ON ONE SIDE THE GOVERNMENT, THE OTHER THE MOB
This is me, catching up on where we seem to be, how we got here, and what might happen next. Spoiler alert: I think the poop is about to hit the propeller.
I believe that Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has hit upon the best description of Donald Trump, his family, and his closest confidants. They’re not politicians. They’re not businessmen. They’re a crime family, like the Corleones.
The Trumps aren’t loyal to anyone or anything but family, and their only interest is how they can monetize the presidency. As Marshall says, “whether things were legal or right just didn’t seem to be a metric they operated in.” But unlike their underworld predecessors, the Trumps are stupid. Donald Trump fancies himself as Michael Corleone, but he’s really just Sonny. And Don Jr. is definitely Fredo.
If they’d been smart enough to keep a low profile, the Trumps might have continued to operate largely under the radar. Even The Donald’s buffoonery helped draw attention away from his unsavory business dealings. Before he decided to run for president, the press regarded him with amusement if they deigned to notice him at all, it was with amusement rather than any sense that he might actually be dangerous.
The Trump Gang lived on the liminal boundary between shady and outright criminal. Their motto was “see you in court,” and their strategy was to stiff partners and then string out the resulting lawsuits until many plaintiffs gave up and settled for pennies on the dollar. They declared bankruptcy every once in a while and walked away from the financial wreckage, leaving somebody else holding the bag.
(I know I’ve said the before, but it bears repeating. Everything Donald Trump touches turns to shit. The longer the Republican Party hangs in there with him, the worse they’ll smell.)
Trump’s money gave him license to cheat on his wives with impunity, and when he got tired of them, he could simply give them a hefty divorce settlement – with a strict non-disclosure agreement as part of the deal. He had two assets – wealth and utter shamelessness – and he parlayed them into a second career as a minor celebrity. It was a sweet gig until he decided to run for president.
In an election that was criminally misreported by the national press, Donald Trump leveraged this shamelessness into a series of Republican primary victories. Bemused reporters and commentators watched him knock off the Republicans’ so-called “deep bench” candidates one by one. They were surprised but indulgent as he took down professional politicians like Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich, as well as the usual boatload of poseurs who were essentially auditioning for work as Fox commentators. TV news, especially, profited from Trump’s primary successes; he was good for ratings. And then, all of a sudden, Donald Trump was the Republican nominee.
And still the press covered him as a novelty. Like everyone else, they assumed that Hillary Clinton would win, and decided to take her down a peg before she became president. They chose to paint Clinton’s lax email security as the most important issue of the campaign. Trump’s gaffes were just Trump being Trump. And then came November 8, and all of a sudden Trump was President-Elect.
The really scary thing is that on November 9, most of the national press would have been willing to overlook Trump’s past. All he needed to do was throw them a bone – pretend to be non-partisan, call for unity, promise to work with Democrats, and mouth the usual come-let-us-reason-together bullshit that the press always falls for. They ran an initial spate of “Democrats aren’t the real America” pieces, and a few “today is the day Donald Trump became president” editorials, but those storylines petered out because Donald Trump was too dumb even to pretend to be a gracious winner. He was a mob boss, not a politician. He wanted revenge against everyone who’d opposed him. He doubled down on his deplorable base. He insulted the press. In an even bigger strategic blunder, he insulted the FBI and the CIA.
His biggest mistake was to assume that as President, he could get away with anything. The press, the government infrastructure he inherited, even the congressional Republicans he’d need to accomplish his agenda – he thought they were all just was like everyone else he’d been dealing with all his life. They could be flattered, bribed, or bullied into submission.
Congressional Republicans have been pretty docile so far, but the media has not. The press – particularly the Washington Post and the New York Times, but also, at times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and others – began pointing out that he and his spokesmen were lying almost all the time. They began poking around into the allegations of citizen journalists that Russians had manipulated the election in some way – and their investigations proved that the much maligned citizen journalists were correct in many cases. Saturday Night Live mocked Trump and his mob mercilessly. They all got under his skin, and he lashed out with tweets that just got him in deeper holes.
The intelligence community also refused to roll over for him. Trump began firing people who were looking into his affairs. It didn’t seem to occur to him that they’d kept records, and made sure their successors could pick up where they left off. We can be sure that Robert Mueller has taken similar precautions in the event that Trump fires him.
So what’s next? Citizen journalists are reporting that Robert Mueller will soon begin to go public with at least the general outlines of the legal case he is preparing to make. Meanwhile, Jared Kushner (Tom Hagen, I guess) is scheduled to testify in private before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday July 24, and Don Jr. is supposed to testify in a public hearing before the same committee on July 26. Those will be a minefields, especially for Fredo.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that one or more intelligence agencies managed to record those conversations Fredo had with Russian spies in June, 2016; and I would bet that the FBI and Robert Mueller have a very good idea of what went down. I won’t be shocked if next Wednesday’s testimony includes some convenient memory lapses, and even invocations of the 5th amendment.
And now comes the news that Trump had another tantrum in an interview with the failing New York Times. He threw Attorney General Jeff Sessions under the bus, and then threatened to fire Robert Mueller unless he steered the investigation away from Trump family finances. This is about as clear a sign as possible that Trump has finally realized that he’s in deep doodoo.
I suspect that Trump hopes he can humiliate Sessions into resigning so that he can appoint someone with the authority to fire Mueller. In the meantime, he hopes that threatening Mueller will convince the Special Counsel to scale back the scope of the investigation.
There are a few problems with this strategy, if you can call it that. First, it’s dumb as hell. Even if Sessions resigns, Trump would have to find someone who was willing to serve as Attorney General, and then the nominee would have to be confirmed by the Senate.
Joining Trump’s Cabinet at this point would be like signing on as a crew member of the Titanic right after it hit the iceberg. Maybe there are people that stupid. But would any of them have the credentials to win the approval of a majority of the Senate Judiciary Committee (where the nominee would surely be asked to go on record about his or her willingness to fire Mueller), and then a majority of the full Senate?
That may be a bridge too far, even for the sleazy cohort of congressional Republicans currently in power. What’s worse for Trump is that even a successful nomination fight could take weeks, by which time Mueller’s team may have handed down indictments. A “Saturday Night Massacre” scenario would be faster, but speed is its only advantage. It would be widely interpreted as an admission of guilt. And it wouldn’t stop the legal firestorm that is swiftly bearing down on the Trump family.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was working on money laundering and other RICO charges against the Trump organization until he decided to step back and let Robert Mueller have a clear field. Mueller’s team would find ways to give Schneiderman the evidence they’ve gathered, and the New York AG can’t be fired by the president. New York has laws against what they call “enterprise corruption” that include civil asset forfeiture under certain conditions (and only after the case has been proven, of course). That should send a shiver down the spines of the Trump gang, since most of their assets are in New York. Be careful what you wish for, Mr. President.
Trump’s last remaining hole card would be issuing preemptive pardons to his entire family, and perhaps even to himself. Could he get away with that? Maybe. That would create enormous pressure on Congress to initiate impeachment hearings. Would enough House Republicans be sufficiently disgusted to join Democrats in voting for impeachment? If not, would national disgust be enough to give Democrats majorities in the House and Senate after the 2018 election?
An alternative for Republicans who don’t have the stomach for impeachment hearings is simply to declare Donald Trump “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” under the 25th Amendment and make Mike Pence Acting President for the remainder of Trump’s term. I have no respect for Pence, but he doesn’t appear to be insane, or in thrall to Vladimir Putin. That’s a pretty low bar, but at this point, I’d settle for getting rid of the madman as soon as possible and working like hell to elect Democrats in 2018 and 2020.
One last thing. On July 19, the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Donald Trump Jr., asking him to produce all correspondence to, from, or about a long list of people. Most of them are Russians; a few are Trump advisors. The name that jumps out at you, though, is Jill Stein. Isn’t that interesting?