The latest Friday dump wasn’t just news. It was Reince Priebus, who was literally left on the tarmac with neither a ride nor the keys to get his stuff back from his office. Priebus later tried to claim that he had quit before he was fired, but … it’s kind of unconvincing if you get in the car and ride out to the airport only to be booted. You just know that, in the other vehicle, Anthony Scarammuci was howling with laughter.
Scaramucci spent the week attacking Priebus and making an ass of himself to a truly astonishing degree. In just a couple of days, Mooch ...
- Claimed that Priebus had stolen a public disclosure form and given it to the media.
- Threatened to fire his entire staff.
- Threatened to kill his entire staff.
- Threatened to sic the FBI on Priebus for a nonexistent “leak.”
- Called up a reporter and delivered a foul-mouthed rant in which he attacked both Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon.
- Admitted that he was tweeting threats for the express purpose of making Priebus angry.
At the end of that week. who was punished? Priebus. Because of course he was. This is a Proctocracy after all — government by, for, and of assholes.
There is something to be gained from this. At least Americans are getting a good look at what “business leaders” are like and how businesses are run. For decades, Americans have been fed a line of BS about how government is inefficient and corrupt while businesses are handled by enlightened leaders guided by the invisible-but-wise hand of the market.
Nope. This is what they’re like. Most businesses are Proctocracies in their purest form, run by the guys who bully, backstab, betray, undercut and cheat their way to the top. They’re exactly as wise as Scaramucci’s call to Ryan Lizza. Exactly as fairly run as Trump’s money-laundering casino.
Quiz time: One of these men worked at a young age in the wealth management division of a big investment firm, then went on to found a series of hedge funds before riding his sneer into America’s living rooms. Now, is that Anthony Scaramucci or 'Pharma Bro' Martin Shkreli? It’s a trick. It’s both of them.
You can’t say Trump isn’t running the government like a business. This week full of infighting and failure? That’s exactly what business is like.
Come on in. Let’s read pundits.
Ruth Marcus on the instability in the White House.
The Trump White House is imploding. The only real thing to debate in that sentence is the tense. “Has imploded” is certainly arguable. Still, as the events of the past few days have shown, implosion, in politics as in physics, is not a moment but a process. The damage continues. It builds on itself as the edifice collapses.
The temptation, of course, is to begin with Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci and his profane rant against soon-to-be-former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon.
But the more powerful, more ominous evidence of implosion and its consequences is found in the collapse of congressional efforts to repeal/replace/do something, anything, with the Republican Party’s chief nemesis over the past seven years: the Affordable Care Act.
Trump has tweeted more often about Fox and Friends than he has about health care. Sure, repealing Obamacare was his second most common promise at campaign rallies (the first was, believe it or not, family leave, not “the wall”). But since the election, Trump has spent far, far more time attacking the New York Times and CNN or praising Hannity than he has battling for a new health care bill.
Who could have imagined, on the day after the election, or even on Inauguration Day, that this would end so ignominiously?
Honestly? Anyone who paid any attention to Trump.
David Smith on why “imploding” is too mild a term.
What went wrong? Take your pick: healthcare, transgender troops, the fallout from his savaging of Jeff Sessions, the Boy Scouts speech – it was the worst week in Trump’s short presidency.
They’re all the worst week. The first week of Trump’s presidency, the big news was that Trump was lying about the size of the inaugural crowd. Now that wouldn’t get ten minutes’ notice, because he does something infinitely worse several times a day. And he’ll do something worse still tomorrow.
In five torrid days, the US president alienated conservatives by savaging his own attorney general; earned a rebuke from the Pentagon over a rushed ban on transgender troops; watched impotently as the Senate dealt a crushing blow to his legislative agenda with the fall of healthcare reform; ousted Priebus; and threw a human grenade – the new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci – into his already dysfunctional White House.
Yeah, but Trump doesn’t think it was his worst week. Trump thinks he gave Sessions a righteous drubbing because the AG isn’t blocking the Russia investigation (and because Sessions is little and almost as old as Trump, so Trump he can take ‘em). Trump thinks betraying his promises to the LGBT community is just shoring up his base. Trump think’s the boy scouts loved his sex yacht story. And he thinks the health care bill was everybody’s fault except his. You can bet that getting rid of Priebus made Trump happy enough to last all weekend.
The Observer, the world’s oldest Sunday paper, says Donald Trump is unfit for office.
The sense of things falling apart in Washington is palpable – and a matter of growing, serious international concern. Donald Trump’s latest asinine act of gesture politics, the forced resignation of his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, has shone a spotlight on the extraordinary chaos inside the White House. Even normally sober, experienced Washington observers now refer to the West Wing as a viper’s nest of seething rivalry, bitter feuds, gross incompetence and an unparalleled leadership vacuum.
Actually, most descriptions of the West Wing these days include at least one four letter word.
Like some kind of Shakespearean villain-clown, Trump plays not to the gallery but to the pit. He is a Falstaff without the humour or the self-awareness, a cowardly, bullying Richard III without a clue. Late-night US satirists find in this an unending source of high comedy. If they did not laugh, they would cry. The world is witnessing the dramatic unfolding of a tragedy whose main victims are a seemingly helpless American audience, America’s system of balanced governance and its global reputation as a leading democratic light.
Did we ever work out the relationship between those instances of killer clown sightings and the rise of Trump? It can’t be a coincidence.
Kathleen Parker on the unsustainable nature of the Trump regime.
Donald Trump had his worst day since he was elected president — we’ll just call it Friday — and his worst week since the last one.
Things can only get worser and worser, as the Bard would permit me to say. …
Scaramucci is the personification of Trump’s deep brain. To the extent that the president ever withholds a thought, Scaramucci is there to express it for him. He’s his human Twitter feed. Thus, we may assume that what Scaramucci says, Trump thinks. Thanks to the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, we’re privy to enough premium quotes to entertain ourselves for months.
Scaramucci set a very high low bar this week. If he doesn’t continue to randomly call up reporters to slam his fellow staffers, there is going to be a lot of disappointment.
A few Trump loyalists may wait for the last lifeboat, but it’s only a matter of time before this administration capsizes, titanically. Trump’s first-year agenda is DOA along with health-care reform. Going after Sessions has hurt the president with conservatives. His chaotic White House operation is a constant reminder that no one’s in charge. The cumulative effect of all of these affronts to normalcy, decorum and democracy is to reveal the profile of a deadly iceberg off the ship of state’s bow.
Figuring out how to sink Trump, without being pulled into a nation-rending whirlpool, is the challenge of our age. By which I mean the next six months.
Leonard Pitts on Republicans converting fear into vote suppression.
Yes, the hypocrisy is staggering. Scientific consensus, Miami Beach flooding, record heat and a chunk of ice the size of Delaware breaking off the Antarctic ice shelf are not enough to convince President Dumpster Fire and his party to get serious about climate change. Meantime, a few dubious anecdotes of voting irregularities gets us a presidential commission furrowing its brows over a “problem” that does not exist.
There is a problem. It’s a white people shortage. And if the only way Republicans can deal with that is punishing black people … hey, nothing new.
Consider, for instance, the rise over the last 10 years of photo ID laws, putatively designed to keep ineligible people from voting. Never mind that this happens only slightly more frequently than Darth Vader dances the macarena. Never mind, too, the alarms raised by observers who point out that poor people are less likely to have — or be readily able to obtain — such IDs. …
It is no mystery who these and other restrictions are designed to hurt. After all, the populations most likely to be affected, including African Americans and the poor, are those most likely to vote for Democrats. But if deductive reasoning is not enough to sway you, there’s also the fact that a Republican is occasionally impolitic enough to admit the chicanery outright.
Republicans have the unique ability to declare that even things coming out of their own mouth is fake news if it doesn’t fit the agenda.
Jonathan Stevenson on why we can’t count on generals to save the day.
At the beginning of the administration, most Democrats (myself included), and even a few Republicans, publicly hoped that a cadre of generals and former generals — Mr. Mattis, John Kelly at Homeland Security, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster at the National Security Council (who replaced retired Gen. Michael Flynn, a Trump loyalist) — would check Mr. Trump’s worse instincts. On Friday, Mr. Trump moved Mr. Kelly into the White House to serve as his chief of staff, replacing Reince Priebus, asserting that his military background would bring order to a tumultuous executive.
But six months later, it seems that hope was misplaced. The generals have done little to curb Mr. Trump, let alone give some shape to a dangerously incoherent foreign policy.
Like the Admiral who confirmed this week that he would fire a nuclear missile into China if Donald Trump so ordered, generals and the military in general are used to a certain level of competence at the top of the ticket. Not a huge amount — the presidency of George W. Bush is still all too fresh in our history — but at least not “I’m bored. Let’s have a war.” incompetence. They’re simply not designed for this.
Consider North Korea: As Pyongyang defiantly ignored Mr. Trump’s martial strutting, he indicated that the United States was counting on the Chinese to bring financial pressure; praised the skills of Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader; and offered to negotiate. A few months later, Mr. Trump has already ditched that approach, closing the door on the Chinese and going back to military threats.
On Saturday, Trump ditched the results of Beautiful Chocolate Cake diplomacy in a series of tweets, saying …
“I am very disappointed in China. Our foolish past leaders have allowed them to make hundreds of billions of dollars a year in trade, yet they do NOTHING for us with North Korea, just talk. We will no longer allow this to continue. China could easily solve this problem!”
Trump’s complete misunderstanding of the nature of US trade relationships with China is just one thing he’s getting wrong. But as in so many areas, Trump already believes he’s an expert, so he’s impervious to evidence or explanations.
Roger Cohen on the vanishing American diplomat
An exodus is underway. Those who have departed include Nancy McEldowney, the director of the Foreign Service Institute until she retired last month, who described to me “a toxic, troubled environment and organization”; Dana Shell Smith, the former ambassador to Qatar, who said what was most striking was the “complete and utter disdain for our expertise”; and Jake Walles, a former ambassador to Tunisia with some 35 years of experience. “There’s just a slow unraveling of the institution,” he told me.
The only thing I would disagree with in those statements is “slow.” Donald Trump’s destruction of American diplomacy and relationships with nations around the world has been striking, and of everything he’s already done, it will be the most difficult to repair. How do you get any nation to believe you when you’ve done this? Where “this” is elect Trump.
The 8,000 Foreign Service officers are not sure how to defend American values under a president who has entertained the idea of torture, shown contempt for the Constitution, and never met an autocrat who failed to elicit his sympathy. Trump seems determined to hollow out the State Department in a strange act of national self-amputation.
It’s still unclear whether Trump thinks diplomats are intrinsically bad because he’d rather an excuse to throw missiles at people, or he believes everything at Foggy Bottom has Hillary Clinton cooties.
Frank Bruni on how one letter in LGBT is already winning.
Despite past statements of affinity with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans, President Trump hastily announced a ban on transgender people in the military, and in court filings, his Justice Department went out of its way to enunciate the position that gay people are not protected by a federal civil rights law on employment discrimination.
These are steps backward. But voters seem to be moving forward …
Women in the L.G.B.T. community won 70.3 percent of their races. Men won only 60.9 percent. And that’s unusual, because there’s almost no difference in success rates for female versus male candidates generally. (There are so many fewer women in office largely because so many fewer women run.)
That last sentence alone ought to make women stop reading right here, get up, and go register for something.
Drew Altman and Larry Levitt on why it’s not “Obamacare,” it’s the way America does health care
Republicans failed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act early Friday because of divisions within their own ranks, and because they tried not only to repeal and replace the ACA but also to cut and cap the Medicaid program, generating opposition from many red-state governors and their senators.
But most of all, they failed because they built their various plans on the false claim — busted by the Congressional Budget Office — that they could maintain the same coverage levels as the ACA and lower premiums and deductibles, while at the same time slashing about a trillion dollars from Medicaid and ACA subsidies and softening the ACA’s consumer protection regulations. Had they succeeded, they would have won a big short-term victory with their base, which strongly supports repeal, but suffered the consequences in subsequent elections as the same voters lost coverage or were hit with higher premiums and deductibles.
There are things that could be done to lower costs. For example, the government could be allowed to negotiate lower prices on drugs, something that Republicans fought to block in the ACA. But that wouldn’t generate enough savings to match the money that Republicans slashed from their bill.
The challenge now is to stabilize the ACA’s insurance marketplaces. They are not in free fall or imploding, as President Trump suggests, and in most markets insurer profits have been improving. But these are fragile markets, especially in rural areas, and there are 38 “bare counties” where no insurer currently intends to participate in 2018. About 20 percent of marketplace enrollees have access to only one insurer, with the biggest problems in rural areas.
Expect Republicans to give repeal at least one more try. Call it the Son of the Ghost of Zombie Trumpcare. Abbott and Costello may not be available, but the bill will still be a joke,
Michael Goldfarb wonders if America can hold up to a president who is out to break it
The Trump administration, having passed the six-month milestone in office, kicked off the next phase of his presidency with an explosion of crazy, spread over the past seven days. Like sweeps week on The Apprentice, every day saw some headline-grabbing event to garner ratings. It started with leaks against his former bosom buddy, attorney general, Jeff Sessions. President Trump, “sources” said, was planning to fire him. It moved on to a speech to the Boy Scouts of America jamboree, where Trump told the story of a property developer who lost a fortune and was lurking at a New York party with the “hottest people”. Later, there was a tweet announcement banning transgender people from the military.
The Boy Scout story also included hints about what billionaires get up to in the south of France. Which 40,000 twelve-year-olds probably think is one helluva lot of video gaming.
All of these events, and a dozen more I don’t have space to mention, create a picture of utter chaos across the American government. Trump has ridden roughshod over not just the customs and norms of presidential behavior but also basic standards of human decency.
In doing so, he has forced journalists and the institutions they write for to change their basic standards of acceptable language. We use the words crazy and stupid now in our reports because some of the behaviour and actions of Trump and his team are crazy and stupid. We debate whether to refer to the Trump administration or the Trump regime, with all the pejorative connotations that word carries. The New York Times is still the Grey Lady, but it has to print “sucking his own cock”, because that’s what the president’s top communications official said.
Trump regards empathy and decency as weakness. If Priebus had gotten on Twitter and made comments about Scaramucci’s mother, he’d probably have gotten a promotion.
Peter Brannen gives us another reminder that there’s no magic protecting the Earth
The planet’s most profound catastrophe struck 252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, killing 90 percent of life in the ocean and 75 percent on land. The fossil record nearly goes silent and remains startlingly impoverished for millions of years: trees disappear, bacteria replace coral reefs, insects hush. What looks like fungus spikes in the fossil record, perhaps the sepulchral rot of a dying world.
It was as close as earth has ever come to being sterilized altogether, and would take 10 million years for the planet to fully recover, setting the stage for the eventual rise of the dinosaurs.
“The End-Permian mass extinction is unique in earth history,” said Seth Burgess, a geologist with the United States Geological Survey. “Nothing else is as severe, and it’s not even close.”
Right about here is the point where Scott Pruitt says “Hold my beer.”
A growing body of evidence suggests that this ancient apocalypse was brought on, in large part, by gigantic emissions of carbon dioxide from volcanoes that erupted across a vast swath of Siberia. Today the consequence of quickly injecting huge pulses of carbon dioxide into the air is discussed as if the threat exists only in the speculative output of computer models. But, as scientists have discovered, this has happened many times before, and sometimes the results were catastrophic.
We’re already wondering if we’ve managed to match the worst event in the planet’s history and simply aren’t aware of it yet. That’s not good.