- Say this about Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fox: He can bring the heavy hitters. A couple of weeks ago, it was Sean Hannity who came to town to endorse DeSantis for governor. This week it was President Donald Trump on the stump locally. Who’s next? Vlad Putin?
- “It’s his live version of a Twitter feed.”—That’s the spot-on take of Princeton political historian Julian Zelizer on a vintage “Lock her up”/“Build the Wall” Trump rally.
- It was like rubbernecking as you drive by an intersection accident. You can’t help looking as you wince. So, I watched Secretary of State Mike Pompeo testifying in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey started off with probing, edgy questions aimed at eliciting yes or no answers about the fiasco in Finland. Pompeo wouldn’t–or couldn’t–tell him specifics from the Trump-Putin sit down. After all, he’s only the secretary of state and a former CIA director.
Pompeo spoke in bullet-point generalities as the adversarial mood ratcheted up.
Next up was Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, perhaps the most conservative GOPster in the senate. He didn’t disappoint Trump Administration lackeys and loyalists. And on it went—punchline Democrats and counterpunching Republican committee members.
We expect conflict. It’s part of who we are as a contentious democracy. But there was a notably palpable, partisan disrespect—not just disagreement—here from the beginning. As in, “We know you’re defending the indefensible, and we know you’ve sold out to work for this guy, so how can we believe or respect anything you say? Please continue.”
Marco Rubio: More political performance art. His allotted Q&A time was devoted to reading from a staff-researched script that made him sound conversant on the issues.
- So, Rudy “Collusion is not a crime” Giuliani, who could use a glib spokesman, has characterized Michael Cohen as a “pathological liar.” “He’s been lying for years.” Doesn’t that pathologically speak volumes? Imagine, Donald Trump’s personal-“fixer” attorney for 11 years is a liar? Maybe it was a condition for employment. Trump’s decades-long pathology of prevarication ranges from the NY tabs to Helsinki blabs.
But there’s no lying about this: Robert Mueller’s leverage keeps increasing. A Trump pardon for Cohen won’t be happening.
- Speaking of Cohen, what a transition: From Trump’s fixer to state’s witness. How karmic.
- In the age of Trump, political potshots are like nothing we’ve seen before, including the Watergate era of Richard Nixon. Here’s a recent Ron Reagan Jr. quote that I wish—as a concerned American—that I disagreed with. He was speaking to “Hard Ball” host-interrupter Chris Mathews. “Think about how extraordinary it is that we’re even having this conversation,” prefaced Reagan. “But we’re actually talking about the president’s very sanity here–and doing it in a serious way. Very sober people are worried that this man is simply unfit for office.”
- For political context and sobriety, recall that a day earlier Tennessee Republican Sen. Bob Corker, who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, had questioned Trump’s mental state and called for “radical change” at the White House. As if.
- The ironic part of America’s position on exiting the Iran nuclear deal is what the U.S. is doing unilaterally. It includes recently announced efforts to try to undermine Iran’s government, including social media messaging and a round-the-clock Persian (Farsi) language broadcast channel. Some might call that, uh, meddling—no bots about it.
- If Melania Trump’s spokeswoman had a media mulligan she might have said: “She can watch whatever she wants on Air Force One. Sometimes it’s CNN, because she takes great fake-news notes, even in English. But otherwise, it’s Fox and ‘Apprentice’ re-runs.”
- This just in: The Mexicans still aren’t on board to pay for a wall.