Will we get something penned by John Barron?
Trump is dense, yet he reads these stories. Many make allegations there are people in the WH preventing him from making and implementing certain decisions. Heâs the President. The actions I read people are subverting are on items Trump could merely decree be done, no argument brooked. Which leads me to believe heâs amenable, however reluctantly, to counsel and advice. He demands something, people push back, he says do it anyway, and those same people leave the room and decide not to do it. But we donât read of Trump having another go at it, telling them their inaction is unacceptable, and goddamn it, do it. So Trump must be digesting the advice and just living with the inaction, right? Or else he would call people back in and demand to know why the hell something discussed the previous day hadnât been implemented?
Is it possible he does in fact listen to objections and let the decisions of others hold sway? They arenât guardrails except to the degree heâs allowing them to be guardrails. Which is entirely different than saying his decisions are being subverted.
I guessing in some ways weâre lucky his attention span is short so he forgets or doesnât follow up on the stupid shit he requests.
The anonymous senior staff person is obviously seeking redemption and shuffling to be in front of the airbag when the last wheel falls off. If they were any sort of patriot they would call a press conference, resign and not stop talking until Trump was no longer a resident of The White House.
Or they are read to him, or he gets what he knows from the teevee.
âAccording to CNN, the most recent piece of this kind was written by an asylum seeker fleeing El Salvador.â
An apt parallel.
In addition to feeling Trump is erratic and unfocused, along with misguided on some policy goals, this person may feel theyâre in the position to observe and record actual crimes. That wasnât a feature of the op-ed, but raising the commission of crimes in the Times article might not have been a priority, and possibly something they felt would distract from the primary theme of their submission. But a resignation would remove them from fulfilling an ulterior motive for sticking around, a motive they didnât cop to publicly.
They got their hands on it because the writer is an arrogant rat who thinks the ship would sink without her. I say her because I guess the author is Kellyanne Conway.
This is strange. One of the reasons someone like Porter (or anybody) shouldâve been denied security clearance is that they were open to blackmail. How is this anonymous source not open to blackmail now? I think FBI is duty bound to get to the bottom of this. I donât see how publishing this will help anybody but the Republicans.
Any person suspected of this would seemingly be someone possessed of a moral code and personal ethical standards we all supect most or all of the White House staff lacks. Conway doesnât strike me as someone predisposed to take the high road in any circumstance. Iâd have people on my radar that hadnât displayed all the typical outlandish conduct and speech youâd associate with the usual sociopath. People unmoored from any belief system having honesty and empathy as components. Which doesnât leave many people in the senior staff to target.
Democrats were on track to gain up to 60 seats in two months. Only an â October Surpriseâ could stop that train. If things are just running their course, enthusiasm is on our side. There isnât universal praise for this woman actions even on the left - and if Trump resorts to inflammatory actions because someone undermines him by sabotage rather than through constitutional means the electorate may be divided closer to the middle than we would hope for.
Itâs the same reasoning thatâs behind avoiding talk of impeachment before election. Why muddle a 65-35 percent advantage ?
Dems have no intention of impeaching Trump, only to see their efforts scuttled by failing to get 67 votes in the Senate. Theyâll be perfectly happy to inflict a death by 1000 cuts if they have the majority in the House.
Ds should CONDEMN this Anonymous, and demand hearings immediately.
Ds wonât gain any additional votes from those already in their camp by condemning this person and demanding investigations. Nor will it score them many points with those already opposed to them in the R camp. No GOPer is flipping allegiance to Elizabeth Warren in 2020 because Dems âdid the right thingâ back in 2018 and condemned Trumpâs anonymous detractor. There is no middle. 98% percent of the populace is frozen right where they are, and theyâre staying there.
Iâm going with Fran Lebowitz on this one:
âthe scarier thing about him is that he is stupid. You do not know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just donât.â
He is flailing around doing stupid shit he forgets. Thatâs all.
LOL â you miss a lot, donât you?
First, what Anonymous is doing is indefensible. Nobody elected this person.
Second, the purpose of a hearing is calling witnesses. Since Rs are the majority, they can either refuse hearings â which means they will have given up their most powerful institutional tool, as well as dissolving their political claim to be against Anonymous. Itâs quite literally refusing to do their job â and ought to be a dominant theme for Ds this fall.
OR they can hold hearings â which can have absolutely no partisan advantage for 'em, since Ds will have already called for these hearings AND since Anonymous is a Trump âsenior officialâ. Going after a guy who is ostensibly on your own side is a way to REDUCE your side.
Third, youâre simply wrong on the polling data. Trump has a hard floor of roughly a third to the mid-40s of the electorate â some analyses put it down as a low as 20%, the folks who would back him even if he really did shoot somebody in public.
But there is a decisive margin of folks â particularly in off year elections for the House and Senate â who are profoundly tired of Trumpâs static.For Ds to call on the Rs to hold hearings immediately on Anonymous, BECAUSE this is about a kind of coup, simply focuses everybody on the reality of the Trump Administration: literally EVERY bit of reporting and insider tell-all has the same story.
Who could the Rs call as witnesses, who would help them? Is there anybody the Ds could call, who WOULDNâT?
Think of Omarosa, playing her tapes in a hearing. Or Scaramucci, verifying that White House staff simply humors the President. What would Mattis say, under oath?
For roughly 30 years people speculated about who Deep Throat might be. Whole books were written about it that tried to guess who it was. I could be wrong, but I donât remember hearing of anyone who guessed Mark Felt.
That alone should make people more cautious about trying to guess who this âmystery stafferâ might be, but I donât suppose it will.
Polling data? Yeah, thatâs something you can lean on.
https://www.cookpolitical.com/presidential/charts/scorecard
<img src="/uploads/default/original/3X/8/2/82899b95134b05b7a38d348cbfcf1e9808ebbe72.png" width="690" height="213">
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/I wonder if Mueller will want to interview the author.