More White House Low Ball - Et Tu John Kelly?

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly

By all accounts, former U.S. Marine general John Kelly was supposed to bring a much-needed measure of order, discipline and ethical clout to a White House that has been embroiled in chaos and controversy since the day after the inauguration in January.

A cursory glance at his lengthy service record leaves little doubt about his love of country, or that he merits the respect of his fellow American citizens.

But it hasn't taken long for him to sink down into the very morass that he was supposed to fix.

After Fake President became defensive about all the negative attention he was receiving for taking twelve days to finally reach out to the families of the four U.S. servicemen killed in an ambush in Niger by terrorists supposedly aligned with ISIS earlier this month, he did what he usually does.

He started throwing around baseless accusations in an effort to blame other people for his own failings - not surprisingly, his target was President Obama.

On Monday, Trump flat out lied by suggesting that pervious U.S. presidents had not reached out to the families of fallen American soldiers as much as he had - as if consoling grieving families is some kind of competition.

It's well known that Obama often went to Andrews Air Force Base in the middle of the night outside Washington, D.C. to pay respects to the remains of fallen soldiers arriving back from overseas before meeting privately with the families at the base chapel.

He frequently visited wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland too.

(Isn't it interesting that regardless of the issue, somehow it always ends up being about Trump's off-the-chart narcissism?)

Robert Kelly (left) with his brother John Jr. (center)
and his father John Kelly, Sr. (right)

When former White House staff members of both Obama and George W. Bush publicly pushed back on Trump's fake accusations, on Tuesday he ratcheted up his idiocy even further by having the gall to invoke White House Chief of Staff John Kelly's deceased son Robert's name in a pathetic effort to lend credibility to his latest lies.

A 1st lieutenant in the 5th Marine Division, Robert Kelly was 29-years old when was killed after stepping on a land mine in Afghanistan during his 3rd combat tour.


Kelly rarely spoke about his son's death publicly, so it's a pretty sad reflection of the monumental insensitivity and ethical cluelessness of Trump to use a personal tragedy like that to bolster a lie.

By Tuesday afternoon Trump was facing mounting criticism over his lies about previous presidents, and was clearly desperate to try and at least appear as if he gave a shit about the four fallen U.S. soldiers killed in Niger.

So instead of apologizing for speaking in error, or taking twelve days to contact any of the family members, he blundered yet again when he called up Myeshia Johnson, the widow of the 25-year old African-American Army special forces sergeant LaDavid Johnson who was one of the four killed in the attack.

Trump called her in the limo that was taking her to the airport to receive her husband's flag-draped coffin, and his insensitive and ill-timed comments angered both the soldier's mother Cowanda Jones-Johnson and Florida Democratic Congresswoman Frederica Wilson - who were both in the car and heard Trump's call on speakerphone.

Myeshia Johnson weeps over her husband's
coffin on Tuesday

His comments were so lacking in empathy, tact and manners that it only brought more attention on the lie he originally told on Monday that ignited the whole controversy.

Congresswoman Wilson publicly took Trump to the woodshed for his clearly unscripted comments during the call, and in an interview with the Washington Post on Wednesday, the soldier's mother confirmed Wilson's allegations saying:

"President Trump did disrespect my son and my daughter and also me and my husband."

In response, Trump basically called the widow and mother of a fallen U.S. soldier liars by publicly denying he'd said the things Wilson claimed he'd said on the call.

Now at this point, one would think the White House Chief of Staff would have stepped in to try and halt this epic PR disaster, right?

Sure enough, John Kelly did step in, but rather than try to privately counsel Trump to dial back the rhetoric, stop attacking the widow and mother of a fallen soldier and the Congresswoman who knew him personally, Kelly made an on-camera appearance in the White House briefing room on Thursday.

Not only did he discuss his son's death in Afghanistan in 2010, he did so to try and justify the flagrant lie that Trump told on Monday about other U.S. presidents not comforting grieving families.

Kelly stepped waist deep in the swamp - and then some.

Not content to polish up Trump's lies, he joined the Trump White House's uncaged attack-dog mentality, ignored the obvious optics of the situation (a racist president attacking the African-American members of a soldier who gave his life for his county) and suddenly veered into a bizarre alt-righty character assassination of Rep. Wilson.

As careful examination of the video of a nine-minute speech Wilson gave during the dedication of a federal building in 2015 named after two FBI agents shows, as the New York Times reported on Friday, it became clear that the Boston-born, Irish Catholic former four-star Marine general John Kelly lied in front of millions of people.

Florida Congresswoman Frederica Wilson

The video (now widely viewed) proves unequivocally that the Democratic Florida representative was not "grandstanding" as both Kelly and his narcissistic boss alleged.

In fact, the video shows her giving credit for a Republican-majority Congress quickly authorizing funds for the federal building to several Republican Congressman, including the former Speaker of the House John Boehner.

Desperately trying to defend yet another White House bundle of lies, the truth-adverse WH press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders then veered even further into territory that can only be described as disturbingly pro-authoritarian by suggesting that members of the press had no right to question anything that Chief of Staff John Kelly said because he used to be a four-star Marine general.

What planet is she on?  Like Trump, she later walked back her comments in a rather timid written statement when the degree of the authoritarian absurdity of what she'd said became apparent.

But she also expended more of the White House's dwindling credibility by peddling more juvenile character assassination jabs at Wilson - as one point even poking fun at the colorful hats that Wilson is known for wearing.

Like her hats have anything to do with Trump waiting twelve days to try and reach out to the families of four fallen service members, then politicizing the death of John Kelly's son Robert to justify his having lied.

Yet another disastrous week for an erratic dysfunctional White House that seems almost clinically detached from the optics of the remarkably petty battles it chooses to engage in.

It's hard to gauge what's going on with John Kelly, a man who devoted his entire career to service, honor and duty, apparently reduced to shilling for a xenophobic racist sociopath and compulsive liar who's just insecure enough to pick fights with Gold  Star families.

With Trump, the bar is so low we expect that kind of low-life bush-league crap.

But Et Tu John Kelly?

Spicey & The Mooch: Surrealism At 1600

Anthony "The Mooch" Scaramucci & Sean Spicer

Last week as I watched the strange, and lengthy, introductory press conference of newly-tapped White House Director of Communications Anthony Scaramucci, it seemed as if I was watching the presidency slip even further down the rabbit hole live on CNN.

It was during my lunch break at the gym so I was on an exercise bike watching on a screen with closed captions instead of sound.

Even still, Scaramucci's statements came off like a deafening confirmation that Donald Trump is determined to further insulate himself from reality by hiring yet another overbearing sycophant slash-Washington outsider who's willing to pledge loyalty to a widely-despised president saddled with a 35% approval rating - and no major legislative or policy accomplishments.

One whose administration is defined by crisis, incompetence and unprecedented political buffoonery.

Just hours after the embattled press secretary Sean Spicer submitted his resignation, Anthony Scaramucci stepped to the podium of the White House press room before the cameras and gathered press like some contestant plucked from a reality show audition.

Here's a guy who left law school to take a job at Goldman-Sachs before starting two different Wall Street firms (who's known affectionately to his peers as "The Mooch"), waving his hands and gesticulating and literally professing his love for Donald Trump in the press room of the White House.

It was like a Salvador Dali painting (with sound) come to life in a White House that was already considered surreal by many observers.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders glowering as The
Mooch gets chatty at his press conference 

The Mooch's hiring was openly chided by multiple members of the top White House staff because of his lack of communications or political experience and his reputation as a slick salesman.

Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, senior strategist Stephen Bannon and the now ex-press secretary Sean Spicer all opposed Scaramucci's hiring.

As the Daily Beast reported last Friday, "other top aides worried that the Scaramucci hiring would perpetuate the notion of 'Amateur hour' in the West Wing."

But The Mooch seemed genuinely intoxicated by being in front of the cameras, and as he gleefully took question after question and preened, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders actually walked out to the podium and stood a few feet from him with a scowl on her face to politely try and hint that he needed to wrap it up.

Probably because she reportedly wasn't happy that Trump hired him as her new boss, but also
because his press conference was stretching into 30 minutes, and because his slick camera style and easy banter was making her seem like the humorless, overly-confrontational, one-note right-wing partisan hack that she is.

The Mooch isn't stupid, and he's probably aware that Huckabee Sanders considers herself "Republican royalty" and above him because her right-wing talk radio host-Christian minister father Mike Huckabee ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 and 2016 - and she worked for the campaign.

But Scaramucci made his own bones as they say, and as he made the rounds of the Sunday morning news shows like a glowing 17-year-old at a debutante ball, he seemed to fire off a shot at Huckabee Sanders towards the end of an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN's State of the Union, saying: 

"Sarah, if your watching I love the hair and makeup person we used on Friday, so I'd like to continue to use the hair and makeup person." 

Obviously it's not hard to see why Trump likes The Mooch.

Farewell Spicey

Say what you want about Sean Spicer (and I've said plenty), he's always been a committed conservative Republican who is committed to the party, whereas Scaramucci has basically served Scaramucci, opportunistically allowing the winds of change to take him wherever they lead.

He was a finance guy for President Obama's campaign who openly eviscerated Trump on Fox News back in 2015.

Think all that crap he said about "loving" Donald Trump in his White House press conference was genuine?

Just take a couple minutes and listen to some of the things Scaramucci said about Trump in a Fox News interview - what a difference 24 months makes.

The only unfortunate thing was that this transition happened during the summer when Saturday Night Live is on summer hiatus and can't do a skit about this shakeup at the White House.

If I was an SNL writer, I'd play on the obvious tension between Scaramucci and Spicer by pitching one of those faux-SNL commercials for a fictional TV cop series called "Spicey and The Mooch". 

It would be a send up of one of those old buddy cop TV series like Starsky and Hutch.

Spicey would play the hard-nosed always-plays-it-by-the-book cop, married to his high school sweetheart for 20 years who's forced to partner up with The Mooch - the slick wise-guy cop with perfect teeth who never stops talking, plays by his own rules, has been married three times and now lives with his lovable old Italian mother in Brooklyn.

But alas, as amusing as it would have been to have both Spicey and The Mooch in the same White House communications department trying to unite their talents like the Wonder Twins to spin Trump's constant stream of lies, baseless accusations and incomprehensible nonsense ("Covfefe"?), Spicer decided that was enough.

Trump acting like an ass at the BSA Jamboree

While I thought Spicer did a real disservice to his professional reputation by being willing to stand up and defend what he knew were outrageous lies by Trump, he was loyal to him - and Trump may come to miss Spicey in the dark days ahead.

Since the shakeup on Friday, Trump seems to have gone off his rocker, with his blathering display of partisan idiocy in front of thousands of Boy Scouts gathered at the Jamboree in West Virginia.

Where among other things, he mocked President Obama (who actually was a Boy Scout), babbled incoherently about his healthcare initiative and, remarkably, talked about a cocktail party he attended.

The BSA has, justifiably, found itself facing a huge backlash from current and former Scouters as well as members of the public outraged that Trump would use such an occasion to act like a narcissistic jackass in front of thousands of young men.

Of course, as we all know, Trump intentionally says such asinine things to deflect media attention from his son-in-law Jared Kushner testifying behind close doors in front of Senate staffers, as demonstrated by his latest Tweets attacking his own Attorney General for not investigating Hillary Clinton's emails.

Seriously, did he forget that she lost the election in 2016?

Trump is like an elephant rampaging through a crowded mall, only now the job of defending this kind of quasi-delusional behavior falls on the shoulders of The Mooch.

A controversial figure with no communications or political experience, climbing aboard a sinking ship where he is openly despised by top members of an already-divided White House where chaos is the norm, accomplishments are few and the shadow of investigations related to administration ties to the Russian government loom like one of those erie distorted figures in a Salvador Dali painting.

Can this train-wreck presidency possibly get any more surreal?

Probably.

Lost In the Bushes

Paranoid? Or just delusional?

In a Washington Post article on Saturday, reporter Phillip Rucker quoted an unnamed high level Republican source close to the White House as worrying that Trump is "in the grip of some kind of paranoid delusion." 

Arguably, millions of people had already reached that conclusion the moment Trump launched his 2016 presidential campaign by accusing Mexicans of being rapists and drug dealers.

Particularly given the widely-respected Constitutional scholar and Harvard law professor law professor Laurence Tribe's op-ed in the Washington Post on Saturday explaining why Trump needs to be impeached.

Let's be clear, even though I'm admittedly somewhat biased in the political sense, I'm not simply saying Trump needs to be impeached because I don't agree with his political views.

This guy has obstructed justice and continues to violate Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution due to the astonishing range of ways in which he continues to use the power and influence of his office to directly channel financial profit to himself and his family.

Late this afternoon WaPo reported that Trump revealed highly classified intel on a possible ISIS attack with (of all people) the Russian ambassador and the Russian foreign minister during a meeting at the White House last week - the day AFTER he fired the FBI director leading the investigation into links between Russia and members of the Trump administration.

Part of the title of my previous blog, in which I used the term "car-wreck presidency" to describe the unmitigated chaos of the current presidential administration, it's a phrase borrowed from journalist Matt Taibbi's words from his April 6th Rolling Stone article, "Trump the Destroyer".

It's not my habit to assign homework or anything on this blog, but if you do have the time and haven't already done so, I would highly recommend you take some time to read it.

I've found it helpful to put Trump's publicly warning former-FBI Director James Comey about "leaking to the press" on Friday just days after firing him, into some kind of context.
  

Republican Senator Dean Heller

Trump's (latest) actions are so far outside the boundaries of normalcy and ethics that even some Republicans, including Nevada Senator Dean Heller, are now saying that an independent investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections and links between Russia and members of the Trump administration "should be on the table".  

The erratic POTUS is loosing popular support, even among his own base.

A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted in the wake of Comey's firing puts Trump's approval rating at an anemic 29%.

According to a Newsweek article by Tim Marcin last Thursday, Trump is actually loosing significant support among the segment of white voters who elected him in November.      

Any newly-elected presidential administration is going to have it's fair share of missteps as a new commander-in-chief and the staff responsible for handling the herculean complexity of running the executive branch of the federal government learn how to operate the levers of power.

But the baffling jumble of policy announcements and executive orders, which are often contradicted by Trump's own nonsensical Tweets or statements, sew disorder and confusion.

The daily White House press briefings conducted by Press Secretary Sean Spicer and Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders (the daughter of former GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee) are so rife with false statements and bogus facts that they're now being openly ridiculed by many in mainstream media

Spicey answering questions in near darkness Tuesday

For Pete's sake, on Tuesday night poor Spicey spent several minutes hiding in the bushes outside the White House in an attempt to avoid talking with reporters demanding answers about Trump firing the FBI Director.

Take a couple minutes to watch CNN's Don Lemon laugh at Spicer's attempts to justify the fact that Congress will not authorize billions for Trump to build the "beautiful wall" along the southern border with Mexico that he made a central theme of his campaign.

Each day it seems like this presidency gets more and more surreal.

At this point it's more of a horror show-circus than a presidential administration.

As Politico reported earlier today, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus scolded members of the senior staff for putting clips of fake news on Trump's desk.

Including the embattled former Fox News commentator Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland, who slipped POTUS a copy of a phony Time Magazine cover about climate change.

Seriously, what kind of White House is this when a Fox News opinionator can slip into the Oval Office and put a fake magazine cover that's been known as an Internet hoax for years on the desk of the president?

The Trump administration conducts itself like some kind of vindictive, punch-drunk boxer who ignores the rules of the ring, issuing right-hand hooks, sweeping jabs, sneaky upper cuts and body blows even after the bell rings - not just to win, but to try and pummel the opponent into submission.

That's just how Trump, who famously fawns over authoritarian leaders who trample human rights and jail or kill their political opponents, and considers Roy Cohn a mentor, operates.

Trump with Machiavellian mentor Roy Cohn

Cohn is the combative, Machiavellian attorney who served as the chief counsel to anti-Communist crusader Senator Joseph McCarthy during the controversial Senate hearings into wide-ranging Communist infiltration of the U.S. government in the 1950's.

He later represented notorious Mafia figures like "Fat Tony" Salerno and John Gotti and is widely considered the man who shaped Trump's propensity to respond to any disagreement with all out war.

To regard any critique as an insult and keep a lengthy enemies list.

Trump first hired Cohn to represent him in the early 1970's when the government accused the Trump organization of widespread discrimination against African-American applicants in Trump-managed apartment complexes in New York and Virginia.

Cohn died 31 years ago but his influence on the chaotic and combative 45's White House is very much alive today.

Given everything else going on in the world today, it's not easy for the average American citizen to keep up with everything White House Inc. is doing and what Trump's strategy for governing actually is.

The glimpses we do get are genuinely horrifying.

On Friday Jessica Huseman of ProPublica reported that Trump is expecting to tap the conservative talk radio host from Iowa Sam Clovis as the undersecretary of the US Department of Agriculture; a position normally held by scientists with years of experience in research and economics.

Sam Clovis: Science? Who needs science?

So a guy with zero scientific knowledge or degree who's loyal to Trump and denies the existence of climate change, will likely head up the department that manages research for the USDA - a federal department with over 100,000 employees and a yearly budget of almost $140 billion.

That's the department responsible for creating the federal laws that govern forestry, farming, and food.


It also oversees the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) that provides poor and working class Americans with food stamp assistance.

What's going to happen to American kids and families who depend on SNAP with Sam Clovis at USDA is too scary to ponder.

To sit down and look at the totality of how this White House operates and what it's priorities are is to face the horror of this presidency; and the damage it's doing to America's reputation, political institutions and the people those institutions are supposed to serve.

Sean Spicer huddling in the bushes while trying to avoid answering questions from the press about why the president fired the director of the FBI is an apt metaphor for Donald Trump's presidency.

An administration huddling in the bushes of lies in a forest of secrecy to avoid the scrutiny of a free and open press - and the American people they're supposed to serve.

Is Trump truly "in the grip of some kind of paranoid delusion" as Phillip Rucker says a Republican insider suggests?

Based on his decisions, actions and words in the past few weeks, sadly for America, it seems likely.