We’re now early into year two of the Trump Administration. Additional outtakes.
* Too bad that the DACA issue can’t be separated out from the rest of an immigration deal. It’s all about being fair and humane. We all know the issues–and the difference between serious security reality and blatant xenophobic bigotry. But a DACA/Wall trade-off!
* We now have more background on Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” best-seller. He caught Trump’s eye when he criticized some media treatment of the president on a cable talk show. Trump called to thank him. That greased the skids for Wolff’s extended White House exposure to do background on a book. Wolff let it be known that its working title was “The Great Transition.” That apparently seemed more laudatory than ironic.
It also helped Wolff, who took a whatever-it-took approach to ingratiate himself with staff, that he was not well monitored.
* What, pray tell, are those Trump-accepting, hypocritical evangelicals thinking? No problem with the ultimate, porn-again Christian? Perhaps they should abort their rationale for support.
* Duckworthy rhetoric: That was quite the visceral reaction from Illinois Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth to Trump’s tweet accusing the Dems of holding the military hostage during shutdown negotiations. The Iraq War veteran is a double amputee and takes such incoming rhetoric personally. Call it ad hominem karma for the president.
“I will not be lectured about what our military needs by a five-deferment draft dodger,” zinged Duckworth. “And I have a message for ‘Cadet Bone Spurs’: If you cared about our military, you’d stop baiting Kim Jong Un into a war that could put 85,000 American troops and millions of innocent civilians in danger.”
* President Donald Trump: Andrew Johnson never looked so good.
* John McCain and Bill Clinton. Without their impact, quite arguably, there would not be a Trump presidency.
When McCain put the embarrassingly uninformed, manifestly unqualified, temperamentally ditzy Sarah Palin on his 2008 ticket, he, in effect, validated future deviations from an acceptable norm. That, alas, is part of the “maverick’s” legacy.
Clinton’s sexual predations–both before and while president–lowered the sleaze bar for successors. His administration targeted diversionary scapegoats such as independent counsel Ken Starr, the opposition and certain elements of the media. And when his wife was seen by some as an enabler, it made it impossible for her to fully rally the sisterhood and prosecute the case that America should never, ever elect such a despicable misogynist as president of all the American people.