On the twenty-first of April, 156 years ago, a failed soldier, farmer, bill collector, and firewood salesman wrote his father a letter: “Whatever may have been my political opinions before, I have but one sentiment now. That is, we have a Government, and laws, and a flag, and they must all be sustained. . . . There are but two parties now, traitors and patriots, and I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter, and I trust the stronger party.” The writer was Ulysses S. Grant, and he was explaining to his father why, when he had just finally gotten up on his feet in civilian life, he had to go back to the Army. Because on that twenty-first of April 1861, there were but two parties: traitors and patriots.
And as this, our modern-day Nero, tweets while a nation burns, those who are not patriots salt away all the financial spoils they can grab, and roll back every statute of progress they can repeal, and exploit every fear they can locate, and put every dollar they can find into the pockets of the corporations that own them. And the bomb in the White House continues to tick, and the infamy continues to adhere more and more strongly to the party at which we will one day soon look back and say, “They could have stopped this.” The reality is simple, and it requires that General Grant’s letter to his father be altered only by the measure of one pair of words: “There are but two parties now: Republicans . . . and Americans.”
ANYBODY ELSE WOULD’VE BEEN FIRED BY NOW
Post date • MONDAY, JUNE 5
Let me apologize again to the world, particularly the United Kingdom, on behalf of the United States of America. Donald Trump is not of sound mind; we are working to correct the problem as soon as possible.
Amid all that he creates—confusion, charges of corruption and collusion—there is a stark reality. In almost any other job in this country—assuredly in any other private sector job—no matter the financial cost, no matter the upheaval, no matter the blowback, Donald Trump, our national embarrassment, our international disgrace, would have been fired by now. His complete incompetence, his complete failure, and his complete inability to see his incompetence and his failure as anything except brilliance would get him fired everywhere from the board room at Microsoft to the deep fryer at McDonald’s.
His tweet: “At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed!’”
The mayor of London didn’t say that.
“Londoners will see an increased police presence today and over the course of the next few days,” said Mayor Sadiq Khan. “No reason to be alarmed—one of the things the police and all of us need to do is make sure we’re as safe as we possibly can be.” Mayor Khan was urging Londoners not to be alarmed at additional police presence. Trump proclaimed himself the law-and-order candidate. He is symbolized by additional police presence. He is in agreement with Mayor Khan.
But Donald Trump is not the kind of man who will take “yes” for an answer. He has now doubled down on his delusion. “Pathetic excuse by London Mayor Sadiq Khan who had to think fast on his ‘no reason to be alarmed’ statement. MSM is working hard to sell it!”
Simply: this is a lie. Mayor Khan’s statement was made, complete, before Trump’s reaction. Trump took a part of it out of context, and is now lying to imply that the part about the police presence came separately. It did not. Trump is lying. It may be a lie that is explained by the liar’s inability to admit he was wrong, or understand context, or process reality, as opposed to what he wants to have had happen—but it is still a lie.
Trump must confound, contradict, exploit, boast, and insult, and he has to do it so compulsively, he cannot even see when somebody from outside his tiny, self-obsessed world is agreeing with him. For that kind of knee-jerk thinking, the lunchroom manager of a middle school would be fired.
Another tweet about the London attack: “Do you notice we are not having a gun debate right now? That’s because they used knives and a truck!” What? A London Bridge kind of attack here in America, where terrorists can easily buy American guns and rifles—and have bought American guns and rifles, and have killed Americans with American guns and rifles—that kind of attack would not see men jumping out of a van brandishing knives; they would be carrying automatic weapons and mowing down Americans with guns and rifles bought in America. For behavior that obstinate, that slow-witted, that overflowing with bad guesswork—an attorney at any law firm in this country would be fired.
“We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!” Trump sent that tweet about forty-eight hours after Justice Department attorneys went to the Supreme Court and asked them to overrule lower courts and instate Trump’s new regulations on foreigners entering this country, and the central premise of their argument is that it isn’t a travel ban. And Trump not only publicly cuts their legs out from under them, but reminds the Supreme Court justices that one of the reasons the travel ban was stopped by the other judges was that, while the lawyers insisted it wasn’t religion-based, or a travel ban, Trump and his associates made, and kept making, public comments about how it was religion-based, and a travel ban.
And then he doubled down on it: “People, the lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!” Were he the head of a company that had decided upon a vital policy, and a strategy to defend that policy legally, and he acted so contradictorily and destructively to that policy—the CEO of any Fortune 500 corporation in this country would be fired.
“Despite the constant negative press covfefe.” Those of us who are repelled by this man got a rare laugh at this absurdly meaningless, stupid tweeting mistake. Meanwhile, Trump and his littlest flying monkey, Sean Spicer, actually tried to seriously claim it was some kind of brilliant communication strategy, intended perhaps to distract and confound his critics.
Neither side fully understood the nightmare behind this. The man acting as president of the United States went to his favorite platform of public communication, at 12:06 a.m. prevailing local time, got to the thirty-seventh character and sixth word of a tweet, misspelled something—probably the word “coverage”—and somehow managed to hit “send.” The meaninglessness, the lack of focus, the carelessness, the self-pity, the irresponsible redefinition of the language itself that has symbolized this fifth-rate administration from the moment of Trump’s inaugural address was summarized in five words plus some kind of typographical error. And no great leap of imagination is required to presume that it was transmitted, because, just as he was misspelling “coverage,” he suddenly—phone in hand—fell asleep or otherwise lost awareness, and pressed “send,” or reached for “delete” and instead hit “send,” and then fell asleep, or otherwise screwed up, and checked out. And Trump says nothing about this remarkable and sudden disconnection from reality—for six hours. And when something is finally said, it is a lie a kindergartner wouldn’t believe.
And the context is lost as well. Just two nights earlier, he had tweeted: “The Fake News Media works hard at disparaging & demeaning my use of social media because they don’t want America to hear the real story!”
Evidently the real story is “covfefe.”
For behavior that irresponsible, that incoherent, that utterly self-unaware, any employee, in any company or in any branch of government service that wasn’t the presidency, would either be fired or immediately tested for substance abuse or their psychological health or both.
For more than a year, I have anguished over what’s wrong with Donald Trump: stupidity, madness, evil, disease, injury. I no longer care which. Attacking a mayor who agreed with him. Attacking him again and, in so doing, attacking a city still reeling from a terrorist attack. Insisting on a travel ban while his lawyers are trying to convince the Supreme Court it isn’t a travel ban. Announcing he doesn’t care what the lawyers call it, and threatening the courts. Tweeting gibberish while half-asleep or half-consc
ious or half-sane.
This is not about policy. It is not about conservatives versus liberals. It is not about Republicans or Democrats. It is not about Make America Great Again or Grab Them by the Pussy. It is not about Russia, and it is not about Pittsburgh or Paris or both. It is about absolute baseline incompetence. We all know that we have, occupying the office of president of the United States, a man doing the simple, easy, isolated, no-brainer parts of the job so badly, so strangely, so destructively even to his own perverse goals, that were he in any other job in this country, somebody would fall back on Trump’s hackneyed television catchphrase.
They would invoke that nitwitted blurt that made him famous to many, infamous to others, and plausible to just enough of this country, and we would be freed from this self-perpetuating nightmare of a chief executive who cannot even handle Twitter, let alone reality.
WHEN DONNIE MET SERGEY
Post date • TUESDAY, JUNE 6
FBI and congressional investigators are reportedly scouring evidence that Donald Trump may have met privately thirteen months ago with the Russian ambassador who is at the nexus of all of the Trump-Russia scandals. This was reported last week by NBC News and CNN, but it fell between the cracks that were the covfefe tweet and the (abandonment of) the Paris Climate Accord, and it got no traction, and it is kind of important—it is weapons-grade important.
In short, it’s: When Donnie Met Sergey.
The date was April 27, 2016, the locale the Mayflower Hotel, in Washington, the sponsor the Center for the National Interest, which is run by the Russian émigré Dimitri Simes, who has long maintained a connection to the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin, along with neocon Richard Burt, who, among other things, is an adviser to the controversial Russian outfit Alfa-Bank. This was not some casual event. The Mayflower speech was the first major foreign policy address of Trump’s presidential campaign, and in the front row for it—you can see him in the pictures and the video—is Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Also in attendance: Jared Kushner, and Jeff Sessions. It is also no secret that before the speech, there was a VIP reception at which, The Wall Street Journal reported, “Trump warmly greeted Mr. Kislyak and three other foreign ambassadors who came to the reception.”
But just how warmly? “Five current and former U.S. officials said they are aware of classified intelligence suggesting there was some sort of private encounter between Trump and his aides and the Russian envoy,” NBC reported, “despite a heated denial from Sessions.” And we all know how much credibility a denial from Sessions about meetings with Russians should be given.
It is also unclear whether the VIP session and the so-called private encounter between Trump and Kislyak are the same thing or separate meetings. But if you read a little between the lines, you get a sense that there’s some evidence somewhere—maybe from our intelligence people surveilling Kislyak, or another country’s spies surveilling somebody else—that at some point on April 27, 2016, there were more words between Trump and his entourage and Kislyak than just the pleasantries of a receiving line, as described this past March by a spokesman for that pro-Kremlin group that hosted Trump’s speech.
Moreover, those would seem to be words that are just now ringing bells. NBC quotes an official who says, “The FBI is interested in who was at the event and what was said, in the context of the counter-intelligence investigation into Russian election meddling.” Timing is, as always, everything. April 27, 2016, is around the time that the Democratic National Committee would begin to realize that there was unusual activity on its computer network. This would soon be confirmed as the Russian hacking.
All the NBC sources emphasized that they only know there is classified intel about the Trump-Kislyak meeting or meetings; they don’t know what it confirms or that it confirms anything. They—and everybody else—know that this week Trump is up to his neck in former FBI directors, what with James Comey scheduled to testify to the Senate Intelligence Committee Thursday and his predecessor—the new Justice Department special counsel, Robert Mueller—reportedly taking over what had been a separate criminal investigation into Paul Manafort and Russia, and also reportedly considering expanding still further into investigating the roles of Attorney General Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in Trump’s firing of Comey, and the Associated Press’s source on whether or not Mueller legally can investigate Sessions and Rosenstein is a pretty good one—Rosenstein himself.
As you will recall, Trump has reportedly at least mulled invoking executive privilege to keep Comey from testifying, but my friend John Dean and others have pointed out that Comey is now a private citizen, and anyway, the subject of what Trump and Comey talked about was discussed by Trump publicly—on Twitter, no less—so if there was any executive privilege, Trump piddled it away.
The Trump-Russia Octopus is so large that his apologists, like Fox News, have even gone so far as to offer a doomsday defense. “Collusion is not a crime, only an antitrust law,” said Gregg Jarrett. “You can collude all you want with a foreign government in an election. There’s no such statute.” So Trump’s not guilty of joining with an enemy foreign government to fix the presidential election—or, oh well, maybe he is, but so what, there ain’t no law against it. In fact, if Trump colluded with the Russians, PolitiFact reported, he could be guilty of fraud, public corruption, conspiracy, and receiving illegal foreign campaign contributions. And if he traded something to the Russians for their help, like a vow to lift sanctions against Russia or destroy NATO, well, we move into the territory of espionage and treason charges.
The original point here: The reporting on FBI and congressional investigations of what happened when Donald Trump and Sergey Kislyak met in Washington on April 27, 2016, might be the most important break yet. Or it might mean nothing. Because not only does it get lost in the latest giant bag of manure generated just this past week by this man occupying the presidency—it also gets lost in the amazing number of individual Trump-Russia scandals. You may have seen this on the internet: As best I can find, it tracks back to early April and a repost on a political cartoon website by somebody calling himself Radish. Let me read you a part of this:
I don’t know it’s hard for me to see any U.S. ties to Russia . . . except for
the Flynn thing and the Manafort thing
and the Tillerson thing
and the Sessions thing
and the Kushner thing
and the Carter Page thing
and the Roger Stone thing
and the Felix Sater thing
and the Boris Epshteyn thing
and the alleged Rosneft thing
and the supposed Gazprom thing
and the Sergey Gorkov banker thing
and the Donald Trump Jr. thing
and the Russian Affiliated Interests thing
and the Russian Business Interests thing
and the Alex Shnaider thing
and the hack of the DNC thing
and the Guccifer 2.0 thing
and the Mike Pence “I don’t know anything” thing
and Trump’s public request to Russia to hack Hillary’s email thing
and the Trump house sale for $100 million at the bottom of the housing bust to the Russian fertilizer king thing
and the Russian fertilizer king’s plane showing up in Concord, NC, during Trump rally campaign thing
and the Nunes sudden flight to the White House in the night thing
and the Cyprus bank thing
and Trump not releasing his tax returns thing
and the Republican Party’s rejection of an amendment to require Trump to show his taxes thing
and the election hacking thing
and the GOP platform change to the Ukraine thing
and the Steele Dossier thing
and the Leninist Bannon thing
and the intelligence community’s investigative repor
ts thing
and Trump’s reassurance that the Russian connection is all “fake news” thing
and Spicer’s Russian Dressing “there’s nothing there” thing so there’s probably nothing there since the swamp has been drained, these people would never lie probably why Nunes cancels the investigation meetings
all of this must be normal
just a bunch of separate dots with no connection.
And all that was before the Trump-Kislyak thing.
TRUMP IS NOW UNDER INVESTIGATION FOR COLLUSION AND OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE
Post date • THURSDAY, JUNE 8
We are at the darkest moment of the history of representative government in this country.
James Comey has now implied, under oath, that the president of the United States is being investigated by the Justice Department for possible collusion with the Russian government in tampering with the 2016 election, and that the president of the United States is also being investigated for possible obstruction of justice. Comey said none of these things so starkly nor directly in his testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee. He might as well have.
The Republican senator Tom Cotton asked it bluntly: “Do you think Donald Trump colluded with Russia?” Comey’s reply: “That’s a question I don’t think I should answer in an open setting . . . But that’s a question that will be answered by the investigation, I think.”
Logic exercise: How would Special Counsel Robert Mueller answer that question? By investigating. Whom would you investigate to see if Trump colluded with Russia? Trump. And all around him. Conclusion? Special Counsel Mueller is investigating Donald Trump, today, about collusion with Russia.
Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) Page 43