Politics

‘Settled law,’ an unsettling phrase when it comes to the unborn, has haunted minds since Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh appeared on the horizon last month. The words thudded into the news cycle again this week when an elated Senator Susan Collins said Kavanaugh had assured her during their two-hour meeting that he considers the 1973 landmark abortion rights case Roe v. Wade to be settled law. This prompted rather some unseemly celebrations from the pro-abortion side, and sighs and despair among those who hoped America might change course on this emotive and important issue.

A few take-aways from yesterday’s prosecutorial frenzy. 1. Paul Manafort is in deep trouble. Absent a presidential pardon, he is likely to spend the rest of his life behind bars. 2. The crimes of which Manafort was convicted — eight counts of tax evasion and bank fraud — not only predated his brief relationship with Donald Trump but had nothing to do with main focus of Robert Mueller’s original writ, namely, to investigate ‘any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.’ That was the nub of Mueller’s marching orders. But note that Rod Rosenstein also authorised him to pursue ‘any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.

Donald Trump has stopped going to the dogs. Now he has landed upon rodents. White House counsel Donald McGahn, he tweeted early this morning, would not be a ‘RAT type’ like John Dean, the Nixon aide who fessed up to felonious White House activities before Congress to avoid being the fall guy for the administration’s misdeeds. It seems, according to a New York Times report, that McGahn was intent on avoiding a similar scenario and spoke for some 30 hours with the Mueller investigation. This revelation predictably sent Trump into a Twitter frenzy. Among other things, he’s claiming that Special Counsel Robert Mueller, or Councel, as Trump apparently likes to spell it, is Joseph McCarthy reincarnated.

If Donald Trump, as Susan Glasser shrewdly notes in her New Yorker column today, is running an ‘unreality show,’ then the latest installment arrived with his cancellation of a military parade in November on Pennsylvania Avenue. He blamed, as he always does, someone else. In this case it was Washington mayor Muriel E. Bowser who says that she ‘finally got thru’ to Trump about the exorbitant expense of his little parade. Trump stated on Twitter that the $21 million bill that the city wanted to submit for the cost of hosting the event would have amounted to a ‘windfall’ that he was unprepared to disburse.

Al Franken must be livid. After all, the failed screenwriter and former senator found himself chased out of office for far less serious allegations. He was accused of merely groping a few unsuspecting – and in one case, sleeping – women. Despite Good Feminist Gloria Steinem’s 90s declaration that Bill Clinton got a pass for one free grope from progressives, the DNC got their folks in line to force Franken’s resignation as allegation after allegation of lewd, forceful behavior unfolded. Yet somehow, Keith Ellison has dodged the bullet of some serious allegations of domestic abuse without so much as spilling his tea. For over 48 hours, the DNC remained silent as their Deputy Chair continued to campaign in the primary race for Minnesota’s Attorney General.

Donald Trump wants to bring Omarosa Manigault-Newman to heel. This morning he declared, “When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn't work out. Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!" In tweeting this sentiment, Trump, who has been vehemently denying that he ever used the N-word, not only revived suspicions about his racism and misogyny, but also did Omarosa an enormous favour. Trump’s mission should have been to let the Omarosa saga peter out. Instead, he has further inflamed it. Today, her release of a tape in which three Trump campaign staffers apparently discuss how to try and spin his use of the N-word add heft to her contentions.

If there is one that American industry President Trump is helping to revive again, it’s book publishing. The latest author to profit from this trend is Omarosa Manigault-Newman whose Unhinged, a memoir of her brief time in the White House, will soon appear. Her account, if the advance excerpts are anything to go by, is not the usual morose lamentation of a true believer who complains that the boss failed to adhere to the policies he enunciated during the campaign. She doesn’t appear to have any ideological concerns about Trump.Instead, she has launched a purely personal attack on Trump. Omarosa’s account has all the fury of a betrayed lover.

The to-ing and fro-ing between President Trump and Special Counsel Robert Mueller over an interview is starting to look like Groundhog Day, the movie in which Bill Murray plays a weatherman who wakes up to the same day each morning. Today, the Trump team apparently rejected Mueller’s proposed parameter of questions and Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani observed, “We’re restating what we have been saying for months: It is time for the Office of Special Counsel to conclude its inquiry without further delay.” It could, he said, be Mueller’s “last, best chance” to speak with Trump.

Beware the intern. Rick Gates first met Paul Manafort in 1995 when he was an ambitious young man. Soon he ascended to become partners in crime with him. The end of the affair was abundantly on evidence in the trial of Manafort today, where Manafort's former deputy and Trump campaign official Gates took the stand to testify. Asked whether he had committed any crimes together with Manafort, he responded, “Yes.” At least he didn’t reply, “Da.” Manafort fixed Gates with a steely gaze, but it didn’t deter his old chum from explaining that they had established no less than 15 foreign bank accounts in an effort to avoid paying taxes to the U.S. government. He also divulged that he had pilfered several hundred thousand dollars from Manafort along the way.

What does it mean to be “presidential”? Literalists might say: “It’s whatever behaviour and affect a President exhibits.” But most of us will have something more rigorous in mind. To be “presidential” means to be dignified but masterly, simultaneously courteous yet decorous, friendly in a self-contained sort of way. The problem with this view is that so many presidents throughout history have violated it, from Andrew Jackson and his smash-up-the-china parties at the White House to Bill Clinton's novel deployment of cigars with Monica Lewinsky. Donald Trump recently mocked the traditional idea of being presidential, explaining that behaving in that way is “a lot easier than what I do.

It’s a tale of two Trump scions. Ivanka is trying to wall herself off from the old man whose behaviour often seems to border on madness. Don Junior, by contrast, is doubling down on the lunacy.On Thursday Ivanka declared that she disagreed with her father’s depiction of the media as the “enemy of the people”— a statement, incidentally, that White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refused to make yesterday — and that she was “vehemently against” plucking migrant children from their parents as they crossed into the U.S. from Mexico. But she has not been able to avoid the taint of working for her father. The brand may be soiled beyond repair. Already she’s had to shutter her eponymous fashion line.