President Donald Trump is privately questioning his White House’s response to domestic-abuse allegations against a key lieutenant, placing much of the blame on his chief of staff, John Kelly, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The president was also frustrated with Hope Hicks, the White House communications director who has been in a relationship with staff secretary Rob Porter, who resigned this week following published reports that he abused his two ex-wives.
.. his most biting remarks were directed at Mr. Kelly, whose about-face on the accusations against Mr. Porter capped a tumultuous week for the chief of staff.
.. The drama surrounding the chief of staff comes as Mr. Trump has started to show some frustration with him, according to friends and advisers. Mr. Trump has already found workarounds to some of Mr. Kelly’s attempts to limit access to the president, such as relying on first lady Melania Trump to field calls from friends who don’t want to wait for the chief’s protocols.
.. Mr. Trump’s friends said the president has started to ask them about Mr. Kelly’s performance. One person said the president has sought opinions on potential replacements, such as Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney.
.. some aides inside the White House have started to question how much longer Mr. Kelly will remain.
.. Mr. Porter’s resignation marks a blow to Mr. Kelly. As the chief of staff seized control of the West Wing, Mr. Porter played an increasingly important role, and Mr. Kelly relied on him.
.. Mr. Porter predated his boss’s arrival in the White House—he was an acquaintance of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, when both attended college, and he was hired at the start of the administration by former staff chief Reince Priebus
.. The White House hired Mr. Porter for the job at the recommendation of Sen. Orrin Hatch
.. had an impressive resume and political pedigree. His father, Roger Porter, was an adviser to former President George H.W. Bush.
.. Kelly and Porter spoke privately and Mr. Porter denied the assault allegation, a White House official said. Mr. Kelly then agreed to have the statement released in his name based on that conversation. The official said Mr. Kelly was misled by Mr. Porter in that discussion.
David Axelrod: James Baker (Episode 176)
Worked for Gerry Ford, ran 2 Campaigns against Reagan
Treasury Secretary under Reagan (tax reform)
Chief of Staff for Reagan
Dissolution of Soviet Union under Bush
Campaign operative for George W. Bush, etc
Slogan: Don’t start any fights you can’t win.
Florida Recount
It was a political event with legal elements
The Willy Horton Ad:
I told them to stop running it (after several weeks)
I don’t know if it was Identity politics.Scapegoating
After Reagan did poorly, people were looking for a whipping boy and they wanted to fire __________.
After the Soviet Union, don’t know why the relation soured, but maybe it was good local politics to blame the US.
Who’s next? A moment of reckoning for men — and the behavior we can no longer ignore.
“Ailes, O’Reilly, Weinstein, Halperin were some of our culture’s key storytellers, shaping our ideas of gender, authority, power & much more,” noted Jodi Kantor, the New York Times reporter who broke the Weinstein story
.. mostly decent men of a certain age (60-plus? 50-plus? What is the generational divide here?) as they realize that the behaviors they perceived as all-in-good-fun were, in fact, only half in good fun — their own half. For decades, the women on the receiving end weren’t having any fun at all.
.. Is this a moment of #MeToo? for George H.W. Bush, the 41st president of the United States? An actor named Heather Lind said she was “sexually assaulted” by the jolly old fellow with the fun socks, who apparently touched her butt while posing for a photo.
.. “To try to put people at ease, the president routinely tells the same joke — and on occasion, he has patted women’s rears in what he intended to be a good-natured manner,” said a spokesman for Bush on Wednesday, while noting that the former president’s wheelchair posture keeps his arms at butt-level.
.. the president asked her to guess his favorite magician, and then, as he squeezed her rear end, revealed that the answer was “David Cop-a-feel.”
.. David Cop-a-feel. Ugh. Gabby dad humor mixed with grabby sexual overtones: a cocktail whose taste many women would recognize but that many men would be shocked to learn they had been mixing and serving all along.
.. In journalism, there’s a term called “notebook dump,” the process of throwing together all your reporting — every note taken, interview conducted, scene observed.
.. The women of America are currently engaged in a notebook dump of epic proportions, releasing the anecdotes they’ve been carrying since puberty.
.. women experiencing harassment don’t particularly want to also be in charge of educating harassers.
.. “What we need to start talking about is the crisis in masculinity,” the actor Emma Thompson told the BBC.
What’s the Matter With Republicans?
Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” In answering his title’s question, Frank argued that hardworking heartland Americans were being duped by a Republican Party that whipped up culture-war frenzy to disguise its plutocratic aims.
.. Middle-class and working-class Republican voters, he insisted, were voting against their own economic self-interest and getting worse than nothing in return.
.. You don’t have to be a dupe to be a “values voter”
.. believe that some moral questions are more important than where to set the top tax rate.
.. embracing theories about how the working class was actually undertaxed, rallying around tax plans that seemed to threaten middle-class tax increases and promoting an Ayn Randian vision in which heroic entrepreneurs were the only economic actor worth defending.
.. Trump has essentially become the Frankian caricature in full
.. a mistake for liberals to suggest that Trump is just returning to the Bush playbook
.. conservatism doesn’t have to be a mix of Randianism and racial resentment
.. a depressing percentage of American conservatives seem perfectly happy with the bargain that Frank claimed defined their party, with a president who ignores their economic interests and public policy more generally and offers instead the perpetual distraction of Twitter feuds and pseudo-patriotic grandstanding.
.. a segment of religious conservatives, like those gathered at last week’s Values Voters Summit, who cheered rapturously for an empty, strutting nationalism and a president who makes a mockery of the remoralized culture that they claim to seek.
.. Far better to have a president who really sticks it to those overpaid babies in the N.F.L. and makes the liberals howl with outrage — that’s what a real and fighting conservatism should be all about!
.. they’ve decided to become part of the caricature themselves, become exactly what their enemies and critics said they were, become a movement of plutocrats and grievance-mongers with an ever-weaker understanding of the common good.
Comments:
they claim patriotism as their own, try to spiritualize secular laws, and demonize immigrants.
Maybe Trump can supporters can live well on spite, resentment, and the veneer of religion (“Merry Christmas!), but I can’t.
.. Jesse The Conservative
The biggest fear of Democrats, is that Conservative Republicans will gain the upper hand–and actually enact some of their ideas–lower taxes, less regulation, free market health care, school choice, tightened welfare guidelines, and control of our borders and enforcement of immigration laws.
Democrats are scared to death that American will become accustomed to lower taxes, more disposable income, a smaller, less intrusive government, a vibrant economy, better schools, better health care, and the enforcement of the rule of law. Liberals know full well, that as soon as Americans return to their free-market, capitalist roots, Conservative messaging will be powerful and direct. Americans will have no problem understanding where their newly-found prosperity comes from.
.. I’m a Republican. I don’t like big government. I am against almost everything they do in DC night and day, aka, The Swamp. I vote on moral issues first and all the rest second. AND, I want the government to do something to return moral values to the center of American life.
.. DougTerry.us
What’s wrong with this picture? I don’t like government and I want government to do something about it!
.. Does anyone remember that Obama was staging war games in Texas a couple of years ago as part of a master plan to take over the country and stay in office? Never mind.
- The old south still hates “the north” from the Civil War.
- The far west hates Washington because it owns and controls so much public land.
- The Republicans generally hate federal taxes because of the vast power amassed by Washington to tax for the common good. They aren’t really interested in that all that much. They want to whack away at “common” and shift to “good for me”, which is, after all, a basic human instinct.
.. Nothing is going to satisfy the dissatisfied 1/4 to 1/3. NOTHING. They are wedded to their grievances.
.. Victor James
.. So forget Reagan and think Brownback, the Kansas version of Trump who led that state into financial ruin. Brownback only denied financial reality, but Trump has that beat by a mile.
.. Francis W
.. The most depressing thing about the rise of Trump is that a sizable percentage of the population really wants a bullying, inexperienced narcissist to be president and and another substantial percentage didn’t see it as a major problem when they cast their vote last fall.
.. WallyWorld
.. There has been one balanced, pragmatic, Republican President since Dwight Eisenhower, and that’s George H.W. Bush, and the party cast him out for trying to be responsible about the budget deficit. Trump did not create the current Republican party, he merely fully unmasked it. The Republican party of today is full of a lot of very dark and dangerous thinking, governing out of animus and resentment, all from a base of ignorance. It’s bad out there.