The Week in Washington: Welcome to Crazytown
“Don’t testify. It’s either that or an orange jumpsuit,” President Trump’s former attorney John Dowd allegedly told his star client, referring to the likely result if the president meets with Robert Mueller, explaining that his loose lips would probably land him in prison. This is just one of the revelations from the upcoming Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward, which also includes allegations that Trump called attorney general Jeff Sessions “mentally retarded” and “a dumb southerner”; that the president said eventually condemning white supremacists after Charlottesville was “the biggest fucking mistake” he made; that defense secretary Jim Mattis thinks his boss has the understanding of “a fifth or sixth grader”; and that chief of staff John Kelly describes the current administration as “Crazytown.”
The book’s imminent publication—it is due out Tuesday—would have been the major story in Crazytown this week, if it weren’t for something else written by a man—or woman—who didn’t choose to reveal his or her identity. The anonymous op-ed in The New York Times that exploded on Wednesday titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” claimed that the author and “like-minded colleagues . . . have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations,” and stated that “the root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making. . . . Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.”
Figuring out who wrote this damning stuff has become the latest Washington, D.C., parlor game—is it John Kelly or Kellyanne Conway? Coats or Haley, Pompeo or maybe even Javanka? Summing up the current situation, one former White House official put it this way: “It’s like the horror movies when everyone realizes the call is coming from inside the house.” The president, by all reports volcanic with rage, suggested on Friday that attorney general Sessions (can the AG last even another week?) investigate the matter, and called upon the Times to hand over this mystery mole. To which the Gray Lady responded; “We’re confident that the Department of Justice understands that the First Amendment protects all American citizens and that it would not participate in such a blatant abuse of government power.”
Just outside the house, there was plenty of other action and it wasn’t anonymous. On Tuesday, a gaggle of female protesters, some in Handmaid’s Tale outfits, greeted Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on the first day of his confirmation hearings. This surreal spectacle included women screaming to be heard as they were dragged by police out of the gallery, and the candidate weaving and bobbing when he was asked a direct question about his views on Roe v. Wade or whether a sitting president can be subpoenaed or pardon himself. Kavanaugh turned out to have quite the selective memory—telling us ad nauseam what a great dad he is, reeling off the names of his daughters’ CYO teammates—Anna, Quinn, Kelsey, Ceane, Chloe, et cetera—but remarkably fuzzy when Senator Kamala Harris attempted to nail him on whether he had ever discussed the Mueller investigation with lawyers at a well-known Washington firm.
On Thursday, Senator Cory Booker, in dramatic remarks, said, “This is about the closest I’ll probably ever have in my life to an ‘I am Spartacus’ moment,” and declared that he was willing to be expelled from the Senate for releasing confidential Kavanaugh emails to the public. And just as in that 1960 movie, other would-be Kirk Douglas Democrats jumped in to say they stood with Booker and that they were Spartacus, too. In any case, the right-wingers shoving this guy through apparently have their reasons for refusing to disclose his complete history—as The New York Times said in an editorial yesterday: “… he’s being rammed through his confirmation process with an unprecedented degree of secrecy and partisan maneuvering by Republican senators who, despite their overflowing praise for his legal acumen and sterling credentials, appear terrified for the American people to find out much of anything about him beyond his penchant for coaching girls’ basketball.”
In other sports news, on Tuesday Nike revealed that Colin Kaepernick, the first football player to take a knee to protest police brutality in the black community, would be the face of company’s latest Just Do It campaign, a move that—no surprise—the president noted by tweeting,“What was Nike thinking?” (Plenty of Americans were happy to supply answers via Twitter.) On Friday,George Papadopoulos, who was either a coffee boy or a foreign policy advisor depending on which current or former White House employee you talk to, was sentenced to 14 days for lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian intermediaries, the first Trump campaign official to go to jail (but hardly, one suspects, the last.)
And remember the dustup about the size of Trump’s inaugural crowd, the ridiculous lie that destroyed Sean Spicer’s credibility as press secretary? On Friday, it came to light that the government photographer who shot the audience on that special day took a page out of Stalin’s playbook and doctored the photos to make the throng seem bigger.
But wait—don’t be sad, don’t be angry—because look who is back! Why it’s former President Barack Obama, hitting the campaign trail and not a moment too soon, promising to work like the very devil to get the vote out in November. In a stirring speech in Illinois kicking off this this effort, he excoriated his successor by name—usually not done by former presidents, but these are far from usual times—and asking at one point, “How hard can that be, saying that Nazis are bad?”
In Crazytown, apparently far too hard for some people.
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