The Carpentariat

Roger Stone gets hammered

What happened this morning was what everyone knew would happen some morning. So, within minutes of Roger Stone's arrest by the FBI, the NY Times published the "news" at some length, which it most assuredly had written weeks ago.

Aside from committing obstruction, making false statements to Congress and witness tampering, Stone made The Hart Mistake: "He sometimes seemed to taunt American law enforcement agencies," writes the Times, "daring them to find hard evidence to link him to the Russian meddling campaign."

The special counsel's office has obliged him.

5. During the summer of 2016, STONE spoke to senior Trump Campaign officials about Organization 1 [Wikileaks] and information it might have had that would be damaging to the Clinton Campaign. STONE was contacted by senior Trump Campaign officials to inquire about future releases by Organization 1.

6. By in or around early August 2016, STONE was claiming both publicly and privately to have communicated with Organization 1. By in or around mid-August 2016, Organization 1 made a public statement denying direct communication with STONE. Thereafter, STONE said that his communication with Organization 1 had occurred through a person STONE described as a "mutual friend," "go-between," and "intermediary." STONE also continued to communicate with members of the Trump Campaign about Organization 1 and its intended future releases.

Robert Mueller has obtained corroborating testimony from three senior Trump campaign officials; Stone had bragged to them about his connection to Wikileaks. "One of them told investigators that Mr. Stone not only seemed to predict WikiLeaks’ actions, but also that he took credit afterward for the timing of its disclosures that damaged Hillary Clinton’s candidacy." Astonishingly, he did the same on social media and in various interviews — until, that is, he saw the righteous hammer of Bob Mueller coming down.

Like other Trumpian scoundrels, Stone has charged the special counsel's office with conducting fishing expeditions — inquiries into activities unrelated to the Trump campaign's collusion with Russia. What will nail Stone as well as the campaign, however, is the collusion pertinence of that which was learned in 2018: that, during the 2016 campaign, Stone had communicated on Twitter with the Russian intelligence operative, Guccifer 2.0, which had stolen Democratic emails and then forwarded them to WikiLeaks.

Stone fancies himself a James Bond type, a doer of clandestine deeds, a master of clever intrigue who always escapes fatal danger, just in the nick of time. His self-image may be somewhat damaged, though, when his Nixon tattoo is replaced by a prison number.

Say what? Trump is closer to what?

As you know, Trump has decided to give the State of the Union address whenever the government reopens, as Speaker Pelosi demanded. From this, NBC News' First Read concludes: "It is a very rare move for Trump to back down on anything, and it suggests we COULD be closer to solving the shutdown than we were a day ago."

Now there's a non sequitur to make your head spin. How does Trump's egomaniacal desire for better television ratings — guaranteed by a SOTU address from the House — in any way suggest that he's "closer to solving the shutdown"?

First Read also quotes a Washington Post story, which, says First Read, is yet another "sign we could be closer to resolving the shutdown":

"Sources in the room told us that Trump pointed out that shutting down the government costs more than building the wall, 'so this is kind of stupid and every day this goes on the cost gets higher,' [the Heritage Foundation’s Stephen] Moore added, paraphrasing Trump."

Did First Read read the entire story? For there was also this quote in the WaPo story, titled "Here's why Trump isn't budging on his border wall":

"The president has no intention of caving on this," said the Center for Immigration Studies' Mark Krikorian.

The obvious Lindsey Graham

You gotta love George Will's biographical take on the Rudy Giuliani of politics, Sen. Lindsey Graham:

When in 1994, Graham, a South Carolina Republican, first ran for Congress, he promised to be "one less vote for an agenda that makes you want to throw up." A quarter-century later, Graham himself is a gastrointestinal challenge….

In 2015, he said Donald Trump was a "jackass." In February 2016, he said "[Trump was] a kook, I think he’s crazy, I think he’s unfit for office"…. Today, Graham … says building the border wall is an existential matter for the GOP: "If we undercut the president, that’s the end of his presidency and the end of our party."

On a recent day, in 90 minutes he went from "I don’t know" whether the president has the power to declare an emergency and [thus build the wall] to "Time for President … to use emergency powers to build Wall."

Why do they come to Congress, these people such as Graham?

I don't know if he's bucking for a cabinet job, or for Trump's presidential endorsement in 2024, or if he's groveling before the enact terrible merely as part of his upcoming reelection effort in reddest South Carolina. But there is no doubt that today Sen. Graham is just one more vote for an agenda that makes you want to throw up.

He first came to celebrity as a House Judiciary Committee member during the tortured slapstick of Bill Clinton's impeachment. I'll never forget the televised scene in which Rep. Graham dug deep into "the method" of the Actors Studio and theatrically, dramatically lamented the personal bile being flung about in the hearings. It just broke Lindsay's heart — pol against pol, brother against brother, American against American. There was some question if he could go on; his dismay was that great. But somehow, he pulled himself together.

I knew then that this Southern charlatan had a brilliant future in the party of counterfeit emotionalism. Graham puffed himself up as one of the little people, your average Joe just trying to make sense of it all, a Mr. Smith done gone to Warshinton who discovers that others are not what they seem. Yes, it broke Lindsey's heart. But somehow, he gathered himself and stayed. And stayed. And stayed.

"This shutdown … should achieve lasting disruption"

"Do they realize what damage they’re causing?" asked Gustavo Costa, an engineering contractor at NASA’s John H. Glenn Research Center — or at least he was, until Trump shut down the government and marooned Dr. Costa at home, where he now ponders alternative employment. The U.S. government has become a precarious, high-risk workplace, and its reputation among the highly skilled is one of dog food.

"The longest shutdown in the country’s history is eroding [their] good will," reports the Times, "already wearing thin after years of pay freezes, unpredictable budgets, and disdain from even the White House for government workers as swamp creatures or worse." And before the White House it was the disdain of congressional Republicans, the Freedom Caucus, the whole lunatic tribe of Louie Gohmerts — government workers themselves.

As I wrote on 15 January, the shutdown is about far more than Trump's steel slats: "It's about the right-wing thrill of watching the federal government get gutted." Stories of soup lines, personal-survival GoFundMe.com accounts, public services going undone, workers suffering and workers leaving the government only make the right's day. A brutalized, starved, imploding federal government has been pseudoconservatives' wettest of dreams since Barry Goldwater, and these days they are positively orgasmic.

To Trump's closest advisers, government workers are but a bloated federal bureaucracy. "As a result," reported the Washington Post, "they have shown a high tolerance for keeping large swaths of the government dark [and] services offline." To Trump, most government workers are the "deep state," whose permanent riddance he would gladly embrace.

In a Daily Caller op-ed, retweeted by Trump and Don Jr. and titled "I'm a Senior Trump Official and I Hope a Long Shutdown Smokes out the Resistance," the dyspeptic author wrote that "To be a victory, this shutdown … should achieve lasting disruption"; "for the sake of our nation, I hope it lasts a very long time, till the government is changed and can never return to its previous form"; "Furloughed employees should find other work, never return and not be paid."

I repeat, the president the United States retweeted that splenetic op-ed. Not only did he take delight in doing what he always did as a businessman — abusing those who worked for him — essentially, he declared war on the very government he oversees. And he could not have made Vladimir Putin happier.

At last, it genuinely seems there is nothing, absolutely nothing that Donald J. Trump won't do in disservice to the United States.

Trump's numbers, still headed south

From a CBS News-SSRS poll:

"Trump's overall approval rating has dipped three points from November to 36 percent today. Fifty- nine percent of Americans now disapprove of the job he is doing — a high for his presidency."

From an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll:

"Overall, 34 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance.... That’s down from 42 percent a month earlier and nears the lowest mark of his two-year presidency."

The AP notes that only five presidents have watched their approval ratings drop into the 20s: Harry S. Truman, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. It won't be long before the number is six.

Zero growth?

An exchange between CNN's Poppy Harlow and Trump's Council of Economic Advisers chairman, Kevin Hassett (who recently and rather cheerfully told the PBS Newshour that furloughed government workers are, "in a sense, better off" with the shutdown, because "they have the vacation, but they don’t have to use their vacation days"):

Harlow: Could we get zero growth? I want to nail this down.

Hassett: Yes. We could, yes. If [the shutdown] extended for a whole quarter and given the fact that the first quarter tends to be low because of residual seasonality [how do like that for impressive economese?), then you could end up with a number close to zero in the first quarter.

But not to worry, added Hassett. "The second quarter would be humongous if the government reopens," he said.

If? replied Harlow.

Trump's "beautiful" healthcare

Here's a graph that could have been produced on 9 November, 2016:

The vertical axis is in millions.

The Obama administration calculated in 2016 that about 20 million once-uninsured Americans had acquired healthcare coverage through the Affordable Care Act. Now, reports HuffPost, "about 7 million fewer Americans had health insurance at the end of last year compared with two years prior, and the share of people who are uninsured is the highest it’s been since 2014" — that, according to the Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index.

As expected, short of dynamiting the ACA altogether — although it tried — the Trump administration has done all it could to deprive lower- and middle-income Americans of healthcare coverage. It has gutted advertising for the ACA, which would have brought new customers into the market, thus reducing premiums. It has eliminated the fine for non-coverage, "causing insurers to increase prices on the assumption that healthier people are less likely to buy coverage in the absence of fines."

And "perhaps most consequentially," writes HuffPost, "Trump ended payments to health insurance companies serving the lowest-income customers, which led insurers to increase prices to make up for the lost revenue."

During the presidential campaign and into his administration, Trump said that "Congress will need the courage to step away from the special interests and do what is right for America" and "We must make sure no one slips through the cracks simply because they cannot afford insurance." He said "We’re going to have insurance for everybody … I am going to take care of everybody … Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now" — and he said his alternative healthcare will be "a beautiful picture."

Does the above look like a beautiful picture?

Which will better handle self-destruction? The U.S. or Britain?

In "Watching Brexit Fall Apart," Le Monde's editorial director, Sylvie Kauffmann, pens a sympathetic elegy to Britain, as well as to Europe, as well as to America.

"We made the mistake of thinking that Brexit was a purely British problem," said an adviser to President Emmanuel Macron of France. "It was not. It is a European problem, and the Yellow Vests are part of it."

From west to east and east to west, the revolt against elites and inequalities has spread. The associated lies, the demagogy, the divisions that are familiar to American voters are now common in Europe…. 

Glued to the BBC over the past few days, some of us, awed by such riveting political theater, could not help envying at least the style with which the British have handled their own bout of madness.

I can speak for neither France nor Europe at large, but as an American studied in The American Character, my educated guess is that our "own bout of madness" will appreciably cure itself with the passing of Mad King Donald's reign. With the return of a Democratic president and Congress (the odds are looking rather good for 2020), Trump's more destructive policies of trade wars and the alienation of allies will come to a swift, merciful end. The U.S. will doubtless remain a global economic power and revert to a global diplomatic power — a voice of cooperation among nations, not of America — and everyone else — First. The right's Trumpian fringe will persist in its hysteria, paranoia and general foulness, but America as a whole — including many former Trump voters — will wash its hands of the ignorance, malice and racism of Trumpism.

Britain, however, appears to be hellbent on devastating its economy for decades to come. If other nations, for whatever insane reason, should wish to set out to economically incapacitate themselves, Brexit is the perfect 50-Year Plan to use as a model. Britain's Conservative Party is in shambles, Labour is led by the eccentric Jeremy Corbyn, and God knows there are no Churchills on the horizon. The goofy Boris Johnson and sadly solemn Theresa May seem to be the exemplars of the nation's political future. In global diplomacy, Britain has proved itself, thanks to Brexit, an un-credible player. And from what I've read, The British Character today is one of exhaustion, disgust or total indifference.

Perhaps Ms. Kauffmann cannot "help envying at least the style with which the British have handled their own bout of madness," but I don't see it — not any sort of enviable style, anyway. Britain is screwing itself but good, whereas for America, there is hope.

The WSJ identifies the problem (again)

Reading the Wall Street Journal's editorial page is like sitting in a Pol Pot-ian reeducation camp and being subjected not to the splendors of communist rectitude, but to the atrocities of reigning capitalist ideology. In the WSJ's camp, however, the capitalists are the "leftists," the Democrats, the "Resistance." They are bad. Very bad. And the Journal just can't stop saying it.

This morning alone, its editorial board, in "The High School Deplorables," ponders "the boys of Covington Catholic High School," whom leftists hate because they are "white, male, Christian, attendees at the annual March for Life in Washington, and wearers of MAGA hats." Concludes the Journal: "This is an ugly moment in America, all right, but there are few things uglier than a righteous leftist mob."

In "The Shaming of Karen Pence," William McGurn, a member of the Journal's editorial board, takes on "Today’s militant secularists [who] ironically resemble the worst caricatures of religious intolerance of early America." Mrs. Pence has taken heat for taking a job at a bigoted Christian school, but "It would be a shame if [she] were to allow the mob to keep her from teaching art to those children." That would be the righteous leftist mob. Get with it, McGurn.

And Journal op-eder Fred Barnes, who was once a ubiquitous staple of cable-news commentary, insists in "The Downside of Anti-Trump Rage" that "The strategy of 'resistance' to President Trump has been a disaster for Democrats." How so? Because, observes Barnes, "young progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have taken on the task of making the party more left-wing."

Barnes also laments that "Democrats are like those Trump-loathing columnists who can’t write about anyone but the president. They’re obsessed with Mr. Trump." Damn right they are. Damn right I am. Because whatever harm ideological leftists, Democrats and Resisters might cause America — harm that is only potential — it is nothing compared to the real, catastrophic damage that Trump and his congressional Republican enablers are causing.

However in reading the Wall Street Journal's editorial page this morning, one might think that political potency lies only in the mostly out-of-power left — increasingly tagged by the Journal and other right-wing outlets as a righteous mob, a lawless congregation of violent extremists, an incorrigible gang of irrational Trump-haters, "radical" tax-hikers and obsessive anti-Christians.

All of whom, suggests the Journal, are coming to get you. While Trump & Friends go about assaulting American institutions and arrogating unconstitutional power, cranking up racism and ripping apart the government, it is the bogeymen and bugaboos of the left who are the nation's imposing threats.

I'll give the Journal this much: Its comedy is worth the price of admission.

The remarkable mind of Rudy Giuliani

Rarely has pettifogging gibberish been so misleading, and, in the end, so honest.

To the NY Times, Giuliani said on Sunday that Trump said conversations with Moscow were "going on from the day I announced to the day I won."

To the New Yorker, Giuliani said on Monday that "the President had no conversations. I shouldn’t say he had no conversations. [Trump] had a few conversations about this early-stage proposal that he ended somewhere in early 2016, and doesn’t have a recollection of anything else, and there is nothing to support anything else. This is a story that is completely exaggerated and made up."

Giuliani's own story, that is.

He added, "Even if there were such conversations, which there weren’t, they would be completely innocent…. If he had a project in Moscow, there would be nothing wrong with it, but he didn’t."

The New Yorker reminded Giuliani of what he had said to the Times. Replied Giuliani: "He’s wrong! They’re wrong! I didn’t say that. Go find out where I said that on Sunday…. [He said it to the NYT — 'Mr. Giuliani quoted Mr. Trump as saying (it).'] I don’t know if they made it up. What I was talking about was, if he had those conversations, they would not be criminal."

Continued Giuliani: "I am not saying that he did it. I just told you he didn’t do it. I am telling you that their investigation is so ridiculous that, even if he did do it, it wouldn’t be a crime."

Finally, the pièce de résistance: I am afraid it will be on my gravestone. "Rudy Giuliani: He lied for Trump." Somehow, I don’t think that will be it. But, if it is, so what do I care? I’ll be dead.

Asleep at the deal

From former Trump-aide Cliff Sims' redundantly revealing Team of Vipers, the book's funniest and yet most frightening passage — who would have thought it possible that a U.S. president could be so lazy? so indifferent to major legislation? indeed so borderline autistic? — as related by the Post:

At times, Trump evinced less rage than a lack of interest. Sims recounts one time when Ryan was in the Oval Office explaining the ins and outs of the Republican health-care bill to the president. As Ryan droned on for 15 minutes, Trump sipped on a glass of Diet Coke, peered out at the Rose Garden, stared aimlessly at the walls and, finally, walked out.

Ryan kept talking as the president wandered down the hall to his private dining room, where he flicked on his giant flat-screen TV. Apparently, he had had enough of Ryan’s talk. It fell to Vice President Pence to retrieve Trump and convince him to return to the Oval Office so they could continue their strategy session.

I once read that in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, aides would attempt to brief Bill Clinton on diverse matters of importance, but the president, on occasion, was utterly incapable of "compartmentalizing" with his usual focus. The briefers reported that he would stare into the abyss, oblivious to what was being discussed in the Oval Office. But even with the pressures of blowjob-impeachment 24/7, President Clinton didn't just "walk out" and "wander down the hall to his private dining room."

Trump? He's in a callous, disheveled, virtually malarial world of his own.

Trump voter: "What the fuck were we thinking?"

Says, now, then-fed-up-with-Obama-era-politics, status-quo-shaking, message-sending, pro-disruptive-Trump-voting Jeff Daudert, 49, of suburban Detroit [where I happen to be sojourning this week]: "What the [expletive] were we thinking?"

Says the Washington Post: "While Trump’s relationship with much of his base remains strong … his ties are fraying with voters like Daudert, the kind who voted in droves for Trump…. The shutdown fight … is further eroding the president’s support among voters who like the idea of beefing up border security — but not enough to close the government." Adds Daudert: "It's silly. It's destructive. I was certainly for the anti-status quo…. I’ll be more status quo next time."

Says Jeremiah Wilburn, 45: "I was doing fine with [Trump] up until this government shutdown. It’s ridiculous … [and] it’s starting to turn people like me away." The Post relates that "To him, the shutdown standoff has also poked holes in Trump’s ability to say he cares for the working class."

Says Erica McQueen, 38, a Trump voter who admires much of what he's done: "Something miraculous has to happen for me to vote for him again."

Says a A CNN/SSRS poll, released Sunday: "Trump's approval among white men without college degrees [is] at 45 percent, which CNN says is the lowest-ever level of support for him from that group in its surveys. Political data site FiveThirtyEight's aggregated presidential popularity tracker shows Trump's approval gap, which has been underwater for most of his presidency, widening markedly since mid-December."

Says Pew Research: "Trump begins his third year with a 37% job approval rating; 59% disapprove of his job performance." Only 29 percent — lower than the commonly quoted percentage of firm Trump supporters; in the mid-30s range — "think he will be a successful president."

The somewhat thin red line is snapping, as even some Trumpeteers begin to see what the Post's brilliant Ann Telnaes sees:

BuzzFeed will be proven right; its detractors, wrong

When it comes to whether Trump instructed his attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the Trump Tower-Moscow development, there is a massive gulf between what BuzzFeed reported and the special counsel's office denied. I remain baffled by various commentators' contention that BuzzFeed got the story "fundamentally wrong," as former Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller tweeted last week.

In fact, BuzzFeed almost certainly got the story fundamentally right.

First, aside from Cohen's own history of lying, we must consider Trump's demonstrable pattern of staggering mendacity. He just can't help himself. The man lies about everything — everything from the insignificance of inauguration crowds to the huge significance of his business and political ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin. As a matter of law (as I understand it), Trump's practice of relentless lying would be admissible in court; hardly inconceivable is that Trump, an inveterate teller of lies, instructed his personal lawyer to do the same before Congress, so as to save the former's rear end. Indeed, it is probable.

Second, just prior to Cohen's sentencing, his lawyer, Guy Petrillo, wrote to the court: "We address the campaign finance and false statements allegations together because both arose from Michael’s fierce loyalty to Client-1 [Trump]. In each case, the conduct was intended to benefit Client-1, in accordance with Client-1’s directives." Here we have the most pertinent corroboration of BuzzFeed's reporting: Cohen's own admission to the court that, out of "fierce loyalty" to Trump and at Trump's "directives," he lied to Congress.

Third, in pushing back on BuzzFeed's story, Robert Mueller's office objected that the publication's "description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate." The office did not say that BuzzFeed's underlying allegation — that Trump told Cohen to lie — was inaccurate; it said, rather, that the special counsel had no internal, substantiating evidence of Trump's felonious behavior. In other words, BuzzFeed's overarching story might well be true.

Fourth, on 18 January, Trump tweeted, "Remember it was Buzzfeed that released the totally discredited 'Dossier,' paid for by Crooked Hillary Clinton and the Democrats (as opposition research), on which the entire Russian probe is based!" The tweet was, of course, intended to smear BuzzFeed's professional reputation; and by extension, to smear the Cohen story. The tweet, however, was but a damning continuation of Trump's pattern of lying — which was crucial to BuzzFeed's overall accusation. The publication's released dossier was anything but "totally discredited"; instead, the Steele dossier's particulars have been regularly confirmed.

As will, in time, BuzzFeed's reporting on Cohen, Trump, Congress, and twofold lying. It wasn't BuzzFeed that got ahead of itself. It is commentators' eager denunciation of bad-boy BuzzFeed.

***

Update: 

I'm in good company. From the Columbia Journalism Review:

"Commentators should be careful not to treat the special counsel’s office—whose inner workings are opaque—as the infallible, benevolent voice of God. In any case, [its] statement neither kills the central essence of the story (it does not take a position on whether Trump did, in fact, tell Cohen to lie), nor specifies exactly what Mueller thinks BuzzFeed got wrong.

"Just as the breathless early coverage of BuzzFeed’s story was over the top, so, too, were reports of its death."

Gov. Christie: Lone Trumpeteer

I gather Chris Christie has jettisoned all hope for a White House job.

Writes the former governor of New Jersey in an upcoming memoir:

"Donald so urgently needed the right people around him and a solid structure in place…. Far too often, he’s found himself saddled with the riffraff…. Instead of high-quality, vetted appointees for key administration posts, he got [Michael Flynn, Scott Pruitt, Tom Price, Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson and Omarosa Manigault]…. Too few Kellyanne Conways. A boatload of Sebastian Gorkas. Too few Steven Mnuchins."

Too few Kellyanne Conways? who know effective communications ("alternative facts") as well as Steven Mnuchin understands politics and public relations?

Continues Christie:

"The day after Trump was elected, he was handed a detailed road map that would have avoided many of these pitfalls…. But that plan was thrown in the trash. Literally. All thirty binders were tossed in a Trump Tower dumpster, never to be seen again. Steve Bannon, Rick Dearborn, Jared Kushner and others, for their own selfish reasons, got rid of the guidance that would have made their candidate an immensely more effective president and would have saved him an awful lot of heartache, too."

Christie doesn't say (in Axios' reprint) who wrote the binders full of guidance, or who might have read them to Trump — but surely he's not suggesting that Trump would (could) have read them himself.

"You're so vain"

From the website Gizmodo:

"The image below, published on the official Donald J. Trump Facebook page on January 17 and on his Instagram account over the weekend, has been altered to make the president look more fit."

Here's the original:

Gizmodo: "As you can see in the comparison above, Trump’s right shoulder has been slimmed down and his face is looking thinner. He’s also gotten a haircut—well, a digital one anyway—and in one of the strangest alterations, Trump’s fingers have been made slightly longer. Seriously."

Trump: Dishonoring Martin Luther King, Jr.

It was inevitable.

Said Vice President Mike Pence on "Face the Nation" yesterday, "Honestly," (which means brace for bullshit) ...

"the hearts and minds of the American people are thinking a lot today about [this] being the weekend we remember the life and work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. One of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was, 'Now is the time to make real the promises of Democracy.' You think of how he changed America, he inspired us to change through the legislative process, to become a more perfect union. That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on the Congress to do."

You bet. Especially as president, Trump has always modeled himself on the gentle, come-let-us- reason-together wisdom of Martin Luther King. And that's exactly why "Trump has no public events scheduled Monday to mark Martin Luther King Jr. Day"? as the Daily Beast reports. "Last year on MLK Day," recalls the Beast, "Trump went golfing in West Palm Beach, Florida."

This is something of a partisan tradition.

Ronald Reagan, the presidential founder of the mostly lily-white conservative movement, opposed establishing an MLK federal holiday based on the dodgy reasoning that if one minority group was granted such a thing, then all minority groups would demand one. Only when Reagan was "faced with inevitable congressional passage of a bill to make Martin Luther King‘s birthday a national holiday," wrote Time magazine in 2015, did he "[swallow] his longstanding objections."

Flash forward 35 years. Donald Trump, the presidential founder of the patented whites-only pseudoconservative movement, is much too skittish about his racist base — born of Goldwater-Nixon's Southern Strategy and Reagan's extended pump-priming — to honor Dr. King. Today Trump may yet stick his orange head out the Oval Office door to say something nice about the civil rights leader. But that the White House made sure to publish a schedule of no public events says it all: Trump simply cannot afford to antagonize the crackers.

***

A bit later, sure enough:

JUST IN: President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have made an unannounced trip to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C.

— Geoff Bennett (@GeoffRBennett) January 21, 2019

The potential splendor of Trump's megalomania

This morning, both the NY Times and Washington Post are running above-the-fold analyses of Trump's megalomaniacal leadership, which is implicitly framed as his greatest presidential defect (after narcissism, sociopathy, varying psychoses and assorted neuroses?). It seems that when Trump boasted on the campaign trail that he alone can fix the system, he really meant it; he genuinely believed that he is the world's supreme problem solver, facilitator and dealmaker.

"I think he was always a terrible negotiator," said Tony Schwartz. "If you don’t care what the collateral damage you create is, then you have a potential advantage," added the fabulist of The Art of the Deal.

"That book, published in 1987, was intended to be an autobiography of Mr. Trump," notes the Times, omitting merely an autobiography. What it became for its author was a fright, a lament, a damn-why-did-I-do-that? The Ghostwriting Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance "said that he created the idea of Mr. Trump as a great deal maker as a literary device to give the book a unifying theme. He said he came to regret the contribution as he watched Mr. Trump seize on the label to sell himself as something he was not — a solver of complicated problems."

Nothing is more complicated than getting 535 self-interested lawmakers on the same legislative page. But in the shutdown fiasco, Trump's attempt has been further complicated by the ghoulish traits he so often demonstrated in business: He "has insulted adversaries, undermined his aides, repeatedly changed course, extolled his primacy as a negotiator and induced chaos," writes the Times.

The Washington Post reflects more singularly on the president's megalomaniacal remark that he alone could fix whatever is damaged. "Precisely two years into his presidency, the government is not simply broken — it is in crisis" — an assessment that in the past has been ridiculed as hyperbolic, but today, inarguably, is just straight reporting. As the Post summarizes the federal-blackout crisis (among others): "Trump’s management of the partial government shutdown … has exposed as never before his shortcomings as a dealmaker."

How Trump got himself into this mess of almost incomprehensible mismanagement is a story unto itself. Where he stands now, however, is quite understandable. Explained a friend of Trump's: "I don’t think there is a plan. He’s not listening to anybody because he thinks that if he folds on this, he loses whatever constituency he thinks he has."

Bingo. This always has been, as everything always will be, about the base — and nothing but the base. From mounds of Trump's illogic has come his one logical position: I must persevere in maintaining the most boneheaded shutdown ever, otherwise my already narrowing base of support will collapse.

This leads to the only logical — indeed seemingly inexorable — next step: His declaration of a national emergency and thus simultaneous reopening of the government. Having accomplished the latter with the stroke of a pen, the former would head to the bottomless sinkhole of the federal courts. But why should Trump care? He would have the shutdown monkey off his back; he can tell his troops he went to the mattresses to build his enchanted wall — which he would then triumphantly have, if it weren't for evil Democrats suing him; and above all this abjectly incompetent dealmaker could proclaim a victory that only his supporters can recognize — which Trump will do anyway. Because he's a base-bootlicking, megalomaniacal jackass.

Trump is wounded, bleeding, and destined for a steadfast demise

Some political observations from "the veteran and shrewd New York political operative Bruce Gyory," in a note to Bill Kristol:

The slippage we anticipated for Trump’s standing in terms of public opinion from the shutdown is coming to pass.

The slippage is the worst kind—the slow erosion of support from key blocs: swing voters (independents and suburbanites) and those who put Trump over the top (blue collar white men and Republicans over 60).

It’s been registering in a cross section of polling data, not just one poll. [Gallup: independents give Trump a 31 percent job approval rating. Marist: a 10 percent drop in Trump's Republican support, 11 percent in white evangelical support, and 17 percent in suburban men's support. Even Rasmussen, which is ludicrously pro-Trump: the president's overall approval rating has dropped 5 points in two months]….

This … spells political trouble for Trump long term, especially if a slow down, much less a recession, looms in 2020.

As an aside, it’s fair to ask why hasn’t this decline in the polls registered more with pundits and pols. I wonder if it’s because Gallup is not doing daily tracking polls anymore? In any case, Trump’s decline in the polls is significant.

Gyory's memo essentially corroborates (and in Marist's case, duplicates) the presidential decay I explored yesterday. It's important to repeat, however, the uncertainty posed by Marist's polling director: "Don't know if [Trump's poor polling is] temporary — tied to the government shutdown — or a broader problem the president is having."

As I wrote in yesterday's post, the shutdown effect cannot be discounted, yet I suspect increasingly engrained problems for Trump. His unpresidential hijinks, his rank incompetence, his calculated though baffling failure to reach out beyond the hardcore base, his "manifestly ignorant, impetuous, pompous, mendacious and cruel" behavior have all conspired, for two harrowing years, to erode his numbers — significantly, as Gyory put it.

None of this should surprise. Trump's decline in popularity is precisely what I and many others have predicted for two years. (The decline is peripheral, not hardcore, but denotes Trump's wide yet shallow base support.) If there is any surprise, it's only that the decline took two years to come about. Trump was the same buffoon on that memorable day of infamy, "Carnage Day," as he is now. Why 24 months of his incompetence, mendacity and cruelty were required to dropkick him into much broader, discernible disrepute is a distressing puzzle. But the fact is, they have — and there are yet more beautiful kicks to come.

Toxic masculinity should be a narrowly defined term

I confess to a profound ignorance when it comes to issues of gender, thus the gender issue of "toxic masculinity" is the perfect topic for me to pontificate on. In my online experience, the less one knows about a subject, the better suited one is to prattle away. Facts, knowledge, familiarity with scholarly work — that sort of thing — are but interferences, nay, intolerable inconveniences, in forming solid convictions and unpersuadable opinions.

I also figure I know at least as much about psychological masculinity, whether toxic or timid, as Ross Douthat does — which is to say (once again), nothing. And if he can prattle away for several hundred words on the topic, then so can I. I do tip my hat to Mr. Douthat, however, for he, not I, had the undaunted balls to actually read "the new guidelines for treating male pathology from the American Psychological Association," which, according to the Times columnist, says "The trouble with men" is not only that "they’re violent and reckless…. The deeper problem is they’re prisoners of 'traditional masculinity,' which the guidelines describe as a model of manhood marked by 'emotional stoicism, homophobia, not showing vulnerability, self-reliance and competitiveness.'"

The described "deep problem" of traditional masculinity — a euphemism, I gather, for toxic masculinity — caught my eye and revved my interest, since, except for homophobia, I saw nothing problematic or "toxic" about traditional masculinity being associated with "emotional stoicism..., not showing vulnerability, self-reliance and competitiveness." And I guffawed — yes, guffawed — when I read that the APA's guidelines themselves said the aforementioned male qualities lead to "aggression and violence as a means to resolve interpersonal conflict," and, in Douthat's words, "[tempt] men toward rape, drug abuse and suicide."

My apologies to dues-paying psychologists everywhere, but that their professional association would allege that a lad modeling himself on the antihero splendor of, say, a Humphrey Bogart leads to male violence and then down the dark road of "rape, drug abuse and suicide" is just about the silliest thing I have read since reading a transcript of Trump's latest remarks. What of Bogart's blistering probity? His courage? His sophistication? His chivalry? Do these count for nothing? And merely because they are "traditional" male characteristics (assuming the boy is otherwise raised responsibly), must they earn the extraordinarily dubious synonym of toxic?

On this, Douthat and I differ. Somewhat. He is correct to observe "the claim that a 'traditional masculinity' encompassing 'stoicism' and 'self-reliance' necessarily makes this problem [of toxic masculinity] worse is mostly ahistorical rubbish." But he errs, I think, in adding "not least because in the actual history of the human race 'traditional masculinity' as a single coherent category simply does not exist" — a personal amalgam, as it were, of a "Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant and John Wayne."

Cary Grant is Douthat's deliberate outlier, in that one is inclined to think of the iconic Grant as a slapstick romantic comedian rather than, for example, as a man's man in Hitchcock's North by Northwest. This latter role joins Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne — and the greatest of all leading men, Bogart — in defining a traditional masculinity, which is anything but toxic (Wayne? I'm not so sure of).

But whatever one thinks of Douthat's varying models of masculinity, he is indeed correct to note that "it’s folly to blame any or all of them for the pathologies they aspire to tame…. Yet that’s what contemporary progressivism is constantly inclined to do: Because the male archetypes were forged in more sexist eras, that sexism is regarded as a reason to reject the archetypes tout court, in the hopes of building some sort of New Progressive Man." Progressivism's belief in the perfectibility of (nongendered] man is a classic progressive notion, or aspiration — however wrong it might be, and is.

Still, the right's notion of manliness is far more egregious. "In overreaction to [progressivism's sensitive man]," writes Douthat, "conservatives in the Trump era have ended up defending a caddishness that would make [the most caddish of Bogarts] blush, in the mistaken belief that they’re defending masculinity itself." Spot on, Ross.

It is this right-wing model of masculinity — the breast-beating, beer-inhaling, USA!-USA!-chanting man — that is truly toxic. This is the bare-chested slob who believes The Three Stooges was high satire, that war is romantic, that all women should be June Cleavers, that Morton Thompson's Not as a Stranger is a spy thriller.

These are the jackanapes who put Trump in the White House — and who have, to me, forever stained the very image of masculinity. These are the toxic males we read of; they are the ones who have given men a pathological name. And they'll always be with us, for the perfectibility of man (men) is as foolish a notion as the educability of Trumpeteers.

Trump and yet another shameful display of cruel, mindless Trumpism

Sophisticated charlatans pitch heaps of bunkum that at least don't insult the intelligence of their marks. Donald Trump pitches bunkum that is screamingly offensive to anyone with any brains. And he just did it — again — on national television.

His new, inventive compromise on the immigration "crisis" he caused was akin to what Voltaire said of the Holy Roman Empire: It was neither new, nor inventive, nor a compromise. In his speech from the White House, Trump began by returning to his familiar fearmongering about immigrants bringing rape, violence, drugs and murder.

His scary spiel on heroin alone was classic Trump. He correctly said the drug was pouring across our southern border, while omitting that the great majority of this and other powerful, illegal drugs enter the U.S. through legal points of entry. But he knows his market and he further knows that that market either doesn't know the facts, or doesn't care about them.

Trump's characteristic exaggerations and falsehoods continued when he castigated those who "demand open borders," which, naturally, meant Democrats, but in reality meant no one. He then indirectly attacked Nancy Pelosi as a member of the "radical left" — Nancy Pelosi! mind you, the most skilled congressional compromiser (read: "centrist") since Sam Rayburn or Lyndon Johnson.

The particulars of the president's offer included a rather twisted status quo, nothing more. He asked for standard border protections (such as more border agents) and a permanent "physical barrier" for three-year extensions of DACA (which he nullified) and TPS (which he also nullified).

In other words, he still wants what he wants in return for temporarily nullifying his own blundering nullifications. Some deal, huh?

Does he — or rather did he — expect Democrats to embrace this farce of a non-compromise? Of course not. As with all of Trump's solutions to crises he creates, today's oratory was a scam; it was 1) tailored to shore up his deplorable, weakening base, 2) intended to frame Dems as the only obstructionists, and 3) falsely designed as a heartfelt effort to relieve 800,000 unpaid, abused workers from his cruelty and stupidity.

I shall conclude this synopsis with a salute to the Times' Roger Cohen, whose own, recent synopsis of Trump the man so closely mirrors mine: "Like every 'enemy of the people' in the press, like every poor schmuck who ever worked for this guy, like any American patriot who wants to respect the president, I’ve struggled to find a redeeming feature in Donald Trump. I can now report: There is none."