Disillusionment

 

The worst of the worst, really?

I was gone for a couple of weeks, and when I got back the whole place had gone nuts. The president seemed bent on conquering Greenland, apparently because he thinks the island is as big as it looks in the traditional Mercator projection and he just had to have it, and had in fact persuaded the Venezuelan Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado to give him her prize, or at least the gold medal that represents it (the prize itself also includes a variable monetary award of around 10 million Swedish kronor or one million US dollars, which the recipient normally uses to benefit the cause for which it was awarded, and which Machado didn't surrender to Trump, as far as I can learn, though I'm sure he'd have cheerfully accepted the money if it was offered, and the reputational enhancement that comes of having been judged worthy of the prize by the Norwegian committee, a glory that can no more be transferred than that of Trump's unearned Super Bowl rings and Purple Hearts, as the Committee made clear). 

Then there was the paramilitary occupation of Minnesota by 2000 irregular troops, 3000 after January, which seemed a good deal more serious than all that tomfoolery, more Miller than Trump if you know what I mean, with ICE and CBP terrorizing the Twin Cities with their arbitrary seizures of people, especially Somali and Latino, in "Operation Metro Surge" since Trump condemned Somalia as "garbage", not so different from what we'd already seen in California, Illinois, Oregon, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C., in particular the ethnic profiling leading to arrests and detention of US citizens and permanent residents and otherwise protected people and kidnaping of children, parking them in the hideous prison camps rising around the country, not to mention all the simple people occupying what may be considered an "illegal" position on US territory (I'll get to that later) doing nothing but working, often in what we call "essential" occupations, educating themselves, and caring for their kids—the exceptional discipline of the general population rising to help protect their neighbors evade the invaders—and the out-of-control response of the latter, who seem to have decided they're at war and so far murdered two.

Things are now apparently getting a little bit better. Seven hundred of the Guards have been removed from the site. Citizens and other officially protected individuals are still getting wrongfully arrested for immigration violations, but are now able to file a habeas claim to get out, though not very quickly: it's going to take you a long time to get your day in court as the entire federal justice system in Minnesota collapses:

the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office has been crippled by mass resignations, including some of its most senior career attorneys. That has left the remaining DOJ attorneys in Minnesota inundated with more cases than they can keep up with. But I’m not sure that does justice to what’s been happening. It’s quite a bit worse than that.

The quality of lawyering has eroded to such a point that government lawyers have been unable to keep up with the court orders demanding that detainees be released. As a result, detainees have lingered in confinement even after courts have ordered their release....

You've probably heard of Julie Le, a DHS lawyer seconded to the U.S. Attorney's Office who was called in to explain why ICE was failing to comply with court orders and more or less broke down in front of the judge:

“I wish you would just hold me in contempt of court so I can get 24 hours of sleep,” Le said. “The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need.”

***

Doppelstaat

Memorial tablet in Berlin, at the house where Fraenkel lived before his forced emigration in 1938, via Wikimedia Commons. 

Two or three weeks ago somebody pointed me to a wonderful piece in Mother Jones by Pema Levy, on the "dual state" theory of dictatorial government, created by the German-Jewish jurist, labor advocate, and political scientist Ernst Fraenkel, based on his observations of the Nazi state in Germany from its origins until his escape from Berlin in 1938, according to which authoritarian regimes can survive and even thrive for some period of time as they consolidate their control by maintaining in effect two distinct legal systems in a single Doppelstaat, a "normative state" covering most of the population, in which civil and criminal laws function in normal and predictable fashion, and a "prerogative state" for the unlucky people scapegoated by the regime—in 1930s Germany union members, members of leftist political parties, Jews and Romani of course, homosexuals and the disabled, and so on—where the dictator's will overrides normal legal considerations and he can "do whatever I want" as Trump has put it on numerous occasions, usually applying to some claimed state of emergency. 

In this way life in the normative state does not change much, at least at first, and its inhabitants were enabled to ignore much of what was happening, if they so chose: "I was silent, for I was not a socialist," as Pastor Niemöller wrote. He himself was a national conservative and an antisemite, and when they finally "came for" him it wasn't because there was nobody left to speak for him, it was because he had bravely changed his mind, I'm pleased to say, and helped start up a Lutheran resistance and got sent to Sachsenhausen and Dachau for that, and survived to die in the German Federal Republic at the age of 92, too, may his memory be a blessing.

Fraenkel became part of the discourse on Trump 2.0 in a footnote from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissent in the matter of Trump v. CASA, arising from the birthright citizenship case, where the Court decided not to ask whether or not the 14th Amendment means what it says, but did say the judges ought to stop issuing universal injunctions, like maybe birthright citizenship is real in San Francisco (one of the parties in the original suit) but not across the bridge in Oakland and it's none of a federal judge's business to assume that the Constitution is the same all over the country, which is not what they thought during the 19 or 20 universal injunctions issued by federal judges during the Obama administration, the 20 under Trump 1.0, or the 14 in Biden's single term, or at least that when the president is told there's something he's constitutionally forbidden to do in San Francisco that doesn't mean he can't do it in Oakland, as Jackson wrote:

Democracy is a Kitchen Table Issue

Photo by Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via NPR.

From the TPM Morning Memo, a little vignette of presidential lobbying:

During an interview with CNBC this morning, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) alluded to an assurance he received from Trump — that the president would fix whatever issues Republicans had with the legislation he wants them to pass via executive action.

“We met with President Trump, and, you know, he did a masterful job of laying out how we could improve it, how he could use his chief executive office, use things to make the bill better,” Norman said Thursday morning. “We accepted the bill as is. What’s different is President Trump is going to use his powers.”

Oh well, in that case. If he's going to use "his powers". Superstrength? X-ray vision? Spidey sense? Can he grow instant wolverine claws? 

I imagine he was talking about Article II of the US Constitution, of which he said during his first term, "I have an Article II that lets me do whatever I want." That's legally as ridiculous as it sounds—the specification of the "executive power" in the oath doesn't really mention powers so much as duties (to "faithfully execute the Office, and "preserve, protect, and defend" the Constitution), and the only explicit powers are those of making treaties, naming officers, and issuing pardons, all but the last with the advice and consent of the Senate. There's not even anything in Article II on the veto—that's in Article I, as a check on the Congress, as Article II has a congressional check on the presidency, in the procedure allowing them to be impeached and tried for "high crimes and misdemeanors". The way it really works in the system of checks and balances has traditionally been that each Branch can do whatever another Branch can't stop them from doing—Congress can stop the president through the impeachment process, the Supreme Court can stop him (if somebody sues) by examining the legality of his behavior, including whether it's constitutionally permitted or not. It's infuriating that we should even have to be talking about this, as if there were some possible universe in which Trump's assertion could be correct. But here we are.

Send the Marines

I'd been wondering if Hegseth was freelancing, volunteering out of the blue when he said on Saturday he was ready to deploy Marines to Los Angeles, the project sounding so off the wall, even more illegal than the National Guard proposal, and I had trouble imagining they'd allow Trump to call him up and ask for them. "Hey Pete! They're burning down Los Angeles! Send the Marines!" And indeed, on the Sunday, Trump didn't seem to have heard of it, suggesting, as he often does when asked about some abuse that he hasn't thought about, that he hadn't made any decisions but definitely could if he felt like it: 

When asked what the threshold is for sending in the Marines, Mr. Trump said Sunday: "The bar is what I think it is."

If I'm reading that right, he was saying the only consideration would be the presidential will. When he found out how he felt, what he wanted to happen, that would be the thing that would happen.

Wall Street Journal (gift link) confirms what you probably have been suspecting, that the ICE push over last week in Southern California, where they raided garment factories and warehouses, car washes (nabbing customers as well as workers) and at least one day care center (where they grabbed a mom dropping off her four-year-old), climaxing with Friday's and Saturday's assaults on Home Depot parking lots in Westlake and Paramount, was engineered by Reichskommissar Stephen Miller as part of a general strategic shift away from trying to deport gang members and criminals to deporting any unauthorized immigrants at all.

The somewhat amusing part is that it was motivated by jealousy, of Joe Biden:

Not Ready for Prime Time

 

Image by Markerarts via Butt Flood Designs.

One thing to remember about Stephen Bannon's celebrated tactical principle of "flooding the zone with shit" is that, in the end, you're landed with a shit flood, which isn't what you really wanted, though that may be OK if what you really wanted was a really big fat tax cut for yourself and your billionaire clientele. Somebody else can try to take care of the backed-up sewage, if they feel like it; you're up on the higher ground of the nice neighborhood, where you hardly even smell it.

I've been thinking of 2017, when the new administration started off with a big bang of regulatory crazy, with executive orders attempting to sabotage the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act on January 20, mandating a 90-day freeze on hiring federal employees, meant to kick off a long-term reduction in the number of civil servants, on January 23, directing DHS to build a Wall of separation between Mexico and the US (they thought it might be paid for with a 20% tariff on Mexican imports) and fast-tracking environmental reviews of infrastructure projects on January 24,  cutting federal funding for so-called "sanctuary cities" that did not cooperate with ICE and banning the EPA from contact with journalists on January 26, suspending the Refugee Admissions Program and barring entry to the United States for citizens of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen (not, of course, Saudi Arabia, UAE, or Qatar) on January 27, and ordering all federal agencies to eliminate two regulations for every new one they proposed on January 30 (when he also installed Thomas Homan as acting director of ICE, without bothering to try getting the Senate to confirm the nomination).

None of these initiatives had any particular consequences, of course. They were ill-conceived, badly drafted, in some cases of questionable legality, or just dumb. The idea of the hiring freeze went back to Carter and Reagan, and it was well known that it had never done any good:

Dictatorship Takes Shape

Dominance and Submission. Photo by Reuters/Jonathan Drake via Hawaii Tribune-Herald.

There's way too much going on. Two bogus emergencies formally declared, the one at the border and the "energy emergency" about Trump's weird belief that the US doesn't mine enough natural gas, and then I think what you might call a "woke emergency" signaled by his actions in the Justice Department: seen, for instance in the canceling of ongoing civil rights cases and police department consent decrees.

An ominous restructuring of the department's procedures was reported in today's Guardian in a piece on the DOJ's investigations of the Biden administration, of its "weaponization" of the federal government (read: its investigations of Trump's criminal participation in the January 6 insurrection and in the theft of government documents) and of its "censorship of speech" in the 2020 campaign--the Twitter Files stories attempting to suggest that when Twitter's trust and safety department blocked users from sharing the New York Post's October 14 Hunter Biden laptop story for a full 24 hours before allowing it was what James Comer called 

a coordinated campaign by social media companies, mainstream news and the intelligence communities to suppress and de-legitimize the existence of Hunter Biden's laptop and its contents...

in which the company was obeying the dictates of the FBI (it wasn't).

The new wrinkle in these two orders is in the reporting requirements: instead of directing investigators to direct the final reports to the department's office of personal responsibility or its inspector general, which would be the normal procedure, they will go to a political appointee at the White House—the deputy chief of staff for policy, who happens to be Mr. Stephen Miller, resuming the job he took with the first Trump administration in December 2016. 

Literary Corner: So Vicious, So Horrible, So Beautiful

 

Martin Sheen as General Lee cheered by the brigades under his direct command, the Army of Northern Virginia, played by unpaid Civil War reenactors, I'm unable to determine at which point in the story (but probably near the beginning, when these troops arrive in Pennsylvania), in Ronald F. Maxwell's 1993 film Gettysburg. It's part of the lore of the movie that the whole sequence is entirely spontaneous, not part of the script but improvised unbidden by the extras, filmed only because the camera operators realized something exceptional was happening and Sheen was responding in character, which he does, as you can see, really gorgeously.

Never Fight Uphill, Me Boys

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle
that was. It was so much, and so interesting,
and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful
in so many different ways—it represented
such a big portion of the success
of this country. Gettysburg, wow—
I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,
to look and to watch. And the statement
of Robert E. Lee, who's no longer in favor—
did you ever notice it? He's no
longer in favor. "Never fight
uphill, me boys, never fight uphill!"
They were fighting uphill, he said.
Wow, that was a big mistake. He lost
his big general. "Never fight uphill,
me boys," but it was too late.

Literary Corner: So Vicious, So Horrible, So Beautiful

Martin Sheen as General Lee cheered by the brigades under his direct command, the Army of Northern Virginia, played by unpaid Civil War reenactors, I'm unable to determine at which point in the story (but probably near the beginning, when these troops arrive in Pennsylvania), in Ronald F. Maxwell's 1993 film Gettysburg. It's part of the lore of the movie that the whole sequence is entirely spontaneous, not part of the script but improvised unbidden by the extras, filmed only because the camera operators realized something exceptional was happening and Sheen was responding in kind, which he does, really gorgeously.

Never Fight Uphill, Me Boys

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle
that was. It was so much, and so interesting,
and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful
in so many different ways—it represented
such a big portion of the success
of this country. Gettysburg, wow—
I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,
to look and to watch. And the statement
of Robert E. Lee, who's no longer in favor—
did you ever notice it? He's no
longer in favor. "Never fight
uphill, me boys, never fight uphill!"
They were fighting uphill, he said.
Wow, that was a big mistake. He lost
his big general. "Never fight uphill,
me boys," but it was too late.

Literary Corner: Who Is Your Retribution?

Yoon Lee, "Retribution (Bud)", 2014, from a 2015 show at Pierogi Gallery, New York. 

You Remember It Just Like I Do

By Donald J. Trump, President of the United States (Semi-Retired), with Stephen Miller

This is Political Persecution
and Election Interference
at the highest level in history. From the time
I came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower,
and even before I was sworn in as your President
of the United States, the Radical Left Democrats -
the enemy of the hard-working Men and Women of this Country -
have been engaged in a Witch-Hunt to destroy
the Make America Great Again movement.

You remember it just like I do:
Russia, Russia, Russia;
the Mueller Hoax; Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine;
Impeachment Hoax 1; Impeachment Hoax 2;
the illegal and unconstitutional
Mar-a-Lago raid; and now this.

The Democrats have lied, cheated and stolen
in their obsession with trying to "Get Trump,"
but now they've done the unthinkable -
indicting a completely innocent person
in an act of blatant Election Interference.

Never before in our Nation's history
has this been done. The Democrats
have cheated countless times over the decades,
including spying on my campaign,
but weaponizing our justice system
to punish a political opponent,
who just so happens to be a President
of the United States and by far
the leading Republican candidate
for President, has never happened before.
Ever.

Let's just say for starters he doesn't "just so happen" to be a President of the United States. 

For the Record: Miller Bringing Back the "China Virus"

 

Trump sold foreign policy to the PRC for less than $20K. https://t.co/hBnMdg0KZR pic.twitter.com/jtvEr4MclF

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) November 15, 2022

Because he didn't think it was going to be that serious, except sometimes. pic.twitter.com/d4DLPsc0qX

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) November 15, 2022

Literary Corner: One Small Step For a Speechwriter, a Leap Too Far For a Former Guy

 

Image by Steve Bronstein/Getty Images, via Foreign Policy, August 2017.

A lovely moment from Trump's rally last night in Wellington, Ohio, where he was seeking vengeance against Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, one of the Republicans who voted to impeach him in January, backing a primary opponent, former Trump White House aide Maxwell Miller, remarkable for having been

arrested multiple times for assault, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct and... caught falsifying his personal resume and educational background after stating that he had been a Marine recruiter, which he had not.  

A Brave Young Man From Ohio

By Stephen Miller and Donald J. Trump, 46th President of the United States of America

America is still the nation
that conquered the wild West,
that vanquished the murderous dictators,
that ended the evil empires,
and that sent a brave young
man from Ohio to a plant.

Think of it. You know the man
I'm talking about? Who am I
talking about? You know who it is?
The Stars and Stripes on the face
of the moon, do you know who it
is? Huh? You know who it is.

Yes, I know who it is, and I know what happened here: Miller's awful text for the peroration, an hour and a half in, was building America up to make an elegant reference to a local boy, Lieutenant (jg) Neil Armstrong, and the teleprompter said that America "sent a brave young man from Ohio to plant the Stars and Stripes on the face of the moon," but The Former Guy just couldn't get there through the Specific Reading Comprehension Deficit, or remember Armstrong's name. 

Literary Corner: Swiftian

Trump about Operation Desert Storm... at... The fields and jungles of Vietnam: "They delivered a swift and sweepy and you know that sweeping it was swift and it was sweeping like nobody's ever seen anything happened" from r/The_Mueller

One of Trump's reading glitches, when he couldn't lift the word "sweeping" off its spot on the teleprompter, landed him into spectacular territory in his Fourth of July speech:

These Planes

by Stephen Miller and Donald J. Trump

These planes once launched 

off of massive aircraft carriers 

in the fiercest battles 

of World War II 

They raced through the 

skies of Korea's MiG Alley 

They carried American 

warriors into the 

dense fields and jungles 

of Vietnam

they delivered a swift 

and Swiftian—

you know that—

sweeping—

it was swift and 

it was sweeping like nobody's

ever seen anything happen

it was a victory in 

Operation Desert Storm

a lot of you were involved in that

a lot of you were involved

that was the quick one

Somebody's deceptive edit of the video (above) made it sound as if Trump thought Operation Desert Storm was in Vietnam instead of Iraq, but of course there is no evidence of that (his interpolation "that was the quick one" suggests he remembers pretty well, in its contrast to the slow Iraq war, which the speech naturally wouldn't mention at all because it wasn't a victory).

It's Stephen Miller's knowledge that is represented here, not Trump's, and Miller wasn't making anything up, either; he was clearly working from the list of historical planes doing the flyovers that were the evening's main entertainment, allowing Trump to cast himself as a kind of MC for the occasion (last year was a similarly structured guided tour, but the flyovers were ordered by service branch instead of time period). The interpolation "a lot of you were involved" does suggest to me that Trump doesn't remember Desert Storm was 30 years ago, and few of the active military among the "front-line workers and their families" who made up the guest list could have participated in it. 

It's clear, on the other hand, that at the Swiftian moment, Trump isn't himself aware that his text has left Vietnam and moved on to Iraq; the huge font on his teleprompter screen doesn't allow enough words to get him there. And as usual he hasn't read the speech in advance.

I'm the only one who thinks Trump said "Swiftian", by the way. Partly because I long for it to be true, but it still sounds plausible, not that Trump knows the word. I thought it would apply very well all the same to the Vietnam War—savage, sarcastic, scatological, and conducted by higher-ups who wouldn't have refused to consider the costs and benefits of eating babies, if it had been suggested to them.

Tweedict

Here we go again with the imperial Tweedict.

Two White House officials said an executive order is being drafted and that Trump could sign it as soon as Tuesday. The order, which was discussed among senior staff members Monday [sure, Jan], would suspend nearly all immigration under the rationale of preventing the spread of infection by foreigners arriving from abroad.

Oh, sure, but

Old, mad, despised

Highlighting by Benjamin Wittes, from 25 January, the day the Senate started hearing Trump's defense in the impeachment trial.

The thing that absolutely struck me about the Oval Office coronavirus address was Trump's/Miller's characteristic effort to blame the "foreign virus" crisis in the US on Europe:

At the very start of the outbreak we instituted sweeping travel restrictions on China and put in place the first federally mandated quarantine in over 50 years. We declared a public health emergency and issued the highest level of travel warning on other countries as the virus spread its horrible infection. And taking early, intense action, we’ve seen dramatically fewer cases of the virus in the United States than are now present in Europe.

The European Union failed to take the same precautions and restrict travel from China and other hotspots. As a result a large number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from Europe...

So that the travel restrictions on Europeans seemed aimed at punishing them rather than protecting the US, something they can hardly help with. anyway, since the horse was already long out of the barn (the outbreak of Covid-19 in the Kirkland nursing home, reported 28 February with the death of the man Trump referred to as a "wonderful woman", can't be traced to any foreign sources, so it's clear the virus was already established in the Northwest by then).

'Twas the eve of impeachment

and all through the House
staffers stared at their screens
and continued to grouse,
when what to their skeptical
eyes should appear
but a screed of six pages,
all dripping with fear!

Trump to Speaker Pelosi:

I write to express my strongest and most powerful protest against the partisan impeachment crusade being pursued by the Democrats in the House of Representatives.

That's pure Trump. Like Putin's, or Kim Jong-un's, or Mohammed bin Salman's denials, we're supposed to accept that it's valid because it's "strong" and "powerful". And it's strong and powerful because he says so.

This impeachment represents an unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power by Democrat Lawmakers, unequaled in nearly two and a half centuries of American legislative history.

I'd mention that impeachment is not unconstitutional or unprecedented, but you probably knew that already. I'm not sure it's part of legislative history. If it was anything like what Trump suggests it was, it was amply precedented by the young nation's first impeachment, that of the Federalist Judge Samuel Chase in an overwhelmingly Republican Congress, as described in Jill Lepore's splendid New Yorker piece in October, in 1805, managed by Rep. John Randolph, whose articles

Lift My Lamp

Not everybody agreed with the idea of the Emma Lazarus inscription on the Statue of Liberty at the time, including cartoonist Victor Gillam in March 1890 (h/t this blog post by Victoria Emily Jones). 

The All-New New Colossus

by Kenneth Cuccinelli

.................... Give me your tired, your poor,
At least if they can stand on their own feet,
But don't send us those homeless any more
Or people who don't have enough to eat.
Ship them back to their shitholes. Lock the door.

Via Splinter News, a story about Ken Cuccinelli's views on immigrants when he was Virginia attorney general (you'll remember him as the one who redesigned the state seal to conceal the left boob of the goddess Virtus, to make the state safe for Christians) that originally appeared in the lamented DCist: in a call to a conservative radio show in January 2012, he was complaining (falsely) about the District of Columbia catching rats and trucking them to Virginia instead of killing them and claiming (falsely) that the rules prevented them from "breaking up the families" of rats (it's true for some animal species, but rats and mice aren't among them):

Deconstruction

This is the most deconstructionist thing that has ever happened: Screenshot from the official White House release of the president's remarks on the tragic shootings over the weekend in El Paso and Dayton and not, as I'm sure you have heard, in that other Ohio city:

Sous rature is a strategic philosophical device originally developed by Martin Heidegger. Usually translated as 'under erasure', it involves the crossing out of a word within a text, but allowing it to remain legible and in place. Used extensively by Jacques Derrida, it signifies that a word is "inadequate yet necessary";^[1] that a particular signifier is not wholly suitable for the concept it represents, but must be used as the constraints of our language offer nothing better.

In the philosophy of deconstruction, sous rature has been described as the typographical expression that seeks to identify sites within texts where key terms and concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning undecidable.^[2][3] To extend this notion, deconstruction and the practice of sous rature also seek to demonstrate that meaning is derived from difference, not by reference to a pre-existing notion or freestanding idea.^[4]

But which, in the last analysis, are we looking at here, in the rature of "in Toledo"? Is it really "inadequate yet necessary"? or is it more "paradoxical or self-undermining"?

Dramatic Readings: Priebus

Screenshot from CNN broadcast of 20 February 2017

Another sketch in my project of dramatizing the Mueller Report, this one dealing with less boring characters than Mueller himself, and forcing me to invent the dialogue myself, since Mueller reports only the content, not in general the words.

As before, the aim is to clarify what the Report is and is not saying by letting the witnesses speak directly, like the participants' reminiscences in a TV documentary, mediated by some kind of voice-over (VO) narration where I'm allowed to speak a bit for myself, mostly through congressional-style pointed questioning. It also involves scrambling the Report's time sequence a bit, to bring together the individual threads that get stranded in Mueller's cop-report style.

I'm seriously trying to find a way of communicating the story somewhat concealed in the Report, to a broad public, ideally in a real documentary film or stage performance, but at any rate in readable form, at this point where the public doesn't seem to be catching on and the House committees are prevented by Trump's and Barr's continuing obstruction from doing it in the way Sam Dash and Sam Ervin did it in 1973. I have no idea if this approach works, I'm blinded in one of those trees-vs.-forest situations, and would appreciate being told one way or another.

PRIEBUS: Reince Priebus, sir, serving at the time as chairman of the Republican National Committee, and incoming chief of staff to President Trump, so I was spending a lot of time working with Trump headquarters in those first weeks of January, getting the system set up.

VO: And you got a call from the president, on January 12?

PRIEBUS: I did. He was upset.

VO: He was upset, on January 12? About what?

Literary Corner: Hymn

Suffragette march in New York City, 1912, via Legends of America.

Hymn to Economic Miracles

Music by Sir Edward Elgar, 

lyrics attributed to Stephen Miller,

arranged for male chorus with obbligato kazoo

Victory is not winning for our party,
victory is winning for our country,
the majesty of America's mission,
and the power of American pride.

We can make our communities safer,
our families stronger, our culture richer,
our faith deeper, and our middle class bigger
and more prosperous than ever before.

We must reject the politics of revenge,
resistance and retribution, and embrace
the boundless potential of cooperation,
compromise and the common good.

We must choose between greatness or gridlock,
results or resistance, vision or vengeance,
incredible progress or pointless destruction.

An economic miracle is taking place
in the United States and the only thing
that can stop it are foolish wars,
politics, or ridiculous partisan investigations.

If there is going to be peace and legislation,
there cannot be war and investigation.
It just doesn't work that way!

What I was mostly struck by in the SOTU was this profusion of chiasmus and alliteration in the early paragraphs, hysterically overwrought, like an Eminent Victorian funeral oration at the outset, but petering out to Johnny Cochrane (O.J. Simpson's memorable defense attorney) in the startling rhyme, and finally Trump himself, when it ends up saying to the whole of the assembled Congress, in essence, "I hope you can give me a break."

Which may be read as a plea or a threat, as you wish.

I didn't do much of anything with the text other than two move lines 3 and 4 into a place where they didn't belong, and I don't have a whole lot more to say about it, but I think it's really pretty funny on its own.

For the Record: White House Follies of Early October

Trumpy saw an economist on TV!

Art Laffer just said that he doesn't know how a Democrat could vote against the big tax cut/reform bill and live with themselves! @FoxNews

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2017

71% of economists agree Art Laffer is an idiot https://t.co/PVk2N5qYHJ (It's not easy to get that many economsts to agree on anything!)

— TalesFromTheCryptic (@Yastreblyansky) October 16, 2017