Jacob Heilbrunn

William P. Barr is out. Joe Biden is in. And Donald Trump has a few more weeks left to bemoan his fate and lash out at his subordinates now that the Electoral College vote has taken place. Poor Trump! He wanted a no-holds-Barred assault on the election. But Barr, who was supposed to be Trump’s faithful janissary, has proved less than reliable in recent weeks, earning him the ultimate opprobrium of the President today, who declared that at least Robert Mueller, in contrast to Barr, would have set the record straight about Hunter Biden. Yup. Mueller. He would have 'set the record straight’, Trump claimed. So the author of the putative Russia witch-hunt is now being used to highlight the shortcomings of Barr?

For all the caterwauling on the left about one William P. Barr, he hasn’t really delivered for Donald Trump, apart from performing some fancy footwork on the release of the Mueller report. The latest affront arrived today when Barr declared that he has discovered nary a shred of evidence of voter fraud. Presumably, Barr searched high and low, like one of those fanatics you see using wearing headphones and deploying metal detectors to sweep a grassy era for precious metals or valuables. But he arrived at the conclusion that 'to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election’.To be sure, Barr was careful to specify 'to date’, suggesting that perhaps something might yet emerged.

So much for the Powell doctrine. Only a few days ago President Trump deemed Sidney Powell a vital part of his ‘elite strike force’. No longer. Now Rudy Giuliani’s cold statement dismissing Sidney Powell, who has been the attorney for Michael Flynn, from the Trump legal team is arousing much merriment but I don’t share it. If you can’t peddle a good conspiracy theory from within the confines of the Trump camp, then things have come to a pretty pass indeed. All that will be left for Powell is to fold her termination into a larger conspiracy. Dominion, she will likely claim, has dominion over the Trump campaign itself.

Give Donald Trump credit for waging a shrewd reelection campaign in the face of the pandemic, a tanking economy and racial strife. But does this mean that he’s a lock to win the presidency itself? Not a chance.Prognostications that Joe Biden would earn a crushing victory proved to be quite wrong and, for what it's worth, I'm eating a good slice of humble pie. But the election has not yet been won by Trump. Quite the contrary. Biden may well win. The reason will be that while Trump ran a good campaign, Biden ran an even better one. Democratic bed wetters, and they are legion, needed to install extra plastic sheets last night, but it’s starting to look like Biden is on a roll.Here’s why. Biden kept his cool. He didn’t travel to Texas. He flipped Arizona.

Freddy Gray is optimistic about President Trump’s political prospects. The polls showing that Trump is headed for the ropes are merely ‘clever mathematical models’. Trump, we are assured, is a protean figure, a ‘great finisher’ who can win a second term and show all those lily-livered pundits what kind of a man it really takes to win a second term in the White House.Don’t believe a word of it. Trump isn’t about to resurrect his campaign. Instead, it’s headed for calamity.One reason is the palpable incompetence of Trump and his Stosstruppen. When the campaign began, Trump and his advisers were bragging about Death Stars. Now their campaign has proven to be ill-starred.

There was nothing original about Amy Coney Barrett’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee other than her incessant professions of her fidelity to an originalist approach to the American Constitution. Originalism is a convenient smokescreen for conservatives to act as what they claim not to be — judicial activists, ascribing their own views to the founders. But to acknowledge this would be to land Barrett in a host of difficulties. For the likes of Barrett, originalist theory is the judicial equivalent of an SDI shield. She wielded it well. Throughout, she dutifully supplied answers that were none at all. She has no ‘agenda’. She has no view on whether a president can delay an election. Voter intimidation at the polls? Once again, she punted. After Sen.

Is Donald Trump feeling overstimulated? First he scorned stimulus talks with the Democrats, tweeting on Tuesday afternoon that he was summarily ending them. Then, a few hours later, he started backpedaling after the stock market plummeted, demanding that Congress send him legislation to stimulate the economy. Next, in the wee hours, he issued a belligerent tweet about declassifying all the intelligence documents related to the Russia investigation, as though he could win the election by running once more against Hillary Clinton rather than Joe Biden. Democrats have largely moved on from the Russia investigation, but Trump seems addicted to it.

Here we go again. President Trump has announced a big healthcare proposal that amounts to none at all. If anything, it will have a positively insalubrious effect upon the health of Americans.On Thursday Trump declared, ‘The historic action I'm taking today includes the first-ever executive order to affirm it is the official policy of the United States government to protect patients with pre-existing conditions. This is affirmed, signed, and done so we can put that to rest.’Umm, no. The fact is that Trump can’t simply issue a healthcare ukase and expect that it will have any practical effect. He can’t force insurers to provide coverage unless he wants to nationalize them.

Free Melania? She made her jailbreak tonight. Whether or not President Trump wins re-election, she was out to save, as far as possible, her own reputation. The voice was soothing, the sentiments compassionate and the delivery emollient. She found her voice. Her good fortune was to be preceded by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who blabbered from the roof of Jerusalem's King David Hotel about Trump’s great foreign policy victories. The media complained about Pompeo breaking norms, but the only thing he really helped break were his own presidential ambitions by coming across as a dullard. His eminently forgettable speech set Melania up perfectly. The mainstream media could barely constrain its enthusiasm for her.

It was like an Elvis sighting. ‘WHERE’S HUNTER,’ Trump kept bellowing in his tweets. Well, there was the recently reclusive 50-year-old lobbyist Hunter Biden, the black sheep of the family, who almost brought down his pappy’s campaign with his Ukraine shenanigans. He looked youthful with his hair slicked back, dark suit, white shirt, and blue tie, appearing at the Democratic convention together his sister Ashley to endorse him for president. Hunter probably will retreat back into seclusion for the duration of the campaign, but it was a smart move to feature him so prominently, a version of the courtroom tactic of getting the unpleasant facts before the jury before the prosecution can air them.

Oops. Not only did the wall that Donald Trump promised to build never get built, but it turns out that some of his closest former confederates are now accused of deploying the slogan in the interests of building up nothing other than their own fortunes. A grizzled Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign adviser, wearing a green Barbour jacket was arrested this morning on charges of fraud by New York federal prosecutors. The contention of the Manhattan prosecutors is that Bannon, who is said to be worth tens of millions, pilfered about £760,000 ($1million) through a private group called 'We Build the Wall'. The advisory board contains a bevy of conservative all-stars, including former Rep. Tom Tancredo and Erik Prince. Kris Kobach was general counsel.

Donald Trump’s tweet mooting an election delay isn’t a sign of strength but weakness. Maybe he’ll say it was just a joke. Maybe it was intended to distract from the bad economic news. Maybe he’s trying to inure the public to the idea of a postponement. Maybe he’s preparing for his post-presidency with a farrago of excuses and complaints and lies. Or maybe Trump is simply flailing, a prospective loser who is already losing it.His erstwhile champion Herman Cain, who denounced the idea of wearing a mask, has just died at 74 from coronavirus complications. His national security adviser has the virus. So does Rep. Louie Gohmert, who refused to wear a mask. Trump’s incessant attempts to depict the pandemic as a hoax have turned out be the palpable fraud.

Is the Death Star about to implode? Trump campaign manager (at least at this writing) Brad Parscale bragged some weeks back that he was about to pull the big guns out to demolish the Biden campaign — a 'juggernaut campaign (Death Star)'. It was a weird comparison considering the Death Star goes down for the count in two Star Wars movies. But then again, Parscale is also the guy who stated that millions were pining to show up at Trump’s ill-fated rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Since then, Trump canceled another rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, claiming that bad weather had forced his hand. Not much is going well for Trump, who seems about as stable as Emperor Palpatine these days.

Who knew that the most prominent NeverTrumper would be a member of the Trump family? Mary Trump is Donald's niece and bears the same name as his mother. She has a PhD in clinical psychology and is now the author of a book called Too Much and Never Enough, an unsparing look at her uncle that does not shrink, as it were, from putting him on the couch. The Amazon bestseller has spun up the president; he is getting his minions to denounce it and is promoting cancel culture by suing to prevent it from being read by the masses. White House spokesman Kayleigh McEnany noted that she had not seen it but went on to declare that Mary’s maiden effort was a 'book of falsehoods' brimming with 'absurd allegations'.