For some time now, the Right has been atwitter with the suggestion that Bill Barr was about to wrap up an investigation into the “true” origins of the Mueller Report. Ok, now, at the time, I assumed he was doing an internal review of the US government in search of the super secret “Deep State.” Silly me, he wasn’t doing that, he was actively running around the GLOBE using his power as a government official to undermine the basis of the Mueller Report.
And guess who all this goes back to — Paul Motherfucking Manafort. And who is Manafort tight with — The Russians. And who else is wrapped up in all that bullshit?
Mike Flynn.
This next part you need to kinda let sink in — things had gotten so bad that House Trump thought it was totally cool and legal to do this essentially in broad daylight. In fact, things had gotten so bad that they didn’t even realize that maybe releasing the whistleblower complaint and rough transcript might not be the brightest move on their part.
This is jaw dropping once you let it roll around in your mind a little bit. It’s staggering. Astonishing.
It’s extremely difficult to work on a novel when the country around you is burning to the ground. Anyway.
If I got any — any — engagement to the idea of starting an email list devoted to impeachment coverage I would do it in a heartbeat. But someone, somewhere would have to take the trouble to actually contact me via email. [migukin (at) gmail (dot) com]
While Moscow Mitch said he would, in fact, open a trial in the Senate against Trump should it get that far, he immediately suggested he would move to dismiss it as soon as possible. So, lulz?
Trump Bonkers Watch: Trump is showing mental strain, but it’s still sufficiently within the spectrum of sanity that the AP is unwilling to even admit that he said some pretty provocative things on Twitter. I would suggest this is because Trump hasn’t literally told people to take up arms against the big meanies who are hurting his fee-fees. Should that change, then watch for the political ground to shift under us. Trump is no where near where he’s likely to end up. And Republicans aren’t going to do anything about it. In fact, the case could be made that Kris “I Hate Brown People” Kobach will be the new center of the Republican Party should there be a post-Trump era in the immediate future. Let that sink in.
Republicans continue to have no strategic messaging other than this:
In fact, things have gotten so bad that in a sense, Republicans are following Trump’s lead. He amps up the civil war / violence rhetoric and they run with it. Newt, specifically, is suggesting that impeachment is a “Constitutional coup”and as such not legitimate. This is, of course, setting the Republicans up for a pretty spectacular problem when bullets start flying and someone gets hurt — or worse. Americans are extremely difficult to rile up, but once you do manage to do so, watch out.
What’s even more troubling is the politically battle hasn’t even been joined yet. The two sides are in shock and are struggling to figure out what to do. When we begin to get a handle on things, that’s when the sparks actually begin to fly. Or, put another way, there’s a lot of slack in the rope right night. It’s beginning to unravel on its way to eventually getting taunt, but we still have a ways go to.
Even more disturbing is when Trump finally snaps, I honestly have no way to telling what the endgame is. It’s all up to the fates at that point.
In the lead up to the 2016 election, I frequently said I’d rather have a Nixon-level crook (Hillary Clinton) president than an alien space hugger on fire with acid dropping off it (Donald Trump.) No one listened to me, probably because they took the metaphor to be too ridiculous to be taken seriously.
Flash forward three years and it turns out I was right. Trump through the Republican Party is an alien xenomorph incubating in our nation’s political abdomen. How else do you describe an organization that so values Trump over all other parts of our society, politics and culture that they would continue to support him even now. When he rants about “civil war” on Twitter, not only do they defend it, they embrace it — Newt is out there calling the current Democratic impeachment effort a “Constitutional coup.”
It’s growing apparent that two things are fusing into one — Trump’s criminal incompetence and is growing mental instability. Republicans are no longer moored to any form of political reality other than protecting Trump going forward. What’s growing more serious by the moment is things are growing darker by the moment because of Trump’s deranged tweets. But Republicans feel the MAGA base will punish them if they don’t support Trump, so they are willing to ride this pony to the bottom.
It all grows even more serious when you realize that even if we somehow miraculously end Trump’s deranged, tyrannical rule, the conditions that created him aren’t going anywhere. There are a half a dozen younger, more passionate Trump-like political figures chomping at the bit to finish the damage that Trump has begun. In a sense, American democracy may get a second chance for the sole reason that that Trump’s deranged and so incompetent that he is brought down not by any external force but by his own epic self-own.
It pains me to say this, but if we actually do want to honor the hundreds of thousands of people who have died to protect the Union and its Constitution, we will have to begin to look at the Republican Party as a fascist enterprise. We will have to do it collectively. We will have to en masse simply agree never to vote for another Republican candidate for the foreseeable future.
Republicans got their smash and grab plutocrat tax cut and they got their dozens of young hack judges on the Federal bench. Addressing those issues, given that Trump won his election under false pretenses is something to consider. But this “nuclear option” comes with a serious danger — about half the population actually agrees with MAGA.
If we want to keep the country together, we’re going to have to figure out a way to bridge the divide between those who believe in liberal democracy and those who don’t. I’m not smart enough to figure that one. Maybe Maggie Haberman can use her access journalism to save the day.
President Abraham Lincoln is a personal hero. The debate as to who is the greater president, he or Washington, is a conundrum I often think about. While Washington laid the nation’s original cornerstone, it was Lincoln would laid the foundation for a new, stronger house.
In a sense, the America we live in, the America we long for, the America that at our current erratic, lawless tyrant would have us believe he is making great “again” is Lincoln’s America. What made Lincoln such a powerful historical force is he lived in a time before the segmentation of society that we now live in.
We remember Lincoln as a statesman, but he was much more. If you plopped him in modern America, he could be a late night talk show host. Or maybe he might find fame on SNL. He could be a law professor. He was a gifted writer and storyteller. Given the opportunities of the modern world, he might simply be a screenwriter in Hollywood.
I only bring him up because you could, in a sense, call Trump something of a disruptor to Lincoln’s long-ago imagine of America. I would even suggest that Lincoln is modern America’s Harri Sheldon. Lincoln formulated a plan — uniting the Union under the rule of law and equality — and Trump is The Mule. The Mule, as you may know, is a character in The Foundation Saga who screws up The Sheldon Plan to create a Second Galactic Empire after 1,000 years, instead of 10,000.
We come to a moment of decision. One that I think Lincoln himself would be aghast at. There’s a reason why several notable historians say we’re now in a “cold civil war.” Some tectonic flaws in the House that Lincoln Built are beginning to grow critical. We no longer have shared values. Even universal truth — the thing that holds everything together — is beginning to be questioned.
The central problem is the Republican Party no longer the party of Lincoln. It no longer believes in the gift that Father Abraham gave us all — liberal democracy. As such, someone who is criminally incompetent such as Trump now is erratically at the wheel of the ship of state. Lincoln was our captain during the fateful journey of civil insurrection. Trump now wilfully not only raises the spectre of a war that would, again, pit brother against brother, he wants to make America a nation not of Lincoln’s dream, but of blood and soil.
Historians need a narrative. They need a way to assure us that the long arc of history does, in fact, bend towards justice. But that is misleading. America has been very lucky. Our birthright is a Constitutional system based on truth and the rule of law. Trump would have us believe that our tribunes, our truth tellers, the press, are the “enemy of the people.” He wants to bring darkness to the land. To end American exceptionalism. To make us a nation based on lies and the arbitrary administration of the law based on power.
I’d like to think that Lincoln, if he was alive today, would see Trump’s craven injustice. Whatever he was doing, be a screenwriter or late night TV show host, Lincoln would come to the forefront of this crisis. Like many people at the time of the Civil War, Lincoln was afforded an opportunity to prove himself in ways he ordinarily would not. U.S. Grant himself was nothing but a drunk for nearly a decade before Lincoln picked him to end the scourge of the Army of Northern Virginia.
The point of all of this is leadership comes with consequences. By definition, courage is seeing danger and rushing towards it, not away from it. We are now in a crisis that is only going to get worse as our American Caligula continues to be emboldened by the callow sycophancy of what was a great and grand old party.
We have a Union. It is up to ensure that we continue to make it more perfect and not succumb to the siren call of tyranny.
No one listens to me. And generally no one reads this blog. But for my own peace of mind, I will make some observations about how bad things could get in the next few weeks.
As I’ve said many times, we’ve elected a deranged version of Being There’s Chauncey Gardner. Trump is not a political genius. Access journalists have had a vested interest in making us thinking this because if Trump really is just a lucky doofus then that means maybe going to Harvard doesn’t make them as cool as they think it does. Trump is not only a moron, he’s wilfully ignorant. He’s unstable, racist and misogynistic. The case could be made that only his love for his daughter — and maybe a native political skill — prevents him from being an anti-semite. Even then, I’m grading doofus on a severe curve.
Stephen King’s “The Dead Zone” may be a little too on the nose.
The worst part of all of this, the thing that makes Trump himself the biggest mistake in American history besides Prohibition and the Dred Scott Decision is we wilfully elected someone who obviously never took his oath seriously. He never took it seriously and he was wilful when given the opportunity to bring as may people down with him when given the chance. That Trump would wait 24 hours to call up the president of Ukraine after being given a political pardon by Chris Wallace because of Mueller’s “poor optics” in his testimony before Congress is the single biggest self-own in American political history.
Nothing comes close. Nixon not burning the tapes comes close, but it’s my understanding he had some health issues with his legs at the time and he was bed ridden and not physically up to doing it.
And so, this is where you need to take a deep breath and have a stiff drink. It’s going to get dark pretty quick. Trump is never going to resign and it’s debatable if Republicans will ever buckle. Or, if they do, Trump’s mental deterioration will have reached a point where we all throw up a few times at the realization that we don’t know exactly who is in control of the nuclear codes.
You Know It.
That we had a similar problem with Nixon during Watergate does not make me feel any better. Nixon — I think — began to act erratically enough that there was talk of the nuclear chain of command debated not being too quick to follow his orders. And Nixon raised our threat level — If I recall correctly — at a politically advantageous moment.
All of this leads to a very specific issue — if somehow Trump self-owns enough that the Senate actually convicts him, what’s the exact sequence of events then? If Trump isn’t at Trump Tower by that point, how, exactly, would we get him out of the White House? He is likely to have snapped by that point and he will have his Twitter feed to make himself feel better. Having an ex-president rage-tweeting all day and squatting in the White House doesn’t make me feel great.
I have my doubts that things will get that bad, and, yet, my general predictions about Trump slowly cracking up once the impeachment process began are holding up quite well. No one can predict the future, least of all me. But I do think we should change the way we look at all of this.
Oh boy.
This is not going to be a political process, this is going to be the entire nation holding its breath to see if Trump goes Howard Beale on us and how the system reacts. No government official can follow an illegal order in the American system — though Trump has “joked” about pardons. Lulz? So, I guess it’s at least possible Trump might begin to go full Nazi on us and simply tell people in a “joking” fashion that he’ll pardon them. (Come to think of it, the president’s all-powerful pardoning ability is a definite weakness in the American system of based on law.)
I just want to make this clear — take this seriously. We may be careening towards a mixture of the OJ Trial and 9/11 with a little bit of Network and I, Claudius thrown in.
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It gives me no pleasure to observe that my scenario running on the topico what might happen to Trump’s mental stability is beginning to play out about the way I predicted. We aren’t where we may endup yet, but we’re getting there.
The pressure of a looming impeachment is beginning to way on Trump and his already weak mental constitution can’t cope. But he’s still well within the spectrum of his previous behavior on Twitter. He’s ranting like a trapped rat, yes, but an adept sycophant could probably defend it on a Sunday morning chat show. It’s when Trump takes it to the next logical step and does things that are demonstrably indefensible, then what is now a chronic DL crisis is, well, just a crisis.
Trump’s bonkers behavior is happening right now and the press isn’t really conveying to the public what it all means. I guess they don’t want to scare people. But there may come a point where things come to a boil and not even access journalists can explain it all away in soothing tones. Here’s what we may be able to expect in the coming days and weeks.
Trump directly tells MAGA supporters to pick up arms against the government, specifically Congress. He will suggest who to kill and why.He may dox Orange Crush on Twitter and tell MAGA to hunt him down and kill him.
He will tweet out a dick pick.
He will start tweeting out the n-word to any notable person of color who he has a past history of hostility towards.
And, worst of all, he will finally suggest in an extremely passive-aggressive fashion that globalist cucks want him to kill himself. When that happens, we remember that he has the nuclear codes. We might find ourselves throwing up a few times, thinking of what might happen.
How likely is any of that? I honestly don’t know. I’m just running a scenario given datapoints that seem to fit future possibilities. Maybe none of that will happen, but they are things to keep in the back of your mind going forward.
What’s more, there’s one loony thing that is the wildcard — will Trump begin to use the levers of power in an attempt to escape his impeachment destiny? In shades of Caligula naming a horse Counsel, he might name Rudy a Special Prosecutor to look into Hillary’s emails. He might somehow talk to Putin or “Little Rocket Man” to stir up trouble for him so he’s a war president. He could finally do that Executive Order ending birthright citizenship.
But that’s a ways down the road. Or, it is until it’s not. That’s why this is beginning to make me nervous. He could simply abruptly lurch forward into bonkers territory in a pretty spectacular fashion and we won’t be prepared for it.
Or maybe not. He might just be chronically somewhat bonkers through the next few weeks and months and never finally crack. But I am nervous. I’m growing concerned.
It’s difficult to articulate how bad a Sunday Republicans had today, at least superficially, when it came to messaging a retail political defense of the president. The reason it was so bad is here it is Sunday afternoon and nothing really stands out. Both sides haven’t really rally around any discernible argument beyond the basics.
You say you want a revolution…
Yes, Democrats have cold hard facts. But we’re still in the gobsmacked stage of the scandal. Meanwhile, Republicans are not only attacking on just a tactical level, they are resorting to rhetorical bobbing and weaving not done in good faith. If Sen. Lindsey Graham is resorting to “let’s agree to disagree” on TV after spending the previous day golfing with the president, well, that’s a pretty powerful statement of how bad things are for Republicans right this second.
I’m extremely reluctant to suggest Trump is anywhere near facing a final existential threat. Hillary hasn’t done her gloating “victory tour” on TV this week. She could very well change the narrative from “oh my god the president is a traitor” to “Hillary Clinton is going to jail.” She is so bad at some very basic elements of being a public figure that it’s a tragedy. Yes, she’s a historic trailblazer for the status of women in politics, but she’s a problematic one. So, in that sense, I’m holding back any judgement of how serious things are for Trump.
And, yet, I have to go back to something very basic — Trump is an idiot. He is such an idiot that he literally found the only thing that could possibly force Nancy Pelosi’s hand in impeachment — allowing her to lean into her status as a Constitutional official. Trump is so very, very stupid. And I still don’t feel that he, himself, is taking this seriously. He’s not freaked out yet. When it happens, we’ll all know it.
One of the reasons I would be very worried if I was a Republican proxy for the president is how easy to box them in rhetorically. Even if you give them that Hunter Biden is some sort of criminal mastermind, that Trump would use the office of the presidency to find that dirt is a grave abuse of power. And that they would put that transcript in an eyes-only server is even worse. That House Trump would be so detached from any connection to the normal rules of government behavior that they would feel it was “totally cool and legal” to do this and then turn around and release the rough transcript and the complaint itself is rather embarrassing.
And we’re just at the beginning of this process. We have weeks for Trump to continue to self-own in various ways. One could make the case that at this point there’s a chance America might have its own “Glorious Revolution.” This was when the British ruling class politely invited William & Mary of Orange to take over the country in a peaceful coup / invasion. If as many people really are implicated in all of this as is feared, there’s at least a chance that a few powerful bolts are going to pop off the government before it’s all over with.
I’ve not forgotten that Pence apparently was bribing House Trump to keep his place on the ticket by going WAY out of his way to stay at Trump property in Ireland. If the American people finally get riled up boot Trump, there’s at least a chance that Pence will be bounced in short measure as well. But he’s likely to name Ivanka or Nikki Haley his replacement with lighting speed if that seemed a possibility. I wouldn’t suggest Nancy Pelosi start measuring the curtains in the Oval Office quite yet.
But for House Trump to implode so completely that even Pence could not escape its black hole would be the single most astonishing event in American political history. We are not prepared for that. It’s not an event that we should be looking forward to. I just want Trump out of office and politically ruined.
It is growing apparent from the chatter in the extreme Right’s echo chamber that there is one reason and one reason only why they want to know the identity of “Orange Crush.” Once they know who the whistleblower is, they use the messaging tools they feel were used on Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings.
They don’t want to talk about anything the cold hard, collaborated facts that are an existential threat to Trump’s presidency — they want to talk about anything Orange Crush has ever done wrong in their entire life. Because a majority of Republican Senators agree with Kavanaugh’s actual judicial policies, the fact that the nomination was in trouble because of something that happens when Kavanaugh was a young man has led many Right wing commentators to wash their hands of liberal democracy altogether.
So, in the eyes of MAGA, the moment they know who Orange Crush is, they have a strategic messaging roadmap — you scream at the top of your lungs that Orange Crush smoked pot at a college party on Twitter instead of addressing what they proved to be correct about Trump. This is something similar to the “but her emails” line of argument.
This is where we are now politically.
There’s really only one major problem with this otherwise fool proof line of reasoning — the conventional wisdom is beginning to form that Orange Crush is a patriot. Every day the Republican Cult lacks a strategic response to what’s going on is another day closer to this actually, in fact, being an existential threat to not just the Trump Administration, but the Republican Party itself.
They could still very well pull it off. I know a decent amount about American presidential history and if the facts that we know hold up, what Orange Crush exposed would be, in fact, the biggest political scandal in American history. In fact, the only scandal I can compare it to is the circumstances surrounding the founding of the Anti-Masonic Party. As I understand it, that party was founded because the Masons used their power in New England to get a Mason off for murder.
The TrumpUkraine scandal takes that quantum leap forward in gravity. It’s not a problem of a secret society in New England overreaching, it’s that the leader of the country, a duly elected president of the United States would go to a foreign power to influence an election. What makes this even worse, is he did it 24 hours after the “bad optics” of Bob Mueller gave him a political pardon. And what’s even WORSE, is he is inching towards getting Orange Crush murdered because of a “joke.”
In the end, this may very well be The Stand of American History. The lines between Good and Evil will be clearly drawn. And, I hate to break it to you, the good guys don’t always win. Just ask he Jews of Europe in September 1939. Or the French Third Republic in 1940. Or the people of Eastern Europe after WWII. Or the people in the graves of Cambodia’s Killing Fields.
Either we’re careening towards darkness, or some sort of national absolution. If I knew which one, I would be working at the RAND Corporation, now giving a TED Talk and smelling my own farts.
Again, no one is going to save us but ourselves.
Shelton Bumgarner is writing his first novel. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail (dot) com if you’re not insane.
Today has been unusual in the annals of Trump Era Republican messaging. It’s all been tactical. I’ve not seen any kind of cogent, strategic response to what Trump is accused of doing.
A lot of quibbling about this or that thing to suggest that either “everybody does it” or “it’s a sinister Deep State plot,” but no cohesive vision as to why Trump should stay in office other than he’s Der Fuhrer and that’s that. With the news that the Trump regime is now abusing power in a spectacular and brazen way by looking to of all things Hillary Clinton’s emails and we know this is, in fact, the existential battle royale I’ve said it is.
The Caine Mutiny (1954)
Directed by Edward Dmytryk
Shown: Humphrey Bogart
Because of the gimme of the Mueller Investigation being not only long but a bust, Trump’s been given the time needed to figure out how to use — and abuse — the levers of power. If Trump’s messaging plan is literally use “but her emails” as a reason why he should in power, he and his corrupt cronies are in serious, serious, serious trouble.
In a sense, all of Trump’s insane attacks on the press have been a lead up to this moment. He believes he’s so discredited the press in the eyes of the MAGA base, if no one else, that they “won’t know who to believe” when push comes to shove. But as of this moment, things aren’t going according to the usual plan.
It’s becoming more and apparent which members of the power structure have a vested interest in absolute devotion to sucking the MAGA teet and who don’t. Some people are simply embarrassing themselves to such an extent that it doesn’t matter what happens next — they’re career as nothing more than a partisan hack is assured. If Trump survives, they become a spokesperson for a corrupt authoritarian regime, if he loses, then their career is destroyed. Brit Hume, specifically, is playing with fire. A very big career-ending bonfire, in fact.
At this point, Trump has leverage over the situation because he’s president and he has no shame. He knows the MAGA base doesn’t believe in liberal democracy, so lulz. The only problem for him is things are moving so fast and he got caught red handed in an easy to understand fashion. Trump is a moron, so he thinks as long as he keeps the base he can survive in the Senate. He thinks Republicans Senators would rather vote to acquit and in the hopes of surviving their primary then brace for the general than vote to convict and lose to a MAGA primary challenger. But if every other political polling group grows to hate Trump with a historical white hot rage, a few Republican Senators might realize that their hopes in the general might not be all that great. They have no shame, so they’re likely to stick with Trump. But as it obvious, Trump’s kind of deranged already as it is, so things are likely to get worse going forward.
This is on the face of it pretty basic modern American politics. Especially if you have to accept that Trump has shown a propensity to meddle in elections when he feels he can, so lulz. Trump is pretty much willing to destroy everything around him simply so he doesn’t get his fee-fees hurt. The Republican Cult will survive if Trump is convicted, but there’s a chance they will be seen by independents for what they are — a dangerous anti-democratic organization that should be voted against at all costs.
What’s more, we haven’t even gotten to the biggest problem facing Republicans going forward — Trump himself. They have no shame, crave power for power’s sake and they have absolute devotion to Trump. So should Trump’s cognitive decline accelerate as the pressure of impeachment gets to him, they have only themselves to blame for what happens. They are going to ride the Trump Train down to the bottom of the raven. What happens then is anyone’s guess.
The macro social, economic and political that produced Trump will linger for decades to come. They’re not going anywhere, even if we somehow miraculously get the Senate to convict him. If it’s not Trump, it’s Kris Kobach. If it’s not Kris Kobach, it’s Tom Cotton. If it’s not Tom Cotton, it’s Tucker Carlson. There’s a never ending supply of people with the exact same base and exact same goals as Trump. The only reason we MIGHT get spared this time is Trump is criminally incompetent at his job. He has always been a Right wing Twitter troll. That’s it. That’s all he is and that’s all he will ever be.
It’s too soon to suggest anything unethical, but there are some datapoints about the end of the Mueller investigation that leave me uneasy.
Bob Mueller is a lifelong Republican. He is very well respected. He’s an American hero. Bill Bar is an old buddy.
Mueller abruptly wrapped up his investigation the Trump Administration soon after Barr formally settled into his job as the head of Justice. Given what has come out, Barr is at the center of a massive scandal. Barr does not seem to have the best interests of the nation or justice at heart.
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