Hurled DNA Kits, “Handmaids,” and More (Mostly Bad) News From Washington This Week
“While you obsess over my genes, your Admin is conducting DNA tests on little kids because you ripped them from their mamas & you are too incompetent to reunite them in time to meet a court order,” Elizabeth Warren tweeted on Thursday. “Maybe you should focus on fixing the lives you’re destroying.” The senator was responding to a wild oration President Trump unleashed earlier that day in Great Falls, Montana, when he said he would fling a DNA test at Warren, who he insists on calling Pocahontas, if she should be the Democratic challenger in 2020.
The prospect of a commander in chief hurling a 23andMe kit at a candidate was only one of the jaw-dropping assertions in this screed, which included attacks on two ailing Republican statesmen—Bush, Sr. and John McCain; a snide mocking of the Me Too movement; and the usual garbage scow of boasts about states that Trump allegedly swept in the last election, many of which were claims that an eight-year-old with access to Google could prove false in less than three minutes.
It’s not like the president doesn’t have anything else to do. He has promised to reveal his Supreme Court nominees tomorrow, and the field includes Brett Kavanaugh, a textbook conservative and Bush alumnus who nevertheless seems like Antonio Gramsci next to another purported finalist, Amy Coney Barrett, who has been on the bench for a whole eight months, and whose outstanding qualification seems to be that she is a member of a charismatic Catholic “cult” called People of Praise that—no lie—until recently referred to some women as “handmaids.”
In other news, is Michael Cohen sending coded hints that he might flip and blab, or is all this business about putting family and country first just a squeeze play to get Trump to foot his legal bills and promise him a pardon? And after a few weeks of blissful silence, guess who’s back? It’s Rudy Giuliani, who yesterday told The New York Times that he is setting new stipulations for a potential Trump/Mueller interview: He wants the special counsel to show evidence that the president committed a crime before Rudy will even consider a sit-down: “If they can come to us and show us the basis and that it’s legitimate and that they have uncovered something, we can go from there and assess their objectivity.” (Even Giuliani himself concedes that Mueller is unlikely to agree to these terms.)
Meanwhile, the White House revolving door keeps spinning. On Thursday, it was announced that the next communications director will be Bill Shine, late of Fox News, who was fired by that network for his alleged role in covering up sex abuse allegations. Also on Thursday—busy day!—the scandal-ridden EPA head Scott Pruitt was finally forced to resign, shattering his dream that he would replace a canned Jeff Sessions and then he, Pruitt, could fire Mueller. Before you break out the Champagne, bear in mind that the new EPA chief, Andrew Wheeler, a former lobbyist for the coal industry, is rumored to be even worse than his ousted boss.
But let us end where we began—with the children that Elizabeth Warren referenced in her tweet, those 3,000 or so juveniles, including 101 under 5, that the Trump administration has been ordered by a federal judge to reunite with their parents. The smallest children are required to be with their families by Tuesday—a court order that Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has termed “extreme.” To which Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s immigrants’ rights project, responded with masterful understatement: “When the government wants to marshal its resources to separate families, it has shown that it can do it quickly and efficiently, but when told to reunite families, it somehow finds it too difficult and cumbersome to accomplish.”
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