There are some elements of diplomacy and international relations that have their place in the toolbox but always struck me as odd. One of these is the tendency to taunt opponents in a Monty Pythonesque way by sending ships in their general direction. What’s always interesting is the commentary that goes along with the announcement. One side expresses their displeasure over some point of contention and says that certain naval forces have been repositioned in response. The other side acts as if this is a giant threatening provocation from which they will not be intimidated. The general public suffers from a momentary fear that dangerous escalation is around the corner. And then nothing happens and we all move on.
The fact that nothing ever happens is part of the point and the utility of the practice. It’s a way to save face and act like you’re doing something without having to truly risk getting anyone killed. Face-saving gestures are very important, even in the United States where people are less obsessed with appearances than in some other cultures.
This diplomatic dance isn’t really working with North Korea, though. On their end, they don’t have the kind of navy that can intimidate so they can’t play the game the same way that the Russians or Chinese do. As a result, they issue the wrong kind of threats. Instead of promising to give us a good ass-whupping, they say effectively that they will kill everyone on American soil, down to the lizards.
The Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the North’s ruling Workers’ Party, did not mince its words.
“In the case of our super-mighty preemptive strike being launched, it will completely and immediately wipe out not only U.S. imperialists’ invasion forces in South Korea and its surrounding areas but the U.S. mainland and reduce them to ashes,” it said.
Threats like these aren’t just over the top. They actually justify preemptive action to reduce North Korea to ashes before they can do what they’ve promised to us and our allies.
If I can go a little diversion here for a moment, consider the literal case for war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
During the buildup to the war in Iraq, the United States repeatedly accused Iraq of using mobile laboratories to produce banned weapons. A U.S.-led force invaded Iraq March 20 after accusing Iraq of violating U.N. resolutions requiring it to give up chemical and biological weapons, long-range missiles and efforts to develop nuclear weapons.
At root, the surface case for war with Saddam was that he threatened us in a vague but still unacceptable way by his maintenance of chemical and biological weapons and his desire to build a nuclear weapon. This was enough to rally the American establishment and half its people behind a policy of forcible regime change.
It would be comparatively easy to make a case for war with North Korea given the fact they actually have nuclear weapons and are threatening to fire them at our country in a preemptive way without warning. In fact, I can’t think of a more open and shut provocation. Ordinarily, a nation that wants to avoid war with our country would work to move American public opinion in the opposite direction.
Of course, North Korea relies on a unique form of deterrence. They can destroy the capital of South Korea at a moment’s notice and we can’t do a damn thing to stop them. This gives them a halo of protection, but they’re at the point now where they’re abusing the privilege of being able to act with impunity.
On our side, we’re doing it wrong because when you announce that you’re sending ships in your enemy’s general direction, you need to make sure that they aren’t sailing in the opposite direction.
There has been some confusion over the whereabouts of a U.S. aircraft carrier group after Trump said last week he had sent an “armada” as a warning to North Korea, even as the ships were still far from Korean waters.
The U.S. military’s Pacific Command explained that the USS Carl Vinson strike group first had to complete a shorter-than-planned period of training with Australia. It was now heading for the Western Pacific as ordered, it said.
China’s influential Global Times newspaper, which is published by the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official paper, wondered whether the misdirection was deliberate.
“The truth seems to be that the U.S. military and president jointly created fake news and it is without doubt a rare scandal in U.S. history, which will be bound to cripple Trump’s and U.S. dignity,” it said.
The Chinese comments don’t make a lot of sense, but their taunting comes through clearly enough. They know how the naval repositioning game is supposed to be played and they know that Trump sank his own battleship with his blundering announcement.
So, we have two nuclear armed countries being run by incompetent loons who don’t understand the basics of diplomacy, which means they are terrible at avoiding war.
There are people in this country with the power to clean house on our end of this dangerous situation. Many of them are Republican lawmakers. If partisanship and narrow fears of personal career preservation didn’t blind them to the far higher demand of species preservation, they’d already be moving to replace our president.
Do you remember the ironically named Arbusto Energy corporation that George W. Bush ran into the ground in the 1980’s? From 1981 to 1986, the chief financial officer of Arbusto was a former high school football star and personal friend of the future president named Mike Conaway. Conaway would later be the beneficiary of a controversial mid-decade redistricting effort that took place at Tom DeLay’s direction. It carved out a congressional seat that Conaway has occupied since January 3rd, 2005.
Now, Conaway may be a Bush family kind of guy, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t know that the man who savaged Jeb for being “low energy” is still pretty popular with his constituents. So, if you thought that the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Trump’s Russia connections was going to be more robust with Devin Nunes having recused himself, you should think again.
With Nunes on the sidelines, Conaway will be calling the shots as the effective chairman of the investigation. And, as Ryan Lizza reports, the early indications are far from promising.
Even though there is now some bipartisan agreement that Nunes’s description of the intercepts was wildly inaccurate, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee are still preparing to focus on Obama’s national-security team, rather than on Vladimir Putin’s. Last week, Democrats and Republicans finalized their witness lists, and the names tell a tale of two separate investigations. The intelligence source said, “The Democratic list involves all of the characters that you would think it would: Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Carter Page,” speaking of the three Trump campaign officials who have been most closely tied to the Russia investigation. “The Republican list is almost entirely people from the Obama Administration.”
The fake scandal created by Trump and Nunes is not over yet. The first name on the Republican list is Susan Rice.
The Susan Rice gambit has flopped. Everyone on the House Intelligence Committee, from both parties, knows this because they sent a delegation over to Ft. Meade to view the intercepts at NSA headquarters. Everything Nunes and Trump said about them was false.
It is now clear that the scandal was not Rice’s normal review of the intelligence reports but the coördinated effort between the Trump Administration and Nunes to sift through classified information and computer logs that recorded Rice’s unmasking requests, and then leak a highly misleading characterization of those documents, all in an apparent effort to turn Rice, a longtime target of Republicans, into the face of alleged spying against Trump. It was a series of lies to manufacture a fake scandal. Last week, CNN was the first to report that both Democrats and Republicans who reviewed the Nunes material at the N.S.A. said that the documents provided “no evidence that Obama Administration officials did anything unusual or illegal.”
I spoke to two intelligence sources, one who read the entire binder of intercepts and one who was briefed on their contents. “There’s absolutely nothing there,” one source said.
Yet, Conaway is persisting in calling Rice as his star witness.
Ironically, I think George and Jeb would be pleased and quite relieved if Conaway chose to be aggressive in his investigation. But I guess he’s looking out for himself these days rather than cooking books for the Bush family.
When BuzzFeed broke the media blackout on January 10th and published the Christopher Steele dossier on Donald Trump, the headlines were all focused on the most salacious allegation it contained. It’s worth revisiting that allegation because it’s been mischaracterized from the very beginning.
Steele’s topline allegation was that a “Former top Russian intelligence officer claims FSB has compromised TRUMP [whose] conduct in Moscow has included perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB.”
The FSB is the Foreign Security Service of the Russian Federation, which is the rough equivalent of our own CIA. There was quite a bit more detail in the dossier. Specifically, the story went that in 2013 Trump rented the “presidential suite” in the Ritz Carlton hotel in Moscow because he knew that Barack and Michelle Obama had stayed in that room once while visiting Russia. While he has renting the suite, he hired prostitutes to “defile” the bed in which the Obamas had slept by urinating on each other while he watched. Trump distracted from the allegation about his motivation by arguing that he was too much of a germaphobe to allow women to pee on him, but the dossier specifically said that he was not an active participant in the “golden showers.” It did suggest that this was a sexual perversion that Trump was acting out, but the reason given for him instigating this act was less sexual than some kind of twisted revenge (perhaps for getting humiliated by the president at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner).
Steele went to some effort to corroborate this explosive story. The part I just related was provided by Source D who was described as “a close associate of Trump who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow.” Quite a few people suspect that Source D was Boris Epshteyn who was just forced out of the White House for unspecified reasons and took a job as the “chief political analyst” for the Sinclair Broadcasting Group. That has not been confirmed.
Steele also had a Source E who told him that some Ritz Carlton staff were aware of the Trump/Golden Shower story at the time and subsequently. Source E introduced a Russian intelligence operative to Source F, a female employee at the hotel. Source F also corroborated the story. Finally (as stated at the top) Source B, who was a former high level Russian intelligence office still active in the Kremlin’s inner circles, confirmed that the government had collected enough material on Trump during his visits that they could blackmail him. Specifically, Trump had engaged in questionable sexual activity that was “arranged/monitored” by the FSB.
It was probably unfortunate that so much focus was put on the golden showers part of the dossier because it wasn’t something that could be confirmed. Yes, it’s easy to establish that the rumor went around and that many people at the Ritz Carlton believed that it occurred. It was much harder to confirm that it happened as described or that the Russians had video or audio evidence of it with which to blackmail Trump. The more important part was what Source B was confirming. Regardless of the veracity of the Ritz Carlton story, a high level Russian intelligence source was saying that the FSB had arranged/monitored sexually compromising situations for Trump.
Because the salacious golden showers story led the dossier, reporters and news organizations were reluctant to publish it. The lewdness had the tendency to discredit the entire document since it was outrageous and unconfirmed. But there were plenty of other parts of the dossier that could be falsified or verified. After some efforts to do that, the FBI was satisfied that the dossier was accurate in many respects. They used it to go to the FISA court and obtain a warrant to monitor the activities of Carter Page.
On the right, the reaction to learning that the FBI relied in part on the dossier to get a warrant on Page is to howl in outrage that they used a “fake” and “dodgy” source. On the left, the reaction is to treat this as confirmation that dossier is legit and to use that as an excuse to revisit the formerly discredited golden showers story.
I don’t think either side has it quite right.
The right was way too quick to dismiss the quality of Christopher Steele’s work. He’s a former MI6 officer who worked under diplomatic cover in Moscow and headed the Russia Desk from 2004 to 2009. He has an excellent reputation in the intelligence community. He clearly has sources and he knows how to write intelligence reports. The dossier was never a fake. It wasn’t gospel, either, nor did it purport to be accurate in every respect. But it was based on real sources, many of which were well-placed sources.
The left’s problem is different. The golden showers story may be true or may not be true. The dossier never really alleged it was true. What it said was that a source close to Trump who had managed his trips to Moscow had been telling the story. It said that the rumor was also believed and spread by people on the staff at the hotel. And it said that a highly placed Russian intelligence source did not confirm that story specifically but confirmed that the FSB had blackmail-worthy sexual material on Trump from his visits to Moscow.
I think the more Steele’s work is corroborated in general, the more we can be sure that he didn’t make things up. So, what’s more credible now is not that the golden showers took place. What’s more credible is that the rumor was real and that it was being related as true by a person very close to Trump who would be in a position to know. And it was possible to establish that people in Moscow at the hotel had heard the same story and believed it.
The thing is, what really matters is the more general question of whether Source B (the former high ranking Russian intelligence office still active in the Kremlin’s inner circles) was telling the truth when he said they had enough material on Trump to blackmail him. If that’s true, the prurient details don’t matter.
During the afternoon of the presidential election, I exchanged emails with a friend in the White House to try to assess how things looked on their end. I heard back that they were cautiously optimistic about the presidential race but increasingly concerned about the prospects for winning the Senate. I told my friend that things looked good in Pennsylvania from everything I could observe. Turnout was very high at my suburban Philadelphia precinct, and reporting from friends in the city indicated excellent voter participation. There was no sign in the southeastern part of the state that Clinton was about to suffer a 10% or greater drop-off of Obama’s 2012 support in 23 counties, and a 10% or greater drop-off on Obama’s 2008 support in 45 counties.
The Clintons got the news first that something was desperately wrong from an operative in Florida.
Around 7:45 on election night, when Hillary Clinton and her aides still thought they were headed to the White House, troubling news emerged from Florida. Steve Schale, the best vote-counter the Democrats had in the state, told campaign officials they were going to lose the biggest battleground in the country. Yes, Clinton was doing well in some places, but Donald Trump’s numbers in Republican areas were inconceivably big.
“You’re going to come up short,” Schale said, stunning aides in Brooklyn who were, until that moment, comfortably cradled in the security of their own faulty analytics.
People talk a lot about “the faulty analytics,” but it’s important to realize that Clinton met reasonable targets in her areas of strength. Compared to Obama’s 2012 performance, she netted about 400 more votes out of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia combined, and in the Philly suburbs, she netted 5,796 more votes out of Delaware County, 26,097 more votes out of Chester County, and 34,376 more votes out of Montgomery County than Obama had in 2012. This more compensated for a modest 1,243 net underperformance for her in the more working class Bucks County suburb.
Compared with Obama’s landslide 2008 election, she impressed by netting 6,331 more votes than he had out of Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County which more than offset the 3,482 fewer votes she netted out of Philadelphia County.
When we talk about “faulty analytics,” therefore, it’s important that we understand regardless of turnout, Clinton was netting votes at a clip that should have assured victory. I don’t know that they thought they were going to do much better than they did in blue areas and I don’t think that’s where there was a failure of modeling or analysis.
The failure seems to have been in not realizing that Trump was going to win red areas by “inconceivably big” margins.
I keep coming back to this because it doesn’t seem to be truly appreciated.
Today, we’ll finally get some answers after countless articles have been written about the special congressional election in the 6th District of Georgia. The spectacle has turned 30-year-old Democrat Jon Ossoff, an independent filmmaker and former congressional staffer, into something of a rockstar. It’s reported that he’s raised an astonishing eight million dollars for his campaign, much of it coming from liberal outlets like Daily Kos and MoveOn.org.
There are actually several other Democrats running in the jungle primary (where you need 50% to win outright and avoid a June runoff election), but they’ve been blotted out. A last second Clout Research poll shows “former State Senator Ron Slotin, the only other prominent-ish Democrat in the running, pull[ing] only 1 percent.” It appears that the left’s votes will not be diluted.
The Clout poll, as well as an Emerson College survey from last week, shows Ossoff polling in the low forties. In fact, the last nine polls going back to March have been remarkably consistent on their measurement of Ossoff’s support. Even when they push undecideds, none of them get him above 49%.
But that doesn’t mean that he can’t clear the magic 50% number and win the seat tonight. A lot will depend on how many voters are mobilized and also by how well Ossoff has done with his persuasion effort. There are signs that the low-propensity voters are more engaged or self-motivated to vote on the left than on the right, and Ossoff should have an impressive and united ground game.
The Republicans in the race are getting comparatively little attention, even as the eventual owner of this seat is not unlikely to be the winner of second place tonight. Robert Costa of the Washington Post gives us a flavor of the infighting and division in that scrum.
Interactions with Trump’s political brand have veered from hearty embrace (Dan Moody, Bob Gray, Bruce LeVell, Amy Kremer) to support but not always rah-rah (Karen Handel, Judson Hill) to flat-out defiance (David Abroms). Most of the leading candidates have bounced between those poles depending on the day or the latest controversy…
…Endorsements from prominent Republican players have been scattered to the point of muddying the field. [Sen. David] Perdue has backed Moody. [Newt] Gingrich supports Hill, as does Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.). Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski endorsed LeVell. Former senator Saxby Chambliss is for Handel. But the conservative Club for Growth has opposed Handel and boosted Gray. To counter the club, the Ending Spending advocacy group, which is backed by the billionaire Ricketts family, has poured millions behind Handel’s candidacy.
It goes on and on like that further down the line in the state. One group or officeholder goes for Handel, another goes for Gray, another jumps in for Moody or Hill, and Trump supporters of different degrees poke and prod one another on social media.
Unsurprisingly, no one has caught fire, and constant squabbling has remained the thrust of the GOP race.
Obviously, all this internecine combat comes at the expense of focus on Ossoff, allowing the clean-cut Democrat to get a bit of a free ride. If he doesn’t secure the seat tonight by winning 50% of the vote, he’ll face a new climate tomorrow where the Republicans are focusing most of their attention on him.
But it may not be so easy to repair the hurt feelings or replace the depleted resources of this rugged Republican brawl. If a Pro-Trump candidate takes second place tonight, it’s not clear that they’ll be able to unite the anti-Trump factions under their banner. The Clout Research poll has pro-Trump Bob Gray leading Karen Handel 17% to 15%, while the Emerson survey has the situation exactly reversed with Handel leading 17% to 15%. If those polls are close to accurate, neither of them is a lock to win even half the Republican votes tonight. That’s a big pool of people who cared enough about the race to vote but supported a loser. In a runoff, Ossoff wouldn’t need to win many of these potentially disaffected voters, but he would have to win some.
A lot has been invested already in the narrative of this race, and it’s somewhat arbitrary to argue that there will be hugely meaningful differences in the significance of this election depending on whether Ossoff wins outright or barely misses. Either way, this is a seat that Health & Human Services Secretary Tom Price carried by 23 points just five months ago. If Ossoff carries close to 50% of the vote, that will signal a significant erosion of Republican support. On the other hand, if he only carries 40 or 41 percent, that won’t really be that much of a change.
The hope on the left is that districts like this will begin to move their way. Trump carried the district by a single point, showing a massive gulf between how the district felt about him and how they felt about the man he would tap to lead his effort to dismantle Obamacare. If that gulf is erased tonight to the Democrats’ benefit, it could be a true indicator of a political realignment in tony suburbs all over the country.
Yet, as I have tried to point out repeatedly, this realignment won’t really benefit the left in the long run if the flip side of it is that the more exurban and rural districts move even further in Trump’s direction.
To give an illustration of what I’m talking about, when President Obama ran for reelection in 2012, he suffered a ten point loss in the percentage of his two-party support in just two Pennsylvania counties (midwestern Cambria and Elk). In 2016, Hillary saw a 10-point reduction in two-party support compared to Obama’s 2012 performance in 23 Pennsylvania counties, and in 45 counties when compared to 2008. In 2008, Obama carried 50% of the vote in southwest Greene County, costing him 60 net votes against John McCain. In 2016, Clinton won 29% of the vote in Greene County, costing her 6,367 net votes against Donald Trump. A 10% or greater drop-off in support in 45 counties compared to 2008 explains why Clinton lost even when bringing in more net votes combined out of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh than Obama ever did.
This same basic story also occurred in many other states, some of which, like Virginia, Clinton held on to win. On the whole, this realignment disfavors the left by making them uncompetitive in most of the counties in the country, meaning that it’s hard to find state legislative districts that elect members of both parties. This is not a realignment that should be embraced or accelerated, even though it could pay near-term benefits by helping the Democrats win back a very narrow and perilous majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
If the Democrats can win over the tax-averse well-educated white professional vote and carry affluent suburban districts, that’s great. But they need to do it without at the same time going from 50% to 29% in places like Greene County, Pennsylvania.
The headline blares “Racism motivated Trump voters more than authoritarianism” but Thomas Wood’s piece at the Washington Post is a bit more nuanced than that. Before we talk about it, though, let’s look at how Wood got his data:
Last week, the widely respected 2016 American National Election Study was released, sending political scientists into a flurry of data modeling and chart making.
The ANES has been conducted since 1948, at first through in-person surveys, and now also online, with about 1,200 nationally representative respondents answering some questions for about 80 minutes. This incredibly rich, publicly funded data source allows us to put elections into historical perspective, examining how much each factor affected the vote in 2016 compared with other recent elections.
The factors he looks at are authoritarianism and racism, but also income level. Income level is self-explanatory, but the former factors require carefully crafted questions. To gauge people’s relative authoritarianism, they asked questions about child-rearing. The more people emphasize following rules and respecting elders over self-reliance and curiosity, the more authoritarian they are. To gauge people’s relative level of racism, they are asked indirect questions that really amount to giving an explanation for why blacks remain lower on the socioeconomic scale. This is called the “symbolic racism scale” or SRS.
The finding here is pretty straightforward:
Moving from the 50th to the 75th percentile in the authoritarian scale made someone about 3 percent more likely to vote for Trump. The same jump on the SRS scale made someone 20 percent more likely to vote for Trump.
This data can be compared to previous elections going back to 1988. What’s surprising isn’t that Trump voters are more racist than Clinton voters, because the same finding is there for people who voted for Romney, McCain, Dole and the two Bushes. In fact, on three of the four questions that test racial attitudes, Trump’s voters were less racist than their Republican predecessors (the fourth question was a tie).
The big difference is among Democrats, or Hillary Clinton voters, who are far less racist in their attitudes than the Democrats who voted in any recent election, including the two for Barack Obama. The implications are bizarre, suggesting that a lot of racially bigoted people were willing to vote for Obama against an opponent who didn’t appeal too directly to their racism, but who flocked to Trump when he made “political incorrectness” central to his pitch. To be explicit here, a lot of racist Democrats voted for Obama and didn’t vote for Clinton, and they did it because of racism.
This suggests that if you want a racist’s vote, you have to make an appeal directly to their racism. Without it, he or she just might vote for the racial minority.
Maybe this data would become a little clearer with questions about gender attitudes, but there would be no historical data for purposes of comparison.
In any case, yes, racism played a bigger role than authoritarianism according to this large survey, but what really stands out is the data about income. Here we have data going back to 1948, and it was always the case that people in the top income quintile vastly preferred the Republican. That changed in 2012, and it changed dramatically in 2016. Rich people preferred Obama in his reelection and they preferred Clinton.
Looking at the lowest income quintile is interesting, too, because prior to 2016 that group had voted at the national average or more strongly for the Democrat is every election except Nixon’s 1960 and 1968 campaigns (but not his landslide 1972 election). They strongly favored Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in all of their elections, but they turned on Hillary.
It looks like Trump resembles Nixon in more ways than one. They both did better among low-income voters than a typical Republican. I guess this is the Silent Majority pitch, and the appeal of the Southern Strategy. Perhaps lower income Protestants were the most likely to abandon the FDR coalition to oppose the Catholic John F. Kennedy, just as lower income Protestants were more likely to abandon the Obama coalition and go for the guy telling them that their racist attitudes were being stifled and marginalized by the political correctness police.
I still think gender attitudes played a role here, but that’s just my conjecture. It’s important to know the complete picture because it’s hard to craft a response without it.
Overall, it confirms my observations about the county patterns of voting. The election was lost because low income/rural white voters who voted for Obama decided to vote for Trump. Ironically, racism played a big role in the flip even though almost everyone expected the opposite to happen (that without a black candidate, the Democrats would do better with the racists).
It just goes to show that you can think you’ve got everything figured out, but you never do.
While everyone panics about North Korea's frankenmissile, I will do what countless ofter Americans are doing today. I will coach my soccer team. I'll do normal stuff that normal people do while my betters discuss things that could easily lead to a near-term nuclear exchange.
I'm hoping this reprise of 1962 doesn't end badly, but Donald Trump is no John Kennedy, and Kim Jong-un is no Nikita Khrushchev.
I’m a little bit swamped with work at the moment, so this is just going to be a brief post. I noticed that the Democrats had a very good result in downstate Illinois municipal elections earlier this month, and I was very curious about how they pulled it off because my preoccupation right now is with figuring out how to undo the damage that was done to the Democratic Party in rural areas over the last election cycle. Unfortunately, the main reporting I found on these elections, in the Huffington Post, doesn’t offer a satisfactory answer.
But, first, the good news:
In a spate of local elections last week in Illinois, Democrats picked up seats in places they’ve never won before.
The city of Kankakee elected its first African-American, Democratic mayor. West Deerfield Township will be led entirely by Democrats for the first time. Elgin Township voted for “a complete changeover,” flipping to an all-Democratic board. Normal Township elected Democratic supervisors and trustees to run its board ― the first time in more than 100 years that a single Democrat has held a seat.
“We had a pretty good day,” said Dan Kovats, executive director of the Illinois Democratic County Chairmen’s Association. “We won in areas we normally would win, but we also won in areas Republicans never expected us to be competitive in. They were caught flat-footed.”
Now, many of these successful politicians attended a candidate boot camp organized by Rep. Cheri Bustos, so some of the explanation may be that they benefited greatly from what they were taught. What I don’t know is if they had any shared message. The article explains why some of the candidates ran, but not really why they won. Chemberly Cummings seemed to think her success was related largely to flaws with her opponent and (maybe) her opponent’s party: “I also think … when you have the representative of a party who is negative, I think you’ll start to see some things change. Nobody wants to be associated with something negative. They want to be associated with the positive.”
I’d like to think there was more to it than that people responded to some kind of generic comparative positivity. But, you know, some of these races for things like town clerk that don’t necessarily lend themselves to broad party messages.
Still, these folks had success where failure has been the recent norm. They may not have discovered the recipe for the secret sauce but they must have more to tell than this.
I’ve written extensively in recent weeks (for example, here) about a structural political problem that Donald Trump has that is going to prevent him from successfully getting legislation passed through this Congress. A simple formulation of the problem is that Trump ran against the current iteration of the Republican Party but adopted a strategy even before his inauguration that depends on his ability to move his agenda with 100% Republican votes. I don’t want to reiterate that argument here, at least not fully, but it now appears that he and many of the people closest to him are beginning to realize their error.
This is why we’re seeing a lot of stories come out about a split between a populist nationalist wing led by Steve Bannon and a more pragmatic wing that is led by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, his daughter Ivanka, and his director of the National Economic Council, Gary Cohn.
One simple way of understanding this is that Kushner, Ivanka and Cohn are realizing that they’re going to need Democrats to do much of what Trump promised he would do. To the Bannon wing, such an assertion is nonsensical. He made promises the Democrats have no interest in helping him keep, and he should stick to the agenda that attracted his base to him in the first place. Running to the Democrats is a betrayal.
But this is just a right-wing version of the unfair criticism President Obama often faced from his left-wing base. If you don’t have the political power to do something either because your own party is too divided or because your political opposition is too united, then whatever that something is is not going to get done. At least, it’s not going to get done in the form in which you promised that it would.
Democrats, from the ivory towers of think tanks down to the unions halls, all agree on the urgent need for infrastructure spending. The knowledgable among them know that going another four or eight years without major investments in roads and bridges and health and education and technology is a recipe for further wealth disparity and disenchantment among their previous supporters in the hollowed out non-urban parts of the country. They want a big infrastructure bill not to help Trump but to help themselves and the American people. But they have no interest in passing an infrastructure bill that takes the form of what Trump initially proposed, and they won’t help pass that kind of bill. What Gary Cohn, for example, understands is that the Republicans won’t pass the infrastructure bill that Trump proposed, either, so the only way anything is going to get done is to make an approach to the Democrats.
I’ve argued that it’s too late to do this, and that Trump has essentially screwed the pooch in two ways. The first is that he took what was already a toxic campaign (and campaign result) and ramped it up once he came into office. The Democrats can’t afford to work with him now even if they wanted to, and they don’t. The second is that Trump is now vulnerable to congressional oversight to such a degree that he can’t afford to split his own party or turn a significant portion of them against him. He needs a united and enthusiastic Republican Congress to run interference on investigations that threaten to take down his presidency.
For both reasons, the pivot that the so-called New York Democrats want to make is doomed. They may get a chance to try, however, because the Democrats will listen on infrastructure and perhaps on some iterations of tax reform, too.
But before we can get to this next act in the play, the Republicans must first avert a government shutdown or resolve it after it takes place. And this is an inflection point in Trump’s administration. If it can only be resolved with Democratic votes, it will endanger the Speakership of Paul Ryan and the loyalty to Trump of the Republican base and congressional caucuses. In normal circumstances, without all the ethical and possibly criminal vulnerabilities Trump is already exposed to, this would be a welcome and rational realignment in Congress that would allow him to govern as a hybrid politician. In some ways, this is how Arnold Schwarzenegger saved his governorship after a rocky start.
But California Democrats had far fewer reasons for keeping Schwarzeneggar at arm’s length than do the Washington Democrats to eschew cooperation with Trump. And Schwarzeneggar didn’t have or need Republican control of the legislative committees to protect him from being impeached.
There is now a new genre of articles appearing about Bannon-supporting Republicans who are disillusioned with Trump’s pivot to the Democrats (even though this pivot is still in the theoretical stage), but these folks are suffering from the same delusions as many of Obama’s early critics, who couldn’t understand why he hadn’t closed the prison at Guantanamo or passed a bigger stimulus or enacted comprehensive immigration reform or moved faster on gay rights. A president can be guided by policies and principles but he or she must ultimately find a way to work within the power structure and political climate that exist not the ones he or she might wish exist. Some promises cannot be kept, and others need to get put low in the queue. Compromises have to made for anything to happen at all, and some results will be flawed as a result and need to be revisited by ensuing administrations.
Republican intransigence hurt Obama simply by making him look naive to promise that he could change how Washington works and find partners across the aisle. Donald Trump looks bad for a slightly different reason. He said he was an expert dealmaker and that many of our problems could be addressed quickly and surprisingly easily with his kind of leadership skills. That’s already looking like a bad joke as a set of promises.
What’s he realizing, too late, is that the deals he needed to make precluded him from going with an all-Republican legislative strategy. And, the need for Democrats meant that he was going to have to abandon his hard right promises.
The logic of legislating is forcing itself upon Trump now, but he’s too weak, tainted and vulnerable to recover from his initial miscalculations.
And no matter what he does, succeed or fail, his base is going to feel disappointed and betrayed. That’s the cost of living in a fantasy world and putting your trust in someone who promises you the impossible.
President Trump’s budget director Mick Mulvaney is displaying a pre-Katrina level of complacency about the prospects that his boss’s hundredth day in office will coincide with a shutdown of the government due to lack of congressionally-approved funding.
Lawmakers are on recess for Easter, set to return four days before current funding runs out at the end of the month.
Despite the short timeline and the disparate positions of the White House and Congress, Mulvaney does not anticipate a shutdown, recently telling CNBC’s John Harwood that chances of a shutdown are “very low” and that he has not yet instructed federal agencies to make preparations for one.
“I don’t see the need to, to be honest with you,” he said. “So we’ve gone to the appropriators and said, ‘Look, if you all can figure out a way to do this, let’s do it together.’ Shutdown is never a desired end.”
Even if lawmakers don’t reach a deal in time, Mulvaney said he does not foresee significant problems in the event of a temporary lapse.
“It’s happened 17 times between 1976 and 1994. Those lapses in funding used to be fairly typical,” he said. “I think the government, if you measure it in terms of the dollars out the door, about 83 percent of the government stays open in a government shutdown. Social Security checks go out, military still exists. The FBI still chases bad guys. I think the consequences have been blown out of proportion.”
Let’s all save those quotes and see how they pan out. If there is a government shutdown on President Trump’s 100th Day anniversary, Mulvaney is going to look pretty stupid. When people are inconvenienced because no preparations have been made by our government agencies, he’s going to look just like Michael “Heck of a Job” Brown, the Arabian horse commissioner who botched FEMA’s pre-planning and response to the hurricane that drowned New Orleans in 2005.
Earlier in this same article, it’s reported that “Mulvaney has…told lawmakers the White House wants to see the must-pass spending bill restrict funding to cities that have sanctuary policies limiting cooperation with federal officials on immigration enforcement.” If that’s true, the Democrats won’t vote for it. They won’t vote for any funding of a border wall either.
Congressional Republicans are now habitually inclined to use must-pass bills to force through provisions (free riders) that cannot pass through Congress under ordinary circumstances. The Democrats aren’t going to supply votes to abolish Planned Parenthood or fulfill some of the other heat fever desires of the hard right, so unless the Republican leadership can keep these riders out, they’ll need to find their own votes to keep the government open. But many conservatives are not inclined to vote for bills that will increase the deficit or even fund the government in a neutral way if the funding doesn’t include some of these spoils.
In other words, give me a recent example of the Republicans managing to keep the government open or pay our debts on time that didn’t depend heavily on Democratic votes!
They thought they could pass their health care reform bill with only Republican votes, too, and look how that worked out.
Under the circumstances, a rational person in a position of responsibility would have contingency plans for a government shutdown, and they certainly wouldn’t fail to prepare if they were simultaneously advising their allies in Congress to defund most major cities in the country, all of which are mostly represented by the political opposition.
But Mulvaney doesn’t seem to be rational.
Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, is pressing lawmakers to include language to restrict federal funding grants for cities that do not enforce federal immigration policies. The goal is to bring the House Freedom Caucus on board with a government funding bill, according to Capitol Hill Republicans — or at least show that the administration is courting the support of the hard-right and pushing GOP leaders to adopt Trump’s priorities.
But the effort by Mulvaney, a former conservative congressman from South Carolina, threatens to disrupt bipartisan negotiations on funding the government. Democrats are already calling a request for border wall money a “poison pill” that would shut down the government. An attempt to block liberal cities from receiving federal funds if they ignore immigration guidance would similarly cause Democrats to flee.
What if, on the other hand, Mulvaney is posturing? What if his position that a government shutdown isn’t really a big deal is just pre-spin for a shutdown that he’s actually anticipating? They’ll want to tell us that it isn’t a crisis or much of a failure, but they’ll also want to find a way to at least attempt to blame the Democrats (they’re protecting illegal immigrants!). They’ll even be able to blame the Freedom Caucus by saying that they offered them the sanctuary thing and they still didn’t vote for it.
This doesn’t seem like it will be very effective because the Republicans control everything and the buck stops with the president, but it makes more strategic sense if it’s a plan for spinning failure than a plan to actually avoid a government shutdown.
I am getting a little frustrated with how elements of the #TrumpRussia story are continually confirmed and expanded upon without giving us much more clarity. For example, today’s Guardianstory provides more insight into which countries were observing disturbing and suspicious contacts between Trump figures and known or suspected Russian spies, but it doesn’t do anything to help us understand why these contacts were so concerning.
For example, we now know that Australia, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Estonia, and the British were all bothered enough by observed Trump/Russia meetings and communications that they separately shared information about it with our intelligence community. But we’re left in the dark about what any of these countries learned.
All these countries are continually tracking Russians who they suspect or know to be covert operators. All of them noticed people of this type coming into contact with folks in Trump’s orbit. All of them found these contacts to be suspicious enough to warrant sharing the information with the Americans. And, of course, Christopher Steele discovered the same thing even though he was retired from MI6 and working in the private sector without the benefit of the signals intelligence or satellite technology, etc., that the national agencies could employ.
In Steele’s case, we have some of his so-called dodgy dossier, which is mostly un-redacted. But we don’t have the transcripts of intercepted electronic communications or geo-positioning data or other travel records. We don’t have the results of any forensic financial investigations.
What we can easily surmise is that a pattern was widely observable of Trump folks coming into contact with Russian operatives. This could result if Russia was the instigator of all these contacts, and we might pick up in this way on a concerted effort on their part to penetrate Trump’s inner circle even if the effort was ultimately unsuccessful.
This would be the innocent explanation. It’s now clear, though, that at least in the case of Carter Page, our intelligence community was successful in convincing a FISC judge that he was acting wittingly as a Russian spy. This indicates that the penetration effort was remarkably successful, since Page was named by Trump as one of only a small handful of his foreign policy advisers. Michael Flynn was a potentially gigantic penetration, as he went on to be named the National Security Adviser. Paul Manafort came forward with an offer to work for the Trump campaign for free, despite being a highly mercenary political consultant in all other areas of his career. We know Manafort was in the pay of Putin-controlled oligarchs and Ukrainian officials and subject to blackmail the entire time he was working for Trump.
This is all very substantial penetration, and it seemed to have had obvious results in terms of the positions Trump took throughout the campaign. It was too obvious, in my opinion. Perhaps this is why many analysts suspect the goal was less to control an administration they had little reason to believe would ever be formed than it was to split the Republican foreign policy establishment and sow discord, with the hope of undermining support for the sanctions.
Still, we’re stuck at this level of speculation because we know that there were extensive contacts but we know little about what was communicated during these contacts, or who initiated them, or what the Trump folks actually did after making these contacts.
If you step back for a minute, though, you can try to imagine how our intelligence community must have felt when Trump simply refused to believe them when they presented him with evidence of Russian meddling and efforts to penetrate his campaign. Imagine what they thought when he named Michael Flynn as his National Security Adviser despite the fact that he was one of the main suspects and had been since at least 2015. And, finally, imagine how they felt when they caught Flynn repeatedly communicating with the Russian ambassador (on the day the Obama administration announced reprisals for election interference) and sending the message not to respond or retaliate because the policy would soon be reviewed and probably reversed.
The first step was for the intelligence community to leak to David Ignatius of the Washington Post that they were aware of Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador. The second step was to the contact the White House Counsel’s office directly and not so gently suggest that Michael Flynn was lying about his contacts and now subject to Russian blackmail. When neither hint was taken, the third and final step was to leak the content of Flynn’s call which promptly resulted in his resignation.
That was some pretty extreme stuff to do to an incoming administration, but fully justified based on their investigation of Flynn. I’m not sure why they didn’t cut him off at the pass by revoking his security clearances before he could take the job in the first place. That’s the step they took with Robin Townley, one of Flynn’s top appointments to the National Security Council.
Our allies are now saying that our intelligence community was too slow to heed their warnings, but the explanation is that they’re trained not to investigate American citizens or to get too close to ongoing political campaigns. You can see why by how Trump’s supporters react to each new revelation, as if Obama was coordinating all this surveillance of Team Trump himself. Personally, I think everyone was lulled into complacency by the polls which indicated all along that Trump had little chance of actually winning. That made people more inclined to think the problem would in some ways resolve itself and in others could be addressed later on when it was not going to be such a sensitive matter.
When Trump actually won, that’s when the intelligence community finally got serious. But their drip-drip-drip leaks are not enough. We need the details.
It can be dizzying to try to follow that ins and outs of the so-called #TrumpRussia scandal, and trying to understand Paul Manafort’s business dealings is no exception. I won’t try to explain it all here, but it looks like Manafort’s life just got more complicated because the Associated Press obtained some banking records that verify that something is true that Manafort has long denied.
You many remember that Manafort stepped down as chairman of the Trump campaign amid a cloud after it was revealed that a black ledger detailing financial transactions had been unearthed in Kiev. You can re-read the article the New York Times published on August 14th, 2016. Manafort resigned on August 19th.
The original reporting was fairly straightforward:
Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau. Investigators assert that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials.
There’s now dispute about whether Manafort received “cash payments,” but it’s clear that in at least two cases he was wired the exact amount of money that was entered in the ledger next to his name. And that means that the ledger is not some fraud or trick concocted by one spy agency or another.
There are a variety of reasons why this matters, some of which are much more relevant to the people of Ukraine than to the people of the United States. At this point, Manafort no longer denies that he was paid, only that he was paid in cash or that there was anything untoward or illegal about him getting compensated for the work he had done. His prior assertion that the ledger was forged or fake is no longer operative.
But, remember, even without proof that the ledger was real, it caused him to resign. What does that tell you?
Since I am trying to keep this simple, the Ukrainians consider these undisclosed payments to Manafort to be a form of public looting by the party of Viktor Yanukovych (the Party of Regions), and they’d like to recover their money. The American authorities are probably more interested in the shell companies that were used as intermediaries to make the wire transfers. The issue of whether Manafort should have registered as an agent of a foreign government will also be revisited.
The public, however, has more confirmation that Manafort was dishonest about taking money off the books from a Ukrainian government that was closely aligned with Vladimir Putin. It was only when this government fell and Yanukovych sought exile in Russia that Putin moved to seize Crimea and to support Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine.
As the AP notes, “Manafort is also under scrutiny as part of congressional and FBI investigations into possible contacts between Trump associates and Russia’s government under President Vladimir Putin during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.” The allegations that led to his resignation have now been largely confirmed, but it’s not clear whether Manafort is newly exposed to perjury charges. I don’t know what he’s told the FBI. Let’s just say that it’s not helpful to his cause:
Federal prosecutors have been looking into Manafort’s work for years as part of an effort to recover Ukrainian assets stolen after the 2014 ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia. No charges have been filed as part of the investigation…
…As the AP reported last month, U.S. authorities have been looking into Manafort’s financial transactions in Cyprus. The records of Manafort’s Cypriot transactions were requested by the U.S. Treasury Department Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which works internationally with agencies to track money laundering and the movement of illicit funds around the globe.
Manafort’s connections to Putin have long been known, but it’s important that we now have proof that he’s been lying about the contents of the Black Ledger. His legal liabilities seem to be piling up, which could make him more likely to turn in to a government witness.
And, of course, you’ve probably heard that Carter Page has been under surveillance since last July, which means that he’s probably about to turn into a government witness, too. We know that Michael Flynn has been discussing an immunity deal with the FBI, although that alone doesn’t mean that he’ll flip or get a deal.
That’s a lot of pent up momentum for more revelations, so I’d expect to have an interesting spring and early summer as the public gradually learns what the Intelligence Community already knows.
President Trump’s budget director Mick Mulvaney was unusually blunt during an interview on CNBC. As Jonathan Chait notes, Republicans usually make some effort to justify tax cuts for the wealthy, for example by denying that they will cause the deficit to grow. But Mulvaney is candid about not caring whether the deficit grows.
“Bad spending, to me, in terms of its economic benefit, would be wealth-transfer payments. It’s a misallocation of resources. Infrastructure is sort of that good spending in the middle, where even if you do misallocate resources a little bit, you still have something to show for it. It’s tangible, it may help economic growth, and so forth. At the other end of the spectrum, at the very other end, is letting people keep more of their money, which — while it can contribute to the deficit in a large fashion — is the most efficient way to actually allocate resources. It’s a little less important to me if infrastructure adds to the deficit. And I’m really not interested in how tax reform handles the deficit.”
What I’d like to focus on is one turn of phrase: "wealth-transfer payments [are] a misallocation of resources." Mulvaney essentially says that if you build a road or a bridge or a tunnel or an airport that you’ll have something tangible in the end even if there are cost overruns or the contracts are needlessly expensive. I think the idea is that maybe the government isn’t the most efficient source of funding for building stuff, but it can get the job done.
On the other hand, wealth-transfer payments get you absolutely nothing. So, by his reckoning, a subsidy to provide health coverage or financial assistance in getting a college degree or money set aside to assure kids aren’t malnourished, none of these things ever result in anything worthwhile.
I suppose there’s a broader ideology about efficiency here, in the sense that he’s framing this as a matter of using money in the most sensible way. But there’s also a value system on display. It’s not just that there is suddenly good deficit spending (tax cuts for the rich) but there’s also a belief that it’s a misallocation of money to invest in people. Maybe investment in people is a little harder to judge in “tangible” results than investment in physical infrastructure, but it’s not impossible. Because they were no longer hungry, someone could concentrate in class so their grades went up. A person became the first person in their family to get a college education. A doctor’s visit detected high blood pressure, which allowed the patient to take life-extending measures and medications.
We can debate the precise meaning of the word “tangible,” but it’s pretty clear that Mulvaney doesn’t value these kinds of positive results of wealth-transfer payments.
In any case, he provided proof that he doesn’t care about deficits. When it comes to deficits caused by failing to tax the rich, he says he really doesn’t care.
What he doesn’t want is for anyone to get something they haven’t earned, and the only way you can earn something is by making money.
