men killed a young Democratic National Committee aide during the 2016 election, emerged in October to offer his services to women accusing Mr. Weinstein of sexual misconduct. He had never handled a sexual harassment matter before.

Those pushing the sexual harassment claims say they are just trying to level a playing field that has long favored powerful men, discouraging their victims from coming forward, and silencing many who do using confidential settlements.

“You got to sweeten the pot a little bit,” Mr. Cernovich said. A lawyer by training, he said he was shocked that the person who gave him the Conyers documents declined his offer to pay for them.

But, he said, “if somebody had a settlement like Conyers, I would gladly, gladly pay for that.”

Money could have costs.

“If you’re getting money from someone who has an ax to grind against the person you’re accusing of unlawful activity, that most certainly opens the door to a line of questioning that very well could undermine the veracity of your client’s story,” said Douglas H. Wigdor, a leading New York employment lawyer who has brought a barrage of lawsuits against powerful men and institutions in recent years.

The partisan efforts have already sparked some backlash. Mr. Cernovich and the far-right activist Charles C. Johnson, had to back away from claims that they possessed a sexual harassment settlement that would bring down a leading Democratic senator when it became apparent that the document— which targeted the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York— was a forgery, lifting passages verbatim from the Conyers complaint unearthed by Mr. Cernovich. Mr. Schumer referred the matter to the Capitol Hill police for a criminal investigation.

“I like to hype things in advance, and this looked pretty good,” Mr. Cernovich said. “I definitely learned a lesson there.”

Mr. Cernovich is an unlikely champion for sexual harassment victims, given his previous career as an anti-feminist blogger who cast doubt on date-rape allegations and wrote posts with headlines like “Misogyny Gets You Laid.”

Trump Flops Badly On Afghanistan

There is only one elected official who was ever right about Afghanistan-- just one: Barbara Lee, who stood alone among the entire Congress and voted against Bush's decision to attack and occupy Afghanistan 17 years ago. After Trumpanzee read the speech someone had written for him from a teleprompter Monday night, Congresswoman Lee released a statement criticizing Trump for his "failure to outline a comprehensive strategy to bring an end to our nation’s longest war. After sixteen years at war, one thing is clear: there is no military solution in Afghanistan. Any lasting peace in Afghanistan must be secured through diplomacy. Further military engagement will only put our brave servicemen and women in harm’s way while doing little to enhance our national security. This war has already cost our nation too much, in blood and in treasure. We have lost 2,386 brave American service members, and more than 20,000 American soldiers have been wounded. It is past time to end the war and bring all of our troops home. In 2001, I opposed authorization for this war because it allowed any President a blank check to wage endless war without Congressional oversight. The Constitution is clear: Congress must provide advise and consent in matters of war and peace. At a minimum, Congress should debate and vote on a new Authorization for the Use of Military Force before we commit to another surge that will keep our troops in Afghanistan for years to come and cost billions more in spending."

Way across the ideological spectrum, Rand Paul was also critical of Trump's stupid, knee-jerk reaction which was based entirely on his own fears and his own vanity-- exactly what you would expect from a deranged sociopath thrust into power by a kakistocracy. Paul, in an OpEd for The Hill reminded his readers that "The mission in Afghanistan has lost its purpose, and I think it is a terrible idea to send any more troops into that war. It’s time to come home now."

We went from striking back against those who attacked us, to regime change, to nation-building, to policing their country for them. And we do it all now with an authorization that is flimsy at best, with the reason blurred, and the costs now known. We do it with an authorization that was debated and passed before some of our newest military personnel were out of diapers. This isn’t fair to them, to the American people, or to a rational foreign policy.

The Afghanistan war going beyond its original mission has an enormous cost. First and most important is the cost to our troops. Deaths, injuries and unnecessary deployments causing harm to families are certainly the most important reason as to why you don’t go to wars that aren’t necessary.

Then comes the taxpayer. We have spent over $1 trillion in Afghanistan, and nearly $5 trillion on Middle East wars in the past 15 years. Would we not be better off with $5 trillion less in debt or using these funds in other, more productive ways?

Nation-building should not be our job, and it has consistently been a fool’s errand for us, particularly in this region. There is no reason to believe we can do it in Afghanistan, and certainly no reason to believe we can do it without a permanent, costly presence in the country.

So I strongly disagree with the administration’s actions here. I’ve spoken to the president, and I know he wants to end this war. We’ve all heard him say it. But talk won’t get it done. Although I’ve been informed that the president rejected larger expansions of troops than the one announced this week, that’s not good enough. He should have rejected this one and stuck to his principles. He knows this war is over, and he-- unlike the last two presidents-- should have the guts to end it for real, on his watch.

Regardless of the argument over the number of troops, I also will insist my colleagues take up a larger argument over the power to declare war. I believe we have allowed the executive to exercise far too much power in recent years.

This is one of the reasons I objected just before the recess when the Senate moved to consider the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). I have an amendment that I will insist be considered that would repeal the 2001 AUMF on Afghanistan. That AUMF is outdated, overcome by events, and provides a feeble bit of cover for people who still want to be there.

If the president and my colleagues want to continue the war in Afghanistan, then at the very least Congress should vote on it. I’ll insist they do this fall, and I’ll be leading the charge for “no.”

Derrick Crowe is currently the Blue America-endorsed congressional candidate for the TX-21 seat occupied by Trumpo rubber-stamp Lamar Smith. We first met him many years ago when he was the political director at Brave New Foundation’s Rethink Afghanistan project.



Right after Trump's speech, Crowe released a statement for TX-21 voters that I think is worthwhile for all Americans to read. "The Afghanistan War is a bipartisan failure," he wrote, "that should end with the immediate withdrawal of troops from that country. Instead, Donald Trump is making a profoundly stupid mistake by adding military forces, despite the clear evidence that the war isn’t making us safer and isn’t worth the costs."

Osama Bin Laden is dead, along with more than 104,000 people. This war created the second largest number of refugees and internally displaced persons behind Syria. Despite these facts, the United States continues to spend $4 million per hour on a war in which Washington, D.C. has lost the plot.

House Speaker Paul Ryan made the incredible statement on CNN Monday night that our enemies will just ‘wait us out’ if we put an end date on our military deployment in Afghanistan. I’d like to discuss with Speaker Ryan what he thinks is happening now in the longest war in U.S. history. There are people finishing graduate school now who were in fourth grade when this war started.

Continuing the Afghanistan War in any way at this point is a profoundly status quo decision, one that will send many more U.S. troops home with deep physical, psychological, and moral injuries, to say nothing of the civilian deaths and maimings that will result as we reheat the conflict. Congress must immediately repeal the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force and bar President Trump from tearing another festering war wound into the painful history of the last two decades of U.S. foreign policy.

Meanwhile Breitbart, the Trump-supporting neo-Nazi website run by the criminal Mercer family and Steve Bannon, wasn't all that supportive. Trump’s 'America First' Base Unhappy with Flip-Flop Afghanistan Speech was the headline.

President Trump’s “America First” base was the biggest loser of Trump’s speech on Afghanistan Monday night, and many quickly expressed their disappointment at the business-as-usual address from the president who had once promised to limit American intervention abroad and focus on nation-building at home.

Trump’s speech, in which he pledged to increase the number of troops in the 16-year-war, was the first since the departure of Chief Strategist Steve Bannon and confirmed the fears of many on the right that without a strong nationalist voice in the West Wing, the President would revert to the same old fare that Americans had voted to reject in November.

Using many of the same vague promises that previous presidents had used, including a repeat of Obama’s promise not to give a “blank check” to Afghanistan and a pledge to finally get tough on Pakistan, it was a far cry from the “America First” foreign policy he laid out in the months before election day.

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter, who had been an enthusiastic supporter of Trump during the campaign and penned a book called In Trump we Trust, summed up the weariness of the nationalist right when she tweeted: “It doesn’t matter who you vote for. The military-industrial complex wins.”

They noted that neo-fascist Putin supporter Mike Cernovich was making fun of Ivanka, Jared and McMaster during the speech. He was also laughing at GOP goof-ball Marco Rubio. You can always count on Cernovich to be opposing all policies and actions viewed negatively by the Kremlin-- and Trump's Afghanistan blunder is, a blunder a president in severely over his depth was pushed into by the Military Industrial Complex Eisenhower warned us about.   

The plan-- which will maintain an unspecified U.S. troop presence without withdrawal timetables and intensify pressure on Pakistan to crack down on terrorist safe havens-- was the product of a months-long strategy review in which the president’s national security team talked him out of ending the costly 16-year war. “It wasn’t a debate,” said a senior White House aide. “It was an attempt to convince the president.”

It was also an unsatisfying outcome for a president who likes to act boldly and who has called America’s commitment to Afghanistan a waste of money. But the president conceded that the world looks different from behind the presidential desk.

“My original instinct was to pull out,” Trump conceded, adding that “decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office.”

...While Trump demands obedience from his civilian subordinates, his decision to recommit to Afghanistan demonstrated a willingness to change his mind on matters of national security when his military aides press him hard enough. “It shows that he’s open to reconsidering his positions on national security, which is a good thing,” said Fred Kagan, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq in the late 2000s.

...McMaster and Mattis, both of whom served in Afghanistan, stressed the weakness of the Afghan government, which controls little more than half the country, and warned that an end to U.S. military support would lead to a Taliban takeover.

In one of the last senior staff meetings before the president made his decision last Friday at Camp David, chief of staff John Kelly-- himself a retired Marine general-- played devil’s advocate, preparing Cabinet members and top aides for a grilling from the skeptical president. Kelly peppered the group with questions that reflected much of Trump’s thinking, according to a senior White House aide, from “Why can't we withdraw?” and “Why can’t we shift to a counter-terrorism only platform?” to “Why couldn’t we do this with paramilitary forces [supplied by the CIA] only?”

...[L]ike Obama, who later complained that his generals had boxed him into sending 30,000 more troops to the country in 2009, Trump chafed at the options presented to him by his military advisers.

“Obama was suspicious of what the generals were telling him. They were telling him to put in more troops than he wanted to,” said Eric Edelman, who served as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy under George W. Bush. “Trump does recognize that just pulling out is not an option. If the Taliban takes over and then there’s a terrorist attack, that is a big political risk for him,” Edelman added.

Although McMaster had hoped Trump would sign off on a strategy before a late May NATO summit in Brussels, allowing him to work out the new plan with allies there, White House aides say Trump’s resistance to the proposals from his national security team dragged out the process. In the spring, he told aides, including McMaster, that he had “campaigned against this” and had “been to Walter Reed and seen these guys with their arms and legs blown off.” He asked for more options and he demanded to know how he could justify an additional troop commitment.

White House aides say the president’s cabinet was united in its recommendation to the president, but there were skeptics and dissenters along the way. Chief strategist Steve Bannon, who was dismissed Friday, was a vocal opponent of the strategy endorsed by the president Monday, and though one White House adviser described him as a “ghost” in internal deliberations-- he preferred to speak privately with the president or to talk to the news media-- he succeeded, at least temporarily, in dubbing the effort “McMaster’s War.”

Some Trump advisers-- including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and Homeland Security Adviser Thomas Bossert-- worried that Trump’s approach might betray the promises he made as a candidate. The president’s national security team presented him with additional options, including a plan to outsource the war to contractors overseen by Erik Prince, the former Blackwater chief.

Trump was also intrigued, in two discussions with Afghan president Ashraf Ghani, by Ghani’s mention of the Afghan-istan’s huge mineral reserves-- which, he told Trump, the Afghans themselves lacked the technology and the resources to exploit. By some assessments, more than $1 trillion in mineral wealth, much of it in the form of lithium, could lay in the rock and soil of Afghanistan. But many analysts say that, given conditions in the country, it could be many years before it can be tapped at a significant profit.

After Trump raised the question of mineral wealth one cabinet meeting, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson-- a former ExxonMobil CEO who oversaw projects in several dangerous nations-- warned him about the risk of investing in politically unstable regions.

Trump nevertheless tasked Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross with examining any potential investment opportunities for the U.S. in Afghanistan, according to a senior White House aide.

Politico's Susan Glasser had a more informed perspective. She wrote that the one thing that the Trumpanzee speech proved "beyond the shadow of a doubt" is that "after nearly 16 years of fighting America’s longest war, there are no new ideas," despite Trumpanzee insisting that "his" plan is "dramatically different." Only his war-mongering rhetoric was different. Pakistan is not likely to change any substantive policies towards Afghanistan despite Trump's blustering. The only change will be that, with the disregard for collateral damage, many more Afghan civilians will die now, something that will further turn these people who never forget into eternal enemies. Meanwhile, by the by, the most historically ignorant president in history is pressuring other NATO members to send more troops into the pointless Afghan meat-grinder.

Bannon Is STILL Colluding With The Kremlin To Undermine America

On Saturday, Israel's Haaretz reported, with a sense of irony, that Trump National Security chief H.R. McMaster is under intense attack from the Bannon wing of the GOP by being "controlled by rich Jews" and "hostile to Israel." This coordinated attack, Haaretz reports, "is coming from media outlets and writers affiliated with Steve Bannon, President Trump's senior political adviser, who has been accused in the past of making anti-Semitic comments. The campaign against McMaster intensified after he fired a number of mid-level officials from the National Security Council, who were considered loyal to Bannon and to the former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn... The driving force behind the campaign has been far-right blogger Mike Cernovich, who started sharing links to a website called, McMaster Leaks, which is devoted to attacks on McMaster, on social media."

The website featured a brazen anti-Semitic caricature depicting McMaster and retired General David Petraeus, who is considered close to a number of senior NSC officials-- as two puppets being controlled by Jewish billionaire George Soros, who himself is being controlled by "the Rothschilds," the famously rich Jewish family of bankers. After the caricature was mocked on social media, the website edited it, replacing the word "Rothschilds" on the top of the pyramid with the word "Saudis," but keeping in Soros depiction in place.

The New York Times' Peter Baker, went a little deeper into the anti-McMaster campaign and seems to have found where Bannon is getting his on-line army for the campaign: the Kremlin. For real.

Conservatives have been dubious about General McMaster since the start, but opened up a concerted assault on him this week after he pushed out Ezra Cohen-Watnick, his senior director for intelligence, the latest of at least four hard-liners to leave the National Security Council staff in recent weeks.

They seized on a conservative website’s report that General McMaster had renewed the security clearance of Mr. Obama’s last national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, amid questions about her handling of intelligence eavesdropping on Russians that overheard Trump associates. And they blamed him when The Washington Post obtained leaked transcripts of phone conversations between Mr. Trump and the leaders of Mexico and Australia.

“General McMaster has to be fired because he is the captain of the ship and he has allowed that ship to get out of control and he can no longer be trusted with that responsibility,” Rick Manning, president of Americans for Limited Government, an advocacy group, said in an interview.

Frank Gaffney Jr., president of the Center for Security Policy, another group on the conservative right, said on a radio program on Friday that General McMaster was “insubordinate to his commander in chief” on matters including Syria and Islamic radicalism.

The ferocity of the attacks coming from the faction of the party allied with Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, had General McMaster’s associates convinced that it was no coincidence. At one point on Friday, Breitbart News, formerly run by Mr. Bannon, had close to a dozen headlines on its home page about General McMaster, like “McMaster ‘Deeply Hostile to Israel and to Trump.’”

The #FireMcMaster hashtag was tweeted more than 50,000 times since Wednesday. Echoing the drumbeat were social media organs tied to the Russian government. According to the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan group created to focus attention on Russian interference in the West, the top hashtag among 600 Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations at one point on Thursday was #FireMcMaster.

In an ostensibly unrelated OpEd for the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum tackled the non-response from the U.S. government to the aggressive Russian cyber war being waged against America. She pointed out that "conspiracy theories can be passed along by networks of bots and trolls in seconds... America’s reputation abroad has plunged in many countries. Conspiracy theories have never been easier to create and pass on, both abroad and at home. A part of the U.S. population right now believes that Russian President Vladi­mir Putin is a “Christian” leader fighting against the Islamic State in Syria. In fact his government represses religion and is not particularly interested in the battle against the Islamic State at all."

Yet at the moment, there is no systematic U.S. or Western response to Russian, Chinese or Islamic State disinformation. Attempts to keep track of it are uneven. There is no group or agency inside the U.S. government dedicated solely to this task. And, thanks to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, it looks like there won’t be anytime soon.

Despite a congressional decision allocating $80 million for this purpose, Tillerson has refused to spend the money. This is most certainly not, as Tillerson’s aide R.C. Hammond has claimed, because there is no plan to spend the money: Officials at State have told me that discussions on the issue are well advanced. Nor is it because State doesn’t have the capacity to spend it, or because the department has too many bureaucrats. From the beginning, the plan was always to create a small internal group to spend a large chunk of the money outside the department and outside the government, for example supporting Russian-language media, which can debunk myths told in the Russian media far better than outsiders could.

The real reason is because we don’t have a president like Harry S. Truman, Ronald Reagan or, frankly, even Jimmy Carter in the White House. We don’t have a president, and therefore we don’t have a secretary of state, who wants to stop conspiracy theories, promote democracy, bolster alliances and defend America’s reputation abroad. Instead of a president who identifies foreign disinformation as a problem that needs a solution, we have a president who thinks it serves his interests. If this were the Cold War, in other words, we would be poised to lose.

(Putin Helped Give America) A Fringe White House

One of the guys I count on for Nunes inside scoops has been talking a lot about a fringe alt-right nut named Mike Cernovich lately. Other than him being the one who made up the bizarre fake news story of Hillary and Podesta running a child prostitution ring in a DC pizzeria, I hadn't followed Cernovich's illustrious career as one of the exemplar's of what the Republican Party has devolved into. A 39 year old woman-hating neo-Nazi, Cernovich was recently profiled in the NY Times: "a blogger, author of books, YouTube personality and filmmaker with a far-right social media following. Much of his online persona is driven by two mottos: 'conflict is attention' and 'attention is influence.' He told the New Yorker. 'I used trolling tactics to build my brand.' Before this week, he was perhaps best known for promoting false claims that Hillary Clinton was part of a pedophile ring located in the basement of a pizzeria. He describes himself as an 'American nationalist' and has been involved in shaping alt-right messages on social media, according to the New Yorker. But he has denied being part of the alt-right movement, calling it 'too obsessed with gossip and drama for my tastes' in a blog post... 'Look at me,' he said, speaking into the camera. 'I did this to Susan Rice. I did this to Hillary Clinton. I’m doing real journalism. I’m destroying your fake news outlets. Look at me. Look at my face. I’m the media now.'"

This weekend, by the way, he fully embraced gossip and drama. He's threatening Señor Trumpanzee that if he fires Bannon he'll go right to where so many Trump supporters live and get their information:

“I will go TMZ on the globalists. I will go Gossip Girl on the globalists. I will go Gawker on the globalists. So you mother-effers going after Bannon, just know I broke two of the biggest stories before anybody else,” Cernovich said on his Periscope. “If you think I don’t know the pills people are popping, the mistresses, the sugar babies-- I know all of it. So you better be smart. Because the mother of all stories will be dropped because I don’t care.”

Yes, these right-wingers are so, so crazy and vile, but you can't ignore them-- not with the billionaire Mercer family and Putin using them to put and keep Trump in the White House and the GOP in charge of Congress. Cernovich released her barrage of threats against the Trump Regime on Thursday night.

“If they get rid of Bannon, you know what’s gonna happen? The motherlode. If Bannon is removed, there are gonna be divorces, because I know about the mistresses, the sugar babies, the drugs, the pill popping, the orgies. I know everything,” said Cernovich.

“If they go after Bannon, the mother of all stories is gonna drop, and we’re just gonna destroy marriages, relationships-- it’s gonna get personal.”

Alt-right leaders have spent the week pushing a #KeepBannon hashtag on Twitter, less than a week after a #FireKushner hashtag prominently amplified by Cernovich became the No. 1 trend in the United States on Twitter.

...“I have more stories that I haven’t released. I haven’t released every scoop that I have. I release my scoops strategically. I’m sitting on way more stories,” he said on his Periscope.

Cernovich and many other alt-right leaders famously split from the Trump administration’s party line last week when Trump signed off on a 59-missile strike on a Syrian airbase. Alt-right and conspiracy websites like InfoWars echoed both Russian public officials and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s claim that the attack was a “false flag.” On Thursday, Assad floated to state media that the attack was entirely staged.

...Cernovich has a long history of floating conspiracy theories about alt-right opponents and people he deems to be “globalists.” He was one of the leading peddlers of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which claimed Hillary Clinton and John Podesta were central figures in a fictitious child sex ring run out of the basement of a pizza shop. He also repeatedly claimed throughout the campaign that Clinton was dying of a litany of diseases, from syphilis to Parkinson’s.

Fox News ran an article on Friday commending Cernovich's recent stories, however, saying his "two recent scoops have been anything but fake."

“Hire public relations firms. Pay off (Trump supporting radio host) Bill Mitchell to call me names. Fabricate things about me. I don’t care,” said Cernovich. “You can’t kill what is already dead. What is dead cannot die.”

Writing for Vanity Fair this weekend, Sarah Ellison digs into the civil war between Kushner-in-law and Bannon that is so roiling the United States government and bringing characters like Mike Cernovich-- not to mention Stephen Miller, Sebastian Gorka, Michael Flynn, Wilbur Ross and Carter Page-- out from under their rocks. Senior administration officials told her that "both Bannon and Priebus partisans have spent hours on the phone with reporters, planting stories about each other and their colleagues." Trump, she wrote, "brought with him a collection of advisers who, according to another senior administration official, not only have 'breathtaking personal agendas' and are willing to 'malign the people around him' but are also prepared to say, 'We are going to do it our way and push through what we want whether it is right for him or not.' The two former presidents Trump is most often compared to are Reagan (for the unserious image that Reagan had as a B-list movie actor) and Richard Nixon (for his authoritarian tendencies, his paranoia, and his antipathy toward the press). But those presidents, this senior administration official explained, had 'a real ideology and a real set of issues, and that doesn’t exist here.' Unlike previous presidents, Trump has also neglected to appoint a professional staff with a high-level governing or White House background. This is due in part to ignorance. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, in his first meeting with Barack Obama, Trump seemed surprised by the scope of the president’s duties, and his aides seemed unaware that there wasn’t a permanent West Wing staff that he would simply inherit."

"Kushner now occupies the office that is physically closest to the Oval Office," she continued. "The appointees who have been championed by Ivanka and Jared seem at the moment to be on the rise-- no surprise to some."

No one has been secure in his or her position. Trump’s initial selection for national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, resigned after misleading White House officials about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. Six weeks after his departure, he offered to testify before Congress, possibly about his former colleagues, in exchange for immunity. Next up was Kellyanne Conway, who was effectively sidelined. Then it was Bannon’s turn. “I’m not sure Steve does a lot of actual work,” said one person in the Trump circle shortly before Bannon was removed from the National Security Council, a position he had enjoyed for fewer than 10 weeks. Prior to his removal, Bannon had repeatedly threatened to quit the administration if he were ousted from the N.S.C., according to two people familiar with the matter. “It was almost like they were calling his bluff,” said one of these people. This person told me that, while Bannon and Kushner got along well during the campaign, Bannon seems to have felt betrayed by Kushner and has retaliated by planting negative stories about him. Kushner sees Bannon as an ideologue whose approach has stymied the president’s effectiveness.

Bannon was said to have been persuaded to stay in part at the urging of Rebekah Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor whose family is part owner of Breitbart News, which Bannon had run. She had been instrumental in getting him hired by Trump in the first place, and she urged him, according to Politico, to put aside differences and think about his position in the White House as “a long-term play.” Bannon, who has denied that he ever threatened to resign or that he ever insulted Kushner, has been pushing back. “There is a concerted effort to paint Jared and Ivanka as anti-movement” among the Bannon faction of the staff, said one senior administration official.

...In this rotating cast of regulars, Steve Bannon has for months conventionally come first. Time put him on its cover as “The Great Manipulator.” In reality-TV terms, he would be the Man with the Dark Past. But Bannon’s recent fall from grace exemplifies just how little certainty there is for anyone in the West Wing. “He wears the negative press as a badge of honor, but Mr. Trump doesn’t subscribe to that,” a person close to Trump told me, using the honorific that you still frequently hear among loyalists. “[Trump] wants positive press. He wants positive press and he wants what he is doing to be viewed favorably by the media.”

Bannon had been viewed as one of the two (with Kushner) most powerful members of the West Wing team, and for a time was referred to (reportedly with his own tacit encouragement) as President Bannon-- a joke that isn’t a joke. He keeps a personal publicist and is the self-appointed guardian of the issues that matter to the base that got Trump elected. But, according to a senior administration official, Bannon’s effort to put himself on the National Security Council, without Trump having been fully briefed, made Ivanka and Jared suspicious of his motives. “This was honestly a dark-of-night operation,” this official told me. Similarly, the bungled implementation of the travel ban didn’t win any points for Bannon. According to a senior official close to the president: “You could have told Homeland Security to really start doing their jobs. You didn’t have to sign an executive order and piss in everyone’s face.”

But Bannon’s real undoing in the eyes of his boss, according to three people familiar with the situation, involves his perceived attacks through the media against Kushner and Ivanka as liberal Democrats seeking to undermine a more conservative agenda. Bannon’s other big mistake has been taking credit for Trump’s own popularity, such as it is. Referring to the Time cover, a senior administration official told me, “He is very talented at making himself seem the hero of the conservatives who elected Donald Trump”-- the implication being that if you lose Bannon, you lose them. “It’s a very smart thing to do on his part,” this official added, “but ultimately it’s not a sustainable strategy for him. The president sees through that kind of thing, and he’s aware of what’s happening.” The official went on: “The reality is, if he keeps this up he’s not going to be here.”

Another strike against Bannon is that, when speaking of the Freedom Caucus ahead of the planned vote on repealing the Affordable Care Act, he assured the rest of the senior team, “I’ve got these guys taken care of,” according to someone close to the West Wing. “We don’t have to worry about them.

...Skepticism about Bannon drips from West Wing tongues, making it understandable why he might feel vulnerable. Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief economic adviser and a former president of Goldman Sachs, is temperamentally a key Bannon foe. And no matter how many hugs Reince Priebus may exchange with Bannon in front of conservative audiences, so is Priebus. Trump himself played down Bannon’s role in the campaign in an April interview with the New York Post. “I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late,” Trump said, a statement which ignores the fact that Bannon was the campaign C.E.O. for most of the general election. “Inside, he is a man standing alone,” a senior official close to the president told me. “Even Reince-- he thought Steve was his guy, but he’s realizing Steve is the problem.” Will Bannon leave? “Where that ends will be up to the president.” Unless, of course, Bannon decides to walk out.

...Ivanka Trump, who could play the No-BS Heiress in our reality show, and her husband, Jared, the Crafty In-Law, are both children of privilege and are both extraordinarily loyal to their fathers. The senior administration official told me that, with this president, it is “family above all else. That’s how he has lived his life. Anybody thinking they are going to win a fight against the family is not very smart.” Kushner has reportedly described himself as a “first among equals” among White House staffers-- not an endearing self-assessment, but probably an accurate one-- and has been given an almost laughable assortment of responsibilities. He is tasked not only with bringing peace to the Middle East but also with re-inventing the way the entire government does business. He is heavily involved in policy regarding China. He recently made a surprise trip to Iraq. In addition, he is now the boss of his father’s former tormentor, Chris Christie, who heads a White House commission to tackle the opioid crisis. Christie was the prosecutor who helped put Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, in prison, and Jared has not forgotten.



The Kushners were a prominent Democratic real-estate family in New Jersey. Their relationship to politics was mostly as members of the donor class. A person close to Jared told me that growing up in New Jersey taught him the utterly transactional nature of politics. His ability to move with ease from one political ideology to another, depending on what seems useful at the moment, comes naturally.

Kushner was drawn into the campaign, and the administration, by degrees-- “drafted into this crazy journey,” he has been heard to say. More than anything it’s a reflection of how few people there were to do anything in the campaign’s early days. At one point during the campaign, when Trump wanted to speak more substantively about China, he gave Kushner a summary of his views and then asked him to do some research. Kushner simply went on Amazon, where he was struck by the title of one book, Death by China, co-authored by Peter Navarro. He cold-called Navarro, a well-known trade-deficit hawk, who agreed to join the team as an economic adviser. (When he joined, Navarro was in fact the campaign’s only economic adviser.) Kushner operated in much the same way when it came to crafting Trump’s tax plan-- calling up someone for help out of the blue. Given the initial absence of pros who could do the job properly, he also tried his hand at writing speeches. Responding to criticism from the boss (“Jared, this is terrible!”), Kushner said, according to a person familiar with the episode, “I’m not a fucking speechwriter. I am a real-estate guy.”

...This White House team, for all its early policy failures and the administration’s historically low approval ratings, is more visible to the public than perhaps any other presidential staff in history-- testimony to the amount of time staff members spend talking about one another to the media they despise. Hate-watching is a key element of reality television: viewers get a surge of superiority and catharsis when watching characters they do not respect but in some strange way are drawn to. “It’s incredibly satisfying to hate-watch [Trump],” Shapiro said—and the same goes for watching members of his staff. Senior West Wing aides, like the president himself, exhibit a trait that is essential for a successful reality-TV show: they are largely unself-aware, not fully realizing “how they are perceived, because they will keep stumbling into the same mess over and over again, and they are really easy to place in a cast of characters,” said UnReal’s Shapiro. They are, in part, reliable caricatures of themselves.

Seen in these terms, this particular White House reality show is a success. Although many of Trump’s signature campaign promises-- the repeal of Obamacare, the Muslim ban, the building of a wall along the Mexican border-- have so far failed, the Trump presidency has propelled TV-news viewership to record numbers. Cable-TV news ratings in the first quarter of 2017 were even higher than those in the last quarter of 2016, which had the suspense of the actual election going for them.

Gauged against a different yardstick, though, the state of affairs in the West Wing is something we have never witnessed before. In every White House, there are competing loyalties and rivalries. That dynamic is normal. What is unusual about this presidency is that Trump himself is not a stable center of gravity and may be incapable of becoming one. He knows little, believes in little, and shows signs of regretting what has happened to him. Governing requires saying no to one’s strongest supporters and yes to one’s fiercest opponents. To have that presence of mind requires a clear and unified vision from the president. “Without an ideology or a worldview, all you have is a scramble for self-preservation and self-aggrandizement,” a former West Wing aide told me.

And it is a scramble without boundaries. What has been seen in the West Wing is now playing out in every Cabinet department and government agency: the competing agendas of a jockeying staff are being transplanted to the upper reaches throughout the executive branch as now Bannon, now Kushner, now Priebus, now Pence push their acolytes and protégés into hundreds of senior positions. The White House mess may soon be everywhere.

Cheeky New York Daily News sports columnist Mike Lupica sees the expiration of Bannon somewhat differently from the SNL vision above. He ended today's column with this: "I honestly do believe that when they remove Steve Bannon from the White House, the scene is going to resemble the doctor getting removed from United 3411."