Month: August 2018

On the ex-campaign manager Paul.

It appears that he should have called Saul.

Will Trump pardon him then?

What’s a crime among friends?

Will he end up just taking the fall?

It has been widely reported that the Europeans have a scheme in dealing with the White House in which Macron plays the good cop and Merkel, the bad cop.  It clearly doesn’t work in the real world, but at least it makes sense in theory.

The question for today is, if the Trump administration wants to try the same game, how does it work?  There is no shortage of candidates for the bad cop role, but who in this government can plausibly play the good cop?  Trump?  Pompeo?  Bolton?

So Trump has a friend known as Paul.

They’re a match with corruption and gall.

“Lock her up!” they both cried.

So it’s just, in my eyes.

He’s the one who’s behind the eight ball.

I wish someone would tell Trump that this phrase makes no sense.  The word “rigged” is only intended to apply to some sort of a competition whose outcome has been unlawfully predetermined.  A “witch hunt” is not such a competition.

The Mueller investigation could in theory be a  “witch hunt,” but it can’t be a “rigged witch hunt.”  The revelations and the guilty pleas that have arisen from it prove my point.

To the average person, “draining the swamp” means reducing the access and power of lobbyists, and eliminating corruption in government.  To Trump, it clearly means no such thing;  lobbying activity in Washington, by all accounts, has increased, and the amount of inappropriate self-dealing by Trump and his officials has reached levels never before seen in my lifetime.

So what did he mean by “draining the swamp?”  In retrospect, we can see that he meant the destruction of prevailing political and ethical norms, and the firing of anyone who dares to use the law to stand in his way.

Trump maintains that the Manafort trial has nothing to do with him, which, on its face, is completely true.  He also argues that Manafort was only his campaign manager for a very short period of time, which isn’t.

If you accept his statements as true, then why is he going ballistic about the case and demanding that Sessions immediately fire Mueller–something he knows isn’t going to happen, given that Sessions’ one slightly redeeming quality is his sense of professional ethics?  Why doesn’t he just ignore the trial if it has no legal implications for him?

It’s a question with significant ramifications.  One hopes Mueller answers it for us.

There are obvious similarities between the American election of 2016 and the outcome of the Brexit referendum.  In both cases, right-wing populists raging against technological changes, globalization, and immigration prevailed over a more cosmopolitan establishment.  In both cases, chaos has ensued, just as the establishment predicted.

The difference is that the British government is trying to ride out the chaos, with very limited success.  Trump, on the other hand, revels in being a chaos agent.  America is now an unapologetic force for instability throughout the world.

Neither will end happily.  It’s just a question of how well the damage can be contained between now and then.

Predictably, Brexit is turning into an economic and political disaster for the UK.  Economically, it has led to uncertainty, a loss of investment, and reduced growth; politically, it is likely to result in the demise of the government sometime between now and the 2019 deadline, and could ultimately put Corbyn in Downing Street.

The paradox is that right-wing populist victories elsewhere in Europe are moving the EU away from “ever closer union” and back to a looser coalition of nation-states with different values and political systems.  When it is all said and done, Brexit may well prove to have been unnecessary as well as damaging.