Donald Trump’s Saturday morning Twitter flurry, which included not one, or two, but three seperate tweets attacking Hillary Clinton should serve as a reminder that there’s one term that gets left out all too often when describing Trump. Sure. He’s a pompous jackass. Absolutely, he’s a know-nothing idiot who has not the first clue about history, or science, or the lives that are lived by people who weren’t born with a silver spoon in every orifice. But there’s one term that sums Donald Trump up better than all the rest.
He’s a coward.
Nine months after the election, Trump is still hiding behind HIllary’s skirts every time he feels the least bit of heat.
So many people? Yeah. Name two. Look at that. How craven. How gutless. How weak-kneed, spineless, and chicken-hearted. Lily-livered. Cowardly.
This eagerness to throw stones at others is the perfect synopsis of a man who’s reached 71 years without ever doing a hard day’s work. Someone who never known a single day of need. Someone whose every moment has been coddled and protected. Who never had to face the results of any decision without a whipping boy kept handy. Someone whose tiny finger always points anywhere but at himself.
This week, Sean Spicer opted out of daily defending the indefensible. So did Mark Corallo, the spokesperson for Trump’s legal team. And while Trump found at least one more person willing to stand between himself and acknowledging the truth, the pardon talk shows that Trump realizes this long buffet of self indulgence is finally getting ready to close.
Let’s read what some pundits have to say.
Lawrence Tribe believes that presidential pardon power, it my not be “complete” after all.
Can a president pardon himself? Four days before Richard Nixon resigned, his own Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel opined no, citing “the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case.” We agree.
The Justice Department was right that guidance could be found in the enduring principles that no one can be both the judge and the defendant in the same matter, and that no one is above the law.
But of course, the issue isn’t what’s right. It’s what will the Supreme Court say. At this point, Trump has three people ready to sign on to a declaration that’s he’s God-emperor. Getting two more to side with him is a long way from impossible.
Or a president may conclude that even if a person may have committed a crime, he was acting in good faith to protect the national interest; President George H.W. Bush pardoned former defense secretary Casper Weinberger in the Iran-contra affair in part for this reason.
In all such instances, however, the president is acting as a kind of super-judge and making a decision about someone else’s conduct, the justice of someone else’s sentence or whether it is in the national interest to prosecute someone else. He is not making a decision about himself.
But … thoughts about himself are the only kind Donald Trump has.
Colbert King on a hopeless quest for Trump’s missing sense of responsibility.
“I’m not going to own it,” President Trump said about the Affordable Care Act that he and Republicans, following years of bombastic promises, have thus far failed to either repeal or replace. “Let Obamacare fail.”
That declaration provoked an angry editorial response from The Post, which asked: “Has there ever been a more cynical abdication of presidential responsibility?”
Uhh. Does it have to be someone other than Trump? Because if we can stay on Trump, then yes. All the time.
Trump said the operation was something military leaders “were looking at for a long time”; it was “something that was, you know, just — they wanted to do. And they came to see me and they explained what they wanted to do, the generals, who are very respected.”
And with that, the commander in chief shifted the blame: “And they lost Ryan.” …
Trump has a penchant for desertion on the field of battle when something goes wrong.
See my primary thesis, top of the page: Donald Trump is a gutless wonder.
Leonard Pitts on how the Republicans turned fear into a franchise.
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.
If you changed the idea that people are the cause of climate change to brown people cause climate change, Republicans would become believers overnight.
As in a party official from North Carolina who bragged in 2013 that the state’s photo ID law would keep “lazy blacks” and others from voting. “The law is going to kick the Democrats in the butt,” Don Yelton told “The Daily Show.”
In a sense, you can’t fault Republicans for this. The GOP is built on appealing to the anger and resentment of older, straight, white, Christian voters.
Wait. I think I can fault Republicans for that. For all of that.
Jennifer Palmieri on why Scaramucci is less a “mooch” and more of “mess” for the White House press corps.
When I was White House communications director for President Barack Obama I would warn the White House press corps that they were living on borrowed time…. in a digital age, with the proliferation of communication platforms, the media was eventually going to need a better answer for why 50 or so reporters deserved daily access to the White House — access not available to other outlets and the general public.
Now, the clock has run out. The ultimate disrupter, in the form of President Trump, is seeking to change nearly every rule that presidents and the reporters who cover them have lived by.
Not quite true. Trump is doing everything he can to undercut and sabotage reporters. He doesn’t believe there are any rules that apply to him.
Spicer was a vestige from the initial era of the Trump White House when Washington regulars joined hoping to “professionalize” this very unconventional president. It was immediately apparent that Spicer would fail in that endeavor as he was forced by the president to so famously lie about the crowd size at the inauguration. It has been a long, slow, painful slog to the inevitable moment when Spicer would quit. For his sake, I wish it had happened on Jan. 21.
I’m not wasting a single-use time machine on Spicer. I’m heading back to mid-October to either knock out James Comey to yell at complacent idiots … like me.
Jennifer Weiner goes flying with Trumperbell.
We’ve all been having a good chuckle watching our president and his surrogates characterize Mr. Trump’s 39-year-old son, the married father of five, as an “honest kid,” a wide-eyed innocent whose only sin in agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected lawyer and others was, perhaps, an endearing overenthusiasm, like when a puppy won’t stop licking your face, or colluding with hostile superpowers.
Every new revelation of each new Russian guest at that Trump Tower meeting, where the aim was to pass along Kremlin-gathered dirt on Dad’s competitor, makes Donald Jr.’s case look increasingly less credible.
There’s also that problem where Trump Jr admitted that he was fishing for emails from the Russian government that were part of a larger campaign to help his father. Carry on.
So far, the administration is spinning it as no big deal. It’s just politics, Trump Sr. now says with a shrug. And Washington is, after all, where a representative, Henry Hyde, once explained away an extramarital dalliance by classifying it among his “youthful indiscretions,” even though he was 41 at the time.
Hyde did this while heading the Bill Clinton impeachment proceedings. That’s not hypocrisy, it’s world-class gall.
In his assertions that Donald Jr. is “a good boy,” “a good kid,” President Trump and his camp are invoking potent precedent about how we’ve been taught to see whiteness and maleness and when — if ever — we expect boys to become men. People of color, of course, never receive the leeway that “good kids” like the 39-year-old Trump son seem to get.
Frank Bruni on that other billionaire real estate “developer” in the White House.
On Monday, Jared Kushner is set to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee, but not so that we can listen. Not so that we can watch. It’s a closed-door affair, meaning that unlike Jeff Sessions, Kushner gets to dance in the dark.
How fitting. We always see his fingerprints but never hear his voice. He throws his weight around, then floats above it all. No wonder the president’s lawyers and various White House aides and advisers are fed up with him. He’s there but not there: a meddlesome ghost. A puff of smoke.
So far as we know, the invisible man is still sitting in on classified hearings, even though he’s lied repeatedly about his own meetings with foreign officials and “corrected” his security form, only to correct it again and again, each time with more admissions.
He got the emails about emissaries of a foreign adversary bearing dirt, but — what do you know? — read right over the subject line that said “Russia - Clinton - private and confidential.” No flashing lights in those proper nouns. No blaring sirens in those particular adjectives.
That’s how Kushner’s attorney can make the outrageous claim that Jared didn’t know what the meeting was about. He didn’t read the email title. He didn’t read the letters at the bottom of the thread. He just read the lines that invited him into the meeting and nothing more. Which is an amazing talent.
Nicholas Kristof is also here to talk about Jared Kushner.
For all that we don’t know about President Trump’s dealings with Russia, one thing should now be clear: Jared Kushner should not be working in the White House, and he should not have a security clearance.
Good call.
Here’s the bottom line: Kushner attended a meeting in June 2016 whose stated purpose was to advance a Kremlin initiative to interfere in the U.S. election; he failed to disclose the meeting on government forms (a felony if intentional); he was apparently complicit in a cover-up in which the Trump team denied at least 20 times that there had been any contacts with Russians to influence the election; and he also sought to set up a secret communications channel with the Kremlin during the presidential transition.
Until the situation is clarified, such a person simply should not work in the White House and have access to America’s most important secrets.
Completely agree. And Kristof points out something that’s often getting overlooked.
Similar issues arise with Ivanka Trump. The SF-86 form to get a national security clearance requires inclusion of a spouse’s foreign contacts, so the question arises: Did Ivanka Trump list the Russians whom Kushner spoke with? If they were intentionally omitted, then that, too, is a felony.
The Washington Post on John McCain.
TOTALLY IN keeping with his character, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) declared, one day after it was disclosed he is suffering from a serious form of brain cancer, that “unfortunately for my sparring partners in Congress, I’ll be back soon, so stand-by!” The senator also issued a toughly worded criticism of President Trump’s decision to end support for the Syrian rebels fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Mr. McCain is not going quietly into the night.
We wish Mr. McCain every success as he considers his treatment options for glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor. It goes almost without saying that his determination and fighting spirit are legendary.
No reflection on John McCain, but every time a story comes up about cancer and “fighting spirit” and “determination” it makes me want to punch something—the writers of the story. Cancer does not care how determined, or cheerful, or upbeat, or “tough minded” you are. A glioblastoma eats your mind. Or it doesn’t. And the outcome of that confrontation is determined by genetics, and treatment protocol, and dozens of factors we don’t yet understand. But we understand enough to know that “a winning attitude” isn’t part of it.
Turning the fight with cancer into something that’s a measure of “fighting spirit” is not even one step removed from blaming those who die from cancer of being somehow Just Not Determined Enough.
Please find ways to compliment John McCain without turning the struggle that millions of Americans have with cancer into a “tough guy” contest.