Shocks, Real Shocks & Consequential Shocks: Why Trump's 2020 Bid Is Doomed

DAMON WINTER / THE NEW YORK TIMES

Donald Trump will not be re-elected in 2020. 

There, I said it.  I said it despite the whupping that I and other prognosticators suffered in 2016 when the deeply corrupt and profoundly unqualified reality TV star and faux billionaire backed into the Oval Office because of his basket of deplorables, Hillary Clinton's tepid popularity and an archaic and deeply unfair system in which Clinton won the popular vote but was defeated in the Electoral College because of the upstart's razor-thin wins in three key states that were propelled by a Russian cyber disinformation blitz adroitly coordinated with Trump's campaign. 

When Trump kicked off his re-election bid on Tuesday night at a cacophonous Orlando, Florida rally, it seemed like old times as he raged against "fake news," stoked fear against immigrants, repeatedly bashed Clinton and recycled his many personal grievances, notably the Russia "witch hunt."  But it is 2019 and not 2015, when he descended an escalator from his gilded Fifth Avenue penthouse to proclaim his maiden voyage, and that is why he will not merely be a one-term president, but hands down the worst in history. 

The reasons Trump's re-election is doomed are manifold, but one predominates:

The 2020 election will resoundingly answer the question of whether Trump's 2016 "victory" was a fluke or a true reflection of what America has become, and whether he can pull off the seemingly impossible twice. 

Trump cannot win twice because he did not make America, America made him, and while his "base" is immovable and tribal politics are ascendant, there are not enough voters beyond that 36 percent or so of the electorate sufficiently enamored of him to close the gap between he and the Democratic nominee.

Not to split decimal points, but pollsters were off by a mere 1 percent nationally in 2016.   

Where they got it wrong -- and not by much -- was in the battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, although they did detect a late surge for Trump and warned that the presence of two minor party candidates made the results there harder to predict. 

Thanks in large part to that Russian disinformation blitz, hacking of Clinton emails and those minor-party candidates, Clinton lost by an infinitesimal combined 77,744 votes out of 13.9 million cast in those three states.  Clinton would have won the Electoral College by a 275-248 electoral vote margin if 5,353 Trump voters had gone for her instead in Michigan, 11,375 voters in Wisconsin and 22,147 voters in Pennsylvania.  

Yes, it was that close.   

"These are shocks, real shocks, consequential shocks," as Josh Marshall notes at Talking Points Memo.  "I don’t mean to discount them or argue them away.  But they are more limited than people remember.  And they've led to a pervasive species of denial and magical thinking that shadows all discussion of the 2020 election." 

Magical thinking -- that Trump has superpowers and his base is unbeatable -- is a creation of his most diehard supporters and pretty much the only thing propelling the president's campaign. 

Yes, the election is nearly a year and a half away and the Democrats could nominate a clunker, but Trump's own internal polling reveals he is in deep trouble in all of the states he needs to win and is barely leading in reliably red Texas.  

The numbers would be even worse if the campaign wasn't using something called an "informed ballot" in which poll respondents are screened based on their answers to loaded questions.  Trump's response to the polling was to first deny it and then, after it was leaked, fire his pollsters.   

Meanwhile, the latest Trump-friendly Fox News poll finds the president not only trailing the Democrat in each of the possible 2020 head-to-head matchups, he never gets above 41 percent support.  And most telling, polls are consistently showing that a majority of voters -- as many as 57 percent in one poll -- say they will definitely not vote to reelect Trump. 

The other reasons Trump will not be re-elected include:

The built-in advantages of being the incumbent being undercut by the widespread perception that Trump is an incompetent and a crook. 

Even with a robust economy, Trump is the only president in the history of polling who has never once earned the support of a majority of Americans. 

While most voters feel optimistic about the economy, few give Trump credit because they know his policies favor the rich and not themselves.    

Trump's support has not expanded beyond his base because he has never tried to win converts, instead intensely focusing on coddling that base. 

Because of a shift in demographics, blue-collar whites will decline as a share of the vote as minorities and college-educated whites edge upward. 

Vows by Trump and Republicans to destroy Obamacare and replace it with a plan no one can articulate because there is no plan are backfiring.

The drip-drip-drip of negative publicity as Trump continues to defy Congress at every turn in the face on all the ongoing House investigations. 

The probability there will be  distracting criminal trials involving longtime Trump associates, even family members, in the heat of the campaign. 

Despite Mitch McConnell's seeming stranglehold on the Senate, bipartisan support to enact legislation to crack down on foreign meddling. 

While Trump has been adept at making himself the story during his first term, policy and politics and not populism and personality will prevail even in these overtly tribal times. 

Trump has pathetically few accomplishments to show. 

Trumponomics -- blatant nationalism writ large -- isn't working, while Obama era environmental rollbacks are deeply unpopular.   In fact, there are signs that Trump's proclivity for starting trade wars is beginning to hurt the economy while already being deeply injurious to farmers and failing to stanch the flow of manufacturing jobs overseas. His Orlando re-election rally was notable for a lack of anything that could be charitably called a governing vision, just more aggrievement and demonization. 

You may have noticed the absence here of another big factor -- impeachment. 

This is because I reluctantly conclude, even as a vociferous supporter of the House initiating impeachment proceedings, that impeaching Trump will have little impact one way or the other in the run-up to November 2020. 

A substantial majority of voters, having had four years to take Trump's measure, already have concluded that he not only has done nothing for them, he is destroying America.  

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

MORE HERE.

Yo Nancy Pelosi, Stop Kicking The Can: Democracy Is Not Going To Save Itself

© RICHARD CODOR

The president of the United States made an extraordinary declaration the other day: He'd welcome help from Russia in a New York minute if it would like to sabotage his opponent in the 2020 election as it did with Lock Her Up Hillary in 2016.   This was a double-edged acknowledgment that Donald Trump will do anything to get re-elected and that likely won't happen without the Kremlin again helping. 

"I like the truth. I'm actually a very honest guy," Trump told an incredulous George Stephanopoulos in interview excerpts aired last Wednesday.  That, of course, was, a lie.   

But what was so extraordinary about his admission to ABC News's chief political correspondent is that

It is the most outrageous example to date of a particularly pernicious phenomenon -- when Trump actually tells the truth it can be even more disturbing than when he lies. 

Trump's declaration that he would again welcome those Ruskies with open arms quickly sank like a stone without a trace into the bubbling cauldron of shit that is his presidency. 

This disappearing act occurred with a gut-wrenching inevitability after only a couple of news cycles of obligatory finger wagging among the liberal punditocracy, canned Democratic outrage and unusually, some Republican tut-tutting.  Then there was Trump's inevitable walk back on Thursday, which coincided with a report that Russia is up to its old tricks and had conducted a textbook disinformation campaign before European Union elections last month to suppress voter turnout.   

Nothing to see here folks, it was just a practice run for 2020.

In the meantime, Trump has pretty much exhausted us, and his truth-telling about welcoming Russian help should have been a signal moment for the Resistance to rise up -- you know, our friends and neighbors who propelled the Blue Wave election victories that flipped the House and saved Obamacare by packing town hall meetings -- was instead an exercise in weary head shaking and wonderment over what awful thing he'll do to America next.   

Next arrived on Friday when the White House announced it was planning to detain 1,400 migrant children separated from their parents -- some still babies -- at an Oklahoma military installation once used as an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II.   

On Saturday, as The New York Times reported that Trump had not been briefed in any detail about a stepped-up U.S. cyber campaign to place software code that can be used for surveillance or attack inside the Russian power grid because he is a security risk who might discuss the operations with foreign officials or countermand them, nationwide demonstrations demanding that Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic leadership move on impeachment bombed.  The crowds were embarrassingly minuscule, like the dozen or so people and one chihuahua that showed up in one Southern California city. 

Then on Sunday Trump tweeted the possibility of staying in office longer than two terms, suggesting that his supporters might "demand that I stay longer." 

The blame for this dire state of affairs also is double edged.   

There is Trump's incompetence, deceit and criminality.   But there is also the refusal of Pelosi and her minions to stop dithering -- that is, continuing to gather evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors ad nauseam when there already is more than enough evidence -- to initiating impeachment proceedings at a time when America is on its collective knees and more vulnerable than that Russian power grid. 

Trump is running scared.  You can see the fear in his weird body language and hear it in his voice.  It's why he keeps accusing Biden of being a mental and physical cripple.  ("I have to tell you, he's a different guy.  He looks different than he used to, he acts different than he used to, he is even slower than he used to be.  So I don't know.") 

Although there are a number of reasons for Trump to be panicky, two predominate and they are perversely interconnected.  You'd expect nothing less of anything having to do with the Deviant in Chief:

Trump knows that if he doesn't win re-election, he will be indicted in connection with one or more of the staggering 29 investigations targeting he, his family and business.  White House to jail house. 

Although it's early in the game, Trump's own internal poll numbers show that he is lagging behind Joe Biden in key states such as Pennsylvania (16 points), Wisconsin (10) and Florida (7).

The polling numbers had been disputed by Trump for weeks.  In fact, he blithely told Stephanopoulos when he brought up the lousy numbers, "No, my polls show that I'm winning everywhere." 

That lie was undercut when someone in the campaign -- although the long knife brigade in the West Wing can't be ruled out -- leaked the poll to ABC News.  It revealed that the president is in deep trouble in all of the states he needs to win and is barely leading in reliably red Texas.  The numbers would be even worse if the campaign wasn't using something called an "informed ballot" in which poll respondents are screened based on their answers to loaded questions. 

You get the idea.  

Trump's state of mind, never mind the polling numbers, should be yet another wakeup call for Pelosi, who has kicked the can down the road so many times that those satin pumps she is so fond of wearing must need new toes. 

Pelosi, as we know all too well, is convinced impeachment would be "divisive," besides which the Republican-led Senate would never convict Trump, who smells her weakness "like a beagle can smell a treat in your pocket," as Andrew Sullivan put it. 

Pelosi's can kicking may make some kind of political sense, but putting that over her constitutional duty is, in its own way, just as bad as congressional Republicans' appeasement of Trump.    

No, it's worse.   

Like the headline says, democracy is not going to save itself from Donald Trump.  

Click HERE for a summary of ongoing Trump-related investigations.  

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

MORE HERE.

Trump Welcomes Russian Interference In 2020; McConnell Could Make It Happen

MARK CARWARDINE / GETTY IMAGES / NEW YORK MAGAZINE

Just when you thought things couldn't get any worse in Washington, they just did with the force of a neutron bomb. 

Donald Trump has declared that he'd gladly accept help from Russia or another foreign power if it wants to sabotage the 2020 election and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has virtually assured that such an effort would succeed by doubling down on refusing to allow the Senate to proceed on election security bills.  Such legislation might mitigate the impact of the very kind of meddling that in 2016 improbably propelled a profoundly incompetent crook to the presidency, reinforcing the reality that these so-called men would do anything -- anything, America -- to assure Trump is re-elected. 

In an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News on Wednesday, Trump yet again telegraphed his inherent vileness when asked how he'd greet another interference effort like the cyberattacks on Hillary Clinton mounted by Vladimir Putin's hackers with the help of his own campaign. 

"Let's put yourself in a position -- you're a congressman," Trump replied in his best mobsterish tone of voice.  "Somebody comes up and says, 'Hey, I have information on your opponent.'  Do you call the FBI?  I'll tell you what, I've seen a lot of things over my life.  I don't think in my whole life I've ever called the FBI.  In my whole life.  You don’t call the FBI. You throw somebody out of your office, you do whatever you do.  Oh, give me a break – life doesn't work that way." 

When Stephanopoulos pointed out that Trump's own FBI director, Christopher Wray, has called for exactly that, Trump said: "The FBI director is wrong."  As surely was Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose report on the Russia scandal was a clarion call to be on guard against the future foreign influence Trump endorses.   

Defending his latest outrage on Thursday in the face of widespread shock and condemnation, including a rebuke from presidential poodle Lindsey Graham, an unrepentant Trump indignantly conflated his willingness to accept campaign help from America's arch enemy or other foreign governments with the diplomatic meetings he holds with the most friendly of world leaders as the nation's chief executive.  

"I meet and talk to 'foreign governments' every day," he tweeted.  "I just met with the Queen of England (U.K.), the Prince of Whales, the P.M. of the United Kingdom, the P.M. of Ireland, the President of France and the President of Poland.  We talked about 'Everything!'" he added, later correcting the title of Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales.

There are multiple bills pending with bipartisan support that would begin to address election interference by a foreign power.  

These bills include a Democratic measure that would send more than $1 billion to state and local governments to tighten election security, but would also demand a national strategy to protect American democratic institutions against cyberattacks and require that states spend federal funds only on federally certified election infrastructure vendors.  

A bipartisan measure in both Senate and House would require internet companies like Facebook to disclose the purchasers of political ads, while a bipartisan Senate measure would codify cyberinformation-sharing initiatives between federal intelligence services and state election officials, speed up the granting of security clearances to state officials and provide federal incentives for states to adopt paper ballots.  

But all of these measures, even with some Republican support, are effectively dead on arrival.   

This is because of McConnell, comfortable in his yellow traitor's coat, has less than no interest in Trump defending America and plenty of interest in him continuing to undermine it.  No interest in defending one of America's most sacred institutions, but all out for defending that southern border against hordes of political refugees seeking a better life in a once great country.   

I would argue that McConnell, by virtue of flagrant violation of an oath of office he has taken six times and perpetual exploitation of his leadership role for power and profit, has done more to undermine our norms than even Trump.  But who's keeping score at this point?  

In September 2016, McConnell, Paul Ryan, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi were invited to the Oval Office where Barack Obama pleaded with them to forge a bipartisan alliance to fight back against ongoing Russian election interference and work with state and local election officials to thwart Election Day threats.  McConnell refused, telling the president that he was trying to politicize the matter and, if he went public with the interference, he would use it as a political hammer on Hillary Clinton, whose campaign at that very moment was being sabotaged by his Kremlin pals.  

Trump's endorsement of foreign sabotage, McConnell's smirking approval and their joint betrayal of American values is extraordinary. 

But these two men and their Republican helpmates have so debased the notion of what is extraordinary when those values have come under such regular and relentless attack that Democrats' efforts to push back -- indeed even the question of whether to impeach a president who deserves that and much worse -- verge on the comical because they are further empowering him.  

Representative Brenda Lawrence was one Democrat who got it right. 

"It is past sad," she said.  "It is past frustration.  This is criminal.  It is criminal.  And we need to hold this president accountable." 

Tell that to Nancy Pelosi, who believes impeachment would be "divisive."  Compared to what?  Allowing Trump to steal another election because the only way he can win is with Russia's help? 

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal

and delated developments. 

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

MORE HERE.

Sublime Becomes Ridiculous As Dithering Dems Spin Their Wheels Over Trump

SOCIAL NEWS DAILY

Shush!  Listen closely.  That sound you hear, no matter how distant you are from Washington, is the sound of congressional Democrats spinning their wheels as they dither over how to rid America of Donald Trump.  Or indeed whether they should even try. 

Yes, even in the face of a veritable Himalaya of evidence that Trump is a criminal of staggering proportions who is profoundly unfit for office, even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller all but shouted that the Dems must do their constitutional duty by picking up the ball and running with it, the party leadership is betwixt and between -- like deer caught in the headlights of a getaway car with the president at the wheel -- about what to do. 

The options are these:

* Continue investigating him on multiple fronts. 

* Begin impeachment proceedings against him. 

* Leave it to voters to deny him a second term. 

* Denied that second term, indict his sorry ass.

Trump has had some success playing the Democrats, frequently through manufactured crises that inevitably collapse under the weight of their own emptiness, most recently an "agreement" with Mexico to avoid tariffs that actually is months old.   

But at this point the Dems are playing themselves, and small victories like an agreement reached Monday between Attorney General William Barr and the House Judiciary Committee on releasing "key evidence" from the Mueller report on whether Trump obstructed justice is illusory.  This is because the outlines of such information are already pretty much known despite Barr's redactions and White House is not budging on the biggie -- forbidding Donald McGahn and other former administration officials to honor subpoenas to testify, which short of an unlikely appearance by Mueller himself is the Dems' best hope of blowing Trump's criminality wide open. 

Hours after the agreement was announced, committee chairman Jerrold Nadler gaveled in the first of a series of hearings scrutinizing 10 incidents of possible obstruction of justice identified by Mueller, but it was something less than must-see TV with Watergate figure John Dean, who dutifully compared Trump to Richard Nixon, and two former federal prosecutors who are MSNBC contributors, weighing in. 

Several Republicans openly mocked the proceedings, which were pre-empted on cable news networks by a helicopter crash in Manhattan.   

Meanwhile, the clock is tick-ticking down with the July 4 recess fast approaching, the House taking August off and then the Democratic presidential race further heating up in September and calls inexorably growing for letting voters, not Congress, decide Trump's fate. 

The premature attention being paid the 23 (count 'em) Democratic presidential candidates is a huge and especially vexsome distraction since they're essentially a circular firing squad armed with Wiffle Ball bats, few of whom are laying so much as a glove on Trump.  Has O'Rourke burned out?  Can de Blasio find anyone to vote for him?  Who's ahead in Iowa?  Is Biden the new Hillary?     

The haplessness -- or perhaps it is hopelessness -- of congressional Dems was inadvertently captured in a recent Washington Post hankie-wringer of an article headlined

 For Democrats, Trump Impeachment Question 

Is a Personal Struggle Transcending Politics

in which congressfolk caught in the "searing debate over whether to impeach President Trump" contemplate the future their grandkids might face if they don't act.   

It's amazing that when the going gets tough, politicians default to fingering their worry beads over their daughters (but seldom their sons) and their grandkids.  

I don't mean to denigrate these Democrats.   

They face an historic and in some ways unprecedented choice, historic because impeachment is such a rarely used option, the Clinton impeachment circus notwithstanding, and unprecedented because there never has been a chief executive as remotely as awful as Trump who has undermined American democracy so thoroughly, jeopardizing the very future of a once great country.  So yeah, the grandkids do matter. 

The impeachment debate, as the WaPo notes, is testing long-standing friendships and alliances, and many Democrats feel caught between party leaders (who may or may not include the enigmatic Nancy Pelosi) fearful that impeachment will provoke a political backlash, lubricating a Trump victory in 2020, and a growing sense that history will judge harshly those who chose not to act in the face of a president who has repeatedly and brazenly abused his power and broken the law. 

I myself, sick to death of the whole debate, have come up with a catchy, if intentionally ambiguous, slogan to move this beast of an impasse forward.  The slogan is easily adaptable as a bumper sticker, billboard or stump speech tag line that should seize the day: 

KEEP TRUMP OUT OF JAIL:

RE-ELECT HIM IN 2020

So there.

Trump Abroad: You Once Were A Beautiful Baby, America, But Look At You Now

© RICHARD CODOR

Donald Trump's most un-excellent European adventure is yet another reminder of a couple three things: The chronic inability of Americans to see ourselves as others see us, Trump's denial over his own atrocious standing abroad, and the grim reality that what should be the highlight of the trip -- the 75th anniversary of the epic D-Day invasion, which turned the tide against fascism in Europe -- will be lost on Colonel Bone Spurs, who never met an autocrat he didn't like and played tennis while 58,000 Americans perished in Vietnam. 

Trump arrived in Britain with an entourage befitting a king, which of course is exactly what he considers himself.  (And doesn't the Trump clan remind you of a royal family?) 

As The New Yorker's Anthony Lane put it, the circumstance was fine; it's the pomp that grated. 

Trump's visit to London prior to embarking for Portsmouth and later the French coast where 73,000 Americans and allied forces were to perish in the Battle of Normandy on June 6, 1944 and the ensuing weeks, wasn't quite the utter embarrassment it could have been.  He didn't walk in front of Queen Elizabeth or use his salad fork to eat the steamed fillet of halibut with watercress mousse at a lavish state dinner, and his toast to Liz came off without a discordant note, which is saying something since this short-fused bully looked like a very dour walrus in his white tie, waistcoat and tails. 

Not that he didn't try to be an utter embarrassment. 

In the face of 75,000 noisy protesters, including a woman banging the bottom of a saucepan with a metal spoon and that adorable 20-foot tall diaper-clad Trump baby blimp, he did manage to make a fool of himself by declaring during a news conference with Theresa May, who is wrapping up her three-year charade of pretending to be prime minister, "Where are the protests?  I don’t see any protests.  I did see a small protest today when I came -- very small.  So a lot of it is fake news, I hate to say." 

The president did get in some quality tweeting time, calling London Mayor Sadiq Khan "a stone cold loser" and actress Bette Midler a "washed up psycho."  Oh, and the noisy crowds "were those that gathered in support of the USA and me." 

Trump did reaffirm his tone deafness for and disinterest in what Brits, in this instance, really care about in declaring that he wants the fate of their National Health Service to be on the table in any U.S.-U.K. trade deal and then refused to meet with Jeremy Corbyn, the "negative" Labor leader, in his words, who has pledged to oppose U.S. corporations taking over the largest national health service in the world "with every breath in my body." 

As anyone with even the attention span of a royal mute swan knows, the NHS is more beloved than even the queen, if likewise criticized, and Trump might have just as well declared that he wanted to replace Big Ben with a flashing neon Chick-Fil-A sign.  After all, that's what he likes to serve at the White House. 

(Corbyn was unable to attend the state dinner -- something about having a conscience -- while Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, had a built in excuse.  She was at home caring for baby Archie, thus avoiding an awkward ecounter with Trump, who called her "nasty" for criticizing his misogyny and then denied saying any such thing although he said that very such thing in a tape-recoded interview prior to crossing the big pond.)    

For good measure, the man who has called global warming a "Chinese hoax" and pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement despite overwhelming scientific consensus that humans are methodically frying the planet, was unmoved by a 90-minute meeting with Charles, Prince of Wales, who has been sounding the global warming alarm for many years. 

A subsequent interview with Piers Morgan on "Good Morning Britain" in the underground bunker where Winston Churchill led the British government during the Blitz and World War II was  punctuated by multiple What the Fuck? moments. 

Revealing the bottomless depths of his ignorance, Trump told the journo to not forget  "it used to be called global warming.  That wasn't working.  Then it was called climate change. Now it's actually called extreme weather, because with extreme weather, you can't miss." 

The president blamed China, India and Russia for polluting the environment, and said the U.S. was responsible for "among the cleanest climates," which was true enough until he defanged the Environmental Protection Agency and started rolling back regulations limiting fossil fuel emissions promulgated by Barack Obama and his predecessors.  

"The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler," he helpfully added. 

In another WTF moment, Trump dodged questions about the epidemic of gun violence and his opposition to doing anything about it by reminding Morgan that "In London you have stabbings all over.  They said your hospital is a sea of blood." 

But the big takeaway of the Morgan interview and the president's entire un-excellent European adventure, delivered with a glibness that only someone in a narcissistic fog could summon, came when he boasted he has "made amends" for ducking service in Vietnam by increasing the Pentagon's budget to $716 billion, in one fell swoop insulting the thousands of D-Day veterans, their chests bursting with medals for bravery, heroism and valor who were reuniting on both sides of the English Channel on a most solemn anniversary.

Explaining further, he told Morgan that he thought Vietnam "was very far away, and at that time nobody ever heard of the country.  So many people dying, what is happening over there?  So I was never a fan." 

No one expected Trump to say or do anything of consequence while abroad, and his pledge of eternal togetherness with May and Britain is likely to last until . . . at least until Air Force One recrosses the big pond after stops in France and his money-losing country club in Doonbeg, Ireland, which . . . get this, is threatened by rising seas caused by global warming.  

Still, his confessionals on climate change, gun control and military service were mind blowing for their overwhelming vapidity -- and his Vietnam confessional for its cruel shallowness -- even if we do understand that Trump is not a "normal" president.   

The news media, however, was not paying attention. 

The New York Times and The Washington Post, who by now should know better, for crying out loud, are covering him just like a "normal" president as he galumphs from country to country, while CNN diluted the callousness of his Vietnam confessional with a blah-blah analysis on how six U.S. presidents served in World War II but there is unlikely to ever be a Viet vet president. 

Still, Trump cannot he blamed for America's descent from greatness.   He has merely accelerated its free fall by standing for all the things that are destroying it from within while opposing the qualities that made it great.   

These qualities, as your father or grandfather knows as he has privately grappled with the horrors and deprivations that his generation endured, included our historic and profoundly deep alliances with Britain and France, now in grave peril because of Trump, as well as the 12 other nations whose armies also stormed the beaches of Normandy so that a lad from Jamaica Estates in Queens could grow up with a platinum spoon in his mouth and someday become a kingpin, if not exactly a king, with a once great country as his plaything.     

With Cohen In Prison, Attorney General Barr Has Become Trump's Personal Fixer

© NANCY  OHANIAN / USED WITH PERMISSION 

I sometimes find myself musing about how history will judge the cast of characters dominating the Washington stage these days.   

Part of that is because I'm not merely a member of the captive audience forced to watch this theater of the absurdly awful, but a journalist-historian who understands that impartial contemporaneous treatment of these characters by the news media (it's called "giving the benefit of the doubt") can metamorphosize into harsher judgments once historians, with the benefit of hindsight, render their own verdicts in the coming years. By that measure, history will judge that William Pelham Barr spectacularly destroyed his reputation by flying too close to the sun, or rather the black hole that is Donald Trump. 

If there is any confusion on this point, it is why Barr knowingly -- and certainly with malice of forethought -- became not just Trump's attorney general, but in a mere four months has become the worst attorney general of the modern era. 

This is quite a feat since since John Mitchell, the previous worst AG, went to prison for multiple Watergate scandal-related crimes and, as hard as he tried, did not politicize an office that the Constitution demands be scrupulously impartial to the extent Barr has in the brief time since he slouched out of retirement to replace the execrable Jeff Sessions, whom Trump had cashiered because he occasionally betrayed a semblance of a spine regarding the Russia scandal. 

Barr's frontal assault on -- and cavalcade of lies and obfuscations about -- Robert Mueller's report on the scandal has been extraordinary even by the standards of compliant Trump Cabinet officers like Steve Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross and Betsy DeVos. 

And make no mistake, Barr's whitewash of a report revealing deep criminality on candidate Trump's part has succeeded because the House Democratic leadership continues to dither over whether to continue investigating the president to a fare the well while trying to secure public testimony from the now-former special counsel or begin impeachment proceedings as an increasing number of Democrats clamor for taking that dramatic but necessary step. 

There is sense of growing urgency -- or at least there should be -- over the Dems' dithering.   

The House will be in session for barely two weeks before the July 4 recess.  It will take August off and come September the Democratic presidential race will further heat up and calls for letting voters, not Congress, decide Trump's fate inevitably will grow.   

Barr's audition to be Trump's "lawn ornament," as Charles Pierce viciously if exquisitely calls his relationship with the Black Hole in Chief, was telegraphed a year ago at a time when Michael Cohen, Trump's longtime personal lawyer and fixer, was blabbing to federal prosecutors and the president seemed increasingly isolated. 

In June 2018, in an apparently unsolicited mash note disguised as a legal memorandum on Mueller's investigation into obstruction of justice, Barr wrote deputy attorney general and future whitewash accomplice Rod Rosenstein that the investigation was "fatally misconceived" because it was within Trump's powers as president to fire FBI Director James Comey after repeatedly asking him to let go of the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.  So by Barr's reasoning, Trump could not have obstructed justice -- which Mueller indicates he may have done on at least 10 occasions -- because of untrammeled executive power. 

The memo should have disqualified Barr from having anything to do with the Russia scandal once he became AG just as Sessions' memory lapses over his meetings with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak prompted his own recusal, but it merely emboldened him. 

The lynchpin of Barr's whitewash is his deeply misleading account of what Mueller found, and I continue to suspect he has not even read the entirety of a report that he has been using as an arsonist would use a can of gasoline. 

"He did not reach a conclusion,” Barr has said over and over of Mueller.  "He provided both sides of the issue, and . . . his conclusion was he wasn't exonerating the president, but he wasn’t finding a crime either." 

Wrong. 

As Mueller stated in his 448-page report report and again at his farewell press conference, he was bound by a policy preventing him from charging the president with a crime, or even saying the president had committed a crime, and by implication it should be left to Congress to decide if the instances of obstruction were crimes.  In other words, through impeachment proceedings. 

Meanwhile, nearly 1,000 former federal prosecutors have stated in an open letter that the actions described by Mueller are criminal if committed by anyone other than a president shielded by an untested cannot-indict-while-in-office regulation. 

Moments after Mueller left the podium at the Justice Department last Wednesday, Barr sat down for an hour-long damage-control blowjob . . . er, interview with Jan Crawford of CBS News in which he grossly contradicts Mueller's findings with regard to Trump’s ties to Russia. 

"Mueller has spent two and half years, and the fact is, there is no evidence of a conspiracy," he said.  "So it was bogus, this whole idea that the Trump was in cahoots with the Russians is bogus."

As lies go, this is a whopper.  Because it was uttered by the attorney general, it is in a class of its own and one of the reasons that historians will eat Barr alive. 

Mueller was unable to establish a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Russia because, as he put it, "some individuals invoked their Fifth Amendment right," or "provided information that was false or incomplete," or "deleted relevant communications."   

Think former campaign adviser Paul Manafort, who will be doing major prison time, and longest-serving Trump adviser Roger Stone, who also is likely to round out his career in an orange jumpsuit.   

Barr, of course, has not been content to merely misrepresent what Mueller found.   

He has picked up and run with Trump's mantra that the entire Russia scandal was a deep-state plot by Mueller and the FBI to overturn Trump's presidency as revenge for Hillary Clinton's "defeat" while incredibly likening the FBI's counterintelligence investigation of Trump to right-wing birther conspiracies. 

"I think if the shoe was on the other foot we could be hearing a lot about it," he told Crawford.  "If those kinds of discussions were held, you know, when Obama first ran for office, people talking about Obama in those tones and suggesting that 'Oh that he might be a Manchurian candidate for Islam or something like that.'  You know some wild accusations like that and you had that kind of discussion back and forth, you don’t think we would be hearing a lot more about it?" 

And then Barr got really crazy. 

"I think one of the ironies today is that people are saying that it's President Trump that's shredding our institutions.  I really see no evidence of that, it is hard, and I really haven't seen bill of particulars as to how that's being done," he added.  "From my perspective the idea of resisting a democratically elected president and basically throwing everything at him and you know, really changing the norms on the grounds that we have to stop this president, that is where the shredding of our norms and our institutions is occurring." 

Taking a page from Trump's own playbook, Barr hints that he has secret evidence to back up this wingnuttery.  Which we'll never see because it doesn't exist.   

But what is most terrifying about Barr is that it's become obvious that he believes his own lies, including his blanket exoneration of Trump and defiance of congressional subpoenas. And that as attorney general his responsibility is not to uphold the rule of law but to defy it.   

Click HERE for Mueller's full statement. 

Click HERE for a searchable version of the Mueller report. 

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal

and related developments.

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

MORE HERE.