I’m going to start the morning with a few words about the staggering implications of this interview with Corey Lewandowski.
Lewandowski was far from the most ravening of Trump’s campaign staff or post-election surrogates, but here he is offering a kind of unified theory of treason, in which every Democratic politician and every member of the Justice Department and FBI — including Republican-appointed officials who sat there through decades of administrations on the left and right — were all joined in treason. Which is the new word for witchcraft.
And the terrifying thing is … this is not ridiculous. Oh, the accusations are ludicrous, but the idea that the months leading up to the 2020 election will not consist of a Trump-sponsored production of The Crucible, held weekly with a revolving cast and a pre-lit bonfire is nowhere near as silly as it should be.
How hard is to imagine Hillary Clinton being led down Pennsylvania Avenue in chains while MAGA-hat wearing mobs hurl invective and rotten front from the wings? On what charges? Who knows? Who cares? Charges. They don’t need no stinkin’ charges. The thesaurus may say that ludicrous and laughable are synonyms. But something can be both preposterous, and ghastly. Just watch that clip if you don’t believe them.
Then come on in, We have pundits to read.
Michael Tomasky spotted the same thing, and is thinking along the same lines.
Daily Beast
I’ve been trying to tell people, with varying degrees of success, that next year’s campaign is going to be—by far—the most ruthless and dishonest campaign that any living American has seen. Some people take me seriously. But most say something along the lines that it can hardly get any worse.
Oh yes it can. It can get a lot worse. And if you want to see how, watch this clip of Corey Lewandowski appearing on Fox News Thursday night…
Yeah. That clip again.
Here’s the transcript, although you really have to study his face and eyes and hear his voice to get the full Weimar effect: “They should be fearful, and I’ll tell you why. The person who has gotten a pass on this so far is Joe Biden. Because I believe that the investigation which was launched came from somewhere inside the White House to greenlight Clapper, Comey, and Brennan to start this investigation into Donald Trump for no valid reason. We now know the State Department, we’ve seen the contemporaneous emails that were put into place after Victoria Nuland did a meeting with Christopher Steele, then notified the FBI this person had no credibility. But it continued. Because it came from the highest levels of the government.
When Trump was laying out his “death list” earlier this week, he included on that list an unnamed “someone higher up” than Comey. Biden is who he meant. Trump, and Rudy Giuliani, and a whole collection of Republican helpers, are building up a case against Biden on every possible front. You only thought it was Ted Cruz’s father who shot JFK. Turns out that was Joe Biden. Stick around, it’ll be on Fox before you know it.
Jonathan Chait on why Trump’s antics are never funny.
New York Magazine
The custom for presidents is to stop campaigning after the election and use their public remarks to address the country as a whole, before — should they decide to seek reelection — shifting back into campaign mode during their fourth year. Trump has never observed any such distinction. He has continued holding campaign rallies throughout his term, presenting himself as a champion of his supporters engaged in total, endless war with their enemies in the Deep State, the news media, and other hostile bastions.
“You joined our movement” — he said, making clear which subset of the country he was speaking to — “because you rejected the failures and betrayals of the past,” he told the crowd. “You reclaimed your destiny, you defended your dignity, and you took back your country.” The clanging, ethnonationalist oratory felt weirdly out of time and place. “Joined our movement”? “Reclaimed your destiny”? “Defended your dignity”? It sounded less like a speech by an American president than like lines uttered by one of the leaders of the Axis powers.
Honestly, it could easily be a speech from one of the Axis powers. One) No one would be surprised to find out Stephen Miller was cribbing from Mussolini. Two) That story wouldn’t even get two days play on the news.
The president then began riffing on the investigation into his campaign’s connections with Russia, which he repeatedly referred to as “treason.” By “treason” he did not mean his encouraging a foreign power to intervene in an American election but rather the investigation into the crime, turning the normal definition of patriotism on its head. The crowd broke into the trademark chant “Lock them up,” which began in 2016 as a supposed endorsement of email-security-protocol enforcement and has morphed into a generalized demand to imprison Trump’s opponents. Trump’s critics have grown increasingly numb to this chant, even as its meaning has grown in menace.
On Thursday, Donald Trump was reminded that treason carries a death penalty, and in response he began listing names. And the fact that Trump is ready to put people’s heads on spikes for the crime of not supporting Trump, didn’t even make one day’s news.
Paul Krugman … is getting skipped over this week.
New York Times
Because his piece is about the change in policies likely to come with a new president of the European Central Bank, and when an economist includes the warning “Wonkish” right in the title of an article, you can believe him. But hey, if this topic fascinates you … the link is there.
Laurie Roberts is writing on a local topic, but I’m including it anyway.
Arizona Republic
I think you’ll see why.
[Arizona] House Republicans met privately on Thursday to, among other things, plot various methods of punishment for a pair of trouble making Republican senators.
An ethics complaint? Possibly. Or maybe putting them – and by extension, their constituents – in the deep freeze? As Rep. Ben Toma, R-Peoria, explained, “There has to be repercussions of some kind.”
So what offense, you might ask, did Sens. Paul Boyer of Glendale and Heather Carter of Phoenix commit? What unforgivable horror have they visited upon Toma and his fellow fuming Republicans?
They’re standing up for victims who were sexually assaulted as children, the ones who have no legal way to hold accountable their rapists and the institutions that enabled them.
You’re reading that right. What Republicans in Arizona are upset about is an attempt to give child victims of sexual abuse more time to come forward. But even though both sponsors of the bill were Republicans, the Republican leaders of both the House and the Senate blocked it from reaching the floor. Then Republicans got together and decided to punish the pair by blocking any bill either of them submits. And no, I don’t know the reasoning behind this. I’m not sure they do.
Renée Graham wants to know when it will be impeachment o’clock.
Boston Globe
Here’s hoping that whatever plan House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has for President Trump, it won’t require him to stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody before she finally agrees to an impeachment inquiry. At this point, that’s about the only thing this unraveling president hasn’t done — not that such a grievous act seems necessary to launch this nation’s first impeachment hearings in more than two decades.
From obstruction of justice to dereliction of duty for refusing to work with Democrats until they “get these phony investigations over with,” as the president recently griped, Trump is a walking encyclopedia of potentially impeachable offenses.
Of course, now that Barr has unlimited power to declassify at will, and practice with taking sentence fragments out of context, any move toward impeachment could feature Barr making regular appearances to accuse Democratic lawmakers of being founding members if MS-13. Or ISIS sympathizers. Or Manson family members. It doesn’t matter, since he can claim anything.
Pelosi claims that Trump’s behavior is beneath the “dignity” of the office he holds. She accuses him of being “engaged in a cover-up.” In a skillful twist on the condescending shade of “bless his heart,” Pelosi said, “I pray for the President of the United States and I pray for the United States of America.”
A day later she said, “I wish that his family or his administration or his staff would have an intervention for the good of the country.”
Pelosi is full of snark. But she still is not calling for impeachment.
If Pelosi was driving a car, I’d be the squirmy kid in the back seat asking, “Are we there yet?” It’s inconceivable to me that hearings aren’t already in full swing, and that seems to be the case for a rising chorus of discontent within the party Madame Speaker leads.
Count me as someone who, right from November of 2016, believed that allowing Trump to remain in office and conducting a fair election in 2020 were incompatible events. I hope I’m wrong, but since every other institution has already been wrecked, the idea that we’re going to have another election that looks like America and not an election in Russia or North Korea … seems not all that certain.
Joan Walsh is signing a similar tune.
The Nation
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a novel suggestion Thursday morning: President Trump is acting so irrationally that his family and staff should stage an “intervention” to assess his psychological “well-being”—“for the good of the country.”
Pelosi, of course, has no influence over whether Trump’s family or staffers do what she suggests. She knows they’re not going to follow her advice. If the situation is as grim as she says, there is an obvious remedy that Pelosi can influence, of course: the start of an impeachment inquiry. But the House Speaker continues to insist Democrats are not going down that “path.”
“The White House is just crying out for impeachment,” she said, and she’s equally determined not to give Trump what he wants.
Trump genuinely does seem to want impeachment. And of course the odds that the Senate would remove him are remote, at best. But there’s something worse than trying and losing.
Pelosi has certainly raised the level of drama. But Americans need more than thoughts and prayers from Pelosi; they need to see that she is prepared to do her duty. Every time she makes the case that Trump’s bad behavior is escalating, she begs the question: Why not move on impeachment? Even on Thursday morning, Pelosi admitted that Trump’s actions obstructing justice and defying subpoenas “could be impeachable offenses.” But she called that path too “divisive” for Democrats to walk at this time. Existing House investigations “may take us to a place that’s unavoidable, in terms of impeachment,” she admitted. “But we’re not at that place.”
Yeah, I’m a firm supported of Pelosi. But I think on this topic, she’s dead wrong. Impeaching carries risks. Not impeaching carries risks. But one set of risks also involves doing the right thing.
Will Bunch on Jay Inslee’s very complete environmental plan, and very low poll numbers.
Philadelphia Inquirer
There’s an old saying in rock 'n' roll that only 5,000 people bought the Velvet Underground’s epic 1967 debut album — but every single one of them started a band. In a weird way, that reminds me of Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee’s 2020 presidential campaign that’s largely based on the issue of global warming and is only getting a composite of about 0.8 percent in the early polls — and yet it feels like every one of that 0.8 percent is a well-known climate scientist.
Michael E. Mann, the prominent Penn State climatologist who runs the university’s Earth System Science Center, told me this week that “Inslee has certainly put forward the boldest, most ambitious and aggressive climate change plan among all of the current candidates vying to be the Democratic nominee for president.” Mann hasn’t endorsed a candidate but he sees Inslee as the one right now who really seems to understand the urgency of the crisis — right at the moment that carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the earth’s atmosphere have hit an all-time record.
“He (Inslee) really gets climate change and doesn’t want millions to die,” Genevieve Guenther, founder and head of EndClimateSilence.org, said by phone from New York, praising Inslee as that rarest of presidential candidates who’s running not because of ego but because of his long-time passion for the idea of beating back climate change.
Since I first wrote three weeks ago comparing Inslee’s plan with that of Beto O’Rourke, Inslee has released a massive amount of detailed additional information. And it’s really, really good.
Nancy LeTourneau on Barr as something way beyond Trump’s personal attorney.
Washington Monthly
In a column dedicated to the idea that Barr’s behavior is the norm, it is interesting that [Cokie Roberts] devotes most of her time to the exceptions. They include the following:
- The “Saturday Night Massacre,” in which Richardson and Ruckelshaus resigned rather than carry out Nixon’s order to fire the Watergate special prosecutor.
- Comey and Mueller rushing to Ashcroft’s hospital bed to protect him from the pressure being exerted by White House aides to sign off on an illegal surveillance program.
- Jeff Sessions’ recusal from the Trump-Russia probe, which eventually got him fired.
What Roberts didn’t mention is that Ed Meese, Reagan’s attorney general, appointed Lawrence Walsh to investigate the Iran-Contra affair and Janet Reno appointed Robert Fiske to investigate the Clinton’s business dealings with Whitewater Development Corp. Ashcroft recused himself from an investigation into whether Bush administration officials illegally leaked the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame and his deputy, James Comey, appointed Patrick Fitzgerald as special prosecutor.
If you think that David Brooks brand of dismissive superiority is uniquely male, I’d like to point out that Cokie Roberts is always available to prove you wrong.
None of those are as dramatic as the Saturday Night Massacre, but they all demonstrate a willingness on the part of an attorney general to open independent investigations into potential wrongdoing by the president who appointed them. Based on what we’ve seen and heard from William Barr, I doubt that there would have been a Mueller investigation if he had been appointed attorney general instead of Jeff Sessions.
That’s a very, very safe bet.
Virginia Heffernan on the one (count ‘em) Republican not kneeling down to Trump
Los Angeles Times
Concerned citizens of the United States should at least follow Congressional Twitter. There, hundreds of our elected representatives make jokes, wax patriotic and, depending on their sensibilities, castigate either the president or his adversaries.
And every now and then Congressional Twitter busts out a plot twist that will make you forget that an HBO series featuring Starbucks cups and dragon incest ever existed.
Such was the case last weekend, when Rep. Justin Amash, Republican of Michigan, a staunch libertarian who for years has used social media to report his votes and explain his political reasoning, broke free of his party’s stifling talking points.
Amash is as far from a progressive as is possible. His “reasoning” on Twitter is often of the kind in which he explains why giving children adequate educational resources is a mistake.
Amash laid down a 13-track LP — OK, a 13-tweet thread — that played like a particularly great saxophone solo. In the end, he advocated no less than the impeachment of President Trump for, as he puts it, “conduct that violates the public trust.”
The occasion for Amash’s thread (and for a couple of follow-ups on Monday and Thursday) was that he had, brace yourself, gotten all the way through the Mueller report on Russian interference into the 2016 presidential election. He had some opinions about it.
And yet, he still may be a hero.
Charles Pierce on statements that Trump might used the Espionage Act to get still more powers.
Esquire
Lawyer friends of mine like to refer to the case of Korematsu v. U.S., the Supreme Court decision that allowed for the dislocation and detention of Japanese-American citizens, as a land mine in the law in that, technically, it never has been repealed, although the Court did repudiate it while throwing out the original Muslim travel ban in Trump v. Hawaii. For me, and for the people in my profession, the land mine in the law always has been 18 USC 793, the Espionage Act of 1917, the immortal gift of that half-nutty professor, Woodrow Wilson, and his truly awful attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer.
Half-nutty, all racist.
Of course, it all came back this week when the president* had himself a nutty on consecutive days, threatened James Comey with execution for treason, and allowed his personal Palmer, the career Republican jackanapes William Barr, to indict Julian Assange on 17 counts of violating, you guessed it, the Espionage Act. It is true that Assange is a messianic nuisance who jacked around with the 2016 presidential election, as well as being the guy who brought a road company performance of The Man Who Came To Dinner to the Ecuadorian embassy that ran for several years.
But this isn’t really about Assange who, in any case, may never see the inside of a U.S. courtroom. This is about Jane Mayer, and Charlie Savage, and Barton Gellman, and David Fahrenthold and every other dogged reporter who has made this president*’s life miserable by continuously pointing out what an incompetent, authoritarian crook and bunco artist this president* is. Weaponizing the Espionage Act on behalf of a Justice Department already weaponized to attack the president*’s political enemies is a signal and a warning. It is a monstrous abuse of power, but only because that power was there to be abused all these years and nobody was paying attention.
The original charge against Assange was carefully worded to avoid laying the groundwork for crushing journalism, but that charge was probably left over from the Obama administration. The new list of charges against Assange should concern every journalist — they certainly concern me.
Karen Tumulty on Pelosi v Trump.
Washington Post
There is something about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that allows her to unnerve President Trump as seemingly no one else can.
“I pray for the president of the United States,” she said on Thursday. “I wish that his family or his administration or his staff would have an intervention for the good of the country. Maybe he wants to take a leave of absence.”
The proof that she had hit the giant bull’s eye of Trump’s insecurities was his response: “I am an extremely stable genius.”
Exchanging insults with Trump is not an endeavor that is normally productive, as many others who tried it have found. But Pelosi is a dangerous foil for a president who operates on impulse and outburst. While Trump succeeds in making everyone else around him dizzy, Pelosi’s unique talent is an ability to keep her focus on the endgame.
Her current goal is to assure that the president vacates the Oval Office, as swiftly and as surely as possible.
I’m with you right until that last paragraph.
That means Pelosi must do two things at once: Keep Trump off balance, and restrain those within her Democratic caucus who are urging a precipitous drive toward impeachment.
How is anything at this stage “precipitous?”
Helaine Olen on identity politics. Republican identity politics.
Washington Post
In the opening speech at the Center for American Progress’s Ideas conference, Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams called for Democrats to embrace the “identity progress” label. “The notion of identity politics has been peddled for the last 10 years, and it’s been used as a dog whistle to say that we shouldn’t pay too much attention to the new voices coming into progress,” she said. “I would argue that identity politics is exactly who we are.”
… It could be said the Trump administration is playing the most nasty form of identify politics of them all. Trump officials are then gaslighting everyone else for the sin of simply seeking equal rights. …
A minority with power and money — white men, mostly wealthy, often religious or pretending to be so — has controlled societal and political norms so effectively that when those left outside simply insist on their rights, they are viewed as angry, resentful, demanding and divisive. When “identity politics” is practiced in such a way that it allows a small group to access and maintain power, it gets labeled as “norms" and treated as simply the way the world works.
I’ve chopped this up to hit some highlights. Go read the rest.
Leonard Pitts is on the impeachment express — and asking Nancy Pelosi to join him.
Miami Herald
You almost felt sorry for Nancy Pelosi.
There was something poignant in seeing her driven to prayer by less than five minutes spent with the human catastrophe that is Donald Trump. But that’s what happened last week when Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer went to the White House, ostensibly to speak with Trump about fixing the country’s decaying infrastructure.
They never got around to that. Trump, the same man who helped his son lie about meeting with Russians promising dirt on Hillary Clinton and allegedly paid hush money to women accusing him of sexual liaisons, the man who intimidates witnesses and stonewalls investigations, was in a snit because Pelosi had dared accuse him of being “engaged in a coverup” earlier that day.
For the record, Pelosi was right. The average burqa doesn’t cover up like Trump does. Still, he is reported to have stormed angrily into the room without sitting or shaking hands and proceeded to have a hissy fit that Schumer said “would make your jaw drop,” then stormed back out. There followed a public temper tantrum in the Rose Garden where this 72-year-old boy declared he would not work with Democrats unless they dropped their “phony investigations.” Somehow, he refrained from vowing to hold his breath until he turned blue.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before … go read the rest of Leonard Pitts.