GOP Death Cult Convention Celebrates Trump's Leadership-- As U.S. Hurtles Towards 200,000 COVID-Deaths

Tuesday, which was the second day of the #CocaineConvention, was just another normal pandemic day in the USA-- another 1,291 Americans killed by Trump and the Republican Party and another 40,098 new cases. These are the ten worst anti-hero Trumpist governors causing their states the most unnecessary contagion and how many new cases they caused as the GOP Convention kicked off:

• Greg Abbott +6,803-- 21,231 cases per million Texans
• Ron DeSantis +2,673-- 28,192 cases per million Floridians
• Brian Kemp +2,101-- 24,333 cases per million Georgians
• Mike Parson +1,060-- 12,692 cases per million Missourans
• Henry McMaster +937-- 22,042 cases per million South Carolinians
• Doug Ducey +859-- 27,377 cases per million Arizonans
• Bill Lee +813-- 21,293 cases per million Tennesseans
• Tate Reeves +801-- 26,614 cases per million Mississippans
• Kevin Stitt +650-- 13,690 cases per million Sooners
• Kim Reynolds +631-- 18,161 cases per million Iowans

For sake of comparison, the worst hit Europeans country, Spain, has 9,051 cases per million Spaniards. Yesterday, Texas and Florida led the nation in reported new COVID-deaths, respectively 206 and 186. All the western European countries combined didn't have as many deaths yesterday as either Texas or Florida:

• Spain +52
• UK +16
• France +16
• Germany +9
• Netherlands +5
• Italy +4
• Belgium +4
• Portugal +4
• Switzerland +1
• Greece +1

Sweden, Ireland, Austria, Denmark, Norway, and Finland all reported no new deaths on Tuesday.

All these numbers point to a failure of American political leadership-- a failure by Trump, first and foremost-- and a failure by his puppet governors. Harsh? Not at all. Ron DeSantis-- who forced his state's schools to reopen this month in the middle of a deadly, out of control pandemic infected 8,585 school children-- bringing the Florida total to 48,730 cases among children in the worst-run of big states in America. DeSantis ordered that any school not holding in person classes at least 5 days a week would be cut off from state funding. Many Floridians are asking if DeSantis should be tried for murder. Anselm Weber is the Democratic Party nominee for the open Florida state House seat representing HD-76 (Fort Myers Beach, Bonita Springs, Sanibel) He told us that "It is downright diabolical what DeSantis is doing with school reopenings. It doesn't take a genius to realize sending kids and school staff back to work during a pandemic, while not mandating masks, will lead to significant rises in COVID deaths. Israel was handling the virus relatively well before they reopened schools, which then resulted in a massive uptick in cases. Florida has already been the global epicenter for COVID-19 roughly a month ago, and we are in absolutely no standing to reopen schools. Moreover, DeSantis is using this opportunity to cut school funding for schools that wish not to reopen. The GOP is intentionally allowing massive COVID deaths while using this as a pretext to support their ghoulish austerity driven ideology."

Kathy Lewis is looking like a winner in a Tampa Bay area open seat district. She has also noticed what DeSantis is up to. "This is a sad situation for all," she told me yesterday. "There is no correct way that I am aware of to handle the back-to-school dilemma during a pandemic. But Governor DeSantis has put our children's lives and their parents' and teachers' livelihoods at risk by forcing a return to in-person classes. Parents and teachers are looking for well-thought direction from their elected leaders, not just offhand orders to 'figure it out.' For instance, this plan does not consider children who need specialized curricula, such as those with disabilities, who are being left adrift by the state while their teachers and parents struggle to find ways to accommodate them and keep all their students safe. I fully expect we will see a preventable rise in the number of new COVID cases and related deaths in early September-- all a result of this unconscionable decision requiring school districts to trade the safety of their students and teachers for desperately needed funding."

After Night Two of the GOP Lie-Fest, Glenn Kessler and his Washington Post team of fact checkers called it "another tsunami of untruths" and singled out 19 particular big lies.

And right after the second night's festivities Post reporter Touluse Olorunnipa began his analysis by noting that "Faced with a pandemic that has killed more than 175,000 Americans, President Trump used glitzy video and misleading testimonials to spin a tale of heroism and resolve far removed from the grim reality of a country in the throes of an uncontrolled public health crisis. At the Republican National Convention on Monday, Trump was hailed as a bold and lifesaving leader who 'was right' on the novel coronavirus while Democrats, doctors and pundits were wrong from the beginning. One campaign-style video that aired during the convention hailed Trump as the 'one leader' who stood up to the virus while quoting Democratic figures who played down the severity of the virus in its early stages."

It’s a revisionist version of recent history belied by hours of videotape in which the president minimized the threat of the virus for months, falsely predicted that it would “disappear” with warmer weather, promoted several unproven miracle cures, pushed states to reopen before meeting federal government benchmarks, equivocated on mask-wearing, defied social distancing guidelines and repeatedly told Americans that everything was under control.

With the pandemic still ravaging the country just 10 weeks before Election Day, the president is mounting his most ambitious effort yet to change Americans’ minds about his handling of the crisis-- relying on his background in reality television and show business to create an alternative reality that edits out his mistakes and magnifies those of his opponents.

“The RNC is taking a ‘Mission Accomplished’ approach to coronavirus, but the fact [Trump] can’t even hold a regular convention says otherwise,” said Amanda Carpenter, a former aide to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and a Trump critic who wrote a book titled Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies To Us.

“American life as we know it has been shut down since last March because of his magical and paranoid style of thinking, campaigning and governing,” she said.

While Trump has previously touted his coronavirus response with misleading videos, charts and quotes during news briefings and in campaign ads, the Republican National Convention gives him a platform unique in its scope and reach. Over the course of four nights, the GOP will have 10 hours of prime time coverage, with cable and broadcast networks airing large chunks of the program uninterrupted.

It is perhaps Trump’s last best chance to present an unfiltered affirmative case for a second term in a race where a majority of voters disapprove of his handling of a pandemic that has battered the economy and upended Americans’ lives.





It is likely to be a difficult task.

Government forecasts predict the country’s coronavirus death toll could surpass 200,000 by mid-September; schools continue to struggle with reopening plans as mini-outbreaks across the country shut down classes and frustrate parents; the economy continues to suffer from recession-level unemployment and desperation; a safe and effective vaccine is at least months away; and a flu season looms that public health experts say will only worsen an already precarious situation.

Trump’s positive portrayal this week of his pandemic response is also undermined by the fact that the convention is mostly virtual despite the president’s best efforts to have an in-person gathering. Still, Trump has found ways to flout public health guidance or at least to show a disregard for social distancing. He plans to have a large crowd at the White House to watch his speech Thursday on the South Lawn.

The broadly accepted view that Trump has mishandled the virus is a political liability for the president, as polls show his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, leading nationally and with key voting groups that will determine the outcome. A Washington Post-ABC News poll this month found that nearly two-thirds of registered voters say they are worried that they or their families might contract the coronavirus, and half of Republicans expressed that concern. Many of those respondents plan to vote for Biden.

Much of Monday’s convention program appeared designed to appeal to such concerned voters by convincing them they should not worry.

During one of his appearances in Monday’s program, Trump spoke with a group of front-line workers to thank them for their efforts in combating the virus.

“Well, I’m for the nurses, I’m for the doctors,” Trump said. “We just have to make this China virus go away, and it’s happening.”

The remarks echoed comments Trump has been making since January, in which he has repeatedly claimed the virus was receding or under control as it spread through the country.

“We have it totally under control,” Trump said in January when asked by a CNBC host whether he worried about a pandemic. “It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

A month later, he praised his administration for “a pretty good job we’ve done,” predicting that the number of confirmed cases in the country would soon decline to zero. The next day he declared “one day-- it’s like a miracle-- it will disappear.”

As cases surged by the thousands in the spring and throughout the summer-- leaving the United States with the most coronavirus deaths in the world-- Trump continued to tout his own handling of the virus and refer to it in the past tense. He regularly made announcements of breakthrough treatments that ultimately did not prove effective, including the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine and ultraviolet rays.

He held rallies and avoided wearing a mask at a time when public health experts said social distancing and face coverings were the country’s best tools to contain the virus.

More recently, Trump has pushed for schools to reopen, claiming falsely that children are essentially immune from catching and spreading the virus. Multiple schools have shut down in-person learning in recent weeks as hundreds of students contracted the virus. The president continues to promote the false idea that case numbers are rising mostly because of more testing. And on Sunday, Trump called an impromptu news conference to announce a “historic breakthrough,” touting a convalescent plasma treatment about which scientists have expressed doubt.

In the video that aired at the convention Monday, Trump was praised for instituting travel restrictions on China and leading an effort to quickly produce personal protective equipment and a vaccine. In the narrator’s telling, only Trump’s perceived opponents and critics were at fault for the country’s predicament.

“From the very beginning, Democrats, the media and the World Health Organization got coronavirus wrong,” the narrator says in the video, which features clips of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio commenting on the novel virus in February and early March.

The video, like others Trump has touted, does not include comments from the president in February, when he publicly dismissed concerns about the virus despite receiving briefings and warnings from top aides and the intelligence community. Trump also praised Chinese President Xi Jinping in January for “transparency” in comments that are now out of step with the president’s tough-on-China stance.

Democrats, who used much of their convention last week to slam Trump as mishandling the pandemic response, said Monday’s program was proof that the president continued to lack a coherent plan to solve the country’s topmost problem.

“The truth is that his failed leadership has needlessly cost over 177,000 Americans their lives, tens of millions of Americans their jobs, and left the United States the hardest hit country by the pandemic in the whole world,” Biden deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said in a statement.

Trump has been his chief spokesman in defending his coronavirus response-- with his own public health experts regularly contradicting him publicly-- but this week’s convention provided an opportunity for the president to showcase other voices that support his boasts of handling the crisis flawlessly.

“As a health-care professional, I can tell you without hesitation, Donald Trump’s quick action and leadership saved thousands of lives during covid-19,” said Amy Johnson Ford, a nurse in West Virginia, who spoke of the Trump administration’s move to expand access to telemedicine.

Though public health experts have criticized the president as failing to take the virus seriously at the beginning of the year, Ford said Trump “recognized the threat this virus presented for all Americans early on and made rapid policy changes.”

Other speakers praised Trump for his administration’s efforts to ramp up production of PPE and testing kits, countering criticism he has received for the country’s shortages at the height of the pandemic.

Trump tried to cast criticism of his response as partisan politicking, using a speech in Charlotte to accuse Democrats of locking down states to hurt his electoral prospects.

“These Democrat governors love shutdowns until the election is over because they want to make our numbers look as bad as possible for the economy,” Trump said during a 50-minute speech that included several baseless charges.

Nancy Rosenblum, a professor of ethics in politics and government at Harvard University, said the president’s willingness to embrace conspiracy theories during a pandemic has hampered the country’s ability to mount an effective public health response. It’s a far cry from the traditional response to a crisis, in which Americans band together across political lines, she said.

“It’s a kind of polarized politics that has now reached down into every aspect of our lives, even to life itself,” said Rosenblum, co-author of A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy.

In a second video that aired during the convention, the narrator took on a more bipartisan tone while still praising Trump’s “swift action” to save lives during the pandemic.

“We are America. Despite unpredictable events, we as Americans work together to overcome challenges and write our own stories,” the narrator said.

But with the death toll continuing to mount and just weeks to go before voting begins in several states, Trump’s attempt to rewrite the script will have limited impact on voters, Carpenter said.

“Four nights of Trumptastic reality TV won’t change the dystopian reality we are living with Donald Trump as president,” she said. “People believe their own eyes and ears over Trump.”

The number of deaths is likely to surpass the benchmark Trump set for success earlier this year just ahead of the election.

“If we can hold that down to 100,000... it’s a horrible number, maybe even less, but to 100,000, so we have between 100 and 200,000, we all together have done a very good job,” he said during a March 29 news conference.

The president, who is to meet with medical professionals Wednesday to discuss the pandemic, has said he will use his acceptance speech at the convention Thursday to set the record straight on his handling of the crisis.

“So we’ll be talking, because really the job that we’ve done is incredible,” Trump said Monday in Charlotte. “It’s incredible, and none of us get any credit for it, and that’s okay.”

As Ezra Klein wrote yesterday, the convention has been "bizarre, unnerving, and unprecedented. It was banal, predictable, and expected... What is there to say upon hearing Trump described as 'the bodyguard of Western civilization?' It’s not an argument so much as a loyalty oath, an offering cut from the speaker’s dignity and burnt for the pleasure of the Dear Leader himself. But the outrageousness is the point. Protest and you’re triggered-- just another oversensitive lib who can’t take a joke. Ignore it and you’re complicit. To care is to lose. The Republican Party on display Monday night didn’t represent an ideology or a governing agenda. It was a personality cult, and a tired one at that. Republicans, in a break with tradition, refused to write a party platform. They chose, instead, to recycle their 2016 platform. But the delegates agreed that if they had met to fashion an actual agenda, they 'would have undoubtedly unanimously agreed to reassert the Party’s strong support for President Donald Trump and his Administration,' and as such, 'the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.'... The problem for Republicans is that the main thing Trump has told them to support is himself. There are no detailed policy proposals, much less a coherent ideology or set of governing principles. And so speech after speech followed the same template: How was America going to stop the coronavirus? By reelecting Donald Trump. How was it going to revive its economy? By reelecting Donald Trump. How was it going to ensure domestic harmony? By reelecting Donald Trump. The contradiction at the heart of the convention, of course, is that Donald Trump is currently president. I’m dead serious. How would reelecting Trump resolve these crises that Trump has proven unable to resolve-- and has, in many cases, worsened-- in office? No one even took a shot at that Rubik’s cube. Instead, the speakers awkwardly talked around the fact of Trump’s incumbency. He was presented, strangely, as both incumbent and challenger; the man who had fixed America’s problems, but also the man needed to fix an America beset by more problems than ever... The core of Trump’s agenda has always been untethering American politics from factual reality, and among Republicans, at least, he’s been startlingly successful. The convention is a loyalty test for Republicans, and a reality check for the rest of us. What are they willing to say? What are we prepared to believe? Do we still have it in us to be surprised?"

What Would Trump Do Differently If He Was TRYING To Lose The Election And Tank The GOP?

People are looking at two big national polls this weekend, one by Marist, released by NPR and PBS that shows Trump losing with just 44% of the vote (and a sky-high disapproval of 57%!) and one from Kaiser showing Trump losing with 38% and with a disapproval of 56%. And, occasionally he's starting to face reality. One such occasion was Thursday evening on Fox with Hannity when he mused that Biden is "gonna be your president because some people don't love me, maybe and all I'm doing is doing my job." He then went into his whole litany of lies about what a great steward of the economy he's been, the myth on which he had been building his campaign-- until the reality of what he made into the Republican Plague hit him in the face and knocked him on his ass. Ezra Klein wrote that as Trump "has continued to treat the presidency as a media spectacle, the work of governance as a dull distraction from the glitter of celebrity"-- obsessing over cable news and Twitter conflict and neglecting the job Americans hired him to do-- he's loath to face up to his record: "More than 120,000 dead from Covid-19 [and] an economy in shambles. Coronavirus cases in America exploding, even as they fall across the European Union... Trump has spent the past three years and 158 days playing president on TV and social media. But he has not spent that time doing the job of the president. A strong economy that carried over from Barack Obama’s presidency hid Trump’s dereliction of duties. But then a crisis came, and presidential leadership was needed, and the American people saw there was no plan, and functionally no president."

Trump seems to be doing everything possible to lose in November. Even the far right editorial board of the Wall Street Journal mused yesterday that "Trump may soon need a new nickname for 'Sleepy Joe' Biden. How does President-elect sound? On present trend that’s exactly what Mr. Biden will be on Nov. 4, as Mr. Trump heads for what could be an historic repudiation that would take the Republican Senate down with him."

Friday morning, the Miami Herald announced that "A record week of surging coronavirus numbers was only heightened on Friday, as state health officials confirmed 8,942 cases, nearly doubling the previous record of cases reported in a single day, two days earlier... Over the last seven days, Florida has reported 29,163 new cases. That’s nearly a quarter of all the confirmed cases in the state so far." Brainless, Trumpist governors Ron DeSantis (FL) and Greg Abbott (TX) finally reversed themselves and ordered their states' bars to close, something they-- and all governors-- should have done in March.





Meanwhile, Fauci told the Washington Post that Trump's testing strategy is a failure.

Not enough to get himself kicked out of office? His regime is still trying to make matters worse for sick people by demanding the Republican-dominated Supreme Court abolish Obamacare-- along with the insistence that insurance companies cover customers with preexisting conditions, the part of Obamacare that is universally popular-- even with hard core Republicans. James Hohmann wrote yesterday that "The Trump team’s core argument is that every Republican who voted for the tax cuts three years ago knowingly voted to destroy the 2010 law in its entirely, not just to get rid of the mandate that individuals buy health insurance. And, because the Supreme Court previously upheld the constitutionality of the law on the grounds that the individual mandate is a tax, Trump’s lawyers say that the whole system became invalid once Congress got rid of the penalty for not carrying health insurance... The brief is full of little gifts like this to Joe Biden and Democrats who hope to ride his coattails down the ballot."

All this stuff is bad for Trump and bad-- deservedly so-- for the GOP. But Trump figured out a way to make it worse yet. Emily Larsen, writing for the Washington Examiner reported that "Trump’s extreme opposition to mail-in ballots is more likely hurting him and down-ballot Republicans than it is helping him. Mounting evidence in voter registration data, a survey, and organizer anecdotes shows that instead of preventing the voting method from being a major factor in the November election, his stance is turning Republican voters off from using the method entirely, which could have the effect of depressing Republican votes. The president’s rampant alarmism on mail-in voting-- most recently claiming that foreign governments will rig the election by printing millions of mail-in ballots, an idea rebuked by elections officials-- frustrates those trying to push state election officials and Congress to provide ample absentee voting and in-person voting options and resources in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. They point out that many analyses find that mail-in voter fraud is small and often prosecuted... Trump’s public lashing out against mail-in voting may come too late. All of the six most important swing states have some form of mail-in or absentee voting. Despite Trump, some state Republicans are doing what they can to organize mail-in votes. The Florida Republican Party sent an email in May to its supporters, reminding voters to request a vote-by-mail ballot. Pennsylvania’s GOP website includes instructions on how to vote absentee."

But not all state Republican parties are doing what Florida and Pennsylvania are doing. 85% of the votes cast for the Kentucky primaries were sent in by mail. How much of an increase was that? In 2016, there were 38,112 ballots mailed in. This year... around 800,000-- a 2,000% increase! But that record turnout is alarming Republicans. In Georgia and Iowa-- both controlled by the GOP-- barriers are going up to vote-by-mail, infuriating voters who find out what the Republicans are up to.

What the Republicans are doing-- whether in healthcare, voting, pandemic response... is all leading to what is going to likely be the most gargantuan repudiation of the GOP since 1932, when Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover was defeated 22,821,277 (57.4%) to 15,761,254 (39.7%)-- losing 42 states (carrying just 6). In the process, the Republicans lost 11 Senate seats (including their Majority Leader, James Watson (R-IN)-- the Mitch McConnell of his day) AND 101 House seats-- yes 101!-- losing the White House, the Senate and the House, all by immense margins. The news lineup in the Democratically-controlled House was 318 Democrats, 117 Republicans. The GOP lost all their seats in Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia.

Who Remembers When You Had To Take A Civics Class To Graduate From High School?

If that were still the case-- required civics classes-- more people would understand the difference between what the House does (impeachment) and what the Senate does (removal from office). They're not the same and there was never any reasonable chance that Trump would be removed by this Senate-- not even if he did take a gun out to the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone. That just speaks to the nature of the conservative movement, 2019. You'd need 2/3s of the Senators to remove Trump. Where you going to find that? Even if all 45 Dems (+ the 2 independents, Bernie and Angus King) voted to remove-- and remember, that would include Trump-lovers Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) and Joe Manchin (WV)-- 47 is a long way to 67. Twenty Republicans? Maybe in an alternative universe. In theory, super-strong, undeniable evidence of treason might open up half a dozen Republican senators to the call of patriotism:

• Lisa Murkowski (AK)
• Jerry Moran (KS)
• Rand Paul (KY)
• Susan Collins (ME)
• Ben Sasse (NE)
• Mitt Romney (UT)

So all you need is 14 more. More likely that half of the ones above vote NO than even one more Republican decides to go for it. That's who they are and what they've become. Unless his approval starts to tank with Republican voters. Even after the release of the Mueller report, the new poll from Ipsos/Reuters released this morning, shows only a 6-point drop in Trump approval, from 43% to 37%, His disapproval rose from 54% to 56%. But 75% of Republicans still approve-- as do 32% of independent voters. That 61% of independents disapprove of Trump should worry Republicans in swing states (and swing districts).

click on the image to enlarge

But most people seem to think "impeachment" is the same as removal. Again-- it isn't. Impeachment is an investigation and a statement of charges. All you need is a majority of House members. There are 235 Democrats and 199 Republicans in the House. Imagine that all the Republicans vote against impeachment. That means 217 Democrats would have to vote to impeach. That's do-able-- unless all 27 Blue Dogs and the worst of the New Dems vote against impeachment.

Anyway, Pelosi and Hoyer are adamantly opposed to impeachment and it would take a massive, unified and sustained howl from the Democratic grassroots. You imagine you even see that on the horizon? As Alex Pareene wrote, for the New Republic yesterday, the Democratic leaders like Hoyer are "terrified to exercise their own power. They’re worried that an acquittal in Mitch McConnell’s Senate would be seen, by the public and the mainstream press, as a vindication of Trump rather than another lesson in the lengths the Republican Party will go to cover for a clearly unfit and crooked president."

In fact, after the Senate refuses to remove an impeached Trump, a vigorous Democratic Party-- something we used to have before Bill Clinton sold the party to Wall Street-- could use that as an opportunity "to take a moral stand against corruption and unaccountable elites" and "to weave the disparate (and quickly forgotten) scandals of the entire Trump presidency into a single narrative that the easily distracted (and even more easily spun) mainstream press can follow." This video is from a Republican group offended by Trump's lawlessness and manhandling of the U.S. Constitution! Pretty good. If Pelosi and Hoyer weren't holding Democrats back, they could do even better, I'm sure.

Democratic leadership seemingly believes that the party can’t let its candidates campaign on promises to materially improve the lives of voters while also letting its elected officials carry out the responsibilities of their offices. They also believe, deep in their bones, that the country is not on their side. They believe going after Trump too directly will stir his mighty base, rather than imagining that full and transparent investigations into his various fraudulent and corrupt activities may demoralize his staunchest supporters-- just as Trump himself was demoralized at the prospect of Mueller’s investigation-- while also persuading those people who aren’t already in the cult of MAGA that this administration, and the party that abets it, need to be soundly defeated.

Once again, we can celebrate a modern example of bipartisanship: a deep conviction, on both sides, that the only legitimate force in American politics is white grievance.

Fox viewers, who have had 24 hours of on-screen celebration must have been scratching their heads if they happened to glance at, say, USA Today today, where one headline says Mueller Report: A Corrupt, Unpatriotic President, A Stark Impeachment Choice For Democrats. Another planet? Jason Sattler posed a question that is surely not in the minds of any Fox viewers today: "We have to decide if we're willing to go on with a president who was elected with Russian help and tried 10 times to obstruct a probe into that help." Fox hasn't been playing up the first 70% of this sentence at all: "Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."

The actual Mueller report, beneath all the redactions, details one of the most successful foreign disruptions of an American election in the history of the republic. It reveals a presidential campaign eager to suck up the benefits of this "sweeping and systematic" interference, and it unmasks a president who attempted to commit multiple crimes to cover the whole thing up.

But beyond all those revelations, this process has shown we are in an emergency unlike anything we've seen since Watergate. Barr has proven that he is determined to help Trump get away with some of the most unpatriotic and corrupt acts ever committed by a president.

...Trump's singularly corrupt approach to politics is perfectly in line with his approach to avoiding taxes and running a fake for-profit college. Likewise, the Republican Party's firm belief that a Republican president is incapable of committing crimes was confirmed in the report. Instead of leading an impartial investigation, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC)-- the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee-- was leaking information to the White House.

America now has to decide if we're willing to go on with a president who was elected with Russian help and then tried to obstruct an investigation into that help-- 10 times. What we're learning for sure is something Russia has known for years: Trump is eager and willing to accept its help, even if that means lying to the American people.

The Republican Party and Barr have made their decision-- to let Democrats carry this burden alone. They know the responsibility to impeach a president will be a distraction for a party that just took over the House by campaigning on issues voters care about, like health care and corporate tax cuts.

But with an attorney general willing to do almost anything to protect this president, the question isn't "What's politically advantageous?" It's what will be left of our democracy if Congress doesn’t do its job.

Ezra Klein posts for Vox they'll never see, so they won't have to steel themselves against his impeccable logic showing that even the best defense of Trump is still a damning indictment. "The story the report tells," wrote Klein, "is that a foreign government illegally interfered in America’s presidential election on Trump’s behalf, and rather than treating that incursion as an attack on America’s political institutions, Trump treated it transactionally, as a gift to him personally. And so, rather than defend America from Russia’s attacks, he defended himself from the investigations into Russia’s attacks. Rather than see Russia’s hacks as a threat to the legitimacy of America’s elections, he saw the investigation as a threat to the legitimacy of his own election. So rather than defend the rule of law, Trump subverted it. The irony is that if Trump’s defenders are right, then it was Trump himself who delegitimized his presidency. He did it through specific acts of obstruction, like firing James Comey and trying to fire Jeff Sessions and lying to the public, but he also did it by failing to understand that being president of the United States means putting America, well, first."

[W]hen Trump is fighting to stop Sessions from recusing himself, McGahn characterizes his motives, in part, as worrying that he’d be “unprotected from an investigation that could hobble the presidency and derail his policy objectives; and detract from favorable press coverage of a Presidential Address to Congress the President had delivered earlier in the week.”

This argument pops up again and again in the characterizations Trump’s staff makes of his motives. It was also the core of Barr’s defense of Trump. It is a deeply damning description of the president of the United States.

The most generous characterization of this is that Trump was so blinded by his own pride and political incentives that he understood an attack on the country’s political system as an alliance with his campaign, and so rather than turning on Russia with fury, he turned on those who would reveal Russia’s role with fury.

This is the thinking of a man who has never understood that the presidency is bigger than he is, that the role he now occupies requires a larger frame of reference than himself. The myopia this causes him comes up again and again. Notably, there is a section in the report where Trump is heard lamenting that he doesn’t have a more corrupt attorney general. “You’re telling me that Bobby and Jack didn’t talk about investigations?” he asked. “Or Obama didn’t tell Eric Holder who to investigate?” To Trump, the attorney general’s role is to protect the president, not to serve the law.

The most generous read of the Mueller report’s findings does not clear Trump of wrongdoing. Instead, it argues that Trump betrayed the laws he swore to uphold because he thought doing so would protect his reputation, and that it was only the insubordination of his staff that restrained him from yet more egregious acts of criminality.

Trump's A Congenital Liar-- And There IS A Smocking Gun! Even Better Than Pants On Fire

Trump says his base will believe anything he tells them and I'm sure he's right-- but the other 65% of the country knows he's a liar and don't believe anything he says. Trump's reflexive lying didn't especially work than well for him in business-- and, as a strategy, it's working even worse in the Oval Office.


From Greg Sargent's new book, An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics, he points out, helpfully (at least for posterity) that Señor T "isn’t trying to persuade anyone to believe his lies as much as he’s trying to render factual reality irrelevant-- thus reducing the pursuit of agreement on it to just another part of the media circus in which he thrives… There is a reason Trump regularly tells lies that are very easy to debunk: The whole point of them is to assert the power to say what the truth is, even when-- or especially when-- easily verifiable facts, ones that are right in front of our noses, dictate the contrary. The brazenness and shamelessness of his lying is not just a by-product of an effort to mislead voters that Trump is merely taking to new levels. Rather, the brazenness and shamelessness of the lying is central to his broader project of declaring for himself the power to say what reality is."

One of the Washington Post's Trumpanzee fact checkers, Glenn Kessler, reported this morning that his paper has a new category of compulsive lies: the bottomless Pinocchio. "Trump’s willingness to constantly repeat false claims," he wrote, "has posed a unique challenge to fact-checkers. Most politicians quickly drop a Four-Pinocchio claim, either out of a duty to be accurate or concern that spreading false information could be politically damaging. Not Trump. The president keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version of it. He is not merely making gaffes or misstating things, he is purposely injecting false information into the national conversation. To accurately reflect this phenomenon, the Washington Post Fact Checker is introducing a new category-- the Bottomless Pinocchio. That dubious distinction will be awarded to politicians who repeat a false claim so many times that they are, in effect, engaging in campaigns of disinformation."

The bar for the Bottomless Pinocchio is high: The claims must have received three or four Pinocchios from The Fact Checker, and they must have been repeated at least 20 times. Twenty is a sufficiently robust number that there can be no question the politician is aware that his or her facts are wrong. The list of Bottomless Pinocchios will be maintained on its own landing page.

The Fact Checker has not identified statements from any other current elected official who meets the standard other than Trump. In fact, 14 statements made by the president immediately qualify for the list.

The president’s most-repeated falsehoods fall into a handful of broad categories-- claiming credit for promises he has not fulfilled; false assertions that provide a rationale for his agenda; and political weaponry against perceived enemies such as Democrats or special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

Some of Trump’s regular deceptions date from the start of his administration, such as his claim that the United States has spent $7 trillion in the Middle East (36 times) or that the United States pays for most of the cost of NATO (87 times). These were both statements that he made repeatedly when he campaigned for president and continues to make, despite having access to official budget data.

Another campaign claim that has carried into his presidency is the assertion that Democrats colluded with Russia during the election (48 times). This is obviously false, as the Democrats were the target of hacking by Russian entities, according to U.S. intelligence agencies. (The assertion, also spread widely by Trump allies in the conservative media, largely rests on the fact that the firm hired by Democrats to examine Trump’s Russia ties was also working to defend a Russian company in U.S. court.)

On 30 separate occasions, Trump has also falsely accused special counsel Mueller of having conflicts of interest and the staff led by the longtime Republican of being “angry Democrats.”

A good example of how objective reality does not appear to matter to the president is how he has framed his tax cut. When the administration’s tax plan was still in the planning stages, Trump spoke to the Independent Community Bankers Association on May 1, 2017, and made this claim, to applause: “We’re proposing one of the largest tax cuts in history, even larger than that of President Ronald Reagan. Our tax cut is bigger.”

He reinforced that statement later that day, with similar wording, in an interview with Bloomberg News. From the start, it was a falsehood, as Reagan’s 1981 tax cut amounted to 2.9 percent of the overall U.S. economy-- and nothing under consideration by Trump came close to that level. Trump’s tax cut was eventually crafted to be just under 1 percent of the economy, making it the eighth-largest tax cut in the past century.

Yet Trump has been undeterred by pesky fact checks showing he is wrong. He kept making the claim-- 123 times before the midterm elections-- and still says it. “We got the biggest tax cuts in history,” he told Chris Wallace of Fox News in his Nov. 18 interview.

Similarly, in June, the president hit upon a new label for the U.S. economy: It was the greatest, the best or the strongest in U.S. history. He liked the phrasing so much that he repeated a version of it every 1.5 days until the midterm elections, for a total of 99 times. The president can certainly brag about the state of the economy, but he runs into trouble when he repeatedly makes a play for the history books. By just about any important measure, the economy today is not doing as well as it did under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton-- not to mention Ulysses S. Grant.

Trump has 40 times asserted that a wall was needed to stem the flow of drugs across the border-- a claim that is contradicted the by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which says most illicit drugs come through legal points of entry. Traffickers conceal the drugs in hidden compartments within passenger cars or hide them alongside other legal cargo in tractor trailers and drive the illicit substances right into the United States. Meanwhile, Fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid, can be easily ordered online, even directly from China.

Some of Trump’s most repeated claims verge on the edge of fantasy. Thirty-seven times, he has asserted that U.S. Steel has announced that it is building new plants in response to his decision to impose steel tariffs. Depending on his mood, the number has ranged from six to nine plants, suggesting a bounty of jobs. But U.S. Steel made no such announcement. It merely stated that it would restart two blast furnaces at the company’s Granite City Works integrated plant in Illinois, creating 800 jobs. The company in August also said it would upgrade a plant in Gary, Ind., but without creating any new jobs.

Similarly, Trump has repeatedly inflated the gains from his 2017 trip to Saudi Arabia, upping the amount from $350 billion to $450 billion when he came under fire for defending the crown prince believed to have ordered the killing of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi.

Separately, he also inflates the jobs said to be created, at one point offering a fanciful figure of 1 million. The Fact Checker obtained detailed spreadsheets of both the military and commercial agreements that showed a total of $267 billion in agreements; we determined that many were simply aspirational. Many of the purported investments are in Saudi Arabia, indicating few jobs would be created for Americans.

Other claims on the list include:

• that the administration has removed thousands and thousands of MS-13 members from the streets, either through deportation or prison. (The group is estimated to have only about 10,000 members).
• that he came just one vote short of repealing Obamacare. (Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) blocked a trimmed-down version, but the full plan was soundly defeated, and there was little consensus on a compromise version.)
• that the United States has “lost” billions of dollars on trade deficits. No economist would agree with that statement, but Trump has said some version of it 131 times.
• that the United States has the worst immigration laws in terms of keeping immigrants out. That’s simply not true. In fact, the United States has among the world’s most restrictive immigration laws.

One other Four-Pinocchio claim by Trump may soon make the list. Fifteen times, the president has claimed to audiences that the Uzbekistan-born man who in 2017 allegedly killed eight people with a pickup truck in New York brought in two dozen relatives to the United States through so-called “chain migration.” But Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov is not even a U.S. citizen, so the actual number is zero.

The only problem with this kind of fact checking, is that it works best for crazy tweets and wild statements but doesn't play as well into long and complicated schemes, like the one Ezra Klein recounted this morning for Vox readers about Paul Ryan's long con. "Ryan's legacy," he wrote, "can be summed up in just one number: $343 billion. That’s the increase between the deficit for fiscal year 2015 and fiscal year 2018-- that is, the difference between the fiscal year before Ryan became speaker of the House and the fiscal year in which he retired. If the economy had fallen into recession between 2015 and 2018, Ryan’s record would be understandable. But it didn’t. In fact, growth quickened and the labor market tightened-- which means deficits should’ve fallen. Indeed, that’s exactly what happened in each of the five years preceding Ryan’s speakership; from 2011 to 2015, annual deficits fell each year."

Even more important, if the spending had been used to improve America-- says by funding free state universities or funding Medicare-For-All, two reasonable examples-- instead of for wasteful tax cuts for billionaires, it would be something positive, rather than something negative enough to mar Ryan's place in history forever.

As he prepares to leave office, Ryan says that debt reduction is one of those things “I wish we could have gotten done.” Ryan, the man with the single most power over the federal budget in recent years, sounds like a bystander, as if he watched laws happen rather than made them happen.

To understand the irony and duplicity of that statement, you need to understand Ryan’s career. After the profligacy of the George W. Bush years and the rise of the Tea Party, Ryan rocketed to the top ranks of his party by warning that mounting deficits under President Obama threatened the “most predictable economic crisis we have ever had in this country.” Absent the fiscal responsibility that would accompany Republican rule, we were facing nothing less than “the end of the American dream.”

Ryan’s reputation was built on the back of his budgets: draconian documents that gutted social spending, privatized Medicare, and showed the Republican Party had embraced the kinds of hard fiscal choices that Bush had sloughed off. And Ryan presented himself as the wonkish apostle of this new GOP, rolling up his sleeves and running through the charts, graphs, and tables that made his case.

“I admit that in recent years Republicans abandoned these principles,” Ryan wrote in the book Young Guns, the 2010 GOP manifesto he co-authored with Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Eric Cantor. “We lost the true path and suffered electoral defeats. But we have not returned from this experience empty handed.”

What Republicans had returned with, according to Ryan, was a willingness to make hard choices. “It’s time politicians in Washington stopped patronizing the American people as if they were children,” he wrote. “It’s time we stop deferring tough decisions and promising fiscal fantasies.”

For this, Ryan was feted in Washington society; the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget gave him a “Fiscy” award for budget bravery; he was a member of the Simpson-Bowles commission (which he ultimately voted against); he became Mitt Romney’s vice presidential candidate. His reputation was so towering that when John Boehner stepped down as speaker, he told Ryan, “You’ve got to do this job.”

...[T]o critics like the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, Ryan was an obvious con man weaponizing the deficit to hamstring Obama’s presidency, weaken the recovery, and snooker Beltway centrists eager to champion a reasonable-seeming Republican. Ryan, after all, had voted for Bush’s deficits-- he was a yes on the tax cuts, on the wars, on Medicare Part D. He proposed a Social Security privatization scheme so pricey that even the Bush administration dismissed it as “irresponsible.”

And his budgets, for all the hard choices, didn’t actually add up. They included massive tax cuts with underestimated costs and unspecified financing-- which is what led Krugman to call him a charlatan back in 2010. Ryan waved this away as nitpicking. ”If needed,” his office said, “adjustments can be easily made to the specified rates to hit the revenue targets.” But his critics predicted he would lose his appetite for hard choices the moment his party returned to power. He hadn’t changed; he had merely rebranded.

The numbers proved them right. Ryan was elected speaker of the House on October 29, 2015. Over the next three years, annual deficits increased by almost 80 percent. The added debt is Ryan’s legacy, not his circumstance. It is entirely attributable to policy choices he made.

...Three bills in particular stand out in assessing Ryan’s record.

The first is the 2017 tax cut Ryan passed but didn’t pay for. His defenders note that early drafts of the tax cut bill included a border adjustment tax that would’ve made the package revenue-neutral, fulfilling Ryan’s promises. But that policy fell out of the legislation early on, and rather than replace it, Ryan pushed a plan that added $1.5 trillion to the national debt over 10 years, and used accounting gimmicks to hide vastly larger increases tucked into the legislation’s long-term design. Now House Republicans, still under Ryan’s leadership, are agitating to make the tax cuts permanent, with a 20-year cost estimated at $4 trillion.

This is particularly galling given that Ryan’s initial star turn in Republican politics came through a misleading presentation accusing the Obama administration of using gimmickry to hide Obamacare’s true cost. (In reality, Obamacare was paid for and its costs have been even lower than promised.)

The second is the spending Ryan passed but didn’t pay for. Years of fiscal irresponsibility have sometimes permitted Republicans to be graded on a curve, where tax cuts can be charged to the national credit card and spending cuts are the true measure of policy steel. But even on this diminished measure, Ryan’s record betrayed his promises.

In March, Ryan pushed a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill through the House, which included almost $300 billion in spending increases. New spending, it turned out, only had to be paid for so long as it was a Democratic president proposing or signing it.

“When you have power and need to make choices, those choices do reveal something about you,” says Yuval Levin, editor of the conservative policy journal National Affairs. “I think what they reveal is where the least common denominator is in the Republican Party. I think there’s no question that what Republicans do when we get power is supply-side tax cuts. That’s the wall I and others have been banging our heads into for years now.”

The third is the expansion of the earned income tax credit Ryan proposed but never even tried to pass. After the 2010 election, he went on a much-vaunted tour of American poverty, racking up positive press for expanding the boundaries of the possible under conservatism, and arguing for an enlarged EITC that would help childless adults.

The Obama administration quickly spied a possible compromise with Ryan, and sought to capitalize on it. But Ryan proved more interested in the praise than the policy.

“When we tried to get it into a negotiation, he refused,” says Jason Furman, who served as Obama’s chief economist. “It wasn’t in his tax plan. In $1.5 trillion in tax cuts, he somehow couldn’t find space for this $60 billion item. It’s just amazing.”

Ryan’s defenders portray him as a principled legislator trapped by the coalition he managed.

“Donald Trump was president of the United States, and that circumscribed Paul Ryan’s choices,” says Brooks. “You can dispute what he did, but he got as much of the loaf as he thought he could get given the factions of his caucus and Trump’s peculiarities. Did he like being speaker of the House? The results speak for themselves: He’s leaving.”

In this telling, Ryan’s principled vision was foiled by Trump’s ascendancy. Faced with a Republican president he had never expected, and managing a restive majority that mostly agreed on being disagreeable, Ryan defaulted to the lowest common denominator of Republican Party policy: unpaid-for tax cuts for the rich, increases in defense spending, and failed attempts to repeal Obamacare.

This is more or less the defense Ryan has offered of his tenure. “I think some people would like me to start a civil war in our party and achieve nothing,” he told the New York Times. Trump had no appetite for cutting entitlements, so Ryan got what he could, and he got out.

But would it have started a civil war in the Republican Party if the most publicly anti-deficit politician of his generation had simply refused to pass laws that increased the deficit? And even if it had, isn’t that the war Ryan had promised?

The question here is not why Ryan didn’t live up to a liberal philosophy of government; it’s why he didn’t live up to his own philosophy of government.

What’s more, Trump was clearly flexible when it came to policy. On the campaign, Trump repeatedly promised he wouldn’t cut Medicaid; as president, he endorsed legislation Ryan wrote that did exactly that. After winning the election, Trump promised he’d replace Obamacare with a plan that offered “insurance for everybody” with “much lower deductibles,” but he ultimately backed Ryan’s bill to take Obamacare away from millions and push the system toward higher-deductible plans. For Ryan to claim he was not driving the policy agenda in the Trump years is ridiculous.

Ryan proved himself and his party to be exactly what the critics said: monomaniacally focused on taking health insurance from the poor, cutting taxes for the rich, and spending more on the Pentagon. And he proved that Republicans were willing to betray their promises and, in their embrace of Trump, violate basic decency to achieve those goals.

Ryan clearly wishes Donald Trump had lost the primary, and his early exit from the speakership reflects it. As such, a lot of the narrative around Ryan’s retirement has emphasized his discontinuities with Trump, and whether he did enough to voice them. In the New York Times, for instance, Mark Leibovich wrote:

As has been strenuously noted, Trump and Ryan are stylistic and philosophical opposites: Trump the blunt-force agitator vs. Ryan the think-tank conservative. Trump lashes out while Ryan treads carefully. Ryan still fashions himself a “policy guy” and a man of ideas: In high school, he read the conservative philosopher Ayn Rand and was captivated by her signature work, “Atlas Shrugged.” He bills himself as a guardian of the free-trading, debt-shrinking notions that Republican-led governments used to stand for before Trump crashed the tent.

But more important than the differences between Ryan and Trump are the similarities. Yes, Ryan is decorous and polite where Trump is confrontational and uncouth, but the say-anything brand of politics that so outrages Trump’s critics is no less present in Ryan’s recent history. How else can we read a politician who rose to power promising to reduce deficits only to increase them at every turn? Or a politician who raked in good press for promising anti-poverty policies that he subsequently refused to pass?

And as ridiculous as some of Trump’s claims have been, his baldfaced lies that his inauguration was better-attended than Obama’s was a less consequential violation of the truth than what Ryan said when asked about the tax bill: “I don’t think it will increase the deficit.” Note that the tax bill is already increasing the deficit.

Ryan’s campaign for his failed Obamacare repeal bill was thick with similarly brazen deceptions, like that the legislation would strengthen protections for preexisting conditions, when in fact it would gut them.

“What made Ryan attractive to analysts and journalists across the spectrum was that he’d engage in a thoughtful dialogue with you,” says Bob Greenstein, president of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “but that didn’t mean that 10 minutes later, in front of the cameras, he wouldn’t say something that was at best misleading and at worst invalid.”

In important ways, Trump is not a break from the Republican Party’s recent past but an acceleration of it. A party that acculturates itself, its base, and its media sphere to constant nonsense can hardly complain when other political entrepreneurs notice that nonsense sells and decide to begin marketing their own brand of flimflam.

Ultimately, Ryan put himself forward as a test of a simple, but important, proposition: Is fiscal responsibility something Republicans believe in or something they simply weaponize against Democrats to win back power so they can pass tax cuts and defense spending? Over the past three years, he provided a clear answer. That is his legacy, and it will haunt his successors.

Sooner or later, Trump’s presidency will end, and there will come a new generation of Republicans who want to separate themselves from the embarrassments of their party’s record. As Ryan did, they will present themselves as appalled by both their party’s past and the Democrats’ present, and they will promise to lead into a more responsible future. The first question they will face, and the hardest one to answer, will be: Why should anyone believe they’re not just another Paul Ryan?

Is there any doubt-- can there be any doubt-- that Ryan deserves the new Post Bottomless Pinocchio rating category every bit as much as Trump does? Or almost as much.

Mueller’s Art Of War, A Guest Post By Ryan Casey

When I first met Ryan Casey, he was chairman of the Lincoln County Democratic Party in Sioux Falls, South Dakota who had served as chairman of South Dakota's delegation to the 2012 Democratic National Convention. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and of Georgetown University, he was on his way to Seattle to study law at the University of Washington. Now he's an attorney, a commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve and the author of today's guest post.

Will Robert Mueller indict Trump? Speculation has been rampant, though insiders don’t expect the special counsel to contravene a DOJ legal opinion that seems to preclude indictment of a sitting president. But the will-he-or-won’t-he dichotomy asks the wrong question. Using strategies of warfare, Mueller has likely already conceived an endgame, setting the stage for Trump’s downfall.

Strategic warfare developed as a means to fight and win wars effectively and efficiently as human societies grew in size and began to operate within a political system. In primitive times, war was not strategic; tribes fought each other in brutal battles that amounted to primal, ritualized violence geared as much toward displaying dominance and masculinity as to actually accomplishing a military objective. Since then, from ancient China to medieval Europe to the modern world, the greatest strategists like Sun Tzu, Miyamoto Musashi, Carl von Clausewitz, and T.E. Lawrence have produced writings that capture their strategic philosophies. Likewise, history’s greatest generals, such as Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, Erwin Rommel, and Vo Nguyen Giap have demonstrated these strategies in action. Author Robert Greene has assembled and organized this collective wisdom of strategic warfare in his excellent book, The 33 Strategies of War.

The essence of strategic warfare is thinking ahead toward long-term goals, deciding when to expend resources or take risks, and when to be patient, or even retreat. A strategist must master his or her emotions, constantly striving to view the world with detached objectivity. Fear, anger, and overconfidence are just a few of the most dangerous emotions; by the same token, a cunning strategist can exploit a less composed enemy. Greene sums up Sun Tzu’s philosophy: “By playing on the psychological weaknesses of the opponent, by maneuvering him into precarious positions, by inducing feelings of frustration and confusion, a strategist can get the other side to break down mentally before surrendering physically.”

Mueller’s investigation can be seen as an extended battle against both a hostile foreign power and a lawless, belligerent president. “War is not some separate realm divorced from the rest of society,” Greene contends. It brings out the best and the worst in human nature, and reflects society’s trends. As institutions and norms unravel periodically, human competition in its various forms mirrors this evolution, as in the case of guerilla warfare, terrorism, industrial espionage, cybercrime, and the kind of slash-and-burn politics that Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, and now Donald Trump have used to great effect.

Those who know Mueller say he’s about the last person you’d expect to go rogue. And yet, it is hard to imagine an ambitious, career lawman like Mueller, who fought and bled for his country as a combat Marine in Vietnam, would take Trump’s shocking corruption and treason lying down. He must have realized at the outset this situation demanded the utmost in strategic thinking.

Mueller’s strategy turns Trump’s impulsive aggression against him. In jujitsu, a weaker fighter can defeat a more powerful opponent by manipulating the enemy’s force and energy. Already we are seeing how Mueller, operating in the background, remains several steps ahead of Trump using subtle, indirect moves. Meanwhile, Trump’s arrogance has led him to underestimate the threat of his own legal exposure. Instead of hiring top-flight defense attorneys and heeding their advice, he has opted for a chaotic carousel of mediocre lawyers and frequently ignored them. The following five strategies of war, as described by Greene, help explain how Mueller will outmaneuver and ultimately defeat Trump --  even without indicting the president.

1. LOSE BATTLES BUT WIN THE WAR: THE GRAND STRATEGY

The grand strategist looks beyond the immediate battles and concerns of the moment and concentrates on his long-term objective. His ultimate goals dictate his actions as he fights the temptation to react to each and every event. All humans are capable of some rational thought, and can devise plans to get what they want, but grand strategists are able to look more deeply into themselves, and to grapple with the lessons of the past to gain a clearer sense of the future.

Napoleon mastered visualizing clear objectives in intense detail. Before a campaign even began, with his advisers gathered around, he would point to a precise spot on a map and identify where the last battle would unfold. To the aides’ shock, time and time again, Napoleon’s vision proved uncanny.

Mueller devised his grand strategy early on, visualizing the type of evidence he was likely to uncover, which witnesses he could squeeze to cooperate, what impact their testimony would have on future events, and how Trump would react. Ken White, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney, explains that a lot of long-term grand jury investigations are specifically designed to provoke reactions. “One of the ways [federal prosecutors] work is to rattle everyone’s cage real loud and see what happens.” Not only do tactics like these trigger stupid mistakes by those under investigation, they also motivate other wrongdoers and witnesses to come forward and attempt to cut deals with the government. Certainly Mueller will go where the evidence leads him, but in this scandal, there are “many secrets; no mysteries,” as David Frum has observed. Indeed, Trump’s brazen coordination with Russia and attempts to obstruct justice have taken place largely in public view.

Like Napoleon, Mueller is playing the long game. Because Trump’s culpability is a political matter as well as a legal question, it is hard to know exactly how this will end. The corrosive effect of exorbitant money in politics has rendered our democratic process largely dysfunctional. Thankfully, Mueller has been able to operate with prosecutorial independence, and his results so far — the indictments, convictions, guilty pleas, and cooperation agreements — speak for themselves. Furthermore, if a grand strategist is a master at controlling his emotions and focusing on the ultimate objective, Trump is the opposite. His constant outbursts are predictable — a serious liability in warfare. One day, we may learn that soon after his appointment, Mueller gathered his team around a map, and pointed to the place where Trump would meet his end.

2. HIT THEM WHERE IT HURTS: THE CENTER OF GRAVITY STRATEGY

All powerful people rely on sources of strength for their lifeblood; choke off these, and their power dries up. In war, a superior general does not focus solely on the enemy’s army, or even its leader. Instead, he keys in on an opponent’s critical vulnerability. Military power, after all, does not reside in the army itself, but in its foundations of support, like funding, supplies, public backing, and foreign alliances. Greene observes, “A person, like an army, usually gets his or her power from three or four simultaneous sources: money, popularity, skillful maneuvering, some particular advantage he has fostered. Knock out one and he will have to depend more on the others; knock out those and he is lost.” For this reason, a strategist must examine closely what is propping up his enemy, because it likely holds the key to what will bring him down.

Trump’s power is rooted in his fame and the veneer of self-made wealth. In truth, as the New York Times recently revealed in a major exposé, Trump’s money is the product of fraudulent transfers of his father’s fortune, which itself was amassed largely through outright fraud and tax evasion. But Trump squandered most of his inheritance long ago in reckless real estate deals, and by the 1990s, he had declared bankruptcy and left creditors holding the bag for more than $900 million. No longer able to secure loans through legitimate channels, Trump began to pay cash for real estate, apparently financing these transactions through illicit deals with Russian oligarchs seeking to launder money. By the 2008–09 recession, not a single U.S. bank would go near him. For the past decade at least, Trump has been beholden to former Soviet oligarchs under Putin’s control.

Trump is paralyzed by the fear that these oligarchs will reveal his illicit dealings-- or worse, simply call his loans due. He is so overleveraged he faces serious risk of a financial wipeout. Should that happen, the aura of wealth and success he has cultivated for so long would shatter, his power evaporating along with it.

In untangling Trump’s criminal enterprise, Mueller’s investigation will lay bare the phoniness of his wealth. Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chair, likely sits at the nexus of Trump’s corrupt business practices and coordination with the Russian government during the 2016 campaign. Manafort is now cooperating with Mueller as part of a major plea agreement following his conviction by a jury in August of various financial crimes. The deal saves Manafort from standing trial on a second wave of charges that included illegal foreign lobbying, conspiracy, money laundering, and obstruction of justice. Meanwhile, federal investigators in the Southern District of New York, working on a referral from Mueller, previously secured a guilty plea from Trump fixer Michael Cohen. He, too, is now cooperating with the special counsel. Prosecutors have granted immunity to other key figures in the case, including Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg. Weisselberg knows more than anyone about Trump’s finances, having worked for the Trump family since the 1980s. Even before the devastating Manafort plea, Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin characterized prosecutors’ aggressive moves on Cohen and Weisselberg: “For Trump, this is the equivalent of being kicked in the balls after taking a crowbar to the face.”

The information contained in forthcoming indictments, along with testimony and evidence put forth in criminal trials, will put Trump’s business incompetence and criminality on full display. It is true that America has become practically numb to Trump’s daily outrages and revelations about his illicit dealings. Even the explosive Times investigation into the Trump family’s wide-ranging financial crimes was largely swallowed up by the Kavanaugh controversy. But Mueller’s disclosures are different-- they carry the imprimatur of the federal courts, and the penalties of the criminal justice system.

The cumulative effect of these revelations will chip away Trump’s political support. To strike at his critical vulnerability, it is not necessary to erode his base completely. In 2016, Trump won only 46.1% of the national popular vote, and his job approval rating has hovered in the low 40s throughout most of his presidency. But while Trump’s support among Republicans remains high (which helps explain congressional Republicans’ undying fealty to him), the GOP itself is shrinking. Overall, Trump is historically and increasingly unpopular. As Mueller systematically chokes off the sources of his power, Trump will act out, accelerating his own downfall.

3. DESTROY FROM WITHIN

For thousands of years, humans have erected walls around cities and military outposts to defend or deter against invasion. And for almost as long, military leaders have strategized about ways to breach these places. The conventional approach was to lay siege to the fortress and attempt to scale or break through its walls, using methods like battering rams, siege towers, or catapults. Invading armies encircled the fortress, depriving its people of food, water, and supplies. As starvation and despair took their toll, eventually the garrison would succumb. This method, however, was often bloody and time-consuming.

More enlightened strategists later devised cleverer ways to breach a city’s walls. Their approach derived from a great insight: the supposed strength of a fortress was an illusion; inside its walls were people who were trapped, afraid, and even desperate. The proper strategy, therefore, was aimed at infiltrating the disaffected inhabitants already inside the city. By inflaming the dread and discontent among these people-- and spreading it to others-- strategists learned they could rot the fortress’s foundation from the inside, causing it to collapse on itself.

Here, Trump is under siege, and the people around him know they are trapped. This is the same strategy Mueller used frequently in prosecuting the Mob. Last November, a person close to the Trump Administration told the Washington Post, “This investigation is a classic Gambino-style roll-up. You have to anticipate this roll-up will reach everyone in this administration.” Neither Trump’s businesses nor his campaign ever had to withstand meaningful scrutiny, but now Mueller is closing in and squeezing Trump’s associates, one by one. A lifetime habit of surrounding himself with unqualified sycophants has left Trump exposed; sloppy criminals like Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Michael Cohen, and Roger Stone are easy pickings for Mueller. So are other witnesses desperate to protect themselves, like White House Counsel Don McGahn. Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn already pleaded guilty last December to lying to the FBI, and has since been cooperating with Mueller. The government almost certainly has recordings of illicit phone conversations between Flynn and then-Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak. All of these loose ends present an enormous liability for Trump.

No one should question Mueller’s commitment to achieving his objective in a criminal case, and his prosecution of Gambino crime boss John Gotti shows why. To nail Gotti, Mueller cut a deal with Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, a ruthless Mob hit man who had admitted to killing 19 men. In exchange for Gravano’s testimony against Gotti, Gravano was rewarded with a light sentence. Describing this episode for Vanity Fair, journalist Howard Blum imagined how much it must have gnawed at Mueller’s lofty moral code to allow a murderer with a body count of 19 to wind up spending “not much more time in jail than a deadbeat dad.” But in the end, Mueller got his man.

Constant leaks from Trump’s inner circle offer a glimpse into the turmoil raging inside the castle walls. As these disaffected inhabitants flip on the president, he will only grow more erratic, and make more mistakes. Through a combination of subtle maneuvering and aggressive strikes, Mueller is destroying Trump from within.

4. MANEUVER YOUR ENEMY INTO WEAKNESS

The key to maneuver warfare is to create dilemmas for an enemy that present him with only bad options. In this way, a strategist can unsettle the enemy before the battle begins. He maneuvers to frustrate and disorient his opponent and place him in a bad position, like looking into the sun or having to fight uphill.

To maneuver, a strategist crafts a plan with branches that allows for contingencies. The ideal plan is neither too rigid nor too vague. It must establish markers guiding toward the strategic objective even when unforeseen events arise, yet leave a strategist room to adjust to the inevitable chaos and fog of war. As an agitated or impulsive enemy reacts, a flexible plan allows the prepared strategist to respond to changing circumstances quickly and rationally. A strategist who keeps more options open than his enemy has more room to maneuver, regardless of who holds territory. This flexibility constitutes a significant strategic advantage.

Mueller is executing a plan with many branches, all of which further his ultimate objective. He is gathering as much information as possible, and will produce for the American people a definitive record of what the Russians did, how they did it, which Americans conspired with them, and who participated in the cover-up. Just as a strategist who dictates the tempo in battle has a powerful edge, Mueller is capitalizing on his ability to decide whom to indict and when, whether to subpoena Trump, when to issue a report to Rosenstein, how to operate in light of the critical 2018 midterm elections, whether to name Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator, and how to prosecute him once he is no longer president. Additionally, Mueller’s plan must anticipate Trump’s reactions.

If Trump tries to fire federal investigators, Mueller has a ready response. Because many of Mueller’s targets are probably exposed to both state and federal criminal charges, state prosecutors could pick up where their federal counterparts leave off. Fordham Law professor Jed Shugerman explains, “Not only is it permissible for federal prosecutors to share evidence with state prosecutors; it is standard, especially in multi-jurisdiction organized crime cases. And frankly, this case has become an organized crime case.” Specifically, Trump and his associates have almost certainly violated several New York state financial laws, and a presidential pardon does not absolve state crimes. For this reason, Mueller has been working closely with New York state officials for more than a year. Trump and his associates may be exposed in other states where he has done business, including New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida, Virginia, Washington, D.C., California, and Arizona. Trump finds himself surrounded as he struggles to wage a multi-front war against Mueller, SDNY, the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, the New York Attorney General, and the Manhattan District Attorney, just for starters. There is little question a Trump firing spree would backfire as it triggers a rash of additional parallel investigations in the states and adds to Mueller’s growing evidence of obstruction of justice.

Mueller has also moved to block Trump’s use of pardons to thwart the investigation. Prior to his plea agreement, Trump openly dangled the possibility of pardoning Manafort, praising his bravery for going to trial instead of cooperating. But in locking down Manafort’s deal, Mueller required him to admit to many state-law crimes beyond the reach of any Trump pardon. Not only was Manafort forced to promise not to seek clemency, the agreement also required him to immediately forfeit an estimated $46 million in real estate and financial assets, “without regard to the status of his criminal conviction.”

Mueller knows Trump must also ponder the political costs of issuing pardons to cover up his crimes. The choice he faces requires trading away political support to contain the legal exposure for himself and his children. But even for Trump, a volley of get-out-of-jail-free cards to protect his family and cronies would likely be politically catastrophic. And, given the truckloads of evidence Mueller has already amassed from other sources--  probably including recordings of Trump’s own voice-- this tradeoff is unsustainable.

Mueller’s investigation has continually forced Trump into hopeless dilemmas. He looks guilty by refusing to answer the special counsel’s questions, but will further incriminate himself if he talks. Pardoning fellow conspirators is even more politically toxic, though Trump seems incapable of restraining himself as Mueller continues his roll-up. It is obvious Trump is politically and operationally constrained; his own top aides routinely ignore his orders, he cannot fire Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General he despises, and twice he has tried and failed to fire Mueller. On multiple occasions, Trump has even reportedly attempted to fire chief of staff John Kelly, who simply ignores the president. At this point, Trump has already waited far too long to hope to contain the damage through pardons. He has few options remaining, and all of them are bad.

5. OCCUPY THE MORAL HIGH GROUND

"War is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means,” Prussian general and military strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously declared. In a democracy, there is no greater strategic imperative than to occupy the moral high ground.

Throughout history, in almost every culture, the concept of morality-- i.e. good vs. evil-- evolved as a way to keep order in society. Antisocial behavior, or “evil” was the opposite of what was social, or “good.” Periodically, when civil strife erodes the consensus surrounding certain values-- like truthfulness or respect for the rule of law-- society faces a moral reckoning, and must reestablish what is social vs. antisocial behavior. We now seem to be in one of these times.

In 1517, a young, unknown priest named Martin Luther challenged Pope Leo X for selling indulgences. Initially Luther had merely intended to question the theological relationship between God’s forgiveness and indulgences paid to the Catholic Church. But when Leo and his lieutenants at the Vatican lashed out at Luther, he came to believe that much of the Church was rotten to the core, and in need of drastic reform. Luther’s strategy in the Protestant Reformation was to make his war with the pope public, garnering as much attention as possible and transforming his moral cause into a political one. Using recent advances in printing technology to disseminate his writings to the masses, he attacked the pope’s decadent lifestyle, and exposed the Church’s deep hypocrisies. The moral anger Luther sparked spread like wildfire across much of Europe, crippling the public image of the pope and the Church itself. “By using morality so consciously and publicly,” Greene writes, Luther “transformed it into a strategy for winning power. The Reformation was one of the greatest political victories in history.”

Of course, morality is in the eye of the beholder, and history’s demagogues have learned to exploit the breakdown of moral consensus on social vs. antisocial behavior to flout established norms of political conduct. Demagogues use morality not for social cohesion, but to gain a visceral connection with their supporters by stoking fear and resentment through racial and cultural division. Manipulating the media, demagogues play for the moral high ground, and then contort their moral arguments to suit their needs.

To counteract a demagogue, a strategist must fight moral fire with moral fire. All savvy politicians know skillful messaging helps solidify the righteousness of their cause, but against a demagogue, it is imperative. A crafty strategist baits the demagogue into overbearing counterattacks, showing himself to be noble and principled by comparison. Rather than trumpet his own goodness, the strategist allows the public to see the glaring contrast between his virtuous deeds and the demagogue’s repulsive antics. But moral maneuvering requires diligence and skill; a strategist cannot simply assume the public will see justice in his cause all on their own. And allowing an opponent to morally frame the conflict is akin to giving away the most favorable position on the battlefield.

On the afternoon of October 20, 1973-- the day of the Saturday night massacre-- Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox held a news conference that proved critical in turning public opinion away from Nixon. Cox appeared with his wife, Phyllis, and calmly but earnestly showed his anguish over trying to reconcile Nixon’s demands with faithfulness to the rule of law. Cox explained to viewers how his father had brought him up to feel great respect for the presidency, but now, he was called to defend basic principles of law. Philip Heymann, a Cox assistant at the time, recalls, “He spoke with confidence, without apparent emotion, and radiating love of his country and respect for its commitment to law... Cox represented a part of all of us that had been lost or compromised; we had missed that part until Cox brought it back.”

The day may come when Mueller has to speak to the American people in the same way. Trump has waged a guerilla war to undercut Mueller’s moral authority, and over the past year, some polls have suggested it may be working. But although opinions on Mueller have become polarized, his long game seems to be bearing fruit-- as the special counsel has racked up convictions and guilty pleas, Trump’s approval rating has declined, while Mueller’s has risen. When it comes to the Russia investigation, a recent CNN poll shows Mueller with a 20-point advantage over Trump, 50–30. Several polls have suggested most Americans think Trump is lying, and probably guilty of wrongdoing. They believe Mueller’s probe is legitimate, consistent with the rule of law, and deals with important issues of public interest.

Robert Mueller was chosen to serve as special counsel based not only on his extensive record of public service at DOJ and the FBI, but because of his sterling reputation for professionalism, integrity, and patriotism. He is beyond reproach-- at least in any sane universe. After graduating from Princeton in 1966, Mueller joined the U.S. Marine Corps and volunteered to serve in Vietnam. When his platoon was ambushed in Quảng Tri province on December 11, 1968, he disregarded his own safety and braved enemy fire to recover the body of a fallen Marine. The horrific firefight decimated half the platoon --  13 Marines were killed that day, and 31 more were wounded. It was some of the heaviest fire those Marines ever experienced in Vietnam, but through the chaos, Mueller took control and maintained poise. For his actions, Mueller earned a Bronze Star with Combat “V” for valor, one of the military’s highest awards for combat bravery. Months later, North Vietnamese fighters again attacked one of Mueller’s squads on patrol. The Marine on point was killed instantly, and Mueller was shot through the thigh by an AK-47 round as he led the rest of his platoon in to rescue the others. So much adrenaline was coursing through his veins that at first he didn’t even notice, and kept fighting. Mueller had to be medevacked out by helicopter, and was subsequently awarded a Purple Heart.

The ordeal of Vietnam seemed to only deepen Mueller’s abiding sense of patriotism and duty, especially as he rose through the ranks in government. In an interview with journalist Garrett Graff, Mueller spoke of his service in the war, noting how extremely lucky he considers himself to have made it out of Vietnam. “There were many-- many-- who did not. And perhaps because I did survive Vietnam, I have always felt compelled to contribute.”

Mueller’s combat experience also lent perspective as he faced adversity throughout his professional life. He told Graff in 2008 that nothing he ever confronted in his career-- from prosecuting the Mob to terror investigations to showdowns with the Bush White House-- was as challenging or intense as leading men in combat and seeing them cut down by enemy fire. “You see a lot, and every day after is a blessing.”

Thanks to his supreme competence and impeccable reputation, Mueller has seized the moral high ground. But to continue to occupy it, he must remain vigilant as he tells the American people the rest of this story. Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency and steadfast support from Republicans is nothing if not an object lesson in the power of a demagogue to exploit tribal divisions and rally supporters around a sense of victimization. If the president really can invent his own truth among a significant portion of the American people, he might well invent his own law, too-- especially as he appoints loyalists to the Supreme Court and the rest of the federal bench. For now, though, Mueller is letting his actions do the talking. If his early indictments are any indication, he has much more to say.

Trump recognizes that his constitutional protection from criminal prosecution makes the court of public opinion the only court that matters, at least for now. His obvious strategy is to do what he does best: demagogue and divide, attack investigators, and undermine legal institutions.

We’re about to find out whether, under these conditions, the American judicial system is capable of confronting a president as lawless and belligerent as Trump. If the political process is the remedy for a rogue president, what redress is there when the political system defaults? Contrary to the Framers’ design, minority rule is one of the central features of this political era. Despite winning fewer votes than Democrats, Republicans control all three branches of the federal government, and most state governments as well. In six of the last seven presidential elections, Democrats have won the national popular vote, including by 3 million votes in 2016. In the 2012, 2014, and 2016 elections that have determined the makeup of the current U.S. Senate, Democrats won 15 million more votes overall than Republicans. With the Senate’s confirmation of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Trump has, after less than two years in office, placed the same number of justices on the Court as Barack Obama did in eight. More to the point: a president who won just 46 percent of the popular vote nominated a judge who was historically unpopular, and that judge was confirmed to the Supreme Court by senators who represent just 44 percent of voters. Sure, the political fortunes of America’s two parties have tended to rise and fall over time, and there will always be some distortion in the marketplace. But there is an unavoidable, disheartening conclusion here: America’s political system faces systemic market failure.

On a recent podcast, Ezra Klein explored the ramifications of this grim reality as it relates to the Mueller investigation:

People keep waiting for Robert Mueller like he’s some deus ex machina to find something like the key, the goblet, to open the treasure chest... We seem, to me, to be handing him a responsibility to force political consequence that is actually-- and maybe properly-- in our (the public’s) hands, or certainly in our representatives in Congress’s hands.

And what if there never are any consequences? What if we learn all of this, and more, but the fact that the consequences here are political means they are politicized? And in a country this politically divided, it means justice never gets done. And the lesson, in the end, is that partisanship overwhelms lawfulness, and the president isn’t so much above the law, as he is separated from the law, protected by a zone of partisanship, in which law doesn’t really reach, unless it is useful for the political party with the power to deploy it. That would be saying something terrible about our political system. But it might also be something true about our political system.

And yet…there are good reasons to have faith that in the end, partisanship will not overwhelm lawfulness-- and that the president is not, in fact, beyond the reach of the law. First, the norm of prosecutorial independence is stronger than most people realize. Second, the interplay between Trump’s political standing and a meticulous criminal case against him will be more dynamic than many appreciate. Admittedly, it takes a certain imagination to foresee this interplay. And yes, there is evidence to the contrary: most recently, the Kavanaugh episode illustrated that partisan hostility and allegiance overwhelms investigatory fact-finding, even when accusations as serious as attempted rape are at issue. But in that instance,Trump had complete control over Kavanaugh’s FBI background check. He has no such control over Mueller’s investigation. Moreover, Kavanaugh’s and Trump’s responses to the political and legal threat of those allegations were instructive in themselves. Kavanaugh debased himself the way he did, and Trump so shamelessly curtailed the FBI’s review, not so much just because they could, but because they thought they had to.

America’s legal institutions are bigger and stronger than any one man--  even a demagogic president enabled by toadies in Congress and on the Supreme Court. Bruce Green, a Fordham Law ethics expert, and Rebecca Roiphe, a professor at New York Law School, have explored the survivability of the rule of law under Trump. “While norms may seem fragile, more malleable and weaker than the law itself, they are, in fact, far stronger than they seem,” Roiphe writes. This is due to both the deep-rootedness of the rule of law, and the diffuse nature of the many lawyers and other officials who serve in DOJ and throughout the executive branch.

The norm of prosecutorial independence in America predates the republic itself; the concept derives from British law, and took root firmly after the Civil War as the federal criminal justice system expanded. Though not enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, federal statute, or Supreme Court case law, prosecutorial independence is very much embedded in our justice system. Over time, it has only grown stronger.

While it may seem a weakness that upholding a norm as critical as prosecutorial independence rests on the personal choices of fallible individuals, the fact that there are so many of them to police each other turns this into an institutional strength. Myriad executive agencies are staffed by professionals who enjoy degrees of independence from the president. This was no accident, Green and Roiphe point out, and it constitutes an important check on partisan politics. Like a diversified portfolio, the American justice system is comprised of thousands of lawyers and agents who, as officers of the court, take oaths of fidelity to their profession and to their public obligations. During Watergate, DOJ professionals stopped Nixon. Now, Mueller and his team are working overtime to stop Trump, too.

History’s lessons of warfare demonstrate how shrewd, composed warriors defeat impulsive fools, no matter how powerful. Right now, Trump basks in winning battles, but he is losing the war. Mueller is skillfully executing a grand strategy as Trump acts on his emotions. “He who is prudent and lies in wait for an enemy who is not, will be victorious,” wrote Sun Tzu 2,500 years ago. No one should underestimate the depths to which Trump will go to save himself. But with superior strategy, expertise, and integrity, Mueller and his team occupy the moral high ground and defend the rule of law with mounting evidence that plainly incriminates the President of the United States. Ultimately, in both the court of law and the court of public opinion, the weight of this evidence will be too much for Trump to survive. At present, perhaps only Robert Mueller knows how this will end. But as the walls close in around him, we too may soon visualize the place where Trump himself will fall.