Uh . . .

Initial thoughts on Trump's intent to nominate Matt Gaetz as Attorney General:

Many do not appreciate the subtlety and nuance of Donald Trump's thinking on political philosophy and governance.  It was a recent rereading of The Federalist, a copy of which he keeps on his bedstand, that inspired him to devise this test of the political and moral strength of our institutions and of the system of checks and balances developed by our Founders.  It's a test reminiscent of Solomon's in the Old Testament.  Just another example of 4-D chess from The Master.

On second thought:

Nominating Matt Gaetz for AG is a political and moral atrocity.  A disaster should he actually become AG.

There is nothing 4-D about it.  Trump will only appoint as AG a person that he has complete faith will unquestioningly follow his instructions and desires and be his "wingman" just as Bobby Kennedy was for his brother and Eric Holder for Barack Obama.  Expertise in the law or in the day to day issues addressed by the Department of Justice is of a secondary, or even tertiary, concern.

To understand why, we need to go back to January 2017, when the Russia collusion story explodes publicly.  Trump knows the allegations contained in the Steele Dossier are phony, though much of the public, including myself, don't know what to make of it.  

He's appointed Jeff Sessions as Attorney General.  Sessions is not a personal friend, but was the first senator to endorse Trump.  However, he's also an old-fashioned "honorable Republican" statesman and when presented by the Democrats with a phony conflict of interest story about the Russian ambassador he recuses himself from anything to do with the Russia collusion allegations (something Eric Holder would never have done in similar circumstances).  It effectively leaves the Justice Department's actions in that matter in the hands of Trump's political enemies.

By later in the spring, Trump becomes aware James Comey at the FBI is actively conspiring against him and fires the FBI Director, but allows Andrew McCabe to become acting director, not realizing he is also part of the conspiracy to get the president.

In May, Robert Mueller is appointed Special Counsel for the Russia investigation.  By now, Trump has his own lawyers to represent him in that investigation.  Those lawyers are experienced hands, but not previously known to Trump and hired on the recommendation of people around him.  They tell the president that Mueller is a straight shooter with a great reputation and advise him to cooperate fully which they think will quickly put an end to the investigation.

Trump takes that advice, does not invoke Executive Privilege, and turns over more than 1 million White House documents and allows his own White House Counsel to be interviewed about conversations he had with Trump, an unprecedented move by any president in American history.

It is from his counsel's interviews that we know, as reported in the Mueller Report, on at least two occasions, Trump complained that he needed an Attorney General like Bobby Kennedy or Eric Holder to protect him, just like they protected their presidents.

But despite giving the cooperation as advised by his lawyers, Mueller did not go away.  To what extent Mueller was already mentally slowed down, as we saw in 2019, is unknown, but it was no secret he despised Trump and he hired a rabid pack of Democratic partisan lawyers who were never going to stop their investigation, regardless of the facts.

To become the new FBI Director, Trump nominated Christopher Wray, as suggested by Chris Christie.  Wray was not personally familiar to Trump and has turned out to be horrible at the agency.

In February 2019, William Barr became Attorney General.  Barr saved the Trump presidency by finally shutting down the Mueller gang, and provided good advice to help advance several of the president's initiatives.  However, Barr was not a MAGA devotee who would do anything the president demanded, several times disagreeing with Trump.  Things finally cratered between the two of them when, after the 2020 election, Barr reported (correctly) to Trump that he found no evidence the election was stolen.  Now Barr is considered an agent of the Deep State.

The bottom line is Trump will no longer rely on the advice of others to appoint someone he doesn't personally know, with a track record of loyalty, to oversee DOJ and the FBI.  The problem is that the lawyers Trump knows with such a record are second and third-rate, with poor legal skills, and with questionable judgement and character.  There are conservative lawyers who'd love a chance to clear out DOJ and FBI and restore integrity to those agencies but Trump does not know them, they have not proved their loyalty to him so, as it stands now, they will not have the opportunity to effectively do what needs to be done.

As I am writing this, several news outlets are reporting that Trump is going to nominate Robert Kennedy Jr as Secretary of HHS.  This is lunacy.  One of the reasons I did not vote for Trump is I thought his presidency would implode, but this is happening faster than I thought.

[UPDATE Nov. 21 - One down, one to go!  Though I'm less optimistic about getting the second one.]

Praise Be

Gulp.  I am about to praise Donald Trump.  Didn't vote for him and there are many things I dislike about his personality but am moved to write this because of a recent piece by Evan Barker, a young woman from a impoverished background who worked on the campaigns of Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders and voted for Donald Trump this year.  The article, which you can read here, explains her political journey, but it was an anecdote she tells at the end that caught my eye.

Leaving Donald Trump's official election night party at the Palm Beach Convention Center she writes:

As the night in Palm Beach, Florida, melded into Wednesday morning, and dawn neared on a new day in America, I crawled into the backseat of my cab to return to my hotel. My cabbie was a middle-aged black man. I asked him how he felt about the night. Giddily, he exclaimed: “READY to make America great again!”

When I asked him why he didn’t vote for Kamala Harris, he answered: “She just didn’t speak to me. It’s like she was pretending to speak like a black person. It felt fake.”

“Trump,” he concluded, “speaks to all of us the same.” 

Whatever else negative I think about Trump, that last sentence is completely accurate.  Donald Trump does not care if you are black, white, red, or any other color (other than green!).  He will treat you the same.  If you praise him, he'll praise you back in the same way regardless of color.  If you attack him, he'll attack you back in the same way regardless of color.  He will not stop to think, "maybe I should say something different because of this person's color".  In this regard, Trump's actions and reactions are authentic. 

I'm reminded of a study done by the Yale psychiatry department a few years ago.  It looked at the comparative speech patterns of self-identified white liberals, moderates, and conservatives when speaking with whites and blacks.  The study found that moderates and conservatives tended to speak with whites and blacks in the same way, while liberals tended to "simplify" their language when speaking with blacks.

The racist label Democrats have tried to pin on him is just wrong, and ironic considering the Democrats own views on the merits and demerits of different races.  Trump is egalitarian in both his praise and abuse of people.  He's the guy praised by Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton when he was a Democrat.  While Trump was president I read both his official White House and personal twitter feeds, because I could not trust what was being reported in the media.  On occasion I would stop reading the personal feed when Trump went on one of his bizarre middle of the night rants, but overall I found it interesting how much of both feeds was filled with events featuring black and Hispanic people.  His administration provided record funding to Historically Black Colleges & Universities.

He was subject to some deliberately outrageously inaccurate reporting by the media when it came to race, most notoriously the "very fine people on both sides" remarks regarding Charlottesville in 2017.  As I came to realize when reading the full transcript of his remarks a couple of years later, he twice stated he was not speaking about neo-nazis and white nationalists, going on to call them "bad people".  Yet, this year, Joe Biden and Barack Obama both cited the out of context remark.

I think he crossed the line in 2016 in an incident I wrote about in What Would Otter Do? in which I also noted that if Democrats were correct in their views on race, then Trump was correct in his remarks.  Since I think the D's are wrong I thought Trump was also wrong.

One other thing I remember.  In the 1990s we lived in Palm Beach County, Florida.  Donald Trump purchased Mar-a-Largo in 1985, converting it into a members only club in 1994.  Shortly after, a local magazine published an article about Trump's new venture.  It reported that the snobby, exclusionary, and conservative residents of Palm Beach island didn't like having the club, thought Trump was crude and gauche, and also didn't like the fact that he had opened membership to blacks and Jews.  As I said, the only color Donald Trump really cares about is green.

Who Is Getting Played?

Now, I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country. 

- Opening scene from the movie Patton (1970)

That memorable opening speech by Patton (George C Scott) was never actually given in that form, being mostly assembled from different speeches and comments Patton made over the years, but he did say the words quoted above. (1)  You can watch the whole thing here.

It pains me to admit, but the Democrats are successfully following Patton's advice, baiting Republicans into nominating Donald Trump in 2024 and letting them politically die on a foolish quest.  The smarter play for those offended by what the Democrats are doing is to nominate someone who can both win and govern effectively; it is unlikely Trump can do the former and he's already demonstrated he is incapable of the latter.

Two things stand out when reading The Art of the Deal and other Trump tomes.  

First, he likes to come in each day without a set agenda and react to what is going on.  That worked for the Trump Organization and on a reality show, but doesn't when you are President, running a complex Federal bureaucracy and dealing with Congress.  It doesn't work when you just react, have a short attention plan, and refuse to spend the time to understand how DC works.  It doesn't work when you think tweeting something is the equivalent of doing something.

Second, Trump did make some great deals.  They were mostly deals that benefited him personally.  He cleverly negotiated himself out of jams where he was a personal guarantor on huge bank loans, managing to keep himself afloat, an impressive accomplishment.  But, in the process, he destroyed, at a minimum, hundreds of millions of capital loaned to him, capital that might have been more productively used elsewhere.  He's doing the same thing now; successfully staying personally afloat, while destroying the built up political capital of those who oppose progressive Democrats.  I wrote about this recently. Win or lose in 2024, he will leave behind a wasteland and a weakened, splintered opposition to a united and authoritarian Democratic party.

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(1)  General Patton began a speech on May 31, 1944 with these words.  He was addressing soldiers of the 6th Armored Division, part of the Third Army which he commanded.  For the film, the screenwriters of the speech and full screenplay won the Academy Award; Edmund H North and Francis Ford Coppola, who two years later directed The Godfather.