North Korea, China and Russia pose growing tests for a beleaguered administration
When a president appears weak, distracted or in trouble, as President Donald Trump does right now, the effects on international affairs can play out on many fronts. First, adversaries may feel more emboldened to challenge a besieged American leader. That may be a miscalculation, but the odds of miscalculation go up at such times.
.. Second, there always is the suspicion that a president embattled at home is looking for a distraction abroad. Even if there’s a real crisis, there would be charges the White House is pumping it up to divert attention. “Wag the Dog” suspicions are never far beneath the surface.
.. Third, when a president is thought to be distracted or in trouble, Congress steps in to fill what it perceives to be a void. That’s what happened during Watergate, when lawmakers voted to cut funding for the war in Vietnam and passed the War Powers Act to limit a president’s hand in military operations abroad... Mr. Trump is right when he says China hasn’t done what it could to curb North Korea: At this point, Beijing’s true intentions have to be considered suspect. The grim reality, though, is that China’s balkiness leaves few options, and no good ones, for dealing with the threat.
President Trump’s Really Weak Week
In his speech, Trump encouraged police brutality and said he was “the big, big believer and admirer of the people in law enforcement, O.K.?” He said that he’s protecting the backs of law enforcement “100 percent.” Except for Sessions, Sally Yates, Preet Bharara and Robert Mueller.
As two people close to Trump told The Times’s Maggie Haberman when asked why he was tormenting Sessions instead of firing him: Because he can.
.. And in his paranoid, aggrieved isolation, he’s even thinking about nixing Steve Bannon, nemesis of the Mooch, and mulling firing the one who could get him fired, Mueller, and pardoning himself for possible charges.
.. Trump learned his technique of publicly criticizing and freely firing from George Steinbrenner, one of the ruthless, towering characters he modeled himself on when he started hanging out at Yankee Stadium in the ’70s.
.. Trump had always resented Priebus for advising him to get out of the race after the Billy Bush “Access Hollywood” tape story broke — known as Priebus’s “scarlet A.H.,” according to The Washington Post — and for not understanding that Trump is not a mere Republican; he’s the head of his own “beautiful,” us-against-them movement, “the likes of which the world has never seen.”
.. As The Post reports, Trump’s delighted demeaning of Priebus included this incident: “At one point, during a meeting in the Oval Office, a fly began buzzing overhead, distracting the president. As the fly continued to circle, Trump summoned his chief of staff and tasked him with killing the insect.”
.. After torturing Reince for months, Trump happily gave him the final humiliating shove. As the tweets hit the White House cellphones, Priebus’s colleagues Stephen Miller and Dan Scavino jumped out of the Suburban they were sharing with Priebus, leaving the jobless man in a driving rain on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base, the weakest link tossed off the sled for the press wolves.
.. You’re a killer and a king or a loser, as Fred Trump liked to say. And anyone who doesn’t understand that Trump is more important than the G.O.P. or the institution of the presidency is, in his mind, a loser. Anyone who doesn’t get that the loyalty should be for him personally, rather than the country, is, to Trump, a loser.
.. With Priebus, The Post reported, the president obsessed on impotence. “The word was ‘weak’ – ‘weak,’ ‘weak,’ ‘weak,’ ‘Can’t get it done,’” an official told the paper.
.. But after all his bragging about being a great negotiator and closer, it is President Trump who can’t get it done. He couldn’t even close the deal on a pathetic, bare-bones health care bill, ineffectually bullying Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator from Alaska, and failing to win over John McCain, who gleefully had his revenge for Trump’s mockery of him as being a loser because he was captured in war.
.. Trump can’t get it done for his pal, Putin, either. In fact, the biggest legislative accomplishment before Congress leaves for August will have been passing new sanctions on Russia because lawmakers don’t trust their own president. Talk about weak.
.. Congressional Republicans are losing their fear of Trump, making ever more snarky comments about him. North Korea is shooting off missiles and the White House is flustered. The generals are resisting Trump’s tweet edicts. The mortified leader of the Boy Scouts had to apologize for the president’s suggestive and partisan speech.
And what could be weaker than that?
Bungled Collusion Is Still Collusion
Donald Trump Jr.’s e-mails discredit the ‘nothingburger’ argument the president’s supporters have been advancing for months.
.. You don’t have to go back to the ’40s and ’50s when the CIA intervened in France and Italy to keep the Communists from coming to power. What about the Obama administration’s blatant interference to try to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu in the latest Israeli election?
.. One might even add the work of groups supported by the U.S. during Russian parliamentary elections — the very origin of Vladimir Putin’s deep animus toward Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, whom he accuses of having orchestrated the opposition.
.. This defense is pathetic for two reasons. First, have the Trumpites not been telling us for six months that no collusion ever happened? And now they say: Sure it happened. So what? Everyone does it.
.. Second, no, not everyone does it. It’s one thing to be open to opposition research dug up in Indiana. But not dirt from Russia, a hostile foreign power that has repeatedly invaded its neighbors (Georgia, Crimea, Eastern Ukraine), that buzzes our planes and ships in international waters, that opposes our every move and objective around the globe. Just last week the Kremlin killed additional U.N. sanctions we were looking to impose on North Korea for its ICBM test.
China Gets Failing Grade on North Korea
In Beijing’s view, the current crisis was largely created by U.S. belligerence, and thus the onus is primarily on Washington to fix it, with China acting as facilitator.
.. An irritated China on Tuesday hit back at U.S. pressure to do more. “The ‘China responsibility theory’ on the peninsula nuclear issue can stop,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman said.
Yet China is Pyongyang’s enabler: Up to 90% of North Korea’s foreign trade runs through its neighbor. And commerce is surging; Pyongyang is a bustling capital.
Beijing appears to believe that living with a nuclear North Korea is preferable to the alternatives: the collapse of its socialist ally spilling refugees into its industrial heartland and bringing U.S. troops to its border.
.. How would Beijing respond if Taiwan reactivated its nuclear program?..But then, the unthinkable is now reality: President Trump talks about a “major, major conflict.”.. Seoul didn’t drop the effort until 1980—after the U.S. suspended a plan to pull out troops.. A North Korea capable of hitting the U.S. with a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile would, once again, raise questions about U.S. willingness to come to the rescue. Would Washington risk Seattle for Seoul? That, in turn, might spur demands for a homegrown nuclear deterrent.