Tag Archives: Mike Pence

“Everyone Was in the Loop”

Posted on by

Well, other than the hotel guy who paid Trump $1 million to play “Ambasador to Europe” confirming that, yup, there really was a “quid pro quo” and what’s more, “everyone was in on it”, it was a pretty good day for Trump Nation.

But they still want to meet the whistleblower.

Everyone has their takeaway from Gordon Sondland’s day in the headlights — a day that, like John Dean, will be remembered for a very long time. Mine is that he’s one smug bastard. And, like Mick Mulvaney, Jim Jordan and John Ratcliffe, he’s another guy who is not nearly as smart as he thinks he is Further, a guy who better be praying to whatever god or golden idol he worships that no one ever puts him in a room or on a phone line amid a conversation about “Burisma” equaling “Joe and Hunter Biden.”

The fact Sondland claims that never in his long, illustrious career as Ambassador to Pretty Much Everything, (that’s a grand total of 17 months and counting), did he ever figure out that Trump and Rudy Giuliani meant “Biden” every time they mentioned “investigations” and “Burisma” is — how to put this? — undigestible bullshit.

Beyond that though his willingness today, finally, to roll Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence and John Bolton into the legal sausage makes my hardened partisan heart sing sweet hallelujahs. There are others, but only a few other threesomes who deserve a public outing as much as they do.

Donny found his Sharpie again …

Bolton — pretty much your textbook raging ideologue, but maybe not fully a criminal — clearly knew what was going on and now has to ruminate on what history will say about him, you know a deep-thinking, “principled conservative”, if Sondland and god knows who else paints him into Donny and Rudy’s boneheaded extortion plot. He signed on with Trump, but he didn’t sign on I’m guessing, for felony stupidity.

I repeat again, the truest words ever spoken about the Age of Trump is the title of Rick Wilson’s book, “Everything Trump Touches Dies.“

The betting is that Bolton will soon see the wisdom of getting his version into the official record, even if it means cutting into sales of his forthcoming book on the fiasco. (Like Donny Jr., I’m sure the “bulk sales” machinery is already being greased and gassed.) Common sense he will now agree to testify, whether the courts “clear” his subpoena or not. But as we saw vividly again today, common sense is not exactly a foundational talent with the Trump crew.

Pompeo and Pence though, I feel certain, will ride the S.S. Trump down the full 1000 fathoms.

One little thing that keeps nagging at me as the list of “in the loopers” metastasizes. Who exactly advised Trump to emphasize to Sondland, “no quid pro quo”? I just don’t think Trump came up with that on his own. It’s the sort of legalized verbiage you get from a “looped in” attorney, like perhaps … John Eisenberg, the National Security Council Legal Advisor, and Deputy Counsel to the President for National Security Affairs appointed by … wait for it … Mike Flynn. Eisenberg being the guy who ordered the infamous July 25 call notes locked away in a super-secure server. That guy “stinks”, as Popeye Doyle and others in the movies are fond of saying.

If anyone reading this is a practicing defense attorney, you might want consider joining the caravan headed to D.C. There’s a hellish amount of good-paying work there for the taking.

Just make sure Trump pays up front.

And What If Mitch Has Finally Had Enough of Donny?

Posted on by

Watching the shock wave rippling out after what should be Donald Trump’s fatal blunder, I keep wondering how close we are to Mitch McConnell at deciding at long last that Trump is no longer a useful idiot?

The fundamentals of McConnell’s support, (with McConnell being the most prominent face of establishment conservatism), remains what it has always been. Any intelligent, calculating conservative — in politics or business — can see clearly that America’s demographic trend lines are not moving in their favor. The USA will soon be a minority majority country with more and more citizens refusing to vote for, much less protect the oligarchic ambitions of rich white guys.

The great backstop to this inevitability therefore is stocking the U.S. court system with hundreds of conservative-to-right-wing judges who will reliably thwart liberal legislative goals designed to realign the country’s wildly out-of-whack economic balance.

And to date McConnell, in mitered-tight coordination with the Federalist Society, the influential conservative legal club — Bill Barr, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh being among its most celebrated members — has done a superb job. With Donald Trump sucking up all the attention the media has to give, McConnell and Barr’s re-fitting of the country’s judicial system has gone on with very little notice and resistance.

In the wake of this week’s Trump meltdown(s) we’ve heard more about how Capitol Hill Republicans “loathe Trump”, and how if the vote could be taken in secret, without their names attached, 30 GOP senators would vote for impeachment. Allowing the usual 50% for hyperbole and bullshit, this rings true.

Trump has been a useful dunce. He’s inattentive to policy, bored by “intellectuals” and think tanks and, as we see with this self-inflicted Ukraine fiasco, all but entirely focused on his personal needs. In other words, up to this point, he’s been a nearly ideal fool, easily manipulated by characters like MCConnewll who truly understand the long-term demographic peril facing the Republican party and are skilled at manipulating the bureacraciesa most critical levers of power.

But now … McConnell has to be reassessing this relationship.

Trump appears to have blundered so badly, so flagrantly, and in a way so easily understood by the general public, that Moscow Mitch has — has — to be running separation scenarios. It’s simply due diligence.

Trump has always been expendable to McConnell (and Barr, et al) if they could do it without infuriating Trump’s base. (Please note that for once I’m not referring to them as slack-jawed racist goobers.) That’s still a tricky move. But with the control they already have over the court system, McConnell and Barr could effectively throw Trump under the bus simply by lifting the myriad obstructions they’ve planted.

By allowing subpoenas to take effect and permitting key witnesses to testify — given that impeachment is a clear “legislative purpose” — and letting the Democrats’ case proceed they could argue to Trump’s low-information voters that they resisted as best they could. “But those damned radical Democrats just built up too much of a head of insane steam and (illegally) railroaded the process!”

Better yet, they could maneuver in a replacement for Trump appealing enough to the base and far, far more appealing to traditional Republicans repulsed by Trump’s vulgarity and corruption.

And no, I don’t mean Mike Pence. Pence is what he appears to be, a vacant stooge. In that way he would be every bit as easy to manipulate as Trump. But he possesses not even a scintilla of charismatic attraction for “the base.”

Far better — McConnell’s dream — would be somehow replacing Trump with the scariest proposition of all, namely, “competent Trump”. A candidate every bit as reliably retrograde and autocratic as Trump, only vastly smarter and therefore capable of functioning — of doing McConnell’s will and protecting conservative power for another generation without a popular majority — in a manner that presents the public face of a thoughtful adult, not a scatter-brained teenager without impulse control.

And who might that be? Among all the names regularly churning among conservative deep thinkers (sic), Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton strikes me as Candidate #1. His style of corrupted intellect — in the vein of Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan and that ilk — could reliably sell and deliver everything McConnell and stegosaur Republicans believe they need to maintain power as places like Texas and Arizona and Florida tip blue.

Sci-fi scenario: Pence resigns for “health reasons” and is replaced by Cotton sometime in the spring.

Far be it for me to give Donald Trump any advice, but Donald, if you’re listening, I hope you’re not so stupid you believe Mitch McConnell has your back come hell, high water and catastrophic election defeat.