Foundering

Via.

Getting pretty crazy, huh? In the middle of a deadly pandemic, this whole other issue of police brutality, and US Army helicopters bearing the Red Cross insignia bearing down on protests in Lafayette Square under, apparently, orders from the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces who is as you know our head of state and head of government, a biggish failure in the fabled separation of powers in our constitutional setup, or the "highest levels of the Washington D.C. Army National Guard" (WaPo), or maybe the attorney general. Seriously, the attorney general? 

Mr. Barr was concerned about demonstrations near the White House over the weekend that had resulted in a small basement fire at St. John’s and graffiti on the Treasury Department headquarters, so he resolved to push the security perimeter farther from the mansion.

And the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in military fatigues and the secretary of defense walking with the president and his all-white goon squad over to St. John's Episcopal (where the pastoral staff and colleagues from other churches, far from terrorized by the nearby graffiti and the small fire, had been passing out water bottles and snacks to the protesters while Black Lives Matter workers filled squeeze bottles with the mix of dish soap and water you can use as an eyewash in a tear gas attack) to, um, film him looking with puzzlement at a Bible and waving it in the air and dandling it up and down like a colicky baby.

Vignette From the Age of Covid

Ooh Mark, Jared saw you crying and told Maggie about it and now ALL the girls know Donald said he might ask for his ring back https://t.co/RL7KKbXufu

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) April 16, 2020

Maggie Haberman, 16 April, on the first three weeks of the president's new chief of staff:

In the case of Mr. Meadows, it has not helped him with his White House colleagues that the former North Carolina congressman, who has a reputation for showing his emotions, cried while meeting with members of the White House staff on at least two occasions. One instance was in the presence of a young West Wing aide; another time was with the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

On both occasions, Mr. Meadows was discussing staffing changes, according to the people briefed on the events. A White House spokesman declined to comment on either meeting. A person close to Mr. Kushner said he denied that any such episode involving him ever took place.

I'm not going to try writing it up as a scene, but I can't stop picturing it as a lockdown moment that should be part of the history, a Skype call between Haberman in her Washington apartment and Jared and Ivanka on a couch somewhere, maybe still in Jersey—they flew to the Bedminster golf course for the first Passover seder, with their Secret Service friends and presumably hundreds of freshly rented golf carts, and it must have been a pretty idyllic moment of respite, unspoiled by any golf or First Golfer raging through the clubhouse. Jared's regaling Maggie with tales of weeping Mark, and they're laughing their little hearts out, and then Ivanka raises a warning finger: "Of course Jared denies that any such episode involving him ever took place." And then they're laughing harder than ever.

Cleaning up the Jefferson monument

Jefferson Memorial aims to clean up a microbial colony of algae, fungi and bacteria that has tarnished the monument’s dome. (Kirk D. McKoy / Los Angeles Times)

Grand Duchess Ivanka Donaldovna reminding her papa that other great men have had it just as tough as he has:

“…surrounded by enemies and spies catching and perverting every word that falls from my lips or flows from my pen, and inventing where facts fail them.” -Thomas Jefferson’s reflections on Washington, D.C. in a letter to his daughter Martha.
Some things never change, dad!

— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) October 31, 2019

Somebody was thinking it would be pretty amusing if the "inventing where facts fail them" Jefferson was complaining about was a reference to the campaign slur claiming he had fathered a child on an enslaved woman, which was actually true, of course (actually six children, and it's hard to imagine Martha didn't know about it; the woman in question, Sally Hemings, was her mother's half-sister, and a very central person in the household after her mother's death).

Is Ivanka quoting a sinful president begging for sympathy over wicked and salacious accusations that are in fact true as she seeks to console another one?

Sadly, no, as a great blogger used to say:

Wall Together Now

Photograph by Bjarni Grimsson for MAGA, a nonprofit arts group led by the Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel which aims to preserve the eight prototype Wall samples in San Diego as sculptures with a cultural value as historical "land art", seen here from the Mexican side of the existing barrier, January 2018, via the Guardian.

It's a mystery!

Fox and Friends always has to be the top suspect, and all of its hosts are certainly stupid enough to believe this https://t.co/lNOlLZjxNp

— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) January 6, 2019

I'll get to my hypothesis eventually, but I want to remind you that the look of the thing, if not Democrats' attitude toward it, has been a big factor in Trumpy's wallthink from the beginning, when you think about it—Trump always insisted that his wall was going to be "big and beautiful", and was very insistent on the importance of aesthetics when he issued the call for design proposals in March 2017:

For the Record: Is Samantha Bee a Traitor to Feminism?

The main thing wrong with the expression used by the comedian Samantha Bee to describe Senior Counselor to the President Ivanka Trump, by which I mean the only thing wrong with it, was that it gave Republicans a way of distracting us from the issue Bee was talking about, which didn't seem to be a part of any of the news stories, but as I learned from Steve, it was the issue that's obsessed me all week. Some idiot kid set me off last night:

If you think feminists call for a double standard and giving women advantages they don't deserve that's because you don't understand.

Feminists call for EQUAL RIGHTS and equal responsibilities. When a woman is vicious and corrupt Bee calls her out just as she would a man.

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) June 1, 2018

For the Record: These Goulish Things Remind Me of You

Deplorable https://t.co/EMGX6xPzva

An early look at Tuesday's front... pic.twitter.com/ZAK1Vk5ACW

— New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) May 15, 2018

This headline is disgusting in every conceivable way https://t.co/sgzh0k7uYI

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) May 15, 2018

So the headline is disgusting, but the fact that people were murdered is completely fine? Was that your take away from this whole thing Ben?

— Mohanad Elshieky (@MohanadElshieky) May 15, 2018

Daily News front page doesn't blame her for it. What's ghoulish is having such a nice party amid the carnage.

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) May 15, 2018

Fire and fury like the world has never seen

Good times! The "fucking liar", as Ivanka calls him, and the "queen of leaks", as Bannon calls her, photo by Carlos Barria/Reuters via Telegraph.

On today's Guardian story pre-publicizing Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which certainly looks like it's going to be fun, when Stephen Bannon is quoted as saying the Trump Tower meeting between Junior-Jared-Manafort and Natalya Veselnitskaya in June 2016 was "treasonous", "unpatriotic", and "should have called the FBI immediately" and "bad shit"—

Bannon, speaking to author Michael Wolff, warned that the investigation into alleged collusion with the Kremlin will focus on money laundering and predicted: “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”

—don't think he means that like it was a bad thing or something. He means they did it wrong: they shouldn't have gotten caught, and Bannon should preferably have made some money out of it:

Bannon went on, Wolff writes, to say that if any such meeting had to take place, it should have been set up “in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people”. Any information, he said, could then be “dump[ed] … down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication”.

And while hating Jared and Ivanka is fun, Bannon still hates them because they're Jewish. That's what "globalist" means ("Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, is quoted as saying: 'It is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews.'"). Enjoy them squabbling and trying to knock each other off as they skitter down the ropes, but they're all bad people.

New York note

Marc Fliedner, via New York.

I'm pretty creeped out at the moment by the startling news that's been coming out about Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. (yes, his papa was Jimmy Carter's patrician secretary of state while Mika Brzezinski's papa was doing all the foreign policy work, in an illustration of how our country seems to have developed a full-blown aristocracy since I was a kid), as summarized by David Freedlander at New York Magazine:

Vance, first elected in 2009, is running for a third term in November without an opponent from any party on the ballot after winning the Democratic primary without opposition in September. In the last couple of weeks Vance has come under withering criticism, first from a ProPublica/WNYC investigation into a decision not to prosecute Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump for misleading prospective buyers about their Trump Soho property, and then after The New Yorker revealed that Vance declined to prosecute Harvey Weinstein for allegedly sexually assaulting 22-year-old model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez even though Gutierrez came forward with a recording of Weinstein discussing the assault.

In both cases, lawyers for the accused made sizable donations to Vance’s campaign, with Trump personal lawyer Marc Kasowitz giving Vance a $32,000 check on the heels of a private meeting with the district attorney, and Weinstein lawyer David Boies donating $10,000 after Vance dropped the investigation into his client. Vance has since returned the Trump money, and denied that the fundraising had anything to do with the decision to not prosecute, saying that neither case had enough evidence to prove criminality.

To paraphrase Lady Bracknell, bumbling into the appearance of having been bribed to not indict an extremely socially powerful criminal may be regarded as a misfortune; but doing it twice looks like carelessness.

And then there's learning the news at this particular moment, less than a month before the election, when there's seemingly nothing that can be done to stop him from getting a third term if we're not satisfied with his explanations, which we really aren't so far—independent nominations closed off, New York laws making it impossible to think about getting an alternative name anywhere on the ballot, not even a Republican to vote for.

But a write-in candidate has bubbled up today, a civil rights lawyer named Marc Fliedner who ran in the summer primary for Brooklyn DA and says he's willing to move across the river, and a background that's both intersectional (he's gay) and Bernieish (Berners backed him in the Brooklyn race, in which he got 10% of the vote):

“I’m not doing any fundraising, I don’t have any staff, but it is accurate to say that I am a candidate via this grassroots write-in effort,” Fliedner said in a phone interview this morning. “It’s important we give voters an ethical choice in a landscape totally devoid of women’s rights and equal justice.”

No, I don't think he's going to win, and I can hardly even believe Vance could be as bad as he looks at the moment (I wish I could hear some acknowledgment that he knows how bad he looks). It's just a thought that not absolutely everything is necessarily going to hell.

Heiress Apparent?

Grand Duchess Ivanka Donaldovna in Harper's Bazaar, 2007, via Time.

I never really know how serious I am talking about Emperor Trump and Grand Duchess Ivanka and so on, or when I call Ross Douthat a monarchist for that matter, but here's the Monsignor calling for Her Grace to succeed His Imperial Highness, not exactly with great enthusiasm, but remarkable equanimity, as a logical next development ("The Ivanka Way"):

in a White House where everything is inappropriate, Ivanka has been considerably less embarrassing than most, and in an administration whose populist agenda keeps misfiring, she has stayed surprisingly on target.

Trumpism as an ideology is on life support, but its 2016 success means that at some point, Trump will have a would-be ideological heir. It could be some enterprising Republican senator, some as-yet-unknown governor, even a political neophyte. Or it could be yet another celebrity with an aspirational brand, critics to her left and right, and an instinct for heterodox-but-popular ideas.

In our increasingly imperial republic, sometimes the most likely heir is already in the line of succession.

The Grand Duchess's heterodox-but-popular ideas Ross cites because they "reminded me of Ivanka’s father’s 2016 approach to many questions—the Trumpian habit of ignoring the ideological assumptions around an issue, and groping toward views that more Americans might be likely to support" are

Lede, Buried: She's not promoting it

Via Mic.

Paragraph 10 of a massive interview story in the Times by Jodi Kantor (didn't she use to be a reporter? when did she join the Palace?), Rachel Abrams (late of Variety), and Maggie Haberman, on how "her goal was to be a moderating influence on the administration of her father, President Trump":

By inserting herself into a scalding set of gender dynamics, she is becoming a proxy for dashed dreams of a female presidency and the debate about President Trump’s record of conduct toward women and his views on them. Critics see her efforts as a brash feat of Trump promotion — an unsatisfying answer to the 2005 “Access Hollywood” recording that surfaced during the campaign and the seas of pink, cat-eared “pussy hats” worn by protesters after the inauguration — by a woman of extraordinary privilege who has learned that feminism makes for potent branding. (Ms. Trump is not promoting her book for ethics reasons.)

I misread the parenthesis there, as meaning, "Ethics reasons are not the reasons for which she is promoting her book," i.e., she has some other reasons for promoting it. What? Why would she be promoting it for ethics reasons—why wouldn't she just be promoting it as part of her marketing strategy? And then realized it was supposed to read, "She's not promoting it. For ethics reasons."

What book? Coyly introduced in paragraph 9:

Social Lives of the Rich and Famous

Somebody photoshop Scalia's face in there for me, please.

This is really dumb to begin with, but everybody needs entertainment, and I've been learning too much about the subject not to share it, concerning the possibility that Ivanka Trump has temporarily abandoned the hubby and kids (one four months old) and the presidential campaign for a vacation with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin's girlfriend, if it's true that Putin's girlfriend is none other than Wendi Deng Murdoch, said to have been dating Vladimir Vladimirovich on the rebound from the (also rumored) affair with Tony Blair that may, if it took place, have brought on the breakup of her marriage with the then 82-year-old ex-Australian news magnate Rupert Murdoch, who is now 85 and married to Mick Jagger's old squeeze and baby mama Jerry Hall.

As far as I know Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson don't come into the story but don't bet on it. I don't, for the record, think much of the Putin angle. If you believe the kinds of publications that have reported it (there's a fresh rundown at Snopes), then you need to believe Angelina Jolie has gotten pregnant 14 or 15 times in the last couple of years (by my back-of-the-envelope calculation based on my view of tabloid front pages in subway stations) and divorced nearly as often, which is not even possible, given that you really can't have more divorces in one individual life than you have marriages.