The Week in Washington: “They Try to Take You Out with Bullshit”
“… I know what Mr. Trump is. He is a racist. He is a con man. And he is a cheat,” Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer and fixer declared Wednesday during his riveting testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee. If even some of Cohen’s allegations are true—that Trump inflated and deflated his income (to make him seem like a fat cat in the first case, to avoid taxes in the second); that he made racist remarks over the years; that he continued to sign hush-money checks to ex-lovers while he was in the White House—you’ve got to wonder: how much more will it take to remove this seedy character from office?
Maybe the revelation that Trump strong-armed his aides to give his son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner a security clearance will be the tipping point? Maybe the possibility of a veto for his ludicrous “national emergency” will finally awaken at least a few craven Republicans? (If it’s such a big crisis, why is the commander-in chief relaxing with a round of golf?) Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, no knight in shining armor, is tepid on this national emergency business. On Tuesday, he ducked and dodged when asked if declaring an emergency was legal, saying, “I haven’t reached a total conclusion…I wouldn’t go to me for a simple will. I did go to law school, but we had some real serious lawyers in there discussing that very issue.” Or maybe the president’s spectacular vulgarity will finally sink him? Yesterday, in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, he attacked the Mueller probe, shouting from the podium, “They try to take you out with bullshit.”
In other news, you know how you can go on a wonderful first date, and the second time around, reality sets in? So it was with the Vietnam rendezvous of President Trump and North Korea strongman Kim Jong Un. Trump flew over to ‘Nam on Air Force One—thankfully he has recovered from those pesky bone spurs that kept him from visiting this place decades ago; Kim arrived via luxury train, and was captured on film taking a cigarette break and flicking the ashes in a crystal ashtray proffered by his sister. The much-touted summit was a flop, with no agreements signed (these two actually thought they might soon be sharing a Nobel Peace Prize!) but this didn’t dampen Trump’s enthusiasm for the dictator. “He likes me. I like him,” Trump said at a news conference on Thursday. "We get along great.”
He descended even further into the abyss when he stated that he had asked Kim about Otto Warmbier, the 22-year-old University of Virginia student who was returned to the U.S. comatose after 17 months in captivity in North Korea, and died shortly after. “[Kim] tells me that he didn't know about it and I will take him at his word," Trump said, adding that the dictator "felt very badly.” This elicited a furious response from the Warmbier family, who released their own statement to CNN that read, “We have been respectful during this summit process. Now we must speak out. Kim and his evil regime are responsible for the death of our son Otto. Kim and his evil regime are responsible for unimaginable cruelty and inhumanity. No excuses or lavish praise can change that. Thank you.”
Lastly, Ivanka Trump took it upon herself to trash the Green New Deal, which includes a demand for jobs to provide “a family-sustaining wage.” In an interview scheduled to air on Fox News today, the heiress said, “I don’t think most Americans, in their heart, want to be given something. People want to work for what they get.” On Saturday night, she poured a little more salt into this (glittering) wound, joking before an audience of 700 at the Gridiron Club dinner: “The press seems to think it’s ironic that I, born of great privilege, think people want to work for what they are given—as if being Donald Trump’s daughter isn’t the hardest job in the world," a "cringey" laugh line, according to the Washington Post, which landed with a resounding thud.
