This is one of those weekends where the news is unfolding rapidly, shaking things up well after the pundits parked their pens and went off to spend a weekend in the mountains, or on the beach, or down a bottle. Articles from the New York Times have revealed that the infamous Trump Tower meeting … was one of a pair, if not a set. Donald Trump Jr hosted another meeting at the tower in which representatives from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, improbably teamed with an Israeli social media expert, offered to lend a considerable hand to the Trump campaign. The meeting was brokered by Erik Prince. Seychelles Erik Prince. Russian back-channel Erik Prince. I had no contact with the Trump campaign, Mr. Congressman, Erik Prince. Why is he still not in jail, Erik Prince.
That meeting also became part of a chain that included a who’s-who of other Trump associates and Republican big-wigs. Including Jared Kushner. Including Michael Flynn. Including Elliot Broidy, the guy who coincidentally signed a contract with Michael Cohen also using the name David Dennison, to buy his way out of his affair.
While a lot of details are still to come out, this second Trump Tower meeting and its follow-ups certainly look like the world’s biggest shakedown — one in which Trump agreed to let the Saudis and UAE blockade Qatar, silence their enemies, and enrich themselves from rising oil prices. And for a finishing note, Jared Kushner got to lean on Qatar to the tune of $1.2 billion. The Saudis won, the UAE won, and Putin won … all making enormous profits. And Jared got his billion. But hey, that’s just one aspect of how this deal could have screwed the world. Just the surface of it. Because everything seems to be about 10 times as awful, and 100 times more blatant, than it previously seemed.
And it was already hideous.
That’s not even touching on how any of this affected the election. Did Erik Prince put in teams of social media special forces to help Trump? Did the Middle Eastern autocracies that Trump was so eager to assist after the election help to make sure he made it over the line? None of that is yet clear.
What is clear is just how far we are from knowing everything that the Trump campaign managed to fit into a few brief months of graft, extortion, and conspiracy. Though of course, Rudy Giuliani will probably be on the tube any moment now to explain that none of this — from lying to congress to selling out American allies — is an issue. Because … It’s just not. After all, Giuliani’s job seems to be to transition Trump fans from “he didn’t do it” to “he did it, so what?”
The skull-splitting details of this story, on the top of a week that ended with yet another school shooting in Texas, I mean Georgia, make that Texas and Georgia, may make it tough to get through the week’s pundits. So … feel free to engage in some punditry of you own. Just come on in.
Leonard Pitts shows how you it’s not just guns making American schools unsafe.
Today, we will discuss one of the most pressing threats to American Christianity. Meaning, of course, American Christians.
Yes, that’s an overly broad statement. All those Christians whose faith requires them to live the Good News, to feed the hungry, to house the homeless, speak for the voiceless and welcome the stranger, surely do not threaten the faith. To the contrary, they empower it. They are what Christianity is supposed to be.
You know the next word is …
But we’re here to contend with what Christianity too often is. Having seen putative Christians excuse the liar, rationalize the alleged pedophile, justify the sexual assaulter and cheer as walls are raised against the most vulnerable, it’s obvious that many of those who claim that name embody a niggardly, cowardly, selfish and situational “faith” that has little to do with Jesus.
Pitts goes on to single out a school where a “Christian” leader allowed a LGBTQ students to be bullied and attacked, because defending those students would be “against her faith.” Which is exactly what most Trump supporters mean when they say “religious freedom.” The freedom to be cruel and heartless.
Carl Hiaasen has a story on some Florida students who also got an education in awful,
… a teacher at Forest High School was put on leave after allegedly enlisting his students to help him drown two wild raccoons and an opossum.
The animals were placed in small cages and submerged in a tub of water, where they struggled miserably for several minutes until dying. Some students became upset, and at least one secretly recorded cell-phone video of the torture.
The teacher indicated he was angry because he blamed the raccoons for the death of chicken’s in the school’s coop. The students were enlisted to make this a participatory experience.
“When the raccoons tried to come up for air…they held them down with metal rods,” she said in a television interview. “And when the raccoon would try to pop its head up, they held water hoses in its face to drown it.”
Is this how Republicans are made?
Jill Abramson is worried about Michael Cohen’s fixing … because he never seemed to fix things.
Michael Cohen has pulled off the seemingly impossible. He has actually sullied the meaning of the term Washington fixer. …
Cohen, Donald Trump’s fixer, has sullied the fixing trade. Indeed, he skipped the public service part of the traditional fixer’s résumé, failing to win a federal appointment from his faithless client. But that didn’t stop him from signing up blue-chip clients, like AT&T, who wanted favorable treatment from the Trump administration for a pending merger deal.
Just a reminder that we still don’t know who paid Cohen millions more in the months where the SARs documents are missing from financial databases. But you can bet — we’re going to know.
Anne Applebaum warns that what’s happening in Italy could be a forecast for America.
Between them ... the Northern League and the Five Star Movement represent every powerful emotion, resentment, suspicion and anxiety that can be mobilized and weaponized by modern political parties. Above all, they reflect the disillusionment with politics — the disillusionment with everything — that inevitably sets in when populism fails.
Applebaum’s focus is that Silvio Berlusconi already represented the Trump style angry-anti-politics-as-populism that Trump has brought to the US. But Berlusconi fell. And in his wake he left broken institutions, shattered traditional parties, and a populace so disillusioned with government, that it may be ungovernable.
The failure of populism did not, in Italy, lead the public to beg for the return of sober centrists. Reeling from the flood of broken promises, electorates did not turn back to honest realists who told them hard truths or laid out the hard choices. On the contrary: In Italy, as in so many Latin American countries in the past, the failure of populism has led to greater dislike of “elites,” both real and imaginary; a greater demand for radical and impossible change; and a greater sense of alienation from politics and politicians than ever before.
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf on Trump’s attempt to turn sanctuary cities into punching bags.
Mr. President, I am not obstructing justice. I am seeking it.
Really, that sentence should be enough. But there is more.
The president takes issue with a tweet I posted in February in which I notified residents of an impending raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Bay Area, including Oakland. I wanted to make sure that people were prepared, not panicked, and that they understood their legal rights. ...
Under the Trump administration, undocumented residents are vilified as “dangerous criminals” or, as of last week — simply “animals.” Trump has more than doubled deportations of people without any criminal convictions.
Trump is a hate-powered politician and Trumpism is a movement that runs on hate. For things to get better, there has to be regime change.
Viet Thanh Nguyen has a warning for those who think that cruelty comes without cost.
When I was 4 years old, I was taken away from my parents. We were refugees from Vietnam, fleeing the end of the war in 1975. With 130,000 other Vietnamese, we were put into refugee camps. To leave, we needed American sponsors, but no sponsor was willing to host my entire family. One took my parents, one took my 10-year-old brother and one took me. Memory for me begins here, howling with fear and pain as I was taken from my mother, too young to understand that I would be returned to her in a few months.
I thought of this experience when I read the words earlier this month of Attorney General Jeff Sessions regarding his intent to separate children from undocumented parents at the border — possibly even sending those children to detention camps on military bases. “If you are smuggling a child then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law,” he said. “If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.”
Go on. Read the whole thing. Then share it.
Dowell Myers and Morris Levy argue that one of the big “status changes” that Trump voters fear isn’t going to happen any time soon.
The tale of the coming white minority has roiled American politics. A recent political science study shows that white anxiety over lost status tipped the last election to Donald Trump, and Democratic Party leaders are banking on changing demography for a brighter destiny.
But rumors of white America’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. That’s because the prevailing definition of whiteness is stubbornly stuck in the past.
But the people who care about this are also stuck in the past. And you can bet that those people are also the ones not about to widen their definition of whiteness.
Walter Pincus on the call for a new A-bombs.
Top Pentagon officials are telling some pretty tall tales in seeking congressional support for a new, low-yield, nuclear warhead to put on a long-range, submarine-launched ballistic missile. …
These low-yield devices are exactly the nuclear weapons most likely to be used. They’re the bombs that make The Bomb seem … almost cute. Russia has them. The United States has them. And any more of them is a disaster waiting to happen. Like every other nuclear bomb, only more so.
David Von Drehle on the effort to move from it’s a witch hunt to it’s entrapment.
… Trump’s media defenders were buzzing about the possibility that Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) might turn up proof that the FBI dispatched a confidential informant to seduce Trump campaign officials into playing footsie with the Russians. From his post as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee , Nunes has been instrumental in creating the widespread view on the right that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation is deeply illegitimate, and that America has more to fear from the Justice Department than it does from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Unless that FBI plant was Donald Trump Jr, it’s hard to see how anyone did anything to make these talks happen. Trump Jr, like others in the campaign, were eager and willing to talk.
But what seems clear to Von Drehle is that the biggest reason Trump’s supporters are looking for a way to sell entrapment, is because proof of Trump’s guilt is all but certain.
Bob Bauer and another look at Michael Cohen.
Now, under apparent pressure from the Office of Government Ethics, the president’s lawyers dropped a note into the president’s personal financial-disclosure reports about the [Stormy Daniels] payment, denying it was a reportable liability and asserting it was included “in the interests of transparency.” The Office of Government Ethics has notified the Justice Department of the reporting issue, raising the possibility of legal exposure for the president.
But the time and energy Trump critics have devoted to this issue has always been misplaced. Whether the Daniels payment is a financial-disclosure matter or a campaign-finance violation is largely a distraction; the more compelling and consequential issue is the Trump-Cohen relationship.
Bauer’s point is that the Daniels case may offer little that wounds Trump, and technical points around campaign finance rarely bring indictments. However, there’s something else to consider.
… the campaign-finance issue and Office of Government Ethics issues would be considerably less interesting to prosecutors than other features of the Cohen-Trump relationship. Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, said earlier this month that Trump’s “reimbursement” was in the neighborhood of $470,000, considerably more than three times the sum paid to Daniels. For some reason, it was also made in installments, and while it is not clear when all the payments were made, at least some occurred after the inquiry by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III began. The arrangement cries out for investigation, which media reports indicate is already underway.
We’re still a long way from knowing everything Cohen did for Trump. Which is just another reason why Giuliani’s statement that Robert Mueller has agreed to limit an interview of Trump to two topics, seems ridiculous.
The Washington Post on the harm done by Trump’s attacks on the FBI and Justice Department.
Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s lawyer and a former Justice Department official who should know better than to spread such slander, told The Post that the president thinks that there is a law-enforcement conspiracy against him. “The prior government did it, but the present government, for some reason I can’t figure out, is covering it up,” he said. He also said: “I don’t know why the current attorney general and the current director of the FBI want to protect a bunch of renegades that might amount to 20 people at most within the FBI.” Yet Mr. Giuliani admitted Friday that the president does not really know whether the FBI planted anyone in his campaign. CNN also reported Friday that U.S. officials insist that no informant was embedded.
Giuliani is claiming that not just Obama officials, but Trump’s own appointees are conspiring against him.It would be amazing, if it wasn’t another step down Autocracy Alley.