Politics

No sooner had darkness at noon ended in a Manhattan courthouse, where Michael Cohen said that Donald Trump’s ‘dirty deeds’ led him into ‘darkness,’ than a fresh story about Individual 1’s past shenanigans emerged. The US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York released a memo indicating it’s receiving ‘substantial and important assistance’ from the parent company of the National Enquirer, American Media Inc. CEO David Pecker, who received immunity from the feds this past August, appears to have become part of a special species that Trump has previously described with disdain: ‘I know all about flipping, for 30, 40 years, I’ve been watching flippers.’Not like now, he hasn’t.

Chuck and Nancy dismantled Donald Trump at the White House today. Trump declared, ‘If we don’t get what we want, one way or the other, whether it’s through you, through military, through anything you want to call, I will shut down the government. I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down.’ Poll after poll has shown that government shutdowns backfire with the public. Trump should have shut up about a shutdown. But Trump, baited by Schumer, couldn’t resist posturing as Mr Big, the protector of the frontier who will singlehandedly stop drugs and felons from entering the US on the southern border, if he can only secure $5 billion to build a wall. The meeting served as an augury of what likely awaits Trump over the next two years.

Less than two years into his administration, President Trump is in search of his third Chief of Staff. This is emblematic of the single largest problem plaguing his White House and hamstringing the implementation of his agenda: personnel. The president ran on a platform of orthodox American republicanism, but that offended the recent vintage sensibilities of the US branch of the globalized ruling class. As a result, he always had a thin bench from which to draw, at least if he restricted his search to Beltway apparatchiks as he inexplicably did. Thus did Trump kill his legislative agenda by making an ill-fated deal with Paul Ryan that brought Reince Priebus into the White House as his Chief of Staff.

Ding, dong, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s gone, and Trump loyalists are pleased. For months now, Kelly has been a thorn in MAGA’s side. He’s reportedly clashed with the President’s agenda, and perhaps most importantly, fallen foul of Melania Trump, who is an increasingly powerful force in the administration. Now, he’ll have left the White House by the end of the year, and the President is expected to pick somebody who will focus on his re-election campaign for 2020. On Thursday, at All Purpose Pizza in DC, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told me, ‘I am 100 percent certain John Kelly will not be the Chief of Staff when Donald Trump is re-elected as President of the United States.

‘Totally clears the President. Thank you!,’ Donald Trump tweeted, following the Southern District of New York’s sentencing filings for Michael Cohen, which recommended prison time for the lawyer. And Donald Trump isn’t mentioned by name in the 40-page document – but things aren’t shaping up too well for whoever ‘Individual-1’ is. Per the filing: ‘During the campaign, Cohen played a central role in two similar schemes to purchase the rights to stories – each from women who claimed to have had an affair with Individual-1 – so as to suppress the stories and thereby prevent them from influencing the election...

Will wonders never cease? Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III is recommending that General Mike Flynn serve no jail time. Isn’t that nice of him? Of course, Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III first destroyed Mike Flynn’s career and essentially pauperized him through legal fees (‘the process,’ as they say, ‘is the punishment’). In making his recommendation, Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III cited Gen. Flynn’s ‘substantial assistance’ in the long-running soap opera that is his campaign against the president of the United States. The centerpiece of that ‘special assistance’ are the 19 interviews with the Office of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III for which Gen. Flynn sat.

George H.W. Bush was a president without an asterisk next to his name. No one ever wondered what overseas power was bankrolling him or what foreign intelligence service was running an operation to elect him to the White House. Americans had partisan and policy differences with George Bush, but even in the heat of the 1992 campaign, the toughest of his life, no one questioned his motives or his intentions. No one could or can doubt his deep patriotism, loyalty, and commitment to service to the nation he so clearly loved. The remembrances of this good man and consequential leader are many, and as a Republican official, campaign operative, ad maker, pundit, and proud Bush guy, I am happy to see America’s outpouring of gratitude and support for the greatest President in my lifetime.

After losing a US Senate race, Congressman George H. W. Bush was prepared to head back to the Texas oilfields and a life of relative obscurity when the new Republican president summoned him to Washington. The president thought highly of the young man and wanted to ensure his political future. He offered Bush the Ambassadorship to the United Nations, a position that would give him a chance to remain politically relevant as he burnished his foreign policy credentials. Bush accepted. And with that, Richard Nixon launched George H.W. Bush as a national figure.

The world knew him as ‘Bush 41.’ I knew him by a different name during the time I worked for him as his speechwriter when he was Vice President. In those days, the staff called him ‘The Vishnu.’ It was his own devising. He’d been to India on a state visit, where they’d presented him, amid much pomp and ceremony and clanging of brass, with a statue of the four-armed Vedic deity Vishnu. Its plaque described Vishnu’s numerous godly qualities, among them: omniscience, omnipotence, and his title ‘Preserver of the Universe.’ Mr Bush immediately recognized a kindred godhead. He began referring to himself, in staff memos and aboard Air Force Two’s loudspeakers as ‘The Vishnu.’ In more intimate settings, simply, ‘The Vish.

The chapters of the life of President George H.W. Bush, who died on Friday night aged 94, are the history of an era. If he was not one of Emerson’s ‘representative men’, it was to the good. The ‘representative man’ of Emerson’s imagination was Carlyle’s ‘great man’, a conqueror who stamped his mark on his age by forcing his environment to reflect his inborn character. G.H.W. Bush’s character reflected its environment, and represented the virtues of a vanishing class and suddenly distant age. Born in 1924 a senator’s son, Bush was educated at Phillips Academy and Yale, decades before the acronym WASP was coined. In 1942, he enlisted in the US Navy on his 18th birthday. As a naval aviator, he returned to duty after being shot down and rescued from the Pacific.

By most conventional pundit metrics, Bernie Sanders should be the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. To state the obvious, he was last cycle’s runner-up, having won 46 percent of elected delegates, 23 states, and smashed small-dollar fundraising records. His policy platform has taken hold across the party, with most every nationally ambitious figure now calling for universal Medicare, free public college tuition, and a host of other measures that were closely associated with his 2016 run. He has consistently polled as the most popular politician in America, he just won re-election in his home-state by a massive margin, and his social media engagement is off-the-charts. So what’s the problem? Simply put, large sections of the party still view him as a threat.

As the teeming mass of mostly male, partly criminal, humanity stews about on Mexican side of our Southern border, entertaining itself by throwing rocks at US border officials, emoting for CNN cameras, and periodically rushing the fence in an effort to break through to America, it is worth stepping back to ask a few large questions. But first, let’s step out of the rancid pool of sentimentality with which the media, in its anti-Trump frenzy, has surrounded this episode.

There is a point where one can go from being a conspiracy theorist to becoming an actual conspirator. It seems that Jerome Corsi, who is reportedly negotiating a plea deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, may have reached that point during the 2016 presidential campaign. Mueller is zeroing in on the ties between Corsi, Roger Stone, WikiLeaks, and, of course, Mother Russia. Corsi has been at the center of right-wing conspiracy thinking for some years. He has been part of numerous campaigns to vilify leading Democrats, a veteran, so to speak, of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s mission to take down John Kerry in 2004 and the birther contretemps about Barack Obama, which Donald Trump, among others, helped to push.

’Twas the night after Thanksgiving 2028, and all the White House was dark, except for the kitchen. President Trump leant against the range, sipping from a can of Poland Spring cranberry seltzer as she watched the First Husband scraping the last of the stuffing from the cavity of the giant turkey. ‘Harder,’ she ordered. ‘Ivanka, I’m trying,’ Jared said. He was glad MBS and Kanye had already left. Thanksgiving 2028 had been just like Thanksgiving 2018, except for the moment at the table when they had been taking turns to say what they were grateful for, and Jared’s electronic ankle bracelet had gone off.

According to a document obtained by the transparency initiative Property of the People, the FBI now regards the Proud Boys (the self-styled ‘pro-West fraternal organization’ founded by right-wing provocateur Gavin McInnes) as an extremist group linked to white nationalism. As someone who’s met similar groups (I’ve stayed with anti-government militias in Kansas and California), I’m not convinced. In my experience, Proud Boy-style groups aren’t racist – if I had to define them, I’d say they’re obnoxious pro-Trumpers whose politics seem less about making America great again and more about antagonizing the other side. Sure, they tend to be strongly anti-immigration and un-PC more generally – but white nationalist?