Politics

The Mueller report should have been a knockout blow to anti-Trump forces who invested their hopes in the special counsel. With Robert Mueller’s finding that the Trump campaign did not conspire with Russia to steal the 2016 election and that there was no clear path to indicting the president for obstruction, the enterprise should have shuddered to a stop. Instead, those who were at first dumbfounded by the special counsel’s report have since found reasons to be buoyed by it – by its grudging tone, its sly assertions resembling proof, and its insistence that not being found guilty should not be confused with innocence.

To make a great success of a speech you need timing, what the ancient Greeks called kairos, you need an electric connection with your audience, and you need a bit of luck. President Trump, in his damp squib of a Fourth of July speech, had none of those things.  Kairos-wise, the Fourth of July was a near-miss: the sort of occasion that asks for and often gets rousing oratory. But in this case the resonance of the date was undermined by the suspicion that rather than honoring the national holiday the president was seeking to hijack it. As Elizabeth Warren commented tartly, 'If he's going to do a campaign event, then it should be paid for by his campaign contributions. It should not be paid for by the American taxpayer.

Sometimes in politics you win without actually winning. Barry Goldwater and George McGovern, two candidates who lost in blow-out landslides to Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, are the obvious examples. Johnson won in 1964, but it was Goldwater’s campaign that indicated where American politics was heading in the next 20 years. McGovern lost in 1972, but the 'acid, amnesty, and abortion' ideology that held him back at the time became, in only slightly diluted form, the regnant social orientation of the Democratic party from his day to our own.More recently, Ron Paul lost his two campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination — in 2008 and 2012 — but won anyway.

The candidate whom Americans should be the most ironically happy is running for the Democratic presidential nomination is surely Eric Swalwell, the goofball California congressman. Of all the contenders, Swalwell best embodies the brand of performative liberal politics that has been in vogue since the election of Donald Trump. It’s at essence the sensibility of MSNBC, which focuses incessantly on Trump’s vulgar personal traits and the never-ending Russia/Mueller saga at the expense of every other issue. So too does Swalwell, which is why he has become one of MSNBC’s most frequent and cherished guests.

The Washington, DC city council is having none of it. 'Tanks, but no tanks', it tweeted at Donald Trump. Trump may shy from actual warfare but he has arranged a military extravaganza masquerading as a July 4 ceremony. While there may be no 'brand new Sherman tanks,' as Trump promised — they were retired after the Korean War — the Pentagon is furiously trying to figure out if it can safely transport the 60-ton M1 Abrams tank over Memorial Bridge without collapsing it. A thunderstorm might also cause any tanks to sink into the ground of the National Mall. It would be awkward symbolism for the man who promised to drain the swamp.

Will President Trump switch up his ticket in 2020? The Wall Street Journal editorial page, bastion of the establishment right, certainly hopes so. A little over a week ago, it called for former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley to replace the dutiful Mike Pence as vice president. But there’s well-placed chatter in Washington that suggests the president will take a different route. Trump does indeed feel he needs VP change, but it is not Nikki Haley he is considering. It is Fox News host Tucker Carlson.The Trump 2020 campaign needs panache, not more cash. If Trump wants to make a switch – as both his predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, flirted with doing – why would he lean further into the establishment?

Of all the low-profile candidates vying for national attention in the Democratic debates this week, Marianne Williamson stood out. In coverage immediately before, she was derided for simply being an 'author and activist': descriptors, it's worth noting, that could be applied to everyone else standing. The 66-year-old was placed at the far edge of the Thursday debate stage and only got four minutes and 58 seconds of speaking time. But she made those seconds count. First, she struck out against her arch-nemesis: plans. 'I’ll tell you one thing, it’s really nice if we’ve got all these plans, but if you think we’re going to beat Donald Trump by just having all these plans, you’ve got another thing coming,' she said. 'Because he didn’t win by saying he had a plan.

The Pentagon is urgently reviewing just how and when the president might launch nuclear missiles as a dangerous new nuclear arms race breaks out. Hypersonic missiles are capable of flying at around 12,000 miles per hour, or Mach 20. That would reduce the US response time to as little as five minutes — too short for the president to enter the launch codes into the ‘football’ (actually a briefcase) that is never more than a few feet away. Instead, some officials argue that Artificial Intelligence should manage the US response. AI could gather information about launches, likely targets, and the most effective counter-responses — and be empowered to launch nuclear missiles without human intervention.

Who was the last person you felt genuinely sorry for? A newly unemployed blue-collar worker who’s been ‘innovated’ out of a job by mechanization, perhaps. Or that elderly widower in an old folks’ home whose family never seems to visit. Maybe even a single mother in the Rust Belt, trapped in the bleak throes of opioid addiction. There’s enough suffering in this country to go around – it’s not hard to pick someone. Then ask yourself this: what about the real victims? Those struggling through the hardship of sleepless nights and non-stop travel, met with at best indifference, at worst disdain wherever they go. When have you given them a moment’s thought?