Señor Trumpanzee On 60 Minutes

Even if Trump loses the presidency and the Democrats hold the House, McConnell will still be able to block a progressive agenda if the GOP holds the Senate— or even a strong minority in the Senate. The Republicans are fighting to hold onto a majority and they will have all the money in the world to do just that. One screw up would be not being able to win back the Alabama Senate seat they narrowly lost to Doug Jones when Trump named Jeff Sessions Attorney General and then Republican voters nominated extremist and— worse for some GOP voters— child molester Roy Moore to replace Sessions. As we saw last Friday, Moore can easily win a Republican primary but not a general election, not even in Alabama. (Although he almost won— 673,896 (50.0%) to 651,972 (48.350). Anyway, now that Moore is running again, McConnell and the Alabama Republican Party think their way out of that potential pitfall is to recruit a very reticent Sessions— who announced he’s done with politics— to run for his old seat again, even to just serve for a couple of years and have the Republican governor appoint a Republican replacement.

When Trump appeared on Meet The Press yesterday, it isn’t likely that Sessions became any less reticent hearing Trump describe him as his biggest mistake. In response to a question from Chuck Todd, Trump said “I would say if I had one do over, it would be… I would not have appointed Jeff Sessions to be attorney general... That was the biggest mistake.” Now Trump is trying to make sure Moore loses the primary. His comments about Sessions must have made McConnell cringe.




And that wasn’t even the worst part of the 35 minute interview for Trump and his congressional enablers. He wasn’t able to satisfactorily explain the loss of a $130 million drone in the Persian Gulf. He lied on the economy over and over again, especially as soon as Obama came up. He lied about the humanitarian crisis at the border, blaming everyone but himself. He lied about the Mueller report. He lied about how badly treated he and his family have been. He lied about his business career. He lied about healthcare. He lied about the 2016 election results. He lied about every question Todd brought up.

The Plague Of Trumpism Is Predatory, Of Course-- But Also Cannibalistic

SCAM-ALERT

Elizabeth Warren was in tiny Kermit, West Virginia yesterday, where she and her message were warmly received. The media dubbed it Trump Country. Politico's story headed it like this: Trump backers applaud Warren in heart of MAGA country. And it is true that Mingo County voters went strongly for Trump in November of 2016. Trump beat Hillary there, 83.2% to 14.4%. But guess what they had done on primary day. Mingo into Trump Country; it's Bernie Country. On primary day, Hillary came in third with 1,074 votes. Bernie came in first among Mingo voters with 2,425. In fact, Bernie beat Trump that day too. Trump trounced Ted Cruz (56), John Kasich (22), Ben Carson (14), Marco Rubio (14), Mike Huckabee (8), Jeb Bush (7), Rand Paul (6), Carly Fiorina (2) and poor Chris Christie (1). Yeah Trump's 1,161 votes was more than all the Republicans combined. Impressive. But remember how many Mingo voters pulled the lever for Bernie that day? 2,425-- more than double Trump's vote-- more than double all the Republicans' votes combined. Mingo County is Bernie Country. But don't tell the media; they'll never stop calling it MAGA Country anyway. Or anti-Hillary Country or Anti-Establishment Country. Hillary offered them nothing and they returned the favor. Not only did Bernie beat her and Trump on primary day. Bernie's primary voters were nearly twice as many as Hillary's in November!

Biden has nothing to offer them either. Want to see a replay of 2016? Help nominate Biden. These are desperate people, desperate for change, not desperate for Calvin Biden Collidge's "return to normalcy." He's talking about the "normalcy" that gave Trump 83% of Mingo County's vote.

True, there are some Trump supporters who are too stupid and too racist to change their ways. But those aren't the ones that Elizabeth Warren and Bernie are appealing to. They're not pursuing the voters Hillary awkwardly tagged as deplorables. They're pursuing the working families looking out for their own interest and understood the establishment politicians don't represent them. It was either a sure loser for them (Hillary) or a likely loser (Trump). They went with Trump and he didn't deliver anything besides a circus and an outlet for their anger and resentments. Yesterday Michael Brice-Saddler, reporting for the Washington Post, laid out the intellectually under-developed Trump voters who will never abandon him-- not even if they get robbed.

In fact that's what Brice-Saddler was reporting-- a robbery of pathetic moron Trumpists. Remember Brian Kolfage, some random xenophobe and obvious hustler, who started a Trump-approved GoFundMe page to build the wall that first Mexico and then Congress refused to pay for? About 5 months ago, yelling about "too many illegals... taking advantage of the United States taxpayers," Kolfage raised $20 million in just a few days. How stupid does someone have to be? Their evangelical pastors have them well-trained to be just that stupid. Kolfage was aiming for a billion dollars to build Trump's wall for a "fraction of what it costs the government." How'd that work out for the morons?

“I am very disappointed in you Brian Kolfage, where are the progress photographs?” one woman posted to the We Build The Wall Facebook page.

“Quit talking about it and do it,” another commented.

“I’ve been away for FIVE months,” one person tweeted in April. “When’s the groundbreaking?”

Reporting on the apparent lack of progress on the private wall, published early Friday by the Daily Beast, drew criticism from Kolfage. The veteran called out the story’s author, Will Sommer, who indicated he’s repeatedly asked Kolfage for proof they were close to a groundbreaking.

“Omg this is PERFECT timing by the liberal rag news site. They are about to look more stupid than @hillaryclinton on election night 2016!” Kolfage wrote. “I guaranteed we would build the wall... and I’ll leave it at that!"

Kolfage did not respond to an email and message from the Washington Post requesting comment Friday. While the nonprofit has floated various groundbreaking dates in the past, it’s not exactly clear when, or if, construction will begin.

“We should be turning dirt on this thing by May 1, June 1 at the latest, according to our experts,” Kolfage told Politico in February. In a March 21 interview with American Family Radio, however, the veteran asserted they were going to “start breaking ground” in April.

n the interview, Kolfage said his nonprofit had identified eight locations to build along the border, but failed to name them, stating that his efforts could be thwarted by liberals if they were revealed.

“I wish I could name where it’s at, but we can’t name it because of the ACLU, these other liberal groups who want to sue us and impede our progress,” he said. “But it’s actually happening, the process is happening . . . the project is moving forward.”

He continued, “But as soon as we start breaking ground, we’ll be putting that information out there to show the American people what they’re doing.”

Kolfage has previously indicated that We Build The Wall Inc. seeks to develop segments of the wall on private property, which he told The Washington Post in January would cost $2 million to $3 million per mile. His GoFundMe says he’s visited the border to scope out potential sites and negotiate with private land owners. Kolfage has also enlisted the help of several high-profile politicians, among them former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and Kris Kobach, the former Secretary of State for Kansas, who sit on the group’s advisory board.

Back in January, Kobach told the New York Times they’d hopefully be breaking ground “within weeks.”

Some critics noted Kolfage was accused of shady behavior in the past, including allegations of misusing funds he raised. NBC and BuzzFeed investigations earlier this year alleged that Kolfage peddled false articles and conspiracy theories with the intent of harvesting reader email addresses. The purported scheme would draw people back to his websites and Facebook pages, generating hundreds of thousands in advertising revenue, Buzzfeed reported.

Facebook removed several of the pages he operated last year, according to NBC, in a purge of pages that were used to “drive traffic to their websites.” In response, Kolfage created a new campaign, “Fight4FreeSpeech,” which also accepts donations.

BuzzFeed looked into Kolfage’s previous crowdfunding efforts, which included an initiative to mentor wounded veterans at military hospitals-- among them Walter Reed and Brooke Army Medical Center. He raised thousands for the project, according to BuzzFeed, but spokespersons for the medical facilities told the outlet they have no record of him working at the hospitals or donating money.

Asked about the story in January, Kolfage told The Post that BuzzFeed “100 percent lied” and had fabricated the investigation to slander him. He said the money was raised to cover his travel expenses, and that he only used them for that purpose.

On Friday, many supporters of Kolfage called the Daily Beast story fake news intended to stymie donations. We Build The Wall occasionally replied in agreement, reassuring commenters the wall was on its way.

“This is what we call FAKE NEWS,” they wrote in a post. “We didn’t stop anything and we are full steam ahead. The wall is being built."

As of Friday night, the group said they’ll be breaking ground “shortly.”

In a separate comment, one woman indicated she’d heard enough.

“Saying it doesn’t get it done,” she wrote late Friday. “Do it.”

The kinds of Trump voters who were part of those twenty million dollars that will never build a wall... they will always be Trump voters. As will the die-hard racists and xenophobes. Forget them. There are plenty of normal Trump voters-- some of whom judged Hillary to be the greater evil-- and who now are open to helping rid the country of the plague of Trumpism.

And if you're trying to reassure your increasingly angry investors, who have started catching on that they've been had, that they can trust you because Steve Bannon and Kris Kobach are in on the deal... you certainly know exactly how dumb and how gullible your investors really are. HARDER, DADDY!

Does Biden Have A Place In History Waiting For Him? Yeah-- And REALLY Different From Bernie's

Cook's Amy Walter framed Biden's misguided run for the presidency slightly different from my own preference to hearken directly back to Warren G Harding's Return to Normalcy campaign; hers is Restoration Versus Revolution. That works. Think about the English Civil War (1642-1651). Charles I was executed in 1649. The restoration refers to the period from 1660 when Charles II returned from exile in Holland and was restored to the throne, which those who hated Oliver Cromwell-- who ran the show while there was no king-- called "a divinely ordained miracle." Many who participated in the overthrow of the kind were drawn and quartered, hung, beheaded, imprisoned for life, etc. The Restoration turned England into a cesspool and it was ended when Parliament invited William of Orange to invade England and help them overthrow James II in 1688 (the Glorious Revolution). He was allowed to flee and move in with Louis XIV, finally ending England's political and civil strife by confirming the primacy of Parliament over the monarchy.

I hope Amy Walter is a fan of English history was wasn't referring to furniture or restoration theater in her title. As for revolution... we all know what that is and many of us are aware that we're not talking about shining the turds on the edges but about fundamental change that would impact the lives of all Americans. "The leaders of the ‘revolution’ wing, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren," wrote Walters, "aren’t running to simply replace President Trump, but to bring serious, structural change to the country. This week, the leader of the ‘restoration’ wing-- Vice President Joe Biden-- announced his candidacy. To Biden, it’s not the system that’s broken as much as it is the person in charge of the system who is broken. 'I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time,' Biden says in his opening video. Biden is only running because of Trump. Sanders and Warren would be running even if another Republican were in the White House."

Biden is running because he's always felt he should be president-- divine right-- and he's failed at it 6 times before. Now he claims he's running because of "the white supremacy march in Charlottesville." He's so full of shit you can smell it on the West Coast. Status Quo Joe Biden would be as good for America as Charles II was for England.

Meanwhile, it is highly likely that Warren and Sanders would be running for president, even if it were President Ted Cruz or President Marco Rubio running for re-election. In his February presidential announcement video, Sanders says that his campaign is not only "about defeating President Trump, the most dangerous president in history...It is about transforming our country and creating a government based on principles of economic, social, racial and environmental justice. Our campaign is about taking on the powerful special interests that dominate our economic life.”

At her presidential kick-off in Lawrence, Massachusetts in February, Warren makes clear that she’s not just running against Trump, she’s running against the system.

"Because the man in the White House is not the cause of what’s broken, he’s just the latest--  and most extreme--  symptom of what’s gone wrong in America. A product of a rigged system that props up the rich and the powerful and kicks dirt on everyone else. And so, once he’s gone, we can’t pretend that all of this never happened. It won’t be enough to just undo the terrible acts of this administration. We can’t afford to just tinker around the edges--  a tax credit here, a regulation there. Our fight is for big, structural change."

There are a bunch of other candidates in the race, of course. But, most fall closer to the ‘restoration’ wing than the ‘revolutionary’ one. For example, while Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker are running as agents of change, they are still coloring within the lines and with a caution that Warren and Sanders do not display.

To me, the big question for these next few months is if Biden will take the fight directly to the "revolutionaries" in a way the other candidates have not.

Biden gave us some hints as to his thinking back in early April. Asked by a reporter to explain why he called himself the most progressive candidate in the race, Biden took a not-so-veiled swipe at Sanders.

"..But my point is, is the definition of 'progressive' now seems to be changing. That is, “Are you a socialist? Well, that’s a real progressive.” Or you believe in, whatever. So I was talking about up until this last time around the traditional judgments of whether or not you were, quote, a 'liberal,' was whether or not-- what your positions on race were; on women; what’s your position on LGBT community; what’s your positions on civil liberties, you know. I’ll stack my record on those things against anybody whose even run, who’s running now, or who will run.”

To be sure, there are plenty of Democrats who’d be happy to stack up their records on women and race with Biden. After all, Biden’s forty-year track record on these issues is littered with inconsistencies. Just this week, those inconsistencies came into stark relief at the "She the People" presidential forum in Houston. Interviews with women of color attending the event by the AP, found a lot of ambivalence to a Biden candidacy, as "black women repeatedly pointed to a singular issue plaguing Biden's candidacy: his handling of the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Clarence Thomas and the Senate Judiciary Committee's treatment of Anita Hill.." They also balked at the early conventional wisdom of Biden as a 'safe' and 'electable' choice. "I know that we have been cultured to feel that only the white man can save us," the LaMarque, Texas organizer said Wednesday. "I just don't feel like Biden is our answer."

Before today, Biden has spent most of his pre-candidacy apologizing for and explaining;  his work on the 1994 Crime Bill, his handling of the Anita Hill hearings and his (literally) hands-on style of personal interaction. Now, he has a chance to pivot to the offense. And, to reset the rules and terrain of the game that have, until this point, been set by Bernie Sanders. Let’s see if-- and how-- he does it.

Early Friday morning, Chuck Todd and his team at NBC noted that a Bernie versus Biden race "represents one heck of an ideological contrast." Leaving aside Biden's penchant for the corrupt swampy politics of the status quo DC establishment, the two are at loggerheads over

• health care (Sanders is for a single-payer system; Biden likely will work to protect/strengthen Obamacare);
• trade (Sanders opposed the TPP trade agreement; Biden backed it as Barack Obama’s VP);
• and their vision for 2020 (Sanders is once again calling for a political revolution; Biden is running on a political restoration project).

Team Todd noted that Thursday night "Elizabeth Warren took a swipe at Biden’s entry when she was asked about his record on Wall Street and bankruptcy, per MSNBC’s Shirley Zilberstein. 'At a time when the biggest financial institutions in this country were trying to put the squeeze on millions of hard-working families who were in bankruptcy because of medical problems, job losses, divorce and death in the family, there was nobody to stand up for them,' she said. 'I got in that fight because they just didn't have anyone. And Joe Biden was on the side of the credit card companies.' Ouch."

Clyburn Is Wrong About The Mueller Report Being A "Chapter Closed"

Last month, Chuck Todd's team at NBC News posed 10 questions that they were looking for Mueller to answer. Only 2 of the 10 were answered-- more or less-- in Barr's press release so I guess it will be up to Jerry Nadler, Ted Lieu, Jamie Raskin, Pramila Jayapal, David Cicilline, and the other Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee to get to the bottom of the questions.

The two that were answered were whether or not Trump would be-- as he certainly should have been-- subpoenaed and if any of the other crooked players who blatantly and indisputably lied to Congress would be charged. Trump wasn't subpoenaed, mooting that question. And Neither Trump Jr nor Erik Prince was charged with lying to Congress, at least not by Mueller, even though there is no denying that each did. Can the Judiciary Committee let that stand?

These are the other 8 questions NBC wanted answered:

• Was there kompromat? Was President Trump compromised by his business dealings with Russia (including the Trump Tower Moscow)?

• Did Paul Manafort really share 2016 polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik (who has ties to Russian intelligence)? And if so, what did Kilimnik do with it?

• Who at the Trump campaign directed Roger Stone to get information about upcoming WikiLeaks disclosures against the Clinton campaign?

• Did anyone in Trump’s orbit help WikiLeaks analyze/organize/curate its email dumps?

• Did Trump know about the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer? And when did he know it?

• Where do Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates fit into this investigation?

• What about the NRA?

• Why has Trump-- throughout it all-- obfuscated, attacked and misdirected as much as he has? In other words, why has he acted like somebody who has something to hide?

I hope it's not just going to be Rachel Maddow who tries giving us the answers to these very salient, crucial questions. Remember, the House voted 420-0 to release the report. I'd like to add another question myself: why wasn't the spider at the center of the whole collusion web, fascist billionaire Robert Mercer, who placed Bannon at Cambridge Analytica to run it for him and who financed the Trump data operation, ever questioned? I hope Nadler's committee will make up for the mistake.

I'm sure you've noticed, as everyone else in the country has, that Trump and the Republican Party-- from top to bottom-- appear to "have already won the narrative of the Mueller report without anyone even reading a full sentence from it." Democrats used to be better at this kind of p.r. game. Maybe the DNC needs to try to hire back John Neffinger as Communications Director.

How Many Republican Politicians Are Ready To Lose Their Seats To Support Behavior By Trump They Hate?

A few days ago, the Cook Report published a piece by Amy Walter about the 2020 prospects of a Blue Wall, basically that "the 'easiest' or least risky electoral path for the Democratic nominee in 2020 is to reconstruct the so-called 'Blue Wall' in the industrial midwest. If the Democratic nominee wins every state Hillary Clinton carried in 2016, plus Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, that Democrat would win 278 electoral votes-- eight more than the 270 needed to win. Just as important, it means that Democrats wouldn’t need to sweat Ohio or Florida. They can lose those big, electoral-vote-rich states, and still have enough to win the White House."

Good, especially if it causes Democratic Parry officials to realize that the party should never abandon the working class to go after the Wall Street class again. It didn't win Hillary a single state shouldn't have won anyway and it cost her Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania as well as any shot she may have had otherwise in Iowa, Ohio, Florida... perhaps Arizona and North Carolina as well. The party hierarchy is from the Wall Street class so they think that represents the party. That's the problem with the DCCC policy of ignoring candidates from the working class and keeping them out of "the club" as they did with IronStache (Randy Bryce). Walters doesn't gp anywhere near this stuff but she makes a point that's important to digest:

[I]f Iowa looks tough for Democrats, Michigan is looking pretty good. Trump carried the Wolverine state in 2016 by less than 11,000 votes. But, a recent WDIV/Detroit News poll finds Trump’s job approval in the state a bleak 38 percent favorable to 53 percent unfavorable. The Detroit Free Press’ Todd Spangler also highlights a key point: "General Motors has laid off thousands of employees counter to what Trump promised when he won in 2016.. and [h]e’s also running into trouble in terms of getting congressional approval for a new North American trade agreement to replace NAFTA, another key campaign promise that helped energize a base of white, working-class voters in Michigan at a time when Democratic enthusiasm seemed at a low point."

More ominously for the president, his job approval rating among independent voters in the state was just 43 percent, with 50 percent disapproving. EPIC/MRA pollster Bernie Porn, who founded the non-partisan Michigan-based polling firm more than 25 years ago, told me that even a motivated GOP base will get Trump, at best 43 percent of the vote. The rest needs to come from independents and/or disaffected Democrats.

But, but, but, didn’t all the polls in 2016 show Hillary winning the state? Why should we trust the polls now? It’s a fair question. The RealClear Politics average of Michigan polls gave Clinton a 3.5 percent advantage going into Election Day 2016. EPIC/MRA never showed Trump ahead in any of their polling. Their final pre-election poll had Clinton over Trump 42 percent to 38 percent.

EPIC/MRA’s pollster, Bernie Porn argues that polling didn’t pick up the tremendous gap in enthusiasm for Trump and lack thereof for Clinton. The results in Michigan in 2016, he told me in a recent interview, were “as much against Hillary Clinton as it was for Trump.”

Today, Porn and others argue that the enthusiasm gap that plagued Democrats in 2016 wasn’t there in 2018, and is not likely to be there in 2020 either. Unless, of course, Porn notes, "Democrats run a terrible candidate." An analysis of the 2018 vote in Michigan by the Detroit Free Press found that turnout in the state was “higher than other non-presidential election years going back decades. And that turnout was higher everywhere-- including rural areas and other areas where Trump did well. But the turnout was particularly notable in some big Democratic areas." In other words, Trump juicing his base only works if Democrats once again fail to be inspired to vote.

...Pennsylvania is another state where the polling was off in 2016. Pollsters in the Keystone state, like their colleagues in Michigan and Wisconsin, point to an underestimation of enthusiasm for Trump as a key factor in their miss.

In 2018, however, it was Democrats who enjoyed a solid enthusiasm advantage. Democratic Sen. Bob Casey crushed Clinton’s margins in the Philadelphia suburbs, while not losing as badly as Clinton did in the more rural/exurban parts of the state. For example, Clinton carried suburban Philadelphia’s Bucks County by just under 3,000 votes. Casey won it by 41,000. Meanwhile, while Trump carried York county in the southeastern part of the state by more than 60,000 votes in 2016, Republican Senate candidate Lou Barletta won there by just 26,000 votes.

Ambivalent voters who disliked both presidential nominees. Tepid enthusiasm from Democrats for their nominee. Tremendous support and energy from Republicans for theirs. Those were the three most important factors in Trump’s success in the three blue wall states. As we look to 2020, we know that Trump continues to enjoy solid support from his base, but the Democrats are at least equally energized to get out and vote against him. This leaves the battle for the 'ambivalent' voter as the most critical piece of the 2020 strategy. Trump has done little in his tenure in office to woo those not already in his base. The only question now is if Democrats will nominate a candidate who can appeal to these voters, or if they will choose a flawed candidate who will, once again, force these voters into having to decide between the "best-worst-choice."

Early this morning Scott Wong and Mike Lillis, reporting for The Hill, noted that Pelosi's office had sent out spreadsheets to Democratic members enumerating 400 wide-ranging local projects threatened by Trump’s decision to raid various budgets to build his vanity wall. The list includes locally important projects from maintenance facilities for F-35 stealth fighters at Eielson Air Force Base outside Fairbanks, Alaska and the operation of a middle school at Fort Campbell, Kentucky to funds to replace a training maze at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

We have to smoke out as many Republicans as possible by making the case that projects in their backyard are in jeopardy and will likely be raided to help pay for Trump’s ineffective and politically motivated wall,” said a senior Democratic aide.

Key congressional Republicans, meanwhile, don’t need any nudge from Democrats. They’re already tearing themselves apart over Trump’s declaration.

“Congress has granted the executive branch certain spending authorities. I strongly object to any president acting outside of those explicit authorities to spend money that Congress has not appropriated for specific initiatives,” said Rep. Greg Walden, the House GOP’s former top campaigns chief and the only Republican in the Oregon delegation.

...Across the Capitol, GOP criticism of Trump’s executive move was even more scathing.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), a former member of leadership and senior appropriator, lambasted Trump’s emergency declaration as “unnecessary, unwise and inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution.”

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), a member of the Judiciary and Armed Services committees, warned that Trump was setting a horrible precedent that the next Democratic president could use to ram through “left-wing” policies.

A President Bernie Sanders, Tillis said, would declare a national emergency to implement the “radical Green New Deal,” while a President Cory Booker would declare an emergency on gun violence and end Second Amendment rights.

...Those GOP concerns aren’t necessarily unfounded. On Friday, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a progressive freshman rabble rouser, tweeted that the next president “should declare a #NationalEmergency on day 1 to address the existential threat to all life on the planet posed by Climate Change.”

Gee, I hope everyone knows who Franco was

And yesterday, CNN reported that Republicans are paying a price for Trump's wall crusade. Good but... what price? Will McConnell, Cornyn and Perdue lose their Senate reelections? Will the Democrats hold all their 2018 gains and win another 50 seats, making the House GOP as relevant as a goldfish? Stephen Collinson's analysis led him to write that "A declaration of a national emergency to bypass Congress and reprogram funds already allocated by lawmakers would represent Trump's most striking assault yet on the system of constitutional order that he is sworn to preserve, protect and defend. If the move is not permanently blocked by the courts it could also come back to haunt Republicans, since it could provide a precedent for a future Democratic president to enact liberal priorities on an executive whim." Pelosi added, ominously "If the President can declare an emergency on something that he has created as an emergency, an illusion that he wants to convey, just think of what a president with different values can present to the American people." Could be gun control (an actual national emergency). Or something like the Green New Deal (an existential planetary emergency).

Trump's power grab yesterday is opposed by 66% of voters. During his entirely unconvincing Rose Garden presentation yesterday, he as much as admitted the whole phrase was just about 2020. "The only reason," he stupidly said into the microphone, "we are up here talking about this [the wall and fake national emergency] is because of the election." McTurtle must have nearly had a stroke or-- in CNN's parlance-- Trump's move "is likely to soon present politically dicey challenges for his fellow Republicans."

Pelosi is likely to invoke a clause in the 1976 National Emergencies Act that permits Congress to seek to terminate a President's declaration that McConnell appears to have no power to stop from coming to the floor in the Senate.

That will jam Republicans worried about the implications of presidential overreach but who will face a tough decision on whether to oppose Trump on the wall-- an issue that has an almost mystical hold on the GOP base.

It will represent yet another uncomfortable moment for a party that has often had to pick between its traditional conservative principles and standing with the barnstorming force-- Trump-- that has taken it over.

Usually, when it has been a dilemma between wielding or maintaining power and guarding principles by reining in Trump, the party has taken the first option.

A GOP senator who will face that choice again is John Cornyn of Texas, who told CNN this month that it was a "serious constitutional question" whether presidents can "usurp" the separation of powers and unilaterally dole out money.

Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who is sometimes a Trump ally, expressed deep reservations about the idea of an emergency declaration.

"I, too, want stronger border security, including a wall in some areas," Paul tweeted. "But how we do things matters. Over 1,000 pages dropped in the middle of the night and extraconstitutional executive actions are wrong, no matter which party does them."

Cornyn's up for reelection and a state that is slowly transitioning from red to purple. If the DSCC gets it wish and Beto runs against Cornyn, he could be in trouble trouble. What will a vote on stopping Trump mean for his reelection chances. If he votes to do that, independents will be more predisposed towards supporting him, but at a tremendous cost among Trumpified Republicans in the more backward, rural parts of the state that Cornyn needs to balance out the suburbanites who have finally freed themselves of the cult of Republican hive behavior. If he votes to let Trump do whatever he pleases regardless of the Constitution, he will activate moderate Republicans, independents and Democrats to commit to voting-- against him.

It's not just Cornyn who might see their seat in jeopardy over this. It will be a politically excruciating decision for Joni Ernst (R-IA), David Perdue (R-GA), Martha McSally (R-AZ), Cory Gardner (R-CO), Susan Collins (R-ME), Thom Tillis (NC)-- not to mention Doug Jones (D-AL).

And the House will have to vote too. It could be suicidal-- no matter what they decide to do other than hiding in the cloakroom-- for olde warhorses like Michael McCaul (R-TX), Kenny Marchant (R-TX), Fred Upton (R-MI), Peter King (R-NY) Scott Perry (R-PA), Steve Chabot (R-OH), Scott Tipton (R-CO), Ann Wagner (R-MO), Tim Walberg (R-MI), Rodney Davis (R-IL), Tom McClinton (R-CA), Vern Buchanan (R-FL)-- and even worse for less established members like Ross Spano (R-FL), Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), Chip Roy (R-TX), Don Bacon (R-NE), Jim Hagedorn (R-MN), Mike Bost (R-IL), Bryan Steil (R-WI), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Peter Stauber (R-MN)...

Trump's critics are warning that America's constitutional architecture is now in peril from a President who has never shown much interest in submitting to institutional checks on his power.

"Just because the President didn't get what he wanted-- a stupid wall to placate his rally-goers and his right-wing media chorus-- does not mean he alone can do whatever he wants," said Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, a pro-immigration overhaul advocacy group. "This is about more than a political tactic. It's an attack on our democracy by an autocrat."

Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a joint statement that declaring a national emergency would be a "lawless act, a gross abuse of the power of the presidency."

"The Congress will defend our constitutional authorities," they said.

But none of that is likely to matter to the President.

This showdown has demonstrated yet again that his own political interests come before any respect for constitutional norms or an awareness of how his actions will affect the political system itself when he has left office.

If that is painful for his own side-- in this case, Senate Republicans-- Trump seems not to care. The most attractive feature of a declaration of national emergency is that it allows him to escape a humiliating set of defeats in Washington and initiative a new controversy.

Even if the courts and Democrats in the Senate succeed in curtailing his behavior, the President can rail against their efforts in order to stir his political base as he embarks on his 2020 re-election race.

That will make clear what has always been the case-- Trump cares most about his base, and rarely dwells on who or what is caught in the crossfire.

Carl Hulse and Glenn Thrush, reporting for the NY Times this morning, noted that "The Republican resistance to Mr. Trump’s emergency declaration was much more pronounced in the Senate than in the House, where a few Republicans-- in the minority but more closely aligned to Mr. Trump-- groused. But most of the conservative rank and file embraced it." Remember, if the DCCC doesn't screw up recruitment, the Democrats can flip more House seats next year than they did last year. This kind of enabler approach McCarthy is leading the House Republicans into is, clear and simple, another loud and unmistakeable death knell for a party that deserves to die.

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.

There Are Democrats... And Then There Are Democrats-- They're Not Interchangeable

Rolling Stone's politics guy, Matt Taibbi welcomed the new version of the Weekly Standard (RIP), The Bulwark by noting that "Neoconservatives, the architects of the War on Terror, are the political version of Jason in Friday the 13th: You can never bank on them being completely dead. They just hide under a log until the next funder appears."

Neocons began as liberal intellectuals. The likes of Bill Kristol’s father, Irving (who famously said a neoconservative was a liberal who’d been “mugged by reality”), drifted from the Democratic Party in the Seventies because it had become insufficiently hawkish after the Vietnam debacle.

They abhorred realpolitik and “containment,” hated Richard Nixon for going to China and preferred using force to spread American values, even if it meant removing an existing government. Reagan’s “evil empire” gibberish and semi-legal muscle-flexing in places like Nicaragua made neocons tingly and finalized their defection to the red party.

The neocon-Republican marriage wasn’t exactly smooth. After all, it required sanctimonious, left-leaning intellectuals to get into political bed with the Jerry Falwells of the world and embrace all sorts of positions they plainly felt were absurd. But they believed pretending to support religiosity or other popular passions was fine for ruling elites. This was supposedly a version of Plato’s “noble lie” concept, as Irving Kristol wrote in Commentary half a century ago:

“If religion is an illusion that the majority of men cannot live without…let men believe in the lies of religion… and let then a handful of sages, who know the truth and can live with it, keep it among themselves,” Kristol wrote, adding: “Men are then divided into the wise and the foolish, the philosophers and the common men.”

Using this strategy, this self-appointed “handful of sages” rode the mule of Republican politics all the way to the White House. By the early 2000s they achieved such status that David Frum, the speechwriter who coined George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil,” felt confident in publicly calling for the excommunication of libertarians, isolationists, nationalists and all sorts of other breeds from the Church of the GOP.

“Antiwar conservatives” had “turned their backs on the country,” Frum wrote. “Now we turn our backs on them.”

Having alienated big chunks of the Republican coalition, the group then sank the mainstream GOP politically with the idiotic prosecution of the Iraq war.

Because they started this Middle East disaster on a lie and even bragged about doing so-- “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”-- they undermined faith in a smorgasbord of American institutions, from the news media to the presidency to the intelligence community to their own party.

This was a huge reason for the rise of Trump, who ran against “elites” and capitalized on voters’ loss of trust in institutions like the press. Conveniently, neocons had already begun tacking back to the Democrats by then.

...[L]ongtime Democratic Party advisers are once again triangulating against their party’s own progressive wing, which was the core strategy of the original “Third Way” Democrats in the early Nineties. Party leaders now want to kick out populist, antiwar liberals in the same way Frum once wanted to excommunicate antiwar conservatives.

This overlaps nicely with neocons’ efforts to stake out the same turf between Trump and Sanders.

This is becoming a little like watching two people pretending not to be attracted to one another even though everyone knows they make each other horny. I’d say the Bulwark neocons and their Democratic allies need to get a room, except they already have MSNBC (as noted by recently resigned reporter William Arkin, who complained the network had become a forum for a “single war party”).

As Glenn Greenwald noted in the Intercept last year, the “most extreme and discredited neocons” began uniting with Democrats “long before the ascension of Donald Trump.”

These two groups came together over a common enemy: the insufficiently bloodthirsty Barack Obama. In July 2014, in “The Next Act of the Neocons,” New York Times writer Jacob Heilbrun predicted the future union:

“Even as they castigate Mr. Obama, the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat: aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver’s seat of American foreign policy.”

Democracy Journal ran a similar piece in 2015, in which Robert Kagan talked about a union with Democrats, hoping to replace the term “neoconservative” with the less-infamous-sounding “liberal interventionist.”

The union achieved formal expression in 2016 with groups like the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which is backed by neocons like Kristol and Jamie Fly as well as former Joe Biden and Clinton campaign security adviser Jake Sullivan. These are the same people advising Facebook about which sites to zap (last week, Revolutionary Left Radio was the latest alt media voice to get the axe).

Both groups praised Trump’s early missile strikes on Syria (Kristol, echoing his dad, said Trump had been “mugged by reality”; Kagan said the strikes should just be an “opening salvo”). Both were horrified by Trump’s recent tweet about withdrawing from the Middle East.

The neocons are trying to create with Democrats a true political movement of shared goals and common adversaries. Apart from “liberal interventionism,” they’re emphasizing stridently anti-populist leanings, making little distinction between Trump and “mouth-breathers” like Rep. Steve King on the one hand, and Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the other.

Onetime neoconservative icon Max Boot even went so far as to compare Ocasio-Cortez to Sarah Palin, bemoaning the fact that she has more Twitter followers than Nancy Pelosi-- more evidence of democracy’s imperfections!

Both groups get starry-eyed around generals and spooks and mourned the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis like music-lovers after the death of Prince (“I am shaken,” said Nancy Pelosi). There were even shared fantasies about a presidential run by the Nosferatoid ex-Defense Secretary, whose greatest achievements to date had been grimacing with military severity while standing next to Trump, and clamoring for an increased role in the bombing of Yemen.

If you’re not concerned about undead neocons making a comeback while Trump is in office, that’s understandable. Many people will take allies against Trump from wherever they can.

Just don’t be surprised if “liberal interventionists” are sitting in the White House once Trump leaves the scene. These are determined revolutionaries who’ve been scheming for years to throw a saddle on the Democratic Party after decades in bed with Republicans. Sadly, they have willing partners over there.

OK-- time for an OpEd from The Guadian by Bhaskar Sunkara on one of my favorite topics: These 2020 hopefuls are courting Wall Street. Don't be fooled by their progressive veneer. I've been dealing with this in a series of posts called Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President. So we have Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, Marianne Williamson and Jeff Merkley on the one hand and then a bunch of others who are running as conservative Democrats (Bloomberg, McAuliffe, Delaney, the Starbucks guy, Biden, Klobuchar) or who are conservative but have decided to run as progressives or progressive-lite candidates (Cory Booker, Julian Castro, Kamala Harris, Beto). I'm guessing Gillibrand's focus group testing isn't complete but she'll get back to us what mix of right and left she "is." And everyone's running on an anti-Trump platform, of course, hoping that's all that's needed to make it over the finish line and then "be" the president.

"[M]ainstream Democrats, such as the likely presidential hopefuls Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand," wrote Sunkara, have "been steadily moving to the left to keep pace with a leftward-moving Democratic party. Booker, Harris and Gillibrand know that voters demand action and are more supportive than ever of Medicare for All and universal childcare. Gillibrand, long considered a moderate, has even gone as far as to endorse abolishing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and, along with Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders’ single-payer healthcare bill. Harris has also backed universal healthcare and free college tuition for most Americans.

But outward appearances aren’t everything. Booker, Harris and Gillibrand have been making a very different pitch of late-- on Wall Street. According to CNBC, all three potential candidates have been reaching out to financial executives lately, including Blackstone’s Jonathan Gray, Robert Wolf from 32 Advisors and the Centerbridge Partners founder Mark Gallogly.

Wall Street, after all, played an important role getting the senators where they are today. During his 2014 Senate run, in which just 7% of his contributions came from small donors, Booker raised $2.2m from the securities and investment industry. Harris and Gillibrand weren’t far behind in 2018, and even the progressive Democrat Sherrod Brown has solicited donations from Gallogly and other powerful executives.

When CNBC’s story about Gillibrand personally working the phones to woo Wall Street executives came out, her team responded defensively, noting her support for financial regulation and promising that if she did run she would take “no corporate Pac money.” But what’s most telling isn’t that Gillibrand and others want Wall Street’s money, it’s that they want the blessings of financial CEOs. Even if she doesn’t take their contributions, she’s signaling that she’s just playing politics with populist rhetoric. That will allow capitalists to focus their attention on candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who have shown a real willingness to abandon the traditional coziness of the Democratic party with the finance, insurance and real estate industries.

...Big business is likely to bet heavily on the Democratic party in 2020, maybe even more so than it did in 2016. In normal circumstances, the Democratic party is the second-favorite party of capital; with an erratic Trump around, it is often the first.

The American ruling class has a nice hustle going with elections. We don’t have a labor-backed social democratic party that could create barriers to avoid capture by monied interests. It’s telling that when asked about the former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper’s recent chats with Wall Street political financiers, a staff member told CNBC: “We meet with a wide range of donors with shared values across sectors.”

Plenty of Democratic leaders believe in the neoliberal growth model. Many have gotten personally wealthy off of it. Others think there is no alternative to allying with finance and then trying to create progressive social policy on the margins. But with sentiments like that, it doesn’t take fake news to convince working-class Americans that Democrats don’t really have their interests at heart.

Of course, the Democratic party isn’t a monolith. But the insurgency waged by newly elected representatives such as the democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ro Khanna and others is still in its infancy. At this stage, it isn’t going to scare capital away from the Democratic party, it’s going to make Wall Street invest more heavily to maintain its stake in it.

Men like Mark Gallogly know who their real enemy is: more than anyone else, the establishment is wary of Bernie Sanders. It seems likely that he will run for president, but he’s been dismissed as a 2020 frontrunner despite his high favorability rates, name recognition, small-donor fundraising ability, appeal to independent voters, and his team’s experience running a competitive national campaign. As 2019 goes on, that dismissal will morph into all-out war.

Wall Street isn’t afraid of corporate Democrats gaining power. It’s afraid of the Democrats who will take them on-- and those, unfortunately, are few and far between.

The Halfway Mark In The Worst U.S. Administration Ever-- As Trump Skips Off To Meet With Putin

Maybe Trump will find solace tomorrow tangoing in the arms of his Russian master, but everything at home is collapsing around his ears-- as should be expected by the country when someone of Trump’s calibre and lack of preparation, apptitude and qualifications is elected (sort of) to the highest office in the land-- and then allowed, by a supine Congress, to run amuck. While in Argentina, I doubt Trump will be thinking about a CNN report showing that despite a strong economy-- at strong least on paper-- the number of uninsured children in America has grown, an unprecedented reversal from Obama’s presidency. "Roughly 276,000 more children were uninsured in 2017 than the year before, bringing the total to more than 3.9 million."

Reporting for CNBC, John Harwood wrote that the two calamitous years of Trump’s all-Republican government is sputtering to an end the same way it began-- in disarray, divisiveness and chaos, marked by fanciful promises, contradictory priorities and presidential provocations that congressional Republicans haven’t attempted to rein in. The Trump regime has struggled with the very concept of government. He may have vowed-- hollow and empty as the rest of his marketing-- to make America great again, but Trump “has rattled financial markets, reduced farm exports and raised manufacturing costs with his tariff policies. As growth slows, he blames the Federal Reserve for raising interest rates and threatens General Motors for closing plants.”

The president who promised law and order, having previously fired the FBI director, fired his attorney general over the Justice Department's Trump-Russia investigation. The acting attorney general has been openly hostile to the probe.

The president who insisted Mexico would finance a border wall now wants American taxpayers to pay as a condition of keeping their government open. Congress doesn't intend to build the wall, so the government could shut down next week.

Thus completes the chaotic circle of governance by Trump and the GOP Congress: fanciful promises, contradictory priorities, presidential provocations that Republicans won't rein in. Voters responded this month by handing the House to Democrats.

Obamacare survived. The better, cheaper Republican alternative never existed.

The infrastructure plan Trump promised business and blue-collar supporters has not materialized. GOP congressional leaders prefer to spend on tax cuts.

Republicans delivered tax cuts, but not as advertised. Proceeds profited the wealthy far more than the middle class and ballooned the budget deficit, with no evidence of giving the economy more than a short-term stimulative boost.

Trump's abandonment of the fight against climate change has not revived the coal industry, which keeps closing unprofitable facilities. The president answers his own government's warnings about the climate by saying he doesn't believe them.

Republican congressional leaders want cuts in Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security to shrink government, reduce deficits and relieve pressure for tax hikes. Trump vows to protect those popular benefits.

Tough executive branch oversight, which preoccupied Obama-era Republicans, vanished when their party won the White House. Lawmakers who talked of prosecuting Hillary Clinton skipped past Ivanka Trump's use of personal email for government business.

Unlike Obama, Trump has supplied a steady stream of genuine scandal. Cabinet members and senior presidential aides have departed under ethical clouds, while Trump's former national security advisor and campaign chairman confessed to felonies.

Unprecedented turnover and turmoil hinder White House operations. Trump has filled just over half the administration jobs important enough to require Senate confirmation.

How Republicans attempted to retain power in this fall's elections exposed the chasm between their policies and public sentiment. Most voters believe the GOP tax cut has not made them better off, so Trump promised a new one.

Republicans who earlier favored repeal ran as defenders of a principal Obamacare achievement-- guaranteed coverage for people with pre-existing health conditions. Trump accused Democrats, rather than his own party, of threatening Medicare.

On Election Day, Americans issued their verdict. They cast 9 million more votes for Democrats than Republicans in House races, the largest margin in midterm election history.

That produced 40 additional Democratic House seats, far beyond the 23 needed to likely make Nancy Pelosi speaker again. Residents of three conservative states-- Idaho, Nebraska and Utah-- voted to adopt the Obamacare-authorized Medicaid expansion that state Republican officials had resisted.

And predictably, Trump’s only governmental concern is in crippling Mueller’s Putin-Gate investigation, now blatantly dangling pardons to confessed felons from his campaign if they will lie to protect him and his family. Chuck Todd and his team reported that “hours before departing for Argentina to attend the G-20 summit— where trade with China, Putin and Saudi Arabia are all important topics-- President Trump has been tweeting this morning about... the Russia probe.” Clearly mentally deranged, it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine most Americans hoping he never comes back from Buenos Aires.

“Did you ever see an investigation more in search of a crime? At the same time Mueller and the Angry Democrats aren’t even looking at the atrocious, and perhaps subversive, crimes that were committed by Crooked Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. A total disgrace!”

“When will this illegal Joseph McCarthy style Witch Hunt, one that has shattered so many innocent lives, ever end-or will it just go on forever?”

The tweets, in fact, are just the tip of the iceberg of the ways in which the president of the United States has intervened in, criticized, thwarted, and potentially obstructed an investigation that involves him, his family and his 2016 presidential campaign. Consider:

• He’s once again dangling a pardon to former campaign chairman Paul Manafort;
• Manafort’s lawyer was cooperating with Trump’s legal defense team-- after Manafort struck a plea agreement with special counsel Robert Mueller;
• Trump dumped his attorney general (because he recused himself from the Russia probe) and inserted a Mueller critic to be acting attorney general;
• When asked why he retweeted an image of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein behind bars, Trump replied, “He should have never picked a special counsel”;
• He admitted firing former FBI Director James Comey over the Russia investigation ("When I decided to [fire Comey], I said to myself, I said you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story,” he told NBC’s Lester Holt);
• And Trump dictated the misleading statement on his son’s Trump Tower meeting with Russians.

Add up all of these actions-- and they’re not an exhaustive list-- and you see a president who’s actively intervening in an investigation that involves him.

Whatever Putin invested in getting Trump into the White House will prove to be one of the most successful and productive moves in Russian history... at least in the short run. America is in chaos and everything is falling apart. Putin's desire to foster disunity in his biggest foe has paid off in spades. America is a crippled giant, exactly what the Russians have been hoping for and plotting for, for decades.