GELFAND’S WORLD - It’s not surprising that a president who does his best to wreck the economy is going to encounter electoral blowback – like losing control of the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate. What is surprising is that the current president says he is doing a wonderful job on the economy and expects the rest of us to believe him. But the elected officials who stand to lose their positions this November are not happy about it and are blowing a lot of smoke to camouflage their own histories. The DailyKos website has a detailed discussion about how Republican candidates in the Midwest are backing off substantially on their anti-abortion positions. We can discount that positioning if we like (as many commenters have already done) but the point is that these candidates feel threatened enough by the political winds to consider discussing the subject at all.
It is tempting to dust off that old cliché about rats deserting the sinking ship, where that ship is the uncritical support for everything that Trump says and does. It’s curious that we are still in the early stages of this shipwreck and that large numbers of Trump supporters are still remaining quiet about their concerns over inflation, gas prices, and the war in Iran. Democrats are hoping that lots of MAGA supporters will just stay home this time around, leaving the electoral field to Democratic candidates who in other years would face hopeless odds.
But there is another kind of political input that is of interest. Can you remember the late William F. Buckley and his creation, the magazine called National Review? It was and remains an influential conservative source. Buckley was both conservative and Catholic, and he built his journal and his own writings along those lines. The current day version of National Review (available on-line) continues the tradition. It was therefore of strong interest to find an op-ed in National Review by Andrew C. McCarthy that essentially accuses Donald Trump of treason. This is a different kind of positioning, in that McCarthy stands to lose support from some of his readers (i.e.: staunch Trump supporters) and merely to gain some grudging respect from liberals and honest patriots.
You may be curious about what McCarthy said. You can find the text here, but let’s take a brief look at the opening paragraph to get a feel:
“Vladimir Putin’s regime is an enemy of the United States, and President Donald Trump is giving it aid and comfort, subordinating vital American interests to the Kremlin’s interests. It’s that simple. The rest is details . . . and there are a lot of those, as I contend in the weekend piece that we posted this morning.”
It is worthwhile to read the text in its entirety. Note the use of the Constitutional words “aid and comfort” from the section which defines treason.
The 500-milli-Scaramucci Job
Back in the first Trump presidency, there was a guy named Anthony Scaramucci who got appointed as White House Communications Director. He didn’t last long. Actually, he came and went in a total of 11 days. Pundits almost immediately began using the term “a Scaramucci” to describe lengths of time that others spent in some appointed position, where one Scaramucci equals 11 days. Somebody who lasted for 3 months was said to have been in the position for 8 Scaramuccis.
And now we have Katie Zacharia as White House Press Secretary for a total of 5 days. Some have described this as “half a Scaramucci,” but I feel like going all metric and referring to her time-in-place as 450 milli-Scaramuccis.
But the main story here is not Katie’s discomfiture. That’s just the giggly part of watching another intellectually superficial, hard-right-winger go down the drain. The real story is that 6 years into the twin Trump presidencies, there is still no legitimate system that the Trump administration uses for appointing powerful government officials.
How did Katie get her appointment?
Rumors abound. One is that Natalie Harp suggested the appointment. Maybe so. But in the old days, people who were going to receive a high-level presidential appointment were carefully vetted, including investigation by the FBI. That was back in the days when presidents and the people who worked for them were concerned about embarrassment falling on the office and its occupant. At a minimum, a review of the Zacharia appointment would involve taking a look at her resume and double checking the main points. Did she really go to law school? Did she ever practice law? That sort of thing.
Instead, the Trump procedure continues to be the ultimate simplification: Find some blond who recites hard-right propaganda on Fox and offer her a position. For men it’s a similar process except that they don’t have to be blond. The one unbending requirement is that the nominee be personally loyal to Donald Trump, and this includes the willingness to lie to the press and the American people in order to uphold Trump’s lies.
The result of this process is that we get incompetency across the board as exemplified by Hegseth.
Sometimes, it seems, the system works to remove people who are actually competent, but who violate some Trumpian norm such as being female or black, as seen in the purge of high ranking military officers in this administration.
In the case of Katie Zacharia, the political embarrassment was bad enough that even Trump had to say something, so he denied personal responsibility. Axios (in the above-linked story) reported that Trump was blindsided by the news about Katie. But Katie did a little fighting back, claiming (with respect to her failure to pass the bar exam) that “Those questions weren’t asked.” It doesn’t speak well for either the job candidate or for the man who appointed her that she didn’t think to mention that she has some skeletons in her closet. In any earlier administration, a job candidate would know that any negatives would come out during the vetting process.
What we have is the same-old-same-old, which is to say a chief executive who fails to do the due diligence that is expected of him, who does not require such care on the part of his staff, and who will not accept responsibility for the inevitable fallout.
Addendum
This story is worthy of a longer telling, but it is current and worrisome, so I’ll mention it here. As spotlighted by Paul Campos in the blog Lawyers Guns & Money, Paul Krugman just published an article pointing out that Trump is going to find himself in a situation where he has no elections left to lose, and will be free to do damage at a higher level than he is already doing. Krugman compares the upcoming lame-duck presidency with the actions of corporate CEOs who are facing company-wide bankruptcy. Some of them try wild-eyed actions that we might think of as the corporate version of a Hail Mary pass. Others just use the opportunity to loot what is left of the company. You can find Krugman’s piece here. Read it.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
