Donald trrump

Do you remember what the political landscape looked like before L’affaire Kavanaugh? If you don’t, that’s not surprising. A week in politics is long; a month in Trumpworld is an eternity. Let us rewind, then, to that dim-lit Sunday, September 16, when the Washington Post first ran the Christine Blasey Ford story. Trump was in trouble. His approval rating was 40 per cent. The Dems were surging in the polls; and talk was all about a midterm blue wave crashing over the administration. The rumbling of a trade war with China was giving fright. The Mueller, Cohen, Manafort scandals were bumping along, each adding to the common sense that, even if no smoking Russian gun, Trump’s circle is significantly dodgier than a President’s should be.

Donald Trump celebrated the confirmation of the second Supreme Court justice of his presidency at the Kansas Expocentre in Topeka on Saturday evening, in a typically boisterous rally meant to boost Republicans running in the state. But all is not well in the land of Oz. Kansas, thought to be a deep-red state which went for Trump in 2016 by more than 20 per cent, nonetheless is posing problems for GOP candidates running in November. The legacy of former governor Sam Brownback, one of the least popular governors in the nation, may be having an impact on the race, despite having left office in January to become Trump’s Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom.

Watch out, Twitter — Donald Trump doesn’t need you anymore. He now has his own Presidential Alert system that can send messages right to every cell phone in the country. Twitter allowed Trump to bypass the traditional media when he wanted to; the service is a sterling example of ‘disintermediation’ and the direct connection that can now be established between celebrities and the public. But with his new text alerts, Trump can well and truly speak directly to people without any fear of censorship by a tech zillionaire. Or at least he could if the Presidential Alert system actually were such a thing, and not just a 21st-century analogue to the dowdy old Emergency Broadcast System that used to transmit a beep to TVs and radios once a month.

Senator Mitch McConnell was right. Brett Kavanaugh will become a member of the Supreme Court. Senators Flake and Collins are already making reassuring noises about the new FBI report. But will his investiture help the GOP?The investigation demanded by Flake and others has proven not to have investigated very much. Mark Judge and a few other of Kavanaugh’s high school cronies were interviewed. Kavanaugh himself was not. Nor was Christine Blasey Ford. Senator Charles Grassley says about the FBI report that ‘there’s nothing in it that we didn’t already know.’ That was by design. Federal gumshoes found what the White House wanted them to find.

Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona is a man on a mission. His goal: to turn back the clock and bring the Republican Party back to its roots, to a time before Donald Trump hijacked American politics and cloaked the GOP with a populist, anti-establishment veneer. Indeed, ‘make Republicans great again’ may make for a decent slogan in the event he tosses his hat in the 2020 scrum. Flake knows from experience how powerful and intoxicating the tribalism engulfing American politics has become. Relatively popular with his constituents with an immaculate record as a fiscal conservative, Flake has represented the state of Arizona in one way or another since the early 2000s.

George Washington couldn’t tell a lie. Donald Trump can’t help telling a lie. At his press conference today Trump suggested that not only wouldn’t Democrats vote to confirm the father of our country to the Supreme Court, but that Washington may not have had a spotless record when it came to his private affairs. ‘He may have had some, I think, accusations made,’ Trump said. ‘Didn’t he have a couple of things in his past?’ Who will Trump exhume next to besmirch? Honest Abe? The Gipper?However outlandish, the presser was no laughing matter.  World leaders didn’t laugh at him, he said, but with him yesterday as he proclaimed that he was the greatest president in American history.

Imagine the excitement at the top of the Trump campaign: finally, the Russians were coming through! A ‘well-connected’ lawyer was on her way from the Kremlin with the dirt on Hillary. Donald Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort assembled to meet her in a conference room at Trump Tower. All three were there together, in the middle of the campaign, because of an email from a British music publicist called Rob Goldstone. He had written to Don Jr: ‘The Crown Prosecutor of Russia [has] offered to provide the Trump Campaign with some official documents that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information, but is part of Russia and its Government’s support for Mr.

It’s just as well that Bob Woodward’s latest exposé seems to have already faded into irrelevancy. The news cycle has briskly lunged forward to new outrages (real or perceived). His supposedly game-changing revelations have been left behind. Still, Woodward’s brief time in the limelight proved highly profitable. His dramatically titled Fear sold 1.1 million copies in just a week, and once again Woodward was bathed in cultural adulation. ‘Seriously Bob, you seem to outdo yourself every time,’ swooned ‘Morning’ Joe Scarborough, as if expressing gratitude on behalf of the collective punditocracy.

This week in Washington, the big political stories centered on sex — one with an unfortunate lack of specificity, the other offering all too many details. After days of rumours that Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s pick for the open Supreme Court seat, was facing an allegation somehow related to sexual assault, his accuser came forward and told her story to the Washington Post. Christine Blasey Ford shed her anonymity and said Kavanaugh had attempted to rape her when they were high school students. She remembered how the event occurred, she said, but not exactly when or where. These details are important, but it seems we’ll never know what exactly happened at a suburban Washington house party sometime in the summer of 1982.

Donald Trump is not an overly bookish kind of guy, but he keeps getting slammed by ambitious authors, ranging from Michael Wolff to Bob Woodward. The latest entrant in this crowded field is Full Disclosure by Stormy Daniels, a ribald tell-all of her frolics with Trump. In it, she lodges the accusation that she enjoyed the ‘least impressive sex I ever had’ with him. Daniels’s book suggests, among other things, that Sen. Marco Rubio was onto something when he mocked Trump for his small hands. Daniels corroborates Rubio’s suspicions with what the New York Post calls a below-the belt blow.

The most surprising political development of the day yesterday did not come in one of the three states that held primaries. Instead, while voting was still ongoing in Florida, Arizona, and Oklahoma, news broke that Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, had endorsed former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson in Johnson’s bid for a Senate seat of his own. Senator Paul has libertarian affinities, but Johnson is running as a big-L Libertarian. After two stints as the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee, Johnson is now its Senate nominee in the state he once governed. Is Paul delivering a vote of no confidence in his own party, the GOP?

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.