The Week in Washington: The Sound of Broomsticks Breaking
“I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family. ‘Justice’ took a 12-year-old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to ‘break’—make up stories in order to get a ‘deal.’ Such respect for a brave man!” President Trump tweeted in August, a lifetime ago.
On Friday, Trump’s paragon of bravery flipped. Already convicted of financial fraud charges and facing a slew of additional indictments, the president’s former campaign manager agreed to tell the Mueller inquiry all he knows about Russian meddling in the 2016 election—and he won’t have to make up any stories. Not only did he have a long-standing, lucrative association with Russian oligarchs (where do you think he got the money for that $15,000 ostrich-leather bomber jacket?) but he was also present at that notorious Trump Tower meeting, during which he and his Trump-campaign compatriots were promised dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Manafort’s collapse is major, so colossal, that a The New York Times op-ed described it thusly: “The capitulation came in spectacular fashion: According to prosecutors, Mr. Manafort has already participated in a so-called proffer session, in which he described information that investigators deemed valuable. . . . His surrender is complete. We will soon see what it means for the president.” Purported Watergate cover-up mastermind John Dean, President Richard Nixon’s erstwhile White House counsel and the original White House flipper, put it this way, tweeting on Friday: “Manafort has flipped! Boom (the sound of broomsticks breaking the sound barrier crashing to earth—no witches). The entire Trump family now in jeopardy. No pardon for Paul from Trump. No nice things to say about Manafort by Rudy. Nightmares at the White House will be unending.”
With Manafort leaping off the sinking ship, the ranks of flipsters is swelling—count them! Former national security adviser Michael Flynn; Rick Gates, Trump’s former deputy campaign manager and Manafort’s protégé; George Papadopoulos, rewarded for his cooperation with a sentence last week of a mere 14 days; and even Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, granted limited immunity by federal prosecutors in New York in exchange for testifying about hush money paid to women who claimed they’d had affairs with Trump. And guess who is reportedly in talks with Mueller’s people, at this very minute? Why it’s Michael Cohen, the president’s former right-hand man and attorney, the guy once so loyal he said he would take a bullet for Trump.
So where does this leave our Captain Queeg commander in chief, surrounded by assassins, with the mole who ratted to The New York Times in that anonymous op-ed still on the loose? Why it leaves him disputing the death toll of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico! As Florence was making its way to the Carolinas on Thursday, he tweeted: “3,000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the island, after the storm had hit, they had anywhere from six to 18 deaths. As time went by, it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3,000. . . . This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising billions of dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!”
This mathematical malarkey was a bridge too far, even for the usually phlegmatic speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who, when asked for comment, sighed and said, “. . . I have no reason to dispute those numbers. Those are just the facts of what happens when a horrible hurricane hits an isolated place like an island.” Ryan’s counterpart in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had another horrible hurricane on his mind. On Tuesday, he said that come the November midterms, the wind is going is going to be in the Republican party’s face, and “we don’t know if it’s going to be Category 3, 4, or 5.” He listed nine states, including formerly reliably red Tennessee and Indiana, as places where Senate races are “dead even . . . Every one of them like a knife fight in an alley, just a brawl in every one of those places,” and added that he could only hope “. . . when the smoke clears, we’ll still have a majority in the Senate.”
If there is any justice, when the smoke clears, Mitch, we will witness not a knife fight in an alley but a fierce platoon of progressives descending on Washington, D.C., determined to save Obamacare, further the rights of women and the LGBTQ community, welcome asylum seekers, understand that black lives matter, fight global warming, demand gun control, safeguard Roe v. Wade, and, of course, marshal their forces to throw the bum out.
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