The Trump Family-- What An Ugly Mess!

Even Eric Trump will be speaking at the Republican convention-- the whole Trump family-- but not Barron... and not his sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry. Definitely not his sister. Washington Post reporter Michael Kranish explained why over the weekend: secretly recorded tapes. Yes, another glimpse into the dysfunctional sociopath in the Oval Office. Their niece, Mary Trump-- the one who wrote the book-- recorded the phone conversations with Trump's older sister, Maryanne, in 2018. "Barry, 83, was aghast at how her 74-year-old brother operated as president," wrote Kranish. "'His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God,' she said. 'I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit.' Lamenting 'what they’re doing with kids at the border,' she guessed her brother 'hasn’t read my immigration opinions' in court cases. In one case, she berated a judge for failing to treat an asylum applicant respectfully. 'What has he read?' Mary Trump asked her aunt. 'No. He doesn’t read,' Barry responded." Most of us have noticed; we have a president who doesn't read. He manages to read a teleprompter, sometimes and often very badly. But he's a functional illiterate.

In the weeks since Mary Trump’s tell-all book about her uncle has been released, she’s been questioned about the source of some of the information, such as her allegation that Trump paid a friend to take his SATs to enable him to transfer into the University of Pennsylvania. Nowhere in the book does she say that she recorded conversations with her aunt.

In response to a question from the Washington Post about how she knew the president paid someone to take the SATs, Mary Trump revealed that she had surreptitiously taped 15 hours of face-to-face conversations with Barry in 2018 and 2019. She provided The Post with previously unreleased transcripts and audio excerpts, which include exchanges that are not in her book.

Barry has never spoken publicly about disagreements with the president, and her extraordinarily candid comments in the recordings mark the most critical comments known to have been made about him by one of his siblings. No one else in the family except Mary Trump has publicly rebuked the president.

The transcripts reveal the depths of discord between the president and his sister, illuminating a rift that began when she asked her brother for a favor in the 1980s, which Trump has frequently used to try to take credit for her success.

At one point Barry said to her niece, “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”

Mary Trump, 55, told The Post recently that her uncle is unfit to be president and she plans to do “everything in my power” to elect Joe Biden. Her father, Fred Trump Jr., died of an alcohol-related illness when she was 16 in 1981. In her book, she says Donald Trump and his father mistreated her father.

The Post sought comment about the tapes from Barry and White House officials on Friday and Saturday and did not receive a response. After this story posted online Saturday night, the White House issued this statement from the president that said in full: “Every day it’s something else, who cares. I miss my brother, and I’ll continue to work hard for the American people. Not everyone agrees, but the results are obvious. Our country will soon be stronger than ever before!”

He was a brat’

The allegation that the president paid someone to take his SATs, which was one of the most publicized allegations in Mary Trump’s book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man, stems from a conversation that Barry had with her niece on Nov. 1, 2018.

Barry told how she tried to help her brother get into college. “He was a brat,” Barry said, explaining that “I did his homework for him” and “I drove him around New York City to try to get him into college.”

Then Barry dropped what Mary considered a bombshell: “He went to Fordham for one year [actually two years] and then he got into University of Pennsylvania because he had somebody take the exams.”

“No way!” Mary responded. “He had somebody take his entrance exams?”

“SATs or whatever... That’s what I believe,” Barry said. “I even remember the name.” That person was Joe Shapiro, Barry said.

Donald Trump was friends with a person at Penn named Joe Shapiro, who is deceased. Shapiro’s widow and sister told The Post last month that he never took a test for anybody, including Trump. Mary Trump has said it was a different Joe Shapiro, but that person has not surfaced.

During a Post Live interview last month, Mary Trump was asked whether the source of her information was Barry. “I prefer not to say who it is,” she responded. “It’s somebody who would have absolutely no reason to make it up.”

Chris Bastardi, a spokesman for Mary Trump, said that she began taping conversations in 2018 with Barry after concluding that her relatives had lied about the value of the family estate two decades earlier during a legal battle over her inheritance, in which she received far less than she expected.

Under New York law, it is legal to tape a conversation with the consent of one party, which in this case was Mary Trump.

The inheritance dispute was settled privately in 2001, but Mary Trump has said she was duped into an agreement because the family said the estate was worth $30 million and she later believed the value was closer to $1 billion.

Bastardi said she recorded the conversations with Barry to gain information that would show she had been misled by the family about the estate’s value. “She hoped to prove this, as is often done, by recording words contrary to their sworn statements. She never expected to learn much of what she heard,” Bastardi said.

He said that Mary believed the information was particularly relevant given the federal charges that have been brought this year against prominent individuals who took “unethical steps to get their children into college.”

The president has said he got into what was then called the Wharton School of Finance at Penn-- which he called one of “the hardest schools to get in to”-- because he is a “super genius.” The Post reported last year, however, that Mary’s father, Fred Jr., was close friends with a Penn admissions official. That official, James Nolan, told The Post that Fred Jr. asked him to interview his brother for admission, which he did. He was granted a place at the school, which Nolan said was “not very difficult” because more than half of applicants at the time were accepted, compared with last year’s 7.4 percent rate.

The Trump siblings have been publicly supportive of the president. The president’s other sister, Elizabeth, has stayed out of the public eye. The president’s younger brother, Robert, who died on Aug. 15, said in 2016 he supported his brother “one thousand percent.”

In 1999, when family patriarch Fred Sr. died, Barry joined with Donald and Robert in a lawsuit to prevent Mary from getting a larger amount of the inheritance. Mary had said in a probate case that she and her brother should have received an amount closer to what would have gone to their father, if he had lived.

On another matter apparently related to Fred Sr.’s will, Barry told her niece that she and Donald had a rift so serious that “he didn’t talk to me for two years.”

Barry received her undergraduate degree from Mount Holyoke College, a master’s from Columbia University and a law degree from Hofstra University. After being a homemaker for 13 years, and having eschewed the Trump family’s real estate business, she became one of only two women out of 62 lawyers in the office of the United States Attorney in New Jersey, where she worked from 1974 to 1983.

Barry has avoided talking publicly about her brother’s presidency while she was on the federal bench. In a rare public appearance, she used empathetic language far removed from her brother’s tough rhetoric.

“Success can be as simple as the warm feeling you get when you smile at a stranger, someone you know must be lonely, and having that stranger return your smile,” Barry said in a speech to graduates of Fairfield University in Connecticut in 2011.

The president, meanwhile, has publicly spoken glowingly of his sister, saying in 2016 that, “We do have different views a little bit,” while adding, “She's a very, very highly respected judge.”

‘I will level you’

In one of the taped conversations, however, Barry revealed how a deep animosity developed between her and her brother.

She recalled how she turned to him for help when she wanted to be nominated by then-President Ronald Reagan for a federal judgeship. She believed that help could come from his attorney: Roy Cohn, who had played an infamous role in the 1950s as chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) on the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Cohn was “like kissing buddies” with Reagan, she said.

“He had Roy Cohn call Reagan about needing to appoint a woman as a federal judge in New Jersey,” Barry told Mary. “Because Reagan’s running for reelection, and he was desperate for the female vote.” Then, she said, “I had the nomination,” and Donald Trump never let Barry forget it.

According to a recent documentary film, Where’s My Roy Cohn? Cohn had been in regular touch with Reagan. Donald Trump met with Reagan at the White House on Aug. 4, 1983, according to presidential records. Reagan talked with Barry on Sept. 13, 1983, and nominated her the following day, according to Reagan’s daily diary.

“He once tried to take credit for me,” Barry said of her brother, quoting him as saying, “Where would you be without me?”

Barry said she told her brother: “You say that one more time and I will level you.” She told Mary that it was “the only favor I ever asked for in my whole life.” She said that she deserved the nomination “on my own merit” and that she was subsequently elevated to higher judicial posts without her brother’s intervention.

“Donald is out for Donald, period,” Barry said.

Mary questioned Barry about what he had accomplished on his own.

“I don’t know,” Barry said.

“Nothing,” Mary responded.

“Well he has five bankruptcies,” Barry said. (Trump’s companies filed for six corporate bankruptcies but he has never declared personal bankruptcy.)

“Good point. He did accomplish those all by his self,” Mary said.

“Yes, he did. Yes, he did. You can’t trust him,” Barry said.

Maryanne said on another occasion that her brother kept asking about Fox News. One day, Barry said, the president called her and said, “Did you watch Fox News?”

“No,” Barry said she told the president.

“Why not?” he said.

“I don’t watch much television at all,” Barry said she responded.

“What do you do?” the president asked.

“I read,” Barry replied.

“What do you read?” the president said.

“Books,” Barry said.

The president was incredulous. “You don’t watch Fox?”

Around the same time the conversations were being conducted, an internal investigation was underway of whether Barry violated judicial conduct rules regarding her role in working with her siblings in determining their tax liability. The investigation stemmed in part from an action that Mary Trump had taken: She had provided boxes of family tax records to the New York Times, which published a Pulitzer Prize-winning report in 2018 that found the president had engaged in suspect tax schemes that increased the family wealth.

Barry retired shortly after the investigation was launched, which ended the probe.

One of the most emotional conversations between Mary and her aunt occurred when they discussed the 1999 funeral of the family patriarch, Fred Sr., at Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue in New York City. During that ceremony, Donald spoke more about his own accomplishments than his father’s life, Barry said.

“Donald was the only one who didn’t speak about Dad,” Barry said. She told Mary that “I don’t want any of my siblings to speak at my funeral. And that’s all about Donald and what he did at Dad’s funeral. I don’t know. It was all about him.”

“I remember,” Mary responded.

Mary Trump said she has not talked to her aunt since the book was published. She said in the Post Live interview that she would not be surprised “if she never contacted me, and I think that’s fair. I understand why she would not want to.”

William Barr's Department Of Crime And Corruption

Before Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered, King Henry II was heard shouting "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?" Ever since, tyrants have adapted the phrase to make themselves clear about having something wicked down without having to resort to specificity. When Trump was screaming for "his Roy Cohn," the zeitgeist puked up William Barr. Trump has been delighted ever since. And with good reason.

Barr is destined to take his place, in the history books, along earlier Attorneys General like A. Mitchell Palmer, who served under Woodrow Wilson, Harry Daugherty, was served under Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, John Mitchell, who served under Nixon and one of his execrable Trumpist predecessors, Jeff Sessions.

Yesterday a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, voted 2-to-1 to order the lower court judge who tried Michael Flynn to dismiss the case. The decision was written by a fake judge appointed by Trump, Neomi Rao, and backed up by another Republican, Karen Henderson. Ttrump has sp polluted the federal judiciary that these fake judges didn't care that Flynn had plead guilty twice.

Yesterday, reporting for the Washington Post, Matt Zapotosky and Karoun Demirjian covered the politicization and perversion of the Trump/Barr Department of Justice. They tepidly noted that a federal prosecutor’s testimony yesterday that he was pressed by supervisors to offer a more lenient sentencing recommendation for a friend of Trump’s capped a remarkable four-month stretch in which Barr repeatedly bent the Justice Department to Trump’s political interests-- generating significant controversy but no personal consequence.

Since February, Barr has intervened in two criminal cases to the benefit of those who once advised Trump; ousted a U.S. attorney who is investigating Trump’s personal lawyer; and dutifully implemented Trump’s vision for a forceful crack down on demonstrators in the District protesting police violence.

Democrats and legal observers have decried the moves-- calling on Barr to resign or be investigated by his agency’s internal watchdog-- and morale inside the Justice Department has plummeted, according to several Justice Department employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter frankly. But lawmakers, who already held Barr in contempt last year for defying congressional subpoenas, seem to have little in the way of practical recourse.

Republicans, who control the Senate, would short-circuit any bid to impeach and remove Barr, who they have asserted is drawing ire because he is trying to ferret out the corruption of his Justice Department predecessors in a Democratic administration.

“I think Barr’s conduct has made it clear that he is not acting as the attorney general for the people of the United States, but as a private attorney to protect the interests of the president,” said former U.S. attorney Barbara McQuade. “What can be done about William Barr? I really think the only thing that can be done is impeachment. And I think that this Republican Senate has shown it doesn’t really have any appetite for that.”

The tension over allegations of Barr’s malfeasance reached new heights Wednesday as the House Judiciary Committee took testimony from two current prosecutors, including one who had worked on the team of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

The hearing came just as an appeals court panel dealt a blow to Barr’s critics, siding with the Justice Department and ordering a reluctant lower court judge to immediately drop the criminal case against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI, as Barr had sought.

Aaron Zelinsky, who formerly worked for Mueller and is now an assistant U.S. attorney in Maryland, said political leadership had pressured him and other career prosecutors to issue a lighter sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone, a longtime Trump friend convicted of lying to Congress. Zelinsky made clear that he thought the reason for the pressure was inappropriate.

“What I heard repeatedly was that this leniency was happening because of Stone’s relationship to the president, that the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia was receiving heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice and that his instructions to us were based on political considerations,” Zelinsky said.

Zelinsky’s testimony was buttressed by a different prosecutor, who works on antitrust matters and said that Barr had personally intervened to spur investigations of mergers in the marijuana industry, even when career officials thought such work was unnecessary.

The prosecutor, John Elias, said the reason seemed to be Barr’s personal distaste for the marijuana business. He also said the Justice Department’s antitrust division was made to investigate deals between the state of California and four automakers to limit emissions, a day after Trump tweeted his displeasure about the arrangement.

“Personal dislike of an industry is not a valid basis upon which to ground an antitrust investigation,” Elias said.

House Democrats said that the prosecutors’ testimony showed that Barr has politicized the Justice Department to help Trump and his friends. In a strident opening statement, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) called Barr “the president’s fixer.”

“The cancer that we must root out is his decision to place the president’s interests above the interests of the American people,” Nadler said.

Legal analysts said the hearing itself was remarkable: prosecutors such as Zelinsky are virtually never permitted or willing to speak to Congress at all, let alone to describe the deliberations surrounding a particular criminal case. They negotiated their appearances independently of the Justice Department, but their lawyers conferred with department officials about limits on their testimony.

“Mr. Zelinsky’s courageous testimony makes more painfully explicit and shocking the brazenness with which the attorney general and other Justice Department officials now readily manipulate cases to serve the president’s political ends,” said David Laufman, a former Justice Department counterintelligence official now in private practice. “And it also indicates how impervious these officials think they are to any meaningful accountability and consequences for their wrongful conduct.”

...In Barr’s first months on the job, Mueller’s team delivered to the attorney general its final report, and Barr stepped fully into controversy. Instead of quickly releasing the report’s executive summaries, Barr condensed the findings into a four-page letter he sent to Congress. The letter declared Mueller had not found evidence to substantiate a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the 2016 election, and had not reached a conclusion on whether Trump had obstructed justice. Barr said he had evaluated that question himself, and determined that Trump had not.

The bare-bones description so infuriated the special counsel team that Mueller sent a letter to Barr complaining that the attorney general “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the investigative report. Barr ultimately pushed to make public a largely unredacted copy of Mueller’s entire report, though on the day of its release, he gave a news conference characterizing it in a way that closely mirrored Trump’s talking points.

In recent months, critics have alleged that Barr has sought to undo the special counsel’s work. Zelinsky testified that career prosecutors initially won their fight over Stone’s sentencing recommendation and filed essentially the request they wanted. But early the next morning, Trump tweeted his displeasure, and Barr directed that a new memo be filed, prompting Zelinsky and three other career prosecutors to withdraw from the case.

Barr has said that he did not discuss the case with the president and that his intervention was not a result of the president’s tweet. In the episode’s aftermath, he gave a remarkable interview saying Trump’s social media missives “make it impossible for me to do my job.”

Barr asked U.S. Attorney John Durham in Connecticut to review the FBI’s Russia investigation and U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen in St. Louis to review the Flynn case-- unusual moves that critics say are meant to fuel Republican attacks on an inquiry that dogged Trump’s presidency. Last month, at Jensen’s recommendation, Barr had the Justice Department move to walk away entirely from the prosecution of Flynn, who pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI’s about his dealings with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

Ryan Fayhee, a former Justice Department prosecutor now in private practice at Hughes Hubbard & Reed, said that Barr had “clearly participated in the systematic undoing of the Mueller investigation,” noting that-- in part because of coronavirus-related releases-- none of those Mueller charged are currently in prison.

“It’s thinly veiled and troubling to say the least,” Fayhee said. “Bill Barr is very bright, capable, and ran a Department of Justice that didn’t look anything like this the last time around-- and didn’t act like this the last time around. The only different factor is the person in the White House.”

Critics have noted that Barr, too, has taken other steps that have fallen in line with the president’s interests. Like Trump, he has voiced skepticism about mail-in voting, telling the New York Times Magazine it could be susceptible to a foreign operation, even though current and former election officials dispute that.

At Trump’s request, he led the law enforcement response to recent protests in the District over police violence and controversially ordered the pushing back of protesters from outside of Lafayette Square near the White House on June 1. That led to police using chemical irritant and horses against largely peaceful demonstrators, just before Trump walked across the square for a photo op at St. John’s Episcopal Church. Barr has said the events were not related.

Last week, Barr moved to oust Geoffrey Berman as the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. Berman’s office has been investigating Rudolph W. Giuliani, a personal lawyer to Trump, though the Justice Department has disputed that Berman’s removal is related to any particular case.

A spokesman for Barr said Wednesday that Barr had agreed to appear before the Judiciary Committee on July 28; he has not made such an appearance since Democrats took over the House majority in 2019. Though analysts note that he is unlikely to face any legal consequences for his various recent moves, he still has to answer to his peers, the public and his own department. Thousands of Justice Department alumni have endorsed various letters calling for Barr’s ouster, and this week, a group of professors at the George Washington University Law School, from which Barr has a degree, condemned his actions.

“At some point,” said McQuade, the former U.S. attorney, “you lose the room.”

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

The words "Republican love of country" just don't go together anymore. People like Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Rudy Giuliani are the embodiment of that sad fact. Can you imagine going back to the 1950s and seeing Dwight Eisenhower have his lawyer go on national TV and say there's nothing wrong with working with the Russians on his campaigns? Both parties would have gotten together and impeached him in a single afternoon. Make that 2 hours. He would have been gone and put on a train to the nearest Federal penitentiary. Not even his war record would have saved him. But this is the Age Of Trump. We the people of this country are so far gone that we even tolerate TV personalities raising the level of their own disgracefulness by having Russia apologist Rudy Giuliani as a guest on their show. That's what NBC's Chuck Todd did on Sunday. That was the day Chuck Todd had Rudy on the once venerable Meet The Press. Even worse of course, we have 24 hours 'round the clock of FOX "News" which is nothing less than a TV network peopled by highly paid Russian assets who broadcast Tokyo Rose styled propaganda. We still have a government funded Voice Of America, which has never been perfect, to say the least, but, people like Rudy Giuliani and his fellow "Hacks For Trump" on FOX are determined to be the Voice Of Putin. And, they are proud of it. In Ike's time, Russian assets infiltrated and operated in secrecy, undercover. Now they seek and get the spotlights and national airtime. Hell, they even get elected to the highest offices in the land!

Meanwhile, no one echos the famous words of former Chief Counsel of The United States Army Joseph Nye Welch who, during the infamous 1954 Army/McCarthy hearings, asked Senator Joseph McCarthy, a slimy little worm of a man who saw Russians lurking in every dark corner whether they were there or not, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

Now, we have an America where Russian assets operate in the open and there's nothing imaginary about them. McCarthy could find tens and multiply it into imaginary tens of thousands in his frenzied mind. He self-immolated in doing so. Today, any of his targets that might have actually been working for Russia would have their own shows on FOX and elsewhere! This is how warped, twisted, and turned on its head our American society has become. At some point in the past, the patriotic part of the fabric of America was torn up into a million threads and randomly reassembled and re-twined into an alternate universe America, all with the approval of the people we are foolish enough to elect. Like I've always said, it's an Idiocracy thing.

It's worth noting that, back when Joseph Welch publicly confronted Joseph McCarthy on live television, McCarthy was working with the uber-corrupt prosecutor Roy Cohn who would become Donald Trump's mentor and lawyer before Cohn got himself disbarred. We are are a stranger brew than we care to acknowledge. Certainly, future historians will get it wrong due to a lack of path that makes sense. They won't see that a lack of sense and logic is the key.

If someone in a position of credible authority were to exist now, and that someone asked the decency question of Giuliani or any one of a multitude of politicians, the irony would be staggering, beyond staggering. Why would anyone need to ask? We're so far gone that if any writer pitched so-called Liberal Hollywood on a movie idea based on that premise, they would probably be blacklisted for life.

"Everyone Needs To Have Something They Can Feel Good About Hating" (Cully Barnaby)

The Barnaby family: Joyce (Jane Wymark), DCI Tom (John Nettles), and Cully (Laura Howard)

"Witch hunts never are [concluded]. You burn
one, you have to find another. . . .
"Everyone needs to have something they can feel
good about hating." -- Cully Barnaby

by Ken

Among the luxuries I've been allowing myself during an already-perhaps-nervously-long period of, er, transition is a slowly ongoing traversal, via Netflix, of the whole of the British mystery series Midsomer Murders (1997-present) -- for my money (in this case literally) the best thing Netflix has to offer, with the whole of the first 19 series already available and Series 20, which just aired in 2018, presumably to follow. (According to Wikipedia, Series 21 is scheduled to begin shooting sometime this year.)

While watching the 34th episode (out of 122 to date, including Series 20), I was stopped in my tracks by an exchange near the start of the final scene, which finds the Barnabys -- DCI Tom (John Nettles), his long-suffering wife Joyce (Jane Wymark), and adult daughter Cully (Laura Howard) -- at home in the kitchen, in various stages of sitting down to family dinner. At this point Tom is nearing wit's end over his seemingly stalled investigation of a series of ostensibly witchcraft-related murders-by-fire in the village of Midsomer Parva -- the first in an actual bonfire on the village green, the others custom-created "individual" mini-bonfires.

Passing the torch of hate

I was so taken by Cully's insight that the, um, logic of witch hunts dictates that they don't end, can't end -- "You burn one, you have to find another" -- that I paused the proceedings in order to undertake the ever-so-laborious process of transcription and then the additional labor of trying to do something about the need I hope you'll understand I felt to do something with the result of those labors. For me this all resonates wildly in the Age of Trump, who himself (we need to remember) is less a cause than a symptom of the social malignancy afflicting us here and now in the year 2019, though of course Trump has spent his whole life doing everything in his malignant powers, in the spirit of his mentor Roy Cohn, to accelerate the malignancy. What Cully is describing is a habit of mind generally found in in right-wing movements and autocracies, and positively beloved of both masters and subjects in right-wing autocracies.

As the scene began, poor Tom Barnaby -- so restless that he's unable to sit or stand still -- has been poring over some sort of old bound book, clearly not getting the answer(s) he's looking for.

CULLY BARNABY [to her father]: So, how's the witch hunt?
DCI TOM BARNABY: The witch hunt is not concluded.
CULLY: Witch hunts never are. You burn one, you have to find another.
JOYCE BARNABY: That's horrible, Cully!
CULLY: It's true! Everyone needs to have something they can feel good about hating. Plus, everyone loves a bonfire.

-- from "The Straw Woman," Episode 6 of
Series 7 (2004) of Midsomer Murders

#

Trump Triumphed Despite Having All Of Roy Cohn’s Debits But None Of His Assets-- Legal Cunning, Brainpower And Loyalty. And Michael Cohen?

Yesterday ABC News reported some financial shenanigans that show one way Señor Trumpanzee has been obstructing justice, using his crooked campaign pay for the defense of his crooked lawyer, Michael Cohen. Do you think Trump would be paying for Cohen's lawyers if Cohen were cooperating with the Justice Department? So far Trump has thrown in nearly a quarter million dollars to keep Cohen from flipping. At the very least that violates campaign finance laws since Cohen has said that he did not have a formal role in the Trump campaign, and it is illegal to spend campaign funds for personal use.

Can Cohen really be that incompetent? Why does Trump even employ him or why did Trump ever employ him? When Trump claimed he hired "only the best people," what was he measuring them against? Himself, of course. Is Trump the best person? Of course not. Trump is the worst person and he hires people like himself, claiming they are-- like himself-- the best. Look at that cabinet! Look at that chaotic White House! Would anyone competent or honorable even work for Trump to begin with?

As for Cohen... Frank Rich wrote an informative piece for New York Magazine that gets to the bottom of why Trump works with Cohen. Simply put... Trump's mobster lawyer, Roy Cohn, is dead, so Trump took a bargain bin version. Cohn was one of the worst characters to land on the public stage in the last century. He and Trump were, of course, drawn each other. Michael Cohen is a Roy Cohn wannabe-- perfect for Trumpanzee.

Roy Cohn, wrote Rich, ended his miserable life as a closeted, homophobic, middle-aged gay man battling AIDS, a real-life Über-villain of America’s 20th century-- "The polestar of human evil; the worst human being who ever lived … the most evil, twisted, vicious bastard ever to snort coke at Studio 54." Trump's mentor ("counterpunch viciously, deny everything, stiff your creditors, manipulate the tabloids") and his idea of the best lawyer ("ruthless bullying and profane braggadocio"). Cohn, he wrote, "was supposed to have been washed up in 1954, after he and his superior in witch-hunting, Joe McCarthy, imploded in the televised Army-McCarthy hearings. McCarthy drank himself to death, and Cohn fled Washington a pariah, his brief career in government service in ruins."

How Mafia is THAT?

Rich is fascinated how Cohn both survived and flourished as a Manhattan eminence in the quarter-century between McCarthy and Reagan and calls it "an ellipsis that gnawed at me because the same question applies to Trump. Cohn thrived throughout a New York second act rife with indictments and scandals that included accusations of multiple bank-and securities-law violations, perennial tax evasion, bribery, extortion, theft, and even precipitating the death of a young man in a suspicious fire. Trump may never have been suspected of manslaughter, but he also flourished for decades despite being a shameless lawbreaker, tax evader, liar, racist, bankruptcy aficionado, and hypocrite notorious for his mob connections, transactional sexual promiscuity, and utter disregard for rules, scruples, and morals. Indeed, Trump triumphed despite having all of Cohn’s debits, wartime draft dodging included, but none of his assets-- legal cunning, erudition, a sense of humor, brainpower, and loyalty. (The putz-cum-fixer Michael Cohen, who is to Cohn what Dan Quayle was to Jack Kennedy, boasts none of these attributes either.) And Trump, like Cohn, got away with it all under the ostensibly pitiless magnifying glass of New York. Much as one hates to concede it, it’s no small achievement that he succeeded where so many of his betters failed in becoming the first New Yorker to catapult himself to the White House since Franklin D. Roosevelt."

The story of Trump’s ascent complicates the equation for those who want to believe that it was exclusively a product of his genius for publicity, or his B-stardom in a long-running reality show in NBC’s prime time, or a vast right-wing conspiracy abetted by deplorable voters like those in Wisconsin who sent McCarthy to the Senate in 1946 and helped Trump take the Electoral College in 2016. Nor is Trump’s New York backstory comforting to those of us in the habit of quarantining the blame for his unlikely victory to Russian and/or Comey’s interference, the ineptitude of the Clinton campaign, the Fox News–Breitbart complex, and the cynical, feckless Vichy Republicans who stood by as Trump subverted every principle they once claimed to have held dear.

There are Vichy Democrats too. From the mid-1970s to the turn of the century, well before Trump debuted on The Apprentice or flirted more than glancingly with politics, he gained power and consolidated it with the help of allies among the elites of New York’s often nominally Democratic and liberal Establishment-- some of them literally the same allies who boosted Cohn. Like Cohn (a registered Democrat until he died) and Trump (an off-and-on Democrat for years), their enablers were not committed to any party or ideology. Their priority was raw personal power that could be leveraged for their own enrichment, privilege, and celebrity. Cohn’s biographer Nicholas von Hoffman described what he called the “Roy Cohn Barter and Swap Exchange”: It specialized in “deals, favors, hand washings, and reciprocities of all kinds.” And while Cohn is gone, the exchange never shut down. Its unofficial legislative body is the floating quid pro quo Favor Bank that has always made New York tick at its highest levels, however corruptly, since Tammany Hall. It’s a realm where everyone has his (or her) price, and clout is always valued higher than any civic good. All that matters is the next transaction. Since time immemorial, those who find it unsavory are invariably dismissed as naïve.

The more I’ve looked back at the entanglements of Trump, Cohn, and their overlapping circles and modi operandi, the more I think the crux of their political culture could be best captured if Edward Sorel were to create a raucous mural depicting the Friday night in February 1979 when Cohn celebrated his 52nd birthday at Studio 54. That sprawling midtown Valhalla of the disco era, a nexus for boldface names, omnivorous drug consumption, anonymous sex, and managerial larceny, was owned by Cohn’s clients (and soon-to-be-imprisoned felons) Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager. The guest list? “If you’re indicted, you’re invited,” went the comedian Joey Adams’s oft-repeated joke about Cohn’s soirées. Among the (all-white) Democratic revelers joining Republican and Conservative party leaders at Cohn’s black-tie testimonial were the borough presidents of Queens (Donald Manes), Brooklyn (Howard Golden), and Manhattan (Andrew Stein), not to mention the former Democratic mayor Abe Beame and a bevy of judges, including the chief of the U.S. District Court. The investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, who covered the scrum from the sidewalk for the Village Voice, noted that, among the usual Warhol celebrity crowd, politicians, and fixers, was a “surprise” attendee-- “newcomer Chuck Schumer, a ‘reform’ assemblyman from Brooklyn who insisted he was just the date of a gossip columnist.” Also in attendance, less surprisingly, and camera-ready for the paparazzi, was the 32-year-old Trump, who by then had been in Cohn’s orbit for six years.

...A few months after the Studio 54 bacchanal, Morley Safer would front a soft 60 Minutes Cohn profile in which, among other euphemisms, viewers were informed that Cohn had never tied the knot with his oft-rumored fiancée Barbara Walters because “he’s just not the marrying kind.” In its effort to be “balanced,” the piece came off as a free ad for Cohn’s supposed legal wizardry and cast him as something of a victim. (Intriguingly, this 60 Minutes segment cannot be found on YouTube, while a tougher, if tardy, Mike Wallace profile, made as Cohn was dying seven years later, can be [that's it, up top].) By that point, Walters had long since delivered for her platonic fiancé with her first promotional profile of his shiny young protégé for ABC’s 60 Minutes rival 20/20. Titled “The Man Who Has Everything,” it was, in the Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio’s description, “wealth pornography.” Among other superlatives, it floated the dubious claim (for the 1970s) that “the Trumps are treated like American royalty.”

For years it’s been a parlor game for Americans to wonder how history might have turned out if someone had stopped Lee Harvey Oswald before he shot JFK. One might be tempted-- just as fruitlessly-- to speculate on what might have happened if more of New York’s elites had intervened back then, nonviolently, to block or seriously challenge Trump’s path to power. They had plenty of provocation and opportunities to do so. Trump practiced bigotry on a grand scale, was a world-class liar, and ripped off customers, investors, and the city itself. Yet for many among New York’s upper register, there was no horror he could commit that would merit his excommunication. As with Cohn before him, the more outrageously and reprehensibly Trump behaved, the more the top rungs of society were titillated by him. They could cop out of any moral judgments or actions by rationalizing him as an entertaining con man: a cheesy, cynical, dumbed-down Gatsby who fit the city’s tacky 1980s Gilded Age much as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s more romantic prototype had the soigné Jazz Age of the 1920s. And so most of those who might have stopped Trump gawked like the rest of us as he scrambled up the city’s ladder, grabbing anything that wasn’t nailed down. [Trump and Schumer have to pretend sometimes to be at each other's throats.]

It was Democrats in New York who taught both Cohn and Trump that they could buy off politicians and try to get away with anything. Cohn’s father, Al, was a Bronx and then New York State Supreme Court judge. The elder Cohn’s roots in the party’s machine were hardwired into his son: Young Roy figured out how to pull strings to fix a parking ticket for a teacher while still in high school. Trump grew up with a father who had been intertwined with the Brooklyn Democratic machine while building his residential-real-estate empire. By the time the clubhouse hack Beame arrived in City Hall in 1974 after the reform mayoralty of John Lindsay, Fred Trump had known him for 30 years. The new mayor immediately gave both Trumps a license to steal by declaring that “whatever Donald and Fred want, they have my complete backing.” Never mind, as the Trump biographers Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher observed, that Donald Trump didn’t have the financing to snag the real-estate prize he then sought, the properties of the bankrupt Penn Central railroad. The Beame deputy mayor Stanley Friedman pushed through an enormous 40-year, $400 million tax abatement-- this at the city’s bankrupt nadir-- and in his waning weeks in office fast-tracked the agency approvals Trump needed to rebuild the decrepit old Commodore Hotel as the Grand Hyatt, his first big deal. Roy Cohn served as the closer: The day after the Beame administration was succeeded by Ed Koch’s in 1978, Friedman was paid off for his Trump handiwork with a new job as a partner in Cohn’s law firm. (It was not enough to save Friedman from federal prison a decade later, when he was convicted in unrelated kickback scandals the year after Cohn’s death.)

Trump’s other major political ally as he erected a new, Manhattan real-estate empire on top of his father’s outer-borough fiefdom was the Democratic governor Hugh Carey. Trump engineered a brazen conflict-of-interest that you’d be tempted to call mind-boggling were its contours not being replicated on a far grander scale within the current White House. In the 1970s, Trump hired as his lobbyist Carey’s chief political fund-raiser, Louise Sunshine, even as he and his father were the second-biggest contributors to Carey’s 1978 reelection campaign (only a Carey brother, an oilman, gave more). “He’ll do anything for a developer who gives him a campaign contribution,” said Trump of Carey. And so he did. Trump was unstoppable, though he kept writing checks to other useful Democrats, including a record $270,000 (for a Board of Estimate election) to the Cohn crony Andrew Stein, who served as Manhattan borough president and then New York City Council president from 1978 to 1994 and “whose varied public performances for Trump were a metaphor for gutter government,” in Wayne Barrett’s estimation. (Stein would years later plead guilty to un-Trump-related tax evasion.) Trump would also give to (among others) Schumer, Eliot Spitzer, and Andrew Cuomo, who took Trump as a client even as his father was governor and Trump was conniving to develop the West Side yards and build a domed football stadium in Queens.

Unlike Trump, Cohn had no interest in building anything. He wanted to tear down institutions and people for fun and profit. To shield him from repercussions, legal or otherwise, he didn’t have just a retinue of politicians from both parties in his pocket but a client list whose breadth was no doubt aspirational to the young Trump — the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, the self-described “boss of bosses” Carmine “Lilo” Galante, and the city’s reigning real-estate titans (the Helmsleys, LeFraks, et al.), as well as the Newhouse publishing empire and Studio 54. This coterie either looked the other way or gave Cohn cover during transgression after transgression, some of them proto-Trump financial flimflams in which he looted banks or companies; others involving unpaid bills to creditors as varied as the IRS, Dunhill Tailors, and a local locksmith; still others more sensational. In the late 1960s, Cohn took a loan of $100,000 from a client for whom he negotiated a suspiciously parsimonious divorce settlement from a billionaire, and fought paying it back until the case threatened his law license in the early 1980s. In the 1970s, a Florida court ruled that Cohn had pushed an elderly friend in mental decline, Lewis Rosenstiel, the founder of the Schenley liquor empire, into signing a will that made Cohn a trustee of his estate. It was in 1973, the year he met Trump, that perhaps the most sinister of the Cohn horror stories of his post-McCarthy career unfolded. A yacht leased by a shell company Cohn controlled was sent to sea despite having been judged in dire disrepair by its previous captain. A suspicious fire broke out, the yacht sank, a crew member died, and Cohn collected both legal fees and a back-channel insurance payout.

...Exhibit A of the Times’ credulousness is the puffy feature that put him on the media map in 1976. “He is tall, lean and blond, with dazzling white teeth, and he looks ever so much like Robert Redford,” read the lead. At this early date, Trump had only proposed ambitious projects, not built them or closed any of the requisite deals, but the profile christened him “New York’s No. 1 real estate promoter of the mid-1970’s” nonetheless. The article accepted Trump’s word that he was of Swedish descent, “publicity shy,” ranked first in his class at Wharton, made millions in unspecified land deals in California, was worth $200 million, and with his father owned 22,000 apartment units. None of this was remotely true, but the sexy brew of hyperbole and outright fantasy, having been certified by the paper of record, set the tone for much that was to come.

In 1981, for instance, the Times could be found quoting an unnamed “real-estate official” (John Barron, perhaps?) furthering the implausible notion that Prince Charles and Diana were considering the purchase of a 21-room condo in Trump Tower for $5 million-- a useful bit of free false advertising as the development’s condos went on the market for a 1983 opening. A 1984 Times Magazine profile christened Trump “the man of the hour” just as he was embarking on his financially reckless (and ultimately catastrophic) expansion into Atlantic City. Along the way, Trump continued to inflate his net worth. He was so obsessed with the Forbes annual list ranking the wealthiest Americans that he had Cohn muscle the magazine to fix it, a tale recently recounted in full by a former Forbes staffer, Jonathan Greenberg, in the Washington Post. By the 1990s, no less a television personage than ABC’s Diane Sawyer courted an exclusive PrimeTime Live interview with Marla Maples, complete with a best-sex-you-ever-had question, to facilitate the promotion of the Trump brand-- “one of the low points in television journalism history,” in the judgment of the PBS anchor Robert MacNeil. The ultimate result of such fake news retailed by real-news outlets, as Michael D’Antonio would conclude just before Trump’s presidential run, is that “no one in the world of business-- not Bill Gates, not Steve Jobs, or Warren Buffett-- has been as famous for as long.” And one might add: No one as famous in business has been famous for a portfolio of low-rent businesses that included the likes of Trump University and Trump Steaks.

...During his campaign, Trump made a cause out of the corruption intrinsic to pay-for-play political donations like those he used to give. “Nobody knows the system better than me,” he claimed, “which is why I alone can fix it.” The second half of that sentence was a lie, but the first was true. As he’d elaborate in pitch-perfect Cohn-speak, he gave to “everybody” because “when I want something, I get it. When I call, they kiss my ass.” At the first Republican presidential debate in August 2015, he fine-tuned his target: “Well, I’ll tell you what, with Hillary Clinton, I said, ‘Be at my wedding,’ and she came to my wedding. You know why? She had no choice, because I gave.”

He was referring to the fact that either he or his “foundation” gave at least $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation. He could have added that between 2002 and 2009, he had also contributed six times to Hillary Clinton’s political war chest. And that he had given Bill Clinton, whom he met with to discuss fund-raising as far back as 1994, free access to his northern-Westchester club, Trump National, and on occasion played golf with him there. Even without that degree of incriminating detail, Trump’s accusation of a quid pro quo stung Hillary Clinton-- so much so that after her defeat, she felt compelled to revisit Trump’s wedding invitation, sort of, in the opening pages of her postelection self-autopsy, What Happened. “He was a fixture of the New York scene when I was a senator-- like a lot of big-shot real-estate guys of the city, only more flamboyant and self-promoting,” she writes of Trump. “In 2005 he invited us to his wedding to Melania in Palm Beach, Florida. We weren’t friends, so I assume he wanted as much star power as you can get. Bill happened to be speaking in the area that weekend, so we decided to go. Why not? I thought it would be a fun, gaudy, over-the-top spectacle, and I was right.”

Let’s posit that Clinton is telling the truth when she says that she attended the wedding only because “Bill happened to be speaking in the area that weekend” and she wanted to take in a campy spectacle-- an explanation that clears her of Trump’s charge that his contributions compelled her to turn up. Let’s also give her a pass for choosing not to regurgitate her and Bill’s financial history with Trump. Even so, everything else about this breezy and disingenuous paragraph epitomizes the honor-among-celebrities ethos of the bipartisan New York Establishment that helped Trump get where he was by 2005. To say that Trump was typical of “big-shot real-estate guys of the city” but merely “more flamboyant and self-promoting” is tantamount to saying that Robert Durst was typical of the big-shot real-estate guys in the Durst family but more prone to being accused of murder. The Clintons had to know that there was a more malevolent side to Trump’s so-called flamboyance than his boorishness, vulgar properties, television stardom, tawdry tabloid antics, and even his brazen destruction of bas-relief sculptures he had promised to the Metropolitan Museum when demolishing Bonwit Teller for Trump Tower. None of it was secret. If the Clintons didn’t know, it’s because they didn’t want to know.

After all, it had been front-page news, including in the Times, when the federal government sued the Trumps under the Fair Housing Act in 1973 for refusing to rent apartments to black applicants (whose paperwork they coded “C” for “colored”). This suit was filed just after Trump had met Cohn, who took on the case and filed a frivolous countersuit demanding $100 million from the government for “defamation.” The Trumps retreated two years later by signing a consent decree-- and soon violated that, too, forcing the Department of Justice to file new complaints of racial discrimination in 1978. The Clintons might have also heard how in 1989 Trump, running amok in a trademark rage, tried to help toss the city into turmoil by taking out a full-page racist ad in the four daily papers demanding a reinstitution of the death penalty for “roving bands of wild criminals” after five black male teenagers were charged (erroneously, as DNA would confirm in 2002) in the rape of a white female Central Park jogger. The Clintons may have even encountered the news, as did most Americans, that Ivana Trump had accused her husband of rape in a sworn divorce deposition uncovered by Harry Hurt III for his 1993 Trump biography.

So to return to Hillary Clinton’s flip rhetorical question: Why not go to the Trump-Melania wedding in 2005? These incidents are just a few of the many reasons why a former president and sitting United States senator with presidential ambitions should not have gone to this particular “fun, gaudy, over-the-top spectacle” in Palm Beach. But they just couldn’t stop themselves, any more than so many Democratic leaders of a quarter-century earlier couldn’t resist dressing up for Cohn’s fun, gaudy, over-the-top birthday gala at Studio 54. In the bipartisan New York political culture that nurtured Cohn and Trump, the statute of limitations for nearly every crime or outrage lasts about 48 hours. Nothing sticks; even repeated racist bygones can be bygones. Whether Hillary Clinton attended the wedding (Bill showed solely for the reception) because she’d taken Trump’s money, or because she wanted to be in the mix of power and celebrity no matter how tacky, or because she hoped there might be more favors to extract from Trump or someone else in the wedding party, doesn’t matter. Whatever the explanation, the then–New York senator, sitting in a reserved seat in the front row, lent a touch of civic legitimacy to Trump that the other glitzy celebrities on hand could not. He got what he’d paid for. He had written his checks knowing that the Clintons could be counted on not to bite the small hand that fed them-- at least not until their own self-interest was threatened in 2016.

...Some of the rich, connected, and powerful New Yorkers who failed to stand up to Trump before it was too late tried to cover their tracks once the music stopped and he had won the Republican nomination for president. When in April 2016 the Hollywood Reporter called 89 guests who had been at his 2005 wedding to request a comment, it did not receive a single response. One attendee who did speak up during the election year was the novelist Joseph O’Neill, who had attended as the plus-one of an invited Vogue editor. Writing in the New Yorker, he suggested that “a revisionist remembrance” was called for given Trump’s “metamorphosis into a would-be dictator.” A wedding that he had viewed ever since as “an anomalous and trivial item of personal recollection” now struck him “as the stuff of historic testimony,” perhaps to be reviewed “in the spirit of a Hannah Arendt or a Victor Klemperer."

Republican Candidates Are In A State Of Delusion Headed Towards The Midterms

The GOP mess has crossed over into popular culture; it ain't going' away

One week ago, Politico interviewed Mike Madrid, a well-known Republican political consultant in California. "The Democrats," he reminded them, "were absolutely convinced that running against Trump down-ticket was going to create the biggest Democratic blue wave of all time, and it did not work at all… What we’re really seeing in America right now is incredibly intense, wired up Democratic base that’s lighting its hair on fire and driving the media narrative, but it’s not driving polling data, and you’re not seeing it in increased turnout in elections."

Is that so? While Trump's approval rating is languishing in the mid-30s, I've never seen as big a gap open in the generic congressional polling. A Quinnipiac poll released a few days before Madrid spoke with Politico reported their results this way:

By a 54 – 38 percent margin, American voters want the Democratic Party to win control of the U.S. House of Representatives. This is the widest margin ever measured for this question in a Quinnipiac University poll, exceeding a 5 percentage point margin for Republicans in 2013.

As for the chief Republican in Congress, PPP polled Paul Ryan's own southeast Wisconsin district and found this:

As for not translating into votes, that's just really insane. Tuesday two deep red legislative districts in New Hampshire and Long Island, the former having never elected a Democrat before ever, and that latter in which Trump's margin of victory had been 20 points, both dumped GOP candidates. The Long Island Assembly district is the only deep red part of Peter King's congressional district. If Republicans can't hold that area, 2018 will be the last anyone ever hears of Peter King, unless he's arrested for robbing a Dunkin' Donuts. Last night Republican Greg Gianforte managed to keep Montana's at-large congressional seat in Republican hands-- but at an immense cost ($29.55 per vote, compared to Quist's $3.94 per vote)-- and by a very reduced margin. Gianfote scored 189,473 votes (50.3%) to 166,483 (44.0%) for Quist and 21,509 (5.7%) for Libertarian Mark Wicks. Last November Ryan Zinke was reelected with 56.19% over Democrat Denise Juneau's 40.55% (and 3.26% for the Libertarian). Trump scored 56.5% over Clinton's 35.9%. Quist's performance was up 8 points over Clinton and 3.5% over Juneau's. The 6.5% swing away from Trump, on a nationwide basis, would be enough for Democrats to take back the House in 2018.

Many Republican incumbents and their campaign consultants are in states of denial, which isn't uncommon when people see a tsunami headed their way. That same Politico article that quoted Madrid, also quoted another GOP political consultant, Dave Gillaird, who is a strategist for 4 of the 7 Republicans the DCCC is targeting in 2018, Jeff Denham, Mimi Walters, Darrell Issa and Ed Royce, said "all four of them had campaigns for re-election saying they were going to repeal Obamacare in favor of something better… They all came to the conclusion that this was better than Obamacare, and that was what they campaigned for re-election on." He called concerns about voter anger at Republicans over healthcare "overblown." That's what I meant by a state of denial.

I turned to the progressive Democrats running against the fools Gillaird has lulled into a state of clueless complacency. Katie Porter and Kia Hamadanchy are both awesome candidates running for the Orange County seat Mimi Walters refuses to move into and claims to represent in Congress. Katie, a consumer advocate and UC Irvine professor told us, simply that "After the House passed Trumpcare, Congresswoman Walters was one of the first people President Trump thanked at the White House. And thanks to the CBO report released yesterday, her constituents now know that the bill Walters helped write would end coverage for 23 million Americans-- including tens of thousands of people in her district. Walters' unconditional support of Trump's plan is completely at odds with the needs and lived experience of families here in Orange County."

We haven't mentioned Sam Jammal before.He's a former Obama Administration official and local Democrat from Royce's district, who progressives are hoping to draft to run against Royce. Last night he told us, "We have to stop Donald Trump's reckless agenda to benefit millionaires at the expense of the rest of us. It starts with holding local Republicans accountable. Our families can't afford elected officials who vote to cut health care for 23 million Americans, while also voting to raise prices for seniors and destabilize the employer-based health care system. All of this was done to give a tax break to millionaires. That's too extreme for Orange County. It is alarming that these Republicans are celebrating this as an accomplishment."

Doug Applegate, the progressive battling it out with Darrell Issa in the San Diego/Orange County district where he nearly beat Issa in 2017, told us that "It’s no longer a right or left battle; it’s right or wrong fight. Americans appreciate the moral imperative of single-payer-universal health care, pre-school to public college, livable $15/hr. wages now and fighting the carbon fuel oligarchy for renewable energy. Within 20 years robotics, automation and artificial intelligence will eliminate half of today’s jobs and in the process deliver the greatest disruption of the world’s economy in history. Everyone, all of our children and grandchildren will face these challenges. That is the reason why I’m going to finish the job I started in 2016 and replace Darrell Issa in Congress.

If Republicans manage to damage the healthcare system in the ways outlined in Trumpcare, California, which dramatically expanded its Medicaid rolls under Obamacare, will be especially hard hit, particularly some of the inland areas represented by Republicans like David Valadao, Steve Knight, Jeff Denham, Devin Nunes, Kevin McCarthy, Ed Royce, Paul Cook, Ken Calvert and Duncan Hunter, some of which are districts that the DCCC looks at as "untouchable." According to California's Legislative Analyst’s Office, 4.6 million Californians had obtained Affordable Care Act-funded coverage as of fall 2016, part of the reason the Cook Report downgraded so many Republican districts after TrumpCare passed the House, including several in California. Confronted with a little dose of reality, Gilliard admitted that Democrats "are doing a very good job of recruiting candidates based on all this energy on their side" and raising lots of money because of the vote.

A week on and Politico was highlighting a split between Democrats who want to focus on Russia-- like conservative New Dem Adam Schiff (eager to run for Feinstein's Senate seat)-- and Democrats who want to focus on health care and other kitchen table issues. Spoiler: focusing on both is the way forward but Politico lives to begin articles with "The Democratic Party is embroiled in a debate over where they should focus their efforts to win back political power."

The party’s campaign committees and many of Democrats’ leading super PACs have spent virtually all their energy this year on shaming Republicans for their push to repeal Obamacare, an issue that clearly touches voters’ daily lives.

But on the other side of the split, American Bridge-- the party’s outside-group research arm run by David Brock, the well-known Hillary Clinton ally-- is among those convinced the investigation into possible collusion between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russian officials is one Democrats would be foolish to downplay or wait to take advantage of.

A raft of data has already tabbed the House Republican health care bill as highly unpopular. But after last week’s explosive developments related to the Russia investigation, Democratic groups have commissioned polling to gauge just how damaging the probe could be to Republicans in the 2018 midterms. They’ve also begun testing theories on how to make Trump’s Russia problem into House and Senate Republicans’ Russia problem.

The debate in some ways reflects the post-mortem from the presidential election, in which some Democrats felt Clinton did not focus enough on the economy and other pocketbook issues, while Clinton’s own team invested more resources in painting Trump as personally unfit for the presidency.

Strategists on both sides of the Democratic divide downplay the extent of the split. They argue the party has an embarrassment of riches to use against Republicans, and they note that different groups fill different niches in the party’s ecosystem-- Bridge deals with day-to-day rapid response, while the party committees are already focused on individual races in November 2018.

But they also whisper about motivations, with some strategists speculating the Brock-led American Bridge may have more of an eye on wooing donors intensely interested in the Russia investigation than picking winning issues for 2018.

“We should focus on the issues that affect people’s lives, not just on what the media in the D.C. bubble is talking about,” said Symone Sanders, the press secretary at Priorities USA.

And there aren't any Democrats I know of who aren't talking about Trump's budget as well. Even the DNC was savvy enough to write to activists yesterday, framing the issue clearly-- and with news clips:

While campaigning for President, Donald Trump ran on a promise of making this country a better place to live for working Americans. Instead of doing this, Trump’s budget would make life easier for millionaires and billionaires at the expense of everyone else. Communities around the country are preparing for the devastating impact of this budget, which will ultimately cause immense hardship to the very Americans who Trump promised to help.

Cuts to social services in President Donald Trump’s proposed budget has one Columbus food pantry concerned. "Our customers, our shoppers are concerned. They're worried about what that means to their ability to get the food that they want and need,” said Kathy Kelly-Long, director of Broad Street Food Pantry.

“I don't think anybody shops at a food pantry or anybody relies on SNAP by choice.”

President Donald Trump's $4.1 trillion budget for 2018 calls for sharp cuts in several programs, including food stamps, known as SNAP. And that means the nearly two million people who live in the Mid-South states could have a hard time putting food on the table.

More than 16% of households in Tennessee are below the poverty line. 17% of Tennesseans rely on food stamps, or SNAP, to feed their families. Under President Donald Trump's new budget, people who are able to work will no longer get assistance.

Lucy Melcher of the anti-hunger group Share Our Strength says some people aren't able to find work in their areas and have no access to job training. She says the cuts could be "devastating."

The proposed cuts would "just exacerbate poverty for people who are already trying to work their way out of it," Melcher said. "I don't think there's a person living in poverty today who wouldn't be affected by this budget."

Nationally, more than 44 million people benefit from food assistance programs. Locally, about 50,000 people in San Luis Obispo County and 140,000 in Santa Barbara County rely on that assistance.  "I feel weird asking for help," said Kaitlyn, who wished to remain anonymous. She's 20-years-old and pregnant and is applying for food stamps for the first time because doctors told her she can't work during her pregnancy.

"Because they are worried he's going to come out early, and he has some health issues, so I'm considered a high-risk pregnancy," Kaitlyn said.

She now joins thousands of others in the area who rely on food assistance for their next meal.

Ryan and Trump are so toxic among voters now that dozens pf Republicans are trembling about the idea of being photographed with them. A Democratic consultant in South California told me that pictures of Trump and individual candidates with Make America Great Again caps are going to be on billboards everywhere. We asked Katie Hill, the progressive Democrat running against Ryan stooge Steve Knight in CA-25, how she felt Trump and Ryan would impact the congressional race in Santa Clarita, Simi Valley and the Antelope Valley.

"Hillary Clinton won the district by 7 points, meaning Trump was wildly unpopular here before," Hill told us, "and that sentiment has only gotten worse. Right now, the issue that people are most concerned about is healthcare. Seniors keep telling me they aren't able to afford their $20 per month cable bill increases... let alone the projected hundreds of dollars a month extra they will have to pay for insurance under the AHCA. The Trump/Ryan health care bill is absolutely loathed by people who are terrified for the health and wellbeing of themselves and their families. People just could not believe that Knight voted for it. Now it's clearer than ever that he is a puppet for those two-- not a voice for our community."

If Knight and the other Republicans want to persuade themselves voters are going to forget this... that's just fine... for Democratic candidates. No one knew about Republican denialism better than right-wing icon Roy Cohn: