Steve Schmidt returned to MSNBC last week, having spent eight months consulting with Howard Schultz regarding a presidential campaign by the billionaire, and his criticism of Donald Trump is as sharp and on target as ever. It is great fun to read (or listen to) this never-Trumper, who left the Republican Party last year (“Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the party of Trump.“). He has Trump’s number.
But he is still whitewashing the complicity — pre-Trump — of the Republican Party in what it has become.
“My perspective is that the Republican party is profoundly corrupted by Donald Trump and it has been corrupted by a tolerance for all and any type of amoral and immoral behavior. Tolerance for astounding levels of corruption and exposure of hypocrisy from the religious far-right leaders like Falwell, to everybody who screamed and shouted about some perfidious act that Obama or the Clintons allegedly committed. Trump has remade the Republican party into an isolationist, grievance-driven, resentment-driven political party. The party looks like what it might have looked like if George Wallace had captured its nomination and become president.”
Strike the word ‘isolationist’ from Schmidt’s indictment. While individual Republicans — John McCain, whom Schmidt advised, stands out — might have stood for more than grievance-driven and resentment-driven politics, these strands were deeply embedded in the contemporary Republican Party long before Trump’s ride down the escalator.
I’ll grant that George W. Bush (whom Schmidt also advised) gave us a bit more than “the pretense of unity.” But the GOP establishment in Washington repudiated Bush’s outreach to ethnic and religious minorities (which was the most significant element of Bush’s electoral strategy that made unity more than a pretense). This Republican pushback came years before Trump became a candidate. To put it bluntly: the party resisted unity.
And Schmidt’s post-Trump indictment doesn’t even make sense on its own terms: “Tolerance for astounding levels of corruption and exposure of hypocrisy from the religious far-right leaders like Falwell, to everybody who screamed and shouted about some perfidious act that Obama or the Clintons allegedly committed.”
The unhinged screaming and shouting about Obama and the Clintons cannot possibly be placed at the feet of Donald Trump. George W. Bush couldn’t have come close enough to steal the 2000 election (even granting Bill Clinton’s sleazy behavior) without the far right’s bizarre tales of murder and more. And Donald Trump didn’t found the Tea Party or advise Mitch McConnell on his scorched earth opposition to Barack Obama.
So, I’m with Schmidt on his repudiation of Trump and the post-Trump Republican Party. But the GOP’s corruption and hypocrisy have been flourishing for more than a generation. Trump didn’t remake the Republican Party. He is just the most recent step in an ugly evolution.
A group of Republican Congressmen, led by Matt Gaetz (“I led over 30 of my colleagues into the SCIF where Adam Schiff is holding secret impeachment depositions. Still inside — more details to come.”), put on a “dramatic protest,” made “process arguments,” “sidestepped the substance” of the case against Trump, and complained about “the private nature” of the hearings.
But “none of the 13 Republicans who spoke defended Trump on the central allegation ….”
After Ambassador William Taylor’s testimony at yesterday’s hearing confirmed Trump’s demand to Ukrainian President Zelensky of a quid pro quo before release of military funds, a diversionary circus was the best ‘defense’ Republicans could offer. Reminiscent of the Brooks Brothers riot (the inspiration for the spectacle perhaps?), today’s performance piece may please the President, but — though it generated a 5 hour delay (and offered an occasion for the restive Congressmen to order out for pizza) — it is unlikely to derail the impeachment inquiry. And what do Republicans, unable to embrace Trump’s treachery, do tomorrow?
A split between urban and rural Canada — similar to that in the United States — was brought into sharp relief as the Liberals swept all 25 seats in the greater Toronto area.
Also on display was a stark regional division, with Liberals completely shut out in Saskatchewan and Alberta. The east-west rift has defined contemporary Canadian politics the way the Solid South — first a Democratic stronghold and then a Republican one — has defined U.S. politics since Reconstruction.
A chastened but triumphant Trudeau acknowledged those divisions and offered a verbal outstretched hand to Saskatchewan and Alberta, which along with Manitoba recoiled at his support for a carbon tax and other energy and environmental policies.
“Know that you are an essential part of this country,” Trudeau said. — A report from this morning’s Los Angeles Times on how yesterday’s Canadian election revealed a closely divided nation. [Editor’s note: Other news organizations, including CNBC, reported the version of the quotation in the headline, not the wording in the LA Times report.]
I can’t vouch for the analogy – that Canada’s East-West rift defines politics in our northern neighbor much as the distinctive preoccupations of the South have shaped American politics since Reconstruction – but both these quotations reveal a huge difference in the national leadership of the two nations.
Trudeau reached out – at least rhetorically – to the folks on the other side of the divide. Donald Trump consistently has catered to the Southern-dominated GOP base, while denigrating cities and regions (as well as religious and ethnic minority communities) where he lacks political support.
The statement was newsworthy because Rooney is a current Republican member of Congress, whose Florida district Trump carried by 22 points in 2016, and a word from the President could imperil the Congressman’s 2020 primary bid. The latter fact, of course, is why Trump has so few critics in the GOP Congressional caucus.
But now the political dissonance has disappeared: Rooney has announced that he will not seek reelection. With this decision, his future is no longer hostage to a vengeful president. Rooney is free to speak out.
While this may not be a tale of political courage, the Congressman’s decision to express his concerns and his decision to leave office are significant. Both are signs, however faint, of principled life within the GOP. And there’s hardly a surfeit of that nowadays.
▪ We’re in an astonishing situation. Mr. Trump seems to have single-handedly and unilaterally precipitated a national security crisis in the middle east.
You know, at the end of the day, he green-lighted the Turkish invasion. The five-day pause is probably a good thing. Maybe it will reduce the number of people murdered by Arab militias that are following the Turkish army. Give the Kurds time to run for their lives. Where they’re supposed to go is beyond me.
But, you know, the instant take on this is: You allow Assad to reenter the Kurdish areas. You allow Iranian dominance in the region. And you let the Russian military occupy abandoned, hastily abandoned U.S. military outposts. It’s an astonishing outcome. What did Mr. Trump think he was getting out of all this? — General Barry McCaffrey, retired — “Gen. Barry McCaffrey blasts Trump’s ‘inexplicable’ policy in Syria.”
▪ Trump has publicly sided with Putin over U.S. intelligence in dismissing the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and suggested this year it would be “appropriate” for Russia to rejoin the Group of Seven richest countries — reversing the 2014 expulsion after Russia invaded Ukraine.
▪ At one point during one of his most unpresidential of days, President Trump insisted that he knew how to be presidential.
“It’s much easier being presidential, it’s easy,” he told a stadium full of more than 20,000 boisterous supporters in MAGA hats and T-shirts cheering his every word on Thursday night. “All you have to do is act like a stiff.”
He buttoned his suit coat, pursed his lips, squared his shoulders and dropped his arms rigidly at his sides. “Ladies and gentlemen of Texas,” he then droned in a sleep-inducing staccato monotone the way he imagined most of the other 44 presidents had done. “It is a great honor to be with you this evening.”
The crowd loved it, roaring with laughter. Transforming back into the unpresidential president America has come to know, Mr. Trump added, “And everybody would be out of here so fast! You wouldn’t come in in the first place!” Being presidential, he was saying, is so boring. Who wants that? — Peter Baker, “On Day 1001, Trump Made It Clear: Being ‘Presidential’ is Boring.”
▪ “This is unquestionably the most outstanding nomination that I’ve ever recommended to Presidents to serve on the bench in Kentucky,” Mitch McConnell tweeted in July, when Walker’s name first came up. However, the Senate Majority Leader made his endorsement to the detriment of the nonpartisan American Bar Association, which gave Walker a rare “not qualified rating.” The ABA suggests that “a nominee to the federal bench ordinarily should have at least 12 years’ experience in the practice of law” — not zero cases in court under their belt. In addition, Paul T. Moxley, chair of the ABA committee on the federal judiciary, issued the closest thing to an I Don’t Know Her that a lawyer can physically emit: “Based on review of his biographical information and conversations with Mr. Walker, it was challenging to determine how much of his ten years since graduation from law school has been spent in the practice of law. — Matt Steib, “As Trump Fumes, GOP Advances Real Party Goal of Making the Federal Judiciary Great Again.”
Exchange of the day as White House Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney renders inoperative weeks of denials of a quid pro quo — Congressionally-approved military aid would go to Ukraine only if Ukraine agreed to dig up dirt on Trump’s political opponents — first revealed in a ‘transcript’ released by the White House.
Mulvaney: “Did he also mention to me in the past the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely. No question about that.
But that’s it. That’s why we held up the money.”
. . .
Reporter: But to be clear, what you just described is a quid pro quo. Funding will not flow unless the investigation into the Democratic server happens as well.
Mulvaney: “We do that all the time with foreign policy.”
Two days ago the Washington Post reported on Mulvaney’s central role in this scheme. Each day, in spite of the White House’s blanket refusal to provide witnesses or documents to Congress, the testimony of witness after witness for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has been filling in additional details on the hijacking of American foreign policy to undermine free and fair elections in the United States and politically benefit Donald Trump.
But — so says Mulvaney — Trump’s concern in directing this quid pro quo wasn’t to implicate the Bidens! It was to prove (contra the Mueller report) that it was Ukraine, not Putin’s Russia, that interfered with the 2016 election and that a Ukrainian company had absconded with the Democratic National Committee server containing Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. (Check out Vox’s explainers regarding Ukraine conspiracy theories.)
So there, Nancy Pelosi, all roads don’t lead to Putin (or so the Trump White House wished to ‘prove’). And ignore the White House memo on Trump’s call to Zalensky, wherein Trump says: ” The other thing, There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me.“
While Conway places (as an organizing device)
Trump’s observable behavior within the diagnostic criteria for narcissism and
sociopathy, he sets aside the issue of a medical diagnosis. What we – the public,
not mental health professionals – have witnessed in plain sight demonstrates
Trump’s unfitness to serve as president.
Trump is obsessed with sustaining a self-image
as exceedingly superior others, who in turn – he is convinced – conspicuously admire
him. He perceives every occasion, every decision, everything that comes before
him as important only insofar as it casts him in a special light.
While I’m not on board with Conway’s insistence the Congress must call on psychologists and psychiatrists to affirm Trump’s incapacity, I credit him with making the case that Trump can’t safeguard the public interest, because he is impaired by an inescapable self-regard:
“From the evidence, it appears that he simply can’t stop himself from putting his own interests above the nation’s.”
But when the NBA makes the wrong geopolitical call, watch out.
“The idea of China interfering in the sanctity of the NBA is somehow incredibly offensive to them, whereas the same standard for American elections results in the sound of crickets.” — Jake Tapper in an interview with Politico
Original post:
“This president doesn’t appear to know or care much about the Constitution, especially the limits it puts on his power.
. . .
Trump took an oath to defend the Constitution. Instead, he’s attacking it — by inflating and abusing his powers, ignoring laws he swore to protect and demanding unconstitutional reprisals against anyone who opposes him.” — Doyle McManus, in Sunday morning’s Los Angeles Times
The headline and sub head in Sunday’s print edition conveys the gist of the column — “A constitutional blind eye: Trump neither knows nor respects how our basic law limits his power” — which contrasts the President’s view of his power under Article II with the view of the founders.
As Trump approaches 1,000 days in office (on October 17, 10 days from now), a recurring question has been, When will Congress step up and check the President? An Iowan put the question to Senator Joni Ernst last weekend:
Charlie Cook (who also used the expression, shelter in place) had an answer in July:
“Those who can’t understand why elected Republicans and party officials don’t stand up to Trump seem to miss a point. The survival instinct in humans is a powerful one. In anticipating human behavior, it should always be kept in mind. The track record of what happened to those who did is pretty clear. They lost primaries or chose retirement. Instead, for many pre-tea-party Republicans, the strategy has been to shelter in place. The thinking goes that there is nothing that can be done to stop Hurricane Donald. The key is to survive the storm and be in a position to put the pieces back together and rebuild the party after it has passed. They know that the final edition of Profiles in Courage has already gone to the printer.
Cook references pre-tea-party Republicans, those who (mostly in silence) still embrace conservative principles (who hope to put the pieces back together and rebuild the party post-Trump). That’s not everyone in the Senate, of course:
“Everyone is getting a little shaky at this point,” said Brendan Buck, who was counselor to former House speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.). “Members have gotten out on a limb with this president many times only to have it be cut off by the president. They know he’s erratic, and this is a completely unsteady and developing situation.”
The few who might harbor thoughts of opposing Trump are even less likely to speak out. As former Senator Jeff Flake put it, “There is a concern that he’ll get through it and he’ll exact revenge on those who didn’t stand with him.”
The founders didn’t expect Profiles in Courage. They anticipated men acting badly, but believed that institutional checks would hold. Personal ambition and rival interests, both good motives and bad, were all part of the equation:
“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public.“
They expected personal ambition, “opposite and rival interests,” and perhaps even institutional pride (or, in less positive terms, institutional jealousy) to be incentive enough to check an errant president.
But when Trump holds sway over Republican primary voters, and is ready to exact revenge for disloyalty, personal ambition requires sheltering in place.
Marco Rubio was ambitious. (“And two weeks from tonight, right here in Florida, we are going to send a message loud and clear. We are going to send a message that the party of Lincoln and Reagan and the presidency of the United States will never be held by a con artist.” Trump beat Rubio by 18 points in the Florida primary.
Given this environment, could Republicans break from Trump?
“Nobody wants to be the zebra that strays from the pack and gets gobbled up by the lion,” a former senior administration official said in assessing the current consensus among Senate Republicans. “They have to hold hands and jump simultaneously … Then Trump is immediately no longer president and the power he can exert over them and the punishment he can inflict is, in the snap of a finger, almost completely erased.”
Expecting Republican Senators to “hold hands and jump simultaneously,” between now and November 3, 2020, even as we learn more about Trump’s extortion of Ukraine, is far fetched.
If the story metastasizes far beyond where we are now, might 3 or 4 Republican Senators vote for impeachment? I would regard that as a victory.
Meanwhile, Republican Senators can be expected to fall into 3 camps. From the first camp, we’ll see an avalanche of lies, diversions, attacks on Democrats and the media, and a bottomless narrative of grievance.
From the second camp, we’ll hear tut-tutting and murmurs of disapproval, but the conduct will not rise to the level of impeachment.
And, a third possibility, 1 or 2 or 3 (or …?) Republican Senators will acknowledge that Trump’s misconduct is undeniable and renders him unfit to serve. At least we can hope that this category is not a null set by the time the Senate votes on impeachment.
When the facts are damning, do anything you can to detract attention from those facts. Three experienced Republican leaders — House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Freedom Caucus-founder Jim Jordan, and Senator Lindsey Graham, always ready to flatter the President with contortions and contrivances — demonstrate how to avoid offering a simple, straightforward answer to an inconvenient question.
Watching the videos (linked to the tweets) is a lesson in subterfuge as practiced by a Republican Party too fearful of the President to acknowledge wrongdoing. Observe Congress’s most vocal defenders of Trump in action on mainstream television:
1. Leader McCarthy listens to Scott Pelley read one of the most talked about exchanges from the memo on Trump’s phone call to President Zelensky.
McCarthy responds: “Well, you just added another word.” Pelley assures him that the word “is in the White House transcript.”
McCarthy pivots and begins a reply, “When I read the transcript …,” by repeating talking points that Republicans distributed last week to Members of Congress. While McCarthy denies having seen those talking points, it’s obvious from his comment about the “added” word that he hasn’t read the transcript — or hasn’t retained what he read. (Not ready for prime time.)
Kevin McCarthy again displays his unique brand of incompetence and dishonesty. pic.twitter.com/KAijpPMk6R
2. Jake Tapper interviews Congressman Jim Jordan, one of the most aggressive practitioners of deflection and whataboutism in the House.
Tapper: I understand you want to change the subject, but the President was pushing the president of Ukraine to investigate a political rival. I cannot believe that that is okay with you. I can’t believe it’s okay with you.
Jordan: It’s not okay because — but he didn’t do that.
Tapper: … It’s in the transcript. We all read it.
Jordan: I read the transcript.
But of course, if he has, he doesn’t want to talk about it. Instead, he throws out accusations against the Bidens, whines about Trump’s victimhood at the hands of the FBI, but — talking fast and loud — won’t acknowledge the simple facts related straightforwardly in the White House transcript. (Finally Tapper has had enough and concludes the interview.)
Tapper snaps at Rep. Jordan for pushing false claim about Biden and Ukraine: "I would think somebody who's been accused of things in the last year and two would be more sensitive about throwing out wild allegations against people." pic.twitter.com/92mfTTqBjI
3. And, last but not least, the Senator from South Carolina: Among the highlights of the interview with Margaret Brennan, is Graham’s complaint about hearsay (“a second hand account,” as the GOP talking point puts it).
Bennan points out that the whistleblower’s account has been confirmed by the White House transcript of the call. The facts don’t matter to Graham. He invokes hearsay multiple times, makes the false claim that “they changed the rules” about hearsay and whistleblowers, and — like Jordan — offers a long diatribe about Trump being persecuted. (And nary a glance at the facts that have been confirmed already.)
LINDSEY GRAHAM: The whistleblower complaint is just hearsay.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But the whistleblower complaint is matched by the call record in numerous ways.
