Jacob Heilbrunn

The knives are out for Donald Trump. ‘The President blew it,’ former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie told Stephen Colbert on Tuesday’s Late Show about the government shutdown. Yesterday the intelligence chiefs disputed Trump’s assessments of Iran and North Korea. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed a measure decrying a ‘precipitous withdrawal’ from Syria and Afghanistan.And it’s only going to get worse for Trump. Roger Stone’s statement that the Mueller investigation is a ‘speeding bullet heading for his head’ offers a reminder that he has failed as badly at impeding, or even shuttering, the Mueller investigation as he did at constructing a border wall.

President Trump, to use his favorite canine terminology, choked like a dog today. In acceding to a three-week continuing resolution to fund the government, he rolled over for Nancy Pelosi and she didn’t even throw him a bone. Pelosi may not be able to muzzle the voluble Trump but she has figured out how to bring him to heel.His failure to procure a single cent for a border wall is already enraging his erstwhile supporters on the right. Ann Coulter: ‘Good news for George Herbert Walker Bush: As of today, he is no longer the biggest wimp ever to serve as President of the United States.’ Having prompted him to fight an unwinnable battle, they’re now denouncing him for fleeing his personal Alamo.

If Kamala Harris, who announced her candidacy on Martin Luther King Day, wins the presidency, she would not only be the first black woman to ascend to the Oval Office but also the first Democrat from California to accomplish that feat. The last two politicians to emerge from the Golden State and prove that they had the right stuff were both Republicans, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. Reagan personified the optimism of California Dreamin’; Nixon, a kind of grapes of wrath resentment that he reverse engineered to condemn liberal elites. Like Nixon, a red hunter par excellence, Harris has tried to play the Russia card to rise to prominence. Today it is Democrats who decry Moscow gold, while Republicans play kissy face with the Kremlin.

On Thursday CNN reported that Donald Trump was taken aback that his nominee for attorney general William Barr and special counsel Robert Mueller are old chums. ‘I have known Bob Mueller for 30 years,’ Barr said during Senate testimony on Tuesday. ‘And I have the utmost respect for Bob and his distinguished record of service.’ Now Barr’s statements are about to create much bigger problems for him. Barr unequivocally affirmed, in response to a question from Sen. Lindsey Graham, that it would be a crime if the president sought to tamper with the testimony of a witness: ‘yes, under an obstruction statute. Yes.

Is Rudy Giuliani becoming a bigger problem for Donald Trump than Nancy Pelosi? Pelosi is bad enough: she is tying Trump in knots with her refusal to budge on the shutdown, which Trump had assumed she should assist him in shutting down weeks ago. Now she’s dissed him with her acidic letter explaining that it would be best to defer the State of the Union speech, which Trump had counted on using to bludgeon the Democrats, until safety issues related to the shutdown have been resolved.But on Wednesday night, Giuliani may have delivered an even bigger hammer blow. He explained to CNN’s Chris Cuomo that he ‘never said there was no collusion’ between President Trump and Russia.

After his soporific performance last night on national television, Donald Trump is back in form. He just engineered a fresh shutdown this afternoon. At a meeting with congressional Democrats this afternoon, Trump threw a temper tantrum, slamming his fist on the Resolute Desk and exiting the Oval Office. He tweeted, ‘Just left a meeting with Chuck and Nancy, a total waste of time. I asked what is going to happen in 30 days if I quickly open things up, are you going to approve Border Security which includes a Wall or Steel Barrier? Nancy said, NO. I said bye-bye, nothing else works!’By the bye, Trump is insisting that Republicans have never been more unified.

Will the government shutdown end soon with a grand bargain between Democrats and Republicans that trades wall money for the legalization of the Dreamers? Dream on. President Trump sent out an email today in which he called for an ‘agreemnet’ to occur that would ensure the construction of a wall ‘immediatly.’ The typographical errors were no accident but symptomatic of a derelict White House that seeks to substitute showmanship for substance. Yesterday it was the bogus news conference at the White House with various glabrous fellows from immigration and border control services who were trotted out to testify to their fealty to Trump. One after another, they blubbered about how important Trump and his wall were to them.

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?

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!

The resignation of Defense Secretary James N. Mattis was only a matter of time – President Trump referred to him as ‘sort of a Democrat’ in October – but it could hardly have come at a more turbulent moment. Earlier on Thursday the Dow was once again crashing. Washington was headed toward a shutdown over the $5 billion that Trump has demanded for a border wall. Then came the resignation letter of Mattis, widely seen as the last ‘adult in the room,’ as the phrase had it, in the Trump administration. Now that Trump has disemboweled his national security team, he, and he alone, will bear responsibility for the consequences of his actions.

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.

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.

Individual 1 is at it again. This morning, he went to the old reliable: ‘AFTER TWO YEARS AND MILLIONS OF PAGES OF DOCUMENTS (and a cost of over $30,000,000), NO COLLUSION!’ But the filings yesterday from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and federal prosecutors in New York indicate that this is an unintentionally self-deprecatory statement. For once, Trump is being far too modest about his abilities. He and his fellow colluders were colluding so much that they have already helped rack up no less than 192 criminal charges. So perhaps Individual 1 should take a step back for a moment from frenetic tweeting to admire his greatest handiwork before it collapses entirely.It’s the very sweep of his schemes that is likely to prove his undoing.

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.