Midnight Meme Of The Day!

 

by Noah

There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.
-Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, one week after his boss lost his bid for reelection.

The Republican Party from it's psychotic Dear Leader, to RNC Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (quoted above) to Moscow Mitch on down has closed ranks in support of Trump staying in power and ignoring the election of President-Elect Biden. It's an attempt to stage a coup. The number of Washington Republicans who are not on board with this can be counted on one hand. There is no other way to rationally comprehend their actions which get more dangerous to our national security and what's left of our democracy every day. This weekend, they plan to have what they are calling a Million Maga March on Washington as they hope for an assemblage of ISIS-style gun-toting pick-up trucks and SUVs. All the MAGA RedHat-wearing Repug freaks are promising to be there: Info Wars, Oath Keepers, Groypers, Proud Boys, QAnon, American Nazis, and American white supremacy group known to humankind. In short, it'll be akin to a second RNC convention.

As I began writing this last Saturday afternoon, the election had just been called. It was impressive that millions of people, not just in this country but the world, cheered from their windows and poured out into the streets when it was announced that Donnie Psycho got fired. Yeah, Donnie, add that to your extensive list of life failures, asshole!

Yes, there were extremely large groups of people celebrating in streets and parks all over the United States. They were doing it with such a sense of relief and enthusiasm that it reminded you of other countries where an oppressive fascist junta had somehow met its demise. All that was missing was the junta's leader hanging from a lamp post by his thumbs ala Mussolini. Fortunately, at least, the Orange Menace To Society has not (so far) been able to fully install the dream of a Fourth Reich that he shares with the goons I mentioned above. Despite the Democratic Party's shortcomings, we do live to fight another day but only if we choose that path. Big if. Meanwhile, my favorite coverage was of the crowds outside of Trump Tower here in NYC. There are, however, other groups, and they won't be just disappearing. Had Trump won, they would be looking like joyous Middle Easterners shooting their AK-47s off into the air with bullets to fall they know not where. Stay tuned, maybe we'll see some of that tomorrow or sometime else in the near future.

Donnie Psycho's newest campaign slogan, tweeted several times in all caps, is "I WON THIS ELECTION BY A LOT." It's hard to look at Donnie's tweets and not imagine them as being written in crayon by a 9-year-old but they have a purpose, a very subversive anti-American purpose. Also, coming from the White House, our White House, on Saturday afternoon was a statement from his campaign that told his fans and militia goons that the election fight is not over and they "Stay at the ready in case they are needed." It was "Stand back and stand by" all over again. Don, Jr., who directed pre-election Trump Caravans, including the one that ran a Biden-Harris bus off the road in Texas, has been duplicating his father's incitements to violence and mayhem, indulging himself in a whirlwind fit of projection and a complete lack of self-awareness by calling for "total war" and "cleaning up this mess." Here's the full quote:

The best thing for America is for @realDonaldTrump to go to total war over this election to expose all of the fraud, cheating, dead/no longer in state voters, that has been going on for far too long. It's time to clean up this mess & stop looking like a banana republic!

Trump advisor and former campaign guru Steve Bannon called for Dr. Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray to be beheaded. This is no joke. It's an effort to whip up violence as a political tool like what they have in real countries, not just the one that Don, Jr. fantasizes about.

The email blasts from the Trump camp came fast and furious in the wake of the election being called for Biden. They had come at an absurd pace leading up to the election, filled with a tone of increasing anxiety. Trump knew he was probably going to lose and it was time to grift as much money as he possibly could but now it was panic time. The headers screamed "I've had enough!" and "Madness. Sheer Madness." They begged you to feel the same. The emails demanded JUSTICE. They told the readers it was time to FIGHT. "Fight like your freedoms, your livelihood, our future depend on it." It was "our future" not yours. Very telling. The emails were filled with lines about "widespread fraud" and "the radical left" "stealing this election." "Trump won. Trump won!" they screamed. "Fraud!" "Fraud!" "Fraud! One after another. It was pathetic. Not 10 minutes went by without another one. You could read them all and see exactly what Trump was screaming in the oval office, minus the cursing, sputtering, and peeing his pants, of course. A favorite of mine came from He Who Attracts Flies. It came fully 24 hours after the election was called. It was headed "The left doesn't want our President to win." No shit Sherlock. You're too late by the way. The email told me "Democrats would rather destroy OUR nation than have four more years of our Presiden't incredible leadership." Ladies and gentlemen, the incredible ironic avant-comedy stylings of Mike Pence.

Rudy Giuliani, who ludicrously claimed that over 21,000 dead people voted for Biden in Pennsylvania alone, has, of course, added to the incitement by going on his FOX "News" soapbox and telling their nutjob audience that there is definitely "election fraud" and that "people were seen carrying bundles of ballots into counting centers." Well, Rudy, you see, it's like this, if you don't take the ballots to the places where they are counted, they don't get counted. Is that really so hard for Republican brains to understand? Apparently, it is.

On Monday morning, the first email I received was from RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel and it was scary in that it symbolized the fact that the Republican Party had closed ranks behind Donald Trump and thrown its full support behind him. In the email, she was joining in, begging for donations to keep up "the fight against the Democrats' attacks on a fair election." She added that "Millions of voters across the Country turned out for President Trump..." Well, yes they did Ronna, but you see, millions more turned out and voted against your dear leader and did so in the right places. That's how it works, baby. Do the effing math. You can do the effing math, can't you? Or were you homeschooled by some fellow freakshow contestant?

On Sunday night it had been Vice President Fly Nest whining "Our democracy and freedom is at risk like never before" in his emails as he begged for more moola 34 hours after the election was called for Joe Biden. Words like "URGENT," "STRONGEST," and "DEFENDING," all in caps, were golden shower-sprinked throughout the email. SAD. Ted Cruz is so ubiquitous through all this that I can only conclude that he sees himself as the heir apparent once Donnie Psycho finally does the world a favor and croaks. There are endless "Election Defense Fund" emails, complete with 1000X Match" headers, soiling my inbox, too, of course. These grifters are not just trying to line their pockets and pay off some personal debts including tax evasion debts as fast as they can, playing the suckers yet again, they are also using their suckers as a source of income, PAC money, and funding for future Trump and Trump family campaigns. Meanwhile, the wording of their emails is clearly designed to incite people. They are dog whistles. They are also examples of Donald Trump acting like a junkie on the subway or the street corner panhandling to raise money not for a meal but a drug fix. That's what republicans are now. These emails come at a rate of about 8 an hour with headers that make Beavis and Butthead look like Rhodes Scholars by comparison. People who contribute are "PATRIOTS," of course, since, in their sick Republican minds only Republicans can possibly be patriots. Fuck these people with a Trump flag on a ten foot pole!

On Monday afternoon, Trump spokescretin Kayleigh McAninny broadcast from the White House press room and went so gungho in her charging President-Elect Biden and the Democratic Party of "welcoming fraud" and "welcoming illegal voting" that even a FOX loon named Neil Cavuto cut her broadcast off the air, pointing out that she, like her boss, has still not offered one iota of evidence or proof. That will only cause rank and file Republicans to start sending death threats to Cavuto in their mass insanity. Trump has probably already made multiple calls to the Murdochs and demanded Cavuto be fired for "lack of loyalty" just like he has fired so many of his "best people" for the same thing and replaced them with even worse and more dangerous hacks like we see him doing throughout his administration and now even the Pentagon.

What has now happened at the Pentagon is a matter of grave national security concern, in addition to being what Trump's master, Vlad Putin wants. Trump has put conspiracy theorists in place who have long been associated with the Devin Nunes school of covering up Trump's ties to Russia. They will now be privy to classified information that they can not only choose to destroy, bury or selectively release and twist for their own purposes, they will be able to sell it to the highest bidders among our adversaries. It will be treason for money, not just politics. Conspiracy theorists in charge of our military; what could go wrong?

And, last I saw and heard, we still haven't had any Republican $entors who voted to keep their treasonous clown in office say one peep about "Where's the evidence" to back up Trump's voter fraud conspiracy mongering. It's the same deafening silence from the Repugs in the House of so-called Representatives. They have joined in, full force, with Dear Leader's autocratic behavior. Not surprisingly, $enate Majority Leader Moscow Mitch has joined in the conspiracy mongering right from the floor of the $enate. There is no low he won't sink to but we already knew that. House Repug Leader Kevin McCarthy echoed Trump saying in a classic dog whistle moment that-

President Trump won this election. So everyone who's listening, do not be quiet. We can not allow this to happen before our very eyes.

The quote from Mike Pompeo at the beginning of this post is designed to help convince Trump voters that a Biden presidency would be illegitimate. It is meant to stoke outrage and violent reaction if Joe Biden moves into the White House as President Of The United States. The Trump administration is attacking the democratic constitutional process and the Constitution, the supposed foundation of this country itself, but these traitors to America are willfully ignoring their responsibility to uphold their oath to defend the Constitution. Instead they uphold their loyalty oath to our psychotic President Trump. They are showing all the signs of attempting to establish a Republican Party insurgency to counter a Biden presidency. This is how all dangerous insurgencies began, whether it was Cuba, Syria, or Chile. No doubt, Trump himself, with the support of lieutenants like Ronna Romney Barret, McConnell, McCarthy and the rest of the Republican Party leadership I mentioned, envision themselves as a Trump government in exile. And, yet, this treachery is exactly what nearly 80,000,000 Republicans voted for as they voted for Trump and all of their Republican Party faithful in Congress. They aren't saying anything other than that they support their Dear Leader.

Reconcilliation with Nazis and Nazi-lovers? Tolerance, bipartisanship and reconciliation with traitors? Reaching across the aisle to such people? I think not. Nope. The problem is these people walk among us. Unlike in 1860, they don't all just live below the Mason-Dixon Line. That shouldn't mean that we give these asylum escapees a free pass to destroy the country utterly and completely, though. These people are beyond any kind of intervention. No medication exists that will fix them. The best we can do is shun them. Extreme social distancing is called for. You don't meet a virus halfway and win anything.

I've heard some people call Trump's Militia "Vanilla ISIS" but Trump's Militia is no laughing matter. How long, with all of this incitement going on, before they decide to no longer stand by. We've had these so-called supporters of "Law & Order" blocking traffic including emergency vehicles all over the country. We saw the menacing and chanting at vote counters in Arizona. The leader of the vote counting efforts at a center in Georgia has stated that he fears for the safety of the people doing the counting, particularly one who had to hide out due to death threats after the republican conspiracy machine went after him. In Philadelphia, two goons armed with AR-15s were stopped on their way to a place where votes were being counted. We've had other Trump supporters try to break into a Mid-West polling place while voting counting is going on because they saw that "Someone went in with 'special vote-stealing' equipment. The "someone" turned out to be a member of the press and the imaginary "vote-stealing equipment" was a strange, exotic device called a camera! This is the Republican mind at work, folks. It's even worse that these Trump Brownshirts are being incited and directed straight from the White House.

There should be no appeasement. None. This is a war. None of this Neville Chamberlain bullshit. To reach out your hand to a Republican is to blindly put your hand into a box of rattlesnakes, which is just what too many wimpy, unity-chanting Democrats, including Joe Biden, think they should do. Good luck with that. The Democratic Party needs to adopt "Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you." as its words to live by.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, with all of the congratulations to President-Elect Biden coming in, there is one particularly conspicuous absence. Care to guess which leader has not sent congratulations? Hint, his first name is Vlad. What a surprise!

Ted Lieu Has A Plan-- Señor Trumpanzee And His Evil Elves Are Not Going To Like It One Bit

Yesterday, you may have read about Ted Lieu's proposal to strengthen Congress’ contempt power to break administration stonewalls. Ted and 5 other members of the Judiciary Committee-- Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Joe Neguse (D-CO), David Cicilline (D-RI), Val Demings (D-FL), and Madeleine Dean (D-PA)-- have been frustrated and angry enough about the Trump Regime systematically defying subpoenas to propose a strong "inherent contempt" rule that would ratchet up their power to punish executive branch officials who reject their legitimate requests. If Congress adopts the rule, they would be giving themselves "authority to unilaterally punish anyone who defies a subpoena for testimony or documents."

Though Congress has long had inherent contempt power, it has been in disuse since before World War II. This power, upheld by courts, has included the ability to levy fines and even jail witnesses who refuse to cooperate with congressional demands.

But such extreme measures have fallen out of favor over the years, as Congress has relied instead primarily on litigation to enforce its subpoenas and officials across government have acknowledged the unappetizing prospect of using force to impose its will. It's even trickier when applied to a coequal branch of government, which may have its own privileges and protections to assert.

...“We've seen unprecedented and illegal obstruction by the Trump administration to Congress where the administration has essentially directed witnesses not to show up to committees even after they have been given lawful congressional subpoenas,” Lieu said in an interview. “We need an enforcement mechanism.”

Lieu's proposal only focuses on monetary penalties. It would establish a process for negotiations between Congress and executive branch officials when disputes arise over testimony and records. The measure would allow federal agencies to lodge objections to congressional requests, and it would permit the president to weigh in and assert any applicable privileges. The measure would also establish a process for holding recalcitrant officials in contempt, including hearings before the full House in which the subject would be permitted to present a defense and would face questions from lawmakers on the House floor.

If the House supports contempt after such a proceeding, it would then vote a second time to impose a financial penalty of up to $25,000. The penalty would be delayed for 20 days to allow for continued negotiations before subsequent penalties may be imposed up to an aggregate of $100,000. The measure would also bar taxpayer dollars from being used to cover any fines assessed through this mechanism.

Democrats say the measure is a crucial effort to formalize and reinvigorate Congress' long-dormant powers.

Lieu said he is hopeful to implement it quickly but at the very least would like it in future Congress’ toolbox. He said the prospect that inherent contempt would be abused by lawmakers is slim.

“The way to prevent it from being abused is pretty simple: the witness just shows up,” Lieu said.

Speaking of which... I got my hands on a letter Lieu's office sent to the Honorable Mike Pompeo, Trumpist Secretary of State, yesterday. "Dear Secretary Pompeo," he began, "As Members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who served on active duty, we are deeply disturbed by the explosive allegations that Russia paid bounties to militants to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan. We are equally disturbed that the Trump Administration apparently knew about these bounties in March but has failed to respond in any meaningful way. Additional reporting has suggested that U.S. intelligence officers and Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan alerted their superiors about suspected Russian bounties as early as January. However, rather than confronting Russia and standing up for our servicemen and women, the President last month invited Vladimir Putin to the G7 summit. This appeasement of Russian aggression is unacceptable and must stop."

Sounds like trouble. " Over the past several years," continued Lieu, "we have seen an emboldened Russia take increasingly aggressive actions against the United States and its allies. In 2014, Russia illegally invaded Ukraine. Our best intelligence has repeatedly confirmed that Russia engaged in a sweeping and systematic attack on U.S. elections in 2016. The Russian military routinely flies military planes into U.S. airspace. And, if the bounty allegation is true, Russia is now paying militants to kill Americans. Despite Russia’s repeated hostile actions, the Trump Administration has often had weak responses or no response whatsoever. The United States cannot stand idly by as Russia brazenly threatens our servicemembers and our national security. We urge you to take diplomatic action immediately. In light of continuing Russian aggression, we request that you answer the following questions as soon as possible:"

• Is Russia paying, or has Russia paid, bounties to people who kill U.S. troops? If yes, when were you first made aware of these bounties? Did you discuss this information with the President and, if so, when?
• What diplomatic efforts, if any, have you made to inform Russian leaders that the United States will not stand for foreign governments paying bounties to kill American servicemembers?
• Is Russia providing any other assistance to the Taliban that may harm U.S. troops or our national security interests?
• Is the Administration planning on imposing sanctions or taking other diplomatic actions against Russia to deter their hostile behavior? If so, what is the timeline?
• How has the alleged Russian intervention in Afghanistan affected the Administration’s the Administration’s timeline for troop withdrawal and overall plan for peace?

We request that you provide the answers within 14 days upon receipt of this letter.  Thank you for your attention to this critical matter.

As reasonable as it is, Pompeo is likely to ignore this request. If inherent contempt were functioning... he might think twice.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Sunday Thoughts:

And, behold: No answer ever came. Trump's very existence in our lives proved that there is no god. It was a message from the Devil. In fact, the existence of Trump and his party proves that the Devil exterminated God a long, long time ago, and darkness came over the land. That darkness has been growing ever since.

You can now go back to watching junk TV and buying crap at the mall.

Wouldn't It Be Hilarious If The Senate Actually Found Him Guilty After All?

You can't 'unknow' something like this, right?

Monday, on Maine public Radio’s Morning Edition, Susan Collins used her experience from the Clinton impeachment trial to urge Moscow Mitch and Little Chucky Schmucky to play nice. “I think that the model and the precedent established by the trial for President Clinton is one that our leaders should take a hard look at. What happened back then is Senator Trent Lott on the Republican side, Senator Tom Daschle on the Democratic side, negotiated the terms to begin the trial. And those terms were adopted unanimously by the Senate, 100 to zero. I can't imagine anything like that happening today, regrettably. They decided that we would start with the opening arguments from both sides. And then we proceeded to a period where senators questioned the two sides through the Chief Justice. I remember submitting the only bipartisan question with Senator Russ Feingold at the time. And those questions, of which there were more than 100, elicited a lot of information that was very useful. So I hope we do that approach this time as well. Then we move to what I call the third stage. At that point, we debated whether or not we wanted to hear from witnesses and get additional documents. And there was a roll call vote, with Republicans wanting witnesses at that point. And Democrats, with few exceptions, not wanting witnesses, so we have a reverse of the current situation. And we decided to call just three witnesses and to have them deposed, rather than testifying live.”

Pressed by the host, she said she is open to calling witnesses, which is not the Trumpist line. “I am open to witnesses. I think it's premature to decide who should be called until we see the evidence that is presented and get the answers to the questions that we senators can submit through the Chief Justice to both sides.”

The reason Collins and Lisa Murkowski are even thinking about breaking with Trump and Moscow Mitch about calling witnesses is because of the bombshell reporting from the NY Times last week. Democrats-- and the media in general-- are presenting it as a game changer in the impeachment process.

Basically, the report reveals what many assumed, namely that Mulvaney was involved in withholding aid from Ukraine at Trump’s orders and that other Trumpists, primarily Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and then-National Security Adviser John Bolton overtly opposed the move. Monday, Schumer was running around like a chicken without a head, shrieking about calling them as witnesses.

"This new story shows all four witnesses that we Senate Democrats have requested" were "intimately involved and had direct knowledge of President Trump's decision to cut off aid and benefit himself," Schumer, a Democrat, told reporters in a press conference at his New York office.

"Simply put, in our fight to have key documents and witnesses in the Senate impeachment trial, these new revelations are a game changer."

The New York Times reported Sunday that Mulvaney was flying with President Donald Trump on Air Force One in June when he emailed his senior adviser to ask, “Did we ever find out about the money for Ukraine and whether we can hold it back?”

The adviser, Robert Blair, emailed back that it could be done, but he warned that they should "[e]xpect Congress to become unhinged," the report said, citing a previously undisclosed email. Assisting Mulvaney execute the hold were Blair and three officials in the White House Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, the office's acting head, Michael Duffey, who oversees funding, and lawyer Mark Paoletta, the report said.

The Times' report also showed there was high-level pushback from top Trump officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and now-former national security adviser John Bolton.

The trio met with Trump in the Oval Office in late August and pressed him to release the aid, with Bolton telling the president, "This is in America's interest," the Times reported, citing an official briefed on the gathering.

Trump responded that he didn't believe Ukraine's new president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, was a genuine reformer. "Ukraine is a corrupt country," Trump reportedly replied, adding that "We are pissing away our money."

Trump reversed course after news of the freeze became public and House Democrats announced they were investigating the hold.

The White House blocked Mulvaney, Pompeo, Esper, Vought, Bolton, Blair and others from testifying or turning over documents to House impeachment investigators.

Schumer is demanding Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) call Mulvaney, Bolton, Blair and Duffey as witnesses at Trump's Senate trial. Emails made public last week showed that Duffey was the official who told the Pentagon that the president wanted the aid frozen-- a request that came just hours after Trump's July phone call with the Ukrainian president that has served as the backbone of the impeachment proceedings against him.

The four witnesses "were intimately involved" with what was going on behind the scenes, Schumer said.

"Let me be clear, this is about getting to the truth," the Democratic leader said. "Will the Senate hold a fair trial or will it enable a cover-up? President Trump, if you are so confident you did nothing wrong, why won't you let your men testify?"

The Senate trial will begin after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) sends the two articles of impeachment over to the Senate, but it's unclear when exactly that will be. Senators are slated to return to Washington on Jan. 3.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a member of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, told MSNBC's Katy Tur on Monday that the Times’ article “vindicates the judgment of the House of Representatives.”

"The New York Times story just fills in a lot more details about the essential narrative that is in the impeachment report coming from the House of Representatives," he said. "And we hope that the Senate would indeed fill in further facts that have since surfaced, you know, after our impeachment of the president."

Rep. Adam Schiff, the Intelligence Committee chairman who led the House impeachment inquiry, tweeted a link to the story and wrote, "Despite the President’s obstruction, additional damning evidence of his abuse of power continues to come to light. The question is whether the Senate will demand to see these and other emails and hear from those who were involved."

Linda Ronstadt Tells Pompeo When He Will Be Loved

In the late '70s one of my jobs was as a dj at a gay country bar in San Francisco. I was also on the board of the Country Music Hall of Fame at the time. Then I discovered The Ramones and Patti Smith and moved on to another phase of my life. But before that I also used to interview country stars and write about them in magazines, especially Country Music Magazine, for which I was the west coast editor. I was especially a fan of fundamenta, rootsy country and of outlaw country and of country rock. Linda Ronstadt was a huge hit in the bar and I got to interview her a couple of times as well. I always liked her and I was happy when I heard she is being honored by the Kennedy Center this year with a Lifetime Achievement award. And then I was even happier when I read Paul Harris' coverage in Variety of a reception the State Department threw for the honorees.

Harris wrote that during the pre-dinner welcoming address, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was the official host of the event quipped: "As I travel the world, I wonder when will I be loved," invoking the words of Ronstadt’s 1975 hit "When Will I Be Loved," penned by Phil Everly. Obviously Ronstadt-- no fan of Señor Trumpanzee-- couldn't really let that question go by unanswered, could she?

In front of some 200 guests, celebrating not just Ronstadt but also Sally Field, Earth, Wind and Fire, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and Sesame Street, who were all their to receive their Kennedy Center rainbow ribbons, Ronstadt let loose, just a few feet away from Pompeo. She looked right at him as said, "I’d like to say to Mr. Pompeo, who wonders when he’ll be loved, it’s when he stops enabling Donald Trump" and then she sat down.

The line drew immediate gasps from the audience, followed by slowly building applause, and then cheers.

Among those in attendance was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who received a standing ovation from a majority of the politically divided gathering.

Pompeo should consider himself lucky. Ronstadt could have easily started singing this to him instead:

Is Trump Destroying-- Or Has He Already Destroyed-- U.S. Foreign Policy And Trade Consensus?

The week started with Señor Trumpanzee announcing an expansion of his trade war antics against Brazil, Argentina and France (and its only Wednesday!)-- followed by grandstanding self-destructive nonsense about trade with China that caused domestic and world markets to crash.

Bloomberg reporters Derek Wallbank and Jordan Fabian: "Stocks dropped in Europe and U.S. equity futures sold off as Trump’s comments indicated no urgency to reach a deal by Dec. 15, which U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on Monday called a 'logical deadline.' The Trump administration has threatened to impose tariffs on more Chinese imports starting that day. Those levies would hit American consumer products such as smartphones, toys and childrens’ clothing just before the Christmas holiday... A flurry of U.S. trade moves in the past 24 hours has eroded investor optimism that Trump would ease up on tariffs that have slowed the global economy. Rather than ratcheting down trade tensions, Trump is indicating confidence that his import taxes are good for America... Speaking to reporters on a trip to attend a summit for the 70th anniversary of NATO, Trump suggested that in some ways, it might be better to wait until after the U.S. presidential election next November. 'I like the idea of waiting until after the election for the China deal. But they want to make a deal now and we’ll see whether not the deal is going to be right. It’s got to be right,' he said. 'The China trade deal is dependent on one thing: Do I want to make it? Because we’re doing very well with China right now and we could do even better with the flick of a pen.'"

Trump's crude, manipulative attacks on Macron, just before his one-on-one meeting with Macron yesterday, were some kind of boorish justification for his threats to slap a punitive 100% tariff on French champagne, cheese, cosmetics and handbags worth around $2.4 billion. Trump says he's retaliating against a digital services tax he claims hurts Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple. (Italy, Austria and Turkey have the same tax.)

Tuesday morning Reuters reported that the EU would retaliate if Trump levied the tariffs against France. Does Putin give Trump bonuses for this kind of behavior?

Ivan Krastev, author of The Light That Failed: A Reckoning, penned an OpEd for the New York Times yesterday, Will Europe Ever Trust America Again?. My guess is yes-- as soon as the whole world breathes a collective sigh of relief on November 4, 2020, but Krastev seems less sanguine. He wrote that "Trump has insulted international institutions and abandoned allies from Syria to the Korean Peninsula, policymakers on this side of the Atlantic have found themselves trying to walk a fine line: On the one hand, they want to hedge against Washington turning its back on Europe; on the other, they want to ensure that their hedging doesn’t push the Trump administration even farther away. Consequently, European policies toward the United States have been oscillating between grandstanding about our ability to do everything on our own and panicked pretending that everything is as it used to be. See, for example, when President Emmanuel Macron of France recently proclaimed that NATO was experiencing 'brain death' and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany quickly responded by insisting that 'NATO remains vital to our security.'"

As the leaders of NATO countries meet this week in London, much attention will focus on the disagreements between Mr. Macron and Ms. Merkel. But beneath the surface, a new European consensus on trans-Atlantic relations is emerging and it represents a huge change. Until recently, most European leaders’ hopes were bound up with the outcome of America’s presidential elections. If Mr. Trump were to lose in 2020, they believed, the world would somehow return to normalcy.

All of that has changed. While Trump-friendly governments in Europe, like Poland’s and Hungary’s, still follow the polls and cross their fingers that Mr. Trump will get four more years in office, European liberals are giving up hope. It is not that they are no longer passionate about American politics. On the contrary, they religiously follow Congress’s impeachment hearings and pray for Mr. Trump’s defeat. But they have finally started to realize that a proper European Union foreign policy cannot be based on who is in the White House.

What explains this shift? It is plausible that European liberals are unconvinced by the foreign policy visions of Democratic hopefuls and detect isolationist tendencies in the party as well. Europeans are still struggling to understand how it was that Barack Obama-- probably the most European-minded American president and one most loved by Europeans-- was also the one least interested in Europe. (At least until Mr. Trump came along.)

Europeans are also scared by the prospect of a Cold War-style clash between the United States and China. A recent poll by the European Council on Foreign Relations found that in conflicts between the United States and China, a majority of European voters want to remain neutral, finding a middle way between the superpowers. There’s good reason for this: Europe remains economically tied to China in ways that Washington doesn’t seem to appreciate, as evidenced by the recent spat over the Chinese telecom giant Huawei’s plans to build 5G networks across the Continent.

But putting that aside, I believe there is a more fundamental change: European liberals have come to understand that American democracy no longer produces a consensual politics with a predictable foreign policy. The change of the president means not only a new figure in the White House but also, in fact, a new regime. Were the Democrats to triumph in 2020 and a Europe-friendly president to take the helm, there is no guarantee that in 2024 Americans will not elect a president who, like Mr. Trump, will see the European Union as an enemy and will actively try to destabilize relations with Europe.

The self-destruction of the American foreign policy consensus was powerfully demonstrated not only during the recent impeachment hearings, which have seen the politicization of policy toward Ukraine, but also by the fact that the specter of Russian subversion did not provoke a bipartisan allergic reaction. When Trump voters were told that President Vladimir Putin of Russia supported their candidate, they started admiring Mr. Putin rather than abandoning Mr. Trump.

For the past 70 years, Europeans have known that no matter who occupies the White House, America’s foreign policy and strategic priorities will be consistent. Today, all bets are off. Although most European leaders were appalled by Mr. Macron’s derisive comments about NATO and the United States, many still agree with him that Europe needs more foreign policy independence. They want Europe to develop its own technological capabilities and to develop the capacity for military operations outside of NATO.

Could this week’s NATO summit change Europe’s current state of mind when it comes to the future of trans-Atlantic relations? It is easier to hope for than to bet on. In the aftermath of the Cold War, Vice President Dan Quayle promised Europeans that “the future will be better tomorrow.” He was wrong. And Europe’s leaders are coming to realize that the future was actually better yesterday.

With Pompeo about to bail from his job heading the State Department so he can prevent neo-fascist crackpot Kris Kobach from losing the Kansas Senate seat to newly minted Democrat-- another Schumer special, a Republican pretending to be a Democrat-- Barbara Bollier, the completely demoralized and decimated department, is in for more turmoil. When Rex Tillerson became secretary of state in early 2017, he set about slashing the ranks of the State Department, both through attrition and through proposed budget cuts. The first few months of Tillerson’s tenure was marked by an across-the-board hiring freeze and an exodus of senior, high-profile foreign service officers.

When Tillerson was fired by tweet and his successor, Mike Pompeo, vowed to bring the “swagger” back to the State Department, he reversed many of Tillerson’s slash-and-burn policies. Still, foreign service veterans say, the damage was done.

What’s more, the attrition continues unabated. Career foreign service officers work long hours in difficult conditions, making less money than they would in the private sector. Often, they are driven by their sense of mission-- say, promoting American values abroad-- but when President Trump began attacking the pillars of American national security and smearing diplomats by name on Twitter, “suddenly,” says one senior foreign service officer who was pushed out on a scheduling technicality, “the equation didn’t make sense anymore.” What had started as a trickle of people leaving at the highest levels-- often, people who were close to retirement-- has turned into a flood of mid-career and junior officers heading for the door. The departure of top talent, people who had decades’ worth of wisdom that could have passed on to people below them, as well as the exodus of mid-level officers who had years to go before their retirements, will continue to resonate for quite a while, says Nicholas Burns, a retired career foreign service officer who is now at the Harvard Kennedy School. “That gap will show up years later,” he told me.

“What’s striking is both the decapitation of the State Department and the loss of people who should have been the next leadership of the department,” says the foreign service officer who was forced out. “It’s a hollowing out of the foreign service. You can’t replace those mid-level people easily at the numbers at which they’re losing them. That will take a generation to rebuild.”

Previously unpublished data from the AFSA shows that the foreign service is losing people at an alarming clip. In the first two years of Trump’s presidency, nearly half of the State Department’s Career Ministers retired or were pushed out. Another 20 percent of its Minister Counselors, one rank level down, also left.

There are no official numbers yet for 2019, but one former career foreign service officer I spoke with offered a telling piece of data that speaks to the unease. Last December, this ex–foreign service officer created a Facebook group aimed at connecting fellow FSOs looking to transition out of the service and into the private sector. In less than a year, this former FSO told me, the group has accumulated over 1,000 members. In the two months since the impeachment inquiry began and Trump started smearing career FSOs like Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and Jennifer Williams, more foreign service officers have begun looking for an exit. Another 100 FSOs have requested to join the Facebook group since the impeachment proceedings began, the source told me, asking other group members to help them dust off their résumés or meet them for informational interviews.

“We’re worried about the effect this can have on recruitment, where people say, ‘Is this what could happen to me?’ ” says Rubin. “People think, ‘I could be subpoenaed, I could be ruined with legal bills, I could end up vilified on TV when all I did was my job.’”

This comes on top of American diplomats feeling like the Trump administration has been even more focused on controlling foreign policy than past administrations, pushing foreign service professionals to the side using a variety of methods. “The administration’s strategy is to isolate career people from the policymaking process as much as possible, and where that’s not possible, to stifle dissent through character assassination and to let that have a chilling effect,” says the foreign service officer who was forced out, adding, “God, it makes me want to vomit. Because what country are we talking about?”

In fact, recruitment has already fallen off dramatically. Ten years ago, in 2009, about 21,000 people took the test to join the American foreign service. Today, according to AFSA’s analysis of internal State Department data, that number is just over 9,000-- less than half. And that was before the impeachment inquiry began.

All of this has created alarming gaps all over the world. Trump was slow to fill diplomatic appointments, and with time a clear preference has emerged for “acting” secretaries and ambassadors who are accountable not to the Senate but to him. According to AFSA, 20 ambassadorships remain unfilled. One-third of foreign service jobs in overseas U.S. embassies and consulates sit empty. The work of filling those jobs has ground to a halt because of impeachment proceedings.

There’s a hope that, if Trump doesn’t win re-election, many of the departed foreign service officers will return to the State Department. Elizabeth Warren’s plan for restructuring the State Department includes a provision to lure back diplomats who have left or were pushed out during the Trump years. “The practical reality is it’s hard to bring people back,” says a senior foreign service officer. “There’s a reason they left; they’ve rebuilt their lives. Some proposals, including Warren’s, are not realistic.”

Meanwhile, China continues staffing up across the world, including in Africa, where the U.S. has an especially high number of unfilled jobs. According to Australia’s Lowy Institute, which issues an annual Diplomacy Index, China just surpassed the United States in diplomatic muscle. The United States, which for decades after World War II had the highest number of embassies and consulates, has been outpaced by a rising adversary.

American diplomatic strength, foreign service veterans say, is further undercut by the high number of political appointees Trump has named to ambassadorships. While many political appointees are quick studies and do a good job of representing American interests abroad-- career FSOs point to Kay Bailey Hutchison, Trump’s ambassador to NATO, as an example of excellence-- many others are woefully unprepared for the job. Unlike career foreign service officers who are often experts in the country in which they are stationed, political nominees are usually top campaign donors and lack the knowledge of either the country to which they’re posted or the diplomatic protocols on which host countries insist. One foreign service officer described a politically appointed ambassador inquiring about the difference between the NSA and CIA.

And yet Trump has appointed more political allies to ambassadorships than any other postwar president. According to AFSA, 52 percent of America’s ambassadors are political appointees. This is the highest proportion since AFSA started keeping count in 1960. The last time the number of politically appointed ambassadors was this high was Ronald Reagan’s second term, when the proportion of political ambassadors peaked at 37 percent. “We are concerned that the percentage of political appointees is the highest it’s ever been,” says Rubin, the AFSA president. “This really hurts us overseas to carry out the president’s policy and to defend national security interests.”

After all, these political appointees, who are often diplomatic novices, are usually facing off against highly trained, disciplined, professional diplomats from countries like Russia and China, which don’t have any politically appointed ambassadors. “China has only professional, not political appointees, and our ambassadors are not always taken seriously,” says one current foreign service official. “We are very often outmatched and outgunned and frequently outmaneuvered these days.”

The political appointees are also usually President Trump’s ideological allies, who see the deep state everywhere. Before Ambassador Johnson called [deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in London, Lewis] Lukens in and fired him, Lukens told me that embassy staffers had heard the ambassador tossing the term “deep state” around, questioning the patriotism of employees he didn’t feel were sufficiently loyal to the president. Lukens was already suspect because, in June 2017, when he was the acting ambassador (Trump still hadn’t named anyone for the job), a terror attack hit London: A man with a knife and a truck mowed down pedestrians on London Bridge, killing eight and injuring 48 more. Trump immediately lashed out at Sadiq Khan, London’s first Muslim mayor, and Lukens used the U.S. Embassy Twitter account to send a message of support to Londoners and their mayor in fairly mild diplomatic language. “I commend the strong leadership of the @MayorofLondon as he leads the city forward after this heinous attack,” Lukens wrote. Breitbart immediately spotted the tweet, and Lukens says he was subjected to several days of virtual abuse.

“There’s a higher level of mistrust from political ambassadors of career FSOs than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Lukens told me. “Many of Trump’s political ambassadors have an unfounded belief that government bureaucrats are overwhelmingly Democrats and liberals and working against Trump’s agenda, and that’s just not the case.”

It didn’t help that, when Trump attacked then prime minister Theresa May, Lukens also passed along a message to the White House from the highest levels of the British government. “The message was, ‘Can you guys cut it out?’ ” Lukens recalls. “The response from Washington was that, short of taking the president's phone away, we don’t really have anything we can do.”

More and more, American diplomats abroad find themselves cleaning up the fallout from the president’s tweets or off-the-cuff remarks. When Trump said he didn’t want any immigrants from “shithole countries,” several ambassadors in Africa were called in by their host countries’ foreign ministries and asked for an official explanation.

“We’re punching below our weight and not taken seriously,” says a senior foreign service officer. “We’re getting into squabbles with the host country, which is one thing if it’s Russia and China. It’s another if it’s our allies.”

Under The Bus! And Don't They All Deserve It!

Trump is hardly the first corrupt politician who greased his way into the White House and then illegally sold position, particularly ambassadorships to countries that matter very little. But only Trump was stupid enough to leave a written trail for law enforcement. And, of course, Trump has done it more than any other White House occupant. Most presidents use some ambassadorial posts to reward supporters, the way Trump has with the latest wealthy skank Newt Gingrich married (Vatican City). But yesterday CBS News exposed a pay-to-play scheme that could land some people in prison and has already ended the still-born diplomatic career of Doug Machester.

Papa Doug

Manchester is a wealthy and crooked developer in San Diego with the reputation of as a shady wheeler-dealer, so... right up Trump's alley. He's been bribing Republicans for years:

• September 30, 2015- $50,000 to a Trump's shady superPAC
• August 31, 2011- $25,000 to a Mitt Romney SuperPAC
• October 16, 2014- $10,000 to the NRCC
• May 6, 2015- 10,000 to a Carly Fiorina SuperPAC
• March 21, 2016- $10,000 to the San Diego County Central Committee
• May 15, 2014- $10,000 to the Republican Party of San Diego
• June 10, 2016- $5,000 to the Republican Party of San Diego
• August 28, 2013- $5,000 to a Marco Rubio SuperPAC

He also maxed out to Darrell Issa (at least 6 times), Scott Walker, Carly Fiorina, Marco Rubio (3 times) and several others. But Trump doesn't sell ambassadorships for $50,000. Trump had Ronna Romney (AKA- RNC chair Ronna McDaniel) hit Manchester up for another half million dollars, after he wrote a check to Trump's inauguration committee, money that is unaccounted for and widely believed translated right into Trump's own bank account.

Trump offered Papa Doug," as Manchester was known in GOP circles, the ambassadorship the day after the inauguration. BUT... while the confirmation was working its way through the Senate, McDaniel told him to write another $500,000 check, this one for the RNC. He refused and that was the end of the nomination, which stalled for 2-and-a-half years in MoscowMitch's corrupt sewer-Senate. "That’s part of politics. It’s unbelievable. You give and you give and you give and you give some more and more and more," Manchester told CBS News. He offered McDaniel a $100,000 check from his wife instead... if MoscowMitch had him confirmed. That never happened and Trump withdrew the nomination last week. Once Manchester basically ratted McDaniel out, to CBS she had the RNC return a small part of the money Papa Doug has given them.

OK, so Trump is selling ambassadorships. Big surprise! Not. Right now about half of the U.S. ambassadors bought their posts, including putting money into Trump's pockets directly (via Mar-A-Lago memberships) and schemes like that. And Pompeo seems perfectly fine with it. Maybe he'll change his tune now that Trump is increasingly turning venomous towards him.

Under The Bus by Nancy Ohanian

An all-star NBC News team-- Carol E. Lee, Courtney Kube and Andrea Mitchell-- reported that Trump is getting on Pompeo's case over the diplomats testifying against him in the House. "Trump," they wrote, "has fumed for weeks that Pompeo is responsible for hiring State Department officials whose congressional testimony threatens to bring down his presidency, the officials said. The president confronted Pompeo about the officials-- and what he believed was a lackluster effort by the secretary of state to block their testimony-- during lunch at the White House on Oct. 29, those familiar with the matter said. Inside the White House, the view was that Trump 'just felt like, rein your people in,' a senior administration official said. Trump particularly blames Pompeo for tapping Ambassador Bill Taylor in June to be the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, the current and former senior administration officials said."

A crack in the seemingly unbreakable bond between Trump and Pompeo is striking because Pompeo, a former Kansas congressman, is viewed as the “Trump whisperer” who has survived-- and thrived-- working for a president who has routinely tired of and discarded senior members of his team.

But the impeachment inquiry has put Pompeo in what one senior administration official described as an untenable position: trying to manage a bureaucracy of 75,000 people that has soured on his leadership and also please a boss with outsized expectations of loyalty.

“He feels like he's getting a bunch of blame from the president and the White House for having hired all these people who are turning against Trump,” an official familiar with the dynamic said of Pompeo, “and that it's the State Department that is going to bring him down, so it's all Pompeo's fault.”

...Trump has hinted publicly at tensions with Pompeo, and while the comments might go unnoticed by the untrained ear they’ve been heard loudly by people close to the president.

The first was on Oct. 23, officials said, when Trump wrote on Twitter: “It would be really great if the people within the Trump Administration, all well-meaning and good (I hope!), could stop hiring Never Trumpers, who are worse than the Do Nothing Democrats. Nothing good will ever come from them!”

Trump followed up with another tweet specifically calling Taylor, and his lawyer, "Never Trumpers."

Two days later, Trump said Pompeo “made a mistake” in hiring Taylor.

“Here’s the problem: He's a never Trumper, and his lawyer is,” the president told reporters about Taylor. “The other problem is-- hey, everyone makes mistakes-- Mike Pompeo. Everybody makes mistakes.”


The next day, Oct. 26, Pompeo was notably absent as the president sat with his national security team during the U.S. military raid that killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Pompeo was not informed about the raid until late Friday after he was home in Kansas for his son’s friend’s wedding, officials said.

Throughout the impeachment inquiry, Pompeo and Trump have maintained their weekly lunches at the White House, according to the president’s public schedule.

But the president was angry when he arrived in his private dining room on Oct. 29, two officials said. Pompeo defended himself, officials said, by telling Trump he doesn’t know who half of these State Department officials are, officials said. He also noted that there are thousands of employees at the agency, explaining that he can’t control them, those familiar with the matter said.

...The tension with Trump comes as Pompeo weighs whether to leave the administration to run for Kansas’ open Senate seat.

Pompeo has served in the administration since its start. Trump tapped him as CIA director, then moved him to secretary of state after he fired Pompeo’s predecessor, Rex Tillerson. For almost three years, Pompeo seamlessly navigated a finicky president. He’s remained, and became more influential, as Trump churned through two chiefs of staff, three national security advisers, an attorney general, and secretaries of defense, state, labor, homeland security, interior, veterans affairs and health and human services.

But in recent weeks Pompeo has been under steady fire over his role in the Ukraine scandal, as well as his handling of it.

Initially when the Ukraine controversy became public, Trump wanted Pompeo to publicly defend him against the State Department bureaucracy, officials said. But the White House thought Pompeo appeared unprepared in his television interviews, and his performance only fueled the president’s frustrations, they said.

Pompeo has faced criticism for saying, during an interview on ABC’s This Week, that he didn’t know anything about the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that is at the center of the controversy. Pompeo didn’t disclose until more than a week later that he had listened in on that call.

Like the White House, he has attempted to block State Department officials from testifying. And he has refused to turn over State Department documents related to Ukraine.

His decision last week, however, to allow the State Department to help pay for the legal fees that officials ensnared in the impeachment inquiry are accruing could further strain his relationship with the president.

That decision underscores the balance Pompeo is trying to strike between the president and the department he leads.

State Department officials had thought Pompeo’s move to the agency in April 2018 would be a welcome antidote to what they viewed as the bureaucratic fecklessness of Tillerson, given Pompeo’s unfettered access to Trump and their close relationship.

But morale at the State Department has sagged for months, and it plummeted further as the Ukraine scandal unfolded, according to multiple officials.

State Department officials are critical of Pompeo for buckling to pressure from the president and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and abruptly recalling Yovanovitch while she was serving as U.S. ambassador in Ukraine. Yovanovitch had been vilified by Giuliani, who convinced the president she was working against his interests.

Criticism of Pompeo inside the State Department escalated when he refused to publicly defend Yovanovitch after a reconstructed transcript of the July 25 call revealed Trump disparaged Yovanovitch to Zelenskiy, administration officials have said. Pompeo’s closest aide, Ambassador Mike McKinley, resigned over the secretary’s refusal to defend Yovanovitch.

Testimony from Taylor and others show Pompeo was keenly aware of the concerns his top officials had about Giuliani’s efforts and his handling of Yovanovitch.

In public testimony on Friday, Yovanovitch appeared to excoriate Pompeo for “the failure of State Department leadership to push back as foreign and corrupt interests apparently hijacked our Ukraine policy.”

“It is the responsibility of the department's leaders to stand up for the institution and the individuals who make that institution the most effective diplomatic force in the world,” she said.

According to administration officials, Pompeo’s refusal to publicly defend Yovanovitch cemented a wider view within the State Department that he has enabled some of Trump’s impulsive foreign policy decisions, such as the withdrawal of U.S. special forces from Syria after a phone call with Turkey’s Erdgoan.

“Pompeo is hated by his building,” a person close to the secretary said, adding that he “feels the heat a great deal and feels it’s personal at state.”

Mike Pompeo-- Far Worse Than You Probably Think

On Saturday, Wall Street Journal reporter Vivian Salama wrote that Philip Reeker, the acting assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs "was set to tell House impeachment investigators Saturday that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other top officials stymied a show of solidarity for the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine after President Trump had her removed." He's another one who knows are about the quo in Trump's Ukrainian quid pro quo and he's going to prove deadly not just for Trump but for Pompeo as well. Since Trump didn't invent Pompeo, I want to remind you about him if you have a minute. We've been writing about him since 2010, ever since the Koch brothers managed to get him into Congress as another one of their personal emissaries (like Mick Mulvaney) on Capitol Hill. In 2011 the Washington Monthly introduced the newly-elected Kansan as the The congressman from Koch Industries. At the time, Steve Benen presented him as a freshman "trying to kill a consumer-product-safety database, allowing Americans to go online and access free information about the safety records of household products. The measure was easily approved with bipartisan support, but the freshman Republican perceived it as anti-business. After all, if consumers are made aware of potentially dangerous products, Americans might not buy them. How can the manufacturers of those products make a profit under conditions like that? As it turned out, the Koch brothers were the ones who wanted the online consumer-product-safety database scuttled, and Pompeo was happy to do their bidding-- he represents the district where Koch Industries is located, and the Koch brothers and their political action committee were his most generous campaign contributors."

Back then I didn't know much about Pompeo, who most Americans never heard of 'til Trump plucked him out of Congress early in 2017 to run the CIA. Other than the well-established fact that he's a virulent racist, all I knew about him was that he was a multimillionaire Teabagger and total corporate shill who's long been in bed with the Koch Brothers-- his top campaign donors through various front groups they control and fund and who placed one of their employees, Mark Chenoweth, as his chief of staff.

When Trump decided to appoint him Secretary of State in 2018, every Democrat but conservative butt-wipes Claire McCaskill (MO), Joe Manchin (WV), Joe Donnelly (IN), Heidi Heitkamp (ND), Doug Jones (AL) and Bill Nelson (FL) voted against confirmation. McCaskill, Donnelly, Heitkamp and Nelson faced the voters that year and, despite it being a Democratic wave election, all 4, unable to explain votes like that, were defeated for reelection. During his first election, Pompeo called his Democratic opponent, state Rep. Raj Goyle, who was born in Cleveland, Ohio, a "turban topper" who "could be a muslim, a hindu, a buddhist etc who knows." No doubt that kind of vicious racism went into Trump's decision to name him Secretary of State.





Garrett Graff, writing yesterday for Wired reported how the Ukraine mess has derailed Pompeo's out-sized political ambitions. He wrote that anyone watching this month's interview for a Tennessee TV station, "you could almost see Mike Pompeo’s political life flash before his eyes as he sat for seven minutes, almost unblinking, under withering cross-examination by-- of all people, he must’ve thought-- a local Nashville TV reporter."

With question after question, WSMV’s Nancy Amons grilled the increasingly uncomfortable secretary of state about the terrible week he’d been having-- the resignation of a top lieutenant, one of the few career foreign service officers who had steadied Pompeo’s ship at state; President Donald Trump’s surprise decision last week to abandon the Kurdish allies who had helped defeat ISIS in Syria and leave them to face annihilation at the hands of a Turkish invasion; the controversy over the recall of the ambassador to Ukraine, who also that day was testifying on Capitol Hill about the alleged conspiracy theory-laden smear campaign that had ended her assignment in Kyiv early; and about the mysterious role of Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, and his mission this year to get Ukraine to investigate the Biden family, possibly in exchange for US military aid.

It probably wasn’t what Pompeo had expected while he was in Tennessee speaking to a Christian conference-- the type of friendly audience Pompeo has increasingly sought. As he’s traveled the country over the last year, the secretary has made a point of engaging with local media (whose questions are generally friendlier) and, not coincidentally, the encounters have the potential to be more helpful to the political future Pompeo seems to be carving out for himself as Trump’s heir apparent.

During a spring swing through Iowa, he did four local radio interviews and more recently has been courting the local press in Kansas, his adopted home state, where he’s keeping open the possibility of running for US Senate next year. Yet given this fall’s momentous events-- much of which involves a budding impeachment inquiry for Pompeo’s boss that has Pompeo himself in the middle of the scandal-- the local TV news interview was far more challenging. The secretary of state, all but visibly seething, muttered non sequiturs, repeated vacuous talking points, and at one point told Amons it sounded like she was working for the Democratic National Committee. In fact, she was doing journalism, trying to pry the truth from one of the administration’s fiercest defenders.

Last month, as news of a whistle-blower from the intelligence community began to circulate in Washington, it would have been hard to find someone in the Trump orbit whose political future seemed brighter than Mike Pompeo's. The 55-year-old former congressman from Kansas has deftly navigated the chaos atop the executive branch to position himself as the Trump administration’s unicorn-- the almost mythic figure who has lasted inside the president’s inner circle. This is, after all, a government where senior officials come and go sometimes by the week. But Pompeo actually earned a promotion along the way, moving from CIA director to secretary of state.

Nearly three years into the administration, Pompeo effectively is the last man standing, having outlasted and vanquished all rivals for Trump’s ear on foreign policy, the president’s tireless, give-no-quarter chief crusader, a political pugilist in a role normally reserved for thoughtful diplomacy, a happy warrior Trump dispatched to tongue-lash European allies over China and Huawei, to scold Iran over its nuclear ambitions, to glad-hand with North Korea, to boost Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, to reassure Saudi Arabia that its relationship with the Trump administration would remain copacetic, despite the government’s alleged killing of US resident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and to clean up with Denmark in the wake of Trump’s aborted effort to purchase Greenland.

Pompeo learned along the way that there was only one way to survive under Trump: to be as enthusiastic about Trump as Trump himself. Or, as Pompeo summed up his daily job to me in one of our conversations, “you go execute and you do it with all the energy and heart and passion and integrity you can muster.” Anything less, after all, and one might face the ignominious end of his predecessor, Rex Tillerson-- who was reportedly sitting on the toilet when he got a call informing him he was about to be fired by presidential tweet. As one former senior intelligence leader said when I mentioned Pompeo, shaking his head: “He’s made his deal with the devil.”

The deal he’d made, after all, was clear. Pompeo was a man in a hurry, standing uniquely astride the three critical strands of the modern GOP: the Kansas Koch brothers who have funded much of the party’s next generation; evangelical Christians, a group that has remained fiercely loyal to Trump; and Trump’s red-hat-wearing, red-meat-loving MAGA “America First” nationalist base. Before the Ukraine scandal engulfed Washington, it appeared that his loyal service to Trump had left Pompeo, perhaps better than anyone, in first position for the shadow primary to succeed Donald Trump in 2024 as heir apparent.

But when the details of the whistle-blower complaint emerged-- that Trump, working with Giuliani, had been trying to pressure Ukraine to drum up dirt on the Bidens and also to chase a widely debunked conspiracy theory that Ukrainians, not Russians, hacked the 2016 election-- Pompeo’s role in the controversy has grown with nearly every passing day.

After an initially ambiguous statement, the secretary of state finally admitted that he’d listened in real time to the now infamous July 25 telephone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, where the US president leaned on Zelensky to help Giuliani and Attorney General Bill Barr smear Hunter Biden. He’d heard, in real time, Trump utter the phrase “I would like you to do us a favor, though,” the smoking-gun utterance that caused such consternation inside the White House, intelligence community, and Justice Department as word spread of Trump’s conversation and tipped House Democrats over the edge to begin a formal impeachment inquiry.

Damning text messages exchanged by two State Department officials added fuel to the controversy, as did the congressional hearing about the State Department’s rushed recall of ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. Pompeo’s decision not to speak out on behalf of those caught up in the scandal and not to defend the integrity of career foreign service officers was reported to have ultimately triggered the resignation this month of Michael McKinley, a State Department lifer whose appointment to Pompeo’s inner circle last year was initially seen inside the department’s Foggy Bottom headquarters as a hopeful sign.

Add in the fact that nearly all of Trump’s foreign policy goals that Pompeo has championed appear unfulfilled-- from Iran, North Korea, and China to the unfolding debacle in Syria that Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence were dispatched last week to calm-- and the growing calls from the intelligentsia in Washington for Pompeo to resign, and it’s hard not to imagine that by the time he sat down to face Amons that Pompeo was wondering whether the implicit deal he’d made with Trump would lead him to the White House-- or, like nearly all others who have served this president, his eventual embarrassing ouster?

Quite the practiced liar, isn't he? More people should get to know what kind of a stinking pile of diarrhea Pompeo is. Lindsay Wise, also writing for the Wall Street Journal, noted that Pompeo had talked with Charles Koch on Friday about quitting as Secretary of State and running for the open Kansas Senate seat. That's him in Nancy Ohanian's drawing-- Disorganized Crime-- third from the left, between William Barr and Señor Trumpanzee himself: