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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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In recent weeks, two leaders — Xi Jinping in China and Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia — have consolidated personal power to degrees unprecedented in their countries’ recent histories. And Donald Trump, presumptive leader of the free world, has praised them both for doing it.
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Xi and Mohammed are not alone. We are living through another age of strongmen: Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey; Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt; Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines; Viktor Orban in Hungary; Vladimir Putin in Russia. Trump isn’t one of them — the American system won’t allow it, as Tuesday’s elections happily remind us — though he fits the psychological profile and yearns for their level of control.
We are also living through another era of democratic self-doubt. Low growth became the new normal for the better part of a decade. We fight wars we don’t know how to win and rue the consequences of action (Iraq) and inaction (Syria) alike. We inhabit a culture we despise and see no way of improving. Congress is paralyzed. The parties are broken. The president is a dolt.
Such moments aren’t historically unknown: They seem to recur roughly every 40 years. The 1930s and 1970s were also periods of autocratic resurgence and democratic degeneration, when exhaustion with process-based politics gave rise to enthusiasms for the politics of charisma, efficiency, or both.
“I have seen the future and it works,” was the progressive journalist Lincoln Steffens’s judgment on the Soviet Union. “The notion of liberty,” he added, “is false, a hangover from our Western tyranny.”
But something is different this time. In Franklin Roosevelt and later in Ronald Reagan, the United States elevated leaders who made the case for the superiority of open societies over closed ones. They ennobled democracy by giving it a sense of destiny and high moral purpose.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has questioned Sam Clovis, co-chairman of President Donald Trump’s election campaign, to determine if Trump or top aides knew of the extent of the campaign team’s contacts with Russia, two sources familiar with the investigation said on Friday.
The focus of the questions put to Clovis by Mueller’s team has not been previously reported.
“The ultimate question Mueller is after is whether candidate Trump and then President-elect Trump knew of the discussions going on with Russia, and who approved or even directed them,” said one source. “That is still just a question.”
Clovis testified in late October before the grand jury in Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He is also cooperating with the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating the same issues.
Contacted late on Friday, the White House declined to comment.
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