A Little Look At Trump's America One Year Before The Fateful Choice

Barr, Pompeo, Trumpanzee and Pence

UPDATE: With 100% of parishes reporting, Governor John Bel Edwards (D) was reelected in red, red Louisiana, despite-- or more likely because of-- a barrage of Trump's carrying on and tons and tons of Republican sewer money:

• John Bel Edwards (D)- 763,386 (51%)
• Eddie Rispone (R)- 731,455 (49%)

If anyone wasn't already sure, this confirms that Trump has the kiss of death when it comes to endorsing candidates. America is onto this crook, even in states like Louisiana and Kentucky, and if Trump can't win in Louisiana and Kentucky, where exactly can he win? He's still relatively popular in both of those states, but his approval is underwater in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Florida, Utah, Montana, Nebraska, Alaska, Ohio... all states he won in 2016. Watch him drag Republican senators Steve Daines, Martha McSally, Cory Gardner, Susan Collins, Joni Ernst, Thom Tillis, David Perdue and Dan Sullivan down the crapper with him. And don't they all ever deserve that!

Chris Strohm and Jordan Fabian, reporting for Bloomberg, wrote that Giuliani is being investigated by the Feds for "campaign finance violations and a failure to register as a foreign agent as part of an active investigation into his financial dealings. The probe of Giuliani, which one official said could also include possible charges on violating laws against bribing foreign officials or conspiracy, presents a serious threat to Trump’s presidency from a man that former national security adviser John Bolton has called a 'hand grenade.'" He is widely expected to be indicted.

Last night, the Washington Post published an Op-Ed by prominent authors Jon Meacham, Walter Issacson and Evan Thomas, It's The Wise Men vs The Wise Guys In Trump's America. They noted that Napoleon is reputed to have said that "geography is destiny" and continued that the axiom "came to our minds this week as we watched two very different but neighboring universes collide before the House Intelligence Committee. The ramrod-straight William B. Taylor Jr. and the bow-tied George Kent, two diplomats from the largely WASP ethos of the post-World War II foreign policy establishment, one headquartered at places such as the Council on Foreign Relations’ imposing Harold Pratt House at 68th Street and Park Avenue, found themselves bearing noble witness amid an impeachment imbroglio that may be best understood by an appreciation of the wilder mores of midtown Manhattan. Only a few blocks away from the portrait-lined walls and genteel cocktails of the Council lies the real center of gravity in the politics of 2019: the gilded Trump Tower, built on the fluid morals and cutthroat deal-making of New York real estate. The Tower sits cheek-by-jowl (the image is chosen purposely) with the Grand Havana Room, a cigar club frequented by Rudy Giuliani, atop a Fifth Avenue building owned by the family of Jared Kushner. Walk a bit farther south-- you don’t even need a Town Car-- and you reach Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., home of Fox News and the New York Post."

To Trump supporters, the testimony Wednesday was the “deep state” surfacing briefly from the depths of white papers, institutional knowledge and a facility with U.S. military and diplomatic history. (Kent’s evocation of von Steuben and Lafayette was straight out of a Ward Just novel.)

To Trump’s critics and defenders of constitutional norms, the Republican narrative that the president’s threats to deny security assistance to Ukraine was just the kind of thing tough guys do (and, after getting caught, he didn’t do it!), suggested that tabloid hyperbole, Fox News arcana and New York hardball had replaced the real world. From the Long Telegram to Twitter, and from Averell Harriman to Sean Hannity: To borrow a phrase of Henry Adams, himself a scion of presidents, the current moment disproves Darwin.

The story of upended conventions and of a president who careens between self-parody and serious lawlessness is by now familiar, as old as the Age of Trump itself. The distinction is that the impeachment hearings have given us perhaps the clearest example yet of the triumph of political demimonde wise guys such as Trump, Giuliani and the Rogers Stone and Ailes over the latter-day Robert Lovetts and Dean Achesons. And it’s not just Wise Men, of course: Jeane Kirkpatrick, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice hailed from the establishment world, as do Marie Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill.

The moment of decision between the Wise Men and the wise guys on Wednesday was subtle but nevertheless clear. It came when Rep. Michael R. Turner, a Republican, noted that diplomats such as Taylor and Kent “deal in words of understanding. Words of beliefs and feelings, because in your profession, that’s what you work with to try to pull together policy.” Theirs, the lawmaker was implying, was almost a touchingly naive way of life in which one trusted what one was told, assumed the fundamental truthfulness of, say, a presidentially appointed ambassador, and believed that a president himself meant what he said.

No longer: The midtown game of wheeling and dealing, often done over a cigar at the Grand Havana or perhaps an overpriced steak at 21, has now gone global as the denizens of Trump’s neighborhood run shadow foreign policy ops seeking 2020 election help and good paydays.

Had any other president, Taylor was asked, linked official aid in the American interest to private or political benefit? With a stoicism and brevity that would’ve made George Marshall quietly proud, Taylor replied, “No.”

To be sure, the establishment has been far from perfect, its fall from preeminence more than partly self-inflicted. Elite education and conventional expertise don’t guarantee good results, and America has been shaped by the battle between the privileged and the populist since long before Andrew Jackson. More recently, there was Vietnam writ large, and intelligence failures like Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Grass-stained ideals of fair play learned on the playing fields of Groton could seem like forlorn hopes on the streets Basra or Baghdad. And the semi-aristocrats of places like Pratt House and the Century Association had a way of turning up their noses at the lesser mortals of Trump’s bridge-and-tunnel crowd.

Alger Hiss once inflamed a young congressman named Richard Nixon when he turned to Nixon, who was about to ask some probing questions about Hiss’s ties to the Kremlin, and sneered, “My law school was Harvard. Yours, I believe, was Whittier?” (Actually, it was Duke.) No wonder Nixon could sell himself as a man of the people when Hiss turned out to be a communist spy.

Such establishment condescension also fueled the rise of Joe McCarthy and of McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who served as lawyer and mentor in the 1970s and ’80s to a young developer from Queens who was looking to make it big in Manhattan. And Donald Trump never forgot a thing Cohn taught him. (One particularly relevant lesson today: Confronted with a tough case to argue, Cohn would say that he didn’t need to know what the law was-- just who the judge was.)

In midtown Manhattan, Trump learned to dominate the news — in his rise, that meant the New York Post, with its screaming, one-sourced stories, an early harbinger of the presidential Twitter strategy. He learned the power of TV. And he learned that tough guys — or “killers,” in a favorite approbation of Trump’s-- like Ailes, who presided over this stew of often-abusive power, money and misinformation, were the kinds of guys he could count on.

For one thing was certain: The Wise Men of 68th Street or the United Nations or any of the traditional institutions of expertise weren’t his guys. The question America now faces in impeachment and, should Trump prevail, in the 2020 election, is whose New York will serve us best in the long run-- the wise guys’ or the Wise Men’s?

I bet you don't have to think about which side of the equation, the wretched and pathetic Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III falls on. Really wretched. You don't have watch them both... but you can. This doozy came first, "Blow Great Job:"





A week later, for whatever reason, Sessions' senate campaign released this cringe-worthy little portrait that illustrates how the Trump Regime is more a product of this America than an actual creator of it:

Is Trump A Russian Agent? Sounds Crazy!

White House President Stephen Miller has no problem with a long, long government shutdown. Neither does Trump's base. Jennifer Epstein at Bloomberg News reported that "Negotiations are at a standstill and no more talks are scheduled for the weekend or early next week. The White House scuttled efforts to reach a deal on Capitol Hill on Thursday, and Trump’s budget team is drawing up contingency plans for a shutdown that extends through the end of February, according to an administration official... An attempt Thursday by moderate Republican senators to broker a deal that would have traded immigration protections for undocumented “Dreamers” brought to the U.S. as children in return for wall money collapsed after Vice President Mike Pence rejected it." And extremists are demanding Trump declare a probably unconstitutional state of emergency and just build the wall with funds earmarked by Congress for amelioration of disasters in Puerto Rico and northern California.

On Friday, Thomas Friedman was on CNN with Wolf Blitzer. He made the point that although Trump has "formal authority," he has "no moral authority... When you have a president with no moral authority, when it comes to a crisis... no one trusts this man; no one believes a word out of his mouth anymore... He started with the B-team. A lot of the B-team left. Now's he's got the C-team. And if we face a crisis with a president who no one believes, who surrounded by a C-team in a dysfunctional White House, then God save us... We have a core problem: we have a president without shame who is backed by a party without spine that is supported by a network called Fox News without integrity. And a president without shame, backed by a party without spine and a network that amplifies it without integrity-- and we face a crisis?-- fasten your seatbelt."



Friedman concluded, "We have a disturbed man as president; that's very clear. And we have a party that is not ready to stand up to it... When he lies, day after day, and you as a party say nothing, what do you think is the corrosive impact of that over time?"

Maybe worse than just "disturbed." He absolutely flipped out this morning over the FBI probe of him as a Russian agent. The NY Times story seems to have driven him bonkers. "In the days after President Trump fired James Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests... The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence...The investigation the F.B.I. opened into Mr. Trump also had a criminal aspect, which has long been publicly known: whether his firing of Mr. Comey constituted obstruction of justice."

Historian Jon Meacham told Brian Williams on MSNBC: "We’ve really never had-- and if we have, it’s classified and lost to history at least so far-- a president of the United States who is considered to be possibly an asset of a foreign government. This is what the founders were worried about in the 1790s." Meacham identified Robert Mueller and Chief Justice John Roberts as the two most important individuals in the country.