Everyone Is On The Edge Of Their Seat To See How The Trump Regime Finally Comes Crashing Down

By this weekend, even Fox viewers were finding out about Trump-- or at least his campaign-- conspiring to collude with the Russians. This Shep Smith segment on the video above could literally be on MSNBC or any other legitimate news outlet.

By last night everyone was going crazy over Greg Miller's story in the Washington Post about how Trump had concealed details of his meetings with Putin from senior officials in administration. Is that news? We didn't know that already? Yeah, Trump went to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Putin. Oh, but this... on at least one occasion he took "possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials." I guess that's new information, albeit probably not to Mueller. That episode was "after a meeting with Putin in 2017 in Hamburg that was also attended by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. U.S. officials learned of Trump’s actions when a White House adviser and a senior State Department official sought information from the interpreter beyond a readout shared by Tillerson. There is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader over the past two years… Such a gap would be unusual in any presidency, let alone one that Russia sought to install through what U.S. intelligence agencies have described as an unprecedented campaign of election interference."

OK, that's kind of a big deal and maybe why right-wing journalist Stephen Hayes decided to explain to Post readers on Friday why his party needs to mount a primary challenge to Trump in 2020. Successful or not he wrote that "If ever there were a time for a serious intraparty challenge, it’s now. He has strong support from elements of the Republican base, but he has alienated virtually everyone else, especially those segments of the electorate that are growing the fastest. The ideal challenger would be a committed, articulate conservative-- maybe a governor, such as Maryland’s Larry Hogan, or a senator, such as Nebraska’s Ben Sasse-- who would make a case for limited government that will otherwise go unmade, and who would show voters that conservatism and Trumpism are not one and the same... The 2018 midterm elections were a clear and unmistakable rebuke of the chaos of his first two years as president. And it’s getting worse. Trump’s steady stream of lies has picked up over the past six months. His Twitter feed is more unhinged... There’s reason to believe this will all get worse over the next year. The Mueller investigation is testing whatever sanity Trump still possesses. Democrats controlling the House will use their newfound power to investigate every corner of the Trump administration-- an administration already marked by malfeasance and corruption."



And that brings us right to Andrew Sullivan's question at New York Magazine: Welcome to Act III of the Trump Tragedy: "When is the moment we can say that Trump has clearly gone over the line in erasing democratic and constitutional restraints on his personal power?" He posits it would be declaring a national emergency just because he can't get Congress to fund his vanity wall. "He couldn’t manage to get his wall funded," wrote Sullivan, "when his own party controlled the entire government. He even turned down a bipartisan offer to build a “wall” in return for a path to citizenship for Dreamers last year, because he wanted a reduction in legal immigration as well. He petulantly refuses to accept greater funding for border control and immigration enforcement if his symbolic wall isn’t part of the package." He warned that "We all knew this was coming. Our liberal democracy is in abeyance. We now wait to see what the replacement will be. It could come sooner than we think." OK, but how many acts in this play?

A Presidency That Is Not Just Illegitimate But Abnormal As Well

Unless you’re a right-wing extremist you probably don’t know who Stephen Hayes, editor of the Weekly Standard, is-- although they often trot him out on Fox News, CNN and CNBC as a Republican commentator. Aside from a couple of crackpot biographies on Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, he’s best known as a writer for an insane book about how Saddam Hussein was working with al Qaeda (a GOP fantasy that has been proven wrong). He’s a loon, but, oddly, he’s not a Trumpist loon. This post should probably read in the context of Dr. Brandy Lee’s evaluation of Trump’s deteriorating mental state.

On Thursday Hayes penned a column for the Weekly Standard that emphasizes how abnormal Trump’s stay in the White House is. His point: despite passing the Tax Scam, getting some neo-fascist judges confirmed and wrecking much of the American regulatory system, “there’s still nothing normal about his presidency-- a fact that was made abundantly clear less than 72 hours into 2018.”

On January 2, Trump tweeted a nonsensical attack on his own Justice Department and, implicitly, the leaders he handpicked, as captives of the Deep State. The president seems to believe justice will be thwarted unless Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, and James Comey soon find themselves in jail. Or, as he prefers: “Jail!”

Almost exactly 12 hours later came a Trump tweet taunting the unstable leader of a nuclear-capable rogue state. Apparently Kim Jong-un’s nuclear “button” isn’t as big as Trump’s. That’s really what he said. In between, Trump took shots at the “failing New York Times” (despite record numbers of subscriptions and digital ad revenues) and suggested, fancifully, that he was responsible for a year of aviation travel without a fatality.

The next day, an excerpt from a forthcoming book by Michael Wolff appeared online. Wolff, who had nearly unfettered access to Trump’s inner circle for the better part of a year, quoted former White House adviser Steve Bannon accusing Trump’s son of treason for meeting with shady Russian sources. In response, the president released a statement--  an official White House statement-- claiming that Bannon, a man he had trusted to run his political operation, was not of sound mind. Donald Trump Jr. took to Twitter to trash Bannon. Among his most ferocious attacks came one on Bannon’s political acuity, citing as evidence the former Trump adviser’s support of Roy Moore’s losing Senate candidacy in Alabama and eliding, for convenience, the fact that the president endorsed and campaigned for Moore, too, despite plausible accusations he had sexually assaulted teen girls. Later that evening, Trump’s lawyer sent a letter to Bannon demanding that the former aide stop criticizing the president, citing a campaign nondisclosure agreement.

Trump has a long history of threatening lawsuits-- not for legal reasons, of course, but for political and psychological ones. Trump frequently threatens to sue those who frustrate him-- the New York Times (for publishing the accounts of women who’d accused him of sexual impropriety), the women themselves (for “lying”), the makers of an anti-Trump ad on veterans (for saying he didn’t love the veterans when he really did love the veterans), Ted Cruz (over his citizenship), the Club for Growth (for ads in Iowa he didn’t like). Trump was seeking less to silence Bannon than to remind him of the consequences of leaving the circle.

Bannon knows a lot, perhaps more than anyone other than Trump family members, and he is tentatively scheduled to testify before the House Intelligence Committee on January 11. What’s more, Bannon has long privately expressed concerns about Trump’s dealings with Russians. If Trump’s goal was to neuter Bannon, to bring him back in line, it seems to have worked. “The president of the United States is a great man,” Bannon said, shortly after the letter went out. “You know I support him day in and day out.”

The following morning, Trump lawyers sent a letter to the book’s publisher threatening legal action and demanding they cease publication immediately.

So the president wants a book banned. He wants a political opponent in jail, and, for good measure, maybe the former FBI director, too. He thinks his former top adviser is insane.

This isn’t normal. And it’s not just “Trump being Trump,” the preferred dodge of elected Republicans. It’s a reflection of the president’s troubled mind and of his erratic, irrational judgment.

Trump’s media defenders will tell us, once again, that he was joking, that we shouldn’t pay attention to his antics. Seriously not literally, and all that bunk. And they’ll point, once again, to tax reform and Justice Neil Gorsuch.

I’m glad Trump signed tax reform that Republicans in Congress have been working on for years. I’m glad he’s taken the advice of Federalist Society leadership and nominated conservatives rather than liberals to the courts. And I’m glad he’s listening to conservatives who have long advocated giving the administrative state a trim.

But this is a president who played a mine-is-bigger-than-yours game in public with the leader of a rogue nuclear state. This is something more than abnormal; it’s dangerous.

We were lucky in 2017. The United States didn’t face a crisis that required presidential leadership. We didn’t have to have the sober judgment of a thoughtful statesman. We won’t be lucky forever.