The Week in Washington: “They Can Name It Peaches”
“I ask the Democrats to come back to Washington and to vote for money for the wall, the barrier, whatever you want to call it, it’s okay with me,” President Trump said Friday. “They can name it whatever. They can name it ‘Peaches.’ I don’t care what they name it. But we need money for that barrier.”
As of today, the government shutdown is in its 23rd day, and Peaches is far from a fait accompli. On Tuesday, the president commandeered network airtime, and a lot of people thought he was going to make good on his threat to declare a national emergency. But no—at least not yet. Instead, he fell back on a regurgitated roster of easily debunked fabrications. If he seemed lackluster, maybe it was because he didn’t want to broadcast this bit of reality TV in the first place. The New York Times reports that “hours before the address, he made clear in blunt terms that he was not inclined to give the speech or go to Texas, but was talked into it by advisers,” namely a devilish chorus consisting of Bill Shine, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Kellyanne Conway.
The morning after this stirring oration he tweeted, “Thank you for soooo many nice comments regarding my Oval Office speech. A very interesting experience!” But there were not soooo many nice comments on Thursday when, in a head-spinning reversal that stunned even the most credulous Trump devotees, the president denied that Mexico was going to be paying for Peaches, a claim he has made hundreds of times over the last two years. “Obviously, I never said this, and I never meant they’re going to write out a check,” he told reporters at the White House. That same day, when a reporter asked Trump if “the buck stops with you over this shutdown,” the commander in chief, ever a profile in courage, responded, “The buck stops with everybody.”
In other news: On Tuesday, the doofuses on former campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s legal team, apparently ignorant of the pitfalls of pdf cutting and pasting, accidentally revealed info describing Manafort’s contacts with a suspected Russian spy. On Monday, Huckabee Sanders’s insistence that U.S. Customs and Border Protection had stopped nearly 4,000 suspected terrorists from crossing the southern border was thoroughly debunked—in truth, the CBP apprehended a mere six immigrants whose names had turned up on a federal government list of suspected terrorists in the first half of 2018.
And Friday night, The New York Times dropped what may be the biggest bombshell in two years of mounting crises—has the FBI suspected that the president has been doing Russia’s bidding all along? In a development worthy of The Manchurian Candidate, the Times reports, “In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as FBI director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.”
But wait! What are you doing February 7? Clear your calendar! Michael Cohen, the president’s erstwhile lawyer/fixer, the guy who did the boss’s dirty work for over a decade, has agreed to tell all in an open session before the House Oversight Committee on that red-letter day. What dark and dastardly doings will he divulge? In a statement released Thursday, Cohen said, “I look forward to having the privilege of being afforded a platform with which to give a full and credible account of the events which have transpired.”
Counting the days, Mr. Cohen.
