Politics

Donald Trump should be in high spirits. Yesterday, a Washington, DC liquor board assessed whether it should yank his license to sell beer, wine and spirits at the Trump International hotel (the lawyer representing the group, Byron York notes on Twitter, also has Glenn Simpson/Fusion GPS as a client). It decided that ‘The board does not agree with the assumption that a character and fitness review may be initiated at any time.’At issue was whether Trump, a lifelong teetotaler who has indulged in copious other vices to compensate for his one public act of self-restraint, is a man of low character who should not be permitted to sell alcohol. The complaint was funded by an Arizonan Republican named Jerry Hirsch who heads an organisation called Make Integrity Great Again.

Andrew Cuomo has spent the better part of his tenure in New York engulfed by corruption and governance failure. As he lurches toward a third term of quasi-imperial gubernatorial rule, he has chosen to follow what has become the standard playbook for blemished Democrats needing self-absolution: just attack Trump. Even when Trump has nothing especially to do with the issues at hand, just attack him and hope it suffices for a plurality of the electorate. And so that’s what Cuomo has been doing at the few begrudging campaign stops he’s made in recent days, with actor Cynthia Nixon forcing him to at least give the appearance of seeking popular approval.

One rule of identity politics is that you get to choose your identity: ‘I identify as trans Latinx’. Another rule is that your identity is fated: ‘I was born trans Latinx’. The assumption of choice applies the logic of the market in a society of cheap credit and easy bankruptcy. The invoking of biological destiny is the crude mechanics of Victorian race theory. This is a pastiche of the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate. The purpose, though, isn’t the ‘identity’ part, solving the mystery of how we are made and become ourselves, but the ‘politics’ part. As in evolution, choice and heredity are complementary strategies, deployed for competitive advantage.

A couple of days ago, The New York Times took what it called the ‘rare step’ of publishing an anonymous op-ed column supposedly by a ‘senior official’ in the Trump administration. The column, which might have been written by Bill Kristol and then run through Pete Wehner’s patented Hand-Wringing Moralising Machine, is the perfect epitome of that emetic, holier-than-thou species of Never-Trump rhetoric practiced by newly irrelevant, nominally conservative pundits. ‘The root of the problem,’ writes this latter-day Mr Podsnap, ‘is the president’s amorality [unlike Hillary Clinton’s, I guess, who was the most corrupt candidate ever to run for the presidency].

It’s hard to avoid the impression that Donald Trump is being stalked by Anonymous, or anomious, as he mispronounced it twice at his rally last night in Billings, Montana (prompting another round of speculation about why he is slurring words). The proof came right as he was denouncing the Democrats for being nothing more than a bunch of lowdown, rotten ‘haters.’ Behind him stood an anonymous young man in a plaid shirt with a three-day stubble who became a sensation on Twitter as he made a bunch of animated facial expressions indicating a degree of skepticism and surprise in response to Trump’s complaints about everything from Bob Woodward’s character assassination to the assault by an op-ed writer in the New York Times.

There is a monumental hypocrisy at the heart of NeverTrump Republicanism. The president’s critics in his own party say that Trump is a danger to American institutions and the rule of law. Yet time and again, these opponents bend and break the rules of institutions stretching from the Republican Party to the federal government in an effort to sabotage the regular political process — a process whereby Republicans, and Americans in generals, have consistently repudiated the NeverTrumpers. They can’t win elections, so they can’t govern constitutionally. But they do everything in their power to seize the machinery of party and state nevertheless.

‘Boys come up, I’m going to be president.’ That’s what John Kerry, Massachusetts senator and the Democratic nominee, told a close group of sometime-advisers at 8 p.m. on election night in 2004, or so a source familiar recounts. That year, and his near unseating of George W. Bush, still shape most Americans’ public perception of the 74-year-old: regal but aloof. That campaign seems prehistoric now: pre-Twitter, and preceding the candidate himself using Twitter for the day’s cavil. But that would be giving 2004 short shrift: the contest was as acrimonious as any prior.

Should President Trump be afraid of Bob Woodward’s new 448-page book Fear: Trump in the White House? Both CNN and the Washington Post are featuring scoops from the book which is slated to be released on September 11. So far, the White House itself has remained mum about the book, which is a major mistake that indicates it is as ill-prepared for Woodward’s assault as it was for Michael Wolff’s. But it seems likely to elicit further fire and fury from Trump, at least in the form of aggrieved tweets that will inadvertently serve to confirm the veracity of the very statements they are meant to impugn.

The New Yorker’s cancellation of Steve Bannon’s appearance at the New Yorker Ideas Festival shows that the New Yorker has no idea what it is doing. Not because it invited Bannon to be interviewed on stage by New Yorker editor David Remnick, but because Remnick reneged on the invitation only eight hours later, and because the reneging was so hasty that it cannot be presented as a thoughtful statement of journalistic principle. It looks more like the result of panic and fear, the emotions that Steve Bannon, by his own admission, exploited so successfully in 2016. https://twitter.com/JuddApatow/status/1036732535957422080 The New Yorker in turn attempted to exploit Bannon’s whiff of sulphur.

The centre of political gravity in the early 2000s moved comprehensively toward default, unrelenting hawkishness, but not necessarily because of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. If liberals went along with the Bush/Cheney foreign policy project, it was often reluctantly and begrudgingly, out of a sense of duty — and in friction with their residual grief over a recent presidential election deemed stolen. The figure who instead inspired the genuine trust of liberals, and gave them confidence in the righteousness of America’s aggressive military path, was John McCain.

Here we go again. Donald Trump is on a fresh Twitter orgy, around 20 or so in the last day, attacking everyone from ‘degenerate fool’ Carl Bernstein to CNN chief Jeff Zucker to Nellie Ohr. Believe it Ohr not, her sin is not only to be married to Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, but also to — gulp — be fluent in Russian. ‘She worked for Fusion GPS where she was paid a lot,’ Trump wrote. ‘Collusion!’ There are two theories circulating about Trump’s collusion effusions. The first is that he’s simply going bonkers. The poor fellow, so the thinking goes, is cracking up under the strain of the stream of revelations about his misdeeds, concupiscent and otherwise.

Democrats will face a dilemma if they win control of the House of Representatives in November’s midterm elections. Should they impeach President Trump over the Russia affair? Or should they impeach him over the Stormy Daniels porn-star payoff? Or should they impeach him over something else? There’s no doubt the party’s base of voters is more than ready to stick it to Trump. A recent poll by Axios found that 79 per cent of Democrats believe Congress should begin impeachment proceedings. And that’s right now. Imagine how they will feel if they are fired up by victory in November. The problem is, Democratic leaders are scared of alienating independent voters the party needs to win.