As the End of the Reign Draws Near, Republican World Gets Crazier and Crazier
By
Terry H. Schwadron, DCReport Opinion Editor
What saved it was the
last-minute, roller-coaster deal in the Congress for a coronavirus aid bill, as
ugly a compromise as possible, but an agreement nevertheless. Stand by for the
conflicting credits and new discoveries about what actually passes today in the
multi-hundred-page bill.
The whole weekend made
me, at least, feel as if I live on a different planet – with theirs being one
in which it is impossible to separate the important from the inane. We all can
agree the White House continues to make seeing the news an emotionally exhausting
experience.
Just a sampling:
Transition interruptus: Trump ordered halted any transition meetings between the Defense Department and the incoming Joe Biden team for the next few weeks. In what universe other than the Trump ego-fantasy does it make any sense for incoming Pentagon leadership not to know about the readiness of military forces, the global danger signs that the Pentagon is tracking, even the Defense spending patterns.
Apparently,
such meetings were halted because Trump was angered by seeing a Washington Post
article that suggested the Biden team was looking at how many billions of
dollars could be saved from re-routing money taken from the Pentagon for the
border wall construction back to the military. I would hope that is something
they should be considering.
Screwing up coronavirus economic aid: Even to their own members, the movement among Republican senators to find new religion for relief from debts and deficits by blocking coronavirus aid to Americans reportedly was being seen as nuts. The situation was fluid, but barely, as Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), led a late charge to stop lending by the supposedly independent Federal Reserve for businesses that need credit to stay afloat.
A compromise finally got through around narrowing the proposal, setting
Congress toward bill approval. Once again it put hunger and evictions over
non-payment of rent for millions on real display and requiring a third, brief
reset of the deadline clock for the final votes. Republicans had seen it as a
fiscal necessity; Democrats saw a bid to throttle the incoming Biden
administration even before it takes office. Though the participants will see it
as a victory, it was politics at its worst.
Ignoring cybersecurity
hacking: Even after
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said it was the Russians who broke through
software walls guarding the Pentagon, the Treasury and Commerce Departments and
the nuclear areas of the Energy Department, Trump still insisted Saturday it
could have been the Chinese. He added they could have skewed voting in the
election to account for his loss. Trump thinks we are idiots.
Trump’s never-ending election challenges: More than six weeks after the election, Trump met in the White House on Friday night with the Sidney Powell, the lawyer who’s outlandish arguments about election fraud were considered too far out of line for him to even keep her on as a personal lawyer. They discussed making her a special counsel investigating voter fraud, according to two people briefed on the discussion.
Even Rudy Giuliani, present by phone, said no, as did White House counsel Pat Cipollone. Apart from all else, declaring a special counsel is the jurisdiction of the Justice Department, not the Oval Office. Powell is the one arguing conspiracy theories about a Venezuelan plot to rig voting machines in the United States.
It was unclear if Trump will move ahead on it.
Meanwhile, Trump associate and the disgraced but pardoned former national
security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, is going around the country telling Trump
to declare martial law over the election results.
The pending pardons: Politico reported that Trump is considering preemptively pardoning as many as 20 aides and associates before leaving office, even to the frustration of Senate Republicans who are arguing that strategy could backfire politically. Again, pardons are supposed to move through the Justice Department and a review process, and again Trump is insisting on his own rules for family and friends.
Those under consideration
include Giuliani, campaign staff and several members of his family. Of course,
accepting a pardon includes the assumption that there was a crime committed.
Perhaps the smartest move Trump might make is to offer Hunter Biden the same
pre-criminal pardon he apparently is considering for his own kids.
Fast and loose money: It turns out Trump will be leaving with 10s of millions of dollars with few legal limits on how he can spend it. And, records now show that his family members managed to interfere with campaign funds to direct hundreds of millions into slush funds controlled by Trump. This brazen attempt to siphon reportable campaign money into accounts for which there is no accounting is questionable on lots of grounds.
The reports extend the pattern of loose financial ethics
marking the Trump presidency. It was common for Trump to use his official
office and functions for personal money-making activities. Everything occurred
from spending his time golfing at Trump resorts to re-routing foreign trips to
the benefit of his own properties.
Expanding
Mining: Despite the timing,
Trump is moving to open up vast amounts of federal land to widespread mining
and drilling, The New York Times reported. It
is a move bound to create yet more consternation and problems for the Biden
administration. The new administration, for procedural reasons as well as
political ones, is bound to challenge a number of the individual sites
involved. Again, whose interests are being served here?
And in possibly the
dumbest attack of the week: Trump
supporters took up the challenge to knock the doctorate earned by Dr. Jill
Biden, defending and outdoing a particularly sexist, silly and
anti-intellectual column from a Wall Street Journal op-ed that asked her to
drop the honorific unless she was going to treat coronavirus patients. Go stuff
it, kiddo.
Meanwhile, at far ends
of the news worlds, both The New York Times and Lou Dobbs ran apologies for
getting things wrong. The Times said sorry for trusting a source on ISIS
without proper investigation. Under legal threat, Dobbs (or his employer Fox
News) gave a mea culpa for allowing unsubstantiated lying
about conspiracy theories about election fraud.
On the other hand,
Trump and Vice President Mike Pence reached the enormously important and
contentious decision to label members of Space Force as “guardians,” rather
than airmen, sailors, soldiers or Marines. Wasn’t that the name of the
universe-traveling robot Gort in “The Day the Earth Stood Still”?
Klaatu barada nikto.
You think we will miss
these weekends after Jan. 20?