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.

Mueller Has Made It Much Harder For Democrats To Go Slow On Impeachment

ABC NEWS

The damage inflicted by Trump’s naïveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. ~ JOHN McCAIN

Although it is equal parts presumptuous and wishful thinking, I'm going to suggest that the hidden message of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's farewell soliloquy was that he believes Congress should impeach Donald Trump because the damage cited by the president's late nemesis -- yeah, the guy whose naval namesake was hidden during Trump's recent Japan misadventure -- is immense. 

"If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so," Mueller said in the money quote of his nine-minute statement on Wednesday in which he conveyed accurately, if briefly and in achingly institutional terms, the findings of his 448-page report, which unlike Trump or that whitewashing William Barr, is the ultimate authority on the Russia scandal. 

Neither Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski nor Bill Clinton nemesis Ken Starr were coy about speaking to the incriminating nature of their findings.   

Starr, in fact, couldn't stop blabbing as Clinton's overtly partisan impeachment sank in the Senate.  We may have to leave it to historians to figure out why Mueller, as devoutly apolitical as he may be, fell back on circumlocution rather than stating the obvious.  And we probably can expect more of the same if he is forced to testify before Congress, leaving the pundits to again parse his comments for hidden meanings.  Me, too. 

Yet the soon-to-be former special counsel was not being obtuse when he answered a question no one asked him since, after all, he refused to take questions: 

If Mueller couldn't indict Trump because he was a sitting president and did not believe he could even file an indictment under seal for when he left office, why then did he bother to investigate him so vigorously and thoroughly for obstruction of justice? 

Mueller answered this unasked question thusly (emphasis mine):

First . . . because it is important to preserve evidence while memories are fresh and documents are available . . . and second, the opinion [barring indictment] says that the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal-justice system to formally accuse a sitting President of wrongdoing.

That process would be impeachment, and thus the door is now opened wide to finally begin proceedings. 

But barely two hours after Mueller had left the podium at the Justice Department, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a statement in which she said, "Congress will continue to investigate and legislate to protect our elections and secure our democracy," but nothing about impeachment, while Jerrold Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which would initiate impeachment proceedings, merely said the option was "on the table" even as the Democratic leadership's go-slow strategy had just been made harder to sustain by the outgoing special counsel himself.  

Meanwhile, Trump, whose Vietnam era bone spurs must have been acting up, accidentally acknowledged for the first time that Russia helped "me to get elected" and then retracted the statement in the course of a series of furious diatribes and widely debunked lies involving Mueller.   

This included calling impeachment a "dirty, filthy, disgusting word," which was something coming from the Potty Mouth in Chief. 

VANITY FAIR

Impeachment is indeed a nasty business and Pelosi's go-slow strategy has had merit since there are numerous cracks in Trump's dam, any one of which could rupture.  But if the impeachment clause of the Constitution wasn’t written for a president like Trump, asks The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson, then why is it there?  

Indeed, and at this point Democrats have no choice but to begin what is a long and drawn-out process to try to take down Trump that would last well into next year and the heart of the 2020 presidential campaign, which on balance is bad for Trump. 

This is because only impeachment -- and the theatrics of televised hearings, with or without Mueller, that would demolish the Trump-Barr narrative -- remotely stands a chance of slowing yet alone stopping the president in his authoritarian power grab. 

At this point, the most probable articles of impeachment (there are so many high crimes and misdemeanors to choose from) probably would be obstruction of justice, perjury, violation of the Constitution on emoluments, and possibly campaign finance law violations and tax fraud.  

Impeachment confers on the House Judiciary Committee certain legal powers it otherwise would not have. 

Chief among these is that it gives the committee a right to information otherwise protected by grand jury secrecy rules, which is key because that information, including damning witness testimony before Mueller's grand jury, was redacted by Barr with one of the swipes of his whitewash brush. 

In a little noticed decision last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that courts may let outsiders, like members of Congress, see grand jury information, in effect upholding a Nixon-era precedent permitting the grand jury investigating the Watergate scandal to share its evidence with the House Judiciary Committee, because such sharing is permitted  when it is needed for "judicial" proceedings, which impeachment is. 

Democratic fears that the Trump administration might try to use lengthy court battles over their subpoenas to run out the clock before the 2020 election may be overstated because an impeachment inquiry is so serious that it could help persuade judges at each stage in the appeals process to expedite their rulings.  That has been the case so far concerning two sets of subpoenas -- one compelling Trump's accounting firm to turn over its records and another compelling Deutsche Bank and Capitol One to turn over its records on loans to Trump, his elder children and family business. 

Less easy to dismiss is that even if the House were to impeach Trump, which is probable, it is unlikely that enough Republicans in the Senate would be willing to vote to convict him. 

The conventional wisdom is that Clinton was politically strengthened by Republican-led impeachment proceedings, and some Democrats fear that the same would be true if they open proceedings but fail to remove Trump, allowing him to claim they had overreached and that Congress had exonerated him. 

It is notable that the White House recalibrated its claim that Trump did not obstruct justice after Mueller's statement. 

No longer are the president’s mouthpieces asserting that Mueller himself in his report found no obstruction, which of course was not the case.  They are now pinning that conclusion on Barr, who had said in his initial summary of the report that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein found Mueller’s evidence of obstruction insufficient to act on.   

If there is a wild card in all of this, it is Roger Stone.  (Go figure.)

Republican dirty trickster Stone, Trump's longest serving political adviser, is scheduled to go on trial in November, and in conjunction with impeachment hearings trial testimony could be hugely damaging to the president because Stone can implicate him directly in Russian election interference, specifically WikiLeaks' coordination with the Trump campaign of its release of emails damaging to Hillary Clinton.   

Alternately, if Trump pardoned Stone, that action could be criminalized by House Democrats in the form of an article of impeachment on abuse of pardon power.  

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.

The Mueller As Superman Myth Is Vanquished, But At Least He Didn't Clear Trump

COLIN ANDERSON / ALEX WONG / GETTY / PAUL SPELLA / THE ATLANTIC

Will the real Robert Mueller please stand up? 

Well, he did on Wednesday morning in nine minutes of no-questions-allowed farewell   remarks from the podium at the Justice Department, only his second public statement since May 18, 2017 when he was appointed special counsel in the wake of Donald Trump's axing of FBI Director James Comey and took over the Russian scandal investigation, briefly remarking then that "I accept this responsibility and will discharge it to the best of my ability." 

Beyond the mild shock of what Mueller's voice actually sounds like, we were reminded that he is first and foremost a gentleman, a rarity in an era of charlatans and rogues, but alas not a superman riding to the rescue of liberals who foolishly believed his 448-page final report on the scandal would save the republic by driving Trump from office. 

The departing special counsel, his work completed and return to private life imminent after two extraordinarily leak-free years, says he will not say anything to Congress, if compelled to testify, beyond what his report says.  Democratic congressional leaders, undoubtedly dismayed by that pledge, said that they hoped to not have to compel Mueller to testify, but a subpoena remains an option.   

Mueller did reiterate what the report does say, which has been obscured by Trump's tweetstorms and Attorney General William Barr's whitewashing, which included his unsubstantiated claim that there was "no collusion" between the Trump campaign and Russia. 

In conveying accurately, if briefly, the findings of a report that is the ultimate authority on the scandal but most Americans nevertheless have not bothered to read, Mueller said that:

* Russia made multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. 

* If he did not believe Trump committed a crime, he would have said so. 

* While a sitting president cannot be indicted, Congress has a follow-up role. 

* He had the right to investigate the issue of obstruction of justice. 

* He does not question Barr's decision to not initially release the report.  

Mueller said he was "speaking out today because our investigation is complete," adding that he hoped "this will be the only time I will speak to you in this manner." 

"I will close by reiterating the central allegation of our indictments, that there were multiple, systemic efforts to interfere in our election," he said in an allusion to the 2020 election and the indifference of Trump and congressional Republicans to ongoing and future Russian meddling.  "And that allegation deserves the attention of every American."

Trump yet again claimed vindication, tweeting shortly after Mueller spoke that "Nothing changes from the Mueller Report.  There was insufficient evidence and therefore, in our Country, a person is innocent.  The case is closed!  Thank you." 

Meanwhile, Republicans circled their wagons around Trump.  

"Today's statement by Mr. Mueller reinforces the findings of his report.  And as for me, the case is over," said Senator Lindsey Graham, a critic turned reliable ally of the president.  "Mr. Mueller has decided to move on and let the report speak for itself. Congress should follow his lead." 

Mueller, of course, was not suggesting any such thing, and Congress does have a clear, constitutionally-mandated option.  It's called impeachment, and on Wednesday afternoon Corey Booker and Julián Castro joined six other Democratic presidential candidates in endorsing that avenue. 

The special counsel's investigation was not a witch hunt by any stretch of the imagination. 

It found that Trump and 18 of his associates had at least 140 contacts with Russian nationals and WikiLeaks, or their intermediaries, during the campaign and presidential transition.  Longtime lawyer-fixer Michael Cohen had at least 25 contacts, Donald Trump Jr. at least 17, and Trump himself at least 13.  

It involved 2,800 subpoenas, 500 witnesses and 500 search warrants leading to 199 individual criminal counts obtained against 34 people, 26 of them Russian intelligence agents, hackers and trolls, and three Russian companies, admissions of guilt by six individuals and still outstanding indictments covering identity theft, money laundering, obstruction, witness tampering, lying to investigators and conspiracy.  

Cohen and former campaign manager Paul Manafort are in prison and Roger Stone, Trump's longest-serving political adviser, is headed there, while there are 29 ongoing congressional, federal and state investigations.  Meanwhile, nearly 1,000 former federal prosecutors signed an open letter saying that Mueller laid out sufficient evidence in his report to make an obstruction case. 

In the end, perhaps a gentleman who deeply values integrity really is a hero -- if not a super hero with super powers -- in this day and age.   

But the problem is that Donald Trump has not been driven from office and could well be reelected.  Robert Mueller's reluctance to appear before Congress because he has discharged his official responsibilities, albeit with admirable rectitude, is based on a vision of an America that pretty much no longer exists. 

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.

Trump Says Congress Can't Legislate & Investigate, But How About Impeach?

EVAN VUCCI / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

While we live in and suffer through an era of profound uncertainty, one thing is certain: So long as Donald Trump remains president, nothing will get done in Congress beyond keeping government huffing and puffing along, and even that is in peril.   But then doing nothing has been the coin of the congressional realm since Barack Obama became president 10 years ago and Mitch McConnell infamously declared that the Islamofascist from Kenya would be a one-term president because Republicans would obstruct everything he tried to do.   

So what's different now? 

What's different, to belabor the obvious, is that while Obama was level headed and a decent if flawed president who ended up treading water for two obstructive terms, Trump is a paranoiac, indecent and deeply flawed. 

And obsessed with the many congressional and other inquiries into his criminality, which has resulted in his blanket defiance of subpoenas and consequent court battles to the point where not only is nothing getting done but America is in the throes of a full-blown constitutional crisis that makes Richard Nixon, his own paranoia and the Watergate scandal seem like quaint relics from a long-ago time.  

The nut of that crisis is Trump's disdain for the Constitution, rule of law and separation of powers, which resulted in his extraordinary declaration last week following an orchestrated temper tantrum directed at the Democratic leadership that Congress could not legislate with him and investigate him at the same time. 

"President Trump is quite willing to sacrifice his agenda to defend himself,” says Tom Daschle, another relic, this one of a somewhat gentler -- or perhaps less vicious -- era who was the Democratic Senate leader during Bill Clinton's impeachment trial.  "That takes priority over any legislative issue." 

This, in its own perverse way, is a not bad thing because the legislative issues that matter to Trump are shot through with his own brand of vitriol.  In other words, they are bad. 

These include delivering a death blow to Obamacare, an even more draconian immigration policy and border wall funding, additional tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, making it easier for Wall Street to engage in the excesses that led to the 2008 financial collapse, and further packing federal courts with far right-wingers.  So what if the nation's deeply ailing infrastructure -- its bridges, highways and power supply -- continues to crumble? 

"He does outrageous, nasty, destructive things, knowing full well he's crossing a line, and then he pretends he didn't,” says Trump biographer Tim O’Brien of the president's feigned ignorance over the altered Nancy Pelosi video brouhaha, which our patriotic comrades at Facebook refuse to take down even though they know it's fake.  "He doesn’t care what people think about how mean or dumb he is." 

And like an Energizer Bunny, this one with rattlesnake fangs, horns and a pot belly instead of cute teeth and floppy ears, he just keeps going and going. 

In a truly remarkable scene that should not be forgotten at least until it's overtaken by another truly remarkable scene, the president of the United States assembled his senior staff in the Roosevelt Room of the White House last Thursday after that orchestrated temper tantrum and name-checked them one by one. 

"Kellyanne, what was my temperament yesterday?" Trump asked White House counselor Kellyanne Conway of what had obviously been a meltdown.   

"Very calm.  No temper tantrum," Conway replied. 

Mercedes Schlapp, White House director of strategic communications: "You were very calm and you were very direct." 

Economic adviser Larry Kudlow: "Very calm and straightforward and clear." 

And so on and so forth. 

But the greatest praise for Trump came from . . . Trump, who declared for the gaggle of agog reporters who were present,  "I'm an extremely stable genius. OK?"  

If you detect some tail chasing in this post, then you're paying attention, which is more than can be said about most of us, who could care less about Trump's latest outrages -- planning to pardon war criminals and denigrating his own intelligence officials by downplaying North Korean missile tests and then joining with dictator Kim Jong Un in attacking front-running 2020 rival Joe Biden.  

So how to begin to end the stalemate between Trump and Congress? 

For openers, I've been very wrong about Trump in several instances: His improbable ascendancy to the Oval Office, the unwavering support of his base and his ability to sanitize the highly damaging Mueller report, although I do not dare predict his defeat in 2020.   

But all three of my misapprehensions have a common thread.   

Trump stole the election with help from Russia, his base sticks with him primarily because they love how he games the system, and he has slithered out from under the Mueller report thus far because his purpose-picked attorney general has lied about it with bold strokes of the whitewash brush.       

Anyhow, end the stalemate by letting that word-slurring Pelosi know that it's time to stop winding up Trump, which is incredibly easy because of his victimhood obsession but at this point has become a distracting exercise in stooping to his own infantile level. 

And begin impeachment proceedings. 

Clinton's impeachment was about partisan overreach and Nixon's impeachment about restoring the appropriate checks and balances between executive and legislative branches. Trump's impeachment, lest we need reminding, is about saving American democracy.   

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

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

MORE HERE.

It's About The Law, Stupid: Latest Court Rulings Reveal Trump's Abject Ignorance

ANDREW HARRIER / BLOOMBERG-GETTY IMAGES

We certainly can expect the two lower court rulings this week upholding House committee subpoenas involving Donald Trump's mysterioso financing to be appealed to Kingdom Come.   

The rulings lay bare Trump's ignorance of the law and a concomitant flaw in the reasoning of his lawyers that provide a glimmer of hope that he will be scuppered in the end: Attempts to block the subpoenas are being made on political grounds -- as in Democrats are beating up on and want impeach a beleaguered president just trying to do his job -- but to Trump's surprise, political grandstanding takes a back seat in federal courts.

On Monday in Washington, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta fast-tracked a decision on Trump's attempt to keep Mazars USA, his longtime accounting firm, from turning over his financial records, ruling that it is legally bound to honor a subpoena to do so.

On Wednesday in Manhattan, U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos blocked an attempt by the president and his elder children to prevent Deutsche Bank and Capitol One from honoring subpoenas seeking information about their loans.     

And in between, Trump went on a temper-tantrum rant that was notable even by his standards. 

He blew up a White House meeting with Democratic congressional leaders, including Nancy Pelosi, or "Crazy Nancy" as Trump calls the speaker of the House in one of his many insults, before it had even started and then stormed into the Rose Garden for a spittle-infused declaration that he wouldn't work with Democrats on a massive infrastructure bill unless they stop investigating him.   

The common denominator of the subpoenas that Mehta and Ramos refused to block, as well as others pertaining to Trump's taxes and his other financial shenanigans, is that he is desperate to keep everything secret pertaining to his "private affairs," as his lawyers term them, by running out the clock until the 2020 elections.  This is because these private affairs are certain to show the same pattern of lying, unethical conduct and outright criminality that pervade his more transparent endeavors. 

All, of course, are messes of Trump's own making and not Democratic overreach, which Ramos addressed in an hour-long reading of his ruling from the bench. 

In rejecting the entirety of Trump's lawyers argument, Ramos drew a distinction between the political ramifications of an investigation into a president's finances and what a judge must consider.   He said that "any delay in the proceedings may result in irreparable harm to the Committees. . . .  Courts have long recognized a clear public interest in maximizing Congress's power to investigate." 

"Propriety of legislative motives is not a question left to the courts,"  Ramos concluded.  It is a question "left to voters, not judges." 

Mehta's decision to fast-track the Mazars injunction pleading, which took only days between hearing and ruling and not weeks or months, and Ramos drawing attention to the timing of the Deutsche Bank-Capitol One injunction pleading point up a factor that should temper any excitement over the rulings. 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said on Thursday that it will expedite its review of the Mazars case, and it is probable that courts at the next level will sustain the rulings on appeal because these courts are generally liberal in outlook.  Additionally, both Mehta and Ramos crafted rulings as appeal proof as possible, and Ramos in particular seemed to be looking beyond the District Court level.   But a judge or panel of judges might not buy into the timing argument and an appeal at the next level or higher could take weeks or months before there is a ruling, something that would help Trump and his lawyers. 

Then there is the ultimate question: When and if these or any other cases reach a Supreme Court with a decidedly conservative bent, including two far-right Trump-nominated justices, how will it rule? 

Trump acts like he is convinced that the high court will effectively serve as a rubber stamp, clearing the way for his agenda.  Most importantly, he believes the court can save him from impeachment. 

But I continue to believe that the court will not "save" Trump, to use a word that his senior advisers have bandied about since Justice Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation, for two interconnected reasons:

* The tactic of Trump's lawyers blaming the Democrats and not arguing the law -- which would be futile -- is further evidence that Trump doesn't understand the basics of American governance and civics, including the reality that the Supreme Court has no authority to help or hinder impeachment proceedings.  

* Even with Trump nominees Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, a ruling by a high court led by John Roberts, a devout constitutionalist, will fail for the same reasons that Richard Nixon failed during Watergate -- the elemental reasons enshrined in that very Constitution that Trump loves to hate.  

Trump's blowup before the Democratic leadership and his Rose Garden theatrics quickly backfired as Democrats called his bluff for yet again making it all about him, not the good of the country.   

The Extremely Stable Genius was left to whine that what obviously was a stunt was not a stunt as he lined up several aides during a press conference to aver that he was not stark raving mad.  Besides which, everything is the Democrats' fault because of all those damned investigations, something he said repeatedly on Thursday.  For good measure, Trump on Thursday night tweeted out a fake video of Pelosi making the rounds on alt-right websites that makes her appear drunk.

All of this is leaving Republicans up for reelection in swing states next year with a queasy feeling because they have very little to show except for a lot of wheel spinning. 

Meanwhile, Pelosi has passed more than 250 pieces of legislation since January, including some major bills that are stuck in the Republican-controlled Senate, and all the while courts are siding with the opposition as threat of impeachment against their stark raving mad leader grows.   

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

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal
and related developments.