I don't think the Trump Presidency is going to make it to June. Basically, the problem lies in the fact that having won the election on a dodgy kind of technicality, he's trying to push ahead as if he has a mandate when in reality he is one of the last popular incoming Presidents in the history of modern polling. He's hardly in a position to push for any mandate to do radical stuff. If anything he should be treading very delicately so that he can at least get the lay of the land and get used to a presidential routine. He's in the metaphorical big leagues now, so if we extend the baseball metaphor, it's time he put his game face on and started fielding the routine plays, play each ball on its merits and try to make good contact with the bat. Instead he's gotten to first base on a dropped third strike and proceeded to get picked off. It's not looking like he actually belongs.
Despite being the Republican POTUS, his notions of policy direction bears little relationship to the stated Republican values and objective, and as such a growing number of Republicans are deserting the cause of the President.
Overnight, the commentary is looking forward to an impeachment.
Unlike in the various dictatorships Trump admires, the complex skein of constitutional legal and political checks on tyranny in the United States are holding—just barely at times, but they are holding. And the more reckless Trump’s behavior, the stronger become the checks.
Only with his lunatic effort to selectively ban refugees (but not from terrorist-sending countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt where Trump has business interests) has Trump discovered that the American system has courts. It has courts. Imagine that.
The more unhinged he becomes, the less will conservative judges be the toadies to ordinary Republican policies that they too often have been. Anybody want to wager that the Supreme Court will be Trump’s whore?
In the past week, Republicans from Mitch McConnell on down have tripped over each other rejecting his view of Putin. They have ridiculed his screwball claim of massive voter fraud.
They are running for cover on how to kill ObamaCare without killing patients or Republican re-election hopes. This is actually complicated, and nuance is not Trump’s strong suit. Rep Tom McClintock of California spoke for many when he warned:
“We’d better be sure that we’re prepared to live with the market we’ve created” with repeal, said Rep. Tom McClintock. (R-Calif.)
“That’s going to be called Trumpcare. Republicans will own that lock, stock and barrel, and we’ll be judged in the election less than two years away.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, mocking Trump’s own nutty tweeting habits, sent out a tweet calling a trade war with Mexico “mucho sad.”
Trump’s own senior staff has had to pull him back from his ludicrous crusade against Mexico and Mexicans, where Trump forces the Mexican president to cancel an official visit one day, and spends an hour on the phone kissing up the next day.
Trump proposed to reinstate torture, but key Republican leaders killed that idea. Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the Senate’s third ranking Republican said Wednesday that the ban on torture was settled law and the Republicans in Congress would oppose any reinstatement. Trump’s own defense secretary holds the same view. After blustering out his new torture policy, Trump meekly agreed to defer to his defense advisers.
That looks ominous. Trump's presidency in roughly a working week has careened from reckless to loose, swinging wrecking ball as it has failed to fill positions, sacked ambassadors, and enacted directives that have blown up around the world.
Here's a more detailed track of what that list of messes looks like, but more simply, there's this alarming chart:
I do want to point out this bit:
(6) Finally, I want to highlight a story that many people haven’t noticed. On Wednesday, Reuters reported (in great detail) how 19.5% of Rosneft, Russia’s state oil company, has been sold to parties unknown. This was done through a dizzying array of shell companies, so that the most that can be said with certainty now is that the money “paying” for it was originally loaned out to the shell layers by VTB (the government’s official bank), even though it’s highly unclear who, if anyone, would be paying that loan back; and the recipients have been traced as far as some Cayman Islands shell companies.
Why is this interesting? Because the much-maligned Steele Dossier (the one with the golden showers in it) included the statement that Putin had offered Trump 19% of Rosneft if he became president and removed sanctions. The reason this is so interesting is that the dossier said this in July, and the sale didn’t happen until early December. And 19.5% sounds an awful lot like “19% plus a brokerage commission.”
Conclusive? No. But it raises some very interesting questions for journalists to investigate.
Finally, somebody is talking about this in the Anglophone Sphere.
Anyway, the Frankenstein Monster that is the Department of Homeland Security is finally getting up and around creating the havoc its critics predicted years ago when it was conceived in the wake of 9/11:
Note also the most frightening escalation last night was that the DHS made it fairly clear that they did not feel bound to obey any court orders. CBP continued to deny all access to counsel, detain people, and deport them in direct contravention to the court’s order, citing “upper management,” and the DHS made a formal (but confusing) statement that they would continue to follow the President’s orders. (See my updates from yesterday, and the various links there, for details) Significant in today’s updates is any lack of suggestion that the courts’ authority played a role in the decision.
That is to say, the administration is testing the extent to which the DHS (and other executive agencies) can act and ignore orders from the other branches of government. This is as serious as it can possibly get: all of the arguments about whether order X or Y is unconstitutional mean nothing if elements of the government are executing them and the courts are being ignored.
Yeah. So logically, the DHS can ignore courts and exercise its prerogatives, and the ramification of that is the Trump administration really is about the Putin-isation of American politics, concentrating power in the executive office.
You can expect that impeachment call to come in before June is through, but it might not be in time before Donald Trump uses the DHS to cut out the Courts, Congress, and the Senate, and then silences the media and academia. This is looking a lot uglier than people imagined.
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