Annotated Edition

Mark Wilson/Getty Images, via Vox.

Annotated edition of the NBC interview with the president-elect. Nearly all of his response to the first question, "What do you plan to accomplish in your first 100 days?"

Well, we’re going to do something with the border, very strong, very powerful. 

But you won't tell us what?

That’ll be our first signal — first signal to America that we’re not playing games. 

Oh, sending a signal. Something with the border, and it's going to be a signal. To America.

We have people coming in by the millions, as you know, and a lot of people shouldn’t be here. Most of them shouldn’t be here.

It has not been anything like millions at the border since December 2023, and especially since Biden's executive order of last June.

And how do you know who should and shouldn't be here?  

But we have jails being emptied into our country. We have mental institutions from all over the world being emptied into our country. 

Nobody, including your own campaign staff, has ever been able to point to any evidence that there is any truth to this story—

Literary Corner: Vital Caselaw (of Which There Is Much)

 

You're welcome!

A No, No!

by Donald J. Trump. 45th President of the United States of America

Vital caselaw, of which there is much,
further confirms that the Presidential Records Act (PRA)
is the only statute which applies
to Presidents and their records.
These cases build on the Clinton Socks case
in making it clear that Presidents have
complete latitude and authority
when it comes to documents, as well as that
the PRA has no criminal enforcement mechanism.
Deranged Jack Smith knows this, but refuses
to even mention the words "Presidential Records Act'"
in his Scam Indictment of Biden's Political Opponent
(who is leading by a lot) in the middle of a Campaign —
a No, No!

Ides

Grigory Rasputin in hospital, 1914, after a first assassination attempt, via History Daily.

Friday afternoon's press conference, 35 minutes in, I thought I heard Trump say he wasn't going to get tested for Covid-19, though he didn't exactly say that:

Q: And also Senat- -- I want to ask another question, if you’ll let me. Senator Lindsey Graham and also Senator Scott -- Rick Scott -- are self-isolating. Are you planning to take any kind of precautionary measure to protect you and also your staff who was there with him?

A: No, we have no symptoms whatsoever. And we have -- we had a great meeting with the President of Brazil, Bolsonaro. Great guy. Very -- a very tremendous -- he’s done -- he’s doing a fantastic job for Brazil. And, as you know, he tested negative -- meaning, nothing wrong -- this morning. And we got that word, too.

Though he certainly hinted it very strongly at 43 minutes:

Well, I don't know that I had exposure, but I don't have any of the symptoms. And we do have a White House doctor and, I should say, many White House doctors, frankly. And I asked them that same question, and they said, “You don't have any symptoms whatsoever.” And we don't want people without symptoms to go and do the test.

But just after an hour he started suggesting that he might want to defy the doctors' recommendations and get tested "anyway", for the reason that he "thought" he would:

For the Record: I was into impeachment before it went mainstream

Photo via Pasta Factory, Cape Town.

A constant theme on the Republican side of the impeachment debate was the idea that "Democrats have been wanting to impeach this president since the day he took office," as if to say the particular matter of the Ukraine case was just an excuse—the spaghetti strand that clung to the wall.

Of course it's projection, as my old friend Mikey says, because it's exactly what they'd been planning themselves  (see Steve M for lots of detail):

What I know is, weeks BEFORE the election, when it seemed a lock for HRC, I’d heard of R’s saying they’d be drafting Articles on her literally before she was even sworn in.

For what??
Doesn’t matter. Because HER.

So, any Rs b¡tching now, can Shut right TFU & sit TF down. 😡

— Not My Secret Twîtter Account (@mikeybee33) December 19, 2019

Nevertheless there's some truth to the suggestion that we'd have taken anything that worked, some of us: the Zelenskyy bribery case being the one that somehow grabbed the attention of those 30 "moderate" congressional Democrats and the big newspapers—though not to the corollary implication that Trump's not guilty in the others, from the corrupt use of the inauguration fund and the campaign finance violations for which Michael Cohen is in jail through all the bank fraud and tax fraud that may apply and the many sexual assault charges and the foreign and domestic emoluments to the big cases of the president bending foreign and national security policy for the personal benefits he may have received or be receiving from the leaderships of countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and above all Russia.

I was worried about this problem in the "marketing" of the narrow impeachment case from the start, that it would give Republicans a chance to insinuate that the Ukraine shakedown must be the only bad thing Trump had ever done as president, since it was the only bad thing Democrats had been able to find, and cast doubt on whether it was really so bad, because they'd be portraying it in isolation, rather than the context of Trump's all-round thug style of foreign policy. Indeed that's how the Republicans have been arguing, and yesterday they did it all day long, until I was moved to emit the following thread:

All the President's Mess

Amphora painting of Odysseus blinding Polyphemus, Eleusis Museum, via Wikipedia.

The thing about Woodward, you know, forty years he’s kissed ass and been kissed in return for crumbs, what the hell’s the point, and now he’s going to look tough again all because of rats leaving a sinking ship.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) September 4, 2018

That's the thing. It strikes me Woodward is like the little man in the forest in a Grimm story. Each brother in turn runs into him and he asks them to share their sandwich and pot of beer and rewards them with a magical object or a bag of gold pieces hidden in the tree stump; but the last brother who's rude and refuses gets a curse instead and henceforward every time he opens his mouth a frog leaps out of it, or something like that. Woodward's just responding to what he gets, and for the first time in 40 years he looks like he's done something.

The good news (and as you can tell from the title,  Fear, there's not a lot of it) is that Trump isn't president, as I've said. He's not authorized to speak for the White House. Kelly and Conway and the rest of the household retainers made huge and successful efforts to keep Trump from talking to Woodward until after the manuscript was submitted, because that would have been too embarrassing to bear, but a pretty accurate picture of the White House is emerging from the Wapo excerpts, and Trump isn't effectively in it, although he makes plenty of trouble trying to make decisions on the few matters that sort of interest him and sometimes getting away with it. But he doesn't know enough about what's going on, or care enough about it, except for the hopeless desire for protection against the Mueller investigation, to impose his will on it in general, and there's been what Woodward calls an "administrative coup d'état", where the staffers work as clearly as they can and Trump howls from the East Wing: