It's Who He Is

It happened to President Trump's chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, who with others

tried to talk Trump off the ledge. At one point, aides were sure Trump would make the announcement. Then they said he wouldn’t. Finally, sitting alongside steel executives, he did.

But Cohn quit his job after"iIn a meeting with steel industry executives, Trump announced plans for a 25 percent tariff on steel imports and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum imports."

He double-crossed Cohn and his allies by implying one thing when he spoke to them, then doing another.

Something similar happened to those bold students, fighting for an issue larger than themselves, and all persons interested in gun safety when, as Kevin Drum pointed out 

The White House on Sunday vowed to help provide “rigorous firearms training” to some schoolteachers and formally endorsed a bill to tighten the federal background checks system, but it backed off President Trump’s earlier call to raise the minimum age to purchase some guns to 21 years old from 18 years old.

….The Trump plan does not include substantial changes to gun laws….Rather, the president is establishing a Federal Commission on School Safety, to be chaired by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

….The White House plan released Sunday does not address the minimum age for gun purchases. Pressed by reporters about the apparent backtracking, a senior administration official said the age issue was “a state-based discussion right now” and would be explored by DeVos’s commission.

Joe Manchin hails from probably the most culturally conservative state in the Union and Toomey from one in which the opening day of hunting season is a holiday in many counties. However, they had sponsored a bill, which ultimately failed to pass, to extend background checks to firearms purchased at  gun shows and on the Internet. Yet, Trump accused them- "you're afraid of the NRA, right"- of being intimidated by the National Rifle Association. The following day, he held a "surprise late-night meeting" with the organization, which presumably told him something like "sit down and shut up." The President promptly complied.

Drum remarked "Who could have guessed that Trump would cave in to the NRA after all his tough talk? That is, other than everyone?" He came cheap- bought in less than 48 hours.





Trump caved, not only because the organization is one of his bankers, but because it's what he does. And now he has done it  to the first Secretary of State named (presumably) after a dinosaur, who

learned he was fired Tuesday only from a tweet by his boss, President Donald Trump, NBC News reported, citing State Department officials.

And to add insult to injury, Tillerson was basically an afterthought in that tweet, which first introduced Trump's new chosen top diplomat, CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

Cowards generally have others do their dirty work for them, and Donald J. Trump is no exception:

NBC News reported that White House chief of staff John Kelly spoke with Tillerson by phone on Friday and told him that Trump intended to ask Tillerson to "step aside," according to two sources familiar with the situation.

On MSNBC's Deadline White House (with Nicolle Wallace), Jeremy Bash responded

The President did this via Twitter. He did this in a very cowardly way. He did this in a way only a small man would do, someone who doesn't actually want to deal with the consequences of telling someone that their employment arrangement is not working out and I wonder what signal it sends to our adversaries that the President is so petrified, to actually fire someone in person.

(Obviously, he meant not to fire someone in person.)

Tariffs, guns, Tillerson. Donald Trump has no backbone. File it along with racial bigot, misognynist, narcissist. Coward. And as for the reason Secretary of State Tillerson was fired:

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Father Figure

Vox's Emily Stewart reports

China has approved a plan to abolish presidential term limits, opening the door for President Xi Jinping to stay in power indefinitely.

China’s National People’s Congress, the country’s national legislative body, voted on Sunday to change the country’s constitution to allow Xi to remain in power beyond his scheduled 2023 departure. In February, the Chinese Communist Party proposed the change; Sunday’s vote was largely considered a rubber-stamp exercise. Out of 2,964 votes, only two delegates voted against the constitutional change, while three abstained. The alteration removes phrasing that says China’s president and vice president “shall serve no more than two consecutive terms.”





This would be the nation which has been referred euphemistically to as "China" since it enacted market reforms and began to embrace the profit motive, which some in this country have sold as synonymous with "freedom." Now none dare recognize it as "Communist China" or even "mainland China."

And of course that makes Xi Jinping one of the favorites of President Trump, who

raised eyebrows earlier this month at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser when he praised President Xi’s power grab and suggested he might not mind trying it himself. “He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great,” Trump said. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”

At a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, Trump brought up the matter again — and media reports of it — and noted his remarks were made in jest. “But I’m joking. And they knew I was joking, everybody in the room was laughing, everybody’s having a great time. I’m joking about being president for life,” he said.

If Trump didn’t have such a habit of admiring dictators and strongmen — including on Saturday, where he publicly admired China and Singapore for executing drug dealers — it might make the public a little less wary about his jokes.

Many a true word is spoken in jest.  Moreover, a preference for authoritarianism is not the only think Trump has in common with Xi Jinping.  In 2014, a successful effort was launched to rebrand the latter as "Xi Dada," which translates as Uncle Xi or Big Daddy Xi.

Although the name has since been dropped, China scholar David Shambaugh at the time stated "I thought the Chinese system had moved beyond one-man rule and personality cults."

Evidently not- but "Big Daddy" has a parallel in American politics.

Interviewed on 60 Minutes in January, 2015,  Donald Trump, aiming to reassure voters that rescinding the Affordable Care Act wouldn't leave people without health care coverage, claimed "I am going to take care of everybody,. I don't care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody's going to be taken care of much better than they're taken care of now."





As a declared candidate a year earlier, Trump tweeted 'I will take care of the veterans who have served this country so bravely."

When last September President Trump revealed the Administration would phase out President Obama's DACA regulations, he declared Dreamers "are here illegally. They shouldn’t be very worried. I do have a big heart. We’re going to take care of everybody."

This is an essential part of the Trump strategy- portraying himself as such a big, strong leader that he will "take care of" people and be a comforting presence. He is the "Big Daddy" Xi Jinping once was... before Xi Jinping established the one-man rule which was not generally expected.

We now know what the Chinese leader had in mind.  So does (if re-elected) Donald Trump. He has told us.



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Policies, Indeed

Appearing with "sleepy eyes" Chuck Todd on Sunday's Meet The Press, Treasury Secretary Steve Munuchin was not pleased that the NBC host wanted to talk about President Grump's speech in Pennsylvania the night before.  Mnuchin pled "again don't take these campaign rallies and focus them on that's what it is, okay."

After Todd asked whether the media should "stop covering the rallies," Mnuchin whined

No, you’re putting words in my mouth. I wasn’t in any way saying you should dismiss that whatsoever. And you should obviously carry them. Because these are important moments for the president. And this is news. What I’m trying to say is, I’m focused on the policies. And the policies have created results. We’ve had more results in the last year on both foreign policy and domestic matters. So what we should be focused on and what I came to talk about were the president’s policies.





"You should obviously carry them," stated Mnuchin, who also claimed Trump was "using these vulgarities in the context of a campaign rally and obviously there were a lot of funny moments on, on, on that rally."

The jokes from the veteran of the comedy clubs of Queens, NY and New York City, NY, now appearing for a four-year (or less) engagement in Washington, DC included the "son of a bitch" Chuck Todd and the black congresswoman who is "a low-IQ individual." 

Trump's shtick was "hilarious," as Todd pointed out. Still, members of the Administration (such as the Treasury Secretary) and Trump surrogates have been promoting the notion that Trump's domestic, especially economic, policies have been an unmitigated success. Both Democrats and Republicans, unlike Newsweek's Michelle Goodkind, presumably have missed this one:

In all, 15 miners died since President Donald Trump took office in 2017—up from eight in all of 2016.This is the dirty secret of Trump’s much-touted effort to help the coal industry. The president has been quick to celebrate the 771 net workers that were hired in 2017, but the administration's push to support the dirtiest of fossil fuels has been accompanied by a surge in deaths of the workers who procure it. 

The 2017 death toll was the highest since 2014—when there were roughly 60,000 more miners at work in America.Mining advocates put some of the blame on the president, whose support for mine owners has led to relaxed safety enforcement, scores of inexperienced new miners and inconsistent commitment to training programs and courses. 

In the meantime,  Republicans in the House want to cut mine safety budgets further, and Trump, who says he supports coal miners, has been silent on a Senate bill that would shore up miners' pensions.“When you look at the Trump administration policies and his ratcheting back of regulations...this administration has no moral compass about ethics,” said Joe Main, who ran the Mine Safety and Health Administration under President Barack Obama. “Companies now think we have a less aggressive sheriff in town.”





Grasping the larger issues at stake, the  reporter continues

Trump’s support for coal is part of a larger economic vision of deregulation—one that he says is responsible for the stock market’s recent boom and higher gross domestic product.

“The stock market is way up [because] we took off restrictions and we took off regulations,” he said on January 16.

But for coal miners, those restrictions and regulations can be the difference between life and death.  

Munuchin and Co. should be so happy that the scandals of this Administration obscure the President's  disastrous policies. If there is a party in opposition to the GOP, it has to block the agenda of deregulation and destruction, and it's not putting up much of a fight so far.




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Drug Dealers

In a campaign stop, poorly disguised as one on behalf of Pennsylvania GOP House candidate Rick Saccone, President Trump did what he did best- ridicule. Business Insider reports

Trump was particularly energetic in attacking the media, leveling a profane taunt toward NBC's Chuck Todd, whom the president has nicknamed "Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd."

"He is a sleeping son of a bitch, I'll tell you," Trump said Saturday.

He went after CNN, too, for its coverage of his recent decision to accept a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Trump called the network "fake as hell CNN. The worst. So fake."

Trump also railed against top Democrats rumored to be considering a presidential bid in 2020. He suggested that the media would be disappointed with a Democratic victory, as Trump's presidency has been a boon for television ratings.

"Could you imagine covering Bernie? Or Pocahontas?" he said, using a derogatory nickname for Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. "How about that? Can you imagine having to cover Elizabeth Warren for four years?"

Trump also slammed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and attacked Rep. Maxine Waters as "a very low-IQ individual," but said he'd be delighted if Oprah Winfrey ran against him so he could defeat her.

Besides going nearly full-bigot, the evangelicals' favorite American addressed the drug crisis when he

praised other countries for imposing the death penalty or life in prison for drug dealers, saying the United States should consider similar penalties.

"I think it's a discussion we have to start thinking about. I don't know if we're ready -- I don't know if this country's ready for it," Trump said.

He said those convicted of killing just one person in shootings and stabbings at times face the death penalty or life in prison without parole. But, he said, someone can "kill 5,000 people with drugs because you're smuggling them in and you're making a lot of money and people are dying," and go without serious punishment.

This isn't the first time President Grump has had this brainstorm (video below from 3/1/18). Newsweek tells us

“Some countries have a very tough penalty, the ultimate penalty, and they have much less of a drug problem than we do,” Trump said during an appearance at a White House summit on opioids last week.

Singapore officials have reportedly briefed White House officials on their country's drugs offense punishment laws. 

Trump has previously expressed admiration for Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duterte’s controversial crackdown on drugs dealers, which human rights groups say has led to thousands of extrajudicial killings by security services and police.

Shortly after taking office, Trump reportedly praised Duterte in a phone call for doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem.” 

This strategy would be among those few instances in which a more aggressive federal government would do more harm than good. Successful litigation against Purdue Pharma and other powerful drug dealers, the manufacturers of opiates, would be more effective (let alone more humane) than life sentences or execution of drug dealers.  Fortunately, as with most of Donald Trump's ludicrous ideas, this one is unlikely to be implemented by the federal government or the states. That is assuming, of course, that Mr. Trump is not rewarded with a second term.








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The Arrow Points Downward.

In the past 4-5 months, I've devoted posts on at least four occassions defending Bill Maher.  The comedian denounced President Trump's proposal fo r a military parade, only somewhat joking "we better get used to that- tanks in the streets."   He criticized former Democratic party chairperson Donna Brazile (who has been on his program) for what she termed "failed policies" of both parties.  Maher even took on the patron saint of the Republican Party, Ronald(6) Wilson(6) Reagan(6)- whom even Democrats assiduously avoid criticizing- for being given credit for a great foreign policy accomplishment because "we stopped fighting the Cold War but the Russians never did."

He called out the state auditor of Alabama- the heart of the Bible Belt- for defending Roy Moore by implying that Joseph was an "adult carpenter" who became the father of Jesus. It's telling when it's left to an imabashed atheist to notice that the point of the Biblical account is that Jesus did not result from a sexual union of Joseph and Mary.

But he was wrong, uncharacteristically, on his central point Friday night pertaining to the decision by Donald J. Trump to travel to Pyongyang to negotiate with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Maher made a legitimate point when he began his monologue with North Korea and commented

I was watching cable news last night. so all these liberals reflexively hating on this. A) Obama- remember him? He proposed the exact same thing in 2008 and they loved it and b) F_ _  - you, you don't live on the west coast,where a nuke can get here faster than an Uber from North Korea.

Obama did in fact promise in 2008 to "initiate tough diplomacy with our enemies," albeit "without preconditions, although with preparation."  It is likely, however, that Trump would do so with little preparation, presumably part of the rationale for one of Maher's guests, comedian Trae Crowder, to remark "I think there's one key difference there... Donald Trump is not Barack Obama."

Still, the allegation that Obama advocated largely the same thing is largely accurate.  (At the time, liberals backed Obama on his aspiration, with conservatives far more negative than they have been about Trump's plan.)

But Maher's remark during the panel discussion about the potential danger in negotiations is troubling. He contended

But the worst actually has happened, instead of the bombs actually exploding.  It kind of reminds me when they talk about mass shootings and somebody says the a liberal talking point and I'm certainly not for arming people but they say if somebody else was in the room it would be made even worse. Really? Really, it could have gotten worse than just the guy who's a nut spraying the room? 





It can get worse- much worse- even short of a nuclear exchange.

Trump is not going only for the photo-op, though he's undoubtedly looking forward to that. He's determined to make a deal and he'll make any he can, lest his trip be branded a failure.  "I alone can fix it" he maintained while accepting the Repub presidential nomination. He once told Laura Ingraham "the one that matters is me. I'm the only one who matters."





Thomas Wright of The Atlantic understands that the President might offer to withdraw American troops from South Korea in return for the North dismantling (with verification) its intercontinetal ballistic missiles.  That would "signal that the United States cares little for its friends and is only concerned about direct threats to the homeland," he recognizes. Reasons such a proposal is particularly likely include that

Trump cares about the direct threat to the American homeland more than anything else. President Obama warned him of the North Korean ICBM threat immediately after the election and he has taken it to heart. He has pursued a unilateral policy and has held open the possibility of a preventive strike without prior approval from Seoul. This is the essence of “America First”—narrow U.S. interests supersede all other concerns. It is a significant conceptual break with traditional American policy since the late 1940s, where the United States treated threats to the homeland and to the allies equally.

The second is that Trump has always had concerns about alliances in general and the U.S.-South Korea one in particular. Since the mid 1980s, he has argued that America’s alliances are a bad deal. Initially his wrath was focused on Japan and the Arab states but in 2013, he said, “How long will we go on defending South Korea from North Korea without payment? … When will they start to pay us?” In an interview with NBC in 2015, he said, “We have 28,000 soldiers on the line in South Korea between the madman and them. We get practically nothing compared to the cost of this.” Perhaps Trump may think that an end to the ICBM program and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Korea is a win-win.

Bill Maher should know better. In Ohio in August, 2016, Trump rhetorically asked black and hispanic voters "what do you have to lose?" a few days after asking black voters in Michigan "what the hell do you have to lose?"

A lot, it turns out, as Maher is aware. A good civilian with a gun can make mass shootings even worse- and there is no situation that Donald Trump can't, and probably will, make worse.




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Not The Button

A few hours before announcement of President Trump's decision to accept an invitation to meet with Chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea Kim Jong-un, Oklahoma's Jim Inhofe (the US Senate's most prominent climate change denier) told Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business Network

I mean, look what's happening right now in North Korea, I believe all of that started when he made the strong statement to Kim Jong-un that he had a bigger button, he could fire (INAUDIBLE) the map and all of a sudden un started talking to South Korea and say -- I think welcome to the Winter games and all of that. 

A few minutes after the big news broke, former Obama Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and eastern European expert Evelyn Farkas (video below from last July) gave a conditional thumbs up to the development. On Chris Matthews' Hardball, she stated "we have to maintain the pressure because remember what got them to the table- sanctions and unfortunately probably some of the bluster coming out of the White House."

Upon further reflection, Farkas on Friday morning added to her comments on Hardball by tweeting

I've sat across from North Korean diplomats and military officers. They come armed with history. Even Kim Jing (sic) Un has been involved in foreign policy longer than our presiden. We should be careful.  

Attributing this hopeful developement solely- or even primarily- to Trump's tough-guy bluster, as Inhofe did, appears to be in error.  The New York Times observes that the invitation relayed to the President resulted from a meeting on Monday of the North Korean dictator and South Korea's Chung Eui-yong.  Further, Time's Laigness Barron reported Wednesday

The U.S. has imposed new sanctions on Pyongyang in response to its determination that the North Korean government used a chemical warfare agent in the assassination of Kim Jong Nam, the estranged half-brother of regime leader Kim Jong Un.

The State Department said Tuesday that it determined North Korea used VX nerve agent, the most toxic of all chemical weapons. The statement offered no further details on how the suspected link between the chemical agent and the North Korean government was definitively proven.

“On February 22, the United States determined under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991 that the Government of North Korea used the chemical warfare agent VX to assassinate Kim Jong Nam, in the Kuala Lumpur airport,” State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert said.

There also now may be a realization that the USA has no alternative but to deal with Pyongyang. NBC's Andrea Mitchell explains today (Friday).


Only this week, the U.S. said it had concluded Pyongyang was responsible for assassinating Kim's step-brother in the Kuala Lumpur airport by using VX, a banned lethal nerve gas. The U.S. has also accused the Pyongyang regime of supplying Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with illegal chemical weapons. And the Defense Intelligence Agency reported to Congress this week that Kim now has three intercontinental ballistic missiles, two of which can hit the U.S. mainland.

The timing of all this is not coincidental. Even before recent events, the Obama Administration had imposed sanctions on the North, though the diplomat who coordinated the policy concedes "the Obama Administration had come to the conclusion in its last six months that it had not done enough on sanctions." In September, President Trump ramped up the pressure.

We can be only uncertain whether the Trump-Kim talks will yield positive results, negative results, or no results at all, nor whether Kim has concluded that he can take Trump for all he's worth. But we do have a fairly good idea of what- on the American side- got the ball rolling, and enabled my cliches.

The North Korean leader, it has been reported, has started to become concerned about the impact of sanctions on his country, at least on the ruling class in Pyongyang. His country is needy, and our side is apprehensive. The suggestion by James Inhofe and others that the guy was intimidated by "fire and fury" rhetoric of the President is (in the spirit of the season) only so much blarney.

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Let Sleeping Dogs Lie.

This post isn't about sex.  It also isn't about money or about the law.

Each plays a role in the Stormy Daniels/Stephanie Clifford-Donald J. Trump story. But this isn't about the corrupt businessman and the pornographic star. It pertains to President Trump's reaction to Sarah Huckabee Sanders' remark about the affair, and how that provides insight into Trump's surprise victory in November of 2016.

James Comey and Mrs. Sanders have something in common, other than belonging to the GOP.  Mediaite (and with different words, everybody) reports

President Donald Trump is reportedly somewhat less than thrilled with his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, for her comments during Wednesday’s briefing addressing the Stormy Daniels story.

According to CNN’s Abby Phillip (citing reporting from Jim Acosta), Trump believes that Sanders essentially breathed life into the Stormy Daniels controversy with her Wednesday remarks.

“According to this source, Sarah Sanders’ comments were essentially putting the Stormy Daniels storyline on steroids yesterday,” Phillip said.

Sanders, in the Wednesday briefing, said “the president has denied the allegations against him. And again, this case has already been won in arbitration.”

Those comments from Sanders led many to point out that the White House was confirming that Trump engaged in some sort of legal agreement with the porn star.





Other than being confusing and possibly inaccurate (not unusual or counte-productive in the Trump presidency), there is nothing wrong with this statement. On the contrary, Sanders essentially repeated a great Trump theme: I'm a winner.  She contended the President a) has denied the allegations; and b) won. Case closed; let's move on.

But Trump, with magnificent political instincts, is upset with Sanders. Not, as far as we know, because of what she said but because she said anything, hence giving the public an opportunity to focus on the matter. If nothing else, it resurrected the issue from the political coffin.

And that's not good. Sometimes it matters less what the facts (in this case, contested) are than that an item is in the public consciousness.

Enter Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey. Last May, numbers-cruncher Nate Silver wrote

Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28. The letter, which said the FBI had “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” into the private email server that Clinton used as secretary of state, upended the news cycle and soon halved Clinton’s lead in the polls, imperiling her position in the Electoral College.

The letter isn’t the only reason that Clinton lost. It does not excuse every decision the Clinton campaign made. Other factors may have played a larger role in her defeat, and it’s up to Democrats to examine those as they choose their strategy for 2018 and 2020.

But the effect of those factors — say, Clinton’s decision to give paid speeches to investment banks, or her messaging on pocket-book issues, or the role that her gender played in the campaign — is hard to measure. The impact of Comey’s letter is comparatively easy to quantify, by contrast. At a maximum, it might have shifted the race by 3 or 4 percentage points toward Donald Trump, swinging Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida to him, perhaps along with North Carolina and Arizona. At a minimum, its impact might have been only a percentage point or so. Still, because Clinton lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by less than 1 point, the letter was probably enough to change the outcome of the Electoral College.

It is highly unlikely, as Silver suggests, that Comey's letter of October 28 did not move at least one additional percent of voters into Trump's column.

Yet, it's likely also that the Director's letter of November 6, 2016- largely exonerating the Democratic nominee- also helped Trump.

The Real Clear Politics average of Pennsylvania polls from 10/29/16-11/5/16 gave Clinton a lead of 2.7%; she lost by .7%.  In Michigan, the average of polls of 11/1/16-11/06/16 had Clinton up by 3.6%. She lost the state by .3%. The RCP average of polls taken 10/26/16-11/01/16 in Wisconsin had Clinton up by 6.5%; she lost by .7% to Trump.

Either there was a whole lot of lying going on- or Clinton lost additional ground in the 2-3 days following Comey's letter of 11/6/16.   The news for her was favorable, but it brought the issue back to the fore. Similarly, Sanders gave a fairly clever defense of Trump's status- but brought the issue back from the dead.

That is what Donald Trump appears to believe. And his instinct, a sense of where people are at any particular time, has proven quite sound.




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