The Week in Washington: Icing Games and the Devil Incarnate
Why does every week feel like a year? Can it be only seven days since the nation was riveted by Stormy/Stephanie on 60 Minutes, telling her tale of bad sex, bribes, and broken promises? But times waits for no man, and no adult film star—as swiftly as an armored train carrying the Supreme Leader of North Korea to China, on Wednesday the President axed yet another member of his cabinet, Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin. Like his luckless predecessors in the You’re Fired White House-Edition game, he was sacked by tweet, but at least he was given a head’s up phone call from Chief of Staff John Kelly. (Could Kelly’s noggin be next on the chopping block?)
The replacement Trump has in mind to head the VA, which employs 360,000 people, is Dr. Ronny L. Jackson, the affable White House physician best known for going before the press corps and saying stuff like: “I told the president that if he had a healthier diet over the last 20 years, he might live to be 200 years old . . . . He has incredibly good genes, and it’s just the way God made him.”
At least Jackson’s reputation doesn’t precede him, unlike his fellow nominee, the atrocious John Bolton, who Trump has picked for National Security Advisor. Even Defense Secretary “Mad Dog” Mattis was overheard on a hot mic greeting Bolton with, "I heard you're actually the devil incarnate and I wanted to meet you." And speaking of devils incarnate—how tightly are our fingers crossed that Laura Ingraham, on what seems to be a hastily arranged hiatus from Fox, never finds her way back on the air? Having taunted Parkland student/activist David Hogg on Wednesday, she faced an immediate backlash, and Hogg called upon advertisers to withdraw from her show. Her pathetic apology did not convince sponsors to stick around; as of this writing, more than a dozen have dumped her.
If Fox does fire Ingraham, maybe she can get a job at the White House—after all, Hope Hick’s slot is available, though rumor has it that Kellyanne “Alternative Facts” Conway has her eye on that prize. (Watch your back, Sarah Huckabee Sanders! When Sean Spicer got canned, Ingraham was allegedly being considered for his gig.) In any case, there are plenty of other jobs available: according to the Washington Post, the Presidential Personnel Office is teeming with callow youths, who like to vape and play Icing, a hide-and-seek game which involves hiding a bottle of Smirnoff Ice and demanding that the person who finds it—in the example the Post cites it was the office’s deputy director—chug it down.
The head of the free world also found time on Wednesday to congratulate Roseanne Barer on the ratings her reboot garnered, calling her personally and also giving her a shout-out at an event in Richfield, Ohio, on Thursday. That hour-long diatribe, which was paid for by taxpayers, was meant to be about infrastructure, but in fact was a shameless campaign rally masquerading as a policy speech. (The Roseanne redux did indeed have impressive ratings of 18.2 million, though Stormy outdid it with 22 million.) But even die-hard Roseanne fans must be appalled at Barr’s tweet on Friday, where she appeared to endorse a dangerous nut theory that accuses Democrats of child trafficking.
Apparently bored during the long holiday weekend—perhaps after spending nearly a quarter of his presidency at Mar-a- Lago and other Trump resorts, the pleasures of those properties have begun to sour?—on Saturday morning, the President railed against Amazon and indulged in his penchant for nicknames, tweeting, “Governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown pardoned 5 criminal illegal aliens whose crimes include (1) Kidnapping and Robbery (2) Badly beating wife and threatening a crime with intent to terrorize (3) Dealing drugs. Is this really what the great people of California want?” If you are the only person in America still in doubt as to where the President gets his information from, the tweet ended, “@FoxNews”
Still, in this season of hope and renewal, let us leave the great people of California, and the other 49 states, with at least one bright thought: a guy you never heard of, a right-wing pundit and Trump ally called Ted Malloch, got off a plane at Logan airport on Wednesday and guess who was there to meet him? FBI agents with a host of questions about subjects like WikiLeaks, Roger Stone, and—just to make sure he got the message—a subpoena.
Which means that no matter how many Roseanne shout-outs and Governor Moonbeam insults, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is working away, digging through the undergrowth, holding the obfuscations, the double-talk, the mendacity, up to the sunlight, and connecting the dots.
