Designed to Lose

Ten-minute drawing by Bonnie-Hop/DrawCeption, November 2016.

Piggybacking on Steve's post yesterday on the new Trump Justice Department policy on the Affordable Care Act—and the ongoing appeal process over the December ruling by federal judge Reed O'Connor of Fort Worth in a suit brought by 18 Republican state attorneys general announcing that the whole law, including mandatory coverage for pre-existing conditions, coverage of children up to age 26 on their parents' policies, regulations requiring insurers to give some kind of value for money, and health insurance for some 17 million people through the Marketplace and expanded Medicaid programs, is invalid—

That was OK with President Chucklehead, of course, who thinks consequences are for little people—

President Donald Trump was quick to take a victory lap, and pressed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and the presumed incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to fix the problem. The president tweeted Friday night: "As I predicted all along, Obamacare has been struck down as an UNCONSTITUTIONAL disaster! Now Congress must pass a STRONG law that provides GREAT healthcare and protects pre-existing conditions. Mitch and Nancy, get it done!"

—but the DOJ announced it would be defending part of the law, though not the pre-existing conditions part, presumably under the advice of lobbyists for insurers anxious to get around the Obama regulations against junk insurance that doesn't cover much of anything.

Now they've changed their minds and decided not to defend any of it at all, which seems like a pretty weird move from the political standpoint; healthcare is the most important issue on voters' minds, and they like what the ACA provides, though most of us really wish there was more of it. They showed it pretty clearly in the November elections, too, as seemed instantly clear the day after the elections:

If you've got the Mueller, I've got the beer

Backlit photo (is Trump trying to stop us from seeing his eyes?) from Kid Rock's Twitter via People.

OK, on reflection and some reading around, and an unbelievably tedious fight with a Greenwald acolyte (Glenn called it a "simple fact" that "not one single American was charged, indicted or convicted for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election" by the Mueller team or, so far, in any of the spinoff cases, and I pointed out that until we saw Mueller's explanation for his declination decisions we could not know how simple the fact was and the acolyte called me a "conspiracy theorist"), I'm inclined to keep working on that bone we got thrown Friday night, by way of preparing myself and anybody who wants to join in for what is clearly not going to be a great big catharsis moment, but will be something nevertheless, when we start learning what's in the report.

One thing that fits in my normal frame of mind is a tweet from Richard Nixon's Michael Cohen, the ineffably proper and wholly rehabilitated John W. Dean:

Trump and his minions think they dodged a bullet. I have a notion — only a recurring though — that Mueller delivered a bomb to AG Barr, who is now trying to figure out how to tell Trump in a way that doesn’t cause him to start World War III. Barr knows he works for a psycho.

— John Dean (@JohnWDean) March 23, 2019

How Emperors Decide

François Flameng (1856-1923), After Waterloo, via Wikimedia Commons.

So it's like that story, which I assume is false, about Napoleon's hemorrhoids being responsible for the French loss at Waterloo—Trump decided to fire James Comey as FBI director because of the bad weather in New Jersey on the weekend of May 6.

It was keeping him indoors at the Bedminster club, with no breaks from the Fox News broadcast other than occasional furtive switching to CNN, where one of the big stories was presumably Comey's testimony to the Senate of the previous Wednesday in which the director said he was "mildly nauseous" at the suggestion that his actions of late October and early November might be the decisive factor that got Trump elected. Meaning, I think, at the shadow on his reputation (he'd been blundering into the situation of influencing the election for months, and it made him look like a bad director), not at the horror of Trump becoming president, but the latter is what Trump heard, of course, because everything's always about him.

This is your Brooks on drugs

Reweaving. Via Houston Culture Map.

Former New York Times columnist David Brooks tries his hand at Trump whispering ("Let's Go for a Win on Opioids"):

If we lived in a normal country our president would use the current moment to try to get a win — to try to pass something that would help people, demonstrate that Washington can function and rebuild his brand.

No no no, if we lived in a normal country we wouldn't be in the current moment, with a president exclusively interested in scoring wins and building his brand. As a matter of fact that is what he's doing, as far as anybody can tell, in between bouts of hanging out with his role models—

Today in Trump whispering

Leila Aliyeva, editor-in-chief of the glossy Baku and daughter of Azerbaijan's president Ilham Aliyev, via world.koropciya.com (I thought it would be ghoulish to run a picture of poor Karimova).

Steve M thinks he knows why Grand Duchess Ivanka took a meeting with former vice president Gore yesterday; a matter of branding, in which she needs to distinguish herself from her father.

Much, I'd say, the way Gulnara Karimova, daughter of the late dictator of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov, who may herself have been murdered by poison last month, nobody really knows, used to work to distance herself from her fusty, conservative father, with her lively tweeting and society-lady AIDS activism. Gugusha, as she liked to be called, was another handsomely leggy blonde and a "designer" of jewelry, a clothing line (making extensive use of the cotton picked under slavery-like conditions by Uzbek children), and fragrances (Victorious for men and Mysterious for women), and it was good for business for her to have a distinct, cooler identity, which ultimately got her in trouble as she lost successively her freedom of movement, Twitter account, father, and now possibly her life.

Ivanka, similarly, is finding her fashion interests threatened by the association with racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and  misogyny, which the young women who constitute her market find to be a bit of a turnoff, and looking for some brand independence. Hence the remarkable spectacle of her promising a Republican convention that a Trump presidency would bring pay equity for women and affordable daycare for all, with no evidence that Donald Trump knew about it in advance, forcing his team to scramble to come up with a plan worthless enough to placate the worried party base.

Emperor Trump, continued

Image via Alabama Today, from a story on the nomination of Tom Price (R-GA) as secretary of destroying the Affordable Care Act. I have no idea why they ran this particular shot, unless Kellyanne wrote a song about it.

So it's my theory—trigger warning, this might make you feel a little sick—that the Romney concept really belongs to Barack Obama, as part of the Trump Whispering campaign.

Yes, I'm old enough to remember when Romney owned the world record for political lies per minute (about 0.76), but that was back in ancient times, before a presidential campaign in which Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Carly Fiorina, some of the most prolific and dedicated liars in US history, making the Mittster look like a gentleman amateur, were themselves completely outclassed by the winning candidate, our president-elect, who reached the stunning rate of a lie every 50 seconds (1.2 lies per minute) during the presidential debates. (Oh, and both sides do it, because Hillary Clinton once said she landed under sniper fire in Sarajevo in 1996, which was not true, but then Brian Williams, who seems to have claimed to have spent pretty much his entire life under sniper fire, still has a job as a news broadcaster, so who knows what it all means.)

Obama doesn't pop off

Best result of googling "Gauthier proportions". Drawing by Manon Gauthier.

Commenter bluicebank writes:

In retrospect, I have realized that David Brooks is a punching bag.

In the last weeks of the Republic, why are we not discussing someone more powerful? As in, the Prez of the usa? Word. He is a black man, and cares about shit, and was arguably a great prez.

I hear lately that one Barack Obama is running tight-end for Trump. That's cool, I guess. But what bothers me is that Obama hasn't a fucking clue that this nation faces a crisis of gauthier proportions, blithely and as smooth-as-silk, almost cavalierly tossing the baton to Trump with fucking Vangelis in the background.

I've done two pieces on Obama's relationship with Trump in the past couple of weeks, plus one indirectly about it on Thursday, and I will undoubtedly do more.

I don't think there's anything in the least blithe or cavalier about what he is doing. I think he is more aware of exactly what kind of crisis we're dealing with here than more or less anybody in the world, and working on it with all the caution and delicacy of a sapper defusing a gigantic landmine, so carefully and so without vanity that we don't really know anything about it and can only speculate, but with all his intellect and patience engaged at the maximum.

He doesn't worry about whether you like how it looks, because he can't afford to, none of us can. It's not a fucking sports competition, as you know, not a question of who's the winner and who's the loser, it's a question of the health and maybe the survival of our whole polity, and if Obama doesn't mind showing up as a graceful loser at this time and even as a kind of friendly mentor to the incoming incompetent, it's because he always keeps goals in mind that are more important than he is. That's what it takes. Obama doesn't pop off.

He did say something in a conference call with supporters and organizers on Monday afternoon that you might have a look at, including this:

Understand that I'm going to be constrained in what I do with all of you until I am again a private citizen.  But that's not so far off.  It's basically six, eight weeks away.  And I will have some time for vacation, but you're going to see me early next year, and we're going to be in a position where we can start cooking up all kinds of great stuff to do. 

It's really not over.

Of course David Brooks is a punching bag, or the metaphor I've used before is that of a five-finger piano exercise. It's low-stakes calisthenics. I do it to keep fit, it's good for my style and fluency, and fun for me, in some sense relaxing, and I post them because a lot of people like to read them. Some don't. My youngest sister, who likes a lot of what I do, sees Brooks in the subject line and skips it, and that's just fine. You should feel free to do the same.

The Trump Whisperer

Photo via Robert Costa.

A weird little sidelight to the discussion of Obama's meeting with Trump on Thursday: at the same time as it was taking place in the Oval Office, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough was out taking a walk on the White House grounds with Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Last time Denis McDonough made news going for a walk on the White House grounds, it was with Obama himself, on August 30, 2013, when the president decided not to ask Congress for an authorization to use military force in Syria, so it sounds a little momentous.

Politico, focused as ever on handicapping the palace intrigue as it relates to titles and pecking orders, speculates that Kushner could be in line for the chief of staff job himself, which is of course completely wrong, because forbidden by Title 5, §3110 of the US Code, representing the Federal Anti-Nepotism Statute of 1967 preventing any federal official hiring a relative to a position the official supervises or manages. No cigar, Politico!

I can imagine something else, building on our own speculation on Thursday over here, that inside the Oval Office the president made clear to Trump exactly how desperate his situation was, how little he could trust the fools and ideologues by whom he was surrounded, and what he needed to do to escape from the next four years with some of his dignity intact, which would be to do whatever Obama tells him, or as Trump told the press after the meeting,

 I very much look forward to dealing with the president in the future, including counsel. He’s explained some of the difficulties, some of the high-flying assets and some of the really great things that have been achieved. So Mr President, it was a great honor being with you, and I look forward to being with you many, many more times in the future.

What was going on between Kushner and McDonough would have been another aspect of the same negotiations, with the same message, focusing on its mechanical aspect. Kushner won't be chief of staff, but he will be a very important unpaid adviser, Trump's link to the haut monde whose approval he yearns for and never gets, and he can serve this relationship as well.

Steve M today is noting that Trump's suddenly favorable views on parts of the Affordable Care Act seem to be connected to the Oval Office meeting, as I suggested might happen (he says parts, the provisions on pre-existing conditions and children on their parents' policies up to age 26, but as Jared Bernstein among others points out you can't have those without the rest, and I think President Obama knows that), and thinking about how susceptible he is to the advice of whoever speaks to him last before he makes an important decision, and suggests

that's how Barack Obama can save America, or at least salvage some of what needs preserving: He should make it his goal to speak to President Trump as often as possible, and be the last person to talk to him about every important issue.

He should be, Steve says, the president whisperer. I'd add there's some hope that this is already happening.

Barack Obama's Art of War

Via QuotesGram.

Nice meeting, from the turkey's point of view:

This was a meeting that was going to last for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and we were just going to get to know each other. We had never met each other. I have great respect – the meeting lasted for almost an hour and a half, and it could have, as far as I’m concerned, it could have gone on for a lot longer. We really, we discussed a lot of different situations, some wonderful and some difficulties. I very much look forward to dealing with the president in the future, including counsel. He’s explained some of the difficulties, some of the high-flying assets and some of the really great things that have been achieved. So Mr President, it was a great honor being with you, and I look forward to being with you many, many more times in the future.

Looks like Obama is following the Putin rule of negotiating with Trump, as Trump formulated it: "'If he says great things about me, I'm going to say great things about him." And Trump has met somebody he thinks is worth taking advice from. Is that the first time he's ever even said something like that about anybody? As far as I remember, last time he talked about taking advice he said "I'm speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I've said a lot of things." This is a distinct improvement.