Satire, commentary, analysis—throw it all out the window. What’s happening in Washington is beyond parody, beyond fiction. What will happen tomorrow, what will happen in the next hour? No one knows.
.. Trump doesn’t want stability, he wants motion. He isn’t interested in details or arguments, he’s energized by accomplishments, achievements, placards on the wall. He doesn’t have a cabinet, he has employees. And the primary job of those employees is to protect their boss.
.. Which is what Anthony Scaramucci understands. Like Trump, he’s a showman. Larger than life. He’s familiar with grand gestures. He’s not a D.C. guy.
.. So the man whom the voters brought in to disrupt Washington brought in Scaramucci to disrupt his own White House. Well, mission accomplished.
.. I have been reading past issues of National Review, including bound volumes from 1977-1981. I do not know whether Donald Trump fits the historian’s model of a “disjunctive” president like Jimmy Carter, but the two chief executives do share this in common: Both campaigned as outsiders, both brought fellow outsiders with them to Washington, and these coteries of trusted advisers did not mesh with the institutions and personalities and manners they found in the city. In both cases there was a culture clash, apparent from the beginning. It soon became apparent that Carter’s presidency was not only dysfunctional, but a failure.
Yes, Trump can legally pardon himself or his family. No, he shouldn’t.
If he really did pardon his aides, his family or himself to head off Robert Mueller’s inquiry, the move probably would be constitutional but ultimately self-defeating for the president.
In using his power to pardon potential witnesses against him, Trump probably would convert a weak criminal investigation into a full-fledged impeachment effort. In 1833, Chief Justice John Marshall upheld a presidential pardon by Andrew Jackson by saying that a pardon is “an act of grace” by a president. A pardon in these circumstances would not be viewed as an act of grace, but a gratuity from an isolated president.
.. Even Nixon did not stoop to a self-pardon, although he did research it.
.. Pardoning his associates at this stage would clearly have a tactical benefit, but the historical and political costs of that would be immense. The most obvious reason for issuing pardons now would not be to protect any of the key people from jail but to limit Mueller’s leverage over witnesses. Mueller has selected a team of prosecutorial heavies, some of whom are known for flipping witnesses and using pressure to secure their cooperation. A pardon removes that option and reinforces the ability of close associates to take a hard line with investigators.
.. the use of the pardon power to protect the president’s political allies and family members would be legitimately decried as an abuse. It would not, however, be unprecedented.
.. Jefferson wanted Bollman to testify against Burr for alleged treason in plotting with the British to create a new country out of territory in the Southwest and Mexico.
.. The most recent abuse of pardon power was by Clinton. He waited until his last day in office to pardon billionaire Marc Rich, generally considered one of the least worthy recipients of a pardon in history. Jimmy Carter denounced the abuse of the pardon power for Rich as “disgraceful” and attributed Clinton’s decision to “his large gifts.” Worse yet, on the same day, Clinton pardoned his half-brother, Roger Clinton, in an open abuse of pardon power to benefit his family.
.. Indeed, with pardons, witnesses could lose protections against self-incrimination and could more easily be forced to testify. New crimes such as perjury could fall outside of the pardon, and such a pardon would not protect against state charges.
.. The existing claims of criminal conduct on Trump’s part are relatively weak and speculative. To move from the legal to the political forum is to leave strategic high ground for a quagmire.
.. Tactical pardons are like burning bridges to slow an investigation. That has rarely stopped a determined foe. Indeed, it tends to encourage and swell the ranks of opponents.
How Trump Broke Campaign Norms But Still Won The Election
I was in Cleveland for the Republican convention. I think there was a Wall Street Journal story during that week or just right afterwards. And the headline was “GOP Delegates Think American Economy Is Terrible – Except Where They Live.” You know, there was a sense that most of their communities were doing OK, but they believe the entire American economy was troubled.
And I think we are seeing some combination of the way in which a generation’s worth of cable news has sort of conditioned people to nonstop and undifferentiated crisis around the world. The great difficulty of presenting positive developments in ways that don’t seem silly or sap-like. And also – I guess I’ve been thinking about this in the last day or two – the elevation of national politics to something like a religion
.. And I think national politics has become what you – what I think of as either a religious affiliation or a particularly sort of acrid sporting team loyalty where people who you otherwise can work with and compromise with and build a future with you either really feel connected to or you really feel just are the other based on which team they’re on, whether they’re on the Republican team, the Trump team, or the anti-Trump team.
And one other theme which no doubt we will explore, which is the ways in which people in non-coastal America feel as – not so much looked down on, but just ignored by media in particular
.. when my wife and I began our flying project back in 2013, our premise was to go to places that you would normally go to only if there were a flood or a tornado or a shooting as opposed to treating them as real entities and giving them the sort of three-dimensionality that you’d naturally give to the big coastal cities.
.. the opinion polls that came out before Donald Trump’s announcement when they asked people to sort of free associate across the country about the greatest threats to the nation, immigration was normally not in the top 10. You know, some people were very concerned about it, but not most people. So I would view this as a phenomenon of something about modern political national-level campaigning and media emphasis thereof has allowed us to get hyperpolarized and hyper, you know, upset about phenomena that in the daily life of the country are not seen as that threatening or disturbing.
.. I’ve interviewed most of the fallen Republicans and their campaign managers. And they really felt that the cable-based structure of those debates, where you had 10 or 11 people on the stage all crowding around for airtime, with Donald Trump standing dominant in the middle – that that helped him as well because it sort of preconditioned a “Survivor” or “Apprentice”-type show where you would knock off the weaklings one by one.
And there was always somebody who was weaker than Donald Trump, so he ended up seeming relatively stronger as time went on. And also, none of them – they didn’t figure out that they needed to join in together to attack him.
.. I think, in a potentially ominous way in the violation of norms. Donald Trump didn’t release his tax information. We thought in modern times that’s what a presidential candidate would have to do. During one of the debates Donald Trump said to Hillary Clinton that if he won, she would be in jail. This is something we have not heard from our candidates. We think of our candidates if they lose a bitter campaign, they say we offer our support to the next president. When Donald Trump suggested that he might not accept the results of the election, that also was unusual.
.. And Jimmy Carter, who had many thoughts to offer about speeches at all times, his thought about this was we don’t say that. You know, he’s a former president. We don’t talk about our opponents that way. We say we disagree with their views. We say they’ve made mistakes, but we don’t say their intentions are bad. And so to leap from there to saying that the incumbent president and his one purported successor are traitors, that is one more of the norms that we had – we’d not seen before this year.
.. I recorded a number of times where something happened and Donald Trump would immediately say it’s 100-percent clear that X happened. For example, this EgyptAir plane disappeared over the Atlantic some time ago – I’m sorry, over the Mediterranean some time ago. And still nobody knows what happened to that plane. But within, like, 30 minutes of its disappearing, Donald Trump was on the news saying it’s 100 percent clear this is terrorism. If you don’t know it’s terrorism, believe me, you’re suckers, folks. This is entirely what it is.
.. FALLOWS: So his main point, it’s based on something that is in my view largely just wrong and connected to something that is – that is real…
GROSS: I mean, wrong you disagree or factually incorrect?
FALLOWS: Factually incorrect – and that is the idea that essentially the economic problems America has is because China is – in particular but also Mexico and Japan and South Korea – are stealing our factories and stealing our jobs. And this is the main reason why the U.S. has the economic problems, the employment problems that it has. I think if 20 years ago, when China was beginning its ascent, you could say that a lot of the economic problems of the early ’90s were much more directly traceable to outsourcing decisions than anything that’s going on right now
.. But if you go many places now, the people who have been losing jobs in the last 10 years have been losing them only minorly to Mexico, China, South Korea, Japan. They’ve been losing them mainly to automation.
.. I can tell you from going back and forth to China that in every single country of the world, including China and Japan and South Korea and Mexico, the employment problem is the hollowing out of factory-type jobs because of automation.
.. I think to blame it as he does on bad-and-stupid deals with Mexico, China, Japan and South Korea both is out of date about the problem and really off about the solution because I don’t think there’s anybody who is involved with those countries who thinks that much tougher or canny or dealmakers is going to bring a lot more factories back to Indiana or Illinois.
The ‘Carterization’ of Trump
Activists and ideological voters often end up being disappointed with the president they’ve supported because of compromises or perceived betrayals, but that disappointment normally takes years before it takes hold. Trump is driving away some of his supporters within the first three months.
.. The opportunistic support he is getting from hawks in both parties isn’t likely to last and won’t help him on other issues, since many of them are otherwise opposed to Trump’s proposals or want to see him humiliated politically.
.. There was already a good chance that Trump would be “Carterized” on account of the divisions within the GOP and the administration’s own ineptitude, and he is making that outcome more likely by alienating at least some of the people that have stuck with him until now. Like almost all of the other wounds his administration has suffered, this wound was self-inflicted, and in this case Trump hurt himself by doing something that he could have easily avoided doing.