I have no idea how it will end — only that it will end badly.
I don’t mean the shutdown. History gives a pretty good guide on how the shutdown will go. It will last a few days or a few weeks, depending on how long it takes Mitch McConnell to convince Donald Trump that Democrats really aren’t going to fold either on his useless wall or his “beautiful” steel slat barrier (with the medieval-looking pikes) and that Senate Republicans are growing so panicked they just might do something crazy — like actually stand up to him.
The shutdown will end in chaos, just as it began. It will end in humiliation — just ask Paul Ryan, who ends his role as speaker in utter failure. It will end with Trump claiming victory, just as he did after the midterm shellacking. And it will end with Trump shouting into the pre-morning Twitter sky that he wants to fire his new Fed chairman or Bob Mueller or his new interim chief of staff or somebody, suddenly realizing that he should have fired Jim Mattis before Mattis quit, leaving behind his dramatic three-page letter that screamed the truth about Trump’s danger to the world.
Remember, it was only 10 days ago that Trump proudly told Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the world that he would own any shutdown, that he wouldn’t blame the Democrats, that he would take the mantle because somebody had to. And then, of course, when the shutdown finally arrived, he did blame the Democrats, he took no mantle, he reconfirmed what we already knew — that the only things Trump truly owns are shiny objects under federal investigation.
(Guess who else faithfully blamed the Democrats for the shutdown? That’s right. Our own Cory Gardner. Thanks for playing.)
So, when I say I don’t know how it will end, I don’t mean the shutdown. I mean this — all of it — the madness that repeats itself by the day, if not by the hour, which is the genius of Trumpworld. By the time the week ends, you have no memory of what lunacy took place on Monday or Tuesday and clearly up until at least Wednesday. Trump is the never-ending earthquake, with daily aftershocks, each one sending us running for cover.
Let’s review. In the midst of the looming shutdown, Trump announced he was pulling all American troops out of Syria, presumably to change the subject. It did. It truly changed the subject, and Mattis, maybe the last respected person in the Trump cabinet, quit, and the world shuddered in disbelief. Who was left to put a check on Trump? Is there anything scarier than truly letting Trump be Trump?
You knew how the neocons would react — shock, dismay, cats and dogs living together. You might expect liberals to cheer this development, to say, as Trump basically said, that endless wars can’t be the solution to anything. Very few did, particularly after learning that Trump came to the Syria decision, over the objections of all his foreign policy advisers, after a phone call from Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president and strongman, who said that if ISIS was defeated, Trump should no longer be arming the Syrian Kurds. According to The Washington Post, Trump replied, “You know what? It’s yours. I’m leaving.”
So, Trump sent out his mission-accomplished tweet, contending that ISIS was defeated because, as we know, he knows more than the generals. If leaving Syria is defensible on some levels, if pulling troops out of Afghanistan makes sense, what’s not defensible is leaving with no idea what comes next, just as Trump left the Senate with no Plan B after he changed his mind on the shutdown.
I’m not sure you’ll remember, but as of Wednesday, Trump was signaling to McConnell and Ryan that he was ready to make a deal on a continuing resolution not to shut down the government over the wall. The Senate unanimously passed such a bill.
Why did Trump change his mind? This is where lunacy hits what Republican Sen. Bob Corker, a retiring sometimes Trump critic, calls tyranny. Trump changed his mind because he was called a sellout and worse by, uh, Ann Coulter. By Rush Limbaugh. By Fox & Friends. When Coulter wrote an op-ed for Breitbart entitled “Gutless President in Wall-Less Country,” Trump was so distressed that he unfollowed her on Twitter. And then he caved to the base.
“We have two talk-radio show hosts who basically influenced the president, and we’re in a shutdown mode. It’s just—that’s tyranny, isn’t it?” is how Corker put it.
“Do we succumb to tyranny of talk-radio show hosts? I mean, this is a juvenile place we find ourselves. The reason we’re here is that we have a couple talk-radio hosts that get the president spun up.”
Juvenile? That fits neatly with the recently surfaced radio interview from 2015 in which Mick Mulvaney, the new (for now) interim chief of staff, called Trump’s belief in a wall “almost childish.”
And so to review, we’ve got the shutdown, the sudden Syria withdrawal, the Mattis resignation, the reeling stock market, which had its worst week since the Great Recession in 2008, Trump’s personal foundation shutting down over what prosecutors called a “shocking pattern of illegality”, the Mueller investigation ever closing in on the White House, the incoming House Dem majority promising to go after Trump’s taxes, the Moscow tower and more. I’m sure I left some other stuff out, but it has been a long, long week.
All the talk is of cracks finally starting to show in Trump’s support from congressional loyalists. I’m not sure I buy any of that, not so long as Trump’s polls among Republican voters remain so strong. Certainly, political logic would suggest that something happened this week, something different, something worse, something irretrievable. It all makes sense unless you think harder about it and ask yourself what part logic has ever played in the endless Trump drama.
The word “despicable” comes readily to mind as a descriptor for Mr. Trump.
On January 21, 2017 I demonstrated in San Jose, CA with a sign that said “IMPEACH THE RUSSIANS’ PRESIDENT!” I knew then, and know even better today, that the U.S. President chosen by a clear minority of 2016 voters was a Russian puppet who would betray this country with his words and actions. That has now come into focus for others, namely Republican Congressman, in recent weeks, yet they find themselves powerless to do anything about it. The answer to me is quite simple. The senators need to coalesce into a quiet caucus of 67 or more sensible people who will vote to convict once the new House votes to impeach the most unstable, irrational and dangerous president the U.S. has ever experienced. They don’t though, because they are afraid to be first to bring it up for fear of retaliation by Republican voters or tax-show hosts. Yes, Mike Pence would bring his own noxious policies upon us, but absent the unstable, irrational and dangerous ones we endure now. Cory Gardner and Michael Bennet would be smart to start the caucus of 67. It’s time for all to reread JFK’s “Profiles in Courage”.
So…what protects us from an insecure, out-of-his-depth tyrant? This man has his finger on “the bomb”. If those in “Republican”
leadership won’t corral him…what is our recourse?
Please take note of what Littwin says about Corey Gardner’s support of Trump’s Wall ultimatum which produced the shutdown. Gardner is someone we can DO something about come 2020 if the world lasts that long. He relentlessly supports Trump in spite of the fact that Republicans got shellacked in the Colorado midterms. Maybe he suspects he’s going to be sidelined. Let’s make sure of it!
The highest level of the U.S. nuclear deployment system (National Command Authority) uses a two-person authorization procedure (the President and the Secretary of Defense). General Mattis was called “last grownup in the room.” God only knows what 31-year-old looks-great-on-TV Mattis replacement we must survive through next.
I stand corrected, unfortunately. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/12/23/trump-can-launch-nuclear-weapons-whenever-he-wants-with-or-without-mattis/?fbclid=IwAR1pndvzi3DoVxTrqz1iC0GxJFxGNzPnvyeDob3XtDKgEqhshTFWQK4EqDo&noredirect=on&utm_term=.a051384e7259
Scary.
When the previous two shutdowns this year occurred, wasn’t there a discussion that kicking the can down the calendar to December 21 was going to be a safety valve that NOBODY would be stupid enough to shut down government right before Christmas?
Our first word of the day is Desensitization.
That’s what the country is experiencing during the onslaught of straws that are finally breaking the orange camel’s back and the Republican fever-fueled psychosis at the same time.
I was too young for Watergate, but I can’t imagine that the population had this kind of granular, slow-mo vantage point. It’s traumatic…like watching a QB shatter his leg on instant replay. Everyday. Over and over.
Desensitization.
Can you imagine if President Obama had tried half this crap?
The silence from the right is thus the epitome of our next word, Hypocrisy.
The final word of the day is Treason.
That’s the charge that Mattis was trying to avoid by pulling the fire alarms as he ran from the building.
Treason or treasonous…as in Republicans on Capitol Hill have been treasonous and are now going to start eating their own.
Littwin says — “the Turkish president and strongman, who said that if ISIS was defeated, Trump should no longer be arming the Syrian Kurds. According to The Washington Post, Trump replied, “You know what? It’s yours. I’m leaving.”
A moment of humor — I’m betting Trump has NEVER been within the borders of Syria or Afghanistan.
I used to think Trump had no ideology, but was simply reacting to his perception of what would make him a profit. Now, I can’t even think of that option. Trump has no investments impacted by an Syrian conflict or Afghan war, has no family, friends or acquaintances [or the children of those connections] involved in the deployments, and has no notion of what happens to money spent on the operations. So Trump’s gut is reacting to people he’s talking to [and possible to what he had for lunch] to choose what to say and do.
Littwin hits the big time, being cited as one of the pundits in the Sunday edition of Daily Kos Abbreviated Pundit Roundup. Mark Sumner wants to counted as a fan.
http://Www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/12/30/1822350/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Round-up-Ending-the-old-year-with-a-list-of-new-writers
Congrats Mike. Three Pulitzers among that group.
“If leaving Syria is defensible on some levels, if pulling troops out of Afghanistan makes sense, what’s not defensible is leaving with no idea what comes next”
As if Mike really gives a damn “what comes next,” outside of “how can I use this to criticize the other political tribe?”
The only mistake Trump made here was not pulling out of the Middle East entirely. Afghanistan and Syria are sunk-cost fallacies, and no one in the Pentagon or the State Department can justify remaining there without sounding like clowns. We’ve been in Afghanistan for over 17 years now, and apparently can’t keep the Taliban from retaking vast swathes of territory without having tens of thousands of troops patrolling the countryside. Syria’s another tar-baby that made the left-wing bobbleheads freak out that Trump was ceding Syria to the Russians (newsflash, folks, it’s been in their sphere of influence for decades), and abandoning the SDF, who apparently haven’t made any progress in over a year on expelling ISIS from their last pocket in Syria.
If Mattis resigned over this, then he wasn’t the “warrior-monk” he was made out to be. He was just another DC nest-featherer who can’t actually make a case for why we need to continue dumping billions into putting boots on the ground in the graveyard of empires.