Short answer: he couldn’t pass a sanity test, then or now. Open book.
This little problem is, of course, disastrous in a presidential candidate, though the minority of 63 million who voted for him either didn’t notice he was the craziest nominee of all time or chose to ignore it. But in a president, the problem escalates to, you know, the possible end of the world. First, the thing with the purported invoice he handed, literally or figuratively, to Angela Merkel—the thing that happened just before this happened, according to The Times of London, which has kept its credibility more or less intact since 1785, or which didn’t happen according to a White House that has already spent all of its credibility as of day 68.
This isn’t hard to grasp, and anybody sane whose parents were alive during World War II grasped it as kids, because they saw the Germans as Nazis and even they understood why suddenly we had to accept the Germans as friends. Geographically, Germany is essential to American security—it is our symbolic front line against Russia, and Russia’s primary geopolitical goal since 1945 has been to break up the German-American alliance. Politically, Germany is essential to American security because the last time we pushed it away, after World War I, when it rose again it was powerful enough by itself to start World War II. If we help it with its self-defense—even if we pay a little more of the freight than Germany does—we are in fact paying for our self-defense. Instead—and, by the way, the source for the London Times story is a minister of the German government—Trump handed Merkel a bill for a supposed shortfall since 2002—with compound interest.
This is nuts—done by a guy who’s nuts.
*
Then there’s the translator story.
Graydon Carter, the publisher of Vanity Fair: “Vintage Trump is not going anywhere anytime soon. A couple of weeks earlier, during a visit by the Japanese prime minister, Shinzō Abe, the president told an acquaintance that he was obsessed with the translator’s breasts—although he expressed this in his own, fragrant fashion.” You can decide which of several vulgar terms Trump used about the woman—which bit of “locker room talk,” the euphemism by which Trump so cynically and successfully made his boasts about sexual assault vanish during the campaign. The point is—nobody at the White House even bothered to deny this. Why would they?
Trump is already disconnected enough from reality to presume that he has the right to talk that way—and disconnected enough from reality that not only did he get the prime minister’s name wrong, but the tweet in which he got it wrong and called him “Prime Minister Shinzo”—as if he wanted you to call him “President Donald”—is still in his timeline, uncorrected.
As is every other crazy thing he’s done just since becoming president—uncorrected: the Obama-wiretapped-me hoax; blaming the Muslim-ban airport chaos on Delta computer problems; bringing his own fanboys with him to applaud during his speech at the CIA; the whole inauguration-crowd-size delusion; the three-million-illegal-votes delusion; the five-million-illegal-votes delusion; praying at the National Prayer Breakfast for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ratings; not knowing Frederick Douglass is dead, when he’s been dead since 1895.
And what is, to me, the surest sign of reality disconnect—the craziest thing so far, possibly worse than all the other ones combined. If you haven’t heard about this yet, please sit down, surrender a few seconds of your life that you’ll never get back, and pray there is a God to help us, and let Trump fill you in on one of the great secrets of American history, about arguably our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln. “Great president. Most people don’t even know he was a Republican, right? Does anybody know? Lot of people don’t know that.”
No.
Hadn’t heard.
Who knew?
Let. That. Sink. In.
Huge if true.
Game-changer.
I’ll just leave that here.
Life comes at you fast.
Mic drop.
*
Are you effing kidding me?
Lincoln, the first Republican president, on Mount Rushmore, face on the five and on the penny, only president on the front page of the GOP website besides Trump, and Trump thinks that “most people don’t even know he was a Republican”?
And in context it’s even worse. He made this claim to the National Republican Congressional Committee fund-raising luncheon.
“Hey . . . did you guys ever hear about this fella Reagan?”
That was the moment I thought back on that sanity test and wondered if maybe he could score not 32 out of 40, but 42 out of 40.
Chapter 9
APRIL 2017
TRUMP IS PANICKING OVER RUSSIA
Post date • MONDAY, APRIL 3
Trump is panicking.
About Russia.
It is often hard to be sure what you are actually seeing when you look at him. There is so much going on. So little of it makes sense to ordinary, sane eyes. But this? This is obviously panic. And the reasons he is panicking may include a man named Mikhail Kalugin, also a growing understanding that the key to Trump’s fatal Russian scandal is less about fake news and more about hacking the voter registration rolls in about twenty different states before the election.
First, the panic. Twitter, bright and early in the morning. Turning to his private intelligence service, Fox & Friends. Can’t stop bringing up spying. Can’t stop bringing up Russia. But now unable to find anything else to deflect whatever his people did by invoking Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman’s brother’s company’s legal lobbying. For a bank, for $28,000 a month. And then: panicking, defined:
“Did Hillary Clinton ever apologize for receiving the answers to the debate? Just asking!”
You wouldn’t get the answers to a debate.
You’d get the questions.
*
There are times when Donald Trump must make no sense even to Donald Trump. And in two other tweets, less than twenty-one hours apart over the weekend, he contradicted himself, first applauding news reporting based on government leaks to anonymous sources, then condemning news reporting based on government leaks to anonymous sources.
But the panic wasn’t limited to Twitter. Common sense would dictate that Trump should never mention any of the following things again: surveillance, wiretapping, intel, leaking, Russia, or, say, “outside things changing the course of a presidential race.”
Trump, Sunday, talking to the Financial Times about the French presidential race:
Question: “In France, Marine Le Pen has a very similar message to you, not identical. Do you think a victory for her would validate what you have done here?”
Don’t answer it / don’t answer it / don’t answer it / don’t hint about Russian interference / don’t hint about Russian interference / don’t hint about Russian interference.
“I don’t know what is going to happen. I know that some outside distractions have taken place which have changed that race. . . . You know, some outside things have happened that maybe will change the course of that race.”
What’s the French word for “panic”?
*
Trump is not panicking solo.
The Devin Nunes story—a Profile in Panic if ever there was one—is now well documented: that the supposedly exculpatory surveillance intel Nunes rushed to the White House to loudly share with Trump was reportedly shared with him the night before at the White House by two or three White House lawyers.
And you may have seen a couple of Sean Spicer’s Baghdad Bob news conferences last week, in which he twisted himself into such knots that—as the former Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller put it—“according to Spicer, Hillary Clinton has such close connections to Russia that they intervened in the election to elect her opponent.”
That’s panic. From Trump. From his White House. From his pet congressman. Because of somebody named Mikhail Kalugin? Head of t
he economics section at the Russian embassy in Washington, Kalugin went home to Russia last August after a six-year stint in this country. Last week, the impeccable BBC reporter Paul Wood reported that U.S. officials have confirmed that Kalugin was, in fact, “a member of one of Russia’s spying organizations, the SVR or GRU.” And so what? There are a lot of spies here under diplomatic cover from a lot of countries—except Mikhail Kalugin may have been the only one who was first identified as a spy in a little thing called the Christopher Steele dossier, the one with Trump and the Moscow prostitutes and the bathroom stuff and all that. “A leading Russian diplomat, Mikhail Kulagin,” Steele wrote in the dossier, getting the man’s name wrong, “had been withdrawn from Washington at short notice because Moscow feared his heavy involvement in the U.S. presidential election operation . . . would be exposed in the media there.” In other words, it appears that the investigation James Comey of the FBI confirmed at the House hearing two weeks ago has not only nailed Kalugin as Russia’s key man in Washington working on the American election, but in so doing confirmed yet another critical detail in the Steele dossier.
And if that story by itself didn’t cause Trump or somebody close to him to fly into full-scale existential panic, something else Wood of the BBC reported must have: “The U.S. government identified Kalugin as a spy while he was still at the embassy. . . . A retired member of a U.S. intelligence agency told me that Kalugin was being kept under surveillance before he left the U.S.”
Surveillance?
Of the Russian operative in Washington trying to help Trump win the election? Dates of meetings, transcripts of conversations, maybe recordings? Last August and earlier? Oops. Who else would be on those transcripts or recordings?
*
And then there’s what Wood of the BBC—and several other, less mainstream news sites—report that American intelligence has finally figured out about what the Russians were actually trying to do to help Trump win. Remember the mysterious news last August that hackers had accessed the computers containing voter registration records in Arizona and Illinois? And then the ABC report that this was tried in at least twenty different states? And then the director of national intelligence said there had been probing and scanning of registration rolls, “in most cases originated from servers operated by a Russian company,” and we were all left wondering: why just scan the voter polls? Just to prove you could hack the computers? A test run for something?
No.
The voter rolls were the goal.
Copying them.
The Russians probing and scanning and copying the names of American voters. The names, the email addresses, the party affiliations of voters. Each could then be sent—by email, on Facebook, in a tweet—only the stories most likely to keep them from voting for Hillary Clinton. Stories based on materials the Russians had already hacked from the Democratic National Committee. Stories based on materials hacked from the emails of John Podesta. Stories not based on anything.
Microtargeting, it’s called. But this would be microtargeting with the best, most specific list of registered voters that a political campaign could ever get: the actual official government list of registered voters. The kind of stuff that would be gold to a political data-mining company like, say, Cambridge Analytica, whose vice president and board member is, or was, Steve Bannon. Cambridge Analytica—up to $5 million of the equity of which is or was owned by Steve Bannon. Cambridge Analytica—which has its headquarters in New York, eight blocks down from Trump Tower.
Moscow’s man in Washington in charge of trying to help Trump win. Wiretapped, to borrow somebody’s favorite phrase. Along with whoever he talked to. Evidence that Russians hacked the names and online identities of voters in twenty key states. And did so to steal the data that companies like the one Steve Bannon was vice president of would kill for.
Ohhhhhh, Donald . . .
This is bad.
I’d panic, too.
FLYNN AND THE DOG THAT DID NOTHING IN THE NIGHTTIME
Post date • TUESDAY, APRIL 4
Perhaps the most crucial break in Trump’s Russia scandals comes to us fresh from the pages of The Strand Magazine and its new issue for December 1892.
Inspector Gregory of Scotland Yard asks Sherlock Holmes, “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes replies: “To the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.”
Gregory states: “The dog did nothing in the nighttime.”
Holmes concludes: “That was the curious incident.”
*
Publicly, the attorney for General Michael Flynn—agent of the Turkish government, Russian television contributor, and not-briefly-enough national security adviser in this shambles of a presidency—publicly, Flynn’s attorney volunteered Flynn to testify to the intelligence committee of the Senate or the House or both and confirmed discussions about testifying and even revealed that he might not be asking for full immunity for his client . . .
And by the following morning he and Flynn had been turned down.
First, a “senior congressional official” said off the record that the Senate committee viewed Flynn’s bid as “wildly preliminary,” and that immunity was “not on the table,” and a second source added, “at this time.” By the next morning, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, in essence said, “too soon,” and after Trump’s crazy tweet suggesting Flynn should seek immunity from what Trump wants us to believe is a fake-news witch hunt, Schiff added, everybody should meet Flynn’s offer with skepticism. The headline here is not so much Flynn’s offer—but the reaction to it from both intelligence committees.
In short: The dog did nothing in the nighttime.
That was the curious incident.
Because other, similar dogs, in other, similar nighttimes, have barked the house down. In 1973, as the unraveling of the Watergate cover-up began to accelerate, White House counsel John Dean realized he was being set up as the scapegoat. President Nixon asked Dean to write a report summarizing everything he knew about the scandal. Dean—then, as now, no dummy—quickly figured out that Nixon could use the document as a shield and say the report was the first time he had heard these details, and also as a spear against Dean by noting that it was odd that Dean knew all this stuff, when he, Nixon, didn’t. Dean knew he needed to make a deal—with somebody. His lawyer initially approached federal prosecutors with Dean’s offer to testify—in exchange for immunity—testify not against the president but against his immediate supervisors. As Dean’s attorney Charles Shaffer colorfully quoted Dean: “We can’t talk about ‘The P!’” The feds thought about it, and turned him down.
Then Nixon fired Dean.
Dean’s lawyer then went to the new committee that the Senate had formed to investigate Watergate, which also had the right to request immunity for its witnesses. When Dean told them he was now ready to “talk about ‘The P,’” Dean got his immunity.
He got it immediately.
He also got something else immediately—he went right into the Federal Witness Protection Program. They moved him out of his home. They moved him to another state. The day two months later when the Senate committee found a witness willing to confirm Dean’s suspicion that Nixon had secretly taped all the conversations in the Oval Office? Committee counsel Sam Dash had to get Dean to come back from a secure, undisclosed location in Florida just to tell him and get his reaction. Starting in the spring of 1973, John Dean spent a total of 540 days as a protected witness.
Those dogs didn’t just bark the house down.
They barked the White House down.
*
But Flynn’s offer didn’t get so much as a tail wag.
I had breakfast with John Dean last Saturday morning. I’ve known him for nearly twenty years and consider him both a friend and a true American hero. Happily, we had so much to talk about that
Michael Flynn barely took up five minutes—but as usual, John made the most of them. Yes, the obvious reaction to Flynn’s offer to make a deal is the suspicion voiced by Adam Schiff and reinforced by this child Trump’s tweet. His lawyer may have offered nothing and demanded everything. Less obviously, these unusually public comments—by the attorney and by Congressman Schiff—could be opening gambits, each man staking his ground for the battle to come over what Flynn testifies to, and what he gets for it.
Except that Flynn’s lawyer is named Robert Kelner, and his bachelor’s degree was in politics and Russian studies, and he wrote his thesis on the black sheep of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky, and he was a Never-Trumper, and in June he tweeted, “Spy novel script: Russia hacks #DNC for @realDonaldTrump oppo. Trump says nice things about #Putin. Hmmm.” And three weeks before the election, Kelner blasted Trump for claiming the voting was rigged, saying, “The only real threat to this election is the reported effort by Russian intelligence services to hack election systems, which is something that Trump himself has failed to condemn.”
Not only does that not sound like a lawyer offering nothing and demanding everything, but Kelner’s letter sounds like he’s not asking for everything. It ends: “No reasonable person, who has the benefit of advice from counsel, would submit to questioning in such a highly politicized, witch hunt environment without assurances against unfair prosecution.”
“Unfair.”
Not “assurances against prosecution.” Assurances against unfair prosecution.
John Dean reminded me that even he didn’t get blanket immunity and didn’t ask for it. He got “use” immunity—they can’t use what you say while testifying against you, but everything else you’ve done is still fair game.
So Flynn’s offer to testify is made by an anti-Trump, Russian-conspiracy-believing student of Russian history, whose law firm biography identifies his areas of expertise as including: “Federal and state campaign finance, lobbying disclosure, pay to play, and government ethics law . . . the Federal Election Campaign Act, Lobbying Disclosure Act, Ethics in Government Act, Foreign Agents Registration Act, and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.” In short, it sounds as though Mr. Kelner was born specifically to represent Michael Flynn. And the Senate and House intelligence committees aren’t climbing over each other to make a deal with Flynn and his anti-Trump lawyer?
Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) Page 33