Did I miss something when Trump said he was salivating at the chance to take health care away from 22 million Americans and the 87-year-old Robertson merely responded with his trademark chucklehead chuckle?
.. Robertson is not the most despicable of Trump’s enablers. For that, you’re probably thinking of Sean Hannity. No, it goes beyond the safe spaces in broadcasting. The most odious of those who are letting Trump drag America into the gutter include Vice President Mike Pence, the leaders in Congress and the pious shepherds of a white evangelical community that continues to give an awful man a pass for every awful thing he does.
.. Pence is the choirboy who leaves the room when the nasty boys take over, and then helps clean up later.
.. Pence has said he would never dine alone with a woman who is not his wife, which raises questions about how he would handle a diplomatic dinner with Angela Merkel.
.. Through every degrading statement, every Oval Office insult, every one of the more than 500 demonstrable lies told (so far) by this president, Pence has remained silent or defended the offender.
And if the White House is blackmailed because the Kremlin has something even more damning on, say, Jared Kushner .. Pence will be further exposed as a gutless cipher... Another boy scout in hiding is House Speaker Paul Ryan. Golly gee, he just wants to cut taxes on the rich, destroy the health care system, and work on his abs and guns... Asked this week if he would ever have a meeting with a foreign power offering dirt on a political opponent, he said, “I’m not going to go into hypotheticals.”.. And the above question is anything but a hypothetical; the dim-bulbed Donald Trump Jr. presented it in writing... A true miracle would be for one of the enablers among the 81 percent of white evangelicals who gave their vote to Trump to follow their conscience, or at least the Scriptures they profess guide them.
The Trumpers Don’t Hate Media. They Are Media Creations.
I was tempted to say this was a paradox. But it’s too straightforward for paradox. The key truth of Trumpism is that for all the purported hatred of “the media”, the main Trumpers are almost all fundamentally media creatures. They think in media terms. They are media creations.
Trump himself is a self-creation of the 80s and 90s New York City tabloid culture. His comeback in the early part of this century was driven more than most people understand by the success of The Apprentice. Why else do you think people in the Philippines or Kazakhstan paid millions to license Trump’s name? It was the brand driver of the licensing empire which allowed Trump to become the 45th President.
Steve Bannon was a publisher. Before that he was a movie producer. Jared Kushner bought a newspaper and used it to fight his battles in the press. On down the list they are all media people. They don’t hate the media. Indeed, they can only understand most battles in media terms.
.. Shouting and messaging and attacks are the only language they really understand. What they hate is that they feel like they’re losing on the terrain they believe is the only one that really matters.
.. We’ve seen the comical and now perennial pattern in which you’ll read an article which describes a White House brought to its knees by some crisis almost entirely of the President’s making. The answer? Time to fire Reince Priebus. There’s a similar story with Sean Spicer.
.. Throughout, there is this abiding belief that enough assertion and aggression can change anything.
.. If the reporting we see is close to reliable, Jared Kushner is in profound legal jeopardy. He must be scared and scarred by the time he spent in federal prisons visiting his father during his father’s incarceration. But the lesson Kushner apparently learned from this searing experience was to attack always and always harder.
.. This is fascinatingly similar to what triggered Kushner’s father’s final downfall. Charles Kushner was the subject of a tax and campaign finance probe when he pulled a breathtakingly wild attempt to obstruct that investigation by hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law and videotape their sex.
.. Kushner wanted them to complain about chyrons on cable news, call reporters to update stories with White House statements, and unleash surrogates immediately. He was angry that there were no talking points offered to surrogates, the source said. One senior administration official suggested that two aides from the communications shop be dedicated just to updating chyrons.
“Jared didn’t like the idea, he wanted people to get aggressive,” said an outside adviser who was briefed on the meeting. “Jared’s the guy who is rushing the front lines and other people are saying, ‘see, wait, hold, and let’s get a battle strategy.’”
.. the belief that yelling and attacking harder can change broad-ranging criminal probes or the equally implausible belief that the Trump White House’s problem has been insufficiently aggressive attacks against those it perceives as enemies. Almost every problem the Trump White House has had, at least the President and in most cases his top advisors have seen it as a failure out of the communications office to sell the administration’s story.
.. It’s a media event, a media campaign – run for most of the campaign by the candidate more or less on his own, a man with long experience and an intuitive sense of marketing and message. Think about it. Trump seems to spend the better part of his time in the White House watching cable news. It’s not just an obsession with his enemies. It’s who he is, just the way policy people read policies papers. It’s the one language he understands and the only one he thinks – and most of his top advisors think – matters.
The Benefit of the Doubt Is Gone
This morning, news came out that some sketchy former Soviet counter-intelligence officer was also in the room. (What are the odds he recorded the conversation, by the way? I’d say they’re pretty high.)
.. Why the Hell are people taking the word of anyone in that meeting as proof of anything? Before this morning’s revelation, even members of the Trump-hostile press repeated that “nothing came of the meeting” or that “no information was given.” On the Trump Aqueduct, this was translated into the whole story being a “nothingburger.” Where did the proof of this come from? From the people in the room! Jiminy Cricket, that’s stupid.
.. But every single person who was in that room has a very strong incentive to say nothing nefarious happened in the room. Well, when the Soprano crew is jointing a corpse in the backroom of Satriale’s, everyone there has a vested interest in sticking to the story that they were just playing cards.
.. Who in that room do you think is above lying about what transpired there? Paul Manafort? Forget his deep Russian connections. The guy was a lobbyist for Mobutu Seske Seko.
.. Jared? The guy who initially “forgot” that meeting happened at all? Don Jr.? We already know he’s capable of lying about the meeting because he’s already lied about the meeting.
.. the Associated Press reported that the sketchy former Soviet counter-intelligence guy, Rinat Akhmetshin, who was in the room claims that Veselnitskaya did indeed hand over a file of incriminating info.
..This is like one of those episodes of Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator” where some sleazebag is catfished into having a “date” with a 13-year-old girl only to show up and find Chris Hansen waiting in the kitchen with a transcript of their conversations. At least those scumbags had the “integrity” to lie and say it was all a misunderstanding and that they were just there because they really like hanging out and watching MTV and eating ice cream.
.. I don’t recall any of them saying, “Hey, I didn’t do anything wrong because I didn’t actually get a chance to rape her.”
If you break into a bank, you can’t claim you did nothing wrong if the safe turns out to be empty any more than a terrorist can plead innocence if his bomb didn’t go off.
.. Yes, “Crooked Hillary,” Ted Kennedy, and a host of other liberals did bad things. Whether those bad things were analogous to this is highly debatable. But let’s just concede the point for argument’s sake. Let’s also accept the president’s grotesquely cynical and false claim that pretty much anyone in politics would have done the same thing and taken the meeting. (I for one am perfectly happy to concede that Sidney Blumenthal would happily have done equally sleazy things for his Queen-master. But I have every confidence that if some shady Russian cutouts approached, say, James Baker with a similar scheme to “incriminate” Michael Dukakis, he would become a helicopter of fists.)
There Is Now Evidence that Senior Trump Officials Attempted to Collude With Russia
On July 8, the New York Times reported that Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner had a previously undisclosed meeting with a Russian lawyer with alleged “connections with the Kremlin.” In an initial response to the story, Trump Jr. said the meeting was “primarily about an adoption program.”
By the next day, the story shifted. The Times reported new details suggesting Trump Jr. took the meeting after being promised “damaging information” about Hillary Clinton.
.. On July 10, the next shoe dropped. This time, the Times alleged Donald Jr. had received an e-mail beforehand making clear that the lawyer was acting as “part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy.”
.. In his latest statement, Trump Jr. claims that the lawyer wasn’t a government official, there was no opposition research, and the meeting was mainly about “adoption policy and the Magnitsky act.”
.. In other words, this isn’t the smoking gun that proves actual “collusion” with Russia, but rather evidence that Trump Jr., Manafort, and Kushner tried to collude with Russia.
.. To repeat, it now looks as if the senior campaign team of a major-party presidential candidate intended to meet with an official representative of a hostile foreign power to facilitate that foreign power’s attempt to influence an American election.
.. at long last we can now put to bed the notion that the Russia investigation is little more than frivolous partisan harassment, and it casts in an entirely different light the president’s fury and frustration at its continued progress.
.. As of now, we should have zero confidence that we know all or even most material facts. We should have zero confidence that Trump’s frustration is entirely due to his feeling like an innocent man caught in the crosshairs of crazed conspiracy theorists. It now appears that his son, son-in-law, and campaign chair met with a lawyer who they were told was part of an official Russian government effort to impact the presidential election. The Russian investigation isn’t a witch hunt anymore, if it ever was. It’s a national necessity.