Donald trrump

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.

The bombshell last night in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report was that there was none. What he did not say turned out to be more significant than what he did. Filled with extensive redactions that made it look more like a newly declassified CIA than a court document, the memo on former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, he of ‘lock her up’ fame, recommended no prison time. In maintaining a vigilant silence, Mueller is sure to enrage and unsettle Trump more than if he had disclosed what he knows. Now Trump — and everyone else’s — imagination is free to run riot. Mueller indicated that Flynn had provided ‘substantial assistance,’ including no less than 19 interviews with the FBI.

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.

For all the good news 2018’s midterms have given Democrats — a House majority, a Senate seat from Arizona, seven more governorships, and an all-blue congressional delegation from Orange County — they have also shown that President Trump has a clear path to re-election in 2020. Midterms historically maximize the relative turnout for the opposition party. More voters overall will go to the polls in 2020 than did so this year, just as more people voted in 2016 than did so this November. But the ratio of Democrats to Republicans will be narrower, if the past anything to go by.

So much for small favors. Judge Timothy J. Kelly just came down hard on the administration that appointed him to the federal bench in September 2017. He granted CNN a temporary restraining order, ruling that the White House did not follow due process in depriving CNN reporter Jim Acosta of his right to a ‘hard pass,’ which permits him to enter White House grounds when pleases. He also noted that the doctored video that press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders disseminated about Acosta performing a karate chop on a hapless intern who was trying to retrieve a microphone was ‘likely untrue.’ The judge’s verdict further demonstrates that Trump is the best thing to happen to Acosta and, by extension, much of the media.

Ivanka Trump holds rather more sway in the White House than a First Daughter should — that much is well-established. Yet this week we see that it is her step-mother, Melania, who calls the shots in her husband’s administration. Mrs T is the real force behind the throne, as Mira Ricardel has discovered to her cost. Palace intrigue doesn’t get more intriguing. Ms Ricardel, a close ally of National Security Adviser John Bolton, made the mistake of clashing with Melania over her ‘Be Best’ trip to Africa. Ricardel allegedly insisted a member of the security council should accompany Mrs Trump as she posed her way around Ghana, Malawi and Kenya in a pith helmet, cream jacket and trousers, and black-neck tie. Melania disagreed. https://audioboom.

We’re all Trumpologists now. Like the Kremlinologists of the Cold War, monitoring the line-ups at missile parades to see who was in or out of the Politburo, we track the president’s Twitter twitches and off-the-cuff quips, then guess which way he’s going to go next. The Soviets were rational actors, and so was Donald Trump when he responded to the midterms. He called the split Congress a ‘beautiful, bipartisan-type situation’ — beautiful because the situation places Trump at the fulcrum of power, bi-partisan because no legislature will pass without both sides on board. Trump is the president who spent his first few days in the White House annulling Barack Obama’s executive orders.

It’s beginning to look as though Michelle Obama does not like Donald Trump. In her new memoir, Becoming, she explains why. Her beef with Trump centers on his embrace of the birther controversy about her husband, who was supposedly born in Indonesia or some other far off country — anywhere but America: ‘The whole thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed. But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks. What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this I’d never forgive him.

Let’s face it, reality show star Jim Acosta could get a cover charge for his rendition of the Man of La Mancha. There he is, press conference after press conference, crooning his ‘unheard melodies’: ‘To dream the impossible dream To fight the unbeatable foe To bear with unbearable sorrow To run where the brave dare not go.’ Don Quixote tilted at windmills and was ridiculous but lovable. Jim Acosta accosts his ‘unbeatable foe,’ Donald Trump and is ridiculous but disgusting. Think back to his performance in August before the President’s Press Secretary Sarah Sanders. Acosta kept badgering her to assure the scribes in the White House press pool that the President did not think the were ‘enemies of the people.

If a midterm is a referendum on a presidency, it is one that presidents usually lose, especially Republican presidents. Since the Civil War, the president’s party has gained seats one only three occasions: 1934, 1998 and 2002. Only on the last of those was recipient of the public’s inexplicable affection was a Republican president, in this case George W. Bush. And in that instance the public’s affection was explicable in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. So yes, Republican losses tonight will constitute a diminution of Donald Trump’s presidency. The question is not one of nature but of degree. Will the diminution resemble a mild paddling of the kind that a pornographic actress might perform on the presidential backside with a rolled-up magazine?