Trump Never Hires Good People-- Never Has And Never Will

Yesterday, Face the Nation featured Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the nation's most trusted voice on the pandemic. Fauci told the audience that "this is going to be a bad week... unfortunately, if you look at the projection of the curves, of the kinetics of the curves, we're going to continue to see an escalation. Also, we should hope that within a week, maybe a little bit more, we'll start to see a flattening out of the curve and coming down. The mitigation that we're talking about that you just mentioned is absolutely key to the success of that. So on the one hand, things are going to get bad and we need to be prepared for that. It is going to be shocking to some. It certainly is-- is really disturbing to see that. But that's what's going to happen before it turns around. So we'll just buckle down, continue to mitigate, continue to do the physical separation because we got to get through this week that's coming up because it is going to be a bad week... I will not say we have it under control, Margaret. That would be a false statement. We are struggling to get it under control, and that's the issue that's at hand right now. The thing that's important is that what you see is increases in new cases, which then start to flatten out."

He added that "Unless we get this globally under control, there's a very good chance that it will assume a seasonal nature in the sense that even if we, and I-- and I hope it's not just if but when we get it down to the point where it really is at a very low level, we need to be prepared that since it unlikely will be completely eradicated from the planet, that as we get into next season, we may see the beginning of a resurgence. And that's the reason why we're pushing so hard and getting our preparedness much better than it was, but importantly, pushing on a vaccine and doing clinical trials for therapeutic interventions so that hopefully if in fact we do see that resurgence, we will have interventions that we did not have in the beginning of the situation that we're in right now."

CBS turned to Fauci. As Maureen Dowd pointed out in her column, the second dumbest man in government turned to the dumbest man in government. "Heaven help us," she wrote, "we’re at the mercy of the Slim Suit crowd." She began with a story illustrating how George W Bush was revealed as "a man who had been winging it for the first half of his life, playing and swaggering around while he relied on his daddy and daddy’s friends to prop him up... Now we have another pampered scion in the Oval, propped up by his daddy for half his life, accustomed to winging it and swaggering around. And he, too, is utterly unprepared to lead us through the storm. Like W., he is resorting to clinical states’ rights arguments, leaving the states to chaotically compete with one another and the federal government for precious medical equipment."

Donald Trump is trying to build a campaign message around his image as a wartime president. But as a commander in chief, Cadet Bone Spurs is bringing up the rear.

“I would leave it up to the governors,” Trump said Friday, when asked about his government’s sclerotic response. Trouble is, when you leave it to the governors, you have scenes like we did in Florida with the open beaches-- not to mention a swath in the middle of the country that, as of Friday night, still had not ordered residents to stay home.

The Los Angeles Times reported that two months before the virus spread through Wuhan, the Trump administration halted a $200 million early-warning program to train scientists in China and elsewhere to deal with a pandemic. The name of the program? “PREDICT.”

It is said that nature abhors a vacuum, but this virus loves it.

At Thursday’s briefing, Rear Adm. John Polowczyk, who barely two weeks ago became the head of the administration’s supply-chain task force, added to the confusion when he defended the government’s decision to send the supplies governors are pleading for to the private sector first.

“I’m not here to disrupt a supply chain,” the admiral said.

Trump was elected to disrupt things. So disrupt.

The president seems oblivious to the fact that his own clown car of an administration bungled the priceless lead time we had to get ready for the pandemic.

With the death toll in this country soaring past 7,000, Trump is focused on the same thing he is always focused on: himself. He proudly told reporters Wednesday, “Did you know I was No. 1 on Facebook? I just found out I was No. 1 on Facebook. I thought that was very nice for whatever it means.” Our doom, perhaps?

Trump’s most defining qualities have been on display in this fight: He has been mercurial, vindictive, deceptive, narcissistic, blame-shifting and nepotistic.

At the Thursday briefing, the president brought out another wealthy, uninformed man-child who loves to play boss: Jared Kushner. Where’s our Mideast peace deal, dude? Surely Trump did not think giving Kushner a lead role would inspire confidence. This is the very same adviser who told his father-in-law early on that the virus was being overplayed by the press and also urged him to tout a Google website guiding people to testing sites that turned out to be, um, still under construction.

Now he is leading a group, mocked within the government as “the Slim Suit crowd,” that is providing one more layer of confusion-- and inane consultant argot-- to the laggardly, disorganized response.

From the lectern, Kushner drilled down on his role as the annoying, spoiled kid in every teen movie ever made. “And the notion of the federal stockpile was, it’s supposed to be our stockpile,” he said. “It’s not supposed to be the states’ stockpiles that they then use.”

Our stockpile?

That’s the way the Trump-Kushner dynasty has approached this whole presidency, conflating what belongs to the people with what is theirs. Trump acts like he has the right to dole out “favors,” based on which governor is most assiduous about kissing up to him.

On Friday, the administration changed the wording on the Department of Health and Human Services website about the stockpile to be matchy-matchy with Kushner’s cavalier dismissal of the states.

It was typical of Trump’s muddled message that on Friday, as the C.D.C. issued new guidelines to wear masks, the president said: “You can wear ’em. You don’t have to wear ’em,” adding he had no intention of wearing one because “Somehow, sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute desk, the great Resolute desk, I think wearing a face mask” did not gel with his image of greeting “prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens, I don’t know somehow, I don’t see it for myself.”

A couple of days earlier, another Times columnist I'm not a fan of, Michelle Goldberg, got there first: Putting Jared Kushner In Charge Is Utter Madness. Perhaps she's speaking for most Americans-- I think she is-- when she writes that "it’s hard to believe that someone with as little expertise as Kushner could be so arrogant... Kushner has succeeded at exactly three things in his life. He was born to the right parents, married well and learned how to influence his father-in-law. Most of his other endeavors-- his biggest real estate deal, his foray into newspaper ownership, his attempt to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians-- have been failures. Undeterred, he has now arrogated to himself a major role in fighting the epochal health crisis that’s brought America to its knees... This is dilettantism raised to the level of sociopathy."

People I know who have known Kushner at various times in his life-- some very well-- all agree with the assessment Dowd used author Andrea Bernstein to make. Bernstein told Goldberg that Kushner "really sees himself as a disrupter." Again and again, she said, people who’d dealt with Kushner told her that whatever he did, he "believed he could do it better than anybody else, and he had supreme confidence in his own abilities and his own judgment even when he didn’t know what he was talking about."

It’s hard to overstate the extent to which this confidence is unearned. Kushner was a reportedly mediocre student whose billionaire father appears to have bought him a place at Harvard. Taking over the family real estate company after his father was sent to prison, Kushner paid $1.8 billion-- a record, at the time-- for a Manhattan skyscraper at the very top of the real estate market in 2007. The debt from that project became a crushing burden for the family business. (Kushner was able to restructure the debt in 2011, and in 2018 the project was bailed out by a Canadian asset management company with links to the government of Qatar.) He gutted the once-great New York Observer, then made a failed attempt to create a national network of local politics websites.

His forays into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict-- for which he boasted of reading a whole 25 books-- have left the dream of a two-state solution on life support. Michael Koplow of the centrist Israel Policy Forum described Kushner’s plan for the Palestinian economy as “the Monty Python version of Israeli-Palestinian peace.”

Now, in our hour of existential horror, Kushner is making life-or-death decisions for all Americans, showing all the wisdom we’ve come to expect from him.

...Disaster response requires discipline and adherence to a clear chain of command, not the move-fast-and-break-things approach of start-up culture. Even if Kushner “were the most competent person in the world, which he clearly isn’t, introducing these kind of competing power centers into a crisis response structure is a guaranteed problem,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a former U.S.A.I.D. official who helped manage the response to the Ebola crisis during Barack Obama’s administration, told me. “So you could have Trump and Kushner and Pence and the governors all be the smartest people in the room, but if there are multiple competing power centers trying to drive this response, it’s still going to be chaos.”

Competing power centers are a motif of this administration, and its approach to the pandemic is no exception. As the Washington Post reported, Kushner’s team added “another layer of confusion and conflicting signals within the White House’s disjointed response to the crisis.” Nor does his operation appear to be internally coherent. “Projects are so decentralized that one team often has little idea what others are doing-- outside of that they all report up to Kushner,” reported Politico.

Most Americans Know Trump Has Screwed Up Iran Policy

A few days ago I was listening to Iranians being interviewed in Tehran on NPR. Invariably, they were completely accepting the regime's version of the shooting down of the Ukrainian airline and absolutely certain that the contrary evidence had been manufactured by the U.S. 'Wow,' I thought, 'they're as brainwashed as American evangelicals are! And just as stupid and bigoted!' However, when the Iranian regime finally copped to the truth over the weekend, Iranians were shocked-- and infuriated. And, unlike U.S. evangelicals, out on the streets protesting-- even calling on Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, to resign! So... not quite as brainwashed, passive and stupid as American evangelicals.





No one was out on the streets protesting as it's become clearer and clearer that Trump and Pompeo have been lying about the whole incident at least as much as the Iranian regime. Trump has tap-danced around why he had Soleimani-- his former business partner-- assassinated, lying to the media, to Congress, to anyone who would listen to his bullshit. Yesterday, in interviews with Jake Tapper on CNN's State of the Union and with Margaret Brennan on CBS' Face The Nation, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, a former crooked lobbyist for Boeing that Trump appointed, seems to have made a farce out of Trump's sorry attempts to deceive the country about his wag the dog strategy in Iran.

Brennan brought up that Señor Trumpanzee told Fox News last week that "there was an attempt to blow up the U.S. embassy in Baghdad" and four unnamed U.S. embassies (which Trump was obviously pulling out of his ass). Trumpanzee: "I think it would have been four embassy (sic), could have been military bases, could have been a lot of other things, too. But it was imminent." Brennan asked Esper, "Why couldn't you share that specific threat with senators in a classified briefing?" Esper made about some total bullshit about the Gang of 8, which was quickly called out by members of the Gang of 8 for the lie it was.

ESPER: Well, that information-- there was a reference in this-- in this exquisite intelligence to an attack on the United States embassy in Baghdad. That information was shared with the Gang of Eight. All that exceptional intelligence shared with the Gang of Eight, not the broader membership of the Congress.

BRENNAN: A specific threat against the U.S. embassy in Baghdad to blow it up...

ESPER: Well, I was...

BRENNAN: ...was shared with the Gang of Eight? 

ESPER: I was not in that meeting with the Gang of Eight. But I will tell you, I spoke to one of the briefers. What the briefer said to me coming out of that meeting was his assessment that most, if not all the members, thought that the intelligence was persuasive and that they-- and that the Gang of Eight did not think that it should be released to the broader members of Congress.

BRENNAN: But, broadly, can you clarify though, was the specific threat that the president shared with Fox News about four U.S. embassies being under threat, also shared with Congress? Why was there a difference? 

ESPER: Well, what the president said was he believed that it probably and could have been attacks against additional embassies. I shared that view. I know other members of national security team shared that view. That's why I deployed thousands of American paratroopers to the Middle East to reinforce our embassy in Baghdad and other sites throughout the region.

BRENNAN: Probably and could have been. That is-- that sounds more like an assessment than a specific, tangible threat with a-- a decisive piece of intelligence.

ESPER: Well, the president didn't say there was a tangible-- he didn't cite a specific piece of evidence. What he said is he probably-- he believed, could have been...

BRENNAN: Are you saying there wasn't one?

ESPER: I didn't see one with regard to four embassies. What I'm saying is I share the president's view that probably-- my expectation was they were going to go after our embassies. The embassies are the most prominent display of American presence in a country.

...BRENNAN: Do you understand the frustration and anger from members of Congress who say why the president- why can the president tell Fox News something he can't tell members of Congress or-- or members of his administration can't explicitly explain to members?

ESPER: Well, look, I understand the frustration. The fact is that evidence, that information is only available to the Gang of Eight. That's been practice and policy for decades.

BRENNAN: But you said you don't know that it was told to the Gang of Eight.

ESPER: Well I'm talking about, the intelligence stream, the exquisite intelligence. That was told-- that information of that source and method was revealed to the Gang of Eight. I understand the frustration of the broader members of Congress. They're not going to have access to that information. I would support it if we-- if we didn't jeopardize the sources and methods. And I think the president said the same.

BRENNAN: Senator Mike Lee, who will be with us on this program, also was frustrated with your briefing. And he said, you know, why did you tell members of Congress that it would essentially be a negative message to try to call into question that the authorization for military force in Iraq. Why did you...

ESPER: Well no...

BRENNAN: ... oppose that debate?

ESPER: Well, first of all, for every member that didn't like the brief, there's members that thought it was the greatest brief ever. That was never said that they should not have a debate, that they should have a discussion. I was asked a specific question about do I have concerns about a debate? And what all I said was this: is as that debate continues, don't not have a debate. But as that debate ensues, be conscious of the messaging, particularly to our troops, because they are looking for messages. Do they have the support of the American people while they are in harm's way? Why do I say that? My predecessors have said that in the past. And I had the personal experience in the 1991 Gulf War. I was on the ground preparing for our final actions to go into Iraq. And we watched very carefully the debate in Congress in mid-January of that year to find out did we have the support of the American people and our lawmakers. 

Yesterday, writing to the Washington Post, Joseph Marks, Juliet Eilperin and Drew Harwell noted that it wasn't just Esper who struggled trying to defend Trump. They reported that Robert O'Brien, Trump's new national security adviser , gave it a try on ABC’s This Week and on Fox News Sunday but "did not confirm Trump’s claim that the White House had received intelligence that Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, was planning 'imminent' attacks against four U.S. embassies."

Top Democrats have pushed back on Esper’s claim that the Gang of Eight was given information on the threat to attack the embassy in Baghdad. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-CA), a member of the Gang of Eight, contradicted Esper’s assertion on Face the Nation about the briefing to Congress, saying it lacked “specificity” about a potential embassy threat. Schiff said he and several members of the Gang of Eight were dissatisfied with the evidence laid out as a basis for the strike. Trump and Esper are “fudging” the details, Schiff added, and “overstating and exaggerating what the intelligence shows.” When it comes to information that could lead to a potential war in Iran, he said, “that’s a dangerous thing to do.”

Trump’s claim about threats against embassies was also not part of a Senate briefing earlier this week, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“That was news to me,” he said. “It certainly wasn’t something I recall being raised in the classified briefing.”

Lee also savaged the Trump administration for failing to sufficiently justify the strike. He earlier called the briefing the “worst” he’s received in nine years in the Senate.

Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-DE), also speaking on Fox News Sunday, criticized the administration for failing to disclose more specific intelligence during the closed-door briefing.

“We got less detailed information there than President Trump shared with Laura Ingraham,” the senator said.

Killing Soleimani did eliminate “one of our worst enemies in the Middle East. … But the larger question is, did it make us safer?” Coons said.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said administration officials were “dismissive of Congress,” throughout the briefing on NBC’s Meet the Press.

He also criticized the administration for relying on a George W. Bush-era authorization for military force to justify the attack.

“We need to have a full-throated debate in Congress,” he said. “I want to have that debate and bring our kids home.”

Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-CO) said on Meet the Press that Trump’s actions “strengthened the hard-line wing of the Iranian government."

“This is a moment when heightened congressional scrutiny of the president is important no matter who the president is,” said Bennett, who’s also a long-shot contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

Even before Esper and the others made fools out of themselves and Trump on Sunday, ABC News had released a poll by Ipsos showing that most Americans-- a majority-- disapprove of how Trump has handled this whole Iranian mess he created. Most say the country is less safe now. No one out in the streets though.

In the aftermath of the U.S. strike, only 28% of Independents, and 25% of Americans, said they felt more safe, while just over half, 51% of Independents and 52% of U.S. adults, said they felt less safe.

When it comes to attitudes on the conflict with Iran, partisanship drives opinions. An overwhelming 87% of Republicans approved of Trump's handling of Iran, and 54% say they feel safer. Among Democrats, 90% disapproved and 82% felt less safe.

Still, when asked about concerns over the possibility of the United States getting involved in a full-scale war with Iran, Democrats are more united in expressing concern than Republicans.

A net total of 94% of Democrats, and 52% of Republicans, are either very concerned or somewhat concerned about the possibility of entering into another war in the Middle East, compared with 6% of Democrats and 48% of Republicans who said they were not so concerned or not concerned at all.

UPDATE: And The Urgency Lie-- "Imminent?"

Trump's biggest excuse for unconstitutionally going around Congress' back to assassinate Soleimani, an act of war against Iran, was all about the split-second decision making on his part. This morning, NBC Nesws reported that Trump authorized the killing of Soleimani 7 months before the actual assassination. "The presidential directive in June 2019," wrote Courtney Kube and Carol Lee, "came with the condition that Trump would have final sign off on any specific operation to kill Soleimani, officials said. That decision explains why assassinating Soleimani was on the menu of options that the military presented to Trump last week for responding to an attack by Iranian proxies in Iraq that killed an American contractor and wounded four U.S. service members. The timing, however, could undermine the Trump administration’s stated justification for ordering the U.S. drone strike that killed Soleimani in Baghdad on Jan. 3. Officials have said Soleimani, the leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force, was planning imminent attacks on Americans and had to be stopped."

Which Side Will James Lankford Take In The Coming Evangelical Civil War?

In 2009 James Lankford stepped down as as the student ministries and evangelism specialist for the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma and as director of the youth programming at the Falls Creek Baptist Conference Center in Davis, Oklahoma to run for Congress. His voting record is pure Trumpist and even before Trump, his record was fanatically far right. He claims to believe deeply in Jesus Christ. And yet, for example, he’s an anti-LGBTQ warrior. And so on. In the video of his appearance on Face the Nation Sunday he talked about how a president should be a role model for the nation’s youth and then offered a scathing indictment of the president from whom he has been a lockstep supporter.

“I don’t think that President Trump as a person is a role model for a lot of different youth. That’s just me personally. I don’t like the way that he tweets… some of the things that he says, his word choices at times are not my word choices. He comes across with more New York City swagger than I do from the Midwest and definitely not the way that I’m raising my kids… It’s also been a grand challenge to be able to say, for a person of faith, for a person who believes that there is a right way to go on things I wish that he did. And he was more of a role model in those areas. Now, saying all that, on the area of life where I'm very passionate about, on the issues of abortion, for instance. He's been tenaciously pro-life. He's focused on putting people around him that are very focused on religious liberty, not honoring a particular faith, but honoring any person of any faith to go be able to live and practice that faith and to have respect for that. That's helpful for any person of faith. And to be able to say, give me the space to be able to live my faith and to be able to put people into the administration that will also allow that and encourage that. So for people of faith, it's a bit of a conundrum at times that I look at some of the moral decisions that he's made and go, I disagree with that. But he's also been very, very protective of areas like life and very protective of areas of religious liberty to be able to allow people to be able to live their faith out. And at the end of the day, what we're really looking for in an administration is folks that allow us to be able to live our principles.”

Recently, a group of evangelical pastors and supporters under the rubric of Vote Common Good asked, “What brings you hope? Is it, as Mr. Rogers once famously said, ‘Looking for the helpers’ Is it remembering all the times where love won in the past and having faith that it will happen again? Is it a blind optimism, undamped by the cynicism of the world?  For us, hope is more than just an emotion, it is a way of living. Hope isn’t just that comes to us in life, it is a reason that we live. Hope is essential, it is growing, and it will not be put out. Hope is here, and in 2020, it will trump hate.”

In 2020, their hope will become action as they organize and host the Faith, Hope and the Common Good Summit & Presidential Forum is Des Moines. The summit “will serve as a training for citizens, faith leaders, community organizers, activists, and political candidates on engaging in civic life and the common good” and shortly after the summit, they will begin their Faith, Hope, and Love for a Change on Election Day 2020 National Bus Tour, traveling to every single state to speak with voters of faith and conscience. Their goal with the tour is “to reach those who want to see our common good be elevated, and to encourage those who have been awakened since 2016. In short, 2020 is the year where our hope comes alive.” In 2018 their tour took them from coast to coast where they introduced Democratic candidates to evangelical voters. In CA-45 they helped Katie Porter win a red Orange County seat. In IA-04 and TX-10 they helped bring J.D. Scholten and Mike Siegel closer to election than anyone could have imagined. This cycle they will be working to help both Scholten and Siegel with evangelical voters again.

Writing for the MaddowBlog the day after Christmas, Steve Benen noted that the civil war brewing in the evangelical movement could be catastrophic for the Trump reelection efforts. Evangelicals-- like Lankford-- have overlooked his tsunami of personal failings to get a step up on their innate hatred and bigotry and to see right-wing judges appointed to courts high and low. Benen wrote that “And while it’s best not to overstate matters-- polling suggests Trump’s support among evangelical Christians is much higher than among Americans in general-- these divisions and public conflicts are exactly what the president’s re-election campaign hoped to avoid. For his part, the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson wrote in his latest column, ‘Christians are called to be representatives of God’s kingdom in the life of this world. Betraying that role not only hurts the reputation of evangelicalism; it does a nasty disservice to the reputation of the Gospel.’ That’s almost certainly not what the White House wants to hear.”

An OpEd by Mario Nicolais in the Colorado Sun on Sunday asked if a generational divide over Trump could lead to an evangelical exodus. He wrote of the war of words in evangelical publications between Mark Galli, Timothy Dalrymple and Napp Nazworth and the old guard of the anti-Jesus sell-outs like Trumpists Ralph Reed, Franklin Graham and James Dobson.

For political purposes, depending on whom you believe, the rift either represents the ramblings of an elitist few or the full-fledged veil of the evangelical temple rent in two. The latter represents not just an existential crisis for Trump and his presidency, but a long-term quandary for all Republicans.

In 2018, white, born-again/evangelical Christians supported Republicans running for Congress at a clip of 75%. No other major religious group eclipsed 56%. Any significant dip in those numbers could cause a ripple effect across the electoral spectrum. Republicans simply have no obvious alternative to replace lost evangelical voters.

Unfortunately for them, that is precisely what some analysts already predict. Earlier this year, the left-of-center FiveThirtyEight website released data that young white evangelicals support for Trump had softened. As younger evangelicals tended to be more liberal on immigration and LGBT rights, their support for Trump teetered.

…Now that generational divide may be super-charged by Galli, Dalrymple and Nazworth. Already leery of Trump and other Republicans, the moral cover provided by CT and its allies may grant young evangelical voters the freedom to abandon the party of their parents.

If that abandonment takes place within the next 10 months, the six days before this Christmas may prove to be the most consequential for the Republican Party in decades.

Doug Pagitt, executive director of Vote Common Good, pointed out that theTrumpist faction “got spooked and I think they realized, ‘we don’t have a handle on the many factions.’ You know you’re in trouble when your argument now is, ‘I don’t have all the evangelicals. We just have some and some are breaking off.’ That’s the beginning of a collapse, and that’s something some of us have been saying all along. It feels to a lot of us that the things we were going to say come November 2020 felt like they needed to be said here in December. Impeachment feels like it’s an issue of national crisis, whereas election just feels like it’s part of the natural cycle.”

The Real State Of The Union-- Most Americans Hope Trump Dies Tonight

State of the Union Poster by Chip Proser

None of those new polls that came out yesterday looked good for Trump-- nor for his congressional enablers. In fact, the CNN poll found that nearly 7 in 10 voters say the federal government is doing a bad job of governing, including 43% who say it’s the worst job of governing in their lifetimes. 19% of Americans think Trump's government is doing a good job. That appeared to clash drastically with Trump's interview with Margaret Brennan on Face The Nation Sunday when he bragged-- lying-- that he's created the best economy in history and that he's headed to a 2020 reelection victory. "The only thing I've done," he stated, falsely, "is created, maybe, the best economy we've had in the history of our country." Tell it to the voters who responded to the new Monmouth poll. Among them, just 37% think Trump should be re-elected-- as opposed to 57% who want to vote for someone else.



He also spent a lot of time talking about his vanity wall, which the new Gallup poll shows is opposed by 60% of voters, up from 57% opposing it 6 months ago. Despite the efforts of the Republican Party 61% of voters oppose deporting all illegal immigrants back to their home country. In fact "the vast majority of Americans (81%) favor allowing immigrants living illegally in the U.S. "the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time."

Preparing for a night of lies (his State of the Union address this evening), Trump is freaking out over the massive White House leak that shows he's a lazy sack of crap who does nothing all day but sit around watching TV, eating junk food and gossiping with his friends on the phone. Mike Allen wrote that "White House insiders said the leak sowed chaos. Cliff Sims, the former White House official who wrote the dishy Team of Vipers, told me: 'There are leaks, and then there are leaks. If most are involuntary manslaughter, this was premeditated murder. People inside are genuinely scared.'" One of the NY Times' Trump specialists, Maggie Haberman took to Twitter:

Trump's instinct for self-preservation, though, isn't just to go on the attack against Democrats-- he went full-on against Pelosi, who is now more popular than he is among the American public-- but to have his political team squelch any attempts within the GOP to mount a primary against him. Yesterday's Monmouth poll shows that 43% of Republican primary voters want a primary next year. Zeke Miller and Stephen Peoples reported for the Associated Press that Trump is worried and "has launched a state-by-state effort to prevent an intraparty fight that could spill over into the general-election campaign... including taking steps to change state party rules, crowd out potential rivals and quell any early signs of opposition that could embarrass the" disgusting, hated slob that virtually anyone who isn't an anti-democracy fascist wishes would die tonight as he speaks.

It is an acknowledgment that Trump, who effectively hijacked the Republican Party in 2016, hasn’t completely cemented his grip on the GOP and, in any event, is not likely to coast to the 2020 GOP nomination without some form of opposition. While any primary challenge would almost certainly be unsuccessful, Trump aides are looking to prevent a repeat of the convention discord that highlighted the electoral weaknesses of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter in their failed re-election campaigns.

To defend against that prospect, Trump’s campaign has deployed what it calls an unprecedented effort to monitor and influence local party operations. It has used endorsements, lobbying and rule changes to increase the likelihood that only loyal Trump activists make it to the Republican nominating convention in August 2020.

Bill Stepien, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, calls it all a “process of ensuring that the national convention is a television commercial for the president for an audience of 300 million and not an internal fight.”

One early success for Trump’s campaign was in Massachusetts, where Trump backer and former state Rep. Jim Lyons last month defeated the candidate backed by Massachusetts Republican Gov. Charlie Baker, a Trump critic, to serve as the state party chairman.

“We have a constant focus on tracking everything regarding this process,” Stepien said. “Who’s running, what their level of support for the president is and what their vote counts are.”

The campaign’s work extends beyond state party leadership races, which are taking place in many key states in the coming weeks. Trump’s team plans to organize at county and state caucuses and conventions over the next 18 months to elevate pro-Trump leaders and potential delegates. Ahead of the convention, it aims to have complete control of the convention agenda, rules and platform-- and to identify any potential trouble-makers well in advance.

...[T]he efforts to protect Trump simply highlight his vulnerability, said an adviser to one potential Republican opponent.

“They’re not talented, but they’re not idiotic. They rightfully understand that he could be badly damaged or lose in a nomination battle. They’re doing too much. It looks weak,” said John Weaver, a senior adviser to former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, one of the few high-profile Republicans seriously contemplating a primary challenge.

Trump’s campaign is closely monitoring the intentions of Kasich and other potential primary challengers, and aides said they expect someone to mount a campaign for the nomination. But they insist their efforts are not borne out of fear that Trump is vulnerable.

Primary challenges against incumbent presidents have never been successful in the modern era. And Trump’s poll numbers among Republican voters have proven to be resilient. Still, his aides said they are taking lessons from one-term leaders who lost their re-elections after embarrassing nominating fights.

Those in the past who challenged a president both distracted the incumbent from the November campaign and offered a voice to intraparty discontent, seeding weaknesses that were exploited by a general-election rival.

Another poster by Chip Proser

Finally-- The End Of Steve King?

Steve King's Iowa district is very, very rural and very, very red. The PVI is R+11 and Trump beat Hillary there 60.9% to 33.5%, significantly outpolling both McCain (50.2%) and Romney (53.4%). Usually King wins in a walk and doesn't even campaign much. This past November, though, he nearly lost, first time candidate and progressive baseball player J.D. Scholten holding him to 50.4%, his smallest win number ever. If only the DCCC hadn't decided J.D. was too progressive for Congress and decided to spend zero on his campaign, while telling national unions and Democratic institutional donors not to give him any money...

I had dinner with J.D. last week and I don't think he's made up his mind about running for the IA-04 House seat again. He may. Or he may run for the Iowa Senate seat currently occupied by Trump-enabler Joni Ernst. Remember, if J.D. could do so well in an R+11 district, how well would he do in an R+3 state with a swingy political history? That said, though, over the weekend, the Des Moines Register noted that even Republicans seem to have had it with King's unbridled racism. And that includes both Ernst and Grassley, both of whom usually support and enable King.

The growing backlash follows an interview with the New York Times earlier this week in which King, who represents Iowa's 4th District, lamented why terms like "white nationalist" and "white supremacist" are offensive.

King attempted to clarify the statements. He issued a release denouncing white nationalism and white supremacy and took to the House floor Friday to address the matter, which he called "a freshman mistake."

But backtracking hasn't slowed the blowback.

"I condemn Rep. Steve King’s comments on white supremacy; they are offensive and racist-- and not representative of our state of Iowa," Sen. Joni Ernst tweeted Saturday. "We are a great nation and this divisiveness is hurting everyone. We cannot continue down this path if we want to continue to be a great nation."

Ernst also linked to a Washington Post op-ed from Sen. Tim Scott in which the South Carolina Republican pulled no punches addressing King's history of racially-charged rhetoric and the lack of action by his party to curb it.

"King’s comments are not conservative views but separate views that should be ridiculed at every turn possible," Scott wrote in the piece.

Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley echoed the remarks from Ernst and Scott on Saturday while speaking with a pair of reporters from Axios.

“I find it offensive to claim white supremacy. I will condemn it," Grassley reportedly said.

Both senators have offered King support in the past or campaigned with him. Shortly before the 2018 election, King released of video of Grassley in which Iowa's senior senator called King an "ally" who he needed in the House.

After the election, Grassley distanced himself from King but did not repudiate him.

Two Iowans this week announced plans to primary King ahead of the 2020 election. One of them, state Sen. Randy Feenstra of Hull, has come out swinging. [Note: Feenstra is an obsessed and deranged homophobic maniac, nearly as bad, in some ways, as King.]

"Our current representative’s caustic nature has left us without a seat at the table," Feenstra said on Twitter. "We don’t need any more sideshows or distractions, we need to start winning for Iowa’s families."

The other Republican challenger, Bret Richards of Irwin, said in an interview with the Des Moines Register about the contrasts between himself and King: “I know who I am. I know I won’t embarrass the state.”

Iowa officials said they were neutral in the potential primary.

Gov. Kim Reynolds issued an ultimatum to King after the election and has said she will stay out of the primary battle but appeared with the Kiron representative during her campaign.

Former 2016 presidential candidate Jeb Bush wrote on Twitter that “Republican leaders must actively support a worthy primary opponent to defeat King because he won’t have the decency to resign.”

Longtime King supporter Bob Vander Plaats, a former Iowa gubernatorial candidate and president of The Family Leader, a conservative political organization, also rebuked the 16-year congressman.

On Face the Nation yesterday, the House Minority's greasy lying Leader, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), told Margaret Brennan that he will meet with King today to talk with him about his racist problem. McCarthy, of course, can't open his mouth without trying to mislead people-- he is a Republican politician in the age of Trump-- but if you access the interview at the 5:40 mark you'll hear him tap-dancing around what he plans to do about King... almost blaming Pelosi!




UPDATE: McConnell Slams King

Republicans are embarrassed-- and it's a lot less risky to take it out on Steve King than on Señor Trumpanzee. McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, said there is "no place in the Republican Party, the Congress or the country for an ideology of racial supremacy of any kind... I have no tolerance for such positions and those who espouse these views are not supporters of American ideals and freedoms. Rep. King’s statements are unwelcome and unworthy of his elected position. If he doesn’t understand why 'white supremacy' is offensive, he should find another line of work."

Where We Go From Here Is More Than Just The Title Of Bernie's New Book

Earlier today we looked at the case for a mushy-middle 2020 scenario. The conclusion was inevitable: the Democrats need to avoid that disaster-- basically by ignoring their own craven, visionless and predatory establishment-- and demanding that Bernie be the candidate against Trump. In a preview of Where We Go From Here, Bernie's new book, Edward-Isaac Dovere mentioned that his "decision about running for president again isn’t about trying to bend the race toward his progressive politics-- it’s about whether he can convince himself that he’s the Democratic candidate with the best chance of beating Donald Trump. He thinks the answer might be yes, but he isn’t quite sure." The book comes out on Tuesday and Dovere terms it "a rundown of the ways he’s been able to keep a hold on American politics, from the demands he gave Hillary Clinton at their post-primary meeting to his political and legislative wins since."

He’ll kick off the release with a speech at George Washington University on Tuesday night, and later in the week he’ll convene a summit of allies at his Sanders Institute, back home in Burlington, Vermont.

Meanwhile, Sanders is trying to figure out where he goes from here.

...“He’s uniquely positioned to do better against Trump in the general because he appeals to white working-class and rural voters-- much better than a conventional Democrat does,” said Ben Tulchin, who was Sanders’s 2016 pollster and remains in touch with his team. “He also is very popular and has done well in the Midwest, such as Michigan and Wisconsin, which are critical to winning.”

Most of the potential 2020 Democratic candidates deciding whether to pull the trigger are deep into staff interviews and debates about the timing of exploratory-committee announcements, but Sanders has turned inward. The number of people he’s actually talking to is tiny. The time they’re spending on what they consider the transactional politics of endorsements and influence is close to nonexistent.

“The place where the country is now is so far off, so out of whack, that those kinds of tactical discussions really don’t give an appropriate amount of appreciation of the danger that Trump and his kind of politics represent to American policy,” Weaver said. “If you had a crystal ball and could say, ‘This is the person, and the only person who could beat Trump,’ then you would have the entire party lining up against him. But I don’t think that’s clear yet.”

Sanders knows that a 2020 campaign would be his last shot at running for president—he turned 77 in September. But he also knows that running isn’t the only way he could be a factor. Some around the senator, who was just reelected to a third term, think he could be a presence in the chamber while continuing to be the kind of outside force that helped pressure Amazon to raise wages over the summer.

Sanders’s midterm campaign swing was, on the one hand, a success-- no prospective presidential candidate drew crowds as big as his, and he drew them consistently, from South Carolina to Iowa to Colorado. Candidates as varied as [corporate conservative] Jacky Rosen, who won her Senate race, and [moderately progressive] Andrew Gillum, who narrowly lost his governor race in Florida, were eager to appear with him. On the way to the University of Reno rally, Sanders stopped by the Culinary Workers’ union hall and was greeted with chants of “2020! 2020!” There were a number of events like that off the public schedule during Sanders’s tour, as well as meetings with local politicians and other leaders who struck the senator and his team as being much more open to him than they were the last time around.

And he and the crowd were both clearly enjoying it in Reno when he directly took on the protesters holding a Trump flag off the side of a multistory parking lot. “Really?” he said. “Do you really want to give a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the 1 percent? Do you really want to throw 32 million Americans off the health care that they have?”

On the other hand, many of the candidates Sanders campaigned for lost, and many of the bigger calculations that would be part of a 2020 run are setting in. In a field this big and fluid, none of the candidates can claim their chances of winning are high, and Sanders has slowly accepted that he’d likely start with a much smaller share of the vote than he ended up with when it was a binary choice between Hillary Clinton and him in 2016. He is high up in the polls, and he might have high name recognition, but he’d be fighting for attention and votes in a field that could range from Elizabeth Warren to Mike Bloomberg, and include everyone in between.

...Ro Khanna, a California congressman who in 2016 knocked out an incumbent Democrat on his second try for the seat, said he thinks Sanders should run again—and he has told the senator directly.

The goal, Khanna said, is “not simply occupying the presidency, but shaping the policy direction for the nation and the policy direction of the progressive movement and the country … I don’t think you can do that behind the scenes being a kingmaker.”

In Where We Go From Here, Sanders notes his successes in getting the Democratic National Committee to eliminate superdelegates and in persuading many Democratic politicians to sign on to Medicare for All. He lays out his foreign-policy philosophy. He also devotes chapters to his support for gun-control laws, addressing a weakness in his record that Clinton exploited in the 2016 campaign, and another to Martin Luther King Jr., which seems aimed at the weakness he had attracting black voters.

“The political revolution is about thinking big. It’s not about one election, one candidate, one issue. It’s about creating a movement that will transform the economic, political, social and environmental life of our country,” Sanders writes in the final chapter.

A few pages later, he ends the book on a vaguer note than Weaver, whose own book, out this past spring, ended, “Run Bernie run!”

“This is not a time for despair. This is not a time for depression. This is a time to stand up and fight back,” Sanders writes. “Please join us.”

That doesn't sound vague to me. Join him-- and if you're ready to contribute, you can do it directly by tapping this link to the 2020 Bernie For President page. Federal money-- like contributions that slow into a Senate campaign-- are 100% fungible within the federal system. In other words, while Bernie could not use donations to his Senate campaign to run for governor of Vermont or mayor of Burlington, he can use it to run for president. Let's have one truly great president in our lifetimes-- not an OK president or a so-so president, one who has at least chance to turn out to be like a Lincoln or a Roosevelt. (And believe me, that's not Ami Klobuchar or Michael Bloomberg or John Hickenlooper.) Watch Bernie's appearance from this morning on Face the Nation:

Talking About Deficits Is Always A Conservative Trap For Progressives

Yesterday on Face the Nation Bernie made a boo-boo, fallng into an old neo-liberal trap while discussing the GOP Tax Scam. John Dickerson asked him about what he referred to-- in neo-liberal parlance-- "entitlements" and asked "If the Democrats take control of the Senate, and you caucus with the Democrats, what's the promise to America about what will be done to reverse the state of affairs that you're so unhappy with?" Bernie responded that "At a time of massive income and wealth inequality where the people on top and large corporations are doing phenomenally well our job is to pay attention to the needs of working families. We talk about a childcare tax credit in this bill. Truth is that depending on where you live in America good quality child care can cost $12, $15, $20,000 a year. Our job is to move to universal childcare so that every working family in this country knows that their kids have good quality care... While the Republicans are spending all of their time providing massive tax breaks to the rich... 9 million kids are going to lose their health insurance."

That's when Dickerson pounced: "But if you-- Democrats take control, are corporate taxes going up? Bernie started out pitch-perfect: "I think we're going to take a very hard look at this entire tax bill and make it a tax bill that works for the middle class and working families. Not for the top 1% and large multinational corporations" but then Dickerson asked a Pete Peterson asinine kind of question: "But there's no question that in order to achieve all of the things you want taxes are going to have to go up on corporations. If they're down to 21 as a result of this legislation, you can't find the money anywhere else."

Bernie didn't push back on the assumptions inherent in the question and, instead, answered, "Absolutely.

Dickerson: All right. Let's go on to now the budget and spending question. The Republicans, when Democrats have said, "Medicare is going to have to be cut because of the so-called Pay-Go rules," what Republicans say is, "Democrats are going to waive those rules next year, that those Pay-Go rules are always waived. And so it's kind of a false attack to say that they are going to be automatic cuts for Medicare." Your response?

Bernie: No. It is not a false attack, John. It's simply listening to what the speaker of the House has said. And what he has said is after they do this tax bill the next order of business is so-called entitlement reform. And please understand that when Republicans talk about entitlement reform what they are talking about are massive cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security in the budget that they already passed.

They proposed a trillion-dollar cut to Medicaid, which would be disastrous to people who have loved ones in nursing homes, for children, and for working families who are on Medicaid. This is what they have already proposed. So they are going to come back in my view in order to offset this deficit with terrible cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

...Right now it is no secret that the middle class is hurting. The Republicans have been unable to reauthorize, for example, the community health center program providing healthcare to 27 million Americans. The CHIP program. The Children's Health Insurance Program. They have ignored the fact that for three months the CHIP program for 9 million children in this country has not been funded.

We have a crisis in pensions in this country. A million and a half hardworking people who were promised their pensions are going to see their pensions reduced by 50 or 60 percent. We have a rural infrastructure crisis where people can't even get broadband. We have 30,000 vacancies in the Veterans Administration that have not been filled. Our job is to take care of the needs of working families and the middle class. Not just worry about the 1 percent. So I believe that as we talk about the new spending bill those are the issues we must demand that Republicans address.

So what was the boo-boo? Bernie ended up sounding like he was saying that kids must suffer UNLESS AND UNTIL we can "find the money" to alleviate their suffering. Wrong framing for a progressive like Bernie.

It's imperative that progressive candidates say-- as Bernie usually does-- that we must look at taxes and reverse the kinds of giveaways that have led to the grotesque concentrations of wealth and income and that they would use the opportunity to do more to raise the incomes of those who are struggling to survive. He should never have conceded that it will be "necessary" to raise the corporate (or any other tax) in order to fund an ambitious progressive agenda. Progressive leaders should just plainly say that they will fund an agenda that looks after the 99% because we can always create the money to do it. Bernie almost always gets this right.

If there's one thing I've learned from Professor Kelton-- if only she was at Stony Brook when I was there... although she wasn't born when I was taking Economics 101 from Bob Lekachman-- it's that budget cuts are absolutely not mandatory.  If they happen, they happen because Republicans voluntarily make cuts. Republicans can waive the rules as they have whenever its politically convenient or feasible for them; they do it often enough. Waiving the rules means cuts don’t have to happen. So what Congress should do, in fact, is to waive the rules and protect vital programs for current and future generations. When we have them on the ropes-- when Bernie has them on the ropes-- that is the time to beat them into submission. Funding programs is always a political choice. Ryan knows this because Greenspan made it abundantly clear. "Why," Kelton told me, "can’t Democrats saddle up and ride that gift horse? I caught this Twitter thread from the progressive economist and former chief economist to Bernie Sanders and the Senate Budget Committee Democrats, Stephanie Kelton, someone all DWT readers should be paying close attention to:

There Is No Way To Clean Up The Disgusting Mess That Is Trump Other Than At The Ballot Box In 2018

Nick Kristof's column in the Times this weekend, Lessons From 100 Days Of President Trump, reminded us that "Trump distinguishes himself in one area: incompetence" and that "Trump remains a bully and a charlatan." Kristof wrote that over his entire career he's "never known a national politician as mendacious, ill informed, bombastic and dangerous as Trump." And it gets worse as he lists a dozen grievances against Trump.

Then yesterday, on CNN's Reliable Sources, Carl Bernstein accused Señor Trumpanzee of having "lied as no president of the United States in my lifetime has, day in and day out."

After Trump's performance at a partially-filled 7600 seat barn in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Saturday night, David Gergen, a former top advisor to Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton, went on CNN and said his stand up routine was "the most divisive speech I’ve ever heard from a sitting American president." Trump was trying to avoid the embarrassment of being roasted on national TV at the White House Correspondents Dinner so he did a free bread and circuses number for some poor schlepps in Pennsylvania who couldn't afford to take the family to see The Fate of the Furious, Smurfs: The Lost Village or How to be a Latin Lover. Instead he ldelighted them with his litany of lies while they laughed and drooled and screamed "lock her up" and "build that wall" over and over again. He boasted about overflowing crowds and lines of people outside while anyone with an IQ of 80-- about the average, it's calculated, for most Trump voters-- could just look around and noticed rows and rows and rows of empty seats.

Gergen: "He played to his base and he treated his other listeners, the rest of the people who have been disturbed about him or oppose him, he treated them basically as 'I don't care, I don't give a damn what you think, because you're frankly like the enemy.'"

The Daily Beast reported that "everyone was eating it up." These are our countrymen.

The phenomenon of a Trump rally is its collapsing of the space-time continuum. It’s timeless and timely with the recitations of the old themes-- “does anyone remember who our opponent was?”-- and the introduction of the new material-- “Senator Schumer is a bad leader.”

Within these spaces, Trump is largely impervious to criticism. His failures are the faults of the Democrats and Republicans who won’t cooperate with him, and his successes are the result of a unique businessman’s approach to the presidency.

“What Donald Trump really is is an independent president, if you will, for lack of a better term hijacking the Republican Party,” Michael Avila, a Trump voter from New York City, told the Daily Beast. “Which I think is a good thing.”

“I think he needs to get rid of Paul Ryan somehow, someway,” Avila added. “I think he’s a big issue.”

For Edward X. Young, a 57-year-old actor from New Jersey, sporting an assortment of buttons including pictures of the president and his wife, Trump achieved a great deal in the first 100 days considering the “quasi-Marxist Democratic party” he had to work with.

His one major issue was that Trump didn’t fulfill the campaign promise of putting Hillary Clinton in jail.

“She’s behind the Resistance,” Young told The Daily Beast, referring to Clinton. Trump “should prosecute her and put her and her lousy husband behind bars, and her daughter too.”

Everything else was mostly peachy to Young-- especially the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

“The last time a new Supreme Court Justice was confirmed, in the first 100 days, was 136 years ago in 1881,” Trump proudly proclaimed at one point. “And I was devastated to hear that because I thought I’d be the only one to have done that.”

He’s right on the numbers and the significance (Chester Arthur was the last to do it in that timeframe), but it’s one of those Trumpian anecdotes that misconstrues a rare opportunity that few presidents get as a massive single-handed achievement.

Yet it plays for the cameras and it plays for the audience that hates the cameras. And on the 100th day of Donald Trump’s presidency on a balmy night in Harrisburg, more than 100 miles away from the grind of his daily job, that’s all that really mattered.

“It is truly great to be back in the wonderful, beautiful state of Pennsylvania,” Trump said to the fans. They all seemed to agree-- the mothers of active service members, actors, bikers and even a few skinheads who came down to celebrate the fact that they had taken the country back from the clutches of the elites who had failed them.

It was a country now where you could wear a Pepe the Frog mask and wave a flag representing the fictitious 4chan-generated Kekistan on the lawn where a president just spoke.

And it’s never going to be the same. Even after police on horseback chased Pepe off the lawn and into the night.

Trump woke up Sunday morning, tweeted some of his normal bullshit and then probably watch his pre-taped interview with John Dickerson on Face The Nation, which he referred to as "Deface the Nation." He's such a witty guy. When Dickerson asked him what he knows "now on day 100 that you wish you knew on day one of the presidency," he's learned "how dishonest the media is, really. I've done things that are I think very good. I've set great foundations with foreign leaders. We have you know-- NAFTA, as you know, I was going to terminate it, but I got a very nice call from a man I like, the president of Mexico. I got a very nice call from Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada. And they said please would you rather than terminating NAFTA--  I was all set to do it. In fact, I was going to do it today. I was going to do as we're sitting here. I would've had to delay you. I was going to do it today. I was going to terminate NAFTA. But they called up and they said, 'Would you negotiate?' And I said, 'Yes, I will negotiate.'"

Most Regime observers have noted he was talked out of scrapping NAFTA by the Goldman Sachs crew he recruited to run the economy even before he called Justin Trudeau and Enrique Peña Nieto as a face-saving gesture. Anyway Dickerson was stunned by the shallow response and followed up: "Surely, you've learned something else other than that the media is dishonest... Give me another thing you learned that you're going to adapt and change because all presidents have to at this stage." And the orange monkey told him things take longer than he'd like them to. "It's just a very, very bureaucratic system. I think the rules in Congress and in particular the rules in the Senate are unbelievably archaic and slow moving. And in many cases, unfair. In many cases, you're forced to make deals that are not the deal you'd make. You'd make a much different kind of a deal. You're forced into situations that you hate to be forced into. I also learned, and this is very sad, because we have a country that we have to take care of. The Democrats have been totally obstructionist. Chuck Schumer has turned out to be a bad leader. He's a bad leader for the country. And the Democrats are extremely obstructionist. All they do is obstruct. All they do is delay. Even our Supreme Court justice, as you know, who I think is going to be outstanding, Justice Gorsuch. I think that it was disgraceful the way they handled that. But, you know, I still have people, I'm waiting for them to be approved. Our chief trade negotiator. We can't get these people through."

And then he stumbled through an awkward and cringeworthy attempt to explain TrumpCare 3.0, which he is basically clueless about and sounded very much like his crackpot Adderall-fueled tweets. Does this delusional imbecile sound like a President of the United States to you?