Life in Trumpistan (with Liars): March and April 2019

March 1, 2019: I’m going to assume most Americans did not have seven hours to invest in watching former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testify before the House Oversight Committee.

I’m retired. So, I watched till my eyes bugged out.

A few observations:

First, it was hard not to think Republicans on the committee were suffering from mass hysteria. They were boiling mad to learn that Cohen had lied to Congress in September 2017, even though they controlled both the House and Senate at the time and could have investigated more thoroughly if they wished. Then again, in those glory days, Cohen was lying for Trump.

“Given my own proximity to the President of the United States as a candidate, let me also say that I never saw anything - not a hint of anything - that demonstrated his involvement in Russian interference in our election or any form of Russian collusion.

“I assume we will discuss the rejected proposal to build a Trump property in Moscow that was terminated in January of 2016; which occurred before the Iowa caucus and months before the very first primary.”

Michael Cohen, Senate testimony, Sept. 19, 2017

When Cohen lied for the president, Republicans were cool with it.

Let’s pick up the thread of Wednesday’s testimony, allowing for a little literary license, with the first Republican speaking and/or yelling:

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH): Admit it, Mr. Cohen, YOU ARE A LIAR! Did anyone ever tell you that?

Cohen: Yes.

Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI.): Admit it! You are a COLOSSAL LIAR!

Cohen: I did lie.

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-VA): Admit it! You lied to CONGRESS?

Cohen: I just admitted it.

At that point, Foxx “yielded back” her time (each representative had five minutes) to Rep. Jordan, who started shouting again. Jordan looked like he wanted to leap over the dais and throttle the witness. You got the feeling Jordan was the kind of guy who could strangle a puppy without remorse.

I decided to pause my TV and look up what Cohen said back on September 19, 2017, testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. That’s when he lied. In those days, Republicans and the president himself were thrilled with what Cohen said under oath: 

Given my own proximity to the President of the United States as a candidate, let me also say that I never saw anything - not a hint of anything - that demonstrated his involvement in Russian interference in our election or any form of Russian collusion.

I assume we will discuss the rejected proposal to build a Trump property in Moscow that was terminated in January of 2016; which occurred before the Iowa caucus and months before the very first primary. This was solely a real estate deal and nothing more. I was doing my job. I would ask that the two-page statement about the Moscow proposal that I sent to the Committee in August be incorporated into and attached to this transcript.

I hit the pause again, to restart the hearings.

Jordan (still yelling at Cohen): You snake! You are a humongous liar!!!

Me (thinking): Cohen knew in September 2017 about a secret June 2016 meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort with agents of the Russian Federation. That was the meeting all three “forgot.” Then the truth came out because the “enemies of the people,” in the free press were digging to find it. Then the president lied about the purpose of the meeting. Next, Press Secretary Pinocchio lied and said her boss never lied about that purpose. Later the president’s lawyer admitted, “Okay, he did.”

My reverie was interrupted by another shouting Republican, Rep. Bob Gibbs of Ohio. He called Cohen a liar.

Lies shielding the president were fine lies.

Me (still thinking): Cohen lied again when he claimed negotiations to build a Trump property in Moscow ended in January 2016. Those lies served to shield Mr. Trump. Surely, the next GOP lawmaker to speak is going to realize…

Mark Meadows (R-NC): I hope you rot in jail for 5,000 years, Mr. Cohen. You are a liar. Have we not asked if you are?

Cohen: I lied. So did the presi…..

Meadows: SILENCE!!

Me: Cohen lied about payments to keep a porn star’s story out of the news. Those lies also benefited Trump. Someone on the Republican side is sure to bring this up.

Mark Green (R-TN): Liar, liar, pants on fire! Let the American people note: We have a poster to make the point!

(He gestures toward it.)

Meadows, Jordan and Massie: proud of their poster.

Me: If Cohen lied to Congress the President of the United States had to know. The president had a tongue that wagged and Twitter thumbs to tap out a correction. Even the greatest idiot ever elected to Congress should be able to figure this out…

Thomas Massie (R-KY): I’m not going to ask you again, Mr. Cohen. You fraud, you faker, you falsifier? You LIED, DIDN’T YOU!

Cohen: Yes.

Massie (beaming): I knew it!!!!!

Me: Maybe I should mute the TV when Jordan talks next and just watch facial expressions….

Jordan: -----

Me:  I never knew veins on a neck could stick out that far. Okay, next is this Democratic guy; I’ll unmute the TV.

Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD): I wonder……………if………Mr. Cohen…………

Me: This guy is phrasing his question so deliberately I don’t think he’s going to get it out before his five minutes are up.

I take a quick bathroom break. When I return Sarbanes is done but I have no idea what he said. Another Republican is shouting at Cohen:

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ): You are a THUG, MR. COHEN. Also, has anyone mentioned that you are a cheat, a phony and a swindler? If President Trump was a liar, a cheat and a racist, as you claim, why did you work for him for TEN YEARS!”

Gosar gets so fired up—because he thinks he has Cohen trapped—that he blathers on and when he tries to launch into a quotation that he says he loves his five minutes are up. He’s left mumbling incomprehensibly into his microphone.

Me (pondering the obvious): If Cohen was a thug and a liar, why was Trump happy to keep him around for a decade?

RNC deputy finance chairman till he crossed Trump.

The hearings continued. I was amused when GOP lawmakers acted as if they couldn’t believe what a sleazebag Cohen had always been—what with cheating on his taxes, which Cohen also admitted. Fortunately, I had a vestige of memory and knew Cohen had been the deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee until June 2018. He only lost his post once it became clear he might turn on President Trump and, shall we say, start correcting his story.

I’m sure no one on the GOP side wanted viewers to recall that Elliot Broidy, another RNC deputy finance chair, had employed Cohen to arrange a secret hush money payment. In that case, Broidy had to fork over $1.6 million to shut up another Playboy Bunny—as opposed to the hush money payment Cohen helped arrange to shut up the other Playboy Bunny with whom Trump had had an affair.

So, yeah, Cohen, what a thug!

Or was it a “rat.” Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-MD) seemed interested in the fact that the President of the United States had labeled Cohen a “rat” on Twitter, after it became clear he would cooperate with prosecutors. This seemed odd, because until it became clear Cohen was going to turn, Trump had tweeted, calling Cohen a “good man” and someone “I always liked & respected.”

Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) spoke next. Higgins, a bullet-headed gentleman, proved unique in that he was clearly baffled by the simplest facts. At one point, Cohen produced evidence, a signed check for $35,000, indicating President Trump was paying him as late as August 1, 2017, for his role in covering up the story of Stormy Daniels, the porn queen, in violation of campaign finance laws.

He said he had more evidence he could share.

Higgins (now chastising the witness): By thunderation, sir, where is this treasure trove of documents of which you speak? Why are you hiding evidence, good sir? Do you think we Republicans on this committee are fools?

Cohen: These documents are in a storage locker. They were seized last April in a raid on my office and home. They aren’t “hidden.” They were returned to me by investigators after they gathered evidence they needed.

Higgins: What kind of monster would hide boxes of evidence, by God and all the 12 Commandments!!!

Cohen: Um…

There was, here and there during testimony, some good news for the president. Cohen said that he himself had never been to Prague. A potentially devastating allegation, included in the Steele dossier, was that Cohen flew there in the summer of 2016 to work out payments to Russian hackers so they could keep up their good work.

A Democratic member, whose name I missed, asked Mr. Cohen about other stories he might have helped “capture and kill” to protect Trump. Was there an elevator tape that might show him striking Mrs. Trump, as had been rumored? Cohen was adamant in stating that he did not believe the president would ever strike his wife. He also said that he did not believe a tape of hookers peeing on a Moscow hotel bed for the viewing pleasure of Donald J. Trump existed.

False testimony vetted by Trump defense team and president.

That was it for the good news. Cohen pointed out that his false testimony in September 2017 had been vetted by defense lawyers for Mr. Trump. He said he discussed his testimony with the president himself.

Back to the testimony:

Me: So, if that testimony was false…

Meadows: Why are we listening to THIS DECEIVER, THIS DISSEMBLER?

Me: Trump must have wanted him to lie…

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY): “When was the last time you had contact with Mr. Trump in regard to possible testimony before Congress or cooperation with investigators?”

Cohen: I think…about June 2018. I cannot comment further because the matter is part of an ongoing investigation in the Southern District of New York. I am in constant contact with prosecutors.

Rep. Jordan gets five minutes “yielded back” by a GOP colleague and spends them calling Cohen a liar.

Eleanor Norton (D-DC): Mr. Cohen, are there other crimes involving Mr. Trump which this panel should know about?

Cohen: Yes. But I cannot comment further because investigations are…

Rep. Meadows: Mr. Cohen, I would like you to look up here. Behind me, we have Lynn Patton, an actual African American! She has worked for Donald J. Trump for many years and now holds a government post. She says Trump is not a racist. How dare you say Mr. Trump is a racist now that we can show he has a black friend?”

(Ms. Patton stands there, not opening her mouth, looking like a hostage who might want to try blinking in Morse code.)

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI): The fact that my colleague would use an African American as a prop is, in itself, a racist ploy.

Meadows (looking like he might be suffering a stroke): How dare you call me a racist!!!

Tlaib: Mr. Cohen, do you believe the president and others have been trying to intimidate you, to convince you not to correct the record before Congress?

Cohen: I do. I worry. I never walk with my wife and children in public anymore. I send them ahead. I’m afraid one of Trump’s 62 million Twitter followers—or even Rep. Matt Gaetz might attack the people I love.

Finally, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has her turn to question the witness—and here we quote questioning and testimony verbatim. The young Democrat from New York goes straight to the point. She has learned, she says, that Trump often overvalued assets—golf courses and the like—if he wanted to win favorable loan treatment from large money-laundering, international banks. To avoid paying property taxes he would then order lawyers and accountants to undervalue the properties. Was this an accurate assessment, she asked?

Actual questions and responses:

Cohen: Yes.

Ocasio-Cortez: Would anyone else know about such practices?

Cohen: Allen Weisselberg, Ron Lieberman and Matthew Calamari.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez: A recent article in The New York Times notes that taxpayers spent $127 million to help build Trump Links, a Trump property in the Bronx, my district. But the deal allowed Mr. Trump to keep almost every dollar the golf club took in. Is it possible he undervalued Trump Links for tax purposes? On financial disclosure forms the president claimed that Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida was worth $50 million. Yet he reported to local tax authorities that the property was worth no more than $5 million.

Cohen: That is identical to what Mr. Trump did with Briarcliff Manor, another private golf club.

Ocasio-Cortez: Would it help for the committee to obtain federal and state tax returns from the president and his companies to address that discrepancy?

Cohen: I believe so.

3/2/19: President Trump shows up Saturday at the CPAC convention and unloads the junk drawer of his mind.

For two hours, two minutes and seventeen seconds he rambles across the right-wing landscape, getting lost in the woods, tangling in briars, falling into fast-moving streams, climbing out dripping wet, and tripping over every stone in his path. The Gettysburg Address this speech is not.

First, he wanders on stage and humps the American flag. From there, it speeds downhill. At one point, he admits:

You know, I don’t know, maybe you know. You know, I’m totally off script, right … You know, I’m totally off script right now. And this is how I got elected, by being off script. True. And if we don’t go off script, our country is in big trouble, folks. ’Cause we have to get it back.

The president hits all the old notes from Beethoven’s Liar’s Symphony #3. Hillary colluded with Russians! Not him! The Mueller probe is a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.” Democrats “don’t care about crime.” They want MS-13 gang members to rape and kill. Climate change isn’t real and socialists—basically the Democrats—want to take away cows, cars and planes. It’s a litany of idiocy, but the crowd cheers every syllable.

At one point, Trump is feeling sorry for himself. Why, oh, why, did he ever appoint Jeff Sessions!

The attorney general recuses himself and I don’t fire him. No obstruction. That’s the other thing—if you use your rights, if you use your power, if you use Article Two, it is called obstruction. But only for Trump, for nobody else,

Unfortunately, you put the wrong people in a couple of positions, and they leave people for a long time that should not be there, and all of a sudden they’re trying to take you out with bullshit.

Trump continues:

Robert Mueller put 13 of the angriest Democrats in the history of our country on the commission. How do you do that? These are angry, angry people. You take a look at them. One of them was involved with the Hillary Clinton foundation, running it. Another one has perhaps the worst reputation of any human being I’ve ever seen. All killers.

(All “killers?” Okay, that sounds nuts.)

Trump isn’t done trashing the people he chose to fill his cabinet back when he was promising to surround himself with “the best people.” Another target of contempt is former Secretary of Defense James Mattis.

“I said, ‘We’re going to give you a new nickname because “Chaos” is not a good nickname.’ So we changed his name. We called him “Mad Dog.” But it wasn’t working too well. Mad Dog wasn’t working too well. So what happened is, I flew to Iraq. I wanted to meet the people on-site because I learn more sometimes from soldiers what’s going on than I do from generals. I do, I hate to say it. And I tell it to the generals all the time. But I didn’t have to go there. I didn’t have to go there. 

But, hey, look at me, Trump wants everyone to think, I did go. I’m a hero. Forget about that time I had those bad feet.

As for the president, he’s on to the next topic. He’s listing his greatest hits. He’s talking immigration:

We need workers to come in. But they need to come in legally, and they’ve got to come in through merit, merit, merit. They’ve got to come in through merit, they have to be people who can help us, they have to be people who can love our country, not hate our country. We have people in Congress right now, we have people in Congress that hate our country. And you know that. And we can name every one of them if they want. They hate our country. Sad. It’s very sad. When I see some of the things being made, the statements being made, it’s very, very sad. And find out: How did they do in their country? Just ask ’em. How did they do? Did they do well? Were they succeeding? Just ask that question. Someone would say, “Oh, that’s terrible that he brings that up,” but that’s okay, I don’t mind, I’ll bring it up. How did they do in their country? Not so good. Not so good.

“These people are sick,” Trump adds, describing Democrats, liberals and critics in a way meant to stir visceral hate.

Again, the crowd goes wild. No one stops to wonder: How did the parents of the First Lady manage to enter this country? What merits did they bring?

And what about all those undocumented workers who are surfacing, working at Trump golf clubs?

No one in that CPAC throng stops to wonder. They cheer.

Trump spends a significant chunk of his two hours plus howling about the Green New Deal. He doesn’t have any plan to address the threat of climate change—in part, because he doesn’t understand basic science.

His base isn’t any smarter when it comes to the matter. So, he’s going to scare the shit out of them by portraying a call for America’s leaders to address the danger into a plot to pull up capitalism by the roots and stamp out the American Dream.

Apparently, if you broach the matter of climate change it means none of us will ever be able to fly or drive a car or turn on lamps again:

No planes. No energy. When the wind stops blowing, that is the end of your electric. Let’s hurry up. “Darling, darling, is the wind blowing today? I would like to watch television, darling” ... Their plan would remove every gas-powered car from American roads. Oh, that’s not so bad. They want you to have one car instead of two. And it should be electric. Okay. So tell people, no more cars, no more cars ... It would end air travel. But you’ll get on a train, don’t worry about it. You just have to cross off about 95 percent of the world. And it would force the destruction or renovation of virtually every existing structure in the United States. New York City would have to rip down buildings and rebuild ’em again. I don’t think so. This is the craziest plan. And yet I see senators that are there for 20 years, white hair. See, I don’t have white hair. I don’t have white hair. I see these white hairs, longtime senators, standing behind this young woman [he means: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], and she’s ranting and raving like a lunatic, and these senators: “Yes, I agree with this. Yes I agree.”

Like most of the fear the right likes to stir up—death panels for granny—Obama is coming for all the guns—transgender people are lurking in the next bathroom stall—this is rank shit.

And the crowd shouts with glee.

Mercifully, Trump finally runs out of steam. He closes by bragging about his success on the world stage. Has there ever been a president quite as great as him?

And just in finishing up, as you know, I just returned from Vietnam, where I had very productive meetings with Chairman Kim Jong Un. We get along. We’ve developed a good relationship, very good, and made great historic progress…One administration gave billions of dollars to him and got nothing. We haven’t given him anything yet. I look forward to maybe doing something at some point. But I know one thing, I am going to get other countries to give. Maybe not us, but I’m going to get other countries to give, if it all works out, if it all works out. But I had to walk, because every once in a while, you have to walk. Because the deal wasn’t a deal that was acceptable to me. I don’t like these deals that politicians make. They make a deal just for the sake of doing it. I don’t want to do that. I want to make a deal that either works, or let’s not make it. But the one thing we have done is we have no testing, no missiles going up, no rockets going up. No nuclear testing…We got our great people back. We got our great, great people. And that includes our beautiful, beautiful Otto. Otto Warmbier, whose parents I’ve gotten to know, who’s incredible. And I am in such a horrible position because, in one way, I have to negotiate. In the other way, I love Mr. and Mrs. Warmbier, and I love Otto. It is a very, very delicate balance. He was a special young man, and to see what happened was so bad, was so bad…And a lot of what I do with respect to North Korea, and any success that we hopefully have, and we’ve had a lot, we’re given no credit.

Yes, yes, it’s very sad. No one gives Trump any credit.

So, let me see if I understand Trump Logic. If a country doesn’t test nuclear weapons (but has them), or fire missiles that can reach the USA (even if they proved they can), then that’s Trump magic?

3/3/19: You may have heard that President Trump was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Back in January, when the story broke, Henrik Urdal, manager of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, told reporters that although Trump had been nominated the application “still lacks a strong academic justification.”

Still, what an honor! And you could assume the justification would soon be forthcoming.

In now turns out someone stole the identity of an individual with the right to make a nomination. Secretary Olav Njolstad of the Norwegian Nobel Committee explains, “As far as I know, this is the first example of someone nominating someone by stealing another person’s identity.”

Russian hackers?

3/4/19: In perhaps the least surprising story of the day, The New Yorker reveals collusion between President Trump and…Fox News!

We have seen some of the evidence before: the incessant praise for Trump from hosts of Fox & Friends, the daily Trump lovin’ fed to viewers by the perpetually outraged-at-liberals Lou Dobbs.

We watched Heather Nauert, former Fox News Bunny, serve as spokesperson for the Department of State.

We saw Bill Shine, disgraced former Fox executive, hired to lead the White House communications department.

There was Sean Hannity, popping up onstage at campaign rallies besides his chunky, orange pal.

Then it was Hannity landing seven interviews with the president and Fox landing 37 more, each chock-full of softball questions…to be sure the president looked good.

Sample question from any Fox interview with Trump: “Are you the best president in history, Mr. Trump?”

Trump: “Yes, and thanks for asking.”

Interview ends.

Fox News performed its own version of “capture and kill.”

Now it turns out a Fox reporter had the story of Stormy Daniels and her affair with Donald J. Trump before the 2016 election. But the network performed its own version of “capture and kill,” despite proof Daniels was telling the truth—that Trump had cheated on his third wife, and now First Lady. “Good reporting, kiddo,” a top executive at Fox told Diana Falzone, the reporter on the case. “But Rupert [Murdoch] wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.”

As a writer for The New Yorker explains:

Falzone discovered that the National Enquirer, in partnership with Trump, had made a “catch and kill” deal with Daniels—buying the exclusive rights to her story in order to bury it. Falzone pitched this story to Fox, too, but it went nowhere.

Falzone was demoted the following January “without explanation.” She sued Fox and reached a settlement. Falzone signed a non-disclosure agreement.

So, there you go.

Fox News: “Fair and balanced.”  We don’t report bad news about Trump, you decide. Also: Non-disclosure agreements are the best kind of news.

Fox News had the story on Stormy.

3/5/19: Trump unleashes a Twitter blizzard, nineteen tweets in a single day. Starting at 8:14 a.m., he complains about the investigations now targeting him and his administration, saying that the “only Collusion with Russia was done by Crooked Hillary Clinton & the Democrats.”

At 9:11 a.m. he whines: “The Dems are obstructing justice and will not get anything done. A big, fat, fishing expedition desperately in search of a crime.”

A minute later he posts in all caps: “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT.”

“I think Bob Mueller’s an American hero.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s former defense lawyer, Ty Cobb does an interview with ABC. In it, he defends Special Counsel Robert Mueller:

“I think Bob Mueller’s an American hero…I think Bob Mueller’s a guy that, you know, even though he came from an arguably privileged background, you know, has a backbone of steel. He walked into a firefight in Vietnam to pull out one of his injured colleagues and was appropriately honored for that….He is a very deliberate guy. And he—but he’s also a class act. And a very justice-oriented person.”

Cobb is asked. Is Mueller leading a team of “angry Democrats” in an illegitimate investigation?

He replies:

“You know, I don’t feel the same way about Mueller. I don’t feel the investigation is a witch hunt. I wish it had happened on a quicker timetable. But it didn’t. And that’s, you know, and that’s unfortunate. But at the same time, it’s not a real criticism of the special counsel, that on the timing, because there were a lot of surprises.”

So: not a witch hunt.

Mueller was once confirmed in a Senate vote: 100-0.

3/6/19: Trump lies awake in the wee hours, tweeting about his emergency declaration, which would give him the power to grab money with both fists and build his wall, whether Congress likes it or not. It’s a declaration he desperately wants GOP senators to uphold.

You can tell how much he reveres the U.S. Constitution if you consider his tweet in the dark:

“Senate Republicans are not voting on constitutionality or precedent [emphasis added] they are voting on desperately needed Border Security & the Wall. Our Country is being invaded with Drugs, Human Traffickers, & Criminals of all shapes and sizes. That’s what this vote is all about. STAY UNITED!”

In other words, if the U.S. Constitution interferes with what he wants, the Republicans should STAY UNITED and ignore what it says.

*

IN OTHER NEWS, Michael Cohen spends another day on Capitol Hill, this time testifying in closed session before the House Intelligence Committee. He brings suitcases filled with documents.

The New York Times reports on a series of fat checks made out to Cohen, all signed by the president, or Don Jr., his dear, dumb son. These checks are part of a scheme to cover up the story of Stormy Daniels, for which scheme (in part) Cohen will soon be camped out in jail. In fact, the Southern District of New York in its filings on the case named “Individual 1,” the president himself, as an “unindicted co-conspirator,” which is kind of fun.

The first check to Mr. Cohen was signed on February 14, 2017, by the newly sworn President of the United States. The day before Trump had had to fire his National Security Adviser, General Michael T. Flynn, for lying to Vice President Pence about contacts with Russians.

Now Trump was signing that fat check—and afterwards he would celebrate Valentine’s Day by calling in F.B.I. Director James Comey and asking him to go easy in the investigation of Flynn.

Keep all of this in mind when you hear the president insist that Comey lies and not him.

Or Cohen lies and not him.

There was another check to his personal lawyer for $35,000 in March, one in April (not yet been found), then one in May, drawn on the president’s personal bank account. The June and July checks are still missing. Then we have another for $35,000, signed on August 1, 2017.

On that very day, Press Secretary Pinocchio confirmed that the president had “weighed in” on a letter Don Jr. wrote about a secret meeting held in June 2016 with a group of Russian agents.

In retrospect, you can see how ridiculous the lies told by Trump and his sycophants have been. Sanders insisted then:

Look, the statement that Don Jr. issued is true. There’s no inaccuracy in the statement.

The president weighed in as any father would, based on the limited information that he had.

This is all discussion, frankly, of no consequence. There was no follow up. It was disclosed to the proper parties, which is how The New York Times found out about it to begin with.

But that statement itself was shot through with untruths. The meeting itself was never “disclosed.” The New York Times dug up the story thirteen months after the meeting was held. Don Jr. initially denied there was discussion with Russian agents about receiving dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Later, Don Jr. issued the aforementioned letter, saying the meeting was primarily about “adoption.”

Email evidence quickly proved that was a lie.

Then Sanders claimed the president simply helped his boy—and that also turned out to be a lie.

Meanwhile, the checks to Cohen kept coming—September 12, October 18 and November 21. The last of a dozen came on December 5, 2017, meaning that the president had been part of a scheme to cover up felony campaign law violations for almost a year.

The evidence builds; and in Trumpistan it makes no dent. As the Times reports:

“I think it’s news we knew about,” Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Reform Committee and one of the president’s staunchest allies, told reporters during a break in last week’s hearing.

The payments, he said, could have been for services based on a retainer, although Mr. Cohen said there was no such retainer.

Trump claims to know nothing about the payments.

Nor should anyone—including Rep. Jordan—forget. In April 2018, Trump could still insist to reporters aboard Air Force One that he knew nothing at all about payments to Stormy.

Q: Mr. President, did you know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels?

THE PRESIDENT: No. No. What else?

Q: Do you know where he got the money to make that payment?

THE PRESIDENT: No, I don’t know. No.

Let’s just face it. President Trump knows how to lie.

*

ODDLY ENOUGH, the president isn’t done tweet-ranting for the day. At 6:56 p.m. on March 6, 2019, he sums up his legal predicament this way. He didn’t do anything wrong. No, the Democrats are out to get him on anything, even “a punctuation mistake in a document.”

Postscript: Judge Andrew Napolitano, perhaps Fox News’s top legal commentator, explained the dangers to Trump in Cohen’s testimony in an editorial in the Washington Examiner:

Hidden in the Cohen testimony was an oblique reference to alleged bank and tax fraud that Cohen claimed he helped Mr. Trump commit, contributed to Mr. Trump’s wealth and has the present interest of federal prosecutors in Manhattan. Many of these events took place more than five years ago and thus are not subject to federal prosecution, so why would prosecutors be interested in them?

Here is where RICO comes in. RICO is the acronym for a Nixon-era federal statute, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, originally enacted to target the mob. It permits federal prosecutors to reach back 10 years to find any two criminal acts, which need not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt; prosecutors need only demonstrate that they were more likely than not to have occurred. Then the feds can seize three times the wealth that the perpetrators of these schemes amassed. That could bankrupt Mr. Trump.

The president has serious and powerful tormentors whom he cannot overcome by mockery alone. He needs to do more than demean them with acerbic tweets, because many of those tormentors can legally cause him real harm. He needs to address these issues soberly, directly and maturely. Can President Trump survive all this? Yes — but not if he has another week like the last one.

First, it’s never going to be a good week for anyone who opens a newspaper and sees his or her name attached to a sentence about the RICO Act.

Second, Napolitano is warning that Trump can only address his problems in a sober, direct, mature fashion.

Not going to happen!

3/7/19: Lately, it sucks to be Trump. He can’t get the cash he wants to build the Great Wall. And he promised he was going to renegotiate the crap out of all the bad trade deals other presidents made. He would fix the whole balance-of-trade mess.

Fanfare please: the trade deficit for 2018 turns out to be $621 billion, the highest figure in ten years.

Last time it was worse: 2008, after the last Republican president plunged the U.S. economy into a near depression.

*

THEN AGAIN, maybe it doesn’t suck so much to be Trump! Party time at the White House, as former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort is sentenced to only 47 months in jail!

In Donald Trump’s mind this unexpectedly light sentence proves that there was no collusion between his campaign and the Russians. Speaking to reporters gathered on the White House lawn, he explains:

I feel very badly for Paul Manafort…uh… I think it’s been a very, very tough time for him, but if you notice, both his lawyer, a highly respected man and a very highly respected judge said that there was no collusion with Russia, this had nothing to do with collusion with Russia, because there was no collusion. It’s a collusion hoax, a collusion witch hunt.

Trump goes on to describe the whole Russia investigation as a “Witch Hunt Hoax.” “So bad for our country,” he adds with a wave of an orange hand and a spritz of self-pity.

Hint of a pardon might influence Manafort to keep yap closed.

A reporter asks if the president has ever discussed a pardon for Manafort—because, you know, the hope of a pardon might influence Manafort to keep his yap closed if he did know about collusion.

“I don’t even discuss it,” the president insists. “The only one discussing it is you.”

Only we know that’s not true. Trump has said repeatedly he won’t take a pardon off the table.

Wink. Wink.

In fact, Rudy Giuliani has now admitted that lawyers for “several people” under investigation by Special Counsel Mueller have approached him to ask if the president might someday grant pardons. These pardons, we know, are not off the table. Rudy says he always tells them he can’t promise them anything and they leave “disappointed.”

Wink. Wink. Wink.

For now, Manafort knows he caught a break. Next week he faces additional sentencing in a Virginia court for another set of crimes. In that case, he’ll find out how much additional time he must serve for additional felonies. And in this case the charges do hint at collusion with Russia.

One felony involves witness tampering, related to Mr. Manafort’s efforts to sync testimony with Konstantin Kilimnik.

Kilimnik used to hang around Washington D.C., but recently fled to Russia.

Postscript: Allow me to clarify! A pardon is out for one of six convicted felons from the Trump campaign.

That would be Michael Cohen. Cohen has been coughing up evidence damaging to Mr. Trump.

Team Trump 2016.

3/8/19: Recent polls have Trump in a bit of a hole, with only 43.4% of Americans approving of the job he’s doing. Part of his problem is that most Americans believe he’s a liar.

His former lawyer, Michael Cohen, is now a convicted felon, headed for jail. But when asked in a Quinnipiac poll, who they believed more after Cohen’s recent testimony before Congress, 50% of Americans said Cohen

Only 35% said Trump.

Worse, 65% of Americans said they believed Trump is not honest, and 64% think he committed crimes before taking office. Almost half, 45%, believe he has committed crimes since being elected.

*

IN NEWS YOU CAN’T MAKE UP, it turns out that Li Yang, who founded the “spa” where Robert Kraft got busted for soliciting prostitution, and who is suspected of running similar spas to this day, attended this year’s Super Bowl party hosted by…President Donald J. Trump!

Here’s how the Miami Herald describes the enterprising Ms. Yang. We  now know she’s appeared in photographs with just about every member of the First Family, save Barron.

The woman who snapped the blurry Super Bowl selfie with the president was Li Yang, 45, a self-made entrepreneur from China who started a chain of Asian day spas in South Florida. Over the years, these establishments — many of which operate under the name Tokyo Day Spas — have gained a reputation for offering sexual services.

Yang’s family still owns several South Florida spas. The family’s Tokyo Day Spa branches have attracted the attention of at least two local police agencies over allegations of prostitution, and are discussed online as places where men can pay for sexual extras.

No doubt, Ms. Yang will face added scrutiny as the story unfolds. In 2016, a massage therapist at one Tokyo Day Spa location told police that employees “were selling sex and said management encouraged the behavior.”

A commenter on an internet site explained the allure of such places: “If you’re just wanting to get a ‘rub and tug,’ this might be one of the best places in West Palm Beach,” he said in describing the local Tokyo Day Spa.

Until 2016, Yang had shown little interest in politics. Records show she hadn’t voted in a decade. But something about Trump appealed. She and her family began to donate to campaigns, $42,000 to Trump Victory, a PAC, and $16,000 to the Trump run for office. Soon she was showing up at all kinds of GOP venues, getting photographed with leaders of the right, attracted perhaps by all the “family values” espoused so fervently by Trump and his type. At many of the gatherings, Ms. Yang “carries a rhinestone encrusted MAGA clutch purse.”

Her business history indicates conservatives might want to think about who they’re hanging out with. After Kraft was arrested for soliciting prostitution at the Orchids of Asia “spa” in Jupiter, Florida, reporters started digging. True: Yang sold her Tokyo Day Spa location there in 2013. It then became Orchids of Asia.

But the Herald reports:

Although the name and ownership of the location have changed, the decor has not. A photo from a Tokyo Day Spa Yelp review shows the same couch, the same wall hanging and the same faux plant as now.

“Used to be known as Tokyo Day Spa and Massage — most of the same girls still work there,” a Yelp reviewer wrote of Orchids of Asia in 2013.

There’s more to the Herald report and similar stories on the Kraft prostitution bust. But the foundation is always the same: sex trafficking of foreign women. If you’re interested in how an awful system thrives, the Herald lays it out, from schools for masseuses that offer a front of legitimacy, to websites like “rubmaps.com” where customers describe experiences. As the Herald explains, one commenter had this to say: “‘your mileage may vary’ at Tokyo Day Spas, meaning sex may not be available depending on the therapist. ‘Been here many times, some play, some don’t,’ a man wrote in 2016. But others raved. ‘I had one of those toe curling experiences,’ a reviewer said.”

So, that’s where we stand with Ms. Yang. We know she attended Trump’s inauguration. We know there’s a picture out there of Yang standing beside Kellyanne Conway, a nightmare in itself. 

And we know this.

In September 2018, Yang received a personalized note from the president and first lady. It read: “Thank you for your friendship and dedication to our cause. Leaders like you in Florida are the key to fulfilling our bold agenda [emphasis added] to Make America Great Again!”

Yang has not been charged. Hua Zhang, to whom she sold her spa in 2013, and where the same girls work, has been. “Zhang was charged with racketeering and running a house of prostitution and has pleaded not guilty.”

3/9-10/19: Sometimes, so much crazy shit happens in Trumpistan it can be hard to keep up. Here are a few stories you might have missed. Or: all the stories you missed if you watch Fox News. (See: 3/4/19.)

First, let’s consider how the president is spending his time. It used to bother him when President Obama played golf. Now the Orange Duffer has a different opinion regarding time on the links. Saturday he played a round with Lexi Thompson at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. Sunday, he was at Mar-a-Lago, hanging with superrich friends. You know—taking the pulse of the MAGA folks. He has now spent 173 days at golf clubs he owns since taking office.

*

SPEAKING OF BIG NUMBERS, the Senate Finance Committee finally got something right, calling in the heads of seven Big Pharma corporations to testify about the ballooning costs of prescription drugs. You can boil down all the testimony of the Seven Robber Barons to this: Don’t blame us!

You can buy a lot of lawmakers for that much cash.

To hear them talk, the Big Pharma guys were doing the best they could to keep prices down and it wasn’t their fault if—to take just one example—the price of insulin, which 3,000,000 Americans with type-1 diabetes must have daily to survive—has skyrocketed in recent years.

Eli Lilly, for example, sold insulin for $35 per vial in 2001. By 2015 the price was $234 and still rising.

Doctors and nurses, patients who wanted to live, and families who loved them and hoped they wouldn’t die, got angry. Senators got upset, too, because angry people might vote them out of office no matter how much money drug company lobbyists threw at them to help with campaigns.

How much money does Big Pharma toss at politicians? In 2018, 1,440 lobbyists for the industry—equal to 3.3 lobbyists for every member of Congress—handed out checks totaling $280,305,523.

You can buy a lot of lawmakers for that much cash.

See, for example, the fine work done by Rep. John Shimkus, who serves the people of Illinois—well, maybe not the sick ones—in the House of Representatives. In 2016 the congressman was instrumental in gathering 242 Republican signatures to block an Obama administration project to test ways to lower drug costs for Medicare Part B. In honor of his work, the pharmaceutical industry donated $295,649 to his campaign that year.

But now, here were senators from both parties lodging protest against runaway prescription drug costs. Even the Big Pharma guys got nervous.

Well, what do you know! On March 4, Eli Lilly announced that it had done some thinking about how maybe prices were a little high. Maybe they could help out a little by selling a half-price version of Humalog, their most popular insulin injection drug, for “only” $137.50 per vial. That would still mean insulin cost four times as much as it did in 2001, but that was better than eight times, which was what it cost before. Of course, you had to be asking yourself: Why was Eli Lilly charging $275 per vial until this week?

Then again, the CEO was earning $14,498,000 per year—and lobbyists are expensive—and you have to pay Shimkus, too.

You have to assume that if Big Pharma is giving politicians billions of dollars,
Big Pharma is getting repaid in some way.

*

WE LEARNED this week that intelligence experts with the F.B.I. and C.I.A. tried to block White House aide Jared Kushner from receiving a top-level secret security clearance. They were concerned that the president’s son-in-law might be manipulated due to manifold business dealings with foreign companies.

The president stepped in and ordered top officials to give Kushner (and daughter Ivanka) top-level clearance anyway.

Then, like George Washington in reverse, the president told reporters he had nothing to do with the process.

Now we know. Trump did interfere. How do we know? The “enemies of the people” in the free press broke the story. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and White House Chief Counsel Don McGahn both wrote memos saying Trump ordered staff to grant the clearances.

And why might this matter, besides the troubling fact that the president lies with abandon? You can sum the danger up in a few steps. When Kushner went to work at the White House his family was saddled with a $1.4 billion loan on a property in New York City, 666 Fifth Avenue, which was deep underwater. So Jared—thinking only of what was best for the country—tried to get Chinese interests to bail his family out. The “enemies of the people” broke that story.

The Chinese backed out.

Eventually, the Kushner family got what was needed, a sweet bailout from Brookfield Asset Management, a most reputable firm! And what do you know! It turned out Qatar was one of the major Brookfield investors. But the Qataris claimed they had no idea their hundreds of millions would be going to help the son-in-law of the President of the United States extricate himself from a jam.

While they were at it, the Qataris wondered, could the United States help them out in their dispute with neighboring Saudi Arabia?

Kushner: naïve and susceptible to foreign inducements.

Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano spelled out the inherent dangers in an editorial in the Washington Examiner:

It was lawful for the president to do this [overrule experts on clearances], but it was extremely dangerous and profoundly unwise [emphasis added]. It undermined the intelligence and law enforcement communities, demeaned those who obtained such clearances by hard work and merit, and has exposed the nation’s most carefully guarded secrets to a person who American intelligence believes is naive and susceptible to foreign inducements to reveal what he knows.

If that wasn’t bad enough, General Kelly made headlines again when speaking to an audience at Duke University. Kelly had a few choice opinions to share regarding his old boss.

What about the claim—a Trump go-to-favorite—that criminals are pouring across our southern border—meaning we have a national emergency on our hands? Nah, Kelly said. The people coming, “They’re overwhelmingly not criminals. They’re people coming up here for economic purposes. I don’t blame them for that.”

What about building a Great Wall of Trump from sea to shining sea? Kelly called it “a waste of money.”

What about the president’s bright idea to use the U.S. military to police the border and build the wall?

Kelly was against it:

We have a long, long tradition of fighting the away game and have real sense that except for natural disasters, to interact domestically is something that most—I would say all—military people prefer not to do [emphasis added]….I would look for another way to do it rather than deploy federal troops on the border.

As for working with Mr. Trump, let’s just say Gen. Kelly was sparing in praise. He told the audience that working in the White House was “the least enjoyable job I’ve ever had.” He added, however, that for eighteen months he “helped the administration, the president of the United States make the very best decisions that he could based on the information that we could provide him.”

He didn’t say Trump listened to anything he was told.

Interestingly enough, a Fox News story on the Kelly interview carries the headline “John Kelly Reveals He Would Have Worked for Hillary Clinton if She Won, Parts with Trump on Wall.”

That headline and the lead sentence, “He would have been with her,” were enough to prompt a cult-like response from Trump fans. The general had explained that he would have worked for Clinton the same way he worked for Trump had he been asked: out of a sense of duty.

In their comments on the story, Trumpophiles insisted this proved Kelly had gone “rogue,” that he lacked “integrity.”

My favorite response came from someone named H.R. Green:

Well, that verifies the problem with Kelly, he’s a liberal, that explains why a lot of pundits discussed the problem with some of Trump’s staff. This also makes it very concerning about the movement of the military toward liberalism. I think it would be wise to begin a major purge of the upper ranks in the military [emphasis added] they will side with the democrats if push comes to conflict.

Okay, enough with the nuts.

*

DID WE JUST SAY, “Enough with the nuts?”” Perhaps you remember Pam Taylor, the West Virginia woman who made headlines in 2016, when she described Michelle Obama as “an ape in heels.”

Ms. Taylor is in the headlines again, this time for stealing $18,149.04 from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

So now we know. Taylor wasn’t just a racist and an idiot. She was also a crook.

*

LAST BUT NOT LEAST, the president learns the hard way (in part because he rarely learns anything at all) that a few “love letters” from Kim Jong-un don’t really mean never having to say you’re sorry.

Intelligence experts now believe that in the time between the first summit meeting between the two chunky world leaders with bad hair and the second summit last month, the North Koreans produced enough uranium and plutonium to build another half-dozen nuclear weapons.

Last June, the president came away from his first meeting with Kim, convinced that he had won serious concessions. Kim had told him that the North “was already destroying” its main rocket-launching site at Sohae, on the Yellow Sea. “That’s a big thing,” Trump bragged. “The site is going to be destroyed very soon.”

That prediction proved wrong—and satellite images show the North is upgrading the site, instead.

On the other hand, this bold prediction proved true. Asked by reporters if he really thought he could trust the erratic North Korean dictator, the erratic American liar replied, “Honestly, I think he’s going to do these things. I may be wrong. I mean, I may stand before you in six months and say, ‘Hey, I was wrong.’”

“I don’t know that I’ll ever admit that,” he said with a sappy grin, “but I’ll find some kind of an excuse.”

Yeah. He’s not admitting anything.

Still has all his nukes!

3/11/19: Once again, we have proof that the president will lie about any topic, no matter how insignificant. Last week, in a White House meeting, Trump inadvertently referred to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, as “Tim Apple.”

Most of us make these kinds of slips every day. Trump is incapable of owning any mistakes. He first claimed that he said “Tim Cook, Apple.” The “Cook” was so soft no one heard him, except Trump’s imaginary friend, Johnny Appleseed.

Then today he changed his story again, tweeting:

Not only is this idiotic, more than 100,000 Trump fans loved it.

The simple slip of the tongue shouldn’t matter. What does matter is that we learn again this is a man who can’t stop lying. Trump is the kind of guy who would deny chopping down a cherry tree even if you had him on tape, chips flying in all directions, as he wielded his little hatchet.

Donald J. Trump is incapable of telling the truth.

Donald J. Trump is incapable of telling the truth. We need to keep that in mind when we consider his Big Lies. For years he promised he was going to prove that President Obama wasn’t born in America. Republicans believed what he said. Once Trump realized that lie was no longer resonating with the broader public and was hurting his chances in 2016, he changed his stance. In a terse nine-word statement, he admitted the very least he could. “President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period,” was all he said. He didn’t explain. He didn’t apologize for pushing the birther myth for years. He took no follow up questions, insisting he wanted to “get back to making America strong and great again.”

This is the guy who whines about “Fake News.”

In truth, the “Fake News” often comes directly from Trump’s Twitter feed to his fans, via a stream of noxious tweets. He offers up colossal errors of fact. Even when those errors are revealed, he never corrects mistakes. Recently he tweeted the “shocking” news that Texas had found 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote. Trump noted that 58,000 had in fact voted!

It was a meat-and-potatoes kind of right-wing fairy tale and the president’s fans gobbled up every bite and clamored for seconds, then pleaded for thirds. More than 140,000 Twitter followers “liked” his tweet. It was retweeted 41,000 times and took on a secondary and tertiary life of its own.

Right-wing numbskulls, too lazy to read anything longer than 280-character tweets, were up in arms, ready to buy more guns, punch a few reporters, and “take America back.” The story of massive voter fraud spread like a BP oil slick and couldn’t be stopped.

Down in Texas, however, the tale was falling apart. Notified by the State of Texas to start checking voter rolls, officials in 254 counties set to work. It was immediately clear that the lists of 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote were so riddled with error as to be useless. We’ve already highlighted the results. (See: 2/22/19.)

So, let’s use the results for McClennan County to again make our point. When McClennan officials began checking the list from the state, they found that of 366 “non-citizens” in the county who were registered to vote… um…366 happened to be U.S. citizens.

The problem, of course, is that even when Trump lies big—and he often lies huge—his fans still fall for it. If there has ever been a group of more gullible Americans, I’m not sure who they might be.

Maybe people who fell for the story of the Cardiff Giant.

This claim proved to be vastly overstated.

3/12/19: A $25 million bribery scandal explodes when an array of superrich parents, college admissions “coaches” and leaders of athletic teams are shown to have participated in a rigged game. You “won” when you managed to get underqualified children of superrich individuals into prestigious universities.

White House aide Kellyanne Conway couldn’t resist tweeting insult of two mothers, adding, “They worried their daughters are as stupid as their mothers.”

Critics faulted her for insulting the intelligence of two young college women, noting that not all of the children knew cheating was involved, and reminded her that Trump had his own higher-education issues. That would include a $25 million settlement for running a scam Trump University.

It didn’t help much when critics pointed out that Jared Kushner was admitted to Harvard the same year his father agreed to donate $2.5 million to the university, in ten annual installments.

At the time, administrators at Jared’s old school expressed surprise, as Daniel Goodin reported:

“There was no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard,” a former official at The Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey, told me. “His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought for sure, there was no way this was going to happen. Then, lo and behold, Jared was accepted. It was a little bit disappointing because there were at the time other kids we thought should really get in on the merits, and they did not.”

Joshua Kushner, Jared’s younger brother was admitted to Harvard two year later.

As for parents involved in this latest scandal—which allowed their children to bump out more-deserving children from less affluent families, I think this proves we need more tax cuts for fat cats.

How else does one pay a bribe of $500,000 to the coach of the USC women’s crew team to accept your daughters as top recruits, despite the inconvenient fact neither had ever actually rowed crew.

And let’s not forget the parents who paid $6.5 million to get their child into another elite school.

3/13/19: Former Trump 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort is sentenced to an added 43 months in jail.

“If the people don’t have the facts, democracy can’t work. Court is one of those places where facts still matter.”

Judge Amy Berman Jackson

This gives him a total of seven-and-a-half years to ponder his crimes, wonder what ever happened to his python skin jacket, and pray for a pardon from President Trump. (See: 3/7/19.)

Judge Amy Berman Jackson roasts the defendant before handing down her decision. Manafort’s lobbying work for Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, which he kept secret for years, “infects our policymaking,” Jackson says. “What you were doing was lying to Congress and the American public,” she adds, noting that Manafort made a “deliberate effort to obscure the facts.”

“If the people don’t have the facts, democracy can’t work,” the judge warns; and “court is one of those places where facts still matter.”

You could take that as a veiled slap at Donald J. Trump.

For his part, Manafort tried his best to appear contrite. “I know it was my conduct that brought me here today,” he said. “For these mistakes, I am remorseful. I will be 70 years old in a few weeks. My wife is 66. She needs me. I need her. I ask you to think of this and our need for each other. Please do not take us away from each other. Please let me and my wife be together.”

Jackson was in no mood to spare the defendant, who appeared in a wheelchair, wearing a green prison jumpsuit.

She noted that one of the crimes for which he was being sentenced was witness tampering. And that tampering involved a Russian, Konstantin Kilimnik. Kilimnik was also under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. But he wasn’t about to stick around and take his chances in court. When last seen he was hopping a flight for a getaway to Moscow. And we assume he’s not coming back.

The conclusion on collusion did not follow from facts.

Finally, Jackson,

chided the defense for using the [last court documents filed] to disprove any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russians in Moscow’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, which is Muller’s chief mandate.

“The ‘no collusion’ refrain that runs through the entire defense memo is entirely unrelated to the matters at hand,” she said. “The ‘no collusion’ mantra is simply a non sequitur.”

That is: the conclusion his lawyers had been trying to draw, that these convictions did not prove collusion with Russians, did not follow from the facts. 

“The ‘no collusion’ mantra is also not accurate because the investigation is still ongoing,” Judge Jackson added.

Or, to put it plainly, she was acknowledging the Orange Elephant in the courtroom (and the Oval Office). She knows full well that Manafort and his team are angling for a presidential pardon. 

She wanted to make it clear he wasn’t deserving.

So, how did the president react once he heard the news? “I feel very badly for Paul Manafort,” Trump told reporters.  Naturally, they asked: Had he given any thought to a pardon for the money-laundering, tax-evading, witness-tampering tool of Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, who used to run his campaign?

Oh, no, Trump claimed. He did add, however, that Judge Jackson had found that there was no collusion with Russians involved in the Manafort case.

In fact, that was the exact opposite of what she had said.

*

BY DAY’S END we had fresh news regarding presidential pardons. Emails between Michael Cohen and lawyers for Mr. Trump suddenly surfaced.

Before diving into this story, it helps to go back to April 9, 2018. That was the day federal law enforcement raided Cohen’s home, office and hotel suite and confiscated his electronic devices. From that moment on, it was clear authorities believed the president’s lawyer was involved in some kind of criminal enterprise. Prosecutors soon charged Cohen with eight felonies—while also listing President Trump as an unindicted coconspirator, or “Individual 1.”

Cohen had to find out. Was he going to be protected by his longtime boss and top client, the President of the United States?

And his longtime boss had to find out. Would his former fixer still take a bullet for him and keep his mouth shut?

What made this unlike your garden variety criminal case was the president’s ability to grant pardons for federal crimes. Cohen had to be pondering his situation. Lawyers for Trump had to be wondering. How could he, Cohen, make it clear he’d keep quiet if a pardon was coming his way? How could Trump’s lawyers hint to Mr. Cohen that a pardon would be forthcoming, and how could they make it clear what they expected in return? There has been a good deal of arguing in recent weeks about whether Cohen asked for a pardon first, or whether the president and his lawyers were all but guaranteeing a pardon in return for sealed lips.

What is not in dispute is that the president has said he would not take pardons off the table for former aides (at least those who protected him). That means any discussions related to pardons could rapidly devolve into classic obstruction of justice.

Initially, the president was all in on support for Cohen. (See: his support for Manafort, above.) Trump made this clear while speaking to reporters from the Oval Office just hours after the Cohen raids:

So I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys, a good man and it’s a disgraceful situation. It’s a total witch-hunt. I’ve been saying it for a long time….And it’s a disgrace, it’s a real disgrace. It’s an attack on our country in a true sense. 

In fact, on April 21, 2018, Trump made it clear where he stood regarding Mr. Cohen when he tweeted:

So, what were Trump’s defense lawyers—and Cohen and his team—discussing that very same day?

Now, recently revealed emails allow us to see.

“Sleep well tonight, you have friends in high places.”

Robert Costello, longtime friend and associate of Rudy Giuliani

“I just spoke to Rudy Giuliani and told him I was on your team,” Robert Costello wrote in the first email. And when was that email sent? It was one of two that popped up in Cohen’s email inbox on April 21, 2018. Costello was a longtime friend and associate of Giuliani and was serving as intermediary between the president’s old lawyer, now in serious legal jeopardy, and his new lawyer, Horndog Rudy, whose full-time job was keeping the president out of similar jeopardy. “He asked me to tell you,” Costello wrote to Mr. Cohen, “that he knows how tough this is on you and your family and he will make (sure) to tell the President. He said thank you for opening this back channel of communication and asked me to keep in touch.”

We don’t know now if Cohen responded. But CNN has seen a second, follow-up email, later that day.

This time, Costello assured Cohen he had spoken with Giuliani and their conversation was “very very positive.” “There was never a doubt and they are in our corner,” Costello continued. “Rudy said this communication channel must be maintained. He called it crucial and noted how reassured they were that they had someone like me whom Rudy has known for so many years in this role.” 

Finally, Costello closed, “Sleep well tonight, you have friends in high places.”

So, was this a veiled hint to Cohen? Keep your yap closed and you can expect a pardon? If you have an ounce of objectivity, you know it sounds like it is. Costello told CNN that interpretation was “utter nonsense.” Well, CNN wanted to know, had a pardon been dangled in front of Cohen, or not?

Costello scoffed:

Does dangled mean that he raised it and I mentioned it to Giuliani, and Giuliani said the President is not going to discuss pardons with anybody? If that’s dangling it, that’s dangling it for about 15 seconds. The first time I kind of danced around the issue because Michael brought it up with me and I told him, “Look, this is way too premature.... But if you want me to bring it up, I will bring it up.” And I did.

Premature, yes. On the table? No doubt.

CNN tracked down Giuliani for this story and inquired: What about the “friends in high places” comment?

What exactly could these friends in high places do for Mr. Cohen—and who might those friends be?

“That was about Michael Cohen thinking that the President was mad at him,” Giuliani told CNN. “I called (Costello) to reassure him that the President was not mad. It wasn’t long after the raid and the President felt bad for him.”

Yes, the president felt bad for Cohen at the time—just like the president feels bad for Paul Manafort, as of today.

Trump feels bad for you so long as you remain on his team. And to remain on his team you clam up.

3/14/19: Well, young Americans, this is your lucky day. Your rich Uncle Sam has died and left you everything in his will.

Unfortunately, Uncle Sam borrowed a few trillion dollars before he died so all his bank accounts are cleaned out.

The new Trump Budget is out this week and funding for the Environmental Protection Agency is to be cut by 30%. You’re going to inherit more pollution, young people! And even supposing healthy 3% annual economic growth (as Trump and his advisers predict), the budget will not balance till 2034. Ha, ha, remember when your grandparents and parents slapped those MAGA hats on their heads and voted for Trump because he said he’d wipe out the national debt in just eight years? Well, it’s not going to happen, young Americans.

The new budget promises to repeal and replace Obamacare, too.

Also, when you are old and wizened, there will be no money for Medicare and Social Security will be flat broke.

In fact, according to Mr. Trump—or at least his economic advisers—you are about to inherit $1,000,000,000,000 in added debt this year, a trillion the year after, a trillion the year after that, and a trillion again the following year. That means Donald J. Trump is bequeathing you $7 trillion in added debt, if we include what he piled up in his first two years in charge.

On the other hand, if Trump has his way, Congress will allocate $8.6 billion for his big, beautiful wall. So at least you’ll have a wall to remember Trump by, when you are old and your Social Security checks bounce!

RED INK FOR YOU!

3/15/19: Is the president nuts? In his latest comments, Trump touts the idea that his side could win a civil war if it came to that.

In an interview with Breitbart News, the president describes “the left” in this country as “vicious.”

“So here’s the thing—it’s so terrible what’s happening,” he explains to Breitbart News political editor Matthew Boyle.

You know, the left plays a tougher game, it’s very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher. Okay? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad. But the left plays it cuter and tougher. Like with all the nonsense that they do in Congress… with all this invest—that’s all they want to do is—you know, they do things that are nasty. Republicans never played this.

So, if you’re into fascism, there you go. The president believes he has the police on his side. Even better, he has the military ready to march at his call.

As for votes, he’s got the “Bikers for Trump” to crack a few skulls if it ever gets “to a certain point.”

If it does—and Trump is speaking in hypotheticals so he can deny he ever said he was in favor of violence—he just wants his loony supporters to know “it would be very bad, very bad.”

Bad for whom?

Any Americans who refuse to support him.

3/16/19: Speaking of haters, Tucker Carlson of Fox News is in a jam. Liberal media outlets have the audacity to quote the Ghost of Tucker Carlson Past, which infuriates Tucker Carlson Present. Here’s his racist assessment of why the Iraq War was a mistake, for example: “Iraq is a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys [emphasis]. That’s why it wasn’t worth invading.”

Any thoughts on Afghanistan? “Well, it’s never going to be a civilized country because the people aren’t civilized.”

Arabs in general? In this conversation he’s talking with Bubba the Love Sponge and a co-host on Bubba’s radio show:

CARLSON: They’re also so just awful. Just awful.

CO-HOST: They’re animals, dude. They are.

CARLSON: I hate the war. You know, I’m not defending the war in any way, but I just have zero sympathy for them or their culture. A culture where people just don’t use toilet paper or forks.

President Obama?

CARLSON: I still can’t get over, you know, Obama saying, “They’re going to attack me because I’m Black.” I mean, that’s just ridiculous. I mean, that is so low to say something like that.

CO-HOST: Well, see, Tucker, here’s the—

CARLSON: Everybody knows that Barack Obama would still be in the state Senate in Illinois if he were white.

Is underage marriage—like to fifteen-year-olds—okay? Or is it the same as child rape?

CARLSON: Wait, wait! Hold on a second. The rapist, in this case, has made a lifelong commitment to live and take care of the person, so it is a little different. I mean, let’s be honest about it.

A thirteen-year-old boy having sex with his 28-year-old teacher?

CARLSON: I was just reading a story trying to figure out how to get it into our show tonight, about the kid, the 13-year-old, who was, I guess, molested, they’re saying, by his teacher, who had sex with him 28 times in one week.

…She slept with this kid 28 times in one week. Now, I ask you –

THE LOVE SPONGE: In one week?

CARLSON: You have a lot of experience. You’ve been around, right? Could you do that?

THE LOVE SPONGE: Could I sleep with—not a kid, but could I sleep with a woman—

CARLSON: Could you sleep with a 165-pound woman 28 times in one week? Are you physically capable of doing that or do you take your hat off to this kid?

THE LOVE SPONGE: Yeah, this kid should get like a Nobel Peace Prize.

CARLSON: The Presidential Medal of Freedom, anyway.

THE LOVE SPONGE: Now at the end of the day. But see, you know, now as double standard as everybody wants to be, it just seems like so much more of a crime from this beast then it does Debra Lafave, does it not?

CARLSON: Totally. Look, my theory on this is, you know, 13-year-old boys have one goal, obviously in life —

THE LOVE SPONGE: To get laid.

CARLSON: Of course. And they take that out on 13-year-old girls. Now, 13-year-old boys getting laid, not a bad thing. Thirteen-year-old girls getting laid, bad thing. Particularly if the 13-year-old girl is your daughter, right?

Exactly. So my point is that teachers like this, not necessarily this one in particular, but they are doing a service to all 13-year-old girls by taking the pressure off. They are a pressure relief valve, like the kind you have on your furnace.

In the next exchange, Carlson and The Sponge are discussing Alexa Stewart, the daughter of Martha Stewart:

THE LOVE SPONGE: They’re very cunty.

CARLSON: She seems extremely cunty.

THE LOVE SPONGE: I like to hear that word, oh yeah—I stepped over him. She seems what now? Go ahead.

CARLSON: She just does seem a little cunty. I mean you said it; I’m just agreeing with you. I don’t use that word because it’s offensive.

THE LOVE SPONGE: Right. I’d love for Tucker Carlson. Tonight on MSNBC a girl that comes across kind of cunty.

CARLSON: Well she does. I mean, I heard—I mean, now I’m a Brent fan, so, I’m just stating my bias right out front here. I heard her on with him and I just wanted to give her the spanking she so desperately needs.

Sarah Palin?

CARLSON: Well, I’ll tell you exactly. I mean, honestly, I voted for McCain, again, because I like the guy personal —

…

THE LOVE SPONGE: You want to fuck Sarah Palin.

CO-HOST: You want to talk about —

CARLSON: Well, there’s that. There is that. I’ll agree with that.

Thoughts on Elena Kagan, on being nominated for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court?

CARLSON: I got to be honest with you. I don’t like and I wouldn’t vote to confirm her if I were a U.S. senator. But I do feel sorry for her in that way. I feel sorry for unattractive women. I mean it’s nothing they did. You know, she didn’t. Nobody deserves that. And men are just mean.

Any thoughts on how to treat women, Tucker?

CARLSON: It’s true. It’s true. You debate politics with a woman and just go—just full blown out there, especially feminism. If you’re talking to a feminist, and she’s given you, “Well, men really need to be more sensitive,” [say] no, actually, men don’t need to be more sensitive. You just need to be quiet and kind of do what you’re told.

CO-HOST: And lighten up a little bit, bitch.

CARLSON: They love it. They love it.

More on women:

TUCKER CARLSON: By the way, women hate you when they do you wrong and you put up with it.

CO-HOST: Exactly.

CARLSON: Because they hate weakness. They’re like dogs that way. They can smell it on you, and they have contempt for it; they’ll bite you.

...

CARLSON: I mean, I love women, but they’re extremely primitive, they’re basic, they’re not that hard to understand. And one of the things they hate more than anything is weakness in a man. 

Anyway, Carlson Present angrily insists Carlson Past’s words were “spoken in jest” and they are taken out of context, just to make him look bad. (See: 5/2/19 for similar comments by Steve Moore.)

3/17/19: Since our topic of late is hate, let’s focus on Judge Jeanine Pirro. The Judge gets yanked from the air after attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar on religious grounds. Omar has indeed been critical of Israeli policies in the Middle East. Pirro decides to focus on what Omar wears—and by extension cast into doubt the loyalty of all Muslim-American women. “Think about it: Omar wears a hijab,” Pirro points out, “which according to the Quran, 33:59, tells women to cover so they won’t get molested. Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to Sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution?”

I’m not going to bother quoting any religious books, but direct right-wing haters to Article VI of the U.S. Constitution.

It reads in part:

The [U.S.] Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States [emphasis added].

That means a Muslim-American woman can wear a hijab if she likes and still serve in Congress.

(One wonders if Amish women, with their conservative clothing, scare Pirro too?)

Postscript: President Trump throws his support behind Pirro, ignores the fact that she has denigrated all Muslim-American women—that is, citizens Trump has sworn to protect and defend—and in backing up Pirro’s right to attack religious freedom, attacks the free press again.

“Bring back @JudgeJeanine Pirro,” he tweets. “The Radical Left Democrats, working closely with their beloved partner, the Fake News Media, is using every trick in the book to SILENCE a majority of our Country. They have all out campaigns against @FoxNews hosts who are doing too well.”

At no time since he was elected, by a minority of voters, has Trump had the majority of Americans on his side.

3/18/19: Remember how, in 2011, President Obama threatened civil war if he wasn’t reelected?

Alright. He didn’t.

Okay, what about that time a Democratic congressman said we were headed for war between the states?

Well, yes, several Democratic lawmakers did say that in 1861.

Still, if you know even a modicum of American history you wouldn’t talk glibly about “civil war” coming soon. At a time when the U.S. had a population of 30 million, the American Civil War (1861-1865) left 600,000 dead, making it the bloodiest fight in our nation’s history. That would be equal to a war costing 6.6 million dead today. And for what would we fight—to protect the president’s tax returns from being exposed?

Rep. Steve King (R-IO), decided to pick up the president’s threatening theme—that he has all the “tough” guys on his team. King decided to post a meme, tagged with the line: “Folks keep talking about another civil war. One side has about 8 trillion bullets while the other side doesn’t know which bathroom to use.”

The meme shows blue states battling red states, like figures from that kids’ game, Rock’em Sock’em Robot,” gone mad.

 Arizona forms the red figure’s head, Texas, the torso, Idaho the left knee. You get the idea. The blue figure’s left arm includes Wisconsin as fist, New Mexico as bicep, and Iowa where the forearm would be.

That’s how clueless and dumb Congressman King from Iowa really is. (See: 11/3/18 for more King ignorance—and racism.)

3/19/19: We have brand new information today to indicate what the Mueller investigation is up to and where it might be headed. This latest evidence supports two points. First, Michael Cohen is a sleazebag.

Second, the president should be worried.

“A veritable smorgasbord of crimes.”

Once again, we learn only when Mueller’s investigators reveal documents in court that they have far more evidence than any pundits know. Only now do we learn that the first search warrant, for Michael Cohen’s emails dating back to January 1, 2016, was filed on July 18, 2017. Two more warrants followed, one for cloud backup files on his phone, the other for emails dating to June 2015. We also find that, “On or about November 7, 2017 and January 4, 2018, as well as certain prior dates, the SCO [Special Counsel’s Office was allowed] …use of pen registers and trap devices to record communications sent to or from the Cohen account.

We already know Mr. Cohen is going to jail for what Judge William H. Paley III described as “a veritable smorgasbord of criminal conduct.”

These latest filings hint broadly that Cohen wasn’t the only one sitting down for a meal. F.B.I. agents received permission to collect “historical location data for two AT&T cellphones, from October 1 to November 8, 2016. There have been rumors that Cohen traveled to Prague in the months before the presidential election and met there with Russian hackers to discuss how to cover up ties between them and the Trump campaign. Then we have a section in the filings, 18 ½ pages long, headed “The Illegal Campaign Contribution Scheme,” which is redacted or blacked out.

What crimes and accomplices are listed beneath those dark pages, we cannot know. But for Team Trump there must be unease.

In all there are 895 pages of filings, often duplicated under different warrants, but filled with oddities. In early 2018 we learn Cohen and his wife took a three-month rental on Room 1728, an expensive suite at the Loews Regency Hotel. Federal law enforcement officials decided to include a search of that suite too. Agents were particularly interested in two cellphones which they were tracking with a “triggerfish” device and believed were kept at the hotel. These phones, agents believed, would contain evidence of “bank fraud,” “wire fraud,” “illegal campaign contributions” and, best of all, “conspiracy as it pertains to other Subject Offenses.”

We also learn that

on or about October 26, 2016, Cohen opened a new bank account for Essential Consulting L.L. C., ostensibly to allow him to operate a real estate investment consulting firm. On January 31, 2017, Cohen’s account received the first of seven checks totaling $583.332.98 from a holding company controlled by Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian national [emphasis added] and based in Switzerland.

Soon the money was pouring in, $1.1 million from Novartis, a pharmaceutical company, $600,000 from AT&T, four equal payments of $150,000 from KAI, a South Korean company that does business with the Pentagon, and a deposit of $150,000 from a Kazakhstani bank. Almost all the information about Essential Consulting, Cohen kept from the bank.

Then, at the bottom of page 38, you have the long, redacted section.

There’s another a comment about Cohen’s use of “encrypted communications applications,” including, “but not limited to, WhatsApp, Signal and Dust.”

On page 81 of the filing, even the name of the F.B.I. Special Agent involved is redacted.

Most of the filings relate to Cohen’s own offenses; but we know federal agents have been compiling massive evidence in his case. Now they want him to cooperate—and possibly bring down others. Another section is redacted after an agent claims “there is probable cause to believe that Subject Premises-3 [Cohen’s offices] will contain evidence of the Bank Fraud Offenses.”

Finally, on April 7, 2018 a warrant for permission to search “A Device containing the Results of Three Email Searches” is filed. That line is crossed out and replaced by hand with “Three Electronic Devices.” An agent (name and title redacted) explains that based on “conversations with witnesses” and reviews of other testimonies he or she is asking to expand the search, in particular because “there is probable cause to believe that the Subject Devices contain evidence of violations” of federal statutes related to “illegal campaign contributions.”

“During the course of this investigation,” the filings continue, “the USAO [U.S. Attorney’s Office] and FBI have obtained evidence that Cohen has also committed a criminal violation of campaign finance laws by…” and then another 19-page section is redacted.

Finally, in a filing on February 28, 2018, a judge agrees to the grant of a “non-disclosure order” for a warrant to search an email account, apparently owned by Mr. Cohen. The court rules that if the warrant is revealed it may lead to “destruction of or tampering with evidence or flight from prosecution, or otherwise…seriously jeopardize an ongoing investigation.”

At least 600 pages have to do with Cohen’s own machinations; but near the end we do learn quite specifically that investigators want location information from Cohen’s cellphones. Another warrant notes:

Cellphone service providers have technical capabilities that allow them to collect at least two kinds of information about the locations of cellphones to which they provide service (a) precision location information, also known as E-911 Phase II Data, or latitude-longitude data, and (b) cell site data, also known as ‘tower/face’ or ‘tower/sector’ information.

Then, a few pages later, a seventeen-page section of the filings is redacted once more. In fact, in one section we learn that “Michael Cohen, a lawyer who holds himself out as the personal attorney of President Donald J. Trump” is under investigation for “violation of the campaign finance laws.”

3/20/19: Reporters catch the president for a moment and ask if he thinks the Mueller report will be coming out anytime soon.

Trump says he has no idea when it might be coming out; but he’s not worried. “Let it come out, let people see it,” he says. “Let’s see whether or not it’s legit.”

In other words, Trump doesn’t know what’s going to be in the report. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have his mind made up. It’s all so unfair! Here he won the election in 2016. And in early 2017 stories begin to swirl—that the Russians may have helped the Trump cause. “I just won one of the greatest elections of all time in the history of this country,” he grumbles, looking back. “And now I have somebody writing a report that never got a vote? It’s called the Mueller report. So explain that because my voters don’t get it. And I don’t get it.”

Okay, me, me, me! I’ll give it a try.

As we now know representatives of your campaign had dozens of contacts with Russians once you decided to run—and after you won. Many of these contacts have been reluctantly admitted—under legal duress. By now, six aides have been convicted of felonies—and all six lied about contacts with Russians.

Frankly, sir, if your fans don’t get it, and you don’t get it, I must assume you and they don’t want to get it. Because if you do and they do, then everyone in American will realize you colluded—that is, conspired—with Russia.

Then you obstructed justice.

Okay, that was easy.

3/21/19: President Twitter Thumbs gets another bitter dose of reality when he learns Hope Hicks, who he once affectionately referred to as “Hopee” and “the Hopester,” has agreed to turn over documents to Congress and cooperate with investigators.

Her hometown newspaper explains why this could matter:

Greenwich [Connecticut] native Hope Hicks has agreed to cooperate with the House Judiciary Committee’s wide-ranging probe of alleged misconduct in office by President Donald Trump.

Hicks was as close to Trump as any of his deputies, both prior to the election and afterwards up to her departure from the White House last year. The document request sent to Hicks earlier this month ran four pages long, asking the 30-year-old former model and Greenwich High School lacrosse team co-captain for information on a multitude of controversies involving her former boss.

Most crucial, perhaps, will be what Hicks reveals about a wildly misleading letter [emphasis added] drafted in the summer of 2017, with her involvement, and that of President Trump and his son, Don Jr.

That letter was designed to obscure the purpose of the infamous June 2016 meeting between Trump campaign officers and agents of the Russian Federation. In other words: the one meeting that looks and feels, and smells, and if you listen, sounds like the essence of COLLUSION/CONSPIRACY.

And that would potentially mean a false letter drafted to obscure the purpose would be the very stuff of OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE.

(We are capitalizing like President Trump.)

There are reports that Hicks kept a detailed diary of her work in the Trump White House, which could prove valuable for investigators. It is also rumored that Hicks, sometimes described as Trump’s “surrogate daughter,” has been offered as much as $10 million to write a tell-all.

Ms. Hicks leaving Air Force One.

3/22/19: Trump announces, via Twitter, that he will be nominating “Stephen Moore, a very respected Economist,” to serve on the Federal Reserve Board.

“I have known Steve for a long time—and have no doubt he will be an outstanding choice!” (See: 3/29/19.)

3/23/19: The Russians decide to test the resolve of President Twitter Thumbs by landing two planes and 100 troops in Caracas, Venezuela.

They probably figure they can pull this off without a hitch because Trump has never heard of the Monroe Doctrine, won’t believe his advisers if they tell him what it says, and besides he still loves Putin.

3/24/19: Party time for President Donald J. Trump. The summary of the Mueller report, all four pages, totally exonerates him.

So Trump says.

 

Even according to the summary prepared by Attorney General William Barr, which includes 73 actual words from the Mueller report, that’s not what it says. It says Mueller was unable to find evidence of conspiracy between members of Trump’s campaign and the Russian government. 

As Barr notes, “The Special Counsel states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.’”

So: Not exonerated.

3/25/19: Party time for Trump! He’s been totally exonerated. “Christmas came early this week,” he tweets.

Now, the sky is the limit. He’s going to be the best president ever. He’s finally going to get Kim Jong-un to give up all his nukes. He’s going to get Mexico to pay for the wall. And he’s going to bang another porn star.

Only this time, he’s not going to get caught.

3/26/19: President Trump just can’t help himself. He’s a true dick. A true dick has to be what he is: a true dick. The Justice Department decides this is a perfect time to challenge the constitutionality of the entire Affordable Care Act. If this challenge succeeds the law gets wiped from the books.

That means protection for 133 million Americans with pre-existing conditions will be cancelled out.

That means, whatever the law’s flaws, healthcare for 21 million individuals covered under the ACA will vanish.

The last time Republicans tried to draft a healthcare plan of their own it went something like this: You say you had your foot cut off in an industrial accident? Well, take two aspirin and just be glad you have another foot.

What about the cap on premiums for older Americans, limiting what insurance companies can charge to three times what they charge younger customers?

That will be gone.

Well, screw granny! We need to build a wall to make America safe, at least for those who can afford to go to the doctor.

What about young people? Screw them too. An Obamacare provision which allows parents to cover children up to age 26 on their family health insurance will be a fond memory.

To be honest, Democrats couldn’t be happier with the president’s decision to raise this issue now. Last time the Republicans cobbled together a “repeal and replace” plan it garnered an approval rating of 12%. Or, if you believe polls are “rigged” anytime they look bad for Trump and his pals, you could go with the one that gave the plan a much better approval rating of 17%.

3/27/19: You know what America needs? Less government regulation! More opioids! And more toxic chemicals in our water!

We get another wakeup call regarding business ethics this week when we learn that there is always a company out there that lives by one guiding rule. If customers will buy it, and it might harm or kill them if they do, that company will still gladly sell it if it reaps them a fat profit.

First, a bit of good news: The State of Oklahoma (not exactly known to be crawling with socialists who want to cut the nuts off capitalists) wins a $270 million judgment against Purdue Pharma. Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter had sued Purdue and others, including Johnson & Johnson, for fueling the opioid crisis “with aggressive marketing of the blockbuster drug OxyContin and deceptive claims that downplayed the dangers of addiction.”

Then the bad news: No court settlement will bring back the 200,000 Americans who are estimated to have died from opioid overdoses in the last twenty years.

*

IF OPIOIDS don’t get you, maybe pesticides for breakfast will. In hopes of aiding old friends in the coal and oil industry, David Bernhardt, Trump’s new choice to head the Department of the Interior, stepped in and blocked regulations to control use of two pesticides: malathion and chlorpyrifos. It turns out, after years of study, scientists at the Fish and Wildlife Service determined those chemicals were so toxic “they jeopardize existence” for 1,200 species of endangered birds, fish and other animals. You know. First you spray the crops to kill pests. Then the chemicals get into the food chain. What could go wrong for humans!

Dow, which makes the pesticides, insists they’re perfectly safe, just like cigarettes used to be. Or opioids! Just to boost that narrative along, Dow donated $1 million to the Trump inauguration.

Bernhardt then stepped in (you get what you pay for) and with pretty much zero knowledge of the science, killed the new regulations.

So have some pesticides for lunch too.

Bad for the birds and the bees and for you.

3/28/19: Time to check on the stock market again to see what magic Trump has wrought. Okay. The Dow is up a bit today, closing at 25,717. That means, since the market closed at 19,804 on January 19, 2017, President Obama’s last full day in office, the Dow Jones is up 29.9%.

The day Obama took over as president, with the market in a catastrophic slide, the Dow stood at 8,281. It was still sliding and would drop to 6,547 by March 9, 2009, before bottoming out. Then Commie Obama (who wasn’t a commie) or Muslim Obama (nope, not a Muslim) took charge. By March 28, 2011, the Dow had risen to 12,220, for a gain of 47.6%.

In fact, if we were being honest, we would admit Obama inherited a mess. That would include a market that had lost six thousand points by the time he took charge. That precipitous plunge was touched off not by Commie Obama or Muslim Obama, but by George W. Bush. If you start at the point where the market hit bottom in March 2009 (at which point $13 trillion in assets had been wiped from the books) you could make the argument any reputable economist would make. By March 28, 2011, the Dow had risen 86.7% under Barack Obama’s steadying hand.

So, let’s stop a moment and consider a presidential tweet from last month. According to President Twitter Thumbs, had Democrats won the 2016 election, “the Stock Market would be down at least 10,000 points by now.”

You could look this up if you had just slightly more intellectual curiosity than the average baked potato. Alas, Donald J. Trump does not. Looking at the last seventeen presidents, going back to 1929, we see that when Herbert Hoover (a Republican) was in office the market dived 82.1 percent. Richard M. Nixon was second worst, with the market falling 28.3 percent. Plus, he got impeached. George W. Bush was third worst, with a plunge of 26.5%.

The worst Democratic president, in terms of market performance, was Jimmy Carter, who saw the Dow stagnate and drop 0.7 percent. Since 1929, every other Democrat registered gains: John F. Kennedy (15.8%), Lyndon B. Johnson (26.1%) and Harry Truman (75.2%). Three of the top four performers, if we’re going to let presidents claim credit for market gains, would be Obama (148.3%), Franklin D. Roosevelt (198.6%) and Bill Clinton (228.9%).

Plus, Bill got impeached.

Calvin Coolidge, a Republican, finished first, with the market exploding to a gain of 230.5 percent during his time in office. Or course, he got lucky and left office on March 4, 1929. The Great Crash came a few months later.

If nothing else, when Trump decided to make the claim that Democrats would cause the market to bomb, there was no historical precedent for his assertion. Or, to put it plainly: Trump was making shit up.

Best stock returns ever: Calvin Coolidge.
He got out just in time to miss the Great Crash of 1929.

3/29/19: If you fill the Swamp with enough alligators, technically they displace all the water and the swamp is drained. Stephen Moore, President Trump’s pick to fill a seat on the Federal Reserve Board, is found to owe $75,328.80 to the Internal Revenue Service, based on tax returns from 2014.

That bit of bad news is topped by a report that in 2012 the Virginia courts ruled that Moore would have to sell his home to satisfy a judgment against him by his ex-wife. At the time, Moore, Trump’s choice to steer the U.S. economy, owed more than $300,000 in alimony and child support.

Moore, of course, helped design the 2017 Trump tax cuts and has written a book called Trumponomics.

(On May 2, Moore will withdraw his name from consideration, claiming he’s been the victim of a “sleaze campaign.”)

*

WE LEARN that the full Mueller report, excluding tables and appendixes, is almost 400 pages long.

So AG Barr’s almost-four-page-long “summary” probably left a little detail out.

Manafort didn’t break: A pardon awaits.

As for this hard-working blogger, I must admit I was wrong in my assessment of the possibilities the Russia probe represented.

I said, for example, I’d be willing to bet Don Jr. got indicted. It looks like he may only end up being a liar and a sleaze.

I did say I thought evidence for impeachment was insufficient—unless Manafort broke.

Manafort didn’t break and a pardon awaits.

3/30/19: Weekend temperatures in parts of Alaska are 50° above normal. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the state is the “fastest-warming” part of our country. On March 19 the town of Klawock reported the earliest 70° temperature ever recorded in the state.

See if you can spot a trend:

A search of Trump’s Twitter feed shows that only once has he ever cited the NOAA in a tweet and that was to show pictures of how large Hurricane Florence was. By comparison, he has discounted climate change/global warming dozens of times, typically mistaking weather for climate. For instance, we had this on February 18, 2015: “Among the lowest temperatures EVER in much of the United States. Ice caps at record size. Changed name from GLOBAL WARMING to CLIMATE CHANGE.”

Any idiot—even the Idiot-in-Chief—could check NASA records and discover that, globally, for the entire year, 2015 was the second hottest year ever, with 2016 hottest, 2017 third hottest and 2018 fourth.

You could look up stories about the tremendous decline in ice in the Arctic Ocean. Or you could check NASA records for the last sixty years, noting significant ice losses in the Antarctic. Assuming you weren’t an idiot, you would not be fooled by Trump and the right-wingers who like to point to one NASA report that showed some ice gains in the Antarctic in 2015. 

Open waters in the Arctic allow ships to go where none have gone for thousands of years.

3/31/19: While President Trump has been bragging about how the Mueller report offers “total exoneration” in the Russia probe, a new poll shows that only 29% of Americans believe he’s in the clear. Four of ten say he’s not. Three of ten aren’t sure.

Trump’s overall numbers on the topic are boosted in large part by the 64% of Republicans who think Mueller cleared his name—most of who wouldn’t have believed Trump colluded with the Russians if Mueller had turned up evidence of multiple Trump campaign aides having secret meetings with agents of the Russian Federation offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. And evidence that other campaign advisers suggested sealing a Trump Tower Moscow deal by offering a free penthouse worth $50 million to Vladimir Putin. And evidence that Trump Sr. and Trump Jr. lied about the purpose of a meeting in Trump Tower with Russians.

Oh, wait, Mueller and the free press already did turn up evidence of all that.

April 1, 2019: April Fools’ Day, America! President Trump announced with confidence last week: “I understand health care now, especially very well. A lot of people don’t understand it.”

Repeal and replace plan coming after Election Day!

“We’re going to be the party of great health care,” he promised. “The Democrats let you down…And you will see this soon. Obamacare is a disaster.” Trump’s Justice Department had a lawsuit going and would soon “terminate” Obamacare and Make American Uninsured Again.

The gullible rubes who fell for the joke two years ago, when “repeal and replace” was going to be easy, fell for it again. “Everybody agrees that ObamaCare doesn’t work,” he tweeted Monday night. Don’t worry, though. The Republicans were “developing a really great HealthCare Plan with far lower premiums (cost) & deductibles than ObamaCare.”

He and Mitch McConnell would roll that great new plan right out, sometime after Election Day in 2020.

4/2/19: There are ample reasons to fear the president and the damage he’s doing to the country. You can start with his cozy relationship with Russians. His sustained attacks on the rule of law should terrify anyone who has read the U.S. Constitution or even studied the Cliff Notes.

 Indeed, the overarching problem is clear. Trump has devoted his first two years in office to encouraging 43 Americans out of every 100 to hate the rest.

“Traitors and scum like you.”

A recent recording of Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and Trump’s nut job pal, brings the point clearly to life. In a clip that lasts four minutes plus, Jones is accosted by a group of young people at a fried chicken joint. Apparently, they have been mocking him for his InfoWars rants.

   

Jones validates their disdain by erupting in a public tirade. He waves his hand at the other patrons, seated round the room. He shouts at his tormenters that these other customers are sick of their “shit.” “They’re Americans,” he barks, “not traitors and scum like you.” At one point he appears to challenge someone off camera to a fight, balling a fist, and leaning forward in burly menace. He calls the hecklers “shit.” “You ain’t American, you’re a slob,” he says, singling out one. “You’re the one running your fat, libtard mouth.” We wouldn’t have our freedoms, he continues, if it was up to people like these.

This is ironic, of course, because Jones—like his hero, Donald J. Trump—has never seen the need to don the uniform and defend his freedom, or anyone else’s, other than with his very big mouth.

“If you libtards don’t like free speech America,” he seethes, “that’s good.” There’s nothing in the film clip to indicate the young people don’t. They seem to be infuriating Jones simply by exercising that very right. “Go listen to your NPR,” he shouts. He calls them “scum” again.

When one good-size young man looks like he’s had enough and he’s ready to duke it out, Jones keeps filming with his phone instead and calls him “a coward.”

That’s what’s scary about Jones and so many on the far-right, and what’s ultimately most frightening about Trump. He and they deal in the kind of dehumanizing language Hitler and his henchmen employed. They hate many of the same groups. During a twelve-year reign of terror, the Nazis were happy to gas gays, lesbians, socialists, Jews and anyone not loyal to their rule. Hitler referred to his enemies as “vermin,” “parasites” and “untermenschen” or “under men.”

You hear the same kind of hateful rhetoric from the President of the United States. We on the other side saw it coming, even as he ran for office. We’ve seen it endlessly on display since. As a candidate, Trump swore he saw a video of thousands of Muslim-Americans celebrating on 9/11 when the Twin Towers fell. No one has seen the video since. Yet the toxin of hate was introduced into the national bloodstream. He implied that all Muslims were terrorists. He came into office promising to bar all members of the religion from entering the U.S. As a hater’s bonus he and half the pundits on Fox News—and Jones—convinced gullible chumps that Barack Hussein Obama was a Muslim, too. They stirred hate against Muslims the way Nazis stirred hate against Jews.

Winning means winning for himself.

We know, after watching President Trump for half his term, that he is bent on winning at any cost. And winning means winning for himself. Whatever weird psychology is at play, this means he is always happy to stir hate so long as it stirs his base. He got traction as a candidate by warning that “rapists” and “murderers” were pouring across the border, ironic now that we have learned how many undocumented workers wash up at his private clubs and find work. They don’t kill the patrons. They groom the fairways, prepare the omelets and plump the beds. But you can’t stir visceral fear and hate by focusing on groundskeepers, short order cooks and maids.

So “rapists” and “murderers” (and more recently, “MS-13”) it is!

You could have a sensible debate about what to do on the border. In fact, this country needs a sensible debate. But in Trump’s vituperative lexicon, those he hates and those he wants supporters to hate are never human. Recently, the president made that clear, insisting the people being deported are “animals.” True: Some of those who have been deported are despicable criminals. But Trump repeatedly employed the term “animals” to make a point he’s used before. He doesn’t deal in nuance. He wants others to hate and fear and react. “Animals,” he once tweeted, “killed that lawyer in a mall parking lot.” “Two deranged animals” killed two young Mississippi cops. “DEATH PENALTY,” Trump added to make his point. In October 2016, when someone set fire to a campaign office in North Carolina, Trump howled: “Animals representing Hillary Clinton and Dems in North Carolina” were on the loose. More recently, the president has called the London terrorists and MS-13 gang members “animals,” while repeatedly implying that the people showing up at our southern border are all MS-13 types, with Middle Eastern terrorists mixed in. And Democrats are evil, too. “DEMOCRATS ARE PROTECTING MS-13 THUGS!” he tweeted in May 2018. “Democrats are the problem,” he insisted last June. “They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13.” 

As Hitler realized, it was easier to consider gassing Jews if they were “vermin” and sub-human.

Trump, with his warnings about “animals,” and Jones with his “scum,” play the same twisted game.

The president’s targets are many and varied. When combined, they represent more than half the U.S. population. Democrats are the “Party of Crime.” They are the party that doesn’t care to stop the “animals.” Liberals want to take away all guns and all cars and make sure America is never great again. Transgender individuals are unworthy to serve in the nation’s military, even if they are willing—unlike all Trumps, so far—to do their part. In fact, “great Americans”—it is another trick of Trump to label his supporters “great Americans,” implying those who oppose him are not—must live in fear because transgenders want to sneak into public restrooms and molest their children. Gays and lesbians are another staple of right-wing hate, what with their demands to marry whomever they please.

Again, the Nazis would understand. Jews got yellow stars to wear in death camps. Gays and lesbians got pink triangles.

Trump has been adept at injecting the toxin of dehumanization into the national discourse. He doesn’t have political opponents. Those who launched the Russia investigation were “evil.” Democrats, Trump added last week, are “sick, sick people.” He denigrated Rep. Adam Schiff, calling him “pencil-neck,” the same kind of juvenile dehumanization that makes cruelty in any middle school easier for kids who take immature pleasure in hating their peers.

Like any school bully, Trump knows what he’s doing when he stokes hate. The label “sick” is a favorite in speeches and tweets. You have the “sicko” school shooters and “sick” terrorists. It’s no coincidence when he labels President Obama and James Comey “sick.” Sen. John Tester he called “very dishonest and sick” when he ran for reelection in 2018. Megyn Kelly was “sick” when she criticized Candidate Trump. All the reporters at The New York Times: “These people are sick.”

“Sick” people—as in deranged school shooters—are often a threat. And when Trump lambasts sick opponents, he wants his fans to feel the same stomach-churning fear they might if a psychopath was loose in their town and had kidnapped a toddler at the nearest park.

Trump is quick to hate, happy to dehumanize foes. Yet his fans fail to sniff danger. Rather, they howl. As far back as 2012, Citizen Trump was referring to critics as “lowlifes,” the equivalent of Hitler’s “untermenschen.” A woman who accused him of sexual impropriety was a “low-life.” Ted Cruz was a “lowlife pol.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former F.B.I. official Andrew McCabe were “lowlifes.” After Trump hired Omarosa to work in the White House, only to have her turn against him, he called her a “low life” and a “dog.” Rep. Adam Schiff is less than human. He’s “Schitt.”

Again: juvenile dehumanization.

The president has the instincts of all true haters and he’s happy to divide the American people, day by day by day. By stirring hate, he has cover to trample the law as he goes. Protesters at his rallies in 2016 were “thugs.” Trump made it clear he’d be happy if fans beat them to a pulp. When NFL players protested police brutality, and protested against him, their First Amendment rights became irrelevant. In Trump’s worldview those players hated America, hated the U.S. military, and hated the Stars and Stripes. The players insisted this was not the case. The president said they should be fined or fired or leave the country. When a sportscaster accused him of being a racist Trump said she should be fired too.

Trump’s Orange Fuhrer alter ego is increasingly on display. When he said recently that Rep. Schiff should be “forced to resign” from Congress, it was probably the first time any chief executive has ever made such a demand. One is reminded—again—of Nazis purging the Reichstag of representatives who were deemed unsuitably loyal to Hitler and the Third Reich. Trump has called those who launched the Russian investigation “treasonous” when the punishment for treason is death. When reporters call him out for policy blunders, for an endless stream of lies, for bizarre behavior related to the Russia probe, they are not doing what the free press has always done best, holding the powerful to account. In Trump’s world only hate can suffice. Those who fail to spew the kind of propaganda he likes are “the enemies of the people.”

It’s the language of Adolf Hitler, c. 1933, and it’s sad to see Trump’s 43% don’t understand how dangerous he is.

Postscript: For purposes of comparison, see: “I Read Mein Kampf, So You Don’t Have To.”

Trump isn't Hitler; but he uses some of the same tactics.

4/3/19: President Trump threatens, via tweet, to take drastic action if he can’t have his way and build the Great Wall of Trump. “Congress must get together and immediately eliminate the loopholes at the Border!” he warns. “If no action, Border, or large sections of Border, will close. This is a National Emergency!”

Joshua Bolten, speaking for the Business Roundtable, joins the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and pretty much every other trade organization in freaking out:

Shutting down the U.S-Mexico border or slowing cross-border trade would severely damage the operations of American businesses and hurt American workers.

Closing the border would back up thousands of trucks, impact billions of dollars of goods each day, cripple supply chains and stall U.S. manufacturing and business activity.

Other than that—yeah, closing the border! What a great plan. (See: 4/4/19.)

4/4/19: Trump decides to spout all kinds of fresh nonsense to begin the month. First, he threatens to shut down the border with Mexico. That idea is so dumb GOP lawmakers force him to recant within 24-hours (see: 4/3/19). Next, the president insists wind turbines cause cancer, a claim so bizarre the White House decides to address it by not addressing it at all (see: 5/14/19, for additional examples of killer windmills). He complains about an immigration decision issued by “Judge Flores,” a judge who doesn’t exist. He also claims his father was born in Germany when Papa Trump was born in the Bronx; and the president repeats this statement several times.

In fact, in one talk with reporters, the president butchers the word “origins,” stating it as “oranges.”

Then, because he’s incapable of admitting his mistakes, White House aides are forced to spend their time (paid for by the American taxpayer) denying Trump messed up the word at all.

He could have said “origami,” or “orgasm,” or “original fried chicken.” He’d have insisted he got the word “origins” right.

*

MEANWHILE, Republicans reacted on Thursday to news Democrats would subpoena the president’s tax returns.

“The Democrat agenda is still strictly focused on harassing the president,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise whined.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy labeled the request “a waste of time.” He warned that Democrats wanted to “use the power of government, the fear that every American has the government has become so strong they go after you because they don’t politically agree with you. It’s wrong.”

There are a few flaws in his complaint—including the fact McCarthy once told a gathering of Republicans that he thought Trump was one of two people the Russians paid. Nor does “every American” need to worry. Democrats are not subpoenaing “every American.” They want to see President Trump’s returns.

If we have any brains left after listening to Trump and his enablers, we might remember the time Candidate Trump said he’d be happy to release his taxes—as soon as the audit process was ended.

We have a right to know if our leaders are paying their share.

We know that almost every other major party presidential candidate in the last forty years has released his or her taxes. Gerald Ford released nothing more than a tax summary in 1976. He was the sole exception. Ronald Reagan released a single year of returns in 1980 and Mitch Romney went with two in 2012. By comparison, Bob Dole gave us thirty years’ worth of returns. Hillary Clinton, in 2016, released fifteen years, covering from 2001 to 2015.

Let’s be blunt. If you don’t dare show your taxes maybe you shouldn’t run for the highest office in the land. The American people have a right to know if their leaders are paying their share to keep the parks open, inspect the foods we eat, fund the military, test the drugs we take and—yes—construct the Great Wall of Trump. We don’t want them stashing hundreds of millions or billions in offshore bank accounts, like several members of the Trump cabinet.

Postscript: In the case of Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross it can be damnably hard to figure where he hides all his hundreds of millions. As Marketplace explains, “Each of the 664 dots [above] represents a business, holding company, offshore account, partnership or investment fund” in the Ross financial empire.

See the dot, center, below?

.

That’s what the “financial empires” of most American taxpayers who pay their shares look like.

4/5/19: Trump lovers are no doubt thrilled to hear that on Thursday ICE launched one of its largest raids in years, netting 280 undocumented workers at CVE Technology Group and four related businesses in Allen, Texas. No telling how many of those 280 were waiting to rape or kill upstanding Americans.

You can definitely assume they were all working cheap.

It’s odd how often businesspersons—who lean heavily Republican in voting preferences—are caught hiring the undocumented and then insist they believe we need a giant border wall. A check of public records fails to yield much info on Edward Cho, owner of CVE, but chances are he donates more to Republican causes and candidates than otherwise. Nearly three out of every four dollars donated to political parties in Texas end up in GOP coffers.

The state is controlled by Republicans: governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, both houses of the legislature. Both U.S. senators and 23 of 36 representatives in the U.S. House are members of the Republican Party. Yet the GOP is completely inept when it comes to curtailing the hiring of undocumented workers in the state.

The Texas Tribune pointed this out in an article in 2016:

In Texas, 1.1 million unauthorized immigrant workers made up 8.5 percent of the state’s total labor force, concentrated in industries like agriculture, hospitality and especially construction, where an estimated 25 percent of workers were unauthorized.

Researchers at the Workers Defense Project and the University of Texas at Austin put that number even higher, finding that half of surveyed construction workers in Texas said they were undocumented.

Typically, Tribune reporters talked to two undocumented brothers working in construction. They said they often put in 14-hour days, for which they earned $90, meaning they worked for $6.43 per hour, with no overtime pay.

So why don’t Texas Republicans do more to curtail illegal hiring? It pays handsomely to look the other way.

Republicans dominate Texas government at the state and national level.
But they can't seem to catch undocumented workers.
You almost think they don't want to.

4/6/19: You can tell the president and his toadies are starting to worry about what the Mueller report will reveal once it’s out. Trump, of course, has claimed that the report “totally exonerates” him. He didn’t collude with Russians. He didn’t conspire. He didn’t fart.

Two weeks ago, Republicans were so excited to have their main man cleared they went along with Democrats in the House of Representatives and voted 420-0 to have the Mueller report released.

The days passed and GOP hands grew clammy. When Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY), head of the House Judiciary Committee, moved to issue a subpoena for the full report, all seventeen Republicans on the panel decided that—on second thought—they really didn’t care to see what Mueller had said. The vote went against them, with all 24 Democrats still in favor of releasing the report.

Seventy-three words from the Mueller report were enough.

Rep. Devin Nunes, who used to run the committee, and couldn’t have found a Russian if a Russian hooker was seated in his lap, appeared on Fox & Friends. He went his GOP colleagues one better. He said he didn’t care what the 488-page report said. He didn’t care about Mueller’s findings. Nor did he have any desire to study appendices and documentation, which might double the length. “You know, we can just burn it up. It is a partisan document,” Nunes claimed.

He hadn’t read it, he admitted. He was merely using his totally non-partisan, clairvoyant powers to make a point.

Nunes told his hosts he thought the four-page summary released by Attorney General William Barr was great, including all 73 words quoted from the Mueller report. But in one poll only 18% of Americans believed the summary was good enough and a full 75% said they would like to see the full report.

A second poll was even more definitive, with 84% of Americans saying they wanted to see the report.

4/7/19: In news too good to miss we learn that Trump has been nominated again for the Nobel Peace Prize! This honor puts him in the running with 216 other individuals and 112 organizations.

There’s only one glitch.

For a second time, the committee which awards the prize discovers that the president’s nomination has been forged.

(I’m blaming Mike Pence.)

*

WE ALSO LEARN, according to Rick Reilly who has written a new book about Trump and golf, that Mr. Trump cheats as much on the links as he cheats on his wives between the sheets.

“If you’re playing golf with him, he’s going to cheat.”

“To say ‘Donald Trump cheats’ is like saying ‘Michael Phelps swims,’” Reilly explains. “He cheats when people are watching and he cheats when they aren’t. He cheats whether you like it or not. He cheats because that’s how he plays golf.…If you’re playing golf with him, he’s going to cheat.”

Typical of Trump’s behavior, here we have one of many stories related to Reilly for the book:

Mike Tirico, the former ESPN football announcer, said that he once hit a great shot that he knew was close. But when he got to the putting green, it was much farther away than he expected. Tirico didn’t understand what happened until Trump’s caddy spoke up. “Trump’s caddy came up to me and said, ‘You know that shot you hit on the par 5?’” Tirico said. “‘It was about 10 feet from the hole. Trump threw it in the bunker. I watched him do it.’”

And if Trump isn’t cheating at golf, he’s defeating Time itself. In his latest trip to the border, the Liar-in-Chief claims he’s scoring immigration holes in one and building ten thousand miles of new wall. Alas, the “new” section of wall he chooses for a photo op is an old section being rebuilt—and that rebuilding process was approved while Obama was in the Oval Office.

CBS is blunt. “Mr. Trump has yet to complete any new mileage of fencing or other barriers anywhere on the border.”

*

ANYTHING ELSE that might keep you awake at night? F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray testifies before a House panel and has this to say:

The danger. I think, of white supremacists, violent extremism or another kind of extremism is of course significant. We assess that it is a persistent, pervasive threat. We tackle it both through our joint terrorism task forces on the domestic terrorism side as well as through our civil rights program on the civil side through hate crime enforcement.

In 2018 almost every victim of a terrorist attack in the United States was killed by a home-grown white supremacist nut.

My friends and neighbors who support Trump aren't racists.
But if you are a racist, you support Trump.

*

WE ALSO LEARN that President Twitter Thumbs has picked some gems to represent us as ambassadors round the world. His nominee to the Bahamas testifies in Congress that the Bahamas are part of the United States.

*

WELL, THEN, how about a shout out for Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who recently justified spending cuts in her department, saying, “We are not doing our children any favors when we borrow from their future in order to invest in systems and policies that are not yielding better results.” With that, she announced that funding for Special Olympics would be ended, because, let’s face it, those kids…they’re still handicapped when the contests are finished.

Yes, the federal government will be running a $1,000,000,000,000 deficit for Fiscal Year 2020, even though President Trump promised his tax cuts and trade deals would lead to a balanced budget. DeVos and her family don’t need to worry. They got some massive tax cuts themselves. Plus, they’re still fooling customers who sign up to sell Amway products and like clockwork lose almost all the money they invest. Amway is essentially a Ponzi scheme by a politer name.

So, let’s screw Special Olympics kids!

Postscript: This decision is so crass and despicable that even Trump realizes it looks bad and overrules DeVos.

Naturally, he blames her for the idea.    

4/8/19: The dickishness of Donald J. Trump knows no bounds. Speaking to the Republican Jewish Coalition over the weekend, he goes out of his way to bash Rep. Ilhan Omar, who has been faulted for tone-deaf remarks about Israel. Or, as Republicans see it: “anti-Semitic” remarks.

We’ll put that issue aside and focus on the dick. “Special thanks to Representative Omar of Minnesota,” Trump tells his audience in mocking tone. “Oh, I forgot. She doesn’t like Israel. I forgot. I’m so sorry.”

See what a comedian he is.

This comes a day after Patrick W. Carlineo Jr., 55, of Addison, New York, is charged with making a threatening call to Rep. Omar’s office. In that call, answered by a staffer, he asks, “Do you work for the Muslim Brotherhood? Why are you working for her, she’s a (expletive) terrorist. I’ll put a bullet in her (expletive) skull.”

According to Fox News (yes, Fox News!), “Carlineo told the FBI that he is a patriot, ‘loves the president and that he hates radical Muslims in our government,’ according to a criminal complaint.”

Of course, he loves the president. (See: 4/2/19, and how Trump has mastered the art of spreading hate.)

Rep. Omar.

*

IT TURNS OUT Trump is still worried about what the Mueller report might reveal—even though he’s been “totally exonerated.”

You can always tell what goblins of thought are crowding the president’s head, because he’s going to tweet. His first post of the day, a quote from Fox News contributor Charles Hurt, comes at 6:39 a.m. This is pretty much like Hitler quoting Joseph Goebbels, his Minister of Propaganda. But here it is: “‘The reason the whole process [the Russian investigation] seems so politicized is that Democrats made up this complete lie about Collusion ....and none of it happened.’ Charles Hurt. The Russian Hoax never happened, it was a fraud on the American people!”

The president’s second tweet features another quote from another Fox News contributor. “‘Jerry Nadler is not entitled to this information [Trump’s tax returns]. He is doing this to get it to the Democrat 2020 nominee.’ @KatiePavlich”

Next come a trio of tweets, quoting Rep. Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who neither cares to see, hear of, or speak of President Trump’s returns. “Dems want President’s tax returns for purely political purposes!” Jordan insists. “There’s no law that says they have to be public.”

This is true as far as it goes, but the public does have a right to know if the tax laws of this nation are written in such a way as to allow a bragging billionaire to pay nothing to fund the government he loves to run. The American people need to know if Trump has his cash stashed in offshore bank accounts. We must be certain there’s no money laundering to be discovered in Trump’s financial records—in particular, money laundering involving assorted Russians. Finally, we want to know if Trump has ever cheated state and local government.

His old lawyer, Michael Cohen has intimated he did. (See: March 1, 2019.)

Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, he of Tea Party fame, has insisted that Democrats will “never” see the president’s tax returns. Because there’s nothing to hide. (See: 4/11/19.)

4/9/19: A study by the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity reveals that some of the largest companies in the country managed to avoid paying any federal taxes under the new Trump Tax Plan.

The 60 largest companies in the study combined for $79 billion in pretax income and included such giants as Amazon, Chevron and Eli Lilly. The last is especially ironic, since Lilly has devoted the past two decades to gouging type-1 diabetics, as prices for life-saving insulin rose by 800%.

We can also assume Eli Lilly CEO David A. Ricks got a sweet tax cut, personally, under the Trump Tax Plan, making it just barely possible to get buy on an income of $15,701,000 in FY 2018.

For FY 2017, when taxes were killing him, Ricks had to struggle to make ends meet on $15.8 million.

4/10/19: The president’s justifiable fears of what the Mueller report will reveal once it’s released are growing. 

In a pair of crazy tweets, Trump insists that duly appointed investigators were enemies of the state. “So, it has now been determined, by 18 people that truly hate President Trump,” he insists, “that there was No Collusion with Russia. In fact, it was an illegal investigation that should never have been allowed to start. I fought back hard against this Phony & Treasonous Hoax!”

He then expands the treasonous group: “I think what the Democrats are doing with the Border is TREASONOUS. Their Open Border mindset is putting our Country at risk. Will not let this happen!”

The president has dictatorial instincts; but his base doesn’t notice or, even worse, doesn’t care.

*

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, Trump made it clear he had a few fresh tools he’d like to employ if Congress and the federal judiciary would just stop barring his path. He claimed Democrats were refusing to change “horrible laws” that prohibit the U.S. military from getting “a little rough.”

The military, he whined, “can’t act like they would normally act. I’m going to have to call up more military. Our military, don’t forget, can’t act like a military would act. Because if they got a little rough, everybody would go crazy.”

If only the military could get a little rough! Frankly, it sounds as if the president is thinking along the same lines as the East German government in 1961, when it threw up the Berlin Wall. Guards were authorized to shoot East Berliners trying to flee. Or perhaps Trump’s model is the Chinese government when it decided to unleash the military on protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Lord Acton (1887)

4/11/19: Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, 82, the president’s sister, retires as a federal judge. Apparently, she takes this step in hopes of insulating herself from an investigation into possible tax fraud.

An earlier story in The New York Times cited documentary evidence that could lay grounds for a case against her. The Times reported:

Judge Barry had been a co-owner of a shell company — All County Building Supply & Maintenance — created by the [Trump] family to siphon cash from their father’s empire by marking up purchases already made by his employees, The Times investigation found. Judge Barry, her siblings and a cousin split the markup, free of gift and estate taxes, which at the time were levied at a much higher rate than income taxes.

Anyone else who might be involved in that alleged scheme?

Donald J. Trump.

*

HAVE WE MENTIONED “Fake News” lately? It turns out the President of the United States and Fox News have been spreading the fakest possible news. First: Fox. On Lou Dobb’s show, they posted the graphic below, supposedly based on a recent poll by Georgetown University. It shows Trump with an approval rating of 55 percent, the highest figure of his presidency.

Trump gets so aroused he has to tweet:

Naturally, his fans love it and the tweet piles up 130,000 “likes.” More than 32,000 people retweet the news!

Real reporters, and even ordinary citizens with a few brain cells, notice a problem with the graphic and the president’s tweet.

The poll cited actually found that 55 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of Trump, as a human being. Only 41 percent had a favorable opinion. As for the job he was doing, only 43 percent approved.

Despite what Trump likes to claim, his approval ratings have been consistently low since he took office.

*

FINALLY, “Sloppy Steve” Bannon, as Trump once labeled him, decides to comment on the possibilities in a 2020 election. He’s not sure the Democrats have put forward anyone who can beat Trump; but if Trump wins, Bannon has no doubt what we’ll get as a nation. “You’re going to get pure Trump off the chain. Four years of Donald Trump in payback mode.”

Neo-Fascist payback mode.

4/12/19: As of today, most transgender individuals are banned from serving in the military, unless they agree to serve in their “birth gender.”

As for those already serving—who may number in the thousands—Axios explains:

After April 12, no one diagnosed with gender dysphoria who is taking hormones or has transitioned to another gender will be allowed to enlist…and those currently serving can be discharged for doing so.

Military personnel will be given “a chance to change their decision,” or given a chance to agree to serve in their birth gender, before being discharged.

Realizing that the U.S. military will be losing hundreds if not thousands of active duty servicemen and women, members of the Trump family rush down, as they always have, and enlist...

Ha, ha! Of course not! Service to country is for suckers.

4/13/19: Here in Ohio, it is now illegal to have an abortion once a fetus registers a heartbeat, around six weeks. The new law will essentially make abortion illegal and end Roe v. Wade.

There are no exceptions for incest or rape.

In Texas, GOP lawmakers have toyed with the idea of making it possible to charge those who have abortions with homicide. In Texas that could lead to the death penalty.

The sponsor of the measure was Rep. Tony Tinderholt. As he explained, the bill might make people “consider the repercussions” of having sex. This would include, as in the Ohio law, those who “consider the repercussions” when they are being raped or young girls assaulted by older relatives.

Tinderholt, who has been married five times, should probably consider the repercussions of marrying.

The Texas bill was defeated.

4/14/19: The American Kratom Association (which we can assume you have never heard of) is insisting that the product members peddle, kratom, is perfectly safe and you should ignore what the Center for Disease Control and Prevention says in a recent report. You should dump the report in the garbage can and dump a boatload of their product into your next cup of tea.

Also, all government regulations are terrible and only commies want you to avoid taking kratom.

As USA Today reports:

Kratom is a plant grown naturally in Southeast Asian countries including Thailand and Malaysia, where it's been widely used for centuries. It's sold as a powder, typically in capsules, that can be used in tea to ease opioid withdrawals as well as fatigue, pain, coughing and diarrhea. 

So, is kratom dangerous? According to CDC, it is. From July 2016 to December 2017 at least 91 persons died from overdoses.

According to those who market this product, kratom will also help you sleep more soundly, perhaps forever.

4/15/19: In recent days, the president has been floating all kinds of bizarre ideas, where illegal immigrants and refugees seeking asylum are involved. That includes attacking the federal judiciary every time he fails to get his way:

Once again, his unreasoning fans ignore his Orange Fuhrer instincts—as evidenced by the 77,000 “likes.”

A one-branch form of government? Why not! How come the Founding Fathers never thought of that?

In fact, there have been several reports that Trump has been telling border officials if they break the law and refuse to allow refugees to enter the U.S., he will pardon them, no sweat. According to CNN, two sources reported that Trump told border patrol agents to ignore any orders from judges. “Sorry, judge, I can’t do it,” he told them to say. “We don’t have the room.”

Even better is his “plan” to dump illegals who enter the U.S. in asylum cities, because, hey, why not screw citizens in parts of the country that didn’t vote for you and don’t support your every move.

Consider how dumb this “plan” is. First, legal or not, Trump would be asking Customs and Border Patrol to transport asylum seekers and others, hundreds of miles north to cities like San Francisco, St. Paul, Minnesota and Newark, New Jersey.

Second, local authorities might simply decide: “Hey, we’re sanctuary cities. We’re not going to lock these people up.” Presto, all the immigrants the president wants to block at the border—because he says they’re “animals” and MS-13 gang members—go free and scatter across the country.

Obviously, this is a stupid plan and would only encourage migrants to try to reach the border, get arrested, and receive transportation deep into the interior. Yet this morning, making the talk show rounds, Press Secretary Pinocchio insisted that the president really “likes the idea,” and “we’re looking to see if there are options to make it possible.”

So: If wages are miserable in Guatemala or gang violence threatens your family in El Salvador, pack your bags.

The Trump Administration is going to send you to Boston—or Chicago—or Detroit or Washington D.C.—all sanctuary cities.

  

Postscript: On This Week, host George Stephanopoulos tried to pin Pinocchio down. He noted that when news of this plan first leaked a few days ago, the White House denied it. He added that the Department of Homeland Security had already announced that such a plan would be illegal. 

“Democrats have said they want these individuals into their communities,” Pinocchio responded, ignoring the question of legality, so “let’s see if it works, and everybody gets a win out of it.”

This would seem to indicate that the Press Secretary has suffered brain damage as a result of shilling for Trump for years. You could point out that not all the citizens of, say, Newark, are “Democrats.” You might mention that “Independents” living in St. Paul might not want dangerous individuals—as Trump always portrays them—deposited on their doorsteps.

And you could highlight how petulant and insane Trump sounds, when he tweets this kind of message:

4/16/19: Has anyone seen President Trump’s taxes? Of course not. He says they are still under audit.

But just to be safe, Trump and his children sue Democratic lawmakers to keep their tax returns secret.

“Investors, including federally insured financial institutions, suffered billions of dollars in losses”

Department of Justice notice

4/17/19: GE has agreed to pay a $1.5 billion fine stemming from fraudulent subprime loans issued in 2005-2007, by WMC Mortgage, a GE subsidiary. According to the Justice Department, “Investors, including federally insured financial institutions, suffered billions of dollars in losses” as a result of WMC’s illegal practices.

This proves again that giant corporations need gigantic tax breaks and government regulations are always bad.

None of the top executives at WHC Mortgage had to face criminal charges or worry about going to jail, of course. By comparison, Ryan Seibert, 22, was sentenced to seven years in prison for robbing a bank near Dayton, Ohio in 2015.

His take: $10,000.

4/18/19: Yesterday, our subject was crooks. Today, let’s talk about healthcare. According to court documents, two whistleblowers have accused Questcor Pharmaceuticals (now Mallinckrodt) of lying to the Food and Drug Administration and bribing doctors to boost sales of H.P. Acthar Gel, used to treat rare infant seizure disorders.

A vial of Acthar gel now goes for $39,000.

Why risk bribery? It turns out the price of the gel has increased a bit since 2000, when a vial cost $40.

To put it plainly, a quick chase of facts across the internet shows that raising prices has been good for the bottom line, even if bribery was required. During the first half of this decade the value of Questcor stock rose 600%. The CEO gave his daughter, who also worked for the company, a $700,000 raise in one year. Mallinckrodt, once it acquired Questcor, had to pay a $100 million fine for blocking a competing drug that could have been used to treat the disorder from reaching market. That didn’t stop CEO Mark Trudeau from earning $9.7 million in 2015.

After all, a vial of Acthar goes for $39,000 today. The government (i.e. you the taxpayer) picks up most of the $2 billion in annual costs.

I wonder if Trump pays any federal taxes at all?

4/19/19: There is nothing President Trump hates more than “Fake News,” and no source of “Fake News” he hates so profoundly as The New York Times. Trump keeps insisting the Mueller report totally exonerates him. “NO COLLUSION. NO OBSTRUCTION,” he likes to tweet.

Meanwhile, the Times keeps putting out “Fake News” stories. On Friday, the “enemies of the people” strike again, after reporters read the report and publish actual quotes. Here are a few gems.

From Page 9, Volume I of the Mueller Report:

The investigation established that several individuals affiliated with the Trump Campaign lied to the office, and to Congress, about their interactions with Russian-affiliated individuals and related matters. Those lies materially impaired the investigation [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted] of Russian election interference.

Page 78, Volume II:

“When Sessions told the president that a special counsel had been appointed, the president slumped back in his chair and said, ‘Oh, my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.’”

Did the Mueller Report clear the president of obstruction?

Page 182, Volume II:

“If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment.”

Did Trump try to obstruct?

Page 158, Volume II:

The president’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.

…The incidents were often carried out through one-on-one meetings in which the president sought to use his official power outside of usual channels. These actions ranged from efforts to remove the special counsel and to reverse the effect of the attorney general’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony. Viewing the acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance.

Allow me to “illuminate” the significance of Trump’s “direct and indirect contacts with witnesses.”

Here’s what he told reporters last November, regarding Paul Manafort, a witness who had potentially devastating testimony to offer:

Finally, did Trump cooperate fully with the investigation—as Attorney General William Barr has suggested?

Appendix C, Page 1:

We received the President’s written responses in late November 2018. In December 2018, we informed counsel of the insufficiency of those responses in several respects. We noted, among other things, that the President stated on more than 30 occasions that he “does not recall” or “remember” or have an “independent recollection” of information called for by the questions. Other answers were “incomplete or imprecise.”

Did Team Trump have questionable contacts with Russians? (At this point, you might think no sane individual would question that fact.)

Page 173, Volume I:

The investigation established multiple links between Trump Campaign officials and individuals tied to the Russian government. Those links included Russian offers of assistance to the campaign…Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.

So, multiple links.

Bumbling attempts to obstruct justice.

Lies that materially impaired the investigation.

Trump’s incomplete written answers—written because he refused to be deposed and answer under oath.

That might not be enough to determine legally that Trump and the Russians conspired; but it’s certainly not total exoneration.

Finally, Mueller is clear on the role Congress might still play.

Page 8, Volume II:

“The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the president’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.”

4/20/19: The president often complains about the laws and we know he’s a fan of torture and the death penalty.

Apparently, no one has told him that a record number of Americans were exonerated last year.

Not him.

The 151 prisoners released in 2018 spent a total of 1,639 years behind bars, including 66 persons jailed for murder. In 23 cases exoneration was based entirely or in part on DNA proof. In 99 cases prosecutors helped free wrongly convicted prisoners. Richard Philips was freed after spending 45 years and two months in a Michigan prison for a murder he did not commit. Wilbert Jones spent 44 years, 9 months, behind bars in Louisiana for a sexual assault carried out by another man. Vincente Benavides was released after 25 years on California’s death row, the kind of place where an alarming number of individuals have been lodged, before justice prevails.

In all, this brings the total number of “criminals” exonerated in the last two decades to 2,418 and pushes years lost in prison to 21,095.

Postscript: Phillips, at least, will receive $1.5 million in restitution for his nearly half-century lost.

4/21/19: A few short weeks ago, Trump was telling reporters Robert Mueller acted honorably during the Russia investigation and claiming the final report offered “total exoneration.” Since then, aides have apparently sat down and read parts of the report to President Dimwit.

That means he’s going to be mad and he’s going to tweet, four times today alone, on the topic. Let’s summarize: “Trump Haters and Angry Democrats,” a “total ‘hit job,’” “Radical Left Democrats,” “this is costing our Country greatly,” “Witch Hunt,” “Disgraceful!”

If you’re a fan of Donald R. (“R.” for Russia) Trump, you should read the report yourself. Try to keep track of all the Russian contacts Trump and his band of buccaneers had and all the lies they told to conceal them.

Keep your calculator handy.

4/22/19: Most people have probably never heard of Cardinal Health, McKesson and AmerisourceBergen, but those three corporations rank among America’s top fifteen for revenue.

What do they do? They are middlemen, distributing medications of all kinds, lately opioids, especially.

Now several state governments have accused the companies of evading regulations in various ways, even warning pharmacies that were selling suspiciously high amounts of the drug that they were about to be audited by Drug Enforcement Agency officials. The distributors continued, for example, to send tens of thousands of pills to doctors who were later indicted for drug trafficking.

And why not? The distributors were making a killing. Between 2010 and 2018 the three companies passed out 1.6 billion opioid pills—in just the State of New York. During a five-year stretch McKesson filled 1.6 million orders for opioids, but despite laws requiring distributors to flag suspicious orders, flagged only 16, or, one order per every 100,000. The company paid a $150 million penalty to the federal government for lax oversight from 2008 to 2013. But profits piled up and if 218,000 Americans died over twenty years as a result of opioid overdoses—well, the profits did pile up—almost as high as the corpses.

That meant when CEO John H. Hammergren retired in 2013, McKesson could give him a $159 million retirement package.

It was later “slashed” to $114 million.

You got more opioids! I got $114 million.

4/23/19: Is it just me, or does Team Trump just naturally attract swindlers, charlatans and thieves?

In 2015, John Lambert and Ryan Fournier, students at Campbell University, a North Carolina school with strong Baptist ties, founded “Students for Trump.” The group grew to include 300 chapters. The Trump campaign embraced the organization and Lambert showed up on Fox News explaining with youthful enthusiasm plans to help Trump Make America Great Again.

So far, so good, if you cherish the right of every American to speak his or her mind and vote for the candidate of their choice.

Alas, Lambert has been charged with wire fraud by prosecutors with the Southern District of New York. By posing online as a lawyer named “Eric Pope” he allegedly bilked would-be clients out of thousands of dollars. Lambert/Pope’s fake online firm even copied attorney biographies from another website.

4/24/19: Someone doesn’t understand how the U.S. Constitution works. Surprise! It’s President Trump!

Apparently, if lawmakers in Congress move to impeach him, he has a secret plan to stop them. He will appeal to Justice Brett Kavanaugh and his friends PJ, Bernie and Squi.

Trump says he’ll head to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, last time I taught seventh graders, had no role in the impeachment process, save for the fact the Chief Justice presides over any trial in the Senate.

By the way, if you’ve never noticed, the President of the United States has only a passing understanding of numbers. On November 29, last year, he complained that the Mueller probe had wasted $40,000,000.

This past April 19, he said it cost $30,000,000.

At this point, Trump could claim that 93 million Americans were unemployed when Obama left office—which he did claim—and then brag that he has added five million jobs since taking office—he has—and his fans would believe Obama left all those people looking for work and now they have jobs!

It’s fiscal loaves and fishes.

*

IN OTHER NEWS, White House aide and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner makes a rare public statement.

Kushner tells Time the Mueller probe was an awful mistake. “The whole thing is just a big distraction for the country,” he says. “You look at what Russia did—buying some Facebook ads to try and sow dissent. And it’s a terrible thing, but I think the investigation and all the speculation that’s happened over the past two years has had a much harsher impact on our democracy.”

Yes, indeed.

We would never want democracy to be impacted, as for example when Jared, Donald J. Trump Jr. and Trump campaign manager (and now convicted felon) Paul Manafort sat down with Russians in June 2016, with the understanding that the Russians would help them win the election.

4/25/19: According to President Trump, the Mueller Report has cleared him of any and all wrongdoing. Mueller’s investigators discovered that Trump never cheated on his wives, that he never cheated students who enrolled at Trump University and that he never cheats on the links.

At least a half-dozen crimes of obstruction committed by Trump

Not everyone is buying that construct. (See, in particular: May 1, 2019.) One who disagrees is Judge Andrew Napolitano, longtime legal expert on Fox News. We are guessing he won’t be seen much longer on that channel.

Napolitano is clear and concise in his explanation and it’s worth reading:

The Constitution prescribes treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors as the sole bases for impeachment. We know that obstruction of justice constitutes an impeachable offense under the “high crimes and misdemeanors” rubric because both presidents in the modern era who were subject to impeachment proceedings—Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton—were charged with obstructing justice.

Obstruction is a rare crime that is rarely completed. Stated differently, the obstructer need not succeed in order to be charged with obstruction [emphasis added]. That’s because the statute itself prohibits attempting to impede or interfere with any government proceeding for a corrupt or self-serving purpose.

Thus, if my neighbor tackles me on my way into a courthouse in order to impede a jury from hearing my testimony, and, though delayed, I still make it to the courthouse and testify, then the neighbor is guilty of obstruction because he attempted to impede the work of the jury that was waiting to hear me.

Mueller laid out at least a half-dozen crimes of obstruction committed by Trump—from asking former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland to write an untruthful letter about the reason for Flynn’s chat with Kislyak, to asking Corey Lewandowski and then-former White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller and McGahn to lie about it, to firing Comey to impede the FBI’s investigations, to dangling a pardon in front of Michael Cohen to stay silent, to ordering his aides to hide and delete records.

The essence of obstruction is deception or diversion—to prevent the government from finding the truth. To Mueller, the issue was not if Trump committed crimes of obstruction. Rather, it was if Trump could be charged successfully with those crimes.

Mueller knew that Barr would block an indictment of Trump because Barr has a personal view of obstruction at odds with the statute itself. Barr’s view requires that the obstructer has done his obstructing in order to impede the investigation or prosecution of a crime that the obstructer himself has committed. Thus, in this narrow view, because Trump did not commit the crime of conspiracy with the Russians, it was legally impossible for Trump to have obstructed the FBI investigation of that crime.

The nearly universal view of law enforcement, however, is that the obstruction statute prohibits all attempted self-serving interference with government investigations or proceedings. Thus, as Georgetown Professor Neal Katyal recently pointed out, former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was convicted of obstruction for interfering with an investigation of his extramarital affair, even though the affair was lawful.

Read the Mueller Report for yourself. If you’re fair-minded, you’ll quickly discover that the President of the United States made repeated efforts to thwart a legal investigation.

4/26/19: We learn—because the free press is still doing its job—that when North Korea released hostage Otto Warmbier in 2017, they handed U.S. negotiators a bill for $2 million to cover the prisoner’s “medical care.” According to the Washington Post the Americans agreed to pay after consultations with President Trump. Warmbier died a few days after he was returned to U.S. custody.

Naturally, this story makes Trump mad because it makes Trump look weak. He says he never paid the bill. Later, his National Security Advisor, John Bolton, admits we agreed to pay. Now, perhaps because the agreement is out in the open, we’re apparently going to renege. North Korea gets zero dollars, despite our promise to pay; and after 28 months of Trump in office, his pal Kim Jong-un has surrendered exactly zero nuclear weapons.

Since Trump hates to look weak and stupid, and the Warmbier story makes him look both, he has no choice but to tweet-brag about his own greatness. That means we are treated to this gem: “‘President Donald J. Trump is the greatest hostage negotiator that I know of in the history of the United States. 20 hostages, many in impossible circumstances, have been released in last two years. No money was paid.’ Cheif Hostage Negotiator, USA!”

This tweet is interesting because

A)    The president misspells “chief.”

B)     The U.S. has no “Cheif Hostage Negotiator.”

C)    No one comes forward to claim they said what Trump says was said.

This is by no means the first time Trump has manufactured quotes to make himself sound good. My favorite may be the imaginary Boy Scout leader who told Trump he had given the greatest speech ever heard at a Boy Scout Jamboree.

What we know now is that lying is as natural to this president as respiration. The Washington Post reports that as of today, Trump has made 10,000 “false or misleading statements” since taking office.

By the end of his term, 20,000 could be in reach.

4/27/19: On a typical day in America 128 people die from opioid overdoses. The spread of cheap heroin and powerful synthetic opioids like fentanyl, referred to by law enforcement officials as “manufactured death,” contributes heavily to the carnage. Military veterans, who often suffer from pain related to wartime injuries, are twice as likely to overdose as those who have never served. The number of infants born with an opioid dependency has skyrocketed.

So, to stop the illegal drug traffic, we need to build a giant border wall, correct? Not according to the Council for Foreign Relations, which reports:

Most of the heroin coming into the United States is cultivated on poppy farms in Mexico, with eight cartels controlling production and operating distribution hubs in major U.S. cities. Mexican cartels, which the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has called the “greatest criminal drug threat to the United States,” typically smuggle narcotics across the U.S. southwest border in passenger vehicles or tractor trailers [emphasis added]. Large quantities of heroin are also produced in South American countries, particularly Colombia, and trafficked to the United States by air and sea.

In fact, if you really want to cut the supply of opioids in this country, forget the Wall. Go after the drug manufacturers and distributors, and their lobbyists who keep pushing more and more pills out to the streets. They’re making billions and leaving the nation awash in dangerous drugs.

Drug smugglers dug this 590-foot long tunnel from a home in Mexico
to a former KFC restaurant across the border in Arizona.

4/28/19: Trump attends a rally in Wisconsin. We all know what that means. Lies and plenty of them, and loud cheering by fans who never check the veracity of what their orange idol says.

According to Trump, now that the Democratic governor is going to veto a Republican bill requiring healthcare professionals to provide treatment for babies born alive after failed abortions, in Wisconsin this will be allowed: “The baby is born,” he insists. “The mother meets with the doctor. They take care of the baby. They wrap the baby beautifully, and then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby. I don’t think so.”

Catastrophic birth defects: children born without brains.

Governor Tony Evers doesn’t think so, either. Neither does anyone else who isn’t totally uniformed.

As the Milwaukee Sentinel-Journal reports,

Evers said he will not sign the bill because of existing protections and criminal penalties in state law.

“I think those protections already exist,” Evers said in an interview Monday. “We have all sorts of issues to deal with in the state of Wisconsin and to pass a bill that is redundant seems to be not a productive use of time. And clearly I ran on the belief — and I still believe — that women should be able to make choices about their health care. But this deals with a specific issue that’s already been resolved.”

You might say this is GOP grandstanding, because it is. Late-term abortions are extremely rare (roughly 1 in every 100 abortions occurs after 21 weeks). Even more rarely do late-term abortions fail. Such procedures almost always involve efforts to save the mother’s life or catastrophic birth defects, like anencephaly. That is, children born without brains. According to the National Institute of Health, 60 percent of children so born do not survive for 24 hours.

Only 2 in every hundred, if I read the NIH statement correctly (5% of the “40%” who live past one day) survive a week.

It would seem, then, that Republicans might have better ways to use their time than to interfere in medical and family decisions of the most complex, emotional kinds.

They could be going after the crooks who jack up drug costs to obscene levels. That might be nice.

4/29/19: Speaking of medical decisions, measles cases in the U.S. have surged to more than 700 this year. The virus, declared eradicated in this country in 2000, has reemerged in 22 states. One center of infection is the Orthodox Jewish population in New York City, with nearly 400 cases. Hundreds of college students in Los Angeles are under quarantine as measles spread. So are passengers and crew aboard the Freewinds, a cruise ship owned by the Church of Scientology.

Health officials fault President Trump in part, since he has said that childhood vaccinations cause autism. 

Praise for saying what experts have been saying for decades.

On Monday, however, the Science-Moron-in-Chief told reporters to spread the word. Children “have to get the shots. The vaccinations are so important. This is really going around now. They have to get their shots.”

Reporters questioned HHS Secretary Alex Azar about the outbreak. Naturally—this is the Trump Administration—Azar praised his boss for saying what experts had been saying for decades: “The president is very clear that children should get their shots, that parents should make sure they are up to date.”

Azar shrugged off the president’s statements, as recently as 2016, linking vaccinations to autism, saying they were based on a “debate about this issue but it’s been settled. The scientific community generated definitive information so we can reassure every parent there is no link.”

The debate was settled decades ago and not just since 2016.

Sixty-six children have been hospitalized this year with serious medical complications related to measles.

*

IN OTHER NEWS, a 19-year-old man armed with an AR-15, storms into a synagogue in Poway, California and kills or wounds four. Republicans offer up “thoughts and prayers.”

Since their party is in thrall to the N.R.A., we can never take any action on guns, no matter how logical or how small the step.

4/30/19: Hooray for giant corporations! The Trump Labor Department has your back! This week the Department ruled that gig-economy companies may indeed classify workers as “contractors.”

This means that companies like Uber and Lyft will be able to pay less than minimum wage, will not need to grant overtime, and will not be required to pay a share of the “contractor’s” Social Security taxes.

Experts estimate that if gig companies had to abide by old-fashioned rules, “labor costs” would increase 20 to 30 percent. You know: “labor costs,” as in, fair wages and benefits for workers. If “labor costs” rose for drivers at Lyft, for example, how could Lyft award CEO Logan Green almost $42 million in compensation in 2017?

To give you some idea of how hard it is for giant corporations, protected by phalanxes of lawyers, legions of lobbyists and lawmakers who love them for their fat campaign checks, here are a few companies that paid NO federal taxes last year and, in many cases, got tax rebates too:

Yes, you are reading this chart right. Amazon had nearly $11 billion in profits and paid no taxes. Delta Air Lines made $5 billion in profits and received a rebate. General Motors (bailed out of bankruptcy by taxpayers in 2008) paid the U.S. government zero. And got a rebate! Ameren, the drug manufacturer, made a billion and paid less in taxes, probably, than you did.

Postscript: The General Motors bailout cost taxpayers an estimated $11.2 billion in the end. In 2018, CEO Mary Barra had to clip coupons to squeak by on salary and compensation totaling $21.87 million.

Trump loves Trump.