from New York Magazine. Jonathan Chait is a big reason to read the magazine.

Trump is trapped, and trying to protect himself at all costs

by Jonathan Chait

On November 7, President Trump woke up to a world in which Democrats had smashed through a gerrymandered map to win three dozen House seats, depriving him of both his legislative majority and his effective immunity from congressional oversight and accountability. He responded in the most Trumpian way: with an atavistic display of brute dominance. He insisted the election had been a triumph (“I thought it was a very close to complete victory”), belittled Republicans who had lost for declining his “embrace,” pulled the press pass from CNN reporter Jim Acosta, and warned Democrats not to investigate anything in his administration or he would refuse to work with them and have Senate Republicans investigate them back.

And he fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose sole offense, in Trump’s eyes, was recusing himself from the Russia investigation. Trump maintains the attorney general’s job is to protect the president’s political interests, even if the president or his allies have committed serious crimes. In an interview with the New York Times last year, Trump explicated this belief. Barack Obama, according to Trump, had engaged in all manner of wrongdoing (as any Fox News addict could tell you), but Attorney General Eric Holder shielded him from investigation. Trump held up this imagined cover-up as admirable. “Holder protected the president,” he said. “And I have great respect for that, I’ll be honest, I have great respect for that.”

Trump finally acted on this vision, skipping the normal chain of command and declaring Matthew Whitaker the acting attorney general. As recently as three years ago, Whitaker worked for a scam company that catered to customers with invention ideas and “provided almost no service in return,” according to the Federal Trade Commission. Whitaker’s role was to testify to the company’s integrity (“World Patent Marketing goes beyond making statements about doing business ‘ethically’ and translate [sic] those words into action”) and serve as legal muscle, firing off threatening letters to customers who complained they had been bilked.

Aside from his now highly relevant experience working for con men, Whitaker’s primary qualification to serve as the nation’s highest law-enforcement official is a fanatical adherence to the right-wing legal agenda. As an unsuccessful far-right Senate candidate in Iowa, Whitaker declared he would be “very concerned” about any judge with a “secular worldview” and should instead follow a “biblical view of justice.” Whitaker’s version of biblical justice blends harsh Old Testament punishments for Democrats with New Testament forgiveness for Republicans. Like Trump, he has argued that Hillary Clinton should have been indicted for using a personal email account, and has publicly opposed the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Whitaker’s hostility to the Mueller investigation is surely what recommended him to the president. He claimed Trump’s campaign had not colluded with Russia (“The truth is there was no collusion with the Russians and the Trump campaign”) at a time when such a defense could not possibly be known. He even denied that Russia interfered in the election at all, a conclusion directly at odds with what U.S. intelligence agencies have found. He has said Mueller has no right to probe Trump’s finances (which of course contain links to Russia) and called for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to curb the investigation. Trump had appointed Whitaker as Sessions’s chief of staff, a position that reportedly allowed him to serve as the president’s eyes and ears within the building.

Whitaker will have ample opportunity to undermine or quash Mueller’s investigation, but his authority over Mueller is not the only weapon at Whitaker’s disposal. Nor is the Mueller investigation the only threat to the president. Trump is a crook who is drawn to other crooks, and the potential criminal exposure across his administration is vast. We barely have a handle on the criminality that has already occurred — it has only been in the last few weeks that we learned, via the Times, that Trump committed systematic tax fraud over many decades. A lawsuit credibly accusing Trump of having run a variety of “fraudulent schemes” came out October 29 — nearly two years after his election.

Because Trump has benefited in office from a near-total Republican blockade on oversight of the Executive branch, it is difficult to estimate how much misconduct has escaped detection. Weeks before the election, congressional Republicans privately circulated a lengthy list of Trump scandals that would be investigated if Democrats won Congress. The list ranges from Trump’s tax returns (which Republicans had voted to keep hidden) to his acceptance of undisclosed payments from foreign and domestic interests while in office to more routine incompetence and sleaze, like lavish expenses by Cabinet members and the hurricane response in Puerto Rico.

In public, Republicans are warning that investigating any of these matters will backfire on Democrats. “The business of presidential harassment,” offered Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, “which we were deeply engaged in in the ’90s, improved the president’s approval ratings and tanked ours.”

It ought to be self-evident that McConnell is not actually expressing sincere concern for the political fortunes of the party with which he is engaged in zero-sum competition. Alas, it isn’t self-evident. The notion that rigorous oversight amounts to “harassment,” and can backfire on the congressional party, has taken hold in Establishment Washington. “There is scant evidence of a mandate for a scorched-earth pursuit of Trump,” two senior editors at Politico wrote the day after the election. In the Times, Nicholas Kristof warned that “Democrats jockeying for the presidential nomination in 2020 will tug the party toward impeachment talk or a blizzard of subpoenas — in ways that may help Trump.”

Yes, sometimes aggressive congressional oversight can backfire, like when Republicans fanatically pursued conspiracy theories like Benghazi and “IRS targeting” during the Obama years. The Republican investigation of Bill Clinton also created some blowback, although even that famous episode has a much less straightforward denouement than is widely understood. While hounding Clinton over his affair, Republicans lost the 1998 midterms, an outcome that suggests that there can be a price for going overboard in the pursuit of a scandal that is palpably unrelated to job performance. But the atmosphere of scandal and dysfunction still clung to the Clinton presidency, and it was that stink that allowed George W. Bush to make a case for change in 2000 in what was otherwise an atmosphere of peace and prosperity. 

As Fred Barnes reported at the time in The Weekly Standard, impeachment “played a historic role, holding Clinton accountable, seeking just punishment, and, not least, shaping the 2000 race and paving the way for a likely Republican victory.” A Bush adviser told him, “There are 13 people who are responsible for where we are now. They are the House impeachment managers.” The lesson seems clear: Even if Congress somehow overreaches in its pursuit of Trump — a prospect that is almost logistically impossible, given the staggering list of misconduct already in plain sight — it would still probably help the Democrats’$2 2020 presidential candidate run against the mess in Washington.

From the very beginning, when Donald Trump and his father ignored demands from the Nixon Justice Department that they stop discriminating against African-Americans, through his repeated tax fraud and financial scams, legal impunity has formed the through-line of his career. Holding him accountable serves not only Democrats’ self-interest but the rule of law. That process begins now.

It was 2004 when this came out.  We're still waiting for the second volume. We'll have to reread this one while we're waiting, or you can read it for the first time if you haven't. He's coming back to the Beacon Theater on November 24th. My friend and I are seeing him again like we did a year ago there. That was a great night. It exceeded my high expectations. I thought it was maybe the last time I'd see him.

I saw this just-released centennial edition on the front table at Strand last evening where I went to avoid seeing more Trump whose press-conference performance yesterday afternoon has to go down in history complete with the white circles around his eyes from the sunlamp goggles. 

I'm at the local library. I still come here to use one of their computers even though my dropped-and-broken laptop has been replaced. I like having to go out. When I was a kid in a small rural town of just 2000 people, we had to go to the post office to get our mail. When that changed and mail started being delivered everyone thought that was progress. I was in grade school when that happened. I felt sad. I liked going to the post office and opening our box with its combination, like a sake-cracker. I liked looking at the wanted posters. I liked the posters advertising commemorative stamps. I liked that I might see someone I knew there. I could tell my mother liked that too. Now everything gets delivered.
 

I wake up early anyway. I always vote early. I'm there when the door opens at 6:00 at PS 47 on East 23rd Street two blocks from where I live. Usually it's me and three other insomniacs. Today the line was a real line growing down the block.

It was raining softly, faintly today and I could have stayed there in it but the sign gets wet and could get ruined. This is the fifth one. So I left after 10 minutes and I'm home reading the paper. I saw this comment from the great Bronx-born novelist Don DeLillo:

“Oh, I think whatever’s going on now seems unique,” he says. “The question is whether the situation is terminal. I’m very reluctant to talk about Trump, simply because everybody else is. We’re deluged with information about Trump on every level – as a man, as a politician. But what’s significant to me is that all of his enormous mistakes and misstatements disappear within 24 hours. The national memory lasts 48 hours, at best. And there’s always something else coming at us down the pipeline. You can’t separate it all out. You get lost in the deluge.”

So what’s the prognosis? DeLillo, God help us, is as discombobulated as anyone. “It’s hard to know. I think it would take a great shift of events for the country to restore its balance, to restore its consciousness, and to think about things the way we did during the Obama administration.” He sighs. “Right now, I’m not sure the situation is recoverable.”

from a review in The New York Review of Books of a collection of stories by Deborah Eisenberg. The 'sirens' sentences I find myself staring at and rereading. 



Her stories, especially the recent ones, demand careful attention and rereading in order to trace the delicate lines of connection across and between sections and paragraphs. One gets the sense, when deep inside an Eisenberg story, that she is pushing past her own understanding of what she knows, trying to find and identify the most difficult questions possible. She is alert to the dire signals that are emanating from the country and planet, but she hasn’t given up on trying to interpret them. “So many sirens!” Keith notices during his brief awakening to the world’s cruelties. “Have there been so many sirens all along?”