Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of ten. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:35 PM, for 9h 09m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 90.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred twentieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Fire Department will hold a business tonight at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1923, Milton College takes a stand against dancing: “Milton College president A.E. Whitford banned dancing by students in off-campus, semi-public places such as confectionery stores.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Michael Wolff reports “You Can’t Make This S— Up”: My Year Inside Trump’s Insane White House:
….There was, after the abrupt Scaramucci meltdown, hardly any effort inside the West Wing to disguise the sense of ludicrousness and anger felt by every member of the senior staff toward Trump’s family and Trump himself. It became almost a kind of competition to demystify Trump. For Rex Tillerson, he was a moron. For Gary Cohn, he was dumb as shit. For H.R. McMaster, he was a hopeless idiot. For Steve Bannon, he had lost his mind.
Most succinctly, no one expected him to survive Mueller. Whatever the substance of the Russia “collusion,” Trump, in the estimation of his senior staff, did not have the discipline to navigate a tough investigation, nor the credibility to attract the caliber of lawyers he would need to help him. (At least nine major law firms had turned down an invitation to represent the president.)
There was more: Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he’d repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions — he just couldn’t stop saying something….
(Everywhere, in public and from private accounts, Trump shows evidence of cognitive decline, approaching in seriousness his long-existing moral and ethical deficiencies.)
Josh Dawsey and Ashley Parker report Trump lawyer seeks to block insider book on White House:
A lawyer representing President Trump sought Thursday to stop the publication of a new behind-the-scenes book about the White House that has already led Trump to angrily decry his former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon.
The legal notice — addressed to author Michael Wolff and the president of the book’s publisher — said Trump’s lawyers were pursuing possible charges including libel in connection with the forthcoming book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”
The letter by Beverly Hills-based attorney Charles J. Harder demanded the publisher, Henry Holt and Co., “immediately cease and desist from any further publication, release or dissemination of the book” or excerpts and summaries of its contents. The lawyers also seek a full copy of the book as part of their investigation….
(Cease and desist on behalf of the most public figure on the planet…good luck with that.)
Josh Marshall sees The End of the Beginning:
One of the things we will be focusing on on the Russia front in 2018 is not simply breaking a lot of news but on narrating the bigger picture. It can be a difficult story to make sense of because it has so many tentacles. There are so many disparate and far-flung parts to keep track of and make sense of. One of the top themes of Glenn Simpson’s and Peter Fritsch’s must-read oped published yesterday in The New York Times is that the focus on conspiracy during the 2016 campaign cycle has almost totally eclipsed examination of Donald Trump’s longstanding involvement with the Russian criminal underworld and money laundering which laid the basis of what happened in 2016. (That has always seemed to be Trump’s greatest fear.) We’ll come back to that.
So where are we now in this story? A series of revelations in the final weeks of 2017 placed us at what we should think not as the beginning or the end but the end of the beginning. We are still only at the front end of this investigation. We still know only the outlines of what happened and how. But we are past any serious question about whether there was collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. There was. It’s no longer a matter of probability, even high probability. We know it from either undisputed facts or sworn statements from Trump associates now cooperating with the Mueller investigation.
As I wrote a week ago, the entire ‘controversy’ over the Steele Dossier is meaningless in any substantive sense. Even if it were literally propaganda from the DNC comms office it wouldn’t change the facts about what the FBI and then Mueller investigations have already uncovered. It is classic misdirection and mendacity in its most direct form. Steele wasn’t some oppo researcher. He was one of his country’s top Russia spies, very well-placed to conduct such an investigation. He was and is trusted and held in high repute by the FBI, in part because of his work in the FIFA scandal. But the storm of abuse and misinformation from Trump supporters have nonetheless cast his work under some public taint. The aforementioned OpEd by the men who run Fusion GPS, I think, finally sets the matter straight. The dossier wasn’t the origin of the investigation. But it added to US counter-intelligence concerns (perhaps more like alarm bells) because as Simpson puts it, “our sources said the dossier … corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp. The intelligence committees have known for months that credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia were pouring in from independent sources during the campaign”….
(The case against Trump grows stronger each day. Much more to be done, but it will be done.)
Ben Schreckinger reports Vladimir Putin’s Worst Enemies Are Hosting a Summit in His Honor (“Organizers of the first-ever “PutinCon” are assembling the Russian president’s fiercest critics to discuss everything from Putin’s finances to his unraveling. Here, an exclusive sneak peek at what’s in store”):
….Imagine Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critics and dogged enemies all getting together in one room to, among other things, discuss his downfall. Well, that’s more or less what organizers of the first-ever “PutinCon” have in mind.
(Good for them – free people should know their enemies.)
These ‘Looping Towers’ Have A Running Track On The Roof:
Michael Wolff’s new screed landed with all of the subtly of a sumo wrestler doing cannonballs off the high board into a septic tank. Shit is flying everywhere! There is an argument being made that Wolff is merely a glorified gossip columnist, and is being overly dramatic. Wolff says he has tapes. This argument can be easily solved, and I expect Wolff to do just that, soon. That Wolff was at the Whitehouse often, wandering around taking notes and presumably hauling around a recorder, or at least wearing a wire, does display a shocking lack of political tradecraft acumen for the Trumpers. Had they never read a Wolff book or column?
This book, whatever the veracity of Wolff, has had a seismic effect on right-wing politics. There are more earthquakes going off in DC than in an Oklahoma oil field during high-fracking season. In less than a day, Trump has defriended Bannon and is issuing cease-and-desist letters to Wolff. Bannon has just lost his sugar-mama, Rebecca Mercer, who has been bankrolling all of his dreams of domination. That will put a big crimp in the Breitbart Christmas bonus. Bannon had dreams of running for president, but now had better think about running for his life.
I doubt that Wolff is breaking any news to Mueller, or to any of us that have been paying attention. The details are moist and juicy, though. The situation for Trump is going supernova. He is staring into the black hole of his life’s future. It’s only going to get worse, and it will happen soon. This situation is not showing any signs of getting even a little bit better for Trump and the rest of the R-team, and is showing every sign of cascading on them.
Somebody better be checking the Reichstag sprinkler system.
Yes, you must be right: Wolff knew where he was, about whom he was writing. Recordings would, and likely will, verify his quotations. There’s no administration before – no one – where this many staffers would have talked this way about a president, especially early on. It’s not one or two disgruntled people – Wolff claims hundreds of interviews. Oh, brother.
Mueller must see (even more clearly) what we those following see, too, about Russia, collusion, money laundering, etc.
But think how odd this must be: Mueller faces in Trump not merely corruption, but almost certainly mental disorder and mental decline. That’s what strikes me so much about those around Trump: they see what’s wrong with him, even if they lack the ability to define it clinically. They know he’s impaired, either in character or capacity (or both, most likely).
All the power in the world, placed in the hands of a man both corrupt and impaired. His supporters, his base, his surrogates, his operatives, his family: they cannot protect Trump against the ruin that awaits. As little as I think of him – and he’s wholly unsympatheic to me – even I would think better of Trump if he resigned now, accepting his misconduct and unsuitability.
He won’t, of course. Each he day avoids lawful removal from office endangers our country.
The Reichstag sprinkler system? Oh, yes: around him are men who will do anything to avoid culpability. Even Nixon wouldn’t, in the end, burn down a building, so to speak.
Trump? One can’t be so sure.