Sorry, I really tried, but could not finish reading this article.
Even after I washed my face and scrubbed my teeth...and tongue.
I've selected the title for my new(first) Best Selling Book "Rape of a
Nation" Sub title: Trump's Dream for the Dismantling of 241 Years of
More or Less Progress.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/23/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
President Donald Trump. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
Trump the Destroyer
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
23 March 17
Trump has stuffed his Cabinet with tyrants, zealots and imbeciles – all bent
on demolishing our government from within
t's like the campaign never ended. It's the same all-Trump, all-the-time
madness, only exponentially worse.
Morning, February 24th, National Harbor, Maryland, the Conservative
Political Action Conference. Chin up, eyes asquint, Donald Trump floats to
the lectern on a sea of applause and adulation. The building is shaking, and
as fans howl his name – Trump! Trump! Trump! – he looks pleased and
satisfied, like a Roman emperor who has just moved his bowels.
"Great to be back at CPAC," he says. "The place I have really ..."
The thought flies into the air and vanishes. Last year at this time, Trump
was bailing on a CPAC invite because a rat's nest of National Review types
was threatening a walkout to protest him. There was talk of 300
conservatives planning a simultaneous march to the toilet if the formerly
pro-choice New Yorker was allowed onstage.
Whether Trump remembers this now, or just loses his train of thought, he
goes silent.
"We love you!" a young woman screams, filling the void.
"I love this place!" Trump exclaims, sunnily now. He recalls the tale of his
first major political speech, which was delivered to this very conference
six years ago. Back then he was introduced to the beat of the O'Jays soul
hit "For the Love of Money," and over the course of 13 uncomfortably
autoerotic minutes flogged his résumé and declared it a myth that a "very
successful person" couldn't run for president.
He starts to tell that story, when suddenly he spots something in the
audience that knocks him off script.
"Siddown, everybody, come on," he says.
A lot of the people can't sit down because they're in standing-room-only
sections. There's confusion, a few nervous laughs. Frowning, Trump plows
ahead.
"You know," he says, "the dishonest media, they'll say, 'He didn't get a
standing ovation.' You know why?"
Those of us in the dishonest-media section shoot befuddled looks at one
another. Not one of us has a clue why.
"You know why? No, you know why?" he goes on. "Because everybody stood and
nobody sat. So they will say, 'He never got a standing ovation.' Right?"
This makes no sense, but the crowd roars anyway. Trump leans over and pauses
to soak in the love, his trademark red tie hanging like the tongue of a sled
dog. Finally he turns and flashes a triumphant thumbs-up. A chant breaks
out:
"U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!"
Reporters stare at one another in shock. They were mute bystanders seconds
ago; now they're the 1980 Soviet hockey team. One turns to a colleague and
silently mouths: "U-S-A? What the f ... "
Nearby, another press nerd is frowning to himself and counting on his
fingers, apparently trying to use visual aids to retrace Trump's reasoning.
Was the idea that reporters wouldn't notice a standing ovation unless the
crowd eventually sat down?
Helpless shrugs all around.
In a flash, Trump is launching into a furious 15-minute diatribe, bashing
the "Clinton News Network" (Trump continually refers to Hillary Clinton as
if the campaign were still going on) and describing the press as the "enemy
of the people."
Within hours, Trump's aides will bar a group of news outlets from a White
House gaggle, in a formal declaration of war against the media. The next
morning, a still-raging Trump will tweet out his decision not to attend the
White House Correspondents' Dinner – no great loss, since the event has
never not been a wretched exercise in stale humor and ankle-biting toadyism,
but still. How long can he keep up this pace?
Since winning the election, Trump has declared interpersonal war on a
breathtaking list of targets: the Australian prime minister, an acting
attorney general, seven predominantly Muslim countries, a "so-called"
federal judge, Sweden, "Fake Tears" Chuck Schumer, Saturday Night Live, the
FBI, the "very un-American" leakers within the intelligence community, and
the city of Paris (it's "no longer Paris"). He's side-eyed Mark Cuban, John
McCain, millions of protesters, Lindsey Graham, Richard Blumenthal, Chris
Cuomo, the University of California at Berkeley, ratings "disaster" Arnold
Schwarzenegger, Nancy Pelosi, the "TRAITOR Chelsea Manning," Mexican
President Enrique Peña Nieto, Barack Obama and the city of Chicago, among
many, many others.
There is no other story in the world, no other show to watch. The first and
most notable consequence of Trump's administration is that his ability to
generate celebrity has massively increased, his persona now turbocharged by
the vast powers of the presidency. Trump has always been a reality star
without peer, but now the most powerful man on Earth is prisoner to his
talents as an attention-generation machine.
Worse, he is leader of a society incapable of discouraging him. The numbers
bear out that we are living through a severely amplified déjà vu of last
year's media-Trump codependent lunacies. TV-news viewership traditionally
plummets after a presidential election, but under Trump, it's soaring.
Ratings since November for the major cable news networks are up an
astonishing 50 percent in some cases, with CNN expecting to improve on its
record 2016 to make a billion dollars – that's billion with a "b" – in
profits this year.
Even the long-suffering newspaper business is crawling off its deathbed,
with The New York Times adding 132,000 subscribers in the first 18 days
after the election. If Trump really hates the press, being the first person
in decades to reverse the industry's seemingly inexorable financial decline
sure is a funny way of showing it.
On the campaign trail, ballooning celebrity equaled victory. But as the
country is finding out, fame and governance have nothing to do with one
another. Trump! is bigger than ever. But the Trump presidency is fast
withering on the vine in a bizarre, Dorian Gray-style inverse correlation.
Which would be a problem for Trump, if he cared.
But does he? During the election, Trump exploded every idea we ever had
about how politics is supposed to work. The easiest marks in his con-artist
conquest of the system were the people who kept trying to measure him
according to conventional standards of candidate behavior. You remember the
Beltway priests who said no one could ever win the White House by insulting
women, the disabled, veterans, Hispanics, "the blacks," by using a Charlie
Chan voice to talk about Asians, etc.
Now he's in office and we're again facing the trap of conventional
assumptions. Surely Trump wants to rule? It couldn't be that the presidency
is just a puppy Trump never intended to care for, could it?
Toward the end of his CPAC speech, following a fusillade of anti-media
tirades that will dominate the headlines for days, Trump, in an offhand
voice, casually mentions what a chore the presidency can be.
"I still don't have my Cabinet approved," he sighs.
In truth, Trump does have much of his team approved. In the early days of
his administration, while his Democratic opposition was still reeling from
November's defeat, Trump managed to stuff the top of his Cabinet with a
jaw-dropping collection of perverts, tyrants and imbeciles, the likes of
which Washington has never seen.
En route to taking this crucial first beachhead in his invasion of the
capital, Trump did what he always does: stoked chaos, created hurricanes of
misdirection, ignored rules and dared the system of checks and balances to
stop him.
By conventional standards, the system held up fairly well. But this is not a
conventional president. He was a new kind of candidate and now is a new kind
of leader: one who stumbles like a drunk up Capitol Hill, but manages even
in defeat to continually pull the country in his direction, transforming not
our laws but our consciousness, one shriveling brain cell at a time.
It seems strange to say about the most overanalyzed person in the world, but
Trump arrived in Washington an unknown. His shocking victory had been won
almost entirely outside the Beltway, via a Shermanesque barnstorming tour
through white-discontent meccas in states like Iowa, Pennsylvania and
Wisconsin, where he devoured popular support by promising wrath and
vengeance on the federal government.
Trump didn't appeal to K Street for help, didn't beg for mailing lists or
the phone numbers of millionaire bundlers, and never wrung his hands waiting
for favorable reviews on Meet the Press. He was the first president in
modern times to arrive in Washington not owing the local burghers.
What that meant, nobody knew, but it probably wasn't good. Leaders in both
parties had reason to panic. Democrats were calling him illegitimate.
Leading Republicans had abandoned Trump during the "grab them by the pussy"
episode. In a true autocracy, theirs would be the first heads gored on
stakes as a warning to the others. Many D.C. bureaucrats had no idea what to
expect. They were like shopkeepers awaiting the arrival of a notorious biker
gang.
Candidate Trump had lied and prevaricated so fluidly that it was impossible
to be sure where he really stood on any issue. Was he "very pro-choice," or
did he think women who got abortions deserved "some form of punishment"? Was
he an aspiring dictator and revolutionary, or merely a pragmatic charlatan
whose run for president was just a publicity stunt that got way out of hand?
The mystery seemed to end once Trump started choosing his team.
Some appointees were less terrifying than others. Former ExxonMobil chief
Rex Tillerson at least pays lip service to climate change and probably has
enough smarts to complete one side of a Rubik's Cube. Treasury pick Steven
Mnuchin would struggle to make a list of the 30 most loathsome Goldman Sachs
veterans. These and a few others were merely worst-case-scenario
corporate-influence types, industry foxes sent to man regulatory henhouses.
But the rest were the most fantastic collection of creeps since the
"Thriller" video. Many were blunderers and conspiracists whose sole
qualification for office appeared to be their open hostility to the missions
of the agencies they were tapped to run.
Trump's choice for EPA director, Scott Pruitt, was a climate-change denier
who infamously zeroed out the environmental-enforcement division from the
Oklahoma attorney general's office. For secretary of labor, Trump picked a
fast-food titan who prefers robots to human workers (robots, he said, don't
file discrimination suits!).
Trump put a brain surgeon in charge of federal housing, picked a hockey-team
owner to be secretary of the Army, and chose as budget director a
congressman best known for inspiring a downgrade to America's credit rating
by threatening to default on the national debt.
Trump's pick for energy secretary, Rick Perry, reportedly not only admitted
that he didn't know what the Department of Energy actually does, but had
called for that very agency's elimination as a presidential candidate (and
forgot that fact during a debate). Moreover, Trump had brutalized Perry
during the campaign as a dimwit among dimwits, whose "smart glasses"
affectation didn't fool anyone.
For Trump and his inner circle to name Perry to any Cabinet post at all felt
like trolling, like a football team wrapping the mascot in packing tape and
mailing him to Canada. But to send someone you're on record calling an idiot
to run the nation's nuclear arsenal, that doesn't fit easily in any bucket:
mischief, evil, incompetence – it's even a little extreme for nihilism.
Trump's lead adviser, the fast-talking Breitbart Svengali Steve Bannon,
would ultimately explain the thinking behind Trump's appointments in front
of the CPAC audience. "If you look at these Cabinet appointees, they were
selected for a reason," he said. The mysterious figure described that reason
as the "deconstruction of the administrative state."
This seemed to confirm the darkest theory of the Trump administration: a
state-smashing revolution disguised as populist political theater. A
do-nothing Cabinet could ease back on its discretionary authority to save
public lands, enforce workplace protections, uphold emissions standards. It
could (and soon would) stop investigating crooked police departments. It
could redirect funds meant to study climate change or viral outbreaks.
Continuing a theme that dominated election season, both parties were
painfully slow to accept the reality of what they were dealing with.
The early response of the Democratic leadership to Trump's picks was a
shocking strategy of partial accommodation and "picking their battles."
"I call it the law of conservation of no's," says Jeff Hauser of the
Revolving Door Project, which monitors federal appointments. "The Democrats
felt they could only say no to Trump so many times, that they had to hoard
their political capital for one or two battles."
Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Co. decided to focus their oppositional
efforts on a few select targets, particularly Trump's Health and Human
Services nominee, Georgia Rep. Tom Price.
An orthopedic surgeon with snow-white hair, sallow cheeks and the voice of a
man complaining to a waitress, Price is probably best known for spending the
past eight years leading the effort to overturn the Affordable Care Act.
In a classic example of Beltway-Clintonian triangular thinking, the
Democrats felt that Price was their best bet to score a crossover win
because of his history of favoring cuts in the popular Medicare and Medicaid
programs.
After a paradigm-crushing year in which Trump won the presidency claiming
vaccines were a hoax, global warming was a Chinese conspiracy and Ted Cruz's
dad killed JFK, Democrats were clinging to a Nineties-era playbook that said
forcing Republicans into a corner on Medicare and Social Security was still
a no-lose play in American politics.
The focus on Price was another example of Democrats' inability to recognize
a changed political landscape. But even before Trump came on the scene, this
lack of vision doomed them.
In 2013, then-Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada eliminated the filibuster
procedure for presidential nominees. Passage of the so-called Reid Rule was
widely hailed by Democrats because it solved the short-term problem of
Republican obstruction of Obama.
In reality, Reid just sabotaged the future self-defense capability of the
entire Senate. This was one of many examples of Democrats cheering an
expansion of executive power that later left them weakened under Trump.
Delaware Sen. Chris Coons was one of the first to get religion late last
year, once he started to see Trump's loony nominees marching up the Hill.
"I do regret that," Coons told CNN in late November. "[The filibuster] would
have been a terrific speed bump."
Still, it's not clear that Democrats would have used the filibuster, even if
they had it holstered. At an early-December meeting at North Dakota Sen.
Heidi Heitkamp's Washington home, several prominent Democrats reportedly met
over Chinese food and emerged with a crack-suicide-squad strategy for
fighting Trump: Talk more about pocketbook issues and maybe take on Price.
One Democrat after another sounded notes of accommodation. West Virginia
Sen. Joe Manchin said he planned to generally support Trump's picks "unless
there's just something scathing coming out that I don't know about." Sen.
Brian Schatz of Hawaii added, "We can't very well be at a fever pitch on
everything."
Price sailed through hearings and was confirmed along party lines basically
without a struggle, and the Democratic "resistance" looked cooked out of the
gate.
Another early nominee who skated through was CIA chief Mike Pompeo, a
Jesus-humping conspiracist who embraces torture and once called politics "a
never-ending struggle ... until the Rapture."
A spy chief who believes in literal Armageddon apparently wasn't "scathing"
enough to be "fevered" about, and 14 Democrats supported his nomination in a
whopping 66-32 confirmation.
Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts then gave
voice votes in favor of Trump's choice to run the Department of Housing and
Urban Development, Ben Carson.
Even if Carson were not an addled mystic who thinks gay rights are a Marxist
plot and "hummus" a Palestinian terrorist group, putting a doctor with no
economics background in charge of an agency about to take part in one of the
most complex financial projects in our history – the reorganization of
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – seemed like madness.
Carson, through an aide, said as late as November he didn't want to take a
Cabinet post because he "has no government experience," saying he didn't
want to do anything that could "cripple the presidency."
Mark it down as another first in the Trump era: Politician formally
announces his own incompetence in an attempt to prevent his own nomination,
gets nominated anyway, and is even supported by members of an opposition
party that perhaps unconsciously has begun to grade Trump's insanity on a
curve – an early example of how the relentless Trump show bends our
perception of reality.
Democratic members who cast early yea votes were besieged when they went
back home. Warren was deluged with furious Twitter responses ("Ben Carson is
ok?! Wtf is wrong with you!"), while Schumer appeared at a rally in Battery
Park in Manhattan, only to be hectored: "Stop voting for his nominees!"
The Women's March also shocked Democratic leadership. Some reports called it
the largest protest in our history, with as many as 4.2 million people
marching in 600 different cities.
These people didn't want Democrats "picking battles" and "conserving no's" –
they wanted them to hurl themselves under tank treads to stop Trump at every
turn. But what really made the message sink in for Democrats was a
mid-January hearing that provided one of their first up-close encounters
with Trump's invasion force.
The turning point comes early on the evening of January 17th, in Room 430 of
the Senate's Dirksen Building. At the center of this imposing hearing hall
with majestic circular paneling, built in the Fifties to provide the Senate
with a dramatic venue fit for the television age, sits the Health,
Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee's first visitor from Planet
Trump.
She is a mute, unassuming woman with straight blond hair, glasses and a
quizzical expression, perched at attention like someone awaiting a sermon.
The nomination of Betsy DeVos to be education secretary was surely meant on
some level as an insult to the Senate. The daughter of an auto-parts
billionaire, DeVos is also married to the heir of the Amway fortune, which
makes her something like America's reigning Queen of Suckers. Her family has
given as much as $200 million to conservative causes and politicians over
the years.
It has to have entered Trump's calculations that a large percentage of
senators for this reason would not be able to reject her no matter what she
said or did under questioning. It's exactly the sort of cruel theater in
which Trump the reality-TV producer once specialized.
DeVos arrives dressed in a blazer of bright purple. (Historians will note
this is the same color of the robes worn by Incitatus, the horse Caligula
used to troll the Senate.) Over the next three and a half hours, she will
prove to be the worst witness since William Jennings Bryan sent himself to
the stand in the Scopes Monkey Trial.
A well-known charter-school advocate who had said that "government really
sucks" and that public education was a "dead end" – who had neither attended
public school nor sent her kids to one – DeVos is at first standoffish but
predictable in her answers. But things turn surreal when Minnesota Sen. Al
Franken asks her where she stands on the question of proficiency versus
growth.
Do we judge schools according to how much their students know, or should we
better measure how much students know relative to how much they knew before?
It's the education equivalent of asking if a football coach prefers the run
or the pass.
DeVos has no idea what Franken is talking about.
"I think, if I'm understanding your question correctly around proficiency, I
would also correlate it to competency and mastery," she says, "so that each
student is measured according to the advancement that they're making in each
subject area."
"Well, that's growth," Franken says. "That's not proficiency."
DeVos stammers a brief response, then freezes. She looks like a duck trying
to read a parking meter.
As the hearing progresses, DeVos tires and her Sunday-school smile wilts
around the edges. By the time Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut asks if guns
should be allowed in schools, she's fed up.
"I think probably there, I would imagine that there is probably a gun in the
school to protect from potential grizzlies," she says, in reference to an
earlier exchange with Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi.
Murmurs shoot through the rear of the hall. The members are unaware that the
hearing is trending on Twitter. The "grizzlies" line, to use an overwrought
cliché, broke the Internet.
Committee Chair Sen. Lamar Alexander, a pink-faced Southerner whose own
fringe presidential runs in the Nineties in some ways presaged Trump's – the
difference being Alexander's populist affectation was a red-flannel shirt
instead of conspiratorial xenophobia – had miscalculated in his apparent
attempt to hide the hearing by scheduling it at night.
The Republicans also failed to adjust for the new Trump-era media landscape.
Twitter that day boiled with hot stories. Trump's NSA communications pick,
pearl-earringed Fox News blockhead Monica Crowley, had to step down over
plagiarism accusations. Trump was continuing his days-long flame war with
Georgia Rep. John Lewis, and blasting his approval ratings as "rigged." Some
51 members of Congress were announcing plans to boycott Trump's
inauguration. And so on.
"During the day, seven crazy things were happening," a committee aide
explains. "But in the evening, this was it."
When the hearing ended, ranking member Sen. Patty Murray of Washington was
amazed to find out that the HELP committee had somehow become the center of
the social-media universe.
"I looked down at my phone and saw all of these texts," she says now. "I was
like, 'Wow.'"
A video from the hearing would garner 1.2 million hits on YouTube, beyond
anything in the committee's history.
The impact of the DeVos implosion was twofold. First, the Democrats realized
they could and should fight back. Second, Republicans found the downside of
party-line votes. Many received a torrent of abuse from constituents who
demanded they vote DeVos out.
"I have heard from thousands, truly, thousands of Alaskans who have shared
their concerns about Mrs. DeVos," said Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who
dealt with protests outside her Alaska office and later estimated that
30,000 constituents called to complain.
Murkowski announced that she would pull her vote for DeVos, as did
Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. A senator voting against his or her
own party's nominee is the Beltway equivalent of an eclipse or a volcanic
lightning strike – rare and frightening to the natives.
True to form, the Democrats – they have been a step behind Trump for a while
now – never managed to peel off a third defector to defeat DeVos. But
Republicans still suffered the indignity of needing Vice President Mike
Pence to break the tie, another thing that had never before happened in the
Senate's history.
The DeVos debacle impacted Trump's choice for labor secretary, Andy Puzder.
The CEO of CKE Restaurants, which includes the Hardee's and Carl's Jr.
chains, the lecherous and moronic Puzder made DeVos look like Robert Frost.
Earlier that week, it came to light that Puzder's ex-wife had appeared in
disguise on The Oprah Winfrey Show back in the Nineties to talk about being
abused. Moreover, Puzder greenlit a line of pseudo-pornographic commercials,
including one that featured babes in postage-stamp bikinis opening wide to
wolf down "three-way burgers." Even his name, Puzder, sounds like an
unmentionable sex act.
To be confirmed, Puzder would have to run the same gauntlet of HELP
committee senators: Murray, Franken, Murphy, Warren and Bernie Sanders,
among others, all of whom had turned their cross-examinations of DeVos into
viral hits.
If silly Betsy DeVos crashed Twitter, what would hours of live Q&A with a
cleavage-obsessed multimillionaire do?
Before it came to that, four Republicans – Collins, Murkowski, Sen. Tim
Scott of South Carolina and Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia – announced they
were withholding support for Puzder's bid. Soon after, he pulled out, and
Democrats for the first time drew blood against Trump. Puzder later told Fox
News that the DeVos hearing "actually is what killed" his nomination.
From that point forward, there was no more "conservation of no's."
"I think before, some people might have been saying, 'Somewhere in his heart
[Trump] must love the country. We'll give him the benefit of the doubt,"
says Murray, stressing she herself never felt this way. "But after DeVos,
everyone realized, you can't give him the benefit of the doubt."
Murray adds that DeVos provided what seemed like proof of the Bannon theory
of Trump's governance by self-sabotage.
"You sensed it before, but now it's jelling in people's minds," Murray says.
"This was a completely different kind of administration. We had to consider
that this was a really focused deconstructive effort."
In the chambers of the Senate and on social media, the battle over Trump's
nominees felt like a comedy of manners. But out in the real world, there
were already people staring at the business end of his presidency, and the
costs were very real.
On the evening of January 28th, Munther Alaskry sits on the tarmac in a
Turkish Air Lines jet in Istanbul, his wife and two young children by his
side. They are on a stopover, headed for Houston. An Iraqi native, Alaskry
had served in combat in Iraq as a translator alongside American soldiers
dating back to 2003. He'd carried a weapon in the field, wore an
American-issued uniform and been hunted by militias in his own country for
more than a decade.
He applied for a visa to the U.S. in 2010 and, after nearly seven years of
paperwork and interviews with practically every American security agency,
was finally granted permission to immigrate in December 2016. "If that is
not extreme vetting, I don't know what is," he says.
But before his jet takes off in Istanbul, a woman comes down the aisle and
asks his wife for her passport. Alaskry knows instantly the game is up. He
and his family are pulled off the plane and flown back to Baghdad at his
expense. There is nothing to go back to. He'd sold his car and furniture. He
and his wife had quit their jobs. He is also sure to be executed if the
wrong people find him. They hide in his father-in-law's house.
"We had no idea what to do," he says. "We had nothing."
Trump's infamous executive order on January 27th barring immigration from
seven Muslim-majority countries was initially taken by conservatives as
proof that he was a doer, not a talker. "Man of Action Has Press, Democrats
and Hollywood in a Dither," The Washington Times gushed.
But the episode ended up being classic Trumpian ineptitude. The order was so
poorly thought out that even the meanest judge couldn't ratify it. It
originally included a de facto exemption for Christians, making it a glaring
violation of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. A Bush-appointed
judge, James Robart, struck it down out of the gate, and Alaskry was shortly
after able to get his family to Rochester, New York. He marveled at
Americans' inability to distinguish, say, an ISIL fighter from people like
himself, to say nothing of his children.
"The veterans, they know," Alaskry says. "But the normal people, they do not
know the difference."
A president like Trump can have an impact even if he never manages to get a
single law passed, simply by unleashing stupidity as a revolutionary force.
Of course, no one can draw a direct line from Trump to incidents like the
one in Kansas, where one of those "normal people" shot two immigrants from
India, killing one, after accosting them about their visa status. Nor can
anyone say that the Trump effect caused a Sikh man with American citizenship
to be shot outside Seattle by a man yelling, "Go back to your own country!"
If Trump and his supporters don't want to take credit for this exciting new
era of not knowing what a Muslim is, but shooting people for being one
anyway, that's OK. But Trump's executive orders were the hallmark of his
first days in office, as he signed the travel ban, pledged to overturn the
Dodd-Frank financial rules and ordered the construction of the so-called
"Great Wall of Trump," among other things.
But in most cases these orders only announced the start of long legal
battles with highly ambiguous chances for success. Take away the impact they
had as symbols of action, and most of what Trump has actually done so far,
concretely, is pick a team. He soon enough stopped bothering with that, too.
Afternoon, February 16th, the Senate. Up in the gallery above the dais, in
the cheap seats near the ceiling where they keep the reporters, rests a copy
of Robert Caro's tour de force Master of the Senate. As you sit flipping the
pages of the colossal tome, reading decades-old descriptions of the very
"drab tan damask walls" next to which you sit, you learn that this body,
like a heavy ocean-worthy ship, was designed to withstand the most violent
changes in circumstance.
Even two centuries ago, people like Jefferson and Madison understood that
Americans were likely to go crazy from time to time, and so infused the
Senate with awesome powers to stall and block the "transient impressions
into which [people] might be led."
On the floor below, Democrats are playing out the script, furiously arguing
against Mick Mulvaney, Trump's nominee to head the Office of Management and
Budget. Emboldened by their clash with DeVos and the withdrawal of Puzder,
they're finally fighting in earnest using traditional legislative weaponry.
But they still have no answer for the post-factual revolution raging outside
the Capitol that saddled them with a figure like Mulvaney in the first
place.
The South Carolina congressman with the cropped hair and the bulldog face is
one of the most disliked people on the Hill. Mulvaney orates with the charm
of a prison guard and behaves as if smiling on Capitol grounds would violate
the Framers' vision of limited government. He fits the Bannonite vision of
revolutionary destruction, having for years led a gang of fiscal conspiracy
theorists who, based on nothing whatsoever, believe that nothing bad could
come from the United States defaulting on its national debt.
"I have yet to meet someone who can articulate the negative consequences [of
defaulting]," he said in 2010.
Shortly after saying this, the United States' credit rating was downgraded
from AAA to AA+ by Standard and Poor's, thanks in large part to
congressional Republicans like Mulvaney threatening default. This episode
will cost American taxpayers an astonishing $18.9 billion due to higher
interest rates just on American securities issued that year. A similar
episode two years later cost the economy another $24 billion, making
Mulvaney and his bund of congressional "debt truthers" perhaps the most
expensively stupid people ever to be elected to federal office in America.
As the Mulvaney vote nears, one Democratic senator after another stands up
in the gallery to call him out. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois notes that
Mulvaney once questioned whether the Zika virus caused birth defects,
apparently because he didn't want the government spending money on
scientific research.
"I'm not making this up," Durbin pleads.
The Republicans yawn. One of the brilliant innovations of the Trump
phenomenon has been the turning of expertise into a class issue. Formerly,
scientists were political liabilities only insofar as their work clashed
with the teachings of TV Bible-thumpers. Now, any person who in any way
disputes popular misconceptions – that balancing a budget is just like
balancing a checkbook, that two snowfalls in a week prove global warming
isn't real, that handguns would have saved Jews from the Holocaust or little
kids from the Sandy Hook massacre – is part of an elitist conspiracy to deny
the selfhood of the Google-educated American. The Republicans understand
this axiom: No politician in the Trump era is going to dive in a foxhole to
save scientific research. Scientists, like reporters, Muslims and the
French, are out.
Most conservatives who opposed Trump over the past two years on grounds of
basic logic now realize that they'll suffer if they take stands against his
conspiratorial ideas on immigrants, the budget, "so-called" judges, climate
change or anything else. Trump has made being the voice of reason
politically dangerous. Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, for instance, is already
saddled with a Trump-aligned primary challenger and the enmity of Breitbart,
which ran a photo of him next to an "I'm With Her" logo.
After Mulvaney squeaks through, the Democrats plunge into desperate tactics
to stop the next bugbear, EPA nominee Pruitt. The drawling, devout Oklahoman
represents the epitome of the Bannon ethos, failing in committee to name a
single environmental regulation he supported.
To try to stop him, Dems invoke one of those senatorial stalling tactics, a
rule that allows them to hold off a final vote for 30 hours, provided they
keep the floor open through the Mr. Smith Goes to Washington technique of
continuous debate. They stay up all night, with one member after another
blasting Pruitt as the kind of man who would use a spotted owl as a
dashboard ornament. But in the many rhetorical dead spots, they hit the
theme of the month: Russia.
At the time, Trump's national security adviser and noted Pizzagate
conspiracy theorist Gen. Michael Flynn had just resigned, after revelations
that he had unreported contact with the Russian ambassador prior to Trump's
inauguration. Within a few weeks, Attorney General Jeff Sessions will be
rolled up in a similar imbroglio.
No matter what you believe on the Russia front, the manner in which the
story is being prosecuted is striking. After failing to stop nutcases like
Mulvaney using conventional tactics, the Democrats forayed into the
unconventional. The scandal so dominates blue-state media that Russia Wars
can almost be said to be the Democrats' competing reality franchise. This
show even incorporates Trump's sensational political style, cycling lurid
accusations with tune-in-next-time promises of future revelations. As
damaging as it's been, it's yet another example of Trump's uncanny ability
to Trump-ize the world around him.
All of Trump's opponents sooner or later fall victim to the same pattern. He
is so voluminously offensive that Christ himself would abandon a positive
message to chase his negatives. His election so completely devastated
Democratic voters that many cannot think of him except in the context of
removing him as soon as possible.
A scenario under which he is impeached somehow for colluding with Vladimir
Putin to disrupt last year's election seems like the needed shortcut.
Unfortunately, despite a lot of lies about meetings and conversations and
other curious behavior, there's no actual proof of conspiracy. The former
director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said there was "no
evidence" of such collusion as of his last day in office.
That has put congressional Democrats in the perilous position of having to
litter their Russia speeches with caveats like, "We do not know all the
facts" and "More information may well surface." They're often stuck using
the conspiracy-theory technique of referring to what they don't know as a
way of talking about what they hope to find out.
Trump has responded to all this in a predictable manner, leveling wild
counter-accusations, saying Obama had been "tapping my phones" and was a
"bad (or sick) guy." Trump's senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, who will
either be ambassador to Mars or in a straitjacket by the end of this
presidency, followed up by suggesting the government may have used a
microwave oven to surveil Trump Tower during the election.
Maybe Trump didn't plan this, and it's just coincidence that where we are
now – dueling accusations of criminality, investigations instead of debates,
jail promised to the loser – is what politics would look like in a WWE
future where government is a for-profit television program. And maybe it's
not the Trump effect that has Democrats so completely focused on him instead
of talking to their voters, a mistake they also made last election season.
Still, the Russia story is the ultimate in high-stakes politics. If proof
emerges that Trump and Putin colluded, it could topple this presidency. But
if no such evidence comes out, the gambit could massively backfire,
validating Trump's accusations of establishment bias and media overreach.
In the short term, however, there's no question that Russia is bloodying
Trump politically. An evening speech during the Pruitt hearings by Minnesota
Sen. Amy Klobuchar hits the typical notes.
She cleverly references a trip she made to Ukraine with McCain and Graham,
both owners of key votes in future legislative battles. She then goes all
out rhetorically, hinting at bombshell future revelations: blackmail,
betrayal, treason.
"If we are committed to ensuring that Russia's hacking invasions and
blackmail do not go unchecked," she says, "we must do everything in our
power to uncover the full extent of this interference in our own political
system... ."
This goes on all night. Democrats stick it out until morning, only to wake
up to find that two of their own caucus members from coal country have
crossed over to give Pruitt their support.
Their cave-in shows that the power of Trump's base extends even to
Democrats. The two senators, Heitkamp of North Dakota and Manchin of West
Virginia, both face re-election in 2018 and hail from states where Trump won
handily. So much for throwing their bodies under tank treads: The Democrats
can't even convince their members to forget about re-election long enough to
save the EPA. The ayes have it, 52-46, handing environmental enforcement to
a man likely bent on a campaign of inaction, portending perhaps a return now
to the good old days of the Cuyahoga River spontaneously catching fire.
As the month of February nears its end, Trump has won far more than he's
lost on the nomination front. But he appears to have been scarred by this
process that saw one appointee resign (Flynn), four more withdraw (Puzder,
Crowley, would-be Army Secretary Vincent Viola and Navy Secretary pick
Philip Bilden), and another, Sessions, caught up in scandal and forced to
recuse himself from the Russia probe after possibly perjuring himself during
his confirmation.
As much of a dumpster fire as it may have seemed from the outside, the rocky
nomination process has actually been a honeymoon of sorts for Trump, a
period when he only needed a simple majority in a 52-Republican Senate to
get his people passed. Going forward, as of now, for actual legislation, the
filibuster will be in play, and Trump will need 60 votes to do real damage.
"The 60-vote universe is where he's got a problem," says longtime Democratic
strategist Simon Rosenberg.
That theory is borne out a few weeks later, when a House bill to repeal the
Affordable Care Act runs into trouble in the Senate, and no fewer than eight
Republicans announce their objections. The Congressional Budget Office
complicates the picture by scoring the Republican bill and concluding that
it would leave 14 million fewer people insured next year.
This contradicts Trump's "drinks for the house!"-style assertion that a new
plan would mean "insurance for everybody." OMB head Mulvaney quickly jumps
in to say the CBO is "terrible at counting" and dismisses the score as bad
math. Newt Gingrich, whose continued relevance as a go-to talking head is
another unfortunate consequence of this presidency, goes further, crying
that the CBO should be "abolished" and replaced by "three to five
professional firms." In modern American politics, every game is a blown call
by the refs.
Just a month or so into Trump's administration, one of the central promises
of his campaign – the killing off of the Affordable Care Act – is in
trouble. Trump's inability to hold coalitions together, or really do much of
anything beyond generate TV ratings, is already showing. But just as it was
last year when the punditocracy told him he'd made himself unelectable,
Trump's ace in the hole may be that he doesn't care. His history is that
when the playing field doesn't work for him, he moves it. The Framers may
have designed the government to withstand bouts of popular madness, but
there are no checks and balances against the power of celebrity. A president
who is both a tyrant and disinterested in governance would have blown their
minds.
"At some point, he just stopped appointing people," says an incredulous
Hauser, the capital watchdog, at the end of February. "He's only made 30
appointments. That means he's still got over 1,000 empty posts. Nearly 200
ambassador posts are in limbo. He named Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court,
but not a single judge beyond that – with over 100 empty federal seats to be
filled. Nobody knows what the hell is going on."
Sources theorize that Trump's appointments slowed thanks to a combination of
factors. Those include a fear of more DeVos-style blowback and an inability
to find people capable of passing security clearances (at least six White
House staffers reportedly had to be dismissed for this reason).
A darker explanation was offered by a ProPublica story revealing that Trump
sent waves of nonpolitical appointees to the agencies in so-called beachhead
teams, i.e., people sent in groups under temporary appointments of four to
eight months.
These appointees did not have to be confirmed by Congress. Some are freaks
and fringe weirdos on a level below even the goofballs in Trump's Cabinet. A
fair number carry amorphous "special assistant" titles, making it difficult
to know what their duties are.
More unnerving is the presence in the Cabinet-level agencies of a seemingly
new position, "senior White House adviser."
Some Hill sources believe these new officials are reporting directly to
Steve Bannon, who is fast achieving mythical status as the empire's supreme
villain. On the surface, Bannon is just another vicious ex-hippie of the
David Horowitz/Michael Savage school, a former Grateful Dead fan who
overswung the other way to embrace a Nazistic "culture first" alt-right
movement. Everyone from Time magazine (which called him "the great
manipulator") to The New York Times (which called him a "de facto
president") is rushing to make him into a superempowered henchman of the
extreme right, a new Roy Cohn – fitting, since Cohn himself was one of
Trump's first mentors. But whether he's Cohn or just a fourth-rate imitator
with a fat neck is still unclear.
Rosenberg believes the anemic pace of Senate-track political nominations,
coupled with this flood of unconfirmed political hires, may be at least in
part a conscious strategy to try to decrease the autonomy of the agencies
and increase the control of the White House, in particular the Bannon camp.
Even at Tillerson's introductory speech, Rosenberg points out, a young Trump
campaign organizer and former Chris Christie aide named Matthew Mowers is
seen standing next to Tillerson.
"He's like a 27-year-old kid," Rosenberg says. "Normally you would never
have a young political appointee in the shot with the principal."
This sounds like Kremlinology – the days when we were forced to try to
figure out who was on the outs in the Soviet Politburo by seeing who sat
next to whom in photos of Red Square parades – and it fits the Soviet flavor
of the news leaking out of the agencies. Congressional sources in contact
with the State Department report that some "beachhead" appointees wanted to
start making immediate drastic cuts, closing consulates abroad willy-nilly,
without asking for information or visiting the locations.
The Trump government has been besieged with damaging leaks – everything from
internal Homeland Security reports showing little risk from immigrants of
"Muslim ban" countries to alleged orders to consider reopening CIA "black
sites." D.C. has never seen anything like it: Reporters are able to get
damaging information about the goings-on inside agencies just by
cold-calling the right numbers.
The administration is so concerned with leakers within the State Department
that Tillerson has supposedly banned note-taking at meetings. "The level of
paranoia is off the charts," reports a former senior official.
Tillerson himself is said to have postponed some diplomatic business to
focus on what is euphemistically described as "fixing" the State Department.
Probably this means more weeding out of civil servants, something going on
across government.
Most infamously, Attorney General Sessions – fast becoming the poster child
for the Trump administration's inability to avoid stepping on its own
genitalia – asked 46 U.S. attorneys to resign, including Southern District
of New York chief Preet Bharara, who reportedly was specifically asked to
stay on just after the election.
Some of these moves sound like Bannon's much-publicized bent toward Leninist
thinking: Purge unbelievers, fill the bureaucracies with loyal dunces,
concentrate power, eschew governance goals for political ones. But it's hard
to say how much unanimity of purpose there could be.
When Sessions got caught up seeming to have lied to the Senate about meeting
Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, a video surfaced showing a scene in which
Trump was reportedly raining expletives on Bannon and others over the
Sessions fiasco. If all this chaos is part of a cunning plan to destroy
government from within, it sure is cleverly disguised as a bunch of paranoid
amateurs flailing around and turning on one another weeks into the job.
One reporter tasked with covering the appointments says the staffing issue
comes down to the same question we always have about Trump: Is this a scheme
to destroy government, or cluelessness? "It's just so hard to tell," he
says, "where this falls on the stupid-to-evil spectrum."
While the chaos of Trump's first months has caused him problems in the
Beltway, it seems not to have hurt him a lick with his fans. After the CPAC
speech, Trump supporters offer their takes on the nominee battles. The
consensus? The Democrats who opposed Trump's picks are a bunch of smartasses
who need to lighten up.
University of Delaware student Daniel Worthington says the Democrats'
grilling of DeVos really rubbed him the wrong way.
"You come off as douchey, when somebody's like, 'Oh, you don't know the
difference between proficiency and growth?'" he says. "I'd be like, 'You're
kind of an asshole.'"
When asked if he thinks Puzder should have been confirmed, Worthington nods.
"Yeah, we don't get Carl's Jr. up here," he says. "But I like their
commercials."
Tuesday, February 28th, a joint session of Congress, the last day of Trump's
first full month in office. It's less than a minute into his first major
national address, and Trump is already eyeballs-deep in bull.
"Recent threats targeting Jewish community centers and vandalism of Jewish
cemeteries," he says, "remind us that ... we are a country that stands
united in condemning hate and evil in all of its very ugly forms." Just
hours before, he told a group of state attorneys general that hate crimes
against Jews were overblown, that "sometimes it's the reverse, to make
people – or to make others – look bad."
Trump moves on to what the press will describe as an "emotional moment." He
recognizes Carryn Owens, the widow of a Navy SEAL whose death Trump only
hours before had blamed on both the previous administration and his
generals. But on TV, Mrs. Owens sobs as Trump says her husband Ryan's name
had been "etched into eternity."
The press goes wild. Van Jones of CNN, for years a fervent critic of Trump
who notably called Trump's electoral victory a "whitelash," gushes that
Trump "became president of the United States" during the Owens episode.
The New York Times, denounced as an "enemy of the American people" just over
a week before, raves about the speech. They describe the "optimistic
address" as "soothing comfort food" in which Trump "seemed to accept the
fetters of formality and tradition that define and dignify the presidency."
The soft-touch treatment seems to make no sense, until one remembers that
the pundit class is the cheapest of dates, and while President Trump may be
a dolt, the reality-show Trump is as clever a manipulator as American
politics has ever seen. Brilliantly, he's turned the presidency into a
permanent campaign, one in which an ostensibly hostile news media has once
again become accomplice to whatever the Trump phenomenon is, by voraciously
feeding at its financial trough.
The genius of Trump has always been his knack for transforming everyone in
his orbit into a reality-TV character. As a candidate, he goaded Lindsey
Graham into putting a cellphone in a blender, inspired pseudo-intellectual
Rand Paul to put out a video of himself chain-sawing a tax code in half, and
pushed Marco Rubio into making jokes about dong size during a debate. He
even managed to get into a public spat with the pope. Whatever your lowest
common denominator is, Trump will bring it out and make sport of it.
The same phenomenon is now in play with the whole world. President Trump,
following Bannon's lead, describes the press as an "opposition party" out to
get him, and before long, they basically are. Trump accuses the Democratic
National Committee of rigging the game against Bernie Sanders; new DNC chair
Tom Perez, in a tweet that could play in the Borscht Belt, says Trump's
weekly address was "translated from the original Russian and everything."
Even before Trump trolls Sweden, Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Isabella
Lövin trolls him, running a photo of herself signing a law while surrounded
by women – a parody of the already-infamous photo of Trump signing an
anti-abortion executive order while surrounded entirely by men.
And when Rachel Maddow finally gets hold of a tiny slice of Trump's tax
returns, instead of soberly reporting it as a small-but-intriguing piece of
a larger picture, she hypes it on Twitter like the scoop of the century –
exactly as Trump would have done. Social media blasted Maddow as the second
coming of Geraldo Rivera opening up Al Capone's vault. Everything connected
with Trump becomes tabloidized. The show is unstoppable.
Nearly two years into our relationship with Donald Trump, politician, his
core schtick is no longer really a secret. The new president swings wildly
between buffoon and strongman acts, creating confusion and disorder. While
his enemies scramble to make sense of the outrages of a week before or
yesterday or 10 minutes ago, and spend valuable energy wondering whether the
man is crazy or stupid or cunning (or perhaps all three things at once),
Trump continually presses forward.
We always assumed there was a goal behind it all: cattle cars, race war,
autocracy. But those were last century's versions of tyranny. It would make
perfect sense if modern America's contribution to the genre were far dumber.
Trump in the White House may just be a monkey clutching history's biggest
hand grenade. Yes, he's always one step ahead of us, and more dangerous than
any smart person, and we can never for a minute take our eyes off him.
But while we keep looking for his hidden agenda, it's our growing addiction
to the spectacle of his car-wreck presidency that is the real threat. He is
already making idiots and accomplices of us all, bringing out the worst in
each of us, making us dumber just by watching. Even if Trump never learns to
govern, after four years of this we will forget what civilization ever
looked like – and it will be programming, not policy, that will have changed
the world.
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