February 19, 2019--Master of Distraction

Being the master of distraction can cut two ways. With Trump, adept at this dubious art, it does and then some.

Take the National Emergency.

Trump was on the ropes. The Democrats in Congress (read Nancy Pelosi) were dug in. They were not going to give him even "one dollar" for his Wall. If he didn't agree to compromise (read "fold") the government would come to a halt and as with the December shutdown, Trump would lose politically and again see his poll numbers tank. They were heading then to the low 30s, pretty much for him a potential 2020 electoral disaster. 

The media covered this wall-to-wall. Even Trump's enablers on Fox News and talk radio (read Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh) were restive and cranky, with Ann Coulter, hitting him literally below the belt, when she called him a "weenie."

So Trump rolled out his thus far most ambitious distraction--he made up and then declared a national emergency, knowing, but not really caring, that it will take forever to get through the courts and ultimately wind up with the Supremes who will likely declare it unconstitutional. Even Clarence Thomas might see things that way. Actually, ignore that--there is no way that he will. But expect Roberts to assure that minimally it will be a 5-4 decision.

In truth, for Trump, the more time it takes to work its way through the judicial system, the more we will be taking about nothing but,  which is his hope. It's about distraction and that's the definition of distraction--talking about something else.

As we saw on Friday the media immediately switched from obsessing about the battle Trump was having with Congress and began talking about only the emergency. To help them and to fill time they rolled out professors of constitutional law, former federal prosecutors, and Pulitzer Prize winning columnists. 

I said to Rona, if this keeps up for another two weeks I'm going to learn so much about the law that I'll be prepared to take the Bar Exam.

But there were a couple of sub-headlines buried on page 16 that ground on relentlessly. Stories that were not about the constitutional crisis but rather about Robert Mueller's investigation. 

At about the same time Trump was holding his rambling, sing-song news conference in the Rose Garden where all the questions were about the "emergency," Mueller prosecutors were in court calling for the presiding judge to sentence Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, to 24 years in prison. Effectively a life sentence for the 69 year-old Manafort. 

So expect that we will soon be back to paying 24/7 attention to Trump's legal troubles. Troubles exacerbated ironically by his use of the national emergency distraction because even some Republicans feel Trump by declaring it abused his power. Which is an impeachable offense. It was one of the charges against Nixon.

Thus, the default on all of this is the Mueller investigation. It is not going away. It is ultimately distraction proof.

For example, it is reported that Manafort is already singing like a canary and Roger Stone may be the next to flip.

February 15, 2019--National Emergencies

Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell unintentionally just set the agenda for the Democrat who will be elected in 2020 to succeed Trump as president.

He was good enough to set both the programmatic and the strategic agenda. With the latter being about how to govern.

Thank you Mitch.

Mitch did this when attempting to discourage Trump from declaring, in his case, a phony emergency.

Do not declare a national emergency, he urged Trump, to get your way with the border wall because if you do you will set a precedent for future presidents. Like the Democrat who will come after you in less than two years. A progressive who might use your precedent to declare emergencies involving gun "rights" and the climate.

When it comes to Trump, McConnell is whistling in the wind because for Trump there are no precedents. A precedent is something that applies to the future, but with Trump there is no such thing as the future. He is all about the now, caring only about himself, ignoring who or what comes next; and thus he will declare an emergency this morning to allow him to reap political credit from his base (meaning Ann Coulter, who two days ago called him a "weenie,"  and Sean Hannity) for building, or pretending to build the wall.

But for a normal person who might become president, governing by the strategic use of national emergencies in an era where nothing can be enacted by a broken and hyper-partisan Congress may make sense and to declare at least two emergencies--one to deal with the scourge of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of murderous people and the other for another genuine emergency, global warming--sounds like a plan for Kamala Harris or Joe Biden or Amy Klobuchar.

January 8, 2019--Trump's Emergency

With the Mueller report likely to surface soon, Trump is experiencing his own private emergency and now he appears to want to drag the rest of us into a much larger, generalized one. A national emergency.

His is real, the one he has in store for us concocted.

At first, hearing about the possibility that Trump was finally trumped, with some Democratic friends I was gleeful.

"This only shows Trump's desperation," one said. Another, that "He's finally painted himself into a corner from which there is no way out."

But then I thought more about this. Yes, there may be no easy exit from the trap he clumsily set for himself, with Nancy Pelosi playing him subtly like a well-tuned piano. And on the other side, to his base, there is more trouble represented by Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, both of whom warned that they would call his manhood into question if he caved in to the Dems by agreeing to reopen the government as part of a deal that would get him a pittance more for his cement, steel, tissue paper wall, fence, barrier, curtain, whatever. Call it anything you like. He just wanted out of the trap.

For the man whose ghostwriter wrote the book on the art of the deals it was looking bleak. No deal in sight. Just plunging poll numbers.

But then there is the potential game-changing idea for Trump to declare a national emergency--he would claim, as he did last night in an Oval Office speech, that the country is threatened by caravans of murderers, rapists, gang members, and drug dealers, augmented by tens of thousands of terrorists sneaking annually across the border. And, oh yes, there is a humanitarian crisis.

Never mind that there were just six (6) potential terrorists who were intercepted by the border patrol during the first half of 2018. Compounding this lie, Trump went on, claiming most of the opioids threatening our young people are coming though the same way--strapped to Mexican MS-13 gang members, while in fact they are hidden in and smuggled across the border by otherwise legitimate big-rig truckers.

If Trump declares a national emergency (and he has the power to do so), he will no longer need Congress (read Democrats in the House of Representatives) to pass a Homeland Security Department budget with $5.0 million allocated for the wall because he will just redeploy those and many more billions from the Pentagon budget (in an official emergency he likely has the power to do that as well as deploy soldiers to take the lead in building the wall).

By this scenario Nancy and Chuck will become irrelevant, Trump will look extra macho to Ann Coulter, Rush will be re-smitten, and too much of the public will think that Trump did the bold and right thing to protect us from all those dangerous brown people heading north on moonless nights.

And then the final irony--since it will cost $50 to $100 billion to build a 500-mile wall, because the money will have come from the Pentagon budget, Trump will demagog Chuck and Nancy into coming up with enough to replace it. The last thing Dems want is to appear wimpy when it comes to military spending. You know--"support our troops."

This strategy is so perversely brilliant that it could have come from only one source. Trump's current senior staff and advisors are incapable of thinking about how to get themselves out of a paper bag and so a play this multi-layered and intricate is beyond their devious capacities.

Therefore this has to be the idea of only one possible person. One evil genius--

Steve Bannon. Remember him?

The only problem--it won't work. 

Trump's favorables will continue to hover in the 35 percent range. His act is becoming boring to all except his relatively few dead-ender followers. Even Steve Bannon will not be able to think his way out of that.

April 17, 2018--Fallout

I have been hearing from angry friends all morning. They are angry with me, actually most are furious with me for agreeing with the likes of Ann Coulter, criticizing the weekend missile strike in Syria.

One said, "So it's OK with you to let Assad get away with using poison gas to kill his people? Did you see those videos of children, babies gasping for their last breath as they vomited and soon died? I can't believe you wouldn't agree with using a targeted missile strike against his chemical weapons facilitates."

"The strike appeared to turn out well." I agreed, "We seem to have managed to avoid killing any Russians. If we had, who knows where this would have led."

"You're avoiding the issue," my friend pressed on, "Even in warfare there are rules and conventions. Combatants agree not to torture prisoners, engage in ethnic cleansing, or, in this case, not use chemical or biological weapons. There is the Geneva Convention that spells out a lot of this. I can't believe you would have not done anything. What Assad did was barbaric."

"I agree with that too," I tried to say. "I even agree with Trump that Assad is a monster. The last I read, he presided over the slaughter of about 600,000 of his own people. Hundreds of thousands more have been crippled and millions have become refugees."

"And, so, if it was up to you you'd stand back and watch this happen?"

"Though I wouldn't put it quite this way, I must admit I probably would. I would not get involved in what's happening on the ground in Syria, that godforsaken place, any more than I was in favor of invading Iraq or, for that matter, getting involved in Vietnam. Where more than 58,000 of our young people were killed, hundreds of thousands more wounded, and at the end of the day we lost the war. Haven't we learned anything from behaving like the world's policeman?"

"But a tyrant deploying poison gas on his own people is not only against the rules of war--what a concept, war having rules--but monstrous."

"I don't know how to put this," I said, "but what's the difference between using gas to kill babies and blowing them up with conventional weapons? Hideous barrel bombs full of shrapnel is seemingly the weapon of choice in Syria for Assad's air force. This is monstrous too so why not, using your logic, go after his air force and the factories where barrel bombs are assembled?"

"I can't believe your lack of anger or passion about this," my friend said.

"Maybe I've gotten to be too old and seen too much evil in my lifetime. That could be what has made me appear to be inured to barbaric behavior of this kind. About that, guilty as charged. But, still, I am not insensitive to this nor am I seeing your distinctions between poison gas and fragmentation bombs, and I am not convinced it's a good idea for us to try to chase down all the Assads of the world. Sadly, there are too many of them and I don't think it's our role to go after all of them."

"There's a point to what you're saying, but complete hands off when there are holocasts going is also not acceptable. I don't know how to determine where to get involved and when to ignore evil behavior, but a version of America First, or anything that smacks of that is not acceptable to me and shouldn't be to you. I know you were a young boy during the Second World War and were aware even then of Hitler's regime--including how some in your family died in concentration camps--and in later years you knew about other atrocities, but you're opting out now is not attractive or, to me, acceptable."

"I love you a lot," I said, "And respect you. I'll have to do some more thinking about this. One thing I won't concede though--all of this is very complicated and can lead to a lot of hypocritical talk and behavior."