"I Told You So" Is Usually An Offensive Argument That Rarely Works

Look, I never thought Hillary was a good nominee and I didn't think she would make a good president-- and therefor didn't vote for her-- but the idea of voting for The Donald? Give me a break. I would have voted for Hillary a thousand times before voting for Trump. But 62,984,828 Americans did (46.1% of all voters). All they all... a problem? More or less, yes. What country! All those people voted for Donald Trump. What were they thinking?

One person who voted for Trump was Elizabeth Neumann, a vehemently anti-Choice, Ted Cruz supporter. [Bonus question: is supporting Ted Cruz better or worse than supporting Donald Trump? Or basically the same?] Neumann worked for the George W. Bush regime starting in 2003 and in 2016 she took a job as Deputy Chief of Staff for Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly. She later served as Assistant Secretary for Threat Prevention and Security Policy under Kirstjen Nielsen, Kevin McAleenan, and neo-Nazi and future criminal defendant Chad Wolf. So... she's been up to a lot of no good for quite some time. But she loves herself some Joe Biden!





Yesterday, she expanded on, or updated, in an OpEd for USA Today, the powerful ad (above) that she cut last summer for Republican Voters Against Trump. "Everything we saw during the first presidential debate," she wrote, "is indicative of how President Donald Trump behaves in the White House. His business model is chaos. He has no organization, no leadership, and sees every interaction as a contest or a battle, even when it doesn’t have to be. Chris Wallace now knows how so many administration staffers feel-- and how I felt when the president got in the way of me doing my job. He is dangerous for our country."

Yep and they all let him get away with it-- they all bowed and scraped to this weak, psychologically wrecked little slob because... well... tax cuts, judges, careerism or, in Neumann's case, her toxic delusions-- which she still clings to, by the way, that God opposes women's Choice.

I served as the Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention, and my job was to help keep Americans safe from terrorist attacks. My time in office coincided with a dramatic rise in white nationalist violence, but my colleagues and I couldn’t get the president to help address the problem. At the debate, America saw what I saw in the administration: President Trump refuses to distance himself from white nationalists. I realized after watching the White House response to the terrorist attack in El Paso that his rhetoric was a recruitment tool for violent extremist groups. The president bears some responsibility for the deaths of Americans at the hands of these violent extremists.

As a conservative, I believe a primary purpose of the federal government is to provide for the national defense. Under the Constitution, it is a mandatory function of the federal government. After serving for three years inside the Trump administration’s national security team, I am convinced the president is failing at keeping Americans safe.

Early on in the administration, I represented the Department of Homeland Security at several meetings in which a White House staff member implied that the president had approved, and that we should begin to carry out, plans that could have led the United States into war. Thankfully, there were experienced people in the room who had enough clout to suggest that these catastrophic plans needed a second look. Many of us weren’t sure what, if anything, the president had actually approved, or that he had been properly briefed to ensure he understood the risks involved. These people helped us avoid war.

Having adults in the room matters. They protect the country from a chaotic White House structure that allows staffers to run amok. But more importantly, they ensure that the president is presented with unvarnished truth, that difficult topics like domestic terrorism are raised even when he doesn’t want to acknowledge them.

This is not necessarily an actionable comment but are you at all nervous about all these die-hard conservative elites happily voting for Biden? Let's end the evening on a funny note-- with Jimmy Kimmel and an oldie but goodie:

Progressives Will Largely Hold Their Noses And Vote For Biden (Who Isn't As Bad As Trump)

At this point I don't know anyone-- aside from myself-- who's still refusing to vote for Biden. No one I know-- not one person-- likes Biden or thinks he'll make a good president. Few expect him to even be a mediocre president. Most everyone I know expects him to be one of the worst... but not as bad as Trump, who is the worst... and beyond. But everything in Biden's decades in elected office says he'll be the worst Democrat in the presidency since, perhaps, James Buchanan, who, tragically, took office in 1857. The only hope for just a plain ole mediocre Biden presidency would be if he sits down in a rocking chair on the day after he's inaugurated, sucks his thumb for four years and lets Obama run the show.

On Tuesday night, though with no success, Trump tried splitting the progressive base away from the virulently anti-progressive Biden. Progressives know what a sack of shit Biden is and know that Trump is infinitely worse. Most people I know, say they will voted for Biden anyway and fully expect to start fighting his and his Wall Street "Nothing Will Change" agenda with all they have as soon as he takes office. Yeah, yeah.

With Trump's prodding, Biden went out of his way Tuesday night not just to distance himself from Medicare-for-All, but to make sure Americans know his plans for a faux public option are mostly faux and will in no way discomfit his friends (and donors) in the health insurance industry. He also bad-mouthed the Green New Deal and gave progressives every reason in the world to sit on their hands next month-- and then he called Trump a "clown" and told him to "shut up" and... some-- in not all-- was forgiven.

Tuesday night, Biden boasted about beating Bernie. Wednesday morning I got an e-mail from Bernie asking me to send a $500 contribution before the end of the day so he can continue trying to help elect the man I won't even vote for. "This is the most important election in the modern history of our country," he wrote. "It is absolutely critical we do all we can to defeat Donald Trump, the most dangerous president in modern American history." Everyone agrees and, like I said, everyone I know plans to hold their noses and vote for Biden.

NBC News' Sahil Kapur reported on Wednesday that a spokesman for the Justice Democrats, Waleed Shahid, responded to Trump's naked attempts to split the Democrats by saying that "Trump wants to play this ridiculous 'Gotcha, you and Bernie disagree!' game as if the entire primary didn’t happen. I think Biden could have tried to articulate his actual policy positions and what he wants to get done. But it was hard to articulate anything in that debate."

Shahid said the progressive movement’s role is to “elect a president closer to your views” and “broaden the scope of what's considered politically possible” with a mix of protest and pressure.

Biden's eagerness to distance himself from the left is reflective of his strategy to win the election by attracting moderate-minded seniors and white college graduates, rather than bet the race on turning out younger or irregular voters in Barack Obama's winning coalitions. Millennials and Generation Z voters are less enthused about Biden, and their voting patterns are difficult to predict.

For now, Trump is a unifying force masking genuine tensions between an older, moderate faction that runs the party and a rising base of young progressives seeking to reshape Democratic priorities. The debate is more reflective of a coffee table conversation on policy than a bloody knife fight threatening to wound the party.

I am not upset with Biden,” said Brian Fallon, a veteran Democratic operative who now runs Demand Justice, a group fighting for a more progressive judiciary and Supreme Court. He said he interpreted Biden's nonanswer on whether he'd support adding Supreme Court seats as a sign that it was “on the table” if he's elected president.

Fallon said Biden wanted to isolate variables and make his opposition to Barrett be about the proximity to the election, but said Biden “oversold it” by calling her a “very fine person.”

Ben Wessel, the executive director of the youth-focused progressive advocacy group NextGen America, dismissed the “noise” around Biden's Green New Deal remarks, and instead praised Biden’s plan for 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035.

Progressive activists say they view the contest as one between a reluctant ally and a mortal enemy. While some distrust Biden’s moderate instincts, they see him as willing to listen and adopt some of their ideas. Some take the optimistic view that he’d embrace more liberal ideas if elected.

“I don’t think most of our people give a shit what it’s called as long as it gives us a fighting chance at a safe and livable climate,” Wessel said. “The young people we’re talking to know that we’re going to have to push Biden to be even stronger on the issues once he’s in office, but that they’ve got to get him in the White House first.”

On Twitter, Ocasio-Cortez dismissed former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway’s attempts to highlight Biden’s opposition to the Green New Deal, contrasting him favorably with Trump, who she said “doesn’t even believe climate change is real.”

A Biden adviser said that if Trump’s strategy was to drive a wedge between Biden and progressives, it only backfired, as Biden held firm to his more moderate lane of the party and used the high-profile moment to undercut Trump's strategy of portraying Biden as a Trojan horse of the radical left.

Campaigning Wednesday in Alliance, Ohio, Biden addressed questions about his differences with the left, reiterating his opposition to Medicare for All and saying his plan is "the Biden Green Deal."

Biden said Trump keeps trying to run against "somebody other than me."

"I've said to the left, to the right, to the center exactly where I am on each of these issues," Biden told reporters. "So I'm not worried about losing the left, right or center of the party. This is a big party."

If Biden is elected, the governing tension could become a theme of his presidency.

Shahid said the modern left will pressure Biden the same way contemporary movements pressured Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson to be bolder.

"Lincoln was not an abolitionist, FDR was not a socialist or trade unionist, and LBJ was not a civil rights activist," he said. "In fact, they took great steps to distance themselves from those movements."

Many of the candidates endorsed by Blue America were Bernie or Elizabeth Warren supporters during the primaries. None were Biden supporters. All of them oppose Trump and I believe all of them plan to vote for Biden while sticking to their own progressive agendas. The first one I reached was Rockland/Westchester congressional candidate Mondaire Jones, a very independent-minded progressive. "The left in recent years has never shied away from a fight with members of the Democratic Party," he told me, "and I see no reason why we won’t flex our newfound muscle in a Biden-Harris administration. Biden and Harris would be working with the most progressive Congress we’ve seen, and I’m ready to make sure they’re sticking to their promises, and I'll be part of the effort to push them to be more in line with progressive values."

Similarly, West Virginia progressive, Cathy Kunkel, told me that her campaign "has been consistent from the beginning in fighting for an economy that works for all West Virginians-- for Medicare for All, well-funded public education and revitalizing our economy as the coal industry continues to decline. Our campaign will continue to advocate for those issues, and highlight the fact that Congressman Alex Mooney has done nothing in the last six years to address these urgent needs, regardless of the dynamics in the presidential race."

Nate McMurray, the populist candidate running in New York's "reddest" district (which he came within a handful of votes of winning in 2018) has a very clear vision when it comes to the elections next month. "Listen," he told he this morning, "I'm way more progressive than Joe Biden. I support him as the Democatic nominee but there are issues we really differ on. It's about the average Americans who need access to good quality, affordable healthcare, safety and secured rights for minorities and LGBTQ Americans. It's about being able to say and mean that Black Lives Matter and not having a President who just tells white supremacy groups to 'stand by' and refuses to renounce white supremacy outright. The American people and our democracy cannot take another four years of Trump. Will I fight for more progressive policies in Washington than Biden stands for? You bet I will. But we need him in office right now to restore our faith in humanity, and repair all the damage done to the country. A Trump win will tear the country apart."

Death Of The GOP? Bring It On!

Covering Up The Cover Up by Nancy Ohanian

Devin Nunes, a Central Valley Trumpist goon, is the ranking Republican on the House Intel Committee. One of his staffers, Derek Harvey, has been leaking the whistleblower's name. That's illegal. But Harvey hasn't been arrested and Nunes hasn't fired him. Mark Zaid, one of the whistleblower’s attorneys: "Exposing the identity of the whistleblower and attacking our client would do nothing to undercut the validity of the complaint’s allegations. What it would do, however, is put that individual and their family at risk of harm. Perhaps more important, it would deter future whistleblowers from coming forward in subsequent administrations, Democratic or Republican."

Do you remember Greg Mankiw? His name used to be in the news very regularly, at least for an economist. (He's a New Keynesian.) He's an author and columnist but he's probably best known for having been George W. Bush's chair of the Council of Economic advisors and then for being both Romney campaign's chief economic advisor. Until yesterday, Mankiw was a Republican opponent of Trump's. Yesterday he left the Republican Party. "I just came back from city hall," he wrote on his blog, "where I switched my voter registration from Republican to unenrolled (aka independent)... [T]he Republican Party has largely become the Party of Trump. Too many Republicans in Congress are willing, in the interest of protecting their jobs, to overlook Trump's misdeeds (just as too many Democrats were for Clinton during his impeachment). I have no interest in associating myself with that behavior. Maybe someday, the party will return to having honorable leaders like Bush, McCain, and Romney. Until then, count me out."




Like all the conservatives fleeing the GOP, Mankiw is ferociously anti-progressive and insists the Democrats nominate a conservative, someone more like Bush or Romney. He says he wants to see Status Quo Joe, Mayo Pete, Amy Klobuchar or Andrew Yang as the party nominee. He rails against Bernie and Elizabeth. Of course. Conservative Republicans would be perfectly happy with a conservative Democrat instead of Trump but conservatives don't want an agent of change, especially not Bernie. Just tune in to Comcast TV any day and you will hear NeverTrump Republicans, ex-Republicans or wealthy conservaDems talking about how Bernie makes their skin crawl.

Charlie Sykes is another prominent Republican who opposes Trump. He's the editor of The Bulwark, the conservative anti-Trump bastion. But his column of advice to Republicans on how to survive their impeachment nightmare was in Politico. Denial, he wrote to Senate Republicans, won't work. And there's no escape. They now know they "are going to have to render a verdict not just on Donald’s Trump’s policies, but on his personal conduct... You’ll have to vote up or down and your decision will have consequences that will linger long past this election cycle. The situation is already grim. 'It feels like a horror movie,' one senator recently told the Washington Post. But it is all about to get worse: the evidence, the venue and the president’s conduct. There may be more smoking guns, the trial will be televised, and based on the past few weeks, Trump is likely to be more unhinged than ever. In honor of the season, I offer you some unsolicited Halloween-themed advice to help you navigate the coming nightmare. If you take this advice, you have a chance of saving your party. Ignore it, and, well, you’ve seen what happens in those horror movies, right?

1. Don’t hide in the basement.

So far you and your fellow Republicans have been able to hide behind complaints about process and the claim that the impeachment probe is “illegitimate.” Your colleagues in the House actually stormed the secure hearing room in the basement of the Capitol and complained about the process even as a few dozen GOP lawmakers were inside being part of that process. It was juvenile and self-defeating. Sooner or later, you will have to confront the substance of case; and that is not likely to get any better.

You have to consider the possibility that there may be more transcripts, more tapes, more whistleblowers. The new evidence is not likely to be exculpatory, because the president’s conduct in pressuring foreign governments for dirt on the Bidens and obstructing justice has already been well documented.

The venue will also change. Republicans are complaining that the process has been secretive, but be careful what you wish for. The trial will be must-see television and not even Fox News will be able to keep much of the evidence from your constituents. Polls already suggest historically high support for the impeachment inquiry, and we have not even begun those public hearings. In short, pretending that the facts aren’t facts-- that you’ll be safe behind your flimsy justification-- is not going to help when everything is out in the open. Deal with it.

2. To kill the monster requires confronting how you made him.

As you watch this reckless and unleashed presidency it may have occurred to you how much you have contributed to this moment. You have convinced Trump that he can take you for granted. The president has bullied and berated you and, again and again, you have rolled over. And it has made things only worse.

Trump’s instinct is to escalate both his tactics and his language. The cascade of stories in just the last week-- Ukraine, Syria, the G-7 and Doral, the launching of a criminal probe against his own Department of Justice, his reference to critics as “human scum”-- are a microcosm of his presidency and where we are going.

Between now and the beginning of the Senate trial, that behavior could become even more erratic and you will be forced to defend an ever-widening gyre of inanities, deceptions, abuses of power, episodes of self-dealing and other assorted outrages. Imagine six months of Giuliani butt-dials.

The first step to saving your life is to recognize what the monster feeds on. In this case, it’s your fear of standing up to him.

3. You survive only if you fight back.

All the craziness might suggest that a policy of strategic silence is the best option. This includes not signing on to more resolutions like the one authored by Sen. Lindsey Graham condemning the House inquiry. Graham may be immune to humiliation and indifferent to history’s verdict, but you likely will not be.

You probably also think you can finesse this by finding a middle ground where you can acknowledge that the call to the Ukrainian president was inappropriate and Trump’s behavior questionable, but not impeachable.

But Trump may not let you. The president and his loudest supporters continue to insist that (a) the phone call with the Ukrainian president was “perfect,” (b) there was no quid pro quo, and (c) even if there was one, it was completely appropriate. Indeed, on Monday he urged to stop focusing on process and defend the merits of his actions. “I'd rather go into the details of the case rather than process... Process is good, but I think you ought to look at the case.”

The problem is that “the genius of our great president” demands total fealty. He will insist that acquittal be considered total exoneration, and he intends you to be a part of the whitewash. He wants you to embrace and ratify his conduct; and if you do, you will own it.

4. The sequel is often scarier than the original.

You need to consider the full implications of the precedent you will be setting if you vote to acquit the president. Imagine a second Trump term beyond the reach of credible constitutional accountability. Consider what that would mean for our political culture, constitutional norms and the future of your party.

“The boundaries of acceptable presidential behavior are defined by which actions the political system tolerates or condemns,” writes Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes.

We are already “perilously close to the point at which there may no longer be a national consensus that there’s anything constitutionally problematic about using governmental powers to advance one’s own pecuniary and electoral interests.”

Writes Wittes: “If a substantial group of members of Congress signals not merely that the president’s conduct does not warrant impeachment and removal but also that it does not even warrant branding as intolerable, such conduct will become normalized-- at a great cost to previously unquestioned first principles of constitutional governance-- even if the House impeaches Trump.”

This is why you should pay more attention to the Federalist Papers than Fox News.

On Fox News, the impeachment proceedings will be characterized as a “coup,” or an attempt to “overturn an election.” But they are neither.

5. Your ultimate weapon is always within reach.

Alexander Hamilton clearly envisioned impeachment as a constitutional check on “the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.” He understood that impeachment proceedings were, by their nature, political, “as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” He also had no illusions about how divisive the process would be, noting that impeachment “will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community,” and that “in such cases there will always be the gravest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.”

But the founders reposed their confidence in you; or rather in what they thought the Senate would be. “Where else than in the Senate could have been found a tribunal sufficiently dignified, or sufficiently independent?” What other body, asked Hamilton, would feel confident enough “to preserve, unawed and uninfluenced, the necessary impartiality,” between the accused “and the REPRESENTATIVES OF THE PEOPLE, HIS ACCUSERS?” (Emphasis Hamilton’s.)

There’s a good reason to listen to Hamilton here-- for the sake of the GOP.

Consider this: What if, instead of breaking with Richard Nixon in 1974, Republicans had stuck with him, deciding that Nixon’s impeachment was a test of tribal loyalty? What would the consequences have been if they had voted to acquit him on charges of obstructing justice, lying to the public, contempt of Congress and abuse of power? Specifically, what would it have meant for the Republican Party had it embraced the defense of Nixon’s corruption? If it had been less Barry Goldwater and more Lindsey Graham?

We know what actually happened. Even after abandoning Nixon, the GOP was punished in 1974 and 1976, but it was able to otherwise wipe the stink off relatively quickly, winning back the presidency in 1980 and holding it for 12 years.

But what if the party had gone all Watergate-is-no-big-deal? If it had, it’s unlikely that Ronald Reagan would even have been elected, because the GOP would have been haunted by Nixon for a generation.

In your idle moments, you have perhaps wondered what your legacy will be. Here’s the answer; history will remember what you do over the next few months.

Short term, breaking with Trump will spark a nasty blowback. But imagine for a moment a post-Trumpian Republican Party freed from the baggage of Trumpist corruption. The choice is between a party inextricably tied to Trump, with all of his crudity, dishonesty, lawlessness and arrogance, and a party that has shown that it is capable of being a principled defender of constitutional norms.

At the end of this process, the simple narrative is likely to be that the president has abused his power, broken the law and sold out his country. You have an opportunity to hold him accountable by doing your constitutional duty. History will want to know whether you got scared and shirked it.

Who Goes To Prison First-- Barr Or Giuliani?

An economic survey for CNBC that was completed before the Ukraine scandal and impeachment mania shows that Trump's job approval rating has continued to collapse and is now at an all-time low for this poll-- 37% approve, 53% disapprove (minus 16). Because of recent developments, the survey is out of date and superseded by more recent polls showing even worse numbers for Trump.

My favorite pollsters this cycle, Change Research, went into 31 Democratic-held districts-- districts that Trump won in 2016 but that Obama had won at least once-- after Pelosi had come out for impeachment, but before the Ukraine scandal had broken wide open. 63% of likely voters in these fairly key districts-- 71% of Hillary voters and 51% of the mentally challenged morons who are stupid enough to have voted for Trump-- are following the news closely. Key findings:

• 63% of likely voters are very closely following the "news of the recent intelligence community whistleblower complaint about President Trump’s communications and actions concerning Ukraine.” 71% of Clinton voters are currently following this news very closely compared with 51% of Trump voters.
• 45% of likely voters, including 85% of Democrats and 42% of independent voters, say “President Trump’s communications and actions concerning Ukraine” raise very serious concerns. (By comparison, just 36% of voters are very seriously concerned about “Joe Biden’s dealings with Ukraine while he was Vice President.”)
• Voters in these Trump-won seats are evenly split on the impeachment issue: 49% support “opening an impeachment inquiry, while also working on other priorities,” including 43% who support it strongly. 49% also support “voting to impeach” the President at this time. Already, 72% of the white college women who were so critical to Democrats’ gains in 2018 support impeachment, as do 48% of independents.

As Jimmy Kimmel said on his show, you can't say Trump is unravelling because it implies he was once raveled. And Kimmel wasn't the only late night comic making fun of Trump's pathetic twitter-campaign against impeachment. Watch Trevor Noah and Colbert. And here's Seth Meyers:





Does Trump have a plan to avoid being impeached? Politico reported his team is scrambling to come up with one and that right now there's no plan, no strategy and not even unified messaging to fight back. Just Trump, high on Adderall making a jerk out of himself on Twitter. This attitude probably will sink him:

“He doesn’t need a war room,” said Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and an informal Trump political adviser. “This is not about impeachment. This is just a coup d’état.”

The infighting over the fate of a war room reflects the long-standing operational styles of the Trump White House and 2016 campaign over the past four years, during which personnel battles often overshadowed any well-honed strategy. The president has always preferred to run his White House with a team-of-rivals approach, with aides fighting over various policies or political options and Trump alone as the decider at the center of the action.

As John Harwood reported for CNBC, as Trump and his enablers in Congress and the White House "have feverishly sought to redirect a whistleblower’s complaints toward Democratic adversaries, the evidence makes mincemeat out their weak parries. Hardwood reported that GOP defenses for Señor Trumpanzee's conduct on Ukraine "simply don’t hold up... [E]ven cursory scrutiny of evidence that has emerged so far knocks down assorted GOP arguments like shanties in a hurricane... 'The fissures are growing,' GOP former Rep. Carlos Curbelo told me. 'I’ve heard from members who are at the end of their ropes. They just feel trapped.'" And now even 23% of Republican voters support an impeachment inquiry. Drip, drip, drip.

Even while the Trump grievance machine is reaping millions for his campaign (and defense)-- 50,000-plus new donors and $8.5 million in two days-- David Frum wrote in his Atlantic column how Trump is taking the opposite approach to impeachment strategy that Bill Clinton did. "During the Lewinsky scandal, Clinton focused on doing his job. Trump isn’t even pretending... Trump may have no impeachment war room, but he does have an impeachment strategy. He deployed it this past weekend. It’s the same strategy he brought to his presidential campaign, then to his presidency: all base, all the time. In 1998 and ’99, Bill Clinton directed his anti-impeachment messaging to voters who did not necessarily approve of him, but who feared impeachment as disruptive. Trump’s message is aimed only at his most all-in supporters, those who see him as a victim of plots and persecution by shadowy, unseen forces."

One reason why Trump's defense is in a shambles-- aside from his own nature-- is that Giuliani and Barr have a contentious relationship. A team of Wall Street Journal reporters wrote that Barr thinks Giuliani is, basically, a clown and an incompetent and assert that Señor Trumpanzee's "relationships with his private lawyer who once aspired to be his attorney general and the man who currently has that post are complicating White House efforts to build a legal and public-relations strategy to keep Mr. Trump in office." Señor T "is receiving advice from two very different lawyers: Mr. Giuliani, who blankets the airwaves morning and evening with combative interviews and is prone to exaggeration; and Mr. Barr, a more measured figure but one who has drawn criticism for appearing overly close to Mr. Trump. As Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Mr. Giuliani’s job is to defend the president; as attorney general, Mr. Barr’s is to defend the Justice Department and the institution of the presidency. Yet Mr. Trump at times refers to the two men almost interchangeably. In a July call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Mr. Trump pressed his counterpart to investigate Democrat Joe Biden, Mr. Trump didn’t draw a distinction between the roles of Messrs. Giuliani and Barr, saying repeatedly that he would have both of them call to discuss the possible Biden investigation and other matters."

“When he was in private life, Trump was accustomed to having lawyers where he was the client, he would give directives and they’d do their best to fulfill his directives,” a former senior administration official said. “The government works a little bit differently. That was something he didn’t know, didn’t appreciate and I’m not sure if he’s ever fully comes to terms with.”

Mr. Barr was surprised and angry to discover weeks later that the president had lumped him together with Mr. Giuliani on the phone call with Mr. Zelensky, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Justice Department said Mr. Trump never asked Mr. Barr to contact the Ukrainians.

House committees on Monday subpoenaed Mr. Giuliani for documents related to his efforts to pressure Ukraine to probe Mr. Biden. Mr. Giuliani didn’t respond to a question about whether he would comply.

Democrats have used the Trump-Zelensky phone call to raise questions about Mr. Barr’s own conduct. “I do think the attorney general has gone rogue,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said Friday on CNN. “Since he was mentioned in all of this, it’s curious that he would be making decisions about how the complaint would be handled.”

...In the days since House Democrats opened an impeachment inquiry, Mr. Giuliani has been a near-constant fixture on TV, declaring himself a whistleblower and confirming he would deliver a paid speech at a Kremlin-backed conference, only to reverse himself hours later. Mr. Barr, in contrast, departed for Italy for a previously scheduled trip and hasn’t spoken publicly.

On Monday, a Justice Department official said Mr. Barr had asked the president to make introductions in several countries that may have information relevant to a federal probe into the origins of the Mueller investigation, which Mr. Trump has repeatedly decried as a “witch hunt.”

One such introduction was to Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, whom Mr. Trump recently called at Mr. Barr’s request, two government officials said. The FBI opened its counterintelligence investigation in July 2016 after the Australian government tipped off the U.S. that another foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign appeared to have foreknowledge of the release of hacked material by Russia.

Despite legal careers that intersected under Mr. Trump, people close to Mr. Barr say he and Mr. Giuliani have never been close and that he is privately mystified by what many in conservative legal circles view as Mr. Giuliani’s meddling in matters that should be handled by officials in government. Mr. Barr has privately told associates that he believes Mr. Giuliani’s behavior in general isn’t helpful to the administration.

Mr. Trump likes and respects Mr. Giuliani but his perception of him is “cyclical” and varies depending on the day, a person close to the president said. The president so far appears to appreciate Mr. Giuliani’s very public defense of their Ukraine strategy. On Wednesday, speaking at the United Nations, Mr. Trump called Mr. Giuliani a “great lawyer” and said: “I’ve watched the passion that he’s had on television over the last few days. I think it’s incredible the way he’s done.”

“The only person that likes Rudy on TV right now is Trump,” said another person close to the president, adding that Mr. Trump “likes people who get on TV and fight for him.”

Giuliani has known the president for decades, but bolstered his standing with Mr. Trump with his loyal support of his campaign in 2016. Mr. Trump didn’t always return the favor. He often needled the former mayor for falling asleep on long flights, and joked about whether Mr. Giuliani was looking at cartoons on his iPad, a former aide said.





Mr. Trump also berated Mr. Giuliani in front of others at the wedding of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in 2017. The president complained that Mr. Giuliani was spitting while he was talking and ordered him to stand elsewhere, the aide said.

After the release of the Access Hollywood tape weeks before the election in which Mr. Trump was captured making lewd comments about women, few advisers were willing to go on the Sunday talk shows to defend the candidate. Mr. Giuliani taped all five shows-- after which Mr. Trump attacked him for his performance. “Man, Rudy, you sucked. You were weak. Low energy,” the candidate told him, according to a book by two former campaign aides, Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie.

Mr. Giuliani rarely complained about such treatment, jockeying with other aides and advisers to sit next to Mr. Trump at dinner or on the plane. “Rudy never wanted to be left out,” one former aide said. “If you were ever between Rudy and the president, look out. You were going to get trampled.”

After the election, Mr. Giuliani was eager for an administration post-- foremost, that of attorney general. He didn’t get it.

Yet Mr. Trump valued his loyalty. In staff meetings at the White House, the president would pre-empt complaints about Mr. Giuliani’s behavior on television by interrupting and making clear that he appreciated how hard the former mayor was fighting for him.

“Everyone shuts up after that,” a White House aide said.

Mr. Trump didn’t know Mr. Barr well before tapping him as the country’s top prosecutor on the recommendation of his legal advisers. Their relationship grew stronger during the final stages of the Mueller investigation, an administration official said, adding that Mr. Trump was pleased with the way his attorney general handled the end of the probe. In the months since, Mr. Trump has often privately praised Mr. Barr, and the two speak regularly.

Mr. Barr unrolled the Mueller team’s findings in a way that favored Mr. Trump, prompting criticism that he appeared overly interested in defending the president and risked the Justice Department’s independence from the White House. It was Mr. Barr who determined, along with then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, that Mr. Trump hadn’t obstructed justice, after Mr. Mueller opted not to make a decision on that matter, citing a Justice Department policy barring the indictment of sitting presidents.

A couple days ago right-wing journalist Joel Gehrke reported that Giuliani's incompetence led to what looks like Trump's impeachment. He reported that Giuliani was conned by Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko, "a disreputable official who hoped to avoid being fired by President Volodymyr. "Lutsenko, 54, convinced Giuliani," according to Gehrke, "that he had evidence of corruption involving former Vice President Joe Biden. But his back-channel meetings are widely perceived as an attempt to forge the kind of political alliance with Trump that would make it difficult for Zelensky to oust him.

When Lutsenko’s allegations provoked Trump to recall the top U.S. ambassador in Kiev, Kurt Volker, the other key American diplomat in Ukraine policy, downplayed the issue by casting doubt on the outgoing prosecutor’s motives.

“Other people in Ukraine are trying to use the U.S. domestic politics as a vehicle for their own engagement, either in fighting their domestic enemies inside Ukraine or trying to feel like they’ve got some special relationship with people in the United States,” Volker, who resigned last week as the State Department’s special representative for the war in Ukraine, said in May.

That was Volker’s explanation for a series of explosive allegations that Lutsenko aired throughout the spring, as Zelensky surged in the presidential elections. Lutsenko claimed to have evidence that Ukrainian officials helped 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign by leaking information that would lead to the indictment of a Trump campaign adviser.

Lutsenko also suggested that Biden had protected his son, Hunter, by pressuring Ukrainian officials to fire a previous prosecutor who was investigating a company that had hired the younger Biden. Trump would echo these suspicions in his now-famous July 25 phone call with Zelensky, but Ukrainian activists counter that Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor Biden denounced, was in fact refusing to investigate the company.

“He was dismissed because of a lack of willingness to investigate this particular case as well as other important cases,” Daria Kaleniuk, director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, said in July. “[Lutsenko] wanted to become a person with whom people in the United States wanted to talk, and then probably he found Giuliani and found a sexy story that fit into the Giuliani agenda.”

Lutsenko had a motive for resorting to these tactics. The prosecutor general was an ally of the outgoing president, Petro Poroshenko, the oligarch who came to power after Yanukovych was ousted in 2014. When Lutsenko was appointed in 2016, he had a “reformist” reputation due to his record as an enemy of Yanukovych, but that would change.

“By the time Zelensky was running, it was pretty clear that all of these corruption investigations under Poroshenko and Lutsenko's watch wasn't going anywhere,” Shevel said. “And so, clearly the idea would be that there would be changes.”

Lutsenko lost his job at the end of August, but Giuliani kept pursuing the allegations against the Bidens. Now, the ex-prosecutor is now undermining those efforts, portraying Giuliani as pushing him to “start an investigation just for the interests of an American official” and adding that he knew of no illegal activity by either the former vice president or his son.

“The president has done things ... based on his obvious presumption that there is something to be found about Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton in Ukraine,” said the central European specialist. “What if there's no there there? It means, then, that Giuliani may have drawn Trump into a situation which is, politically, extraordinarily damaging-- for no purpose.”

Many Americans look forward to seeing both Giuliani and Barr behind bars-- sooner the better.

William Jennings Bryan Lost-- Can Bernie Win A Century Later And Fighting For The Same Interests Of Everyday Americans?

"Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved."
-William Jennings Bryan

The presidential election of 1896 could have been a great game-changer. But it wasn't. The urban working class and the rural Americans looked like they were going to united behind Democrat and populist William Jennings Bryan. Rural Americans largely came to the party. The working class in the Northeast and Midwest didn't, selling out their own economic interests to the capitalists, screwing themselves and their families royally for the next 4 decades.

After Bryan won the Democratic Party nomination, the Blue Dogs of the day-- they were called Bourbon Democrats back them-- split off and started the National Democratic Party and ran conservative John Palmer, who switched parties throughout his miserable life, as a third party, likely depriving Bryan of California and Kentucky and possibly Oregon. Republican William McKinley, the candidate of Big Business beat Bryan, the candidate of the workers and farmers, 7,111,607 (51.0%) to 6,509,052 (46.7%). McKinley preached trickle down-- in the middle of a depression and high unemployment no less-- and the workers, swayed by the biggest campaign spending ever up to that point, bought it. Turnout was massive-- the biggest in American history.

It makes me sad that Bryan lost and that McKinley won but we can still absolve ourselves of this great injustice next year-- by electing the guy who said this yesterday:

Today I took people with diabetes across the border from Detroit to Canada to buy insulin-- medication they need to survive.

In the United States, a single vial of insulin costs on average $340. But in Canada, the same exact drug is just $30.

Why? Because the United States is the only major country on earth that lets drug companies charge whatever they want.

One in four people with diabetes ration their insulin because it is so expensive. That means American people die because of corporate greed.

So I took people with diabetes to a pharmacy in Windsor, Ontario-- just a 20 minute drive from Detroit-- to buy the drugs they need to survive.

While we were there, people were able to buy the same drugs at one-tenth of the cost. One family from Indiana told me in the pharmacy that they skip paying their electric bill in order to pay for their son’s insulin. They paid $1,000 today for six months of insulin. It would have cost them $10,000 in the United States.

We have to ask ourselves why this is possible. And it is because of two factors: the greed of the pharmaceutical manufacturers, and the fact that these companies buy off politicians who will protect their greed.

These lower prices are possible in Canada because that country negotiates drug prices with drug companies. They have the common sense to say that drug company profits are not more important than the lives of their citizens.

The United States must negotiate for lower drug prices, and it must allow cheaper drugs to be imported from other countries.

Our job now is to end the incredible corruption and greed in the pharmaceutical industry.

[T]ell Congress you believe the government should negotiate with drugmakers for lower prices and allow for the importation of less expensive but safe and affordable drugs from other countries.

When we are in the White House, we will take on Big Pharma and we will win.

It's Mueller Time... More Or Less

It had to happen sooner or later but a few hours ago Bob Mueller delivered his Putin-Gate report to Trump's handpicked Attorney General, William Barr, "bringing to a close," according to the NY Times, an investigation that "has consumed the nation and cast a shadow over" the fake illegitimate "president" (AKA- Individual One) for nearly two years. "Barr will decide how much of the report to share with Congress and, by extension, the American public. The House voted unanimously in March on a nonbinding resolution to make public the report’s findings, an indication of the deep support within both parties to air whatever evidence prosecutors uncovered. In a letter to the leadership of the House and Senate Judiciary committees, Mr. Barr wrote, 'I may be in a position to advise you of the special counsel’s principal conclusions as soon as this weekend.' ... Even though Mr. Mueller’s report is complete, some aspects of his inquiry remain active and may be overseen by the same prosecutors once they are reassigned to their old jobs within the Justice Department. For instance, recently filed court documents suggest that investigators are still examining why the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort turned over campaign polling data in 2016 to a Russian associate whom prosecutors said was tied to Russian intelligence." But what we do know is that there will no no more indictments from Mueller and that the investigation ends without Trump sitting down to answer Mueller's questions.

Earlier today, the Daily Beast published a provocative column by Republican Party standup comedian Rick Wilson, Profiles in Chickenshit From the Grand Old Party as Trump Spits on John McCain’s American Greatness. It should help you remember that if we ever get the Mueller report, it should be read as an indictment not just of Trump and his grifter family and his inner circle, but of the whole GOP as well. "Damn near every elected member of the Republican Party failed another easy test this week as Donald Trump lost his grip on reality and spent days attacking the late Sen. John McCain," write Wilson. "They tripped over their own dicks in the face of Trump’s egregious bullying, racing for political cover and sacrificing their few remaining shreds of dignity because they fear this mad president more than they love their own honor. Starting this weekend, Trump has tweeted six days’ worth of escalating insults on Twitter and in person at a rival who died seven months ago. Like I said, it’s an easy test: As elected leaders, as Republicans, as conservatives, as Americans, this was a moment to honor McCain and to call out the president by name for failing to do so. Party loyalty isn’t a suicide pact… or is it?"

Only Mitt Romney (R-UT) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA), neither of whom will ever have to face the voters while Trump is in the White House, passed the low bar test.

Let me help the rest of our supposed leaders. Here’s what you say to Donald Trump as he continues to Ahab McCain’s legacy:

John McCain was an American hero with more courage and decency than you will ever have. You are wrong and your behavior is despicable, Mr. President. For the good of the country, please shut the fuck up.

Too much? Try:

John McCain is a role model and example for every American. His heroism was a service to our country or a light in a dark time and I am honored to follow his example of public service and commitment to the nation before politics, and people before party. You would be best served by shutting the fuck up.

Wilson, apparently doesn't like the 78% of Republican Fox viewers who think Trump is a better president that Abe Lincoln, George Washington and FDR. He advised the GOP senators that "keeping your mouth shut may keep Trump’s vicious, grunting, prole army on your side for now, but you live on in history as cowards so divorced from the American ideal your accomplishments will be lost and your names remembered only as a cautionary tale to others aspiring to lead, and serve."

When David Drucker wrote his Republicans resigned to Trump losing 2020 popular vote about the glories of the electoral college this morning, no one knew that Mueller was poised to release the report today. He wrote that "senior Republicans are resigned to President Trump losing the popular vote in 2020, conceding the limits of the flamboyant incumbent’s political appeal and revealing just how central the Electoral College has become to the party’s White House prospects. Some Republicans say the problem is Trump's populist brand of partisan grievance. It's an attitude tailor-made for the Electoral College in the current era of regionally Balkanized politics, but anathema to attracting a broad, national coalition that can win the most votes, as past presidents did when seeking re-election amid a booming economy. Others argue that neither Trump, nor possibly any Republican, could win the popular vote when most big states are overwhelmingly liberal." He warns that Trump's "team, planning for higher voter turnout in 2020 but privately bracing for a second popular vote defeat, is moving to build on 2016 by going on offense in Democratic-trending battlegrounds that Trump lost to Clinton by surprisingly narrow margins. Some states on this list were targets three years ago. Trump is prepared to commit substantial resources to Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, and Nevada despite 2018 midterm election results suggesting tough sledding there ahead. New Hampshire may also be a target." If Trump's reelection is dependent on Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada and New Hampshire-- or on keeping Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, we can all rest easy tonight, no matter how long it takes for the Mueller report to come out.

What Americans Really Want To Know Is, Who Will Protect Us From Trump

To a normal person, the case for reelection Trump is making-- "I'll protect you"-- is patently absurd. But normal people won't be voting for Donald Trump anyway, even if they did in 2016. Ron Brownstein asserted yesterday that amid all the meandering and asides, the belittling taunts and geysers of grievance in his insane 2 hour CPAC speech, Trump may have synthesized the essence of his reelection strategy in just those three words: "I'll protect you."

With that concise phrase, Trump revealed volumes about his view of the electorate and the coalition that he hopes will carry him to a second term. The comment underscored his determination to convince his followers of a two-stage proposition: First, that they are 'under siege,' as he put it, by an array of forces that he presented as either hostile to their interests or contemptuous of their values, and second, that only he can shield them from those threats.

That dark and martial message shows that Trump continues to prioritize energizing his core supporters-- blue-collar, older, and nonurban whites uneasy about demographic, cultural, and economic change-- even at the price of further alienating voters dismayed or disgusted by his behavior as president. It also shows that, even as an incumbent... [rather than touting] the usual path of presidents seeking reelection... the economic progress since his inauguration-- the message that most Republican strategists believe represents his best opportunity to recapture white-collar suburbanites in particular. But Trump showed far more passion in warning against all the dangers he described as massing against his supporters. The speech demonstrated yet again that he’s more comfortable positioning himself as the lone sentry manning the watch at 'midnight in America' than as the optimist who has delivered 'morning in America,' as Ronald Reagan memorably put it.

This positioning may help explain the reports that Trump has not lobbied too hard to prevent the Republican-controlled Senate from joining the Democratic House in rejecting his emergency declaration to transfer federal funds to his proposed border wall. It’s difficult to imagine a way for him to more dramatically portray himself as the solitary figure standing up for his voters than vetoing a resolution, passed by both chambers, opposing his declaration-- over the border wall, no less. “It actually suits him better to have a presidential veto against even his own party, because it supports this line, ‘You can’t count on the Democrats, you can’t count on even the Republicans, but you can count on me,’” said Robert P. Jones, the CEO of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), which studies public attitudes primarily on social and cultural issues.

Trump tried to send that message with both the substance and the style of his CPAC speech. He offered a rare example of a president using profanity during public remarks when he insisted that congressional Democrats are using “bullshit” charges against him. For Trump, breaking such rules of presidential decorum offers another opportunity to tell his supporters that he will barrel through any norm, and shatter any convention, to protect them. “When he does that type of thing,” said the longtime Republican strategist John Brabender, “it enhances the type of supporter he is truly talking to.”

This video that played on a loop at CPAC pretty much sums up the GOP messaging for 2020. [Trigger warning: feh!]



Brownstein continued that his CPAC speech was a preview of the 2020 campaign, closely echoing the central arguments of the American far right from Joseph McCarthy to George Wallace to Pat Buchanan [to Sean Hannity, Seb Gorka and Stephen Miller]. And like them, "he portrayed his preponderantly white followers as caught between disdainful elites and dangerous minorities. Trump lambasted 'the failed ruling class' that he claimed has betrayed working Americans with free-trade deals. He described college campuses as biased against conservatives, and he insisted that 'Hollywood discriminates against our people.' And as he has done since his first day as a national candidate, Trump warned darkly of immigrants coming to steal Americans’ jobs or menace them with crime. Amid all these domestic threats coiled a serpentine network of international dangers, from trading competitors such as China targeting U.S. industries to Central American nations encouraging migrant caravans so they could 'give us some very bad people. People with big, long crime records.' The new twist in Trump’s CPAC speech was how directly he tried to connect the Democratic Party with the shadowy forces that he tells his supporters are threatening them. At one point, he declared that there are 'people in Congress right now … that hate our country.' Later, he insisted, 'Democratic lawmakers are now embracing socialism.' Both charges send the underlying message: Trump’s opponents are not only misguided, but also fundamentally un-American."

As he summoned all these dangers, Trump simultaneously portrayed himself as the one force that could block them. As Jones described it, Trump offered himself to his supporters as “a kind of wall,” a resolute barrier against the forces of social and economic change. Perhaps the single most telling moment of the speech came when he offered his pledge to “protect” his supporters: Trump insisted that gun owners are “under siege” from liberals determined to undermine the Second Amendment, before quickly adding, “but I’ll protect you.” That rhetoric echoed his declaration of “I alone can fix it” during his acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican convention. At CPAC, a few moments later, Trump added an exclamation point: “We will defend the American way of life.”

Trump didn’t define “the American way of life” in his speech, but he’s left little doubt that he identifies it with the attributes of his own followers: overwhelmingly white and Christian and mostly living outside major cities. (Trump generated a big round of applause at CPAC with a passing attack on “sanctuary cities.”) “It is really clear in a lot of Trump’s most visceral rhetoric [that] it’s not the whole country he is speaking to,” Jones said. “He is speaking to his base, and he has no intention of speaking to the entire country.

“That is another [presidential] norm that he’s broken: really not ever getting to an inclusive ‘we,’” Jones added. “His ‘we’s’ are always ‘what my base supports.’”

The fervor that Trump stirs among his supporters with such exclusionary rhetoric is palpable at each of his rallies—and was visible again at CPAC last weekend. But the circle he draws around “the American way of life” has never been inclusive enough to attract a majority of the country. Both Election Day exit polls and postelection analysis of state voter files indicate that the groups that feel most excluded from his definition—young people, minorities, college-educated white women—not only gave Democrats larger-than-usual margins last November, but also turned out in unusually high numbers. The veteran Democratic pollster Geoff Garin told me the evidence from 2018 suggests that in 2020, at least 10 million more people might vote than in the 2016 presidential election—most of them from constituencies hostile to Trump.

Trump, and the GOP leadership more broadly, continue to behave as if those newly activated Americans are not also hearing everything Trump does to stoke his core supporters. But last weekend’s speech encapsulated almost everything that people critical of or even ambivalent about Trump dislike about him. Each time Trump breaks a boundary, he hardens the discontent, in particular among many well-educated middle-class voters who are doing fine economically but who view him as unfit for the Oval Office in morals and temperament. “There is a group of voters who voted for Trump holding their nose, who hoped he would be a different person and would be like other presidents-- a figure of decorum and dignity and respect,” Garin said. “And he was anything but [that] … at that speech.” In PRRI polling last fall, 88 percent of African Americans, 75 percent of Hispanics, and 70 percent of white voters with a four-year college degree or more agreed that he has damaged the dignity of the presidency.

Trump’s disjointed, angry, boastful, vulgar, and divisive speech at CPAC was the clearest indication yet that he remains almost entirely uninterested in reaching out to the groups resisting him... Trump last weekend showed clearly that his own instinct is always to reprise the strategy that elected him in 2016: Maximize turnout among his core groups of non-college-educated, evangelical, and rural whites, even if that further inflames the groups most alienated from him.

In that way, Trump’s unstinting promises to “protect” his supporters against a changing America may expose him to greater risk from an electorate that will likely look slightly younger and more diverse in 2020 than it did four years ago. “It is a trade-off without a doubt,” Brabender said. “But it is a calculated risk by a president who feels that the trade-off is worth it. In fairness, it was the same trade-off four years ago, and it paid off. The question is whether you can do the same thing this time, when the electorate is going to change a little bit.” After last weekend, there’s less doubt that Trump is determined to find out.

Democrats are entering this race with a clear advantage. I sure hope they don't blow it with the one front-runner who would be a better foil for Trump than Hillary was: Status Quo Joe. Who warned in 1993 of "predators on our streets" who were "beyond the pale" and said they must be cordoned off from the rest of society because the justice system did not know how to rehabilitate them?" It wasn't Trump. But right now Democratic base voters don't know about the real Joe Biden, just the one Obama picked as a ticket-balancer. There's no doubt that if he's the nominee, his record will be the best way the GOP could ever hope to depress turnout among the Democratic base. Neither Trump nor Biden has any understanding of why this is important to voters:

No One Wants To Be Trumpanzee's Chief Of Staff. Can You Blame Them?

Eliana Johnson and Alex Isenstadt, in their reporting for Politico, reminded readers what a top of the pile DC job presidential chief of staff is. But for the two Trump has gone through, Reince Priebus and John Kelly? Both "left as diminished and arguably humiliated figures, unable to control the wild chaos" inside the monkey house: Mission Impossible is how people in DC see the job. Nick Ayers, a self-made multimillionaire, ex-male prostitute and former lobbyist, currently Pence's chief of staff and his closest confidant (after Mother), was Trump's first-- and only choice-- but Ayer's either:

• got passed over when someone told Trump he used to be a male prostitute or
• passed on the job when he realized he'd have to commit through the bitter, likely historic (in a very bad way) end, and what that would do to his future prospects or
• knew he'd be in trouble when the Senate started scrutinizing his personal finances and wormed out of the job or
• Trump found out Ayers had been gossiping about him and freaked.

We'll never know for sure which one or which combination is sending Ayers back to Georgia. What we do know is that a tough job in the best of circumstances, has turned into the worst job in the country-- and about to get worse: saving the Trump presidency from itself and keeping Trump and his family out of prison... while also running the United States government and trying to keep the economy from falling off a cliff.

Names being floated include neo-fascist North Carolina Congressman Mark Meadows, Blackstone managing director Wayne Berman, Citizens United president and Trumpets fanatic Dave Bossie, Chris Christie, U.S. Trade Rep. Robert Lighthizer, Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, Mick Mulvaney, the acting Attorney General who-will-never-be-confirmed Matthew Whitaker, and... wait for it... Reince Priebus. The Politico team says they made a round of calls last night about the chief of staff job and "heard the same thing over and over again: No one wants it this time, and it’s an exceedingly bad phase of the administration to take the helm. Whoever takes over right now would likely be at Trump’s side when special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s report drops, when Democrats on Capitol Hill start hammering him and as the market continues to slump."

Rahm Emanuel, Obama's first-- and disastrous-- Chief of Staff, told the NY Times helpfully/smugly that "Someone needs to get the White House under control-- but the president won’t let it happen."

CNN released a new SSRS poll this morning with data from last week-- and, remember, it's been all bad news since then. Trump's job approval

• Approve- 39%

• Approve strongly- 30%
• Approve moderately- 9%
• Disapprove- 52%

• Disapprove strongly- 44%
• Disapprove moderately- 8%
• No opinion- 9%

Since Trumpanzee can't find anyone remotely qualified and willing to take the thankless job, it looks like John Kelly will stay on at least into January-- probably much longer-- despite Trump's foolish announcement Saturday that Kelly would be out before the end of the year. Trump's a moron and was bragging this morning about how proud he would be to shut down the government. Worth watching him meeting with Pelosi this morning-- Schumer was there as well-- and... that was not a Pence stuffed toy next to Trump; it actually was Mike Pence. I wonder why he didn't bother inviting Ryan, McCarthy and McConnell-- or at least McCarthy. (You can skip the first five and half minutes of Trump babbling sheer nonsense about the wall.) I bet Pelosi's approval numbers shoot up after this meeting.



What If Meadows Takes The Job?

Mark Meadows is a hard-right-- some would say neo-fascist-- asshole who chairs the Freedom Caucus. He represents North Carolina's 11th congressional district, the reddest district in the state-- with a PVI of R+14. Obama lost it both times and Trump beat Hillary 63.2 (his best showing in North Carolina) to 34.0%. The district includes all or part of 16 western North Carolina counties. The biggest, population-wise, Buncombe County, went for Hillary 55.7% to 41.1%. In the 2016 primary Buncombe was Bernie's strongest county in the state and he won it with 62.1%. In fact, Bernie won more votes on primary day than Trump did (30,913 to 8,430) and more votes than the entire GOP field did combined! The Republican legislature, however, managed to split Buncombe County up in a way as to prevent a competitive district from emerging. Most of the city of Asheville, the heart of Buncombe, was chopped off and grafted onto another ultra Republican district, Patrick McHenry's 10th, diluting the Democratic vote in both districts. The Buncombe part of Meadows' district voted D+10 last month and the Buncombe part of McHenry's district voted D+ 39.

District-wide, Meadows won 177,230 (59.2%) to 115,824 (38.7%) against Democrat Phillip Price. The counties bordering on Tennessee are among the most dependably Republican in the whole country. The 4 westernmost counties, Cherokee, Clay, Macon and Graham, routinely give Republicans massive leads in any contest. This cycle Meadows raised $1,773,788 to Price's $237,843. The DCCC ignored the race entirely.

I only bring this up to warn Democrats that if Trump picks Meadows, triggering a special election, it is a dead-end for Democrats. The district is designed to elect Republicans and until Republican gerrymandering is finally thrown out in court and Buncombe County reunited-- which will happen eventually-- NC-11 is off-limits to Democrats.