Jacob Heilbrunn

President Trump isn’t supposed to be watching television at 9:30 am tomorrow. The White House has scheduled him to attend events that are supposed to make him look above the fray. But that’s also when Attorney General William P. Barr will take a breather from targeting asylum seekers and hold a press conference on Thursday morning to discuss the release of the Mueller report.If his previous performances are anything to go by, Barr’s comments will be directed directly at Trump in another bid to curry favor with him. Meanwhile, Trump himself is saying that he may conduct his own press conference: ‘Maybe I’ll do one after that, we’ll see.

Is a #NeverBernie faction starting to emerge among Democrats? Sanders is on a roll after his appearance at a town hall meeting on Fox News where he garnered the applause of many in the audience and attracted several million viewers. He attacked Trump as a ‘pathological liar’ and defended his sweeping healthcare — BernieCare? — plan. After Bret Baier asked how many in the audience were willing to trade in their current plans for Medicare for All, a majority raised their hands, much to his surprise. President Trump was clearly irked by Sanders’s successful foray into hostile territory, tweeting “So weird to watch Crazy Bernie on @FoxNews. Not surprisingly, @BretBaier and the “audience” was so smiley and nice.

William Barr flinched for a nanosecond, then plunged into the murky waters of the deep state. There was ‘spying,’ he ventured, in 2016 – against the Trump campaign. There was no ‘specific evidence,’ but he’s persuaded it happened. In that moment before the Senate, Barr betrothed himself to Donald Trump. Only moments earlier Trump had gone on a prolonged tirade about the malefactions of ‘dirty cops’ who had engaged in ‘treasonous’ activities against him and his aides. Trump, you could say, is on a roll these days. His chum Benjamin Netanyahu just won re-election, partly thanks to a series of boosts from Trump. He may be heading towards a trade deal with China.

Until now Donald Trump has proceeded with relative impunity in foreign affairs. But his imposition of a terrorist designation on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which numbers some 1.1 million strong, could change that. Iran is promising to respond by labeling the American military as a terrorist organization. These moves could lead, willy-nilly, to a fresh conflict in the Middle East, the very thing, incidentally, that Trump promised to avoid when campaigning for the presidency in 2016. But then again Trump made a lot of promises. A wall would be built and the border secured. Obamacare would be nuked. Coal would make a big comeback. America would experience a Great Leap Forward. And so on. The contradictions of his presidency are now catching up to him.

Poor Donald Trump. Even Mar-a-Lago may not provide much of a refuge from his cares now that it has been exposed as a nest of Chinese spies. Trump, who campaigned against Hillary Clinton for jeopardizing national security with her private email server, makes her look like a piker when it comes to keep state secrets. Come one, come all. Mar-a-Lago is open to the highest bidder with access to the president as the highest prize. And to think that Americans were once scandalized that Bill Clinton was renting out the Lincoln bedroom for campaign contributions. Trump’s pocketing the proceeds personally. For him it’s always and only about the bottom line.

Is someone in the Deep State finally blowing the whistle on the Trump presidency? Meet Tricia Newbold, the 18-year veteran of the White House Personnel Security Office, who is alleging that Trump’s camarilla received 25 security clearances that should never have been cleared. Blackmail, drug abuse, criminal conduct, financial peculation — you name it and Newbold says it raised nary an eyebrow among the Trump crowd. Instead, national security clearances were handed out like jellybeans to Trump acolytes, including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.In the case of ‘Senior White House Official No. 1’, most likely Kushner, Newbold explained to congressional investigators that concerns she highlighted were swept aside like so much useless ballast.

His fans are relieved. He’s getting off scot-free. I’m referring of course to Jussie Smollett, the Empire actor whose charges were dropped today in Chicago. It’s a good week if you’re in the crosshairs of the law — unless, of course, you’re Michael Avenatti, the quondam lawyer for Stormy Daniels who got busted, if that’s the appropriate word, for trying to shake down Nike for a cool $25 million. In Greek, Nike means ‘victory’ but Avenatti looks to be going down to a nasty defeat. The slick talking lawyer had delusions of grandeur all along, reckoning first that he could bring down Trump with a lawsuit, then viewing himself as presidential timber. He’s the one that got felled by law enforcement.

The fight between George Conway and Donald Trump is getting nutty. ‘You. Are. Nuts.’, Conway tweeted this morning about the commander-in-chief who also happens to be the employer of his wife, Kellyanne, Trump’s unflinching defender. Earlier this morning, the president tweeted, ‘George Conway, often referred to as Mr Kellyanne Conway by those who know him, is VERY jealous of his wife’s success & angry that I, with her help, didn’t give him the job he so desperately wanted. I barely know him but just take a look, a stone cold LOSER & husband from hell!’ https://twitter.com/gtconway3d/status/1108341534137692160 If anything, Conway should feel flattered.

Melania wore white today for St. Patrick’s Day services, but her husband was not in a peaceful mood. He came out swinging today against the shade of John McCain. Already peeved by a rerun of Saturday Night Live that portrayed him with disapprobation, Trump unloaded on his longtime nemesis in no uncertain terms. McCain may have died in August 2018, but to Trump his example apparently remains a living rebuke. So he had to disparage him. McCain’s marks at the Naval Academy were so lousy that he was ‘last in his class,’ according to Trump on — what else? — Twitter.

It was no cakewalk for Vice President Mike Pence. He had showed up in Sea Island, Ga., reckoning that he would schmooze with the wealthy donors to the American Enterprise Institute and answer some prearranged questions from Dick Cheney aka Vice. No dice. Cheney, the wily veteran, took a look at the parvenu occupying his old office and decided to go off script. Where were all the ‘softball’ topics, Pence remarked. Cheney was having none of it. There wasn’t much gratitude for the administration that had finally gotten around to pardoning his former aide I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby. Instead, Cheney breathed fire.

Donald Trump really likes to brag about his brains. To listen to him, he has kind of a supercomputer whirring away there beneath the plume of iridescent hair. He can do anything better than anyone else, whether it’s spending a few hours learning about nuclear strategy or winning trade wars. Besides, his uncle taught at MIT, which means that the Trump gene pool couldn’t be more robust: ‘My two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.’ For good measure, Trump noted that his ability to win the presidency on his first attempt ‘would qualify as not smart, but genius... and a very stable genius at that!’ Well, well, well. Now it turns out that Trump went to great lengths to suppress his high school transcripts.

The most fascinating thing about the Michael Cohen hearing may not be what Michael Cohen said, but what Republicans didn’t. They made no attempt to defend Donald Trump other than to disparage Cohen’s character with metronomic regularity. Cohen was a liar. A bad man. He enriched himself. But how do you derogate someone who has already confessed to swimming happily in Trump’s swampy waters? The other tack they pursued was to declare the hearing a circus or a charade. Protestations were profuse. O tempora o mores! Washington, we were told, is a ‘hellhole.’ (At least Republican lawmakers forbore from deeming it a shithole.

Michael Cohen wanted to be the dean of the White House, but Trump spurned him. Now he’s getting a chance to become the John Dean of Trump’s entourage as he prepares to testify publicly before Congress tomorrow about his former boss. Dean’s testimony led to the downfall of Richard Nixon. Will Cohen’s appearance lead to the downfall of Trump? Cohen, who has been convicted of tax evasion, lying to Congress, and campaign finance violations, faces his own credibility gap. Today, as he met behind closed doors with the Senate Intelligence Committee, he was disbarred by a New York court.

Is Donald Trump spacing out? Yesterday he signed Space Policy Directive-4, which orders the Pentagon to establish a Space Force within the US Air Force. Not quite the separate, sixth branch of the military that he touted back in June 2018, but whatever. Trump is riding high, so to speak. He may riding even higher if the Mueller inquiry turns out to be a bust, at least when it comes to proving that Trump was actively colluding with Russian president Vladimir Putin during the 2016 presidential campaign. To be sure, there are no indications that Trump is feeling secure.

Ever the showman, Donald Trump did something during his press conference that was another presidential first. He broke into song in the middle of his soliloquy about the need for a border wall. In a refrain that was sure to send shivers down the spines of those who see him as an aspiring tyrant, Trump mocked the judicial system in a sing-song voice, declaring that while he might experience a few bumps in the rutted constitutional road, victory at the hands of the Supreme Court was a foregone conclusion. It would be the Muslim ban all over again. Not everyone was in harmony with Trump. Perhaps the most notable dissenter is Ann Coulter. Trump threw shade at her during his press conference. Rush Limbaugh is a tireless speaker. Tucker Carlson is a fine fellow. And Coulter?

It’s classic Trump. A president who knows the virtues of suspense is not going to render a final verdict on the congressional spending deal – which Fox News host Sean Hannity deemed ‘garbage’ – until the very last moment, trying to make it look as though he’s the Decider, when he really has little choice about whether to sign off on it. El Paso, where he ranted last night about the need to finish a wall he never even started, was his personal Alamo.After the 35-day government shutdown, which tanked his favorability ratings, Trump can hardly afford to create déjà vu all over again with a fresh one.

Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech tried to strike a unifying tone. But it was unnerving to hear him talk of rejecting the politics of revenge and the need for compromise. Did Melania write it? The only humdingers centered on illegal immigration, but they were essentially a recitation of his greatest hits. The same old claptrap about MS-13 swarming over 20 states and caravans heading for the borders and squishy liberals failing to recognize the dire need for a border wall. When it came to NATO, he was on his best behavior, stating that he, and he alone, had cajoled its members into forking over $100 billion to beef up their militaries. His emollient approach was jarring.