Politics

Well, well, well. So President Trump isn’t serious about Syria. Sen. Lindsey Graham has announced that President Trump is pondering his declaration that its time to bring the boys back from the wasteland of Syria within 30-days. ‘I think we’re in a pause situation,’ Graham said on Sunday. Trump himself tweeted, ‘we’re slowly sending our troops back home to be with their families, while at the same time fighting ISIS remnants...’ This is classic Trump. Announce a bold policy, create a furor — and then move on. Disarm North Korea? Extract real concessions from Canada and Mexico? Improve relations with Russia? Bulky China into a trade deal on American terms? Build a wall?

On Christmas Eve, President Trump spoke to a seven-year-old girl called Collman Lloyd. ‘Are you still a believer in Santa?’ he asked her, ‘coz at seven, it’s marginal, right?’ Perfect. Pure Trump. It was OK, though. Later, little Collman told reporters that she still believed, despite what the leader of the free world had said to her. Trump didn’t manage to shake a seven-year-old’s faith in Santa. But, in another surprise declaration over Christmas, he announced that American troops would be leaving Syria. It happened ‘very fast,’ as Trump likes to say. He took a call from the Turkish leader, President Erdogan.

Donald Trump is trashing America. Garbage is piling up from California national parks to the Washington mall as Trump insists on keeping the federal government shutdown over his request for a totemic border wall. The longer he’s cooped up in the White House, the crazier his pronouncements seem to become. Once upon a time a defiant Trump declared, ‘I am proud to shutdown the government.’ He figured this would be enough to scare Chuck and Nancy into compliance. It didn’t. Instead, they were emboldened. Schumer, who previously offered Trump a cool $25 billion in wall money in exchange for liberating the Dreamers, isn’t budging. And Pelosi is openly scoffing at him.

Better late than never. On the day that the New York Times unearthed the Queens podiatrist who, in exchange for favors from Fred Trump, had diagnosed young Donald as suffering from bone spurs in 1968 that precluded military service in Vietnam, he finally visited a war zone. Trump didn’t seem to be suffering from any overt infirmities as, together with Melania, he mingled with troops in Iraq, where he seems predisposed to maintain a military presence. Keeping armed forces in Iraq will allow him to up the pressure on Iran if he chooses and to launch commando missions into Syria. To the probable relief of his aides, his trip also gets him out of the White House, where he was fulminating about the refusal of Democrats to pay for a border wall.

For Donald Trump, parting is never such sweet sorrow. He’s been jettisoning cabinet officials with rapidity. The latest is Defense Secretary James N. Mattis, whose stiff resignation letter has predictably enraged Trump, prompting him to appoint Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing executive who has curried favor with Trump by backing a space force, as acting Defense Secretary starting January 1. This morning, Trump tweeted, ‘I am pleased to announce that our very talented Deputy Secretary of Defense, Patrick Shanahan, will assume the title of Acting Secretary of Defense starting January 1, 2019. Patrick has a long list of accomplishments while serving as Deputy, & previously Boeing. He will be great!

What Malcolm said of the Thane of Cawdor — ‘nothing in his life/ Became him like the leaving it’ — cannot be said of General James Mattis’s leavetaking his position as Secretary of Defense. Let me first say that General Mattis has long served his country with distinction, betraying immense care for the Marines and soldiers under his command as well as condign fierceness towards the enemies of civilization. As Secretary of Defense, he obliterated ISIS as a fighting force and has overseen the beginnings of a critical upgrade of America’s military infrastructure, which had been allowed to atrophy under the lead-from-behind posturing of Barack Obama.

Things are getting quite hairy at the White House. Apparently, senior adviser Stephen Miller reckoned that he needed to perform a cover-up before he went on national television this past Sunday. He seems to have sprayed on hair-in-a-canister to camouflage his glabrous head. Like many of the moves this administration has made, Miller’s gambit only drew more attention to what he wished to conceal. The Washington Post observed, ‘it emanated from Miller’s head like a physical manifestation of his personality — a follicle’d inferiority complex that was suddenly in charge of creating the nation’s policies.’ Since then, the White House has run into a fresh spate of bad news. Former Lt. Gen.

Sometime back in the Pleistocene Era — that is to say, round about 2015 — a frequent criticism of Donald Trump was that he wasn’t ‘really’ a conservative. He was an ‘opportunist,’ you see, someone who blithely changed his position on exigent issues — abortion, government run health care, etc. — and even his political party to suit the prevailing winds of the zeitgeist. There is something to that charge, but the more interesting question is whether it counts as a criticism or a commendation. The poet William Blake was not exactly a political sage. But his observation that an honest man may change his opinions but not his principles is relevant here.

Donald Trump secured his third choice for his third Chief of Staff on Friday. Though the budget pointman, Mick Mulvaney, has only been tapped for the top job in an ‘acting’ capacity – implying a probationary period – there’s every reason to think Mulvaney could prove a success. Mulvaney, a former Congressman from South Carolina, has proved indispensable for Trump in his early years in office, taking jobs that the president has struggled to fill. While the latest is chief of staff, Mulvaney also temporarily headed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from late last year into 2018. But some hope Mulvaney secures his latest job for the long haul. Spurned by Nick Ayers and Chris Christie, Trump has an incentive to show stability.

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.