The Swamp May Be the Swampiest It's Ever Been Under President Trump
"That is the great Grimpen Mire," said he. "A false step yonder means death to man or beast. Only yesterday I saw one of the moor ponies wander into it. He never came out. I saw his head for quite a long time craning out of the bog-hole, but it sucked him down at last. Even in dry seasons it is a danger to cross it, but after these autumn rains it is an awful place."
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles.
The swamp draining, it appears, she is again postponed.
CNBC tells us that the president-elect has concluded yet another Wall Street-wide search and hired yet another noted friend of the working man for his populist economic team.
Cohn, Goldman's 56-year-old president and chief operating officer, has been offered the directorship of the National Economic Council and assistant to the president for economic policy, the sources said. It is unclear if Cohn will accept the post, but he reportedly had discussions late last month about leaving Goldman. Cohn has been at Goldman for 25 years and previously worked in commodities. The National Economic Council, which Cohn would lead, is meant to "coordinate policy-making for domestic and international issues, to coordinate economic policy advice for the president, to ensure that policy decisions and programs are consistent with the president's economic goals, and to monitor implementation of the president's economic policy agenda."
Tell me again how Matt Taibbi's description of GS as a great vampire squid was an infelicitous metaphor.
There are still some hopeful souls, full of seasonal cheer, if not 150-proof poitin, who will argue that Trump's goal is not to break the money power, but to spread its bounty out more generally among more of the citizenry. That is certainly what he says he's going to do, but I've discovered that it's a good rule of thumb not to believe anything El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago says because a) he doesn't remember anything two minutes after he says it, and b) he's a stupendous liar anyway.
It's what he does that's important and, so far, he hasn't done anything that would indicate that he's going to disturb either the current economic order, or the country's relentless drive toward another fiscal catastrophe. His appointees all have been comfortable oligarchs; his Secretary of Labor believes in cheap hiring until he's sure the robots are ready to take the jobs. His Secretary of the Treasury is a foreclosure baron, and his Secretary of Commerce made his boodle running a corporate chop-shop courtesy of this country's ludicrous bankruptcy laws.
This, naturally, has led to some interesting speculation as to who's really running the store down at Camp Runamuck while the president-elect is stroking the suckers out in the boondocks. It is being described as a power struggle between the old-school loyalists like Steve Bannon and Establishment infiltrators like obvious anagram Reince Priebus, soon to be the White House chief-of-staff, with Priebus at the moment being said to be winning.
(And can we declare a year's moratorium on both the phrase "Team of Rivals" and any analogy involving Game of Thrones? Thank you. Sincerely, America.)
Since I don't think Priebus could lead kindergartners across the street, the question I have is who's pulling Priebus' strings. If I had to guess, I'd point to Jim DeMint and his now completely radicalized Heritage Foundation. While Trump's stump rhetoric is wildly dissonant from the recruitment policy that's burped up all of those recruits, one thing all of them-including egregious thooleramawns like Scott Pruitt at EPA and Betsy DeVos at Education-have in common in that they have records and policy positions perfectly in tune with what DeMint and Heritage have been pushing for years. If you're looking for the dark lord behind the events of the next few years, you could do worse than look on Massachusetts Avenue NE in Washington, not too far from both the Capitol and the chambers of the Supreme Court.
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On the electric Twitter machine Thursday night, David Simon made a convincing case why having the President of the United States keep his day job as the executive producer of a reality television show really isn't that big a deal, even though it looks extraordinarily hinky. I'm not sure I agree with Simon completely, but he certainly knows more about the world of TV than I do. (Note: because he's keeping the job, the president-elect of the United States now will be Arnold Schwarzeneggar's boss. What a country this is.) However, I am very sure that Kellyanne Conway is as full of shit as the Christmas goose when she argues a similar case on the grounds that it's Obama's fault. From CNN:
"He's a very transparent guy. Everyone can see what he's doing, and the fact is that he is conferring with all types of experts who tell him what he can do and not do as President of the United States," Conway, a top Trump adviser and his former campaign manager, said on CNN's "New Day." "If this is one of the approved activities, then perhaps he will consider staying on …"It certainly seems like there is a lot of time to do based on recent precedent while you're president of the United States. But the point is the same. Whether it's President Obama or President Donald Trump, the idea that these men are going to be all work and nothing else all the time is just unrealistic because it's never happened in our lifetimes."
I'd like a list of all these "experts" he's conferring with on this or, at least, all the experts not named Ivanka. And he's not "considering staying on." He's freaking staying on. And there are obvious conflicts of interest involving NBC Universal, and the news division of NBC that were not a factor between the current president and the greenskeepers at Hilton Head. But this extremely weird set of facts leads me to sign on to Josh Marshall's conclusion that he has to keep all these other irons in the fire because, if he doesn't, then he'd be broke as hell and, maybe, all those Chinese banks would call in their loans. The swamp gets deeper by the day.
And what fresh hell will we see next?
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