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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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The Bankruptcy King in Person
All of this is, of course, ancient history, but as a document that first speech is anything but yesterday’s news. In many ways, it remains tomorrow’s headlines in a media world that, so long after, still can’t get enough of him. Had any of us truly been paying attention to more than the circus quality of the former ringmaster of The Apprentice taking his moment in the electoral sun, we might have noticed that Donald Trump was — give him credit — a strangely open book, no ghostwriters in sight. He’s remained so ever since.
That June 16th, he displayed himself nakedly — except for the orange hair — before that audience of reporters and hired actors, as well as the rest of America, and he’s never put on a stitch of clothing since. His initial TV moment was not a once-in-a-lifetime but a first-in-a-lifetime performance by a man in the process of creating a genuine what-you-see-is-what-you-get presidential run and presidency.
As I mentioned, however, there was an exception to everything I’ve written above, as there usually is to all rules in life. One thing was missing from his speech, as it would be from all of the speeches, tweets, and rallies to follow. The single hidden factor in the Trump presidency (even if, like everything else about the man from bone spurs to Roy Cohn, it was always in plain sight) contradicted his endless presentation of himself as the ultimate businessman and dealmaker for a floundering and foundering America.
Donald Trump wasn’t actually a successful businessman at all, not in the normal sense anyway. He was an economic magician (or, in classic American terms, a con man) who regularly ground business after business — a set of casinos (at a time when other casinos were thriving), hotels, an airline, and a series of other endeavors ranging from Trump Steaks to Trump Vodka to Trump University — into the dust of bankruptcy or failure. What made him such a magician was that, in case after case, his greatest “business” skill proved to be jumping ship, dollars in hand, leaving those who trusted him, had faith in him, believed in him holding the bag.
He had a history of screwing anyone who relied on him, whether we’re talking about the investors in his Atlantic City casinos or a bevy of small business types and others who worked for him — plumbers, waiters, painters, cabinet makers — and were later stiffed. In other words, Americans elected a https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2016/live-updates/general-election/real-time-fact-checking-and-analysis-of-the-first-presidential-debate/fact-check-has-trump-declared-bankruptcy-four-or-six-times/?utm_term=.11a92f14a3e9 (bankruptcy king) as their president and character will tell.
There really are no secrets here. In the end, Donald Trump clearly cares about nothing but himself (and perhaps his family as an extension of that self).
So read or listen to that first campaign speech again. Reintroduce yourself to Donald Trump presenting himself with naked honesty — with that single exception — and then consider the future for a moment. Whether in his first or second term (should he win again in 2020), if things start to head south economically, count on this: he’ll repeat his well-documented history and jump ship, leaving the American people, including that beloved base of his, holding the bag.
A White House Personnel Security Office employee is alleging that senior Trump administration officials often rebuffed national security concerns to grant high-level security clearances to people who were initially denied access to top-secret information, a pattern she described as troubling and one she said continued for months.
That employee, Tricia Newbold, sat for an interview with the House Oversight and Reform Committee on March 23 about the Trump administration’s security clearance process, becoming the highest-ranking White House official to speak out about the issue which has come under intense scrutiny from lawmakers.
Newbold told the committee that coming to Congress was her “last hope” to bring “integrity” back to her office, noting that her internal complaints were ignored even as she amassed a list of more than two dozen officials whose clearances were approved despite an initial denial.
“I do not see a way forward positively in our office without coming to an external entity, and that’s because I have raised my concerns throughout the [Executive Office of the President] to career staffers as well as political staffers,” she said, according to a memo prepared for members of the committee. “And I want it known that this is a systematic, it’s an office issue, and we’re not a political office, but these decisions were being continuously overrode.”
“I would not be doing a service to myself, my country, or my children if I sat back knowing that the issues that we have could impact national security,” Newbold added in her interview with committee staffers for the Republican and Democratic sides of the committee.
Newbold laid out a series of explosive allegations, often implicating Carl Kline, the former White House personnel security chief. She kept a list of White House officials whose clearance applications were initially denied but eventually overruled, and said the list included as many as 25 people, some of whom had daily access to the president.
“According to Ms. Newbold, these individuals had a wide range of serious disqualifying issues involving foreign influence, conflicts of interest, concerning personal conduct, financial problems, drug use, and criminal conduct,” aides wrote in the 10-page memo, summarizing Newbold’s testimony.
By all indications, President Trump is in the process of cutting off large infusions of aid to three Northern Triangle countries. Their offense? Not doing enough to mitigate the catastrophic failures of his own immigration agenda.
We already know Trump is extraordinarily sensitive to spikes in people crossing our southern border, which he views as a metric by which his presidency will be judged. Last spring, such a rise caused him to https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/were-closed-trump-directs-his-anger-over-immigration-at-homeland-security-secretary/2018/05/24/4bd686ec-5abc-11e8-8b92-45fdd7aaef3c_story.html?utm_term=.b8a6e2282fe7 (erupt in a fury) at his homeland security secretary.
Now that we’re seeing another big spike in border-crossings, one largely driven by asylum-seeking families, Trump is retaliating by https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-white-house-doubles-down-on-threat-to-close-us-mexico-border/2019/03/31/bd2e070a-53c9-11e9-9136-f8e636f1f6df_story.html?utm_term=.665e263a4f6a (cutting off aid) to Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Trump wants them to do more to prevent people from migrating north into Mexico en route to the U.S.
The task of defending this action has fallen largely to acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. In so doing, however, Mulvaney has actually demonstrated just how glaring Trump’s failures on his signature issue have really been.
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Will Bunch argues provocatively that Trump might not even mind failing here: More chaos at the border, leading to more cruel imagery (such as migrants penned under an El Paso bridge) and ever more cruel responses will galvanize the base into 2020. It’s a measure of how low we’ve sunk that this cannot be dismissed out of hand: Remember, Trump reportedly claimed of family separations that “my people love it.”
But all the cruelty and failure caused a massive backlash in 2018, helping cost Republicans the House. And it looks as if the border is going to get worse before it gets better -- a lot worse, now that Trump appears determined to make it so.
Until the full report comes out, and it must, all we know for sure is that Special Counsel Mueller didn’t believe he had enough evidence to charge Trump himself with the principal wrongdoing he was authorized to determine, that of actively conspiring with the government of Russia in its campaign to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. It was always going to be difficult to reach the high bar required to prove beyond doubt that Trump himself was criminally culpable, even as many of his closest advisers were convicted.
Not being indicted for the unethical and illicit acts everyone already knows you and your subordinates committed is a precarious platform from which to declare victory, but of course that’s what Trump and his supporters are doing.
It’s a strange claim coming from someone whose campaign manager, personal attorney and national security adviser were all indicted by the Russia probe. They, like Trump himself, spent years lying about their contacts with Russian operatives. Had all those charges come out at once last week, along with those against two dozen Russians and other Trump team members, it’s hard to imagine anyone calling it any kind of victory for the president. It would be considered, and still should be, the greatest scandal in the history of the US government.
Even more surprising, Mueller also declined to charge Trump with obstructing the investigation, something he has done publicly nearly every day, from threatening witnesses to blatantly lying about what and when he and his team knew about meetings with Russians.
Barr provided a logical fallacy when he said there couldn’t be an obstruction charge without proof of an underlying crime to obstruct, and, since there was no collusion charge, there could be no charge for obstructing the investigation of collusion. But what if the goal of the obstruction was to prevent discovery of the crime that was therefore not discovered? He’s essentially saying that obstruction of justice cannot exist if it’s successful.
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Congress should not be cowed by Trump’s celebration without exoneration. The House must keep looking into Trump’s conflicts of interest and dubious loyalties while also hardening the U.S.’s defenses, knowing that the Republican-controlled Senate will do nothing to help. The GOP has become not just the party of whatever Trump says, but whatever Trump says today. Tomorrow there will be a whole new list of lies they will accept as the truth.
In this they side with Hamlet when he said, “for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” This is how the poison of fake news and moral relativism spreads. There is right, there is wrong. There is good, there is evil. We would do well to remember that before following Hamlet to the end, where everyone dies by poison.
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My second cut is that Democrats should have an easy time picking apart the Trump campaign’s “https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/02/12/so-how-is-truthful-hyperbole-going-foreign-policy/?utm_term=.70819759dd7b (truthful hyperbole)” in foreign policy. Yes, the Islamic State was defeated — by https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/02/06/state-trumps-foreign-policy-is-poor/?utm_term=.b071d0ee590d (continuing the policies) that the Obama administration laid down. Yes, NATO allies are spending more on defense — but that has nothing to do with Trump and everything to do with Russia’s incursion into Ukraine. Sure, the administration has ratcheted up sanctions against Iran and Venezuela — but both regimes remain unbowed and the administration’s strategy for both countries is starting to seem stale. As for North Korea, not even Republicans are shameless enough to claim any accomplishments in that negotiation.
My third cut is that there is a deeper problem with the president’s foreign policy, and it is a problem that might affect his 2020 chances. Simply put, the Trump administration has frittered away its ability to cow or coerce anyone on the global stage. It is not just that the rest of https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/01/22/the-world-hates-president-trump/?utm_term=.2d9d3d64cb19 (the world hates Donald Trump); it is that they neither https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/10/02/trump-says-america-is-respected-again-he-is-quite-wrong/?utm_term=.47204d4c5e20 (respect)nor fear him.
The tricks that Trump deployed in his first few years to try to coerce allies no longer seem to work. U.S. corporations no longer fear the wrath of Trump’s tweets, for example. the New York Times’s Alan Rappeport reported last month that “the president’s scattershot attention span has diminished his power to persuade the business world to bend to his will, corporate communications experts say, as once fearsome tweet storms have devolved into ephemeral annoyances.”
The same is true for U.S. allies, as well. The NYT’s Julian Barnes and Adam Satariano reported last month that the Trump administration’s efforts to cajole allies into blocking Huawei from building their 5G networks have failed, and failed badly.
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There is a pattern here: When the rest of the world is not https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/09/26/world-is-laughing-president-trump/?utm_term=.1fd01fd39985 (laughing)at Trump, they are ignoring him. As https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/02/03/will-trumps-foreign-policy-blunders-amount-to-anything/?utm_term=.e3f893bdeb90 (I feared in 2017), Trump has become more predictable and less credible in foreign policy.
Will any of this matter for the 2020 election? Probably not. That said, the one time foreign policy did play a significant role was in 2008, when Americans had grown concerned about the loss of U.S. standing under President George W. Bush. If that concern manifests itself again in 2020, Trump will have to explain why the United States is no longer respected in the world. He will try to blame everyone else. That dog won’t hunt.
