PMC Commentary

I appreciate your indulgence of this week's much lighter postings. I've been spending the days with my mother, 95 years of age now, in a Missouri Ozarks nursing home. I live 450 miles away; I never know when I may last see her. I'm sure many of you are in the same boat. Anyway, it's been a pleasant week of family visiting. The only downside is that I also sustained a $400 bill for new tires, a $1,300 brake job and a $200 radiator flush. Ouch, and triple ouch. Tomorrow (Sunday) I'll be on the road, heading home, and Monday I shall be back at normal operations. Happy New Year. —PM  

American democracy, the Russia-Ukraine war, and 2023

I'm generally not one for annual retrospectives and Panglossian prospectuses, but Tom Nichols' Atlantic post — "There Is a Case for Optimism in 2023" — inspired me to amend my habitual humbuggery and alight on the positive, for a change. His opening line caught my eye in agreement:  

"Throughout 2022, I’ve worried a lot. I’ve had plenty of smaller gripes ... but mostly, I’ve been concerned about world war, the rule of law, and the collapse of democracy," writes Nichols. "But here at the end of the year, I am optimistic, which is a surprise even to me."

Same here. And for the same reasons as the Atlantic writer's optimism: "The single most important story of the year is the resilience of democracy. Two great events (or, more accurately, non-events) reassured me as part of that heartening narrative: The Russians failed to win a war in Europe, and antidemocratic candidates failed to rebound in America."

Taking the re-ascendence of a democratic America first — excuse the Trumpian pun — election prognosticators had every empirical reason to predict a massive Red Wave in November. Before that, political pundits foresaw a nomination cakewalk for the Donald — again, with good cause. Both predictions collapsed in spectacular ways.       

Trump's candidacy has been met with a "collective national shrug," as Nichols puts it. The former president promoted a phalanx of Crackpots for Congress in 2022, but he had exhausted the base — and himself — well before that with his jackhammer whining about 2020. Meanwhile, Gov. Ron DeSantis was eating his proverbial lunch by proferring the reddest of raw meats to the GOP faithful. And yet DeSantis' presidential odds in 2024 are no better than Trump's, for the U.S. electorate has chosen to reject authoritarian goons.       

In Congress, Republicans' slim control of the House will in no way subdue their colossal proclivity for boneheadedness, bless their hearts. Countless committee "investigations" and impeachment hearings will thrill the GOP hardcore, but disgust the populace at large. Assuming the Fed hasn't crashed the economy, by the end of 2024 the electorate will have had more than enough from the Republican House. 

In Ukraine, the Russians have not only "failed to win," as Nichols observes. They have succeeded in losing. Nichols also notes a characteristically brilliant piece by his Atlantic colleague Anne Applebaum, who pondered the alternative, had the U.S. abandoned Ukraine:

Zelensky, his wife, and his children would have been murdered by one of the hit squads that roamed the capital city. The Ukrainian state would have been taken over by the collaborators who had already chosen their Kyiv apartments. Then, city by city, region by region, the Russian army would have fought the remnants of the Ukrainian army until it finally conquered the entire country....

Ukraine would now be pockmarked with the concentration camps, torture chambers, and makeshift prisons that have been discovered in Bucha, Izyum, Kherson, and all the other territories temporarily occupied by Russia and liberated by the Ukrainian army. A generation of Ukrainian writers, artists, politicians, journalists, and civic leaders would already be buried in mass graves. Ukrainian books would have been removed from schools and libraries. The Ukrainian language would have been suppressed in all public spaces. Hundreds of thousands more Ukrainian children would have been kidnapped and transported to Russia or trafficked farther around the world.

Of all this, there is no doubt. Yet Western, and especially American, aid hijacked Putin's dream of a Greater Russia, beginning with a devastated Ukraine. Almost miraculously, the latter is now poised to win the war militarily next year. 

One immense danger still exists, however. Notes Nichols: "I have worried about unpredictable nuclear dangers in 2022, and I will continue to worry about them in 2023 and for as long as Putin pursues this mad war." Here I am in full accord. I cannot see Putin walking away from Ukraine without having deployed every last resort to conquer it. On this my opinion is in the minority, though — and for good reason, I hope.

Many a harum-scarum scenario has been omitted from these thoughts about, and predictions for, 2023. But at least from these two angles — the recrudescence of American democracy and a Ukrainian triumph — the year is looking better than we might have imagined just a couple months ago.   

"If the Russians thought that no one at home would be affected by the war, then they were deeply mistaken"

The Russian military has acknowledged that a Ukrainian drone threatened one of its military installations yesterday — the Engels airbase, about 300 miles inside Russian territory. The drone was shot down, but its wreckage also rained down on three soldiers, now dead. The airbase houses bombers used to fire cruise missiles into Ukraine, which no longer fears retaliatory escalation. 

So it's been directly confronting Vladimir Putin's fatherland. "If the Russians thought that no one at home would be affected by the war, then they were deeply mistaken," said Col. Yuriy Ihnat of the Ukrainian Air Force. 

Monday's drone assault was Ukraine's third this month. On 5 December it attacked the Dyagilevo military base, roughly 100 miles from Moscow, and on that day came its first strike on the Engels airfield. 

Although the Kremlin repeatedly promises "dire consequences for attacks against Russia," notes The NY Times, Ukrainian authorities have concluded that the Russian army is already exhausting what force it has. In a mid-December Bloomberg interview, Ukraine's security chief, Olekskiy Danilov, estimated that Russia was capable of only three or four more missile barrages. Hence Ukraine sees "little risk of Moscow’s escalating its war in retaliation."

Said retired colonel Serhiy Hrabskiy, "Russia stated many, many red lines regarding further escalation." But, "there is no reaction. Why? Because the Russians simply do not have capacity to do so." 

The Biden administration, however, remains paralyzed in neurasthenic knots at the impossible prospect of WW III should Ukraine do to Russia what Russia has been doing to Ukraine for more than 10 months. The Russia-Ukraine war is asymmetric in theory as well as weaponry. The U.S. believes Putin is crazy enough to use his nuclear capability on Ukraine, while Ukraine knows he will not for fear of spearheading the very thing that most terrorizes the U.S.: a Third World War.

Putin may indeed unleash radioactive dirty bombs in Ukraine; he might even detonate a nuclear weapon over the Black Sea as a demonstration of his country's ultimate power. But he will not commence the utter destruction of his beloved Russia. He's sociopathic; not suicidal.  

Nevertheless, along with battle tanks and fighter jets, the Biden administration continues to withhold long-range precision missiles. It also demands that the missiles it does provide to Ukraine cannot be used to attack Russia proper, although Putin possesses no scruples when it comes to massacring Ukrainian women and children with his missiles and Iranian drones — more mind-bending asymmetry of warfare on display.   

As the Times observes, "The Ukrainian attacks have been pinpricks compared to the widespread devastation Russia has wrought against Ukraine. But the strikes have boosted Ukrainian morale, damaged some Russian warplanes and infrastructure, and pierced the air of normalcy the Kremlin has tried to maintain for most of its people."

The strikes are also infuriating the fatherland's prowar fanatics — some, at high levels in the rancid hierarchy of the Russian Federation. They were already dyspeptic over Russia's battlefield losses; now they're wrathfully asking why their nation is so exposed to Ukrainian attacks. All of which piles more heat on Putin.

Thus Ukraine is likely to persist in assaulting Russia proper, notwithstanding U.S. opinion. And by the end of Ukraine's spring offensives — which will be even costlier for Russia's armed forces, as it were — even the war hawks might be begging Vladimir Putin to quit. 

My apologies for today's laziness. I'm visiting family and enjoying a restful break from global madness.

But I'll soon be back at it again for another year, one full of Putinesque butchery, McCarthyite buffoonery and Trumpian-DeSantian barbarity.

You know, the right's version of peace on earth and good will toward men.  

Geason Sreetings to all (which is usually how my sentences come out)

My brother and I have been visiting our mother at "the home" today, so I haven't had a chance to say ...

Merry Christmas

and

Happy Hanukka!

"We’re watching the Trump story end before our eyes"; but just one more round, please

Peggy Noonan's latest musing in The Wall Street Journal is titled "Spare Us a Trump-Biden Rematch." Ms. Noonan then goes on to explain, unintentionally, why we should pray for a Trump-Biden rematch.

In perhaps the greatest self-contradiction of 2022, she writes that "It’s a race that would depress the whole country" and "It is certain that Donald Trump will never again be president." What could be more uplifting than the thought, prospect and almost certain reality that Trump will never again haunt the White House? Make us smile, make us happy, make our day.   

Ms. Noonan says "It is possible Mr. Trump will get the presidential nomination, but it’s no longer likely.... His polls continue their downward drift. He is under intense legal pressures." There's the Jan. 6 thing, there's his age, and there's his latest coterie of crackpots: "naïfs, suck-ups, grifters and operators. That was always true but now they are fourth-rate, not second- or third-rate."

Only one of the above is pertinent, however. Rare in the Republican base is the voter who cares about naifs, suck-ups, grifters and operators, who are but the new Republican strategists. Jan. 6 has not hurt Trump, his age is seldom mentioned (even though Biden's is daily fodder) and when it comes to his "intense legal troubles," he always has Merrick Garland.

But his polls. Oh my, his polls. They're just dreadful — and singularly relevant. In the latest Cygnal poll (B+), Trump stands at 40%; DeSantis, 35. Only two months ago, Trump had a 19-point lead over DeSantis. "There has been a shift in momentum over the last several weeks," said Cygnal's pollster, Brent Buchanan — and it's all been in the Florida governor's favor. 

As Noonan notes: "Trump’s slump won’t end, because it’s not a slump; it’s a losing season.... We’re watching the Trump story end before our eyes and can hardly believe it because we thought it was ending before and it wasn’t. But it is now." 

Which, again, is why depression is bound to set in among the rational-voter crowd. Take Trump out of the presidential picture and we'll have a real race. This leads to Part II of Noonan's rather peculiar reasoning.  

"A great many Democrats," she wrotes, "believe that if Mr. Trump isn’t the Republican nominee—and they are starting to think he won’t be—then that nominee will go forward without Mr. Trump’s deficits, and may even be a normal Republican, which will mean he or she will squish the eternally underwater Mr. Biden like a peanut."

There are two problems here, the first being: No normal Republican will seize the nomination. The radical base will see to that. The far bigger problem is the Republican alternative to Trump, which Ms. Noonan appears to oppose; that being a Trump² — a smarter, more competent and even more ruthless authoritarian, Ron DeSantis.  

And that would appear to vastly conflict with Ms. Noonan's yearning for an "America trying to return itself to its previous settings" — one that is "inherently moderate," one in which "those who seemed extreme didn’t prosper."

What better argument for a Trump nomination? — which would virtually guarantee an "inherently moderate" president's reelection.  

The outcome of the Zelensky visit: zilch

Although Volodymyr Zelensky's visit to Washington was one for the history books, historians are likely to concentrate less on the Churchill comparisons than on the trip's practical outcome, which was, in a word, disappointing.  

John Kirby, spokesman for the National Security Council, said yesterday that "the United States was committed to providing the equipment that Ukraine needs." (NYT.) In a modern war, one might think that would include battle tanks, fighter jets and long-range precision missiles. But these, which Zelensky asked for, the U.S. denied. 

The Biden administration persists in refusing long-range missiles — ATACMS, with a range of nearly 200 miles — for fear that Ukraine might begin striking Russia proper. (In other words, what Russia has been doing to Ukraine.) As the theory goes, that could compel Vladimir Putin to "widen the war."

But widen it where? Against NATO? Putin isn't that crazy. "The administration continues to overestimate the risk of escalation and underestimate Ukraine’s cleverness and innovative ways of fighting," says Frederick Hodges, the former top U.S. Army commander in Europe.

He's right of course. The administration fretted for months about sending HIMARS rocket artillery. It finally did, and Putin did nothing. 

The equivalent will play out with America's Patriot missile defense system. The fretting is over, the Patriot will be on its way, and Putin's reaction has been nothing more — to quote — than: "An antidote will always be found. This is simply prolonging the conflict — that’s it." Against ATACMS, he'd say the same.  

As for battle tanks and F-16 fighter jets, the Pentagon protests that either Ukraine already has enough from other allies, or that our tanks and jets would take Ukrainians too long to learn. Yet the Pentagon is also predicting a long war — is it not?

As the shipments of HIMARS and the Patriot battery demonstrated, the Biden administration could always come around on the other armaments. Notes the Times: "The United States has repeatedly said there are weapons it will not send to Ukraine to battle Russia’s invading forces. But as the last 10 months of war have shown, the limits of U.S. support have shifted in Ukraine’s favor, and Mr. Zelensky may yet get what he wants."

Better sooner than later. Putin has shown no reluctance to widen the war's brutality — murdering, deporting and freezing women and children — and yet the U.S. hesitates in supplying everything the defender needs, since that could upset the butchering dictator. As he worked to supply Great Britain in 1940, did FDR worry about making Hitler mad? 

Ukraine can win this war — and with the proper equipment, it can probably win it this spring. Opposing that view is Sen. Chris Murphy, who said that "Putin is never going to meaningfully come to the table unless he has seen in real terms where his power stops. And so that means you have to be perhaps willing to fund a stalemate for a period of time." 

A stalemate to accomplish what? Bring Putin to the table to achieve what? Only one settlement is acceptable: Russia pulls out of Ukraine. In that, there is nothing to negotiate. That means this war will be decided on the battlefield. And there, President Zelensky is owed everything he asks for.  

The best of the best

The Washington Post is featuring editorial cartoonist Michael de Adder's reflections on 2022. These are my favorites of his favorites. 

Wednesday morning (Dec. 21st) I'm heading for Trump country, Southwest Missouri – "Krazo," Ozark spelled backward – to vist my rational mother and brother for Christmas. I'm staying till the new year, and hoping my Verizon hotspot works so that I can get some writing done each day. See you soon.   

It would be quite rewarding to finish this year with a financial bang. Contributions have been a bit off this year. So if you're a regular reader of this site, I need you. What's here, every day, is impossible without you. So please, go to the "Make A Donation" button in the sidebar. It's somewhat painless with a credit card and, far better, it's extraordinarily rewarding for you, too. Thank you, —PM   

Yesterday's needed conviction of Donald J. Trump. What's next? It's very scary.

The question is: What next? Will the Department of Justice act? Or will Attorney General Merrick Garland, in an anticlimactic Gerald Ford moment, decide that bringing Trump to justice would unacceptably tax the nation's tender sensibilities?

House panel member Jamie Raskin rightly said no "foot soldiers" should pay a penalty for their Jan. 6 offenses while "the masterminds and ringleaders get a free pass." Yet so far, as is the Beltway's wont, this has been the case.

Against Trump, the committee referred to DOJ the criminal charges of obstructing an official congressional proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, inciting or abetting an insurrection, and conspiracy to make a false statement. Already — against others — 300 cases of obstruction have been brought; others have been charged with conspiracy to defraud the U.S.; and DOJ has won one conviction on a seditious conspiracy charge and is about to try five more. As for Trump and false statements, one might as well charge him with breathing. 

Two years have passed since Trump attempted to overthrow the government. Little of this was done secretly. He ascended a stage and instructed armed malcontents to "fight like hell" on Jan. 6. He assembled co-conspirators to submit counterfeit electors. He criminally pressured state officials to overturn the will of voters. And he has stumped publicly for more than 24 months on the Big Lie, well after being informed by responsible parties that he was lying bigly.  

Most of you reading this are private citizens of the United States. Donald Trump is a private citizen of the United States. Had you committed the above crimes, you would have been apprehended, charged, tried and convicted some time ago. Mr. Trump has yet to see FBI agents carrying a pair of cuffs. This, in a land where the rule of law purportedly reigns.    

In its summary report, the committee wrote that its months of hearings and investigations have "led to an overriding and straight-forward conclusion: the central cause of January 6th was one man, former president Donald Trump." Testifying against him were nearly all partisan Republicans. More than 30 witnesses took the Fifth. The committee also referred criminal charges against former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark and Trump lawyers John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani and Kenneth Chesebro, as well as filing ethics complaints — refusal to obey congressional subpoenas — against the House's pit of Trumper snakes, Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, Scott Perry and Andy Biggs. 

America's past political scandals — the Whiskey Ring, Teapot Dome, even Watergate — begin to fade in deserved obscurity when stacked against Trump's crimes, which themselves have failed to acquire a "ring"- or "gate"-like tag. Why? Because his crimes were too comprehensive and almost too incomprehensible to earn a singular title. Let it suffice, or to be hoped, that America had four sui gereris years of The Dark Ages — though all of it has come to light.    

Some of it, however, may also begin to recede into the shadows. For the forces of obstruction are still at it. Committee member Zoe Lofgren observed that one witness was "offered potential employment that would make her 'financially very comfortable' as the date of her testimony approached by entities that were linked to Donald Trump and his associates." (The offer vanished when it became evident the witness would be cooperatively honest.) As DOJ's Jack Smith re-investigates the committee's findings, more and similar offers are likely to surface. The longer the additional inquiry, the more probable that damning testimony will slip away.   

Nevertheless, a seeming eternity is in store. Mr. Smith only recently issued subpoenas "to officials across 2020’s most closely contested battleground states asking for all correspondence with Trump or his campaign, including his lawyers." Again, two years have passed already. Hundreds of prosecutions and convictions have occurred. The foot soldiers are being locked up, yet the masterminds and ringleaders are just now being summoned by Merrick Garland's man in the trenches. Visions of Dickens' sempiternal Bleak House legal wrangling dance in our heads.

Even Hope Hicks, perhaps Trump's most loyal pooch once upon a time, testified to the committee about her employer's absolute indifference to urgent, presidential responsibility. She knew what was coming on Jan. 6. For two days prior, she texted a colleague saying that she had "suggested … several times" that Trump call for peace in his Ellipse speech. But Trump refused. Said Hicks to the committee: "He said something along the lines of: 'Nobody will care about my legacy if I lose. So that won’t matter. The only thing that matters is winning.'" 

When the only thing that matters is winning, criminal acts, if necessary, get green-lighted. Which is what Trump committed before, during and after Jan. 6. It's also what led the committee's vice chairwoman, Liz Cheney, to rationally conclude that "no man who would behave that way at that moment can ever serve in any position of authority in our nation again. He’s unfit for office." Plus staggeringly, awesomely and prodigiously liable criminally.

Yet there he is, out there — somewhere — perfectly free to serve in the position of highest authority once again. It's the clock versus Jack Smith and then Mr. Garland, and the clock is favored to win. Trump's lawyers may not know how to win cases in court, but they do know how to delay. And a mere 22 months separate Trump from a rerun of presidential impunity. 

Do I believe he'll be renominated, let alone reelected? No. But since that darkest of black swan events in 2016, rational predictions have been defenestrated. Positively frightful and impeccably ghastly are opinions such as those of Pennsylvania's former Republican Party chairman, Rob Gleason: "There’s still a lot of people that support Donald Trump; there’s just no question about that." He noted the widespread ignorance of Trump's recent devastation of the party's 2022 hopes. "We assume people know too much," he said. But "they’re not following a lot of this stuff." 

Reports the Times: "Indeed, some Republicans said privately that the House select committee’s criminal referrals could serve to galvanize Mr. Trump’s supporters behind him, as was the case for a short time after the F.B.I. searched his club, Mar-a-Lago, in August, looking for additional classified documents." Other Republicans disagree with such speculation, but again, see: 2016. 

The timeframe is in Trump's favor. Special Counsel Jack Smith's investigation could extend well into the presidential primaries and even close to the November 2024 election. Merrick Garland would then be faced with the supremely delicate decision of whether — assuming Trump survives the primaries — to indict the Republican Party's presidential nominee. As we know from Garland's past behavior, he would act against this. And then we would face another back swan event.  

The two scariest things in America today? The clock and the U.S. attorney general's office.    

Rule of law? We don't even abide by the rule of democratic polling.

And he'll probably be exhausting into 2023.

The Associated Press:

"After firing about half the Twitter workforce and sowing chaos with impulsive and ever-changing policies, Musk essentially asked users whether he should fire himself. In an unscientific poll he set up, a majority of the 17.5 million respondents said he should step down as Twitter chief. No word yet whether he will honor the result as promised."

Word is in, however, on the incompatibility of "honor" and the personage of Elon Musk appearing in the same sentence. As the Daily Beast reminds us, Mr. "Vox Populi, Vox Dei" Musk is a wily one. After losing in his own poll:

Musk replied to an apparent Trump supporter who suggested that Twitter Blue subscribers – who pay $8 a month – should be the only ones that can vote in "policy related polls." Just one minute later, Musk’s fingers found their strength [after hours of silence]. "Good point. Twitter will make that change," he replied.

He then commented on a post from Twitter account "Wall Street Silver" that compared the number of votes in the poll to those who liked the actual tweet. "Did bots brigade the Elon poll yesterday?"

Elon replied tepidly once again: "Interesting."

It seems he'll always be with us. Because these days, national elections and "you're fired" polls are dispensable.  

How justified is the new defense budget?

Congress is about to approve an $858 billion military budget, which is $45 billion more than President Biden asked for, as well as billions more than even the Pentagon requested. The initial figure omits another $18 billion of planned weapons deliveries to Taiwan. 

But it's Taiwan — and Ukraine, of course, plus inflation— driving the defense department increases. Said National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan last week: "[The United States must] support Ukraine and be able to deal with contingencies elsewhere in the world." Observed defense contractor Raytheon's chief executive, "We went through six years of Stingers" — shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles — "in 10 months." having sent 1.600 of them to Ukraine.

As the opening sentence suggests, there's another player involved in jacking up the Pentagon's budget: Congress. It's at the trough again. Duly elected members of both houses and defense contractors themselves spread arms manufacturing throughout the country, making the Pentagon a vested political interest. It's no accident that suppliers in 48 states contribute to the building of a malfunctioning F-35 aircraft.   

Defense spending might even top the $858 billion figure, since Congress is pondering another $22 billion in resupplies to Ukraine. The war there, NATO's needs, China's saber-rattling and inflation are pushing defense spending higher, plus the U.S. must maintain an adequate level of its own war matériel. Even if reluctantly, one must admit that greater defense spending is temporarily necessary. If one persists in wondering why, see Putin and Xi for answers. 

What rankles is when Congress insists on spending that the Joint Chiefs want stopped. For example the Senate's military authorization bill prevented "the Air Force and Navy from retiring aging weapons systems that the military would like to take out of service, including certain C-130 transport planes or F-22 fighter jets," reports The NY Times. "At the same time, it includes billions of dollars in extra money to build even more new ships and planes than the Pentagon itself asked for."

But things that fly, float and go boom are made in Democratic as well as Republican districts. Hence, as Politico reported last summer, the House Armed Services Committee preferred an additional $37 billion to the Biden administration's request. The final committee vote: a sizably lopsided 42-17 in favor of the excess cash. More out of balance was the Senate's counterpart committee, which wanted $45 billion more, and which the 7-1 vote approved.

All of this has congressional progressives up in arms, so to speak. For virtue never tires, even when one free, democratic nation is getting the poop kicked out of it by an invading, authoritarian neighbor, and another one — an island — is ultimately facing the same fate. Nor do several trillion dollars laid out on alleviating the pandemic's economic pain muffle progressives' cries of discretionary spending ignored in favor of defense.    

More reasonable is the voice of former assistant secretary of defense (Reagan administration) Lawrence Korb, now at the progressive Center for American Progress. Writing for The National Interest, he sees three spending priorities that should go the way of the Studebaker, beginning with Trump's "proposed modernizing [of] all three legs of the nuclear triad and building two new tactical nuclear weapons." Except for wanting to cancel one of the two tactical nukes, the Biden administration has agreed with its predecessor. Korb sensibly says there's no harm in canceling all of it, saving about $300 billion over the next several years. 

"Second," writes Korb, "the president should retire irrelevant and old Navy ships such as the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) and use the savings to build new, modern ships.... In addition, the Navy should stop building large aircraft carriers such as the $13 billion Ford-class carrier. And given the Marines’ new strategy of abandoning amphibious landings, the Navy could reduce the number of large deck amphibious ships." Third are those pesky F-35 fighter jets, whose production — because of "cost overruns and technical problems" — should be reduced. 

The world is more dangerous today than it was yesterday. There is no way around that simple, straightforward, immensely unpleasant fact. Thus however disagreeable increased defense spending is, it's also necessary — authoritarian brutes such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping made it so.

Another nettlesome fact is bipartisan piling on, although the upside is that U.S. presidents are not dictators who could unilaterally cut defense fat. The end would be nice, but not the means.      

A prediction, kind of: Trump will quit the presidential race next year

He has an upcoming week of criminal referrals and scandalous tax returns, but this is what's on Trump's mind this morning.

I gather rejoicing about a failed AOC documentary — who knows what it actually grossed — is meant to distract the faithful. But that's becoming an impossible task. (Note also that less than 10,000 even "liked" his post.) 

No one has ever attempted a presidential campaign while virtually under federal and state criminal indictment. Prosecutors tend to want your attention — not that Trump's span can accommodate - no matter how often you try to change the subject. 

I won't be surprised if, as his numbers worsen against DeSantis in primary states, Trump bows out of the race next year. In his mind, better that — which he can blame on those demanding prosecutors — than watching himself get creamed in New Hampshire, Nevada, etc.

Then those pestering prosecutors can have whatever attention span Trump can muster.      

DeSantis' new Trump attack, and a scary DeSantis-Biden poll

To those who had any doubt that Ron DeSantis lacks scruples on a Trumpian scale, you can put that doubt to rest. The Florida governor, who once championed covid vaccines and praised the Donald for their speedy development, has now decided that vaccinating one's body against death is a dubious thing.     

All because he wants to get to Trump's right in the upcoming Republican presidential primaries. As sociopathy goes, so goes Gov. DeSantis. 

His previous support of covid vaccines and the president behind them is clear. In early 2020: "I think they’re putting all hands on deck for it," he told Fox News. "I applaud the president." Feb. 2021: "We’re having more vaccine because of [government shipments to pharmacies], which is great." Again, Feb. 2021: "I can tell you, we wish we have had more vaccine every week, but it’s just being produced. So, I think, by and large, the Warp Speed team did a great job."

Apr. 2021: "I think the credit goes to President Trump," he told fellow sociopath and radio host Mark Levin. And July 2021: "If you are vaccinated, fully vaccinated, the chance of you getting seriously ill or dying from covid is effectively zero. These vaccines are saving lives." By January of this year, however, DeSantis refused even to acknowledge if he had received a booster. "I’ve done whatever I did," he said, and would say only.

Now he's assembling covid skeptics to rebut advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and "seeking to investigate vaccine makers for fraud," reports The Washington Post. Said he on Wednesday: "These companies have made a fortune off this federal government imposing or at least attempting to impose mandates, and a lot of false statements. I think people want the truth and I think people want accountability, so you need to have a thorough investigation into what’s happened with these shots."

But perish your noggin's suspicion that the governor is being political, says GOP donor and DeSantis supporter Eric Anton: "If the left comes at him and says, you flipped because you want to be more anti-vaccine than Trump, he’s just gonna kill ’em with facts. If you want to call that political, then I think you’re too political." Inherent in Anton's remark is that DeSantis needn't worry about Trump and the primaries, but about the left and the general — as though DeSantis' nomination is a done deal.

Which is probably justifiable. Some primary-state polls are already showing DeSantis with a lead over Trump — less because DeSantis is so lovable than Trump is increasingly toxic. A recent CNN poll found that "about 6 in 10 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they want their party to nominate someone other than [Trump]," whose decline is palpable. "In January, the poll found a near-even split: 50% said they hoped Trump would be the nominee.... By July, 44% wanted Trump to be the party’s nominee, and now, 38% say the same."

Selling cornball trading cards to recidivist suckers is one thing. Convincing conservatives and Republican-leaning independents who want to win in 2024 that you — a twice-impeached, federally indictable former president — are the best choice for victory is something altogether different. For St. Pete's sake, even Trump-idolizer Steve Bannon likes the Florida governor: "What I like about DeSantis, he’s probably not a guy you’d like to run at, let’s go have a beer, but he’s all business." 

Current and former healthcare executives see the future nominee's "business" in a less adulatory light. Said one, who's also a lifelong Republican who has counseled Republican pols: "We know he’s not really anti-vax, he’s on the record, but now he’s taking this position for really blatant political purposes, it appears, and it’s really undermining to healthcare professionals."

Added the former executive and political adviser: "I’m not sure what the gain is, because he’s already got the base, and now this is just going to alienate moderates and independents." The speaker appears to have forgotten that moderates and independents don't determine the outcome of primaries. Extremists do. And among Republican pols, they can never have enough. 

That DeSantis is robbing Trump's cradle in the asylum is smart politics. He can always move a bit to the middle in the general, although he's unlikely to do so. So far, at least, he has little reason to contemplate a more moderate general-election campaign. While a recent USAToday/Suffolk University poll (13 Dec.) found President Biden beating Trump 47-40, it also found DeSantis beating Biden, 47-43.

Those numbers could also read: DeSantis beats the economy, 47-43. Everything hangs on that. Meanwhile, the Florida wannabe is free to outflank Trump.