DOES THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION WANT TO DO ANYTHING WITH THE PRESIDENCY BESIDES YELL AT THE TV?

Courtesy of Business Insider's Natasha Bertrand, we seem to have an explanation for the apparently false National-Guard-as-deportation-force story:

The White House quickly denied an explosive Associated Press report published Friday morning that said the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was seeking to mobilize 100,000 National Guard troops to round up and deport immigrants living in the US illegally.

"It is false," the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, said, according to a pool report. "It is irresponsible to be saying this. There is no effort at all to round up, to utilize the National Guard to round up illegal immigrants."

"I wish you guys had asked before you tweeted," Spicer added.

An AP reporter, however, replied that the wire service had asked the White House for comment multiple times before publishing the report, which was based off of a leaked DHS draft memo....

This seems to be a pattern for the Trumpers:

1. Wait for a draft memo of a proposal to be leaked to the press.
2. Refuse to comment when asked about the draft.
3. Wait to dispute a story's accuracy until the story is published.
4. Accuse the press of never having sought comment to begin with.

Bertrand quotes a number of reporters who've noticed this pattern. She also quotes the press secretary to Congressman Keith Ellison, who's noticed it, too.

The Trumpers are so determined to demonstrate bad faith on the part of the mainstream media that they're floating fake stories, refusing to comment on them, then saying they were never given a chance to deny them. But why? How does this help them accomplish any goal connected to governing? Do they even care about governing? Look, I don't want them to do any of the things they say they want to do in the governing realm, but I understand why this right-wing writer is frustrated (in response to a now-deleted and subsequently updated tweet by the president that's part of the press demonization campaign):

The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017

Do the Trumpers even want to do any of those things? It seems that they just want to pound on the press --or maybe it's just the president. The most powerful job in the world, and all he wants to use it for is, in effect, yelling at the TV. Bizarre.

DO REAL FASCISTS FLOAT TRIAL BALLOONS?

Almost as soon as this report broke, it was denied by the White House:

The Trump administration considered a proposal to mobilize as many as 100,000 National Guard troops to round up unauthorized immigrants, including millions living nowhere near the Mexico border, according to a draft memo obtained by The Associated Press.

Staffers in the Department of Homeland Security said the proposal had been discussed as recently as last Friday.

The 11-page document calls for the unprecedented militarization of immigration enforcement as far north as Portland, Oregon, and as far east as New Orleans, Louisiana.

Four states that border on Mexico were included in the proposal — California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas — but it also encompasses seven states contiguous to those four — Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana.

The denial:

White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Friday the document was "not a White House document."

"There is no effort to do what is potentially suggested," he said. Spicer called the AP report "100 percent not true, adding that there was "no effort at all to utilize the National Guard to round up unauthorized immigrants."

So what's going on? The Moscow deputy bureau chief for Bloomberg Businessweek thinks it's eleven-dimensional fascist chess:

Process I've seen repeatedly in Russia:
1) odious proposal
2) outrage
3) administration actually only wants 70% of plan
4) relief/acceptance

— Scott Rose (@rprose) February 17, 2017

But if that's how this was meant to work, you'd think the Trumpers would want it to hang in the air a little longer before issuing a denial. And you'd think they'd want to clear the news cycle a bit, to give it some breathing room. We still haven't stopped talking about yesterday's Trump press conference; this got wedged in between that press conference and what could be another Lenny-Bruce-shortly before-his-death moment, Trump's appearance today at Boeing, which is happening as I type.

Also, why propose a deportation force (authoritarian) and give governors an opt-out option (wussy)?

Governors in the 11 states would have had a choice whether to have their guard troops participate, according to the memo....

There's no way the Democratic governors of California, Oregon, and Colorado are going to say yes, and I'm not sure about the Republican governors of purple New Mexico and Nevada. It's as if the Trumpers want to come off as jackbooted thugs, but nice jackbooted thugs -- jackbooted thugs who say "Please."

It's my opinion that this would be very popular among white voters across the country, including some now-wavering moderate conservatives. So why not just do it? Get it written, get it vetted, get it done? I think it's because there's a crazy-idea shop in the West Wing (Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller), but there's no one who's skilled at putting policies into effect, which requires a minimal ability to interact with other human beings and coordinate with those other human beings on implementation. So the White House executive-order-and-memorandum shop is basically a federally funded version of a regular column at a wingnut online news site -- heavy on extreme ideas, but with not much skill at follow-through.

This might still happen. I just don't know why it isn't happening already.

THE "GROWN-UPS" IN CONGRESS AREN'T IN CHARGE EITHER -- THEY'RE TOO BUSY SQUABBLING

The undisciplined preadolescents in the White House are the biggest impediment to an extreme-right transformation of America, but it's also true that Republicans in Congress can't agree on detailed plans to destroy all the things they've been promising to destroy for years. We know they've spent years promising to repeal and replace Obamacare, only to discover that all their healthcare ideas would horrify the public. But they also can't agree on a key element of the tax overhaul they want so much, as Politico reports:

Paul Ryan showed up to Senate Republicans’ weekly lunch on Tuesday hoping to salvage a controversial pillar of his tax reform plan that would change how imports and exports are taxed. “Keep your powder dry,” the House speaker pleaded.

The next day, Sen. Tom Cotton took to the Senate floor to slam Ryan’s so-called border adjustment tax, saying “some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual could believe them.”

“Many other senators share these concerns and we most certainly will not ‘keep our powder dry,’” Cotton went on, without naming the speaker in his speech.

The sequence was an ominous sign for a linchpin of Ryan’s tax plan — and perhaps for the prospects of tax reform happening at all. The border adjustment tax would generate more than a trillion dollars over a decade; there’s no obvious way to replace that money, which is needed to help pay for a steep cut in corporate and income taxes.

I assumed that with a Republican in the White House they'd have no qualms about running huge deficits in order to slash taxes for corporations and the rich, but it seems that some of them actually believe their own talking points about deficits and debt. So they're trying to offset the huge cut in revenues -- and Republicans don't like the method Ryan has chosen.

Many Republican senators say privately they detest the concept, fretting that it will hurt their in-state retailers like Walmart, which is headquartered in Cotton's state of Arkansas. Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), sources said, has warned Trump and Ryan that border adjustment won't likely have the support needed to clear the Senate....

That’s not to mention Ryan’s issue in his own chamber. A handful of Ways and Means Republicans — including some with close ties to Trump — are fretting that retailers slapped with an import tax will ultimately pass the cost onto consumers.

So this is another dog-that-caught-the-car issue for Republicans, just like Obamacare. But do you know who actually likes the border adjustment tax? Darth Vader himself:

Ironically, the speaker seems to have a strong ally in Bannon, the ex-boss of Breitbart News, which attacked the speaker mercilessly during the campaign.

Well, of course he likes it. Recall what I told you last week: Bannon is a believer in the generational theories of William Strauss and Neil Howe, who foresee a crisis point for America in which citizens will need to suffer in order to reach the Promised Land. They've written:

... new leadership will assert public authority and demand private sacrifice. Where leaders had once been inclined to alleviate societal pressures, they will now aggravate them to command the nation’s attention.

And Bannon said in 2010, foreseeing this moment of crisis:

“We are going to have to take some massive pain. Anybody who thinks we don’t have to take pain is, I believe, fooling you.”

So he has no problem with a tax that will passed on to consumers. The president presumably has no idea that this tax or the tax he proposed during the campaign, a levy on imports, will be passed on to consumers. And congressional deficit hawks don't want either.

So the GOP dysfunction is at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. To me, that's a relief.

WHAT YOU SAW AT TODAY'S TRUMP PRESS CONFERENCE IS MODERN CONSERVATISM

So this happened today:

After stewing in anger during four rocky weeks in the White House, President Donald Trump had his say Thursday.

He spent 80 minutes in an impromptu East Room news conference shredding his critics, relitigating the election, bragging about his crowds, crowing about his accomplishments and denying, deflecting and obfuscating a series of mushrooming bad stories that have dogged his presidency and depressed his approval ratings....

In Trump style, the news conference was heavy on braggadocio....

"There has never been a president that has done so much in such a short period of time," Trump said, reading a list of his own accomplishments.

He said his administration is a "finely tuned machine" ...

More:

Before the hour-plus session was over, Trump had told a reporter from a Jewish publication that his question about rising anti-Semitism was very unfair and to sit down....

He ripped into CNN repeatedly.... The president also lashed out at “fake news” repeatedly, even while spewing falsehoods. He said he’d had the biggest electoral landslide since 1984. Not true.... He then said he’d been given “misinformation” about the size of his electoral win.

Shorter Trump today:



But that's what conservatism is now -- angry white people saying "Respect ME, dammit!" and insisting that everyone who doesn't agree with them deserves to be harangued or intimidated into silence.



Whether it's white working-class voters demanding an end to "political correctness" and Mexican and Muslim immigration, or alt-rightists harassing opposition voices on the Internet, or billionaires describing progressive protesters as Hitlerian, the message is: Those people are the scum of the earth, and they should just shut up forever. I'm talking now. Listen to me. Listen only to me and my allies.

During the campaign, many concerned political observers asked, "What does conservatism stand for now?" This is what it stands for. It stands for I have the floor, so you just shut the hell up.

LIE DOWN WITH A LAZY, ILL-TEMPERED, DISLOYAL DOG, WAKE UP WITH...

Let's rosin up an itty-bitty bow and use it to play the world's most minuscule violin:

Congressional Republicans, who craved unified control of the government to secure their aggressive conservative agenda, have instead found themselves on a legislative elliptical trainer, gliding toward nowhere.

After moving to start rolling back the Affordable Care Act just days after President Trump was sworn in last month, Republican lawmakers and Mr. Trump have yet to deliver on any of the sweeping legislation they promised. Efforts to come up with a replacement for the health care law have been stymied by disagreements among Republicans about how to proceed. The same is true for a proposed overhaul of the tax code.

The large infrastructure bill that both Democrats and Mr. Trump were eager to pursue has barely been mentioned, other than a very general hearing to discuss well-documented needs for infrastructure improvements. Even a simple emergency spending bill that the Trump administration promised weeks ago — which was expected to include a proposal for his wall on the Mexican border — has not materialized, leaving appropriators idle and checking Twitter.

Some of this is because Republicans believed their own worse-than-Hitler hyperbole about Obamacare and were blindsided by the fact that some people actually like the program and are angry about repeal plans. Some is because Republicans never realized that it would be ridiculously easy for Democrats to reverse-engineer GOP obstructionist tactics, for which Republicans, of course, paid no political price.

But the big problem for congressional Republicans seems to be that they're still waiting for the unsupervised, sugar-rushing, ADHD third graders who now make up the executive branch to settle down and do some serious work:

... The inactivity stems from a lack of clear policy guidance — and, just as often, contradictory messages — from the Trump administration, which does not appear to have spent the campaign and transition periods forming a legislative wish list....

Congressional Republicans seem wary of offering their own bills, lest Mr. Trump or one of his aides, who have largely been distracted by personnel and intelligence scandals, undercut their efforts. This was most visible when Mr. Trump demanded that Republicans come up with a replacement plan for a health care law they had hoped to simply repeal, sending members flailing. The administration also gave conflicting messages on a tax plan embraced by House Republicans that would apply the corporate tax rate to all imports while exempting exports.

“On our side, it’s pretty clear who drives policy,” said a Republican aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being written about by Mr. Trump on Twitter. “But take any issue and try to figure that out from their side.”

Just write the bills, you idiots. Do you seriously think this administration remembers its own pronouncements from one day to the next, however angrily delivered they may be? Do you think the president remembers?

If you're really afraid that you can't proceed on legislation without first having it carefully crafted by the White House, then you're going to be waiting a long time. The only work being done in this White House that's even vaguely along those lines seems to be the crafting of executive orders that are more like manifestos from a radical group that's actually one foul-smelling sociopath in a cabin in Montana.

Well, congressional Republicans, you bought this ticket, so take the ride. You thought Trump would govern like a normal person. You thought he really meant it when he said he'd surround himself with "the best people." You thought he'd "grow in office." Welcome to a hell of your own making.

REPUBLICANS: ON THE TRUMP TRAIN OR UNDER IT, STILL

David Frum is dismayed because his fellow conservatives in Congress remain loyal to the president, so he tries to sweet-talk them into dumping Trump:

Here’s something to consider. Trump has never shown much enthusiasm for the congressional agenda of reforming Obamacare and reducing taxes. He has developed no plans, and his White House staff is not structured in a way likely to produce such plans anytime soon.

Without presidential leadership—and with the visible and traditional disagreements between House members who mostly hold safe seats, and senators vulnerable to state-wide electorates—it’s hard to see how anything gets done in the next session. Congressional Republicans are now at risk of wasting this rare chance, risking an all-Republican government accomplishing nothing beside Trump’s self-aggrandizement and corrosion of constitutional government. That will suit Donald Trump fine. It can hardly suit Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell.

Suppose Mike Pence were president now. Tax-reform legislation would be hitting the floor of the House. A competent White House staff, headed by people with intact reputations for honesty, would be hammering out the compromises necessary to repeal healthcare reform. A functional National Security Council would be generating options for responding to Russia’s cheating on arms-control treaties and aggression in Ukraine. Democrats and liberals would be assailing congressional Republicans on immigration and abortion—not espionage and treason. Instead, their hopes, their interests, their constituencies, and possibly their careers are all at risk, subordinated to the personal imperatives of a president who does not share their principles and does not care about their party.

But here's the problem: There's no reason to believe that congressional Republicans really care all that much about repealing Obamacare, restricting abortion, or the rest of the right-wing agenda. Sure, they always have cared about these things. But what they really care about is getting reelected forever. In the past, that was accomplished by doing whatever Fox News, the Koch brothers, the religious right, and the NRA told you to do. Now the important thing is doing whatever Trump wants.

It's true that President Pence would assemble a team of professionals who'd efficiently set to work dismantling Obamacare, the Great Society, the New Deal, and the Progressive Era -- or at least they'd be a lot more goal-oriented about all that. They'd work seamlessly with Republicans in Congress. There'd be no distractions. Everyone would be rowing in the same direction.

But GOP voters still believe that Trump is the strongest possible leader, a financial mastermind, and a preternaturally gifted dealmaker. Plus, he clearly hates darker-skinned people much more than Pence does.

And they also think he cares about the Fox/Koch GOP agenda as much as they do. (He does -- he just gets so distracted when someone insults him, or says he didn't win a landslide, or when Vladimir Putin does that thing he does when he smiles and the corners of his eyes crinkle.)

So Frum's plea is going to fall on deaf ears. Republicans in Congress aren't going to quit Trump, because their voters won't.

ON IRAN, TRUMP LOSES HIS BRAIN

Yesterday, at the Washington Free Beacon, Adam Kredo speculated that Michael Flynn was ousted by a sinister cabal with a very specific aim:

The abrupt resignation Monday evening of White House national security adviser Michael Flynn is the culmination of a secret, months-long campaign by former Obama administration confidantes to handicap President Donald Trump's national security apparatus and preserve the nuclear deal with Iran, according to multiple sources in and out of the White House who described to the Washington Free Beacon a behind-the-scenes effort by these officials to plant a series of damaging stories about Flynn in the national media.

The effort, said to include former Obama administration adviser Ben Rhodes—the architect of a separate White House effort to create what he described as a pro-Iran echo chamber—included a small task force of Obama loyalists who deluged media outlets with stories aimed at eroding Flynn's credibility, multiple sources revealed.

The operation primarily focused on discrediting Flynn, an opponent of the Iran nuclear deal, in order to handicap the Trump administration's efforts to disclose secret details of the nuclear deal with Iran that had been long hidden by the Obama administration.

Today, Haaretz reports this:

In the bigger picture, the loss of Flynn on Trump’s team will surely come as a deep disappointment to those in Israel who counted on his uncompromising stance on Iran and Islamic terror to influence the direction of Trump’s policy....

The Israeli hard right loved Flynn. When he was first named to his post, right-wing pundit Caroline Glick wrote in a celebratory piece that he “is far-sighted and determined, and locked on his target: Iran.” She expressed her belief that “Trump intends to bring down the Iranian regime as a first step toward securing an unconditional victory in the war against radical Islam.”

But in a normal presidency, the departure of one adviser -- even a top adviser -- wouldn't result in the radical remaking of a president's policy. A president presumably has opinions of his own, and if they're strong opinions, you'd expect them to keep policy relatively consistent regardless of who the advisers are.

Trump certainly talks as if he has firm opinions on the Iran deal:

... Trump called the nuclear pact a "disaster" and "the worst deal ever negotiated" during his campaign and said it could lead to a "nuclear holocaust."

In a speech to the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC in March, Trump declared that his “Number-One priority” would be to “dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.”

Trump said the same thing in the interview with Bill O'Reilly that aired on Super Bowl Sunday:

“I think it was the worst deal I’ve ever seen negotiated,” Trump told Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly in an interview that aired prior to the Super Bowl.

The president continued: “I think they have total disrespect for our country and I understand that deal. I would have lived with it if they said ‘OK, we’re all together now,’ but it’s just the opposite. It’s like they’re emboldened. They follow our planes, they circle our ships with their little boats and they lost respect because they can’t believe anybody could be so stupid as to make a deal like that.”

Trump said it was a “deal that never should have been negotiated....”

But Flynn is gone, and now we assume that Trump isn't determined to scuttle the Iran deal and isn't particularly angry at the Iranians. That's not normal. He's the president. He said he was angry at Iran and unswervingly opposed to the deal, and that should still be true.

But, of course, this is Donald Trump we're talking about. I suppose he really might not care about Iran if the next person to whisper in his ear on the subject says the regime's behavior is acceptable and the deal really isn't bad at all. I think the Free Beacon's theory is off base, but if you wanted to completely upend Iran policy in the Trump White House, it's likely that you could do it just by targeting Flynn. He really might have been Trump's brain on this. Who knows what Trump believes about Iran now?Do you think Trump knows?

AMERICA'S DUMBEST TRAITORS

So, like everyone else, I'm reading this New York Times story...

Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.

American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.

And this CNN story...

High-level advisers close to then-presidential nominee Donald Trump were in constant communication during the campaign with Russians known to US intelligence, multiple current and former intelligence, law enforcement and administration officials tell CNN....

Among several senior Trump advisers regularly communicating with Russian nationals were then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort and then-adviser Michael Flynn.

I'm amazed that the wheels are coming off this quickly. I'm listening to well-meaning hand-wringers who wonder whether it's a good thing that the national security apparatus is leaking this way. But I'm struck by the fact that the Trumpers involved in this didn't even seem to realize that their conversations would be monitored.

I know that the average person on the street might not realize that U.S. agencies routinely monitor the phone calls of Russian intelligence officials. But this was a big-league presidential campaign. Sure, the campaign was full of people from outside the world of politics and government, starting with the candidate. But Flynn worked in military intelligence and then was the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Manafort was a longtime Republican operative and had a lot of dealings in the Russian sphere. Did they really not understand that what they were doing was known to our intelligence agencies? Was this ignorance, arrogance, or a combination of both?

The president is too ill informed to realize that he shouldn't deal with a national security situation in a public dining room, or allow ordinary citizens to take photos of the officer holding the nuclear football for him. But his crew was no more circumspect before the inaugural, even when scheming to undermine the international order. What's wrong with these people?

IF THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION CONTINUES TO IMPLODE, THE RIGHT WILL LEARN NOTHING FROM THE FAILURE

The hottest opinion piece in the right-o-sphere at this moment is "The Political Assassination of Michael Flynn" by Eli Lake:

It's possible that Flynn has more ties to Russia that he had kept from the public and his colleagues. It's also possible that a group of national security bureaucrats and former Obama officials are selectively leaking highly sensitive law enforcement information to undermine the elected government.

Flynn was a fat target for the national security state. He has cultivated a reputation as a reformer and a fierce critic of the intelligence community leaders he once served with when he was the director the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama. Flynn was working to reform the intelligence-industrial complex, something that threatened the bureaucratic prerogatives of his rivals.

He was also a fat target for Democrats....

[Representative Devin] Nunes [the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee] told me Monday night that this will not end well. "First it's Flynn, next it will be Kellyanne Conway, then it will be Steve Bannon, then it will be Reince Priebus," he said. Put another way, Flynn is only the appetizer. Trump is the entree.

The guilty parties are Democrats and "the national security state." The notion that Flynn might actually have done something that genuinely disqualified him for government service is barely addressed in Lake's column.

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line writes, "The media-intelligence community pipeline is a swamp that needs to be drained. But can it be?" At Instapundit, Stephen Green writes,

The chatter against Flynn -- and it has come from Democrats, Republicans, and the intelligence community -- has been longstanding, intense, and in the end, effective. The motives for it also seem to come from across the spectrum: Partisanship, #NeverTrump, and for those concerned about his Russian ties, honest patriotism. It would also be too kind to say that Flynn is unloved by the I.C. following his troubled tenure as head of D.I.A.

But what really happened? It’s impossible to say, but if the intelligence community is still at war with the Trump Administration even after collecting Flynn’s scalp, then we we’ll know at least part of the answer.

And Trump himself, of course, is more concerned with how Flynn was exposed than with how Flynn might have endangered national security:

The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington? Will these leaks be happening as I deal on N.Korea etc?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 14, 2017

It's all of a piece with the voter-fraud excuse for Hillary Clinton's Electoral College victory, and with claims that anti-Trump protesters are paid agents, probably of George Soros. Nothing is ever a justifiable reaction to something Team Republican does. Any attack on Republicans is a back-alley mugging of holy innocents.

If the Trump administration continues to be one faceplant after another, angry right-wingers will continue to offer a one-size-fits-all explanation for the administration's failures: sabotage, sabotage, sabotage. They never do anything wrong -- period. And that will be the right's official narrative of the Trump years forever.

ON FLYNN RESIGNATION, BREITBART, FOX, AND THE LIBERAL-HATING LEFT ARE ON THE SAME PAGE, NATURALLY

General Mike Flynn has resigned as national security adviser, and Breitbart finds the real enemy:

Flynn Resignation Raises Tough Questions for FBI, Intel Services

The resignation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn on Monday evening raises troubling questions about the role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the intelligence services.

... [Flynn] was “caught” because the Department of Justice had been eavesdropping on the conversation....

Democrats are clamoring for a deeper investigation of Russian ties to Trump. But the more serious question is whether our nation’s intelligence services were involved in what amounts to political espionage against the newly-elected government.

We know that there are hundreds and perhaps thousands of federal bureaucrats already using shadow communications systems. How far does that “shadow government” go?

The FBI, CIA and other agencies ought to reassure Congress, or come clean.

And if you think Breitbart is more extreme than the outlet it's trying to replace as the right's media source of record, Fox News, here's Steve Doocy on Fox & Friends this morning:

.@KellyannePolls: It's not a particular contact or incident by itself that led to #FlynnResignation. It's the cumulative effect. pic.twitter.com/NZmShV0q4Q

— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) February 14, 2017

DOOCY: There are a number of major U.S. papers that apparently got the leaks from the intel community that said, "Hey, look, we've got the transcript of what Mr. Flynn said to the Russian ambassador," and, uh, looks kinda shady. Just the fact that there are these leaks inside the permanent government is troubling.

And ostensibly over on the left, here's a tweet from Young Turks reporter Michael Tracey that was, unsurprisingly, retweeted by Glenn Greenwald:



And, of course, there's WikiLeaks:

Trump's National Security Advisor Michael Flynn resigns after destabilization campaign by US spies, Democrats, press https://t.co/vKlX1Tqek1

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) February 14, 2017

Right, WikiLeaks is appalled that anyone would engage in a "destabilization campaign."

To sum up: We're not supposed to be upset at Flynn's phone calls, or the policy they were in the service of. We're not supposed to worry about how many other Trumpers are colluding with the Russians. The villains here are the "Deep State," the Democrats, and the media. And that'll be the right-wing line and the liberal-hating-left line going forward.

STEPHEN MILLER: AUTHORITARIAN OR WANNABE?

This doesn't seem reassuring:

Senior White House policy adviser Stephen Miller made the rounds on the Sunday talk shows over the weekend, and his comments about voter fraud have earned him justifiably dim reviews....

But amid all the baseless and false statements about electoral integrity, Miller did something even more controversial: He expanded upon his boss's views of whether judges are allowed to question President Trump's authority. And at one point, Miller even said Trump's national security decisions "will not be questioned."

On Face the Nation, Miller said:

One unelected judge in Seattle cannot remake laws for the entire country. I mean this is just crazy, John, the idea that you have a judge in Seattle say that a foreign national living in Libya has an effective right to enter the United States is -- is -- is beyond anything we've ever seen before.

The end result of this, though, is that our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.

Is Miller telling us in all seriousness that the Trump administration won't be constrained by the checks and balances built into our system? Or is it a lot of empty bluster?

The administration's actions have been very harsh, but the Trumpers don't seem ready yet to ignore the courts and impose their will by brute force. Greg Sargent writes this:

Taken together, Miller’s comments signal that, if the White House does manage to get a version of the ban past legal hurdles, it will have demonstrated that Trump’s powers “will not be questioned,” meaning that the judiciary will not stand in his way. There is simply no reason to assume in advance that this will end here.... the possibility cannot be ruled out that Trump could seek to extend the ban and expand it, in effect trying to simulate an indefinite ban on legal immigration from many Muslim-majority nations -- particularly if there is a major terrorist attack.

That's true, and it's bad enough, but if the way the administration plans to prove that it "will not be questioned" is by getting a revised version of the travel ban "past legal hurdles," that means it's respecting the legal system, however begrudgingly.

Or maybe the administration isn't respecting the legal administration so much as it's unprepared to launch a totalitarian assault on the legal system. I think that's closer to the truth. And I do mean "unprepared" in a very literal sense: Serious authoritarians would have have had a plan to neutralize the courts if they wanted to do something that could be blocked by a lawsuit. The Trumpers couldn't think one additional move ahead, and never consolidated power enough to try to rule with that kind of ruthlessness. They seemed to think had all the power they wanted already. They apparently believed they'd issue an executive order and that would be the last word on the subject.

This could change -- there might be people in the government who are not only as ruthless as Trump and Steve Bannon but who also possess the Government 101 level of knowledge necessary to grasp where the implementation of the agenda can be slowed or stopped.

One would assume that Miller understands how the government actually works -- he was, after all, an aide to Jeff Sessions when Sessions was a senator. But he offers no evidence that his idle threat because will be carried out -- he seems to be holding forth like the school-paper op-ed writer and talk-radio frequent caller he used to be:

In a column in his high school newspaper, titled “A Time to Kill,” he urged violent response to radical Islamists....

Ari Rosmarin, a civil rights lawyer who edited the student newspaper at time, recalled that Miller was especially critical of a Mexican American student group.

“I think he’s got a very sharp understanding of what words and issues will poke and provoke progressives, because he came up around it and really cut his teeth picking these fights that had low stakes but high offense,” Rosmarin said.

That skill led Miller to become a mini-celebrity in conservative intellectual circles because of his passion, age and home town. He appeared 70 times on [Larry] Elder’s show before his high school graduation, according to the host.

The Trumpers came into this full of revenge fantasies but with no idea how to rule by fiat in what is still a nation of laws, if barely. Miller doesn't scare me until the administration starts defying the courts or roughing up judges and journalists. For now the Trumpers are awful, and they still need to be passionately opposed, but they don't seem to have the will to be worse than that.

YOU SAY "CHAOS" AS IF IT'S A BAD THING!

Mike Flynn's head might roll soon, or maybe not:

The White House is reviewing whether to retain National Security Adviser Mike Flynn amid a furor over his contacts with Russian officials before President Donald Trump took office, an administration official said Sunday....

Mr. Trump’s views toward the matter aren’t clear. In recent days, he has privately told people the controversy surrounding Mr. Flynn is unwelcome, after he told reporters on Friday he would “look into” the disclosures.

But Mr. Trump also has said he has confidence in Mr. Flynn and wants to “keep moving forward,” a person familiar with his thinking said.

And Flynn might not be the only Trumper who lacks job security:

Yet Trump’s concern goes beyond his embattled national security adviser, according to conversations with more than a dozen people who have spoken to Trump or his top aides. He has mused aloud about press secretary Sean Spicer, asking specific questions to confidants about how they think he’s doing behind the podium. During conversations with Spicer, the president has occasionally expressed unhappiness with how his press secretary is talking about some matters -- sometimes pointing out even small things he’s doing that he doesn’t like.

Others who’ve talked with the president have begun to wonder about the future of Chief of Staff Reince Priebus.

Yes, we know that Priebus is in trouble because Christopher Ruddy -- another right-wing media bigwig who's befriended Trump -- has blabbed about this:

The friend, Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media, said in an interview that Reince Priebus was well meaning and well liked. But he said Mr. Priebus was in over his head, and he hinted that Mr. Trump may already be growing weary of the man he chose to run the White House.

“He doesn’t waste a lot of time,” Mr. Ruddy said of the president. “If he thinks somebody is not performing, he moves pretty quickly.”

There's chaos at the National Security Council, and incompetence:

Three weeks into the Trump administration, council staff members get up in the morning, read President Trump’s Twitter posts and struggle to make policy to fit them. Most are kept in the dark about what Mr. Trump tells foreign leaders in his phone calls....

Two people with direct access to the White House leadership said Mr. Flynn was surprised to learn that the State Department and Congress play a pivotal role in foreign arms sales and technology transfers. So it was a rude discovery that Mr. Trump could not simply order the Pentagon to send more weapons to Saudi Arabia ... or to deliver bigger weapons packages to the United Arab Emirates.

And Trump just keeps getting into fights with people:

The morning after North Korea launched a ballistic missile into the sea, apparently to test President Trump’s resolve in his first days in office, the new commander in chief wanted to make one thing very clear to the world: Mark Cuban, the billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner, was not smart enough to have his job.

“I know Mark Cuban well,” Mr. Trump said Sunday morning on Twitter.... “He backed me big-time but I wasn’t interested in taking all of his calls. He’s not smart enough to run for president!”

It was not clear what provoked the insult....

He swiped at Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, for criticizing the counterterrorism raid in Yemen that resulted in the death of a Navy SEAL....

The same day, the president took on Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, for revealing that Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, had called Mr. Trump’s attacks on judges “demoralizing” and “disheartening.” ...

Are Trump fans upset about any of this? Nope. Here's what a Politico reporter tells us about a weekend trip to Terre Haute, Indiana:

“Oh, Trump -- I’m still all Trumped up,” Jane, a retired insurance broker, told me....

What I heard, in conversations with nearly a dozen Trump supporters, is that ... most of Vigo County is still “Trumped up.” ... You hear it in chatter at eateries like Logan’s and in coffee shops and diners such as Boo’s Crossroads Cafe & Corner Grind.... And the grist of the coastal media’s hot takes? The lies, the fumbles and faux pas that have rattled the D.C. establishment and global allies? None of it seems to resonate here.

Are they upset about the chaos and the Twitter beefs? Nahhh.

Nor are voters like Kelly lamenting his Twitter tirades: “He’s speaking directly to the people. Like Reagan!” Dick told me over lunch. Trump’s brusque, shoot-from-the-hip conversations with world leaders and allies? “We’re not going to go to war with Australia,” Kindsvatter said.

“I think he’s pretty much following The Art of the Deal,” said Ken Warner, 60, who works in the finance industry. “He’s got the price of fighter jets down. It’s not something we’re used to. It’s a little unorthodox. Listening to his Carrier negotiation, you have to shrug on the means but can’t disagree with the ends. You don’t want to be picking winners and losers. You don’t want to see a president calling out people on Twitter. However, the results so far have not been bad. So I can’t say it’s wrong.”

What I'm thinking is that these people aren't just tut-tutting "the means" while applauding "the results." I think they assume that anyone of their own political persuasion who's getting press this bad must be doing something right. I think the chaos reinforces the sense that Trump is "shaking things up."

Paul Krugman writes today:

At this point, someone is bound to say, “If they’re so dumb, how come they won?” Part of the answer is that disdain for experts -- sorry, “so-called” experts -- resonates with an important part of the electorate. Bigotry wasn’t the only dark force at work in the election; so was anti-intellectualism, hostility toward “elites” who claim that opinions should be based on careful study and thought.

I think chaos and incompetence are part of the secret sauce that signals to Trump voters that he's a refreshing change from the pols who've disappointed them in the past. Eventually, whewn the dust settles, they'll know they've been cheated. But -- if we haven't all died in a thermonuclear war or plunged into an economic depression by then -- it might not be until well into his second term.

Trump voters see crowd-pleasing policies accompanied by turbulence. They say the turbulence doesn't bother them. I think they see it as an affirmation of their worldview, and a sign that their champion is hard at work on their behalf.

KELLYANNE CONWAY DOES NOT STRIKE ME AS EMOTIONALLY NEEDY

I'm not sure how I feel about this:

Saturday Night Live Just Aired A Kellyanne Conway Sketch That Is Very Controversial

Kellyanne Conway and Jake Tapper in a remake of Fatal Attraction.

Twitter is divided! ...

Casting Kellyanne Conway as Glenn Close was a miscalculation on SNL's part. Will be interpreted as unfair and mean to a wife and mother.

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) February 12, 2017

... But a lot of people thought it was funny.

Sorry but this is not sexist. It’s actually brilliant. For many reasons. https://t.co/bCM9DG2EC8

— Sasha Stone (@AwardsDaily) February 12, 2017

Here's the sketch:



I'm old enough to have seen Fatal Attraction during its initial theatrical run, and I thought it was a sexist mess. I'm less certain about this sketch; the original movie wanted you to take Glenn Close's mingling of sexuality, menace, and madness very, very seriously, with the implication that women, or at least the "wrong" kind of women, are crazy, dangerous bitches. (It's similar to the way Trumpers talk about Mexicans and Muslims.) In the sketch, on the other hand, it's clear everyone knows the situation is ridiculous and over the top. The sketch seems to mocking the movie as much as it's mocking Conway. (Oh, and Kate McKinnon acts the hell out of it.)

But why does SNL persist in depicting Conway as needy and desperate for media validation? (Also see the earlier sketch that I've posted below.) She strikes me as one of the least needy people in this administration, and she's getting plenty of media validation doing just what she's doing. Unlike rage junkie Trump, bitter schemers Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, and resentful arrow-catcher Sean Spicer, Conway seems to be happy all the time, and carries herself as if she believes she thinks she's damn good. She seems to be in Trump's good graces, even after the Bowling Green Massacre gaffe (well, it's not as if Trump is a stickler for facts) and after the ethically improper promotion of Ivanka's merchandise (which I'm sure the boss would ideally want her to repeat every day). On Twitter and TV, Conway is almost better at being Trumpian than Trump is. Unlike Trump, whose unquenchable thirst for validation means he's never really happy, Conway genuinely seems to derive sustained soul satisfaction from her own meanness. And she can be nastier than trump when slipping in the shiv -- see her response after Hillary Clinton responded to the appeals court decision upholding the block on the travel ban:



I'm no comedy writer, but if it were up to me she'd be getting some of the lines SNL is giving to Melissa McCarthy's Sean Spicer. Can't you imagine Conway saying something along the lines of "I’d like to begin today by apologizing on behalf of you to me for how you have treated me these last two weeks"? McCarthy-as-Spicer says this like an angry cop; Conway would just rattle it off in self-righteous, finger-wagging tones, as if she's demanding that the press feel shame. And then she'd rattle off five more indefensible statements so quickly you couldn't fact-check her fast enough.

She's good at jiujitsuing everything said to her. She's better than Spicer. She's better than Trump. Why would she feel desperate? She's an excellent bullshit artist, and this job is her best work to date.

HOW TO REMAIN A MANAGEMENT GENIUS IN YOUR OWN MIND NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU SCREW UP

Donald Trump is backing down from his defense of the travel ban executive order. Except maybe he isn't backing down. So there!

President Trump vowed on Friday to order new security measures by next week intended to stop terrorists from entering the United States, even as aides debated whether to ask the Supreme Court to reinstate his original travel ban that has now been blocked by lower courts.

A day after a three-judge panel rebuffed him, Mr. Trump said he might sign “a brand new order” as early as Monday that would be aimed at accomplishing the same purpose but, presumably, with a stronger legal basis. While he vowed to keep fighting for the original order in court, he indicated that he would not wait for the process to play out to take action.

“We will win that battle,” he told reporters on Air Force One as he flew to Florida for a weekend golf outing with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan. Yet noting that it most likely would not happen quickly, he also raised the possibility of “a lot of other options, including just filing a brand new order.”

I think I'm starting to understand why Trump has always had "multiple power centers" in his business and now in his White House: It's so he's never wrong, at least in his own mind. Consider what happened in this case. He wanted a bold step on immigration from predominantly Muslim countries, so he turned it over to ... his bomb-throwing team of experts, led by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller. They kept their efforts secret even from others in the White House and generated a nasty piece of work that really rattled the cages of Trump's enemies. Trump's a genius! But the executive order was also a work of incompetence, so now that it's being rebuffed in court, Trump is thinking about following the advice of, presumably ... another group of expert subordinates, who are presumably telling him to give up on the original executive order and write another one. Having them around to counsel wisdom and due process shows (again) that Trump's a genius! And meanwhile he'll still defend the old executive order, or at least he's insisting he might, just in case you thought he wasn't a genius when he was listening to the experts whose work he's now planning to replace with the work of his other experts.

Trump just can't stand being wrong, even though he's wrong most of the time. He has to be right -- his delicate ego demands it. Being able to play one group of top aides against others guarantees that he can always point to somebody on his team of the "best people" who hasn't been definitively proved wrong. Brilliant!

BANNON FAVORABLY INVOKES WRITINGS OF NAZI SYMPATHIZER; AN OBAMA STAFFER WAS PILLORIED FOR MUCH LESS

In The New York Times, Jason Horowitz tells us about the pro-Nazi Italian writer Steve Bannon apparently takes seriously:

Those trying to divine the roots of Stephen K. Bannon’s dark and at times apocalyptic worldview have repeatedly combed over a speech that Mr. Bannon, President Trump’s ideological guru, made in 2014 to a Vatican conference....

... a passing reference by Mr. Bannon to an esoteric Italian philosopher has gone little noticed, except perhaps by scholars and followers of the deeply taboo, Nazi-affiliated thinker, Julius Evola....

Evola, who died in 1974, ... became a darling of Italian Fascists, and Italy’s post-Fascist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s looked to him as a spiritual and intellectual godfather....

A March article titled “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” in Breitbart, the website then run by Mr. Bannon, included Evola as one of the thinkers in whose writings the “origins of the alternative right” could be found....

Evola’s ideal order, Professor [Richard] Drake wrote, was based on “hierarchy, caste, monarchy, race, myth, religion and ritual.”

That made a fan out of Benito Mussolini....

Evola eventually broke with Mussolini and the Italian Fascists because he considered them overly tame and corrupted by compromise. Instead he preferred the Nazi SS officers, seeing in them something closer to a mythic ideal. They also shared his anti-Semitism.

Here's what Bannon said about Evola at that Vatican conference (emphasis added):

When Vladimir Putin, when you really look at some of the underpinnings of some of his beliefs today, a lot of those come from what I call Eurasianism; he’s got an adviser who harkens back to Julius Evola and different writers of the early 20th century who are really the supporters of what’s called the traditionalist movement, which really eventually metastasized into Italian fascism. A lot of people that are traditionalists are attracted to that.

One of the reasons is that they believe that at least Putin is standing up for traditional institutions, and he’s trying to do it in a form of nationalism -- and I think that people, particularly in certain countries, want to see the sovereignty for their country, they want to see nationalism for their country. They don’t believe in this kind of pan-European Union or they don’t believe in the centralized government in the United States. They’d rather see more of a states-based entity that the founders originally set up where freedoms were controlled at the local level.

I’m not justifying Vladimir Putin and the kleptocracy that he represents, because he eventually is the state capitalist of kleptocracy. However, we the Judeo-Christian West really have to look at what he’s talking about as far as traditionalism goes -- particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism -- and I happen to think that the individual sovereignty of a country is a good thing and a strong thing. I think strong countries and strong nationalist movements in countries make strong neighbors, and that is really the building blocks that built Western Europe and the United States, and I think it’s what can see us forward.

The key line there is "we the Judeo-Christian West really have to look at what he’s talking about as far as traditionalism goes." Bannon calls Putin a kleptocrat, and he says that Evola's philosophy evolved into fascism -- but he thinks Traditionalism is a good thing, certainly insofar as "it supports the underpinnings of nationalism" (nationalism is definitely a good thing as far as Bannon is concerned: "I think strong countries and strong nationalist movements in countries make strong neighbors").

So Bannon was saying some positive things about this Nazi sympathizer, and this Nazi sympathizer got name-checked in a guide to the alt-right published at Breitbart when Bannon was its editor.

Waiting for a big reaction in the political world? Don't hold your breath.

As a point of comparison, recall the story of Anita Dunn, who spent less than a year as White House communications director in President Obama's first term. Shortly before she was set to resign, Glenn Beck, then on Fox, unearthed a video clip in which Dunn cited Mao Zedong, along with Mother Teresa, to impart a lesson about staying true to oneself:

On the Oct. 15, 2009, episode of his Fox show, Beck aired a video of a speech Dunn made to high school students.

In it, Dunn imparted a series of life lessons to the students, the third of which "actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers: Mao Tse-tung and Mother Teresa, not often coupled together, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is, you're going to make choices. You're going to challenge. You're going to say why not. You're going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before."

Dunn then told an anecdote about how Mao triumphed as an underdog over his rival, nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek, during the Chinese civil war. Asked how he would win, Mao said, according to Dunn, "You know, you fight your war, and I'll fight mine."

Dunn continued, "And think about that for a second. You don't have to accept the definition of how to do things, and you don't have to follow other people's choices and paths, okay? It is about your choices and your path. You fight your own war. You lay out your own path. You figure out what's right for you. You don't let external definitions define how good you are internally."

Citing this, Beck referred to Mao as Dunn's "hero" and accused her and other Obama officials of being Mao worshipers:

"America, how many radicals is it going to take?" Beck stated: "[W]e're not just talking about progressives now, we're talking about revolutionaries that idolize Mao."

... Beck asked, "[I]s it a concern to any American that so many people now in and around this administration and this president seem to love a communist revolutionary dictator? Here's our White House communications director, Anita Dunn, standing in front of a group of graduating high school students and praising him."

Dunn, who later said she got the Mao quote from the late GOP strategist Lee Atwater -- would go on to be attacked by The Wall Street Journal's John Fund, William Bennett and Lou Dobbs on CNN, multiple National Review writers, Breitbart, RedState ("Obama Communications Director Anita Dunn: Isn't Genocide Great?"), World Net Daily ("Why Obama's Lieutenants Love Mao"), Michelle Malkin ("Anita Dunn: A Corruptocrat Flack and a Mao Cheerleader"), and Laura Ingraham, whose website put a Mao hat on a photo of Dunn and paired it with a photo of Mao (headline: "Separated at Birth").

Will there be anything like that for Bannon? There should be -- it's likely he genuinely admires Evola's philosophy, or at least some aspects of it, whereas Dunn is a veteran Democratic Party operative, and thus hardly a communist or Maoist. (If you don't believe me, go ask an actual communist or Maoist.) But I'm betting we won't hear much more about this. Nevertheless, a tip of the hat to the Times for the deep dive.

HE ALONE CAN'T FIX IT

Politico says that Donald Trump is grumpy:

Being president is harder than Donald Trump thought, according to aides and allies who say that he’s growing increasingly frustrated with the challenges of running the massive federal bureaucracy.

In interviews, nearly two dozen people who’ve spent time with Trump in the three weeks since his inauguration said that his mood has careened between surprise and anger as he’s faced the predictable realities of governing, [including] congressional delays over his cabinet nominations and legal fights holding up his aggressive initiatives....

The administration’s rocky opening days have been a setback for a president who, as a billionaire businessman, sold himself to voters as being uniquely qualified to fix what ailed the nation.

The poor dear -- he was supposed to make America great again single-handedly, and lesser mortals were just supposed to yield to him. He was supposed to face no congressional or popular resistance when he nominated the most radical cabinet in modern history; affected parties, the courts, and the public were just supposed to suck it up and give in when he issued extreme, hastily drawn-up executive orders. He's the alpha male! Why isn't everyone just acknowledging his obvious dominance?

David Brooks thinks the president just needs a buddy or two:

If you could give Donald Trump the gift of a single trait to help his presidency, what would it be?

... the gift I would give Trump would be an emotional gift, the gift of fraternity. I’d give him the gift of some crisis he absolutely could not handle on his own. The only way to survive would be to fall back entirely on others, and then to experience what it feels like to have them hold him up.

Out of that, I hope, would come an ability to depend on others, to trust other people, to receive grace, and eventually a desire for companionship....

Donald Trump didn’t have to have an administration that was at war with everyone but its base....

He doesn’t have to begin each day making enemies: Nordstrom, John McCain, judges. He could begin each day looking for friends, and he would actually get a lot more done.

But Trump was raised to believe that life is war and the way to win is to be a lone wolf and the meanest SOB on the planet -- and then, perhaps more important for the present circumstances, he was politicized by Fox News, a channel run for years by Roger Ailes, who also believes that life is war and America needs a strongman. The new Ailes in Trump's life, Steve Bannon, also believes in strongmen and perpetual war.

This is the worldview of modern conservatism: cooperation is evil, and collective action even by allies isn't as good as heroic individualism. And when heroes act, it's all supposed to work the way it does in the movies: Their bullets always hit their targets, their enemies are always permanently vanquished, and only good things result from their actions.

Trump was supposed to just roll right over the rest of us. His fan base believed that. He believed that. Strongmen always win, you see, and conservatives who talk tough are always strongmen.

It's not working out like a movie, or a Fox tribute to Ronald Reagan. No wonder Trump is confused.

GINGRICH USES FOOTBALL TO TELL TRUMP THAT HE'S SCREWING UP BADLY

Newt Gingrich published an opinion piece at FoxNews.com today that's titled "Trump Should Have Belichick Spend One Day a Week at the White House. Here’s Why." Gingrich uses the success of the New England Patriots coach to gently suggest that Donald Trump is an incompetent president:

President Trump and Belichick are similar in several ways. But there are a few ways Trump could benefit from spending time with his good friend Coach Belichick.

Both work very hard.

Both are driven by a deep determination to win.

Both are comfortable having to come from behind....

However, Coach Belichick has three big advantages.

First, Belichick has had years to build his system....

President Trump is now more like Belichick when he was first head coach in Cleveland. And President Trump has no offseason to think and regroup.

Second, Belichick has a constant emphasis on the team, which has a huge impact on morale....

It would help President Trump to have Coach Belichick spend one day a week during the offseason teaching team building, team thinking, and the principles of mutual support....

Third, Coach Belichick and President Trump are both very smart. But Belichick began learning football at the age of nine from his father -- the greatest scouting coach of his generation. So, Belichick has a lifetime of mastering his field. Trump has just begun to lead the free world....

Leading the United States of America is clearly more difficult and more important than winning the Super Bowl, but it requires the same fundamentals -- smart strategy, a strong team, and a keen understanding of the game.

Implication: None of which Trump has.

Gingrich was an unswerving Trump loyalist for most of the campaign. He still seem like one when you watch him on TV -- and then you read this, in which he says that Trump is completely out of his depth and has a staff that's out of control.

Nice friends you got there, Mr. President.

I MUST HAVE MISSED THE BARRAGE OF TRUMP TWEETS AFTER THIS STORY RAN

As The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, Donald Trump's bluster isn't preventing companies from shipping jobs to Mexico:

President Donald Trump boosted the hopes of employees at Rexnord Corp.’s factory here in December when he castigated the company for “viciously firing” workers and planning to move their jobs to Mexico.

Two months later, Rexnord is still planning to close the industrial-bearings factory, which employs about 350 people, despite Mr. Trump’s shaming and his earlier intervention to stop a nearby Carrier Corp. furnace factory from closing....

Executives at Peoria, Ill.-based Caterpillar are moving ahead with a restructuring that includes shifting jobs from a Joliet, Ill., factory to Monterrey, Mexico....

Charlotte, N.C.-based Nucor is moving forward with Japan’s JFE Steel to build a new plant in Mexico to make steel for car makers....

Manitowoc Foodservice Inc. went ahead with plans to wind down its soft-drink dispenser factory near Sellersburg, Ind., and lay off about 80 employees in the wake of Mr. Trump’s election, according to local officials.... Electronic component maker CTS Corp. still plans to phase out production at its Elkhart, Ind., plant by mid-2018 and shift production to China, Mexico and Taiwan, a spokesman said. The company has said about 230 employees would be affected as part of the restructuring.

Ford Motor Co., which Mr. Trump criticized during his presidential campaign, decided to scrap plans to build a new factory in Mexico and would create 700 new U.S. jobs. But the company said in January it would still shift production of its Focus small car from Michigan to an existing Mexican facility. General Motors Co. is in the process of moving more production to Mexico, despite criticism from Mr. Trump....

At Axios, Alayna Treene writes:

The economic benefits of investing abroad [have] continued to undermine Trump's plans, even if he uses the carrot of tax cuts and deregulations and the stick of potential tarriffs.

Well, of course "the carrot of tax cuts and deregulations" isn't working -- Trump and the Republicans are dangling offers of tax and regulatory breaks to every business, so it's not as if there's any special incentive to play by Trump's offshoring rules. And remember that the Trump team floated the idea of tariffs last month, only to walk it back when congressional Republicans objected.

Trump's attention span won't permit him to focus on every business that's sending jobs to other countries, and he's not even going to be aware of most of the job exporting if it's not mentioned on his beloved TV shows. This story was in the Journal, but I guess it didn't get attention on Fox & Friends or Morning Joe, presumably because the world of politics is more interested in Neil Gorsuch's criticism of Trump and in Trump's battle with Nordstrom's over his daughter's clothing and shoe lines, a fight now taken up by Kellyanne Conway, who plugged the product lines in clear violation of government ethics rules.

Companies that want to export jobs just have to keep their heads down and wait for Trump's focus to be directed elsewhere, at which point they can do what they want. Also, Trump seems to be less and less interested in posturing as a champion of working people now that memories of his phony-populist campaign remarks have faded for him somewhat. He's got other Twitter wars to wage, and his team has other norms to smash, so this no longer seems to be an administration focus.

Working-class whites, you were seduced. Now you're being abandoned.

BANNON: SHUT UP AND EAT YOUR GENERATIONAL UPHEAVAL

At the Huffington Post, Paul Blumenthal and J.M. Rieger make the case that Steve Bannon is anticipating an apocalypse, in part because he believes the writings of two faux-scholars:

In 2009, the historian David Kaiser, then a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, got a call from a guy named Steve Bannon.

Bannon wanted to interview Kaiser for a documentary he was making based on the work of the generational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe. Kaiser, an expert on Strauss and Howe, didn’t know Bannon from Adam, but he agreed to participate. He went to the Washington headquarters of the conservative activist group Citizens United, where Bannon was then based, for a chat.

Kaiser was impressed by how much Bannon knew about Strauss and Howe, who argued that American history operates in four-stage cycles that move from major crisis to awakening to major crisis. These crises are called “Fourth Turnings” -- and Bannon believed the U.S. had entered one on Sept. 18, 2008, when Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke went to Capitol Hill to ask for a bailout of the international banking system.

“He knew the theory,” Kaiser said. “He obviously enjoyed interviewing me.”

As Blumenthal and Rieger note, the work of Strauss and Howe has been called pseudoscience by the historian Michael Lind. It strikes me as a mix of mildly interesting futurology and utter schlock:

Strauss and Howe’s theory is based on a series of generational archetypes -- the Artists, the Prophets, the Nomads and the Heroes -- that sound like they were pulled from a dystopian young adult fiction series. Each complete four-part cycle, or saeculum, takes about 80 to 100 years, in Strauss and Howe’s reckoning. The Fourth Turning, which the authors published in 1997, focuses on the final, apocalyptic part of the cycle.

Strauss and Howe postulate that during this Fourth Turning crisis, an unexpected leader will emerge from an older generation to lead the nation, and what they call the “Hero” generation (in this case, millennials), to a new order. This person is known as the Grey Champion. An election or another event -- perhaps a war -- will bring this person to power, and their regime will rule throughout the crisis.

Bannon's public utterances frequently allude to these ideas -- Blumenthal and Rieger have the quotes -- and he worked them into a 2010 "documentary" called Generation Zero.



It's bad enough that the top adviser to the president of the United States is an overgrown revenge-obsessed adolescent devoted to apocalyptic nonsense. What makes it worse is that if Bannon really is working from the Strauss and Howe playbook, then he's not at all interested in government initiatives that improve the lives of ordinary people. Just the opposite, in fact:

“The winners will now have the power to pursue the more potent, less incrementalist agenda about which they had long dreamed and against which their adversaries had darkly warned,” Strauss and Howe wrote in The Fourth Turning. “This new regime will enthrone itself for the duration of the Crisis. Regardless of its ideology, that new leadership will assert public authority and demand private sacrifice. Where leaders had once been inclined to alleviate societal pressures, they will now aggravate them to command the nation’s attention.” ...

“We’re gonna have to have some dark days before we get to the blue sky of morning again in America,” Bannon warned in 2010. “We are going to have to take some massive pain. Anybody who thinks we don’t have to take pain is, I believe, fooling you.”

(Emphasis added.)

I'd already assumed that the Trump administration would try to mimic white nationalist parties in Europe, but without the enhancements of the social safety net that those parties generally advocate. Back in December I wrote about a Washington Post story on Poland's ruling Law and Justice Party, which preaches ethno-nationalism but has also increased government benefits. As Paul Krugman wrote,

Europe’s populist parties are actually populist; they pursue policies that really do help workers, as long as those workers are the right color and ethnicity. As someone put it, they’re selling a herrenvolk welfare state. Law and Justice has raised minimum wages and reduced the retirement age; France’s National Front advocates the same things.

Trump, however, is different. He said lots of things on the campaign trail, but his personnel choices indicate that in practice he’s going to be a standard hard-line economic-right Republican. His Congressional allies are revving up to dismantle Obamacare, privatize Medicare, and raise the retirement age. His pick for Labor Secretary is a fast-food tycoon who loathes minimum wage hikes. And his pick for top economic advisor is the king of trickle-down.

That's just mainstream Republicanism, of course -- but we see why Bannon wouldn't have a problem with it, despite his alleged working-class sympathies and his stated desire to crush the Establishment: Bannon thinks we need to suffer before we reach his Promised Land. Our pain is part of his great purging.

So I'm not sure the Trump administration will even try to make its voters' lives better, apart from the occasional scolding of a company attempting to outsource jobs, if this is what the top strategist for the administration believes. Assuming we have elections in the future, that could be a problem for Trump.

LET'S SEE HOW GOOD THEY ARE AT MANUFACTURING CONSENT

I wandered over to Breitbart just now and discovered this:

Conservative grassroots leaders are planning a series of massive pro-President Donald Trump rallies nationwide, Breitbart News has learned exclusively.

On Feb. 27 and March 4, the rallies -- dubbed the Spirit of America Rallies -- will spring up nationwide in cities and towns across America.

“These rallies are inclusive, non-partisan, and open to anyone supporting President Trump in his efforts to bring back manufacturing jobs to America, put the security of our nation ahead of political correctness, improve our infrastructure, revitalize the inner cities and secure our nation’s borders,” Debbie Dooley, a national co-founder of the Tea Party movement and a key organizer of the Spirit of America rallies, says in a press release obtained by Breitbart News ahead of its public release.

The resistance movement clearly has these folks scared -- the president's job approval rating is underwater in most polls, the news coverage of the president is deservedly awful, and opponents are getting pretty good press. I don't know if the pro-Trumpers can really put big crowds together -- I have my doubts, especially about February 27, which is a Monday, but we'll see. In any case, there's clearly a fear out there that the Trumpers have lost control of the narrative. They can write a lot of executive orders, they can get all their Cabinet picks approved on party-line votes, but we've got them on the defensive. I like that.

TYou may not recognize the name of the woman quoted above, but she gets quite a lot of good press in the mainstream media -- she's pro-solar energy, even though she's a conservative, so she gets headlines such as "The Tea Party Leader Taking a Stand for Solar Energy: 'I Will Do What's Right'" and "The Green Tea Party: Conservative Group Embraces Clean Energy." Go to her Twitter feed and you see a lot about solar, in among the usual right-wing material. But what does she do when faced with an administration that's going to be relentlessly hostile to green energy? She signs on as a propagandist. Maybe she's one of the many dupes who believe that Trump's politics will occasionally veer to the center. Prepare to be disappointed, Debbie.