Daily Archives: June 21, 2017

Kevin DrumJun. 20, 2017 6:33 PM

Lets see. So far President Obama has (a) wiretapped Trump, (b) deliberately planned the destruction of Obamacare for 2017, (c) caused the Mike Flynn debacle by failing to properly vet Flynn,1 (d) personally organized anti-Trump protests around the country, and (e) caused the death of Otto Warmbier because he was too weak-kneed to stand up to North Korea.

Its standard practice for new presidents to declare that things are even worse than I thought, usually offered up as an excuse for why the country hasnt blossomed under new leadership within the first month.2 Its also standard to attack your predecessors policies. But its decidedly not standard to accuse your predecessor personally of illegal, unethical, and cowardly acts.

I suppose Obama will continue to stay quiet about this, partly because its tradition, partly because thats who he is, and partly because speaking up might be counterproductive at the moment. But Im pretty sure Im not the only one who wishes hed toss tradition aside and just lay into Trump. Id pay to see it.

1For the record, Flynn was fired by Obama in 2014 because he had become deranged. Obama personally warned Trump about this.

2Also newly elected governors, mayors, district attorneys, sheriffs, dogcatchers, and PTA presidents.

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Donald Trump, Classy As Always - Mother Jones

Congratulations to Karen Handel on her big win in Georgia 6th, Trump wroteon Twitter. Fantastic job, we are all very proud of you!

The president had dinner with Vice President Mike Pence and his wife Karen at his residence Tuesday evening before returning to the White House.

Trump appeared to be watching the election results closely, at one point acknowledging that things are looking great for Karen H!

The president celebrated the massive victory late into the night at the White House.

Well, the Special Elections are over and those that want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN are 5 and O! he wrote on Twitter just before midnight. All the Fake News, all the money spent = 0

He also thanked Fox News for acknowledging the huge win for Republicans and his presidency.

Handel won the seat vacated by Rep. Tom Price, who joined the Trump administration as the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Handel also thanked Trump during her victory speech in Georgia, prompting chants of TRUMP! in the audience.

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Donald Trump Congratulates Karen Handel for 'Big Win' in Georgia - Breitbart News

Donald Trump speaks at a Victory Tour Rally in Des Moines, Iowa, on December 8, 2016.Steve PopeGetty Images

(DES MOINES, Iowa) Iowa independents who helped Donald Trump win the presidency see last year's tough-talking candidate as a thin-skinned chief executive and wish he'd show more grace.

Unaffiliated voters make up the largest percentage of the electorate in the Midwest state that backed Trump in 2016, after lifting Democrat Barack Obama to the White House in party caucuses and two straight elections. Ahead of Trump's visit to Iowa on Wednesday several independents who voted for Trump expressed frustration with the President.

It's not just his famous tweetstorms. It's what they represent: a president distracted by investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and a court battle over his executive order barring refugees from majority-Muslim countries at the expense of tangible health care legislation and new tax policy.

"He's so sidetracked," said Chris Hungerford, a 47-year-old home-business owner from Marshalltown. "He gets off track on things he should just let go."

And when he does spout off, he appears to lack constraint, said Scott Scherer, a 48-year-old chiropractor from Guttenberg, in northeast Iowa.

"Engage your brain before you engage your mouth," Scherer advised, especially on matters pertaining to investigations. "Shut up. Just shut up, and let the investigation run its course."

Scherer said he would vote again for Trump, but pauses a long time before declining to answer when asked if he approves of the job the president is doing.

Cody Marsh isn't sure about voting for Trump a second time. The 32-year-old power-line technician from Tabor, in western Iowa, says, "It's 50-50."

"People don't take him seriously," he said.

Unaffiliated, or "no party" voters as they are known in Iowa, make up 36 percent of the electorate, compared with 33 percent who register Republican and 31 percent registered Democrat. Self-identified independents in Iowa voted for Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton by a 13-percentage-point margin last year, according to exit polls conducted for the Associated Press and television networks

They helped him capture 51.8 percent of the overall vote against Clinton.

Nationally, exit polls showed independents tilted toward Trump over Clinton by about a 4-percentage-point margin in November, but an AP-NORC poll conducted in June found that about two-thirds of them disapprove of how he's handling his job as president.

In North Carolina, Republican pollster Paul Shumaker says he has seen internal polling that has warning signs for his state, where Trump prevailed last year. Independent voters are becoming frustrated with Trump, especially for failing so far to deliver on long-promised household economic issues such as health care, said Shumaker, an adviser to Republican Sen. Richard Burr.

Inaction on health care and any notable decline in the economy will hurt Trump's ability to improve his numbers with independents, with broad implications for the midterm elections next year, Shumaker said. At stake in 2018 will be majority control of the House. A favorable map and more Democrats up for re-election make the GOP more likely to add to its numbers in the Senate.

"How the president and members of Congress move forward and address the kitchen-table issues facing the American voters will determine the outcome of the 2018 elections," he said.

In Iowa on Wednesday, Trump will be rallying his Republican base in Cedar Rapids.

Earlier this month, Vice President Mike Pence attended Republican Sen. Joni Ernst's annual fundraiser, where he talked about job growth and low unemployment since the start of the year, although economists see much of it as a continuation of Obama policies.

Trump has only been in office five months.

It's a message the Republican establishment is clinging to, especially those looking ahead to 2018.

Gov. Kim Reynolds, installed last month to succeed new U.S. Ambassador to China Terry Branstad, said last week of Iowa voters: "I think they are confident that President Trump and this administration are doing the job that they said that they would do, going out there and making America great again."

But Trump has to worry about people like Richard Sternberg, a 68-year-old retired high school guidance counselor from Roland, in central Iowa, who voted for Trump. But is Sternberg satisfied? "Not completely."

He is bothered by Trump's proposed cut to vocational education, an economic lift for some in rural areas.

"We, especially in Iowa, need those two-year technically trained people," Sternberg said.

More broadly, Trump needs to act more "presidential," he said.

"Trump speaks before he thinks," Sternberg said. "He doesn't seem to realize what the president says in the form of direct communication or Twitter carries great weight and can be misconstrued if not carefully crafted."

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President Trump Is Returning to Iowa, Where He May Find Remorseful Independent Voters - TIME

Jay Sekulow hosting an event at the Allen Arena at Lipscomb University on April 29, 2014, in Nashville, Tennessee.

Rick Diamond/Getty Images for GMA

Jay Sekulow had one job. He didnt do it. In fact, he did the opposite. The newest member of Donald Trumps private legal team, Sekulow was supposed to explain that, counter to the Washington Posts reporting, the president is not under investigation,. Instead, he told Fox News Chris Wallace that Trump is under investigationtwicebefore denying hed said any such thing.

This embarrassing flap raises two questions: Who is Jay Sekulow, and why is he defending Trump?

The first question is more easily answered than the second. Sekulow is a conservative litigator who has spent his career dismantling the constitutional separation of church and state. In 1986, he persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down an ordinance barring Jews for Jesus from proselytizing in Los Angeles International Airport. The issue was close to Sekulows heart: Although he was raised Jewish, he became a Messianic Jew while attending Atlanta Baptist College (now Mercer University). As he explained in an essay, Sekulow commit[ted] [his] life to Jesus at a performance by the Liberated Wailing Wall, the Jews for Jesus music group.

Sekulow served as the Jews for Jesus general counsel for several years and founded a nonprofit, Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism, or CASE, to fund his legal work. In 1991, he moved to the American Center for Law & Justice, a conservative Christian advocacy group founded by Pat Robertson to counteract the American Civil Liberties Union. In his capacity as ACLJ chief counsel, Sekulow continued to argue cases at the Supreme Court, usually defending school prayer and government subsidization of religion. Sekulow also repeatedly attacked buffer zones around abortion clinics that prevent protesters from accosting women. He lost that fight but won several high-profile religion cases by asserting that restrictions on religion in schools violate freedom of speech.

Sekulows profile rose precipitously in the 1990s thanks in large part to Paul and Jan Crouch, owners of the Trinity Broadcast Network. (Jan Crouch, the Los Angeles Times reported in 1993, referred to Sekulow as our little Jew.) The Crouches gave him a talk show on the network called Call to Action: Legal Issues Facing Christians Today, a platform that cemented his reputation as a top evangelical attorney. According to the LAT, donations to Sekulows nonprofit, CASE, quadrupled after he mentioned it on air.

Sekulows hiring may have been a gesture of goodwill to a group whose support Trump cannot afford to lose.

Over the next 15 years, Sekulow also transformed himself into a minor Republican powerbroker, working with the Bush White House to select conservative judicial nominees and push them through the Senate. In 2005, however, the Legal Times Tony Mauro published an investigative piece revealing that Sekulow had through the ACLJ and a string of interconnected nonprofit and for-profit entities built a financial empire that generates millions of dollars a year and supports a lavish lifestylecomplete with multiple homes, chauffeur-driven cars, and a private jet that he once used to ferry Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

While Sekulow struggled to maintain his image and fundraising capabilities, other groups began to outshine the ACLJ. The Alliance Defending Freedom and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, for example, became key players in conservative Christian litigation, creating a network of supporters and donors through more traditional channels. Sekulow retreated from the front lines of church-state lawsuits; he argued his last Supreme Court case in 2008.

But Sekulow and the ACLJ have continued advocating for their peculiar vision of evangelical conservatism. In 2011, the ACLJwhich purports to support religious and constitutional freedomssued New York to block the construction of what it called the Ground Zero mosque. Sekulow, who still serves as the organizations chief counsel, vocally supported the effort and contributed to both the lawsuit and the appeal. He lost.

In recent years, Sekulow has served as an informal adviser to Mitt Romneys 2012 presidential campaign, hosted a radio show, and contributed to the ACLJs blog. He has also used the ACLJs resources to promote conservative values in Africa. In 2010, Sekulow and his son set up ACLJ offices in Zimbabwe and Kenya as both countries were in the midst of revising their constitutions. The ACLJ lobbied for the inclusion of constitutional bans on homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and abortioneven in cases where the mother will die unless her pregnancy is terminated. While neither country wrote total bans on abortion or homosexuality into their constitutions, Zimbabwe did include a prohibition on same-sex marriage. (Homosexuality is already illegal in both countries by statute.)

Top Comment

" to block the construction of what it called the Ground Zero mosque." You know, because religious freedom. The hypocrisy of the current religious right is just pathetic. They wallow in it, like stink on a turd. More...

Sekulows career arc looks similar to that of a Trump hanger-on like Rudy Giuliani: fame and relevance followed by intense controversy and flagging fortunes that are suddenly reversed by affiliation with the president. Despite this surface resemblance, it might seem odd that Trump hired Sekulowa First Amendment lawyerto defend him against possible obstruction of justice charges. But the hire makes sense if Trump views Sekulow as less a litigator than a messenger. While Sekulow may not be an expert in obstruction, impeachment, or executive privilege, he seems to remain popular among the Christian right. His hiring may have been a gesture of goodwill to a group whose support Trump cannot afford to lose.

Whatever logic justified Sekulows recruitment was shattered on Sunday, when the fiery culture warrior of the 1990s was reduced to an incoherent propagandist. He tripped and stammered, then grew furious with Wallace, his relatively friendly interlocutor, for noting his contradictory statements. It was a humiliating performance, one that likely disqualified him from future TV appearances. Sekulows deflating stint as a surrogate-attorney serves as a reminder that Trumps habit of hiring unqualified, unprepared advisors doesnt just hurt the country. Sometimes, it hurts the president, too.

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Who Is Jay Sekulow, and Why Is He Defending Donald Trump? - Slate Magazine

During the 2016 election, many voters were dismayed by both major-party candidates. Hillary Clinton was the personification of the Washington establishment foreign-policy hawk, with her dismal track record of urging ill-conceived military interventions. And Donald Trump, who railed against squandering American blood and treasure abroad, possessed neither the knowledge nor the experience nor the discipline nor the character to steer Americas approach to geopolitics in a better direction.

As if those choices weren't dispiriting enough, I fretted that for all Donald Trumps denunciations of the Iraq War and promises to spend money at home rather than abroad, a careful assessment of his words showed that his own instincts were interventionistthat he was no less likely than his opponent to blunder into a major war.

In Syria today, President Trump is risking just such a conflict.

American forces and American allies are not only taking territory from ISIS, theyre holding that territory against regime forces, David French writes at National Review. Theres a word for what happens when a foreign power takes and holds territory without the consent of the sovereign state invasion. In many ways, current American policy is a lighter-footprint, less ambitious version of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Were using local allies, but our own boots are on the ground, and were directly defending our forces and our allies from threats from Syrias own government. In his estimation, the key warring parties increasingly face a stark choiceagree to a de facto partition of the country or inch toward a great-power conflict.

To wit, an American fighter shot down a Syrian warplane on Sunday, the first time the American military has downed a Syrian aircraft since the start of the civil war in 2011. Observers immediately called the incident a marked escalation in the conflict.

And their view was quickly vindicated: Russia on Monday condemned the American militarys downing of a Syrian warplane, suspending the use of a military hotline that Washington and Moscow have used to avoid collisions in Syrian airspace and threatening to target aircraft flown by the United States and its allies over Syria.

Those skeptical of U.S. intervention in the Syrian civil war have long warned that it could escalate into a civilization-warping conflict between nuclear powers. But neither Vietnam nor Afghanistan nor Iraq nor Libya has persuaded todays hawks to sufficiently weight the unintended consequences that plague all complex military interventions. And there are so many varieties of hawks that are urging action.

The complexity of the civil war in Syria is underscored by the fact that the ascendant pro-war faction inside the Trump administration is composed of Iran hawks. According to reporters Kate Brannen, Dan De Luce and Paul McLeary at Just Security, antagonism toward Iran is causing two officials in the Trump White House to push for broadening the conflict, against the advice of officials at the Pentagon:

Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence on the National Security Council, and Derek Harvey, the NSCs top Middle East advisor, want the United States to start going on the offensive in southern Syria Their plans are making even traditional Iran hawks nervous, including Defense Secretary James Mattis, who has personally shot down their proposals more than once, the two sources said Despite the more aggressive stance pushed by some White House officials, Mattis, military commanders and top U.S. diplomats all oppose opening up a broader front against Iran and its proxies in southeastern Syria, viewing it as a risky move that could draw the United States into a dangerous confrontation with Iran, defense officials said. Such a clash could trigger retaliation against U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Syria, where Tehran has armed thousands of Shiite militia fighters and deployed hundreds of Revolutionary Guard officers.

Put another way, Iran hawks in the Trump White House want to broaden the conflict there in a manner that pits the U.S. against another country that also seeks the defeat of ISIS, the ostensible reason the U.S. is involved in Syria in the first place.

Meanwhile, hawks in Iran are escalating that countrys role in Syria: Iran announced Sunday the Iran Revolutionary Guards had launched ballistic missile strikes on Saturday against ISIS targets in Syria, dramatically escalating the countrys role in the Syrian conflict. The mid-range ground-to-ground missiles targeted militants in eastern Syria in retaliation for the deadly terrorist attacks in Tehran earlier this month.

The American public does not want a major intervention in Syria.

There has never been a congressional vote authorizing U.S. military operations in Syria against anyone, and there has been scant debate over any of the goals that the U.S. claims to be pursuing there, Daniel Larison notes. The U.S. launches attacks inside Syria with no legal authority from the U.N. or Congress, and it strains credulity that any of these operations have anything to do with individual or collective self-defense.

And the push for escalation is a particular betrayal for Trump voters who supported the candidate based on rhetoric about quickly defeating ISIS and otherwise eschewing war. Here is what Trump had to say back when President Obama was contemplating a greater U.S. role in Syria: What I am saying is stay out of Syria AGAIN, TO OUR VERY FOOLISH LEADER, DO NOT ATTACK SYRIA - IF YOU DO MANY VERY BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN & FROM THAT FIGHT THE U.S. GETS NOTHING!

Today, escalation in Syria risks those very bad things, along with American lives and treasure, but Trumps current rhetoric suggests he is more focused on his ongoing feud with the news media, Hillary Clinton, and whether he is under investigation. His approach carries all the risks of Washington establishment hawkery with none of the steadiness, experience or discipline that helps to mitigate them.

Were inching toward an outright invasion and extended occupation of northern Syria, French writes at National Review. All without congressional approval. All without meaningful public debate. Will Trumps base stand for this betrayal? So long as he is commander in chief, the U.S. will suffer from the worst qualities of the establishment and its antagonists. It is hard to imagine a president less fit to avoid catastrophe.

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Donald Trump No Longer Wants to 'Stay Out' of Syria - The Atlantic