White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. (photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
President Trump with his new Chief of Staff General John Kelly. (photo: Jim Watson/Getty)
03 August 17
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today: why there’s no such thing as a post-Scaramucci era in White House communications, Trump helping Don Jr., and Republican senator Jeff Flake critiquing his own party.
fter an adventurous 11 days, Anthony Scaramucci followed Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus out of the White House, with General John Kelly — and possibly former Fox News executive Bill Shine — on the way in. How will this change the way the White House communicates?
Here’s one thing I can say without fear of
contradiction: The removal of Scaramucci, like that of Spicer before
him, will have no impact at all on White House “communications.” The
default setting will still be All Lying All the Time. It says all you
need to know that Trump’s leakers floated the notion that the ousted Fox
News executive Bill Shine, the former Roger Ailes deputy, might be the
Mooch’s successor even as he is busy fending off lawsuits alleging that he was an enabler of his late boss’s serial sexual harassments. Billy Bush would be a better choice.
Whoever is in charge, it’s safe to say that nothing will be too small to lie about
at this White House. Even as the latest chaotic organizational-chart
shake-up was in full swing in the West Wing, the communicator-in-chief
was on Twitter declaring “No WH chaos!” Nothing has changed since Inauguration Day, which, as many will recall, had the biggest crowd turnout in the history of Western civilization.
You have to feel a bit sorry for Kelly, though surely
he knew what he was getting into when he undertook a role most likely to
end with his humiliating banishment from the island on Pennsylvania
Avenue. Yes, he is a much-admired Marine — one of what Trump calls “my generals.” But I doubt that even Hermann Goering could impose discipline on this White House.
Some hope has been invested in Kelly’s decisive
canning of the Mooch on his first day of work. But that was low-hanging
fruit. Kelly lacks the power to fire the president’s son-in-law or
daughter, both of whom were behind the brilliant idea of Scaramucci’s
appointment in the first place and both of whom had pushed another candidate,
the Goldman Sachs alum Dina Powell, over Kelly as his replacement once
the Mooch was caught sucking his own cock. To paraphrase a joke about
nepotism from the old show How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, blood
is thicker than water in this White House, and Jared Kushner is thicker
than anything. He is lying in wait for Kelly, and you can bet
everything will leak along the way as Kushner administers the shiv.
The Washington Post reported this week that Donald Trump Jr.’s first response to the Russia meeting — the short statement describing it as “primarily … about the adoption of Russian children” — was “personally dictated” by the president himself. Is there a way to explain this other than as a cover-up attempt?
This lie was so big that one Republican in the Senate, Lindsey Graham, was actually moved to call it “a lie,”
of all things. I’ve lost count of how many lies have been told about
this Trump Tower meeting by Trump, his son-in-law, his son, and their
various lawyers and flacks. And even as this new Post scoop
landed, the collusion plot thickened with the revelation of a new
lawsuit, first reported by David Folkenflik of NPR, brought by a Fox
News contributor and private investigator named Rod Wheeler. The suit
alleges that the Trump White House, with Sean Spicer as point man, collaborated on a cover-up story that was aired by Fox in May:
a supposed exposé (later retracted), hyped by Sean Hannity, that tried
to whitewash Russian culpability in the hack of DNC emails by blaming
the hack instead on a bogus conspiracy allegedly implicating Hillary
Clinton and a murdered 27-year-old DNC data worker named Seth Rich.
Yesterday Sarah Huckabee Sanders dismissed the allegations in this lawsuit, saying “the president had no knowledge”
of the Fox story and that it was “completely untrue” that the White
House had any involvement in Fox’s muscular effort to shift the blame
from Russia to the Democrats for the publication of DNC emails by
WikiLeaks. This is essentially the same denial Sanders issued
to knock down speculation that Trump had any involvement in Donald
Jr.’s initial “adoption of Russian children” explanation for the Trump
Tower meeting. We can safely assume that her new lie is at least as big
as the last.
In a new book, Republican senator Jeff Flake
of Arizona has written that his party, in a “Faustian bargain” with
Trump, has made “the government of the United States … dysfunctional at the highest levels.”
He encouraged his colleagues to end their “unnerving silence in the
face of an erratic Executive branch.” Are we seeing the start of
Congress genuinely pulling away from Trump’s agenda?
Flake, a NeverTrumper from the start,
has written by far the toughest anti-Trump critique yet to be delivered
by a Republican politician currently holding high office.
But as Jennifer Senior pointed out in her review of his book for the Times, Flake likes saying Republicans should do something to counter Trump but is short of battle plans for realizing that goal. Flake did not even have the guts to join
Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and his fellow Arizona senator John
McCain in voting down the “skinny repeal” of Obamacare last week. (Nor,
by the way, did Lindsey Graham.)
We are seeing some small, if as yet inconclusive, signs that GOP senators, notably Lamar Alexander of Tennessee,
are pulling away from Trump’s entreaties to vote on repealing Obamacare
yet again and will instead try to join with Democrats on bipartisan
efforts to shore up the law against the administration’s attempts to
sabotage it. It’s an open question whether this is anything more than
political posturing to provide fodder for those pundits who are always
spotting the dawn of bipartisanship on the Hill just before it
evaporates in the cold light of day.
The biggest motivating factor for the GOP to pull away
from Trump, I’ll say yet again, is the ever-approaching 2018 midterms
and the punishment that is likely to be inflicted on Republicans for
their unblemished record of legislative failure. Steve Mnuchin, the
Treasury secretary, has urged Congress to raise the debt ceiling by the deadline of September 29 and vowed that a tax bill is “going to get done this year.”
Neither is likely to happen, nor is anything else, thanks in no small
part to a White House paralyzed by scandal, consumed with intrigue, and
run by a sociopath. Yet this is what the party in power will have to run
on a mere 15 months from now.
Trump has one tweet right when he declared after the health-care debacle that Republicans in Congress “look like fools.”
But most of them still seem to be afraid of him — or if not him, his
hard-core supporters. Those supporters are a loyal cohort: Polls found
that 25 percent supported Trumpcare until the bitter end and 26 percent wanted Scaramucci to stay on the job even after his rant to The New Yorker. That’s
the base, and it is never going to defect from Trump. Unless and until
Republicans in Washington are willing to cross those voters, the status
quo in Washington will remain as is. For another 15 months, anyway.
Top 6 Falsehoods Embraced by New WH Chief of Staff John Kelly
ohn
Kelly will get a lot of good will from having fired the foul-mouthed
Anthony Scaramucci. But should he? At least Scaramucci had been
gunning for Steve Bannon, the scary far, far right wing white
nationalist who serves as White House strategist. You have a sense that
while Kelly is just very, very conservative, there are lots of things
about Bannon he is comfortable with. That isn’t a comforting thought.1. Kelly thinks we are under siege:
“We are under attack from failed states, cyber-terrorists, vicious smugglers, and sadistic radicals. And we are under attack every single day. The threats are relentless.”
As Michael Cohen wrote in response at the Boston Globe, “Cyber-terrorists have never killed an American citizen, no failed state threatens America and more Americans are killed by lightning strikes than sadistic radicals.”
2. Kelly said that construction on Trump’s border wall would begin by the end of this summer. It won’t.
3. Nor is the wall needed or wanted by a majority of Americans. Kelly is almost delusional about US immigration enforcement: “Nothing’s been done in the past eight years to to enforce the border rules and regulations, not to mention many of the immigration laws inside of the United States…”
Fact: The Obama administration deported at least as many people as the Bush administration had, if you use the same definition for deportations in both administrations. By sheer reported numbers, Obama deported some 2.5 million people during his 8 years while Bush deported 2 million. They probably actually deported about the same number. Kelly’s bizarre notion that the laws were not implemented since 2009 is flat wrong.
4. Kelly wanted to prioritize deportation of undocumented people who use marijuana on the circa 1910 grounds that it is a “gateway drug.” It is not, or Colorado would be nothing but heroin addicts. Legalization of marijuana tracks with lower crime rates.
5. Kelly said of reports that Jared Kushner had met with the Russians during the campaign, before these reports were confirmed, that “any channel of communication” with Russia “is a good thing.” .
6. Not to mention Kelly’s bizarre performance during Trump’s first attempt at a Muslim ban, when he gladly acted without any regard to the US constitution and claimed to have authored the policy (Bannon and Miller sprang it on him). The most dangerous thing of all is that Kelly is a good soldier and will do as he is told by Trump.
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