The Commentariat -- November 12, 2017

David Lawler of Axios: "Rep. Kevin Brady, chairman of the Ways and Means committee, was unequivocal when asked on 'Fox News Sunday' whether he could guarantee that deductions for state and local taxes would not be eliminated in the final tax plan: 'I can,' he said."

*****

Mark Landler of the New York Times: "In a stream of tweets on Sunday, the president said those who wanted to investigate his ties to Russia were 'haters and fools,' ridiculed 'crooked' Hillary Clinton's ill-fated effort to reset relations with Russia and fired back at North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, for calling him old, saying that he could call Mr. Kim 'short and fat' -- but had restrained himself. That followed a freewheeling session with reporters on Air Force One on Saturday, in which Mr. Trump dismissed the Russia investigation as a Democratic 'hit job' and derided as 'political hacks' three former chiefs of the nation's intelligence agencies, all three of which concluded that Russia had meddled in the 2016 presidential election.... Pressed again on Sunday about whether he believed President Vladimir V. Putin's denials that Russia had intervened, Mr. Trump seemed to walk back his earlier comments somewhat.... 'As to whether I believe it or not, I'm with our agencies, especially as currently constituted, with their leadership,' Mr. Trump said at a news conference with Vietnam's president, Tran Dai Quang. 'I believe in our agencies. I've worked with them very strongly.'" ...

     ... Mrs. Bea McCrabbie: Landler is perplexed about what caused Trump to start mean-tweeting. But it seems obvious: somebody in the administration told him a POTUS had to put the U.S. before the leader of an adversarial government. So he came up with that weird "very strongly" line, but he wasn't happy about it. ...

... Karen DeYoung, et al., of the Washington Post: "President Trump said that President Vladimir Putin had assured him again Saturday that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 presidential campaign, and indicated that he believed Putin's sincerity, drawing immediate criticism from lawmakers and former intelligence officials who assessed that the meddling took place.... Former CIA director Michael V. Hayden said he was so concerned by Trump's statement that he contacted the agency to confirm that it stood by the January assessment. He described Trump's remarks as 'egregious comments on the character of folks who have been public servants ... [and] the public should know that these guys are thoroughgoing professionals, and what the president left unsaid is that the people he put into these jobs agree with the so-called hacks.'... Michael Morell, a former acting director and deputy director of the CIA, said Trump was 'biting hook, line and sinker' the word of Putin, a former intelligence officer who is a 'trained liar and manipulator.' Although progress had been made in the intelligence community's initial raw relationship with Trump, Morell said in an email, 'this will most definitely be a step backward.' Sen. Mark R. Warner (Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, one of the panels investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, said he was left 'completely speechless' by Trump's willingness to take Putin's word 'over the conclusions of our own combined intelligence community.'... Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said in a statement that 'there's nothing "America First" about taking the word of a KGB colonel over that of the American intelligence community ... Vladimir Putin does not have America's interests at heart. To believe otherwise is not only naive but also places our national security at risk.'" ...

... Daniella Diaz of CNN: "CIA Director Mike Pompeo stands by US intelligence assessments that Russia meddled in the 2016 election, the agency said Saturday, despite ... Donald Trump saying he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin when he says his country didn't interfere." Mrs. McC: That's not exactly what Trump said: rather, he said he believed Putin was sincere in his denials of Russian interference. That's stupid, but it's not quite saying he believes Putin, although of course he implied it by running down our own intelligence assessments & the men who directed them. ...

... The Washington Post story on the Trump-Putin chats, by Ashley Parker & David Nakamura, also linked yesterday, has been updated several times. Here are a few additions: "On Saturday, Trump described former FBI director James Comey, who testified to Congress that Trump asked him to drop an investigation into his campaign's ties to Russian officials, as a proven 'liar' and 'leaker.' Trump called the former U.S. intelligence officials who concluded the Russians tampered -- including former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. and former CIA director John Brennan -- 'political hacks.'... Of Putin, he added: 'He says that very strongly, he really seems to be insulted by it, and he says he didn't do it. He is very, very strong in the fact that he didn't do it. You have President Putin very strongly, vehemently, says he has nothing to do with that....'... Trump did not answer when asked during the flight to Hanoi whether he believed Putin's denial of the tampering.... Yet a Kremlin spokesman denied that the two leaders discussed election meddling, according to CNN." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: Trump said that Putin spoke so strongly -- 'He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying he did" -- and that our own intelligence agencies were run by liars and hacks. This implies, IMO, that the head of government of an adversarial nation is more believable & trustworthy than is U.S. intelligence. Whatever your political leanings, this is an alarming, anti-American statement. And it's coming from the President of the United States. ...

... Amber Phillips of the Washington Post has Trump's full remarks aboard AF1 to the press, annotated, here. Here's another comment Trump made about Putin: "And there are those that say, if he did do it, he wouldn't have gotten caught, all right? Which is a very interesting statement." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...

... Dan Merica of CNN: "... Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin informally met on the sidelines of a regional economic summit in Vietnam Saturday and agreed to an extensive statement on the conflict in Syria. The statement, which reaffirms the leaders' commitment to defeat ISIS in the country, stresses the need to keep existing military communications open and agrees that the bloody conflict does not have a military solution. 'President Trump and President Putin today, meeting on the margins of the APEC conference in Da Nang, Vietnam, confirmed their determination to defeat ISIS in Syria,' the statement reads, adding later that Trump felt he had a 'good meeting with President Putin.'... The statement mostly addresses long-accepted areas of agreement between the United States and Russia...." ...

... Mark Landler: "President Trump has issued two starkly contradictory calls on his trip to Asia this past week: The nations of the world must rally behind the United States to confront the nuclear threat from North Korea, but they should expect America to go its own way on trade. Reconciling those messages will be hard.... The contradictions also reflect a more fundamental disarray in the presidency's policy toward Asia. It seems caught between the geopolitical realism of Mr. Trump's diplomats and the economic nationalism of his political aides. These competing impulses have left allies and adversaries alike confused about America's motives and staying power. Over time, several experts said, the balancing act will be impossible to maintain." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...

... David Nakamura & Ashley Parker: "On his third day in office, President Trump signed an executive memorandum withdrawing the United States from a 12-nation Asia-Pacific trade accord that had been painstakingly negotiated over a decade by two of his White House predecessors.... But on the 295th day of his presidency -- during a trip to the region where the trade pact was most vital -- a competing narrative emerged. Trump's 'America first' slogan has, in many ways, begun to translate into something more akin to 'America alone.'"

The New York Times Editors urge Trump to read the Constitution: "... throughout his candidacy and presidency, Mr. Trump has treated the Constitution less as a guiding light than as an inconvenient hindrance. 'His idea of the presidency is, he was elected and he can do whatever he wants,' said Corey Brettschneider, a professor of political science at Brown University and author of 'The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents.'... 'Presidents usually regard the oath as a set of legally binding principles that they abide by,' Mr. Brettschneider said. 'Trump tends to think of things in terms of real estate law -- ways to get around legal requirements rather than enforcing and promoting them. That's scary, because we rely on a president to espouse the norms of the Constitution.'" The editors provide "a small sampling of Mr. Trump's depredations of those foundational amendments -- via tweet, speech or interview -- over the past two and a half years." We've hit most if not all of them here.

Mark Hosenball & John Walcott of Reuters: "Special counsel Robert Mueller's team has questioned Sam Clovis, co-chairman of ... Donald Trump's election campaign, to determine if Trump or top aides knew of the extent of the campaign team's contacts with Russia, two sources familiar with the investigation said on Friday.... 'The ultimate question Mueller is after is whether candidate Trump and then President-elect Trump knew of the discussions going on with Russia, and who approved or even directed them,' said one source. 'That is still just a question.'" (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...

... Jonathan Chait: "... it certainly appears that Cambridge Analytica was heavily involved with trying to get Clinton's stolen emails, and was aware that Russia had engineered their theft, and played an important role facilitating cooperation between Russia and the Trump campaign." Chait connects the known dots. There are quite a few of them. (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...

... Ed Kilgore: "... in [Mike] Flynn's case, if the allegations [about his $15MM deal with Turkey] are proved to be true, the scandal would ... resemble ... Teapot Dome (the 1920's scandal that took down former Interior Secretary Albert Fall for selling public oil leases), but with a dash of treason. That a presidential National Security Advisor would sell his influence to a foreign government so quickly and cheaply is a very big deal, which we need to linger over before returning to the rest of the issues Mueller is investigating." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)

"Trump Team Begins Drafting Middle East Peace Plan" seems like an Andy Borowitz headline, but it actually heads a story by Peter Baker & is the New York Times' top story this morning. "President Trump and his advisers have begun developing their own concrete blueprint to end the decades-old conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, a plan intended to go beyond previous frameworks offered by the American government in pursuit of what the president calls 'the ultimate deal.'" Mrs. Mc.C: Also, that's as far as I could read.

Charlie Savage of the New York Times has the most depressing story of the day, especially for younger people who will bear the brunt of it: Trump is reshaping the federal courts with young, ultra-conservative judges.

** Trumpian Values. Adam Davidson of the New Yorker: "[T]he Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. E.I.T.I., formed in 2003, is an international organization through which governments, private citizens, and corporations seek to reduce the rampant pilfering of wealth in the oil, gas, mineral, and other extractive industries.... The membership roll has been growing rapidly and now includes dozens of nations.... As of last spring, the Trump Administration seemed to be moving away from years of enthusiastic, bipartisan American support of E.I.T.I.... Now we learn that the Trump Administration is abandoning the global pact...[T]he U.S. pulling out of E.I.T.I. ... does show that the Trump Administration is actively implementing, in real policy, its avowed distrust -- even contempt -- for international compacts designed to improve the lives of people around the world. That is terrifying." --safari

Senate Race

Everybody Thought Roy Was Weird. Max Greenwood of the Hill: "A former colleague of GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore said Saturday that it was 'common knowledge' that the Alabama Republican dated high school girls when he worked in the Etowah County District Attorney's Office in the 1980s. In a statement to CNN, Teresa Jones, who served as deputy district attorney for Etowah County, Ala., from 1982 until 1985, said that multiple people thought it was unusual that Moore dated high school girls, but that no one ever raised the matter with him. 'It was common knowledge that Roy Moore dated high school girls, everyone we knew thought it was weird,' Jones told CNN. 'We wondered why someone his age would hang out at high school football games and the mall ... but you really wouldn't say anything to someone like that.'"

News Lede

New York Times: "Liz Smith, the longtime queen of New York's tabloid gossip columns, who for more than three decades chronicled little triumphs and trespasses in the soap-opera lives of the rich, the famous and the merely beautiful, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 94."

Comments

[Marvin Schwalb]

Last week we became the only country in the world denying climate change.
Now we are the only country in the world that doesn't believe Putin is a liar.
Soooo special.

[PD Pepe]

I found the statement by Marie yesterday and repeated today –––"...[re: Trump's slandering remarks] ... that our own intelligence agencies were run by liars and hacks. This implies, IMO, that the head of government of an adversarial nation is more believable & trustworthy than is U.S. intelligence. Whatever your political leanings, this is an alarming, anti-American statement. And it's coming from the President of the United States. ..."
absolutely right and rightly shocking. And again I ask––is there no one to guide this guy through diplomatic maneuvers? Is there no one to advise him that you don't do dirt on your own intelligence while in another country? This is so bad, so counter productive, that I have trouble understanding why this may not be the nail in his coffin, but you can bet it won't be.

[Akhilleus]

So much rotten swill gushes from the Trump pie hole that it’s hard to decide upon the most rotten. This week there is no doubt. The little king surpassed himself on his Blame America First Tour. This is nothing like the imaginary “apology” tours that had Confederates ready to secede when that horrible nee-groe was in the White House, a tabula rasa upon which haters and racists could inscribe their worst fears and grievances. No, on this trip, Trump has basically said “America sucks. We suck and we’re stupid.”

He has gone down on his knees before foreign powers and acknowledged their superiority in the face of American weakness and ignorance. This is such an abomination that it stands out like an inferno, towering over his typical everyday dumpster fires of arrogance, stupidity, and bigotry.

And his embarrassing bluster about how he will turn it all around stands in sharp contrast to the mountain of evidence of his feckless impotence.

Trump cannot be compared to any other president at this point. He is sui generis, alone in a cloud cuckoo land of his own making. A big red nose, floppy shoes, and a lascivious grin couldn’t increase his evil clown image any more than events of the past week.

Calling him a disgrace would be a kindness he does not deserve.

[Akhilleus]

PD,

I look for no one to guide this fool. He is beyond the point of rescue. That point passed when he descended the escalator in his cut-rate Xanadu.

He is, as the bard would have it, "A most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality."

The ones to be held accountable are the sniveling toadies in the Confederate Party of Traitors, they who could stand up for the nation but choose, rather, to sit for their own benefit and comfort. Cowards and mountebank to a person.

As Will would say, they are not clean enough to spit upon.

He’d have to go back to the drawing board to invent invective potent enough for these and their vile little king, who would toss us all overboard for an extra pillow under his fat ass.

My mother was no bard but she had wisdom to burn. One of her prime directives to us as kids was “Never throw your own in front of strangers.”

She’d have some pretty harsh words, in both Irish and English for this fool living, incredibly, in the White House.

[Mrs. Bea McCrabbie]

@PD Pepe: I'm glad to see -- as the WashPo reports -- that some leaders are coming out & saying pretty much what I did. Even back when the FBI & the CIA were far less professional than they are now, not a single U.S. president at the time would have said such a thing publicly, & I doubt if any even thought it. It's just mind-blowing. Apparently, somebody told Trump he'd have to eat his words because he walked back his remarks -- awkwardly & unconvincingly.

It occurred to me this morning that the things Trump has said & done will set this country back to such a degree that even with the best of management (and we don't usually elect the best), it will be 50 years before we can hope to regain the status in the world that we enjoyed under presidents like Obama & FDR. You & I aren't going to live long enough to see the U.S. become the great nation our schoolbooks told us it was. Always in the back of everyone's mind will be, "Yes, but remember, this a country that chose Donald Trump as its president. We don't want to hang our hats on the U.S. If there was a Trump once, there could be a Trump again."

Slavery & the oppression that continued have been the great stain on this country, but the Trump stain may prove to be nearly as indelible.

Marie