Peter Baker and Nicholas Fandos at the NY Times have put together a damning look into how Trump went down the rabbit hole on Ukraine: Hungary’s Orban Gave Trump Harsh Analysis of Ukraine Before Key Meeting. Here’s some choice bits:
...Just 10 days before a key meeting on Ukraine, President Trump met, over the objections of his national security adviser, with one of the former Soviet republic’s most virulent critics, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, and heard a sharp assessment that bolstered his hostility toward the country…
...John R. Bolton, then the president’s national security adviser, and Fiona Hill, then the National Security Council’s senior director for Eurasian and Russian affairs, opposed a White House invitation for the Hungarian leader, according to the people briefed on the matter. But they were outmaneuvered by Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff…
...Mr. Trump at a critical moment in the Ukraine saga sat down in the Oval Office with a European leader with a fiercely negative outlook on Ukraine that fortified opinions he had heard from his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, and from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia repeatedly over the months and years…
You know you’re in trouble when John Bolton comes across as a good guy in this mess. And Mulvaney? Here’s another choice bit — while everyone else was leery of Orban who has racked up a reputation as an autocrat and worse,
Mr. Mulvaney, however, had come to respect Mr. Orban from his time as a member of Congress and his involvement with the International Catholic Legislators Network, according to an administration official close to the acting chief of staff. Mr. Orban has positioned himself as a champion of Christians in the Middle East, a position that earned him Mr. Mulvaney’s admiration, the official said.
Remember when there were worries JFK would owe first allegiance to the Pope? George Soros and his eternal International Jewish Conspiracy? Radical Muslims and Sharia Law coming to America? Funny who gets to mix religion with politics, and who doesn’t.
To expand on a comment I submitted to the Times, let’s see what we have here:
- A president who is being led around by the nose by people with agendas that are not in the interests of the United States.
- A president whose, ignorance, arrogance, paranoia, weakness for conspiracy theories casting him as the victim, and susceptibility to flattery lets him be easily manipulated.
- A key staff member with a religious agenda.
- Ethnic tensions, division among allies, autocrat envy: check.
- Blackmail by withholding military aid until dirt is manufactured on a political opponent.
About the only thing missing from this are some kind of deals that benefit the Trump business empire, and a personal role for Ivanka or Jared. You can’t make this stuff up.
Read the whole thing — it’s like a historical novel about the worst kind of court petty politics, intrigue, foreign interference, etc. except it’s not fiction. Lincoln may have had a team of rivals; Trump has a cabal of puppet masters trying to pull his strings as he pulls everyone else’s.
After that train wreck of a press conference yesterday where Trump repeatedly went off the rails, there’s enough material to support both a 25th Amendment intervention and impeachment on multiple counts. Or would be if we still had a functioning democracy. (If Democrats don’t have a team putting together viral videos of Trump’s Greatest Hits for a social media push, they really are as stupid as they seem at times.)
This is what an Imperial Presidency with a mad king looks like. It certainly makes it easier to understand how Trump could blow up Syria with a single phone call. There is no adult supervision in the White House.
Moscow Mitch continues to play Sergeant Schulz and sees nothing as he packs the courts with horrible judges who will be there for decades. Trump’s appointees continue to gut federal agencies and sell off the country. The Supreme Court stays on track to disassemble the New Deal, Voting Rights, Roe v. Wade, and anything else the Federalist Society has on its shopping list. Fox News and talk radio continues to act like a combination of Pravda and Tokyo Rose. Russia issues statements of false concern about the decline of the U.S. while chortling that they really have to help Trump get re-elected.
Oh, and Climate Change is still out there, along with Infrastructure Week.
The press that obsessed over Bill Clinton’s bimbonic eruptions, Whitewater, and “Her Emails” seems strangely passive about all this, while worrying Democrats aren’t doing enough to woo Trump supporters and might be going too far left. Do you think they believe Trump is toast, so their most important job is to keep Democrats in line?
SMH. Interesting times.