Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[Winstonm]

Nope. I saw similar comment made by here last week. Spent 20 minutes or so trying to figure out what she was talking about and then gave up.

 

From what I've read, it seems to revolve around what is being proposed now, with the U.S. recognizing al-Assad and withdrawing from Syria in exchange for Russian promises to remove Iranians. It makes sense that Russia would want this, but how it helps the U.S. is speculative. Surely, if Kushner, Flynn, and Trump are involved, it has to do with a payoff - but how and why?

 

The only thing I can think of would be pipeline access, but I really don't know enough about the region to know if that would be a legitimate possibility.

[Winstonm]

Connect the dots.

 

Rosenstein told Dennison days ago about the indictment.

The indictment specifies that a candidate for Congress asked for and received from the Russians their stolen information.

Out of nowhere, Dennison, a day before the indictment is unsealed, tweets this:

Donald J. Trump

‏

Verified account

 

@realDonaldTrump

Follow Follow @realDonaldTrump

 

Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida is one of the finest and most talented people in Congress. Strong on Crime, the Border, Illegal Immigration, the 2nd Amendment, our great Military & Vets, Matt worked tirelessly on helping to get our Massive Tax Cuts. He has my Full Endorsement!

 

11:02 PM - 12 Jul 2018

 

Dennison had never before mentioned Gaetz in a tweet.

Was Dennison preemptively trying to support Gaetz because he knows Gaetz is the candidate of the indictment?

 

(Note: On page 15 and page 16 of the indictment, this is found: "On or about August 16, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Gucifer 2.0, received a request for stolen documents from a candidate for the U.S. Congress. The Conspirators responded using the Gucifer 2.0 persona and sent the candidate stolen documents related to the candidate's opponent.")

 

I suspect whomever the indictment is talking about is in the process right about now of finding a good attorney.

[Winstonm]

A sobering account by Axios of the importance and scope of the latest Mueller indictiment.

 

And none of that is even the most alarming, damning news in the filing in U.S. District Court in D.C. Mueller, who personally signed the document, saved that for page 25:

 

Two of the officers conspired "to hack into the computers of U.S. persons and entities responsible for the administration of 2016 U.S. elections, such as state boards of elections, secretaries of state, and U.S. companies that supplied software and other technology related to the administration of U.S. elections."

And they actually pulled it off: "In or around July 2016, [Russian military officer Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev] and his co-conspirators hacked the website of [an unnamed] state board of elections ... and stole information related to approximately 500,000 voters, including names, addresses, partial social security numbers, dates of birth, and driver’s license numbers."

[Zelandakh]

Was Dennison preemptively trying to support Gaetz because he knows Gaetz is the candidate of the indictment?

Obstruction of justice?

[Winstonm]

Obstruction of justice?

 

Hard to know. According to a NYT article, the link to which is in the Lawfare article I am posting below, many Congressional Democrats were affected by release of damaging information, so the indictment may not be Gaetz.

 

Lawfare has an excellent article on the meaning and importance of this current indictment.

 

Finally, the factual allegations in this document significantly improve the possibility of criminal conspiracy charges involving Americans. Until this action, there was little indication in the public record that the hacking operation persisted beyond the date the documents were released. While there were questions about whether the Trump campaign participated in some way in coordinating the release of these documents, the presumption based on public evidence was that the hacking scheme—that is, the violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which constituted the most obvious criminal offense—was complete. This left a bit of a puzzle for “collusion” purposes. If the crime was completed at the time the hacking and theft were done, what crime could constitute conspiracy?....This indictment, by contrast, offers a potential factual breakthrough. It tells us that the prior factual premise was wrong: the alleged conduct violating the CFAA continued to occur throughout the summer of 2016. That affects the earlier analysis in two ways. First, it makes clear that the Russians did intend to release the information at the time the hacking occured. Second, and perhaps more important, the indictment alleges that the criminal hacking conspiracy was ongoing at the time individuals in the Trump campaign were in contact with charged and uncharged Russian conspirators, raising the possibility of more straightforward aiding and abetting liability.

[Winstonm]

If you ever wondered what a "non-denial denial" looks like, here it is:

 

Asked if Russia had compromising material on the American president, Putin replied, “it’s difficult to imagine utter nonsense on a bigger scale than this. Please disregard these issues and don’t think about this anymore again.

[kenberg]

I have this weird feeling we might be in for a change. Call me crazy, it won't be the first time. Trump goes to Europe and insults everyone in sight, then he goes off to Helsinki to see his BFF Putin.

 

There was a cartoon book in the 1960s, if anyone can remember the author please tell me. A 6 year old boy, Munro, is drafted and nobody will listen to him, try as he might. He tells them again and again that he is only 6. Eventually he breaks down in tears and a sergeant ridicules him, tell s him he is no soldier he is just being a little child. And then, after these words are spoken, everyone realizes, hey, he is just a little child.

 

In real life, it seemed there would be no end to Nixon. And then, and it suddenly wen from impossible to obvious, he was gone.Even glaciers move.

 

There must be, there really must be, Republicans who look at all of this and say "Huh? What the hell?" . Munro was a 6 year old child, and Trump is, well, whatever he is. Munro did not belong in the Army, and Trump does not belong in charge of foreign policy. There have to be other people who can see this, you really don't have to be some elite radical to be a bit worried.

[PassedOut]

Trump does not belong in charge of foreign policy. There have to be other people who can see this, you really don't have to be some elite radical to be a bit worried.

Trump Sheds All Notions of How a President Should Conduct Himself Abroad

 

No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant, Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, said in a statement.

 

John O. Brennan, who served as C.I.A. director under President Barack Obama, said, Donald Trumps news conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of high crimes and misdemeanors. It was nothing short of treasonous.

Some do. I truly hope many other folks do also.

 

McCain's statement on Trump's news conference with Putin

Edited July 16, 2018 by PassedOut

[Winstonm]

Wow, we may be well past the looking glass now, with this news from Daily Kos about the Butina arrest and information.

31. On October 4, 2016, U.S. Person 1 sent an email to an acquaintance. The email covered a number of topics. Within the email, U.S. Person 1 stated, “Unrelated to specific presidential campaigns, I’ve been involved in securing a VERY private line of communication between the Kremlin and key POLITICAL PARTY 1 leaders through, of all conduits, the [GUN RIGHTS ORGANIZATION].” Based on my training, expertise, and familiarity with this investigation, I believe that this email describes U.S. Person 1’s involvement in BUTINA’s efforts to establish a “back channel” communication for representatives of the Government of Russia.

 

 

We can presume that POLITICAL PARTY 1 is the Republican Party; that’s made clear from the rest of the document. So the question is, which “key leaders” of the Republican Party had secured a “VERY” private line of communication to the Kremlin, in October of 2016?

[johnu]

Trump Sheds All Notions of How a President Should Conduct Himself Abroad

 

McCain's statement on Trump's news conference with Putin

 

I have criticized Dennison in the past, but in his defense, he remembered the note from his advisors from several months ago

 

Congratulates Putin On Election Win

 

and did not congratulate Putin a 2nd time on his recent "election" victory. Well done Dennison.

[hrothgar]

I want to thank the British and their fine tradition of personal vindictive for finally coming up with an suitably appropriate description of our current President: The Butterscotch ***** Gibbon

[hrothgar]

I want to thank the British and their fine tradition of personal vindictive for finally coming up with a suitably appropriate description of our current President: The Butterscotch Shiite Gibbon

[y66]

From Trump's Helsinki Bow To Putin Leaves World Wondering: Why? by Ron Elving at NPR:

 

Much of America was watching, and much of the world. And you could hear the question arising from countless places at once:

 

"What is going on?"

 

Not once, not twice, but repeatedly the U.S. president refused to demand satisfaction, or an apology, or a promise that such interference would cease. Instead, he said the two nations needed to get along and the probe of Russian interference was getting in the way.

 

Both countries were responsible for the difficult state of relations between them, Trump said. There was no mention here of Russia invading Crimea and East Ukraine, nor its actions in Syria or aid to Iran or its nerve agent attacks in the United Kingdom.

 

Then the moment came, in Monday's news conference, for Trump to reveal what the Putin meeting had produced on the issue of Russian interference. Instead, Trump began talking about Hillary Clinton's missing emails and the "brilliant campaign" he had run in 2016 — citing the tally from the Electoral College.

 

It was as if the need to keep that Election Night feeling alive was greater than the need to deal with the geopolitical situation at hand and defend the international rule of law. Greater also than the need to support NATO and its mission to hold Putin accountable.

 

And greater than the first commitment of any president to protect the national security and preserve the democracy of the United States.

From the Editorial Board at the NYT:

 

Other than according Mr. Putin the honor of a meeting that begins to erase the ostracism he suffered for invading Ukraine, it is hard to see what Mr. Trump accomplished. The two men talked about forging a new treaty to replace the New Start Treaty, which constrains nuclear weapons and is to expire in 2021, and also discussed cooperating on Syria, though they seem to have passed up a chance for concrete action.

 

There has been no sign that the United States has derived any benefit from Mr. Trump’s obsequiousness toward Mr. Putin, though Mr. Trump himself has now at least gotten a shiny new soccer ball.

 

It remains a mystery why the president, unlike any of his Republican or Democratic predecessors, is unwilling to call out Russian perfidy. He has no trouble throwing his weight around when he is in the company of America’s European allies, attacking them as deadbeats and the European Union as a “foe,” or when he excoriates the news media as “enemies of the people.” Put him next to Mr. Putin and other dictators, and he turns to putty.

 

All that’s clear is that a president who is way out of his depth is getting America into deep trouble.

[y66]

From Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

 

Is President Donald Trump destroying the ability of the U.S. government to function normally at all?

 

That’s the question Dan Drezner raised in a smart column before the Helsinki summit demonstrated just how badly the administration is running.

 

I think there are three separate issues here:

 

One is the White House itself, which is pretty clearly understaffed, with a succession of under- or unqualified people in key posts and, despite some attempts at normalcy when Chief of Staff John Kelly came on board, a strong tendency to revert to chaos. With, as we saw throughout Trump’s European trip, ugly and embarrassing — and dangerous — results. Remember too that we’re only seeing the process failures, but the classic White House job of coordinating the various executive-branch departments and agencies is almost certainly just not getting done, with all kinds of unpredictable results, many of which are scary indeed.

 

A second is the general failure of the Republican Party to cultivate and train its next generation of party professionals. Some of that preceded Trump; some of it is getting worse as a result of his presidency. It also varies by policy area. In national security and foreign policy, Republicans never did come to terms with the George W. Bush administration’s failure in Iraq. It took Democrats years — and considerable turmoil — to bounce back from Vietnam; Republicans have ignored the problem of having so many of their experts discredited by what happened in Iraq, and that creates a whole different set of problems than purging people did for Democrats. At any rate, it’s hard to see a cadre of Republican professionals emerging from the Trump administration to become the leaders of the next Republican presidency, and it’s not as if Congress is producing a replacement group of governing experts.

 

Then there’s the deterioration of neutral expertise within the various executive-branch departments and agencies. Drezner has anecdotal evidence that it’s happening, and I’m sure it is. On the other hand, I heard similar stories during Republican administrations (and occasionally Democratic ones) going back to Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. So far, I haven’t seen any systematic evidence of just how bad the problem is. That’s not to make light of the problem; once the U.S. government resumes doing such things as negotiating trade deals, it’s going to need experts that know all the technical details of how to do it. It’s not clear to me so far, however, whether we’re talking about some fairly normal deterioration or a sudden collapse in government capacity.

 

While liberals clearly have reason to worry about government’s capacity, conservatives — even small-government conservatives — should worry about it, too. It’s as necessary to have expertise to wind down government involvement in any particular task as it is to ramp up that involvement. The idea that chaos and bad government inevitably lead to a demand for less government is simply wrong … as anyone who remembers the electoral consequences of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and a rather large recession could remind us.

Less competent is the new great?

[barmar]

There was a cartoon book in the 1960s, if anyone can remember the author please tell me. A 6 year old boy, Munro, is drafted and nobody will listen to him, try as he might. He tells them again and again that he is only 6. Eventually he breaks down in tears and a sergeant ridicules him, tell s him he is no soldier he is just being a little child. And then, after these words are spoken, everyone realizes, hey, he is just a little child.

Fake news! The boy was only 4 years old.

 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054100/

 

It was written by the celebrated political cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and won the Oscar for Best Short Subject, Cartoon.

[kenberg]

Fake news! The boy was only 4 years old.

 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054100/

 

It was written by the celebrated political cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and won the Oscar for Best Short Subject, Cartoon.

 

Thanks much. I had it in book form. There were, I think, four or maybe five stories Munro being one of them. Now I have looked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munro_(film) and they mention "Passionella and Other Stories". I think that's the book I had but it's too far back for me to say with confidence.

 

The late 1950s and early 1960s had several very good cartoonists/satirists. There was some local guy from the University of Minnesota I think, but I cannot recall any details.

 

Anyway, I thought Munro was great. The opening line is something like "This is about Munro, who is 4" and then it goes on to him getting his draft notice. You can almost imagine it as true.

 

[y66]

From Jonathan Chait at NYMag:

 

Trump delivered a forced recantation on Tuesday, then quickly reversed. Photo: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

Vladimir Putin has cultivated a mix of overt and covert influence with a wide array of right-wing politicians throughout the West. In some respects, his alliance with Donald Trump fits the pattern perfectly. There is the openly shared ideology of white nationalism, with its belief that Christian Europe should ally with Russia against the common terrorist foe. There is the web of under-the-table financing connecting Putin to his allies and supporting their cause.

 

But in one crucial aspect, Putin’s American strategy has worked very differently than his political operations everywhere else. Whereas in most countries, Putin has created inroads with parties, in the United States he mostly cultivated just one person. That person happens to hold the most powerful office in the entire world, but he remains a solo actor. And the entire fallout from Trump’s bizarrely submissive meeting with the Russian president can be understood as the unspooling tension of a government whose leader stands totally apart from his party.

 

Well before Trump had even disembarked from his trip to Finland, Republican members of Congress and his own aides were registering their dismay at his performance. Trump defended his behavior in an interview with Sean Hannity, one of the few high-profile Republicans slavish enough to defend his open-channel collusion. As of Tuesday morning, he was still hoping to bring his party around. By afternoon, the pressure to climb down had grown too intense. John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, was, incredibly, telling Republican members of Congress to criticize the president. Trump’s own secretary of State and vice-president begged him to reverse himself.

 

And so on Tuesday afternoon, he delivered a forced recantation. Of sorts. Trump’s defense, that he accidentally said the opposite of what he meant to say, was difficult to believe under the best of circumstances. The context of his remarks, in which he dismissed allegations of Russian election interference, made it hard to believe he had intended to insinuate Russia was actually guilty.

 

Trump proceeded to erase whatever smidgeon of credit he might have gained by undermining his stage directions. After putatively affirming the conclusion of U.S. intelligence that Russia had hacked Democratic emails, he added, “Could have been other people also. There’s a lot of people out there.” A reporter caught him crossing off from his prepared text a line promising to bring “anyone involved in that meddling to justice.” Perhaps he realizes that the people involved in Russia’s election meddling include members of his own campaign and, in all probability, Trump himself. Or else he has despaired that his Samuel Gerard-like hunt will ever track down the elusive 400-pound man who really stole the files.

 

By Tuesday night, Trump was predictably back to his original line, or perhaps had gone even further. In an inflammatory interview with Tucker Carlson (who, along with Hannity, had never left Trump’s side) Trump made another astonishing announcement.

 

Here was Trump not only picking fights with allies, as he has been doing for months, but seeming to abandon the promise of collective self-defense that is the heart of the NATO pact. Without that ironclad pledge, the alliance would dissolve, to Russia’s delight.

 

Some analysts have tried to explain away these kinds of sentiments as just Trump’s relentlessly selfish worldview. And yet in the very same interview with Carlson, Trump expressed a sense of gratitude toward Russia for its sacrifices as an American ally in World War II:

 

There is no remotely consistent thread between abandoning America’s current allies and expressing fondness for its old ones. NATO came to America’s defense after al Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. That was the only time NATO has ever invoked its collective defense charter. And yet Trump is resentful of this obligation to countries that still support the United States even as he expresses his sense of debt for Russian help 75 years ago.

 

While the NATO comment is the more newsworthy, the Russia comment is the more telling. Has Trump ever formulated his policy toward another country in terms of historical moral obligation by the United States?

 

Trump’s Russophilia is not completely unique within his party elite. Representative Dana Rohrabacher has long attended to Russia’s interests in an idiosyncratic fashion. Russia has also wooed allies in the gun rights lobby. Beyond that, Trump has almost no support for his pro-Russia views. He continues to place his political standing at risk by issuing endless Russia-friendly statements. There are limits to what one person, even the most powerful one in the world, can accomplish without a party behind him. Trump seems bound to press those limits.

[y66]

From Trump and Russia: One Mystery, Three Theories: An agnostic's guide to our president’s strange conduct. by Ross Douthat at NYT:

 

My official pundit’s opinion on Donald Trump, Russian election interference, collusion, kompromat and impeachment is that I’m waiting for the Mueller investigation to finish before I have a strong opinion. This allows me to cultivate the agnostic’s smug superiority, but it also leaves me without a suitably en fuego take after something like the immediately infamous Trump-Putin news conference — not because the president’s behavior wasn’t predictably disgraceful, but because the nature and scale of the disgrace can’t be assessed without a certainty about Trump’s motives that’s somewhat out of reach.

 

So maybe this is a good time to step back and sketch out the three main ways to understand Trump’s relationship to Russia and Putin and the 2016 hacking of his Democratic rivals, the three major theories that make sense of our president’s strange conduct before and since. I’m not going to formally choose among them, but for people interested in betting I will offer odds for each.

 

Scenario 1: Trump Being Trump

 

In this theory of the case, you can explain all of Trump’s Russia-related behavior simply by finding him guilty of being the person we always knew him to be — vain, mendacious, self-serving, sleazy and absurdly stubborn, with a purely personalized understanding of allies and adversaries, a not-so-sneaking admiration for strongmen and the information filter of an old man who prefers his own reality to the discomforts of contrary information.

 

Thus Trump is friendly to Putin for the same reason that he praised the Chinese Politburo after Tiananmen Square and now praises Xi Jinping; the same reason that he likes the Saudi royals and buddies up to Recep Tayyip Erdogan; the same reason that after a brief period of bellicosity he’s ended up as a tacit apologist for Kim Jong-un. We have ample evidence, going back decades, that Trump simply likes authoritarian rulers, that he admires their supposed toughness and doesn’t give a fig about their cruelty, that he thinks they would make more reliable allies and partners for the United States than the ingrate democracies of Western Europe. And as Ben Domenech of The Federalist noted after the Helsinki performance, we also have ample evidence that he likes people who seem to like him and considers anyone who criticizes him an enemy: “Thus, the Euros are bastards, and Xi and Kim and Putin are not bad guys.”

 

If Trump seems to have a more intense affinity for Putin than for other autocrats, two further explanations may suffice. First, his history of doing business deals with Russians makes him particularly inclined to seek geopolitical deals with Russia — an inclination that’s essentially a shadier version of the affinity that the Bush family and other Arabists had with the Saudis and the Gulf States, cross-pollinated with the sleazy campaign-finance relationships that the Chinese cultivated with the Clinton White House.

 

At the same time, his vanity and amour propre, joined to his rage against his doubters, makes it impossible for Trump to admit that anyone else helped him win the White House — so he cannot bring himself to fully acknowledge and criticize Russian election meddling because to do so might call into question not only his legitimacy but his self-conception as a political grandmaster.

 

And what about the election-season contacts with suspicious Russian nationals and WikiLeaks, the Don Jr. meeting and the Roger Stone forays? In this theory they’re indicators that Trump, a shady guy surrounded by shady guys and professional morons, might well have colluded given the opportunity — but they don’t prove that any such opportunity presented itself. After all, neither the hacking nor the leaking of emails required his campaign’s cooperation, so there was no reason for the Russian side to advance beyond a deniable low-level meeting and WikiLeaks D.M.s, and thus no real opportunity for the Trump team to be a true accessory to the underlying crime.

 

This narrative does not exonerate Trump; indeed, it provides various grounds to condemn him. But those grounds are the same grounds that were obvious during the campaign: We watched him blow kisses to dictators then, complain about our allies then, promise a détente with Russia while exploiting the D.N.C. hacking then, double and triple down on falsehoods and bogus narratives then, cling to self-destructive feuds (the Khans, Alicia Machado) in the same way that he clings to public flattery for Putin … and after all this, he was still elected president. So be appalled when he behaves appallingly, but do not be surprised, do not confuse Trump being Trump with Trump being treasonous — and recognize that he isn’t leaving office until you beat him at the polls.

 

Overall it’s a theory that fits Trump’s personality extremely well, fits the available facts reasonably well, and doesn’t require any new revelations or heretofore-hidden conspiracies. So I continue to give it a … (consults extremely scientific methodology) … 65 percent chance of being the truth.

 

Scenario 2: Watergate With Russian Burglars

 

But in outlining the previous scenario I’ve conceded that people around Trump, including his own family members, did show a willingness to collude with dubious figures — and this concession alone means I can’t go along with Trump apologists and anti-anti-Trumpers who insist that collusion theories don’t have any evidence behind them. At the very least, they have the evidence of Don Jr.’s obvious enthusiasm and Stone’s conspicuous maneuvering. And then there is the reasonable point that if he were anyone else, much of Trump’s own behavior — the firing of James Comey, the rage against the investigations, the frequent lies and denials of the obvious, the unnecessary self-destruction — would look a lot like the behavior of a guilty man.

 

Because Trump is Trump, I think it’s more reasonable to see this behavior as of a piece with all his other irrational-seeming, self-destructive behavior on questions unrelated to l’affaire Russe. But there’s always the possibility that this characterological analysis is a form of overthinking, and that when the truth comes out we’ll look back and say that his guilt should have been obvious all along.

 

And what kind of guilt would it be? There are various possibilities, but the latest Mueller filing supplies one possible answer: In addition to the email leaks, we now know that the Russian hackers also accessed Democratic campaign analytics, a prize that (far more than the emails) would have been hard to fully weaponize if they weren’t shared directly with the Trump campaign.

 

Is there evidence of this weaponization? Not necessarily: A Twitter theory that the Trump team’s late spending shifts were suspiciously targeted and timed runs into the difficulty that 1) anyone could see by the fall that his electoral path ran through the Midwest and 2) the Democrats didn’t see his Wisconsin-Pennsylvania upsets coming, so why would their stolen analytics have helped Trump’s people target their way to victory?

 

But the Russians presumably hoped to do something with those analytics, people in Trump’s circle did show a willingness to communicate with them … and we know not only from Richard Nixon but also from Lyndon Johnson that the temptation to spy on your opponent’s campaign can be irresistible to politicians more experienced than Donald Trump.

 

So a Watergate-style endgame with a Russian twist is hardly a paranoiac’s fantasy: If the Trump campaign got stolen campaign data and Trump knew enough about it to inform his firing of Comey, that’s collusion and a case for impeachment wrapped into one scenario. And the odds that something like this is the truth I boldly place at … (calculates) … 25 percent.

 

Scenario 3: The Muscovite Candidate

 

That leaves 10 percent for the most dramatic theory, which is that any collusion wasn’t just something Trump’s team stumbled into during the campaign but something connected to a much longer-running Russian intelligence operation, and that Trump’s relationship to the Russian state is not just a personal or ideological affinity or a campaign-season alliance but a partnership forged through blackmail or bribery or both.

 

Most of that 10 percent covers the narrow version of this theory, in which Putin and Co. are blackmailing Trump with damaging financial information from his recent Russian dealings or with the mythical-or-is-it pee tape. A much smaller fraction of the fraction is left for the more baroque theory, elaborated (with caveats, but also way too much credulity) by Jonathan Chait in New York magazine recently, that Trump was actually compromised-cum-recruited by Russian intelligence all the way back in 1987, and that his whole worldview was somehow made in Moscow to help unmake the West.

 

There is a great deal of enthusiasm for this kind of theory, on social media especially, and on many days I think it’s embarrassing or risible — a birtherism of the center-left, an exculpatory fantasy from an establishment thrashing about to evade its own responsibility for the rise of populism, a “brown scare” about an omnicompetent Putin and a fascist international that mirrors similar paranoias on the right.

 

The first two narratives I’ve offered seem far more parsimonious, Trump seems like too brazen a sinner to be effectively blackmailed, and his worldview seems very palpably his own. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s actual Russia policy, with its combination of the public bromance with Putin and more hawkish policies behind the scenes, would be a pretty a strange way for a Kremlin stooge to play his part.

 

But one of the vows I took after Trump's stunning political ascent was to refuse to be that surprised again, to refuse to simply laugh at scenarios that seem outlandish or unlikely — because, as they say, that kind of reflexive laughter is how you got Trump. And much as I’m inclined to put the Muscovite Candidate scenario at 1 percent or 0.1 percent, as I worked on this column the number kept creeping upward. After all, there’s got to be something in those tax returns … of course the Russians spy on foreign celebrities when they visit … the way he talks about Putin is, well, weirder than the way he talks about other foreign leaders …

 

Don’t fit me for that #Resistance shirt just yet; my money is still on the strange-but-not-that-crazy explanations for our president’s behavior. But in the age of Donald Trump, everyone should hedge their bets.

[kenberg]

I see it more simply than do the pundits quoted above. Imagine one of those psychology things where you are given a word and you are to respond with the first word that comes to mind:

Love ---- --MarriageWar--------PeaceLife---------DeathClothes---HorseThat sort pf ting. Two weeks ago:Trump-----BelligerentNow, after the trip and the clarification that he inadvertently forgot a "not" in what he said:Trump-----Pathetic

Quoting Chait from above "And so on Tuesday afternoon, he delivered a forced recantation. Of sorts. Trump’s defense, that he accidentally said the opposite of what he meant to say, was difficult to believe under the best of circumstances. The context of his remarks, in which he dismissed allegations of Russian election interference, made it hard to believe he had intended to insinuate Russia was actually guilty."No. It is not "difficult to believe". It is absolutely impossible to believe. Of course we all occasionally mis-speak. But it is simply impossible to watch that news conference and think that Trump was intending to express skepticism of Putin's denial of interference. His entire performance, his demeanor, his other comments make it clear that he regards the denial as very acceptable.

 

So, going back to an earlier post, he goes to NATO and insults everyone, he goes to Helsinki and cozies up to Putin, He comes back and after broad criticism explains that he mis-spoke. He lies? That's not new. But this was pathetic. Some people might want to stand next to a belligerent bully when he is winning. Nobody wants to stand next to someone who looks foolish.

We are watching the unraveling of a presidency. This is a very dangerous time.

 

[Winstonm]

I see it more simply than do the pundits quoted above. Imagine one of those psychology things where you are given a word and you are to respond with the first word that comes to mind:

Love ---- --MarriageWar--------PeaceLife---------DeathClothes---HorseThat sort pf ting. Two weeks ago:Trump-----BelligerentNow, after the trip and the clarification that he inadvertently forgot a "not" in what he said:Trump-----Pathetic

Quoting Chait from above "And so on Tuesday afternoon, he delivered a forced recantation. Of sorts. Trump’s defense, that he accidentally said the opposite of what he meant to say, was difficult to believe under the best of circumstances. The context of his remarks, in which he dismissed allegations of Russian election interference, made it hard to believe he had intended to insinuate Russia was actually guilty."No. It is not "difficult to believe". It is absolutely impossible to believe. Of course we all occasionally mis-speak. But it is simply impossible to watch that news conference and think that Trump was intending to express skepticism of Putin's denial of interference. His entire performance, his demeanor, his other comments make it clear that he regards the denial as very acceptable.

 

So, going back to an earlier post, he goes to NATO and insults everyone, he goes to Helsinki and cozies up to Putin, He comes back and after broad criticism explains that he mis-spoke. He lies? That's not new. But this was pathetic. Some people might want to stand next to a belligerent bully when he is winning. Nobody wants to stand next to someone who looks foolish.

We are watching the unraveling of a presidency. This is a very dangerous time.

 

It appears from this NYT article tonight that Dennison has known from 2 weeks prior to his inauguration that Putin had personally ordered the attack on the American elections.

 

July 18, 2018

 

WASHINGTON — Two weeks before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election.

 

The evidence included texts and emails from Russian military officers and information gleaned from a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin, who had described to the C.I.A. how the Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking and disinformation.

 

Mr. Trump sounded grudgingly convinced, according to several people who attended the intelligence briefing. But ever since, Mr. Trump has tried to cloud the very clear findings that he received on Jan. 6, 2017, which his own intelligence leaders have unanimously endorsed.

 

What this means is that for the past 1 1/2 years, every time Dennison denied or disputed Russian involvement he was doing so intentionally and in full knowledge that he was trying to mislead the public. It also means that last week in Helsinki, he ingratiated himself with the person whom he knows ordered the attack on American elections and American democracy.

 

Today, he is mulling over a proposal from Putin to turn over to Russia an ex-U.S. ambassador for questioning about a bogus charge of aiding embezzlement.

 

It is hard to overemphasize the danger we are in. Not only is Dennison unraveling, but so too his cover story and alibi.

[y66]

From Martin Wolf's review of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze:

 

“There is a striking similarity between the questions we ask about 1914 and 2008,” writes Adam Tooze. “How does a great moderation end? How do huge risks build up that are little understood and barely controllable? . . . How do the passions of popular politics shape elite decision-making? Is there any route to international and domestic order? Can we achieve perpetual stability and peace? Does law offer the answer? Or must we rely on the balance of terror and the judgment of technicians and generals?”

 

With these questions, Tooze, a distinguished British historian, now teaching at Columbia University, finishes his monumental narrative history of 10 years that have reshaped our world. These are, he adds, also questions “that haunt the great crises of modernity”.

 

Yet the fact that the book closes, rather than opens, with these questions indicates that it does not provide the answers. Instead, Crashed gives readers a detailed and superbly researched account of the origins and consequences of the wave of financial crises that emanated from the core of the global financial system from 2007. The prose is clear. The scholarship remarkable. Even people who have followed this story closely will learn a great deal.

 

As Tooze explains, the book examines “the struggle to contain the crisis in three interlocking zones of deep private financial integration: the transatlantic dollar-based financial system, the eurozone and the post-Soviet sphere of eastern Europe”. This implosion “entangled both public and private finances in a doom loop”. The failures of banks forced “scandalous government intervention to rescue private oligopolists”. The Federal Reserve even acted to provide liquidity to banks in other countries.

 

Such a huge crisis, Tooze points out, has inevitably deeply affected international affairs: relations between Germany and Greece, the UK and the eurozone, the US and the EU and the west and Russia were all affected. In all, he adds, the challenges were “mind-bogglingly technical and complex. They were vast in scale. They were fast moving. Between 2007 and 2012, the pressure was relentless.”

 

Tooze concludes this description of events with the judgment that “In its own terms, . . . the response patched together by the US Treasury and the Fed was remarkably successful.” Yet the success of these technocrats, first with support from the Democratic Congress at the end of the administration of George W Bush, and then under a Democratic president, brought the Democrats no political benefits.

 

The adamantine opposition of the Republican party to all efforts to deal sensibly with the aftermath of (or learn from) the crisis reaped the political rewards. Ultimately, their deliberate fomenting of rage led to the election in 2016 of Donald Trump, described here as an “erratic, narcissistic nationalist”.

 

This, then, is a complex story, financially, economically and also politically. Yet some things are now clear. The crisis marked the end of the dominant consensus in favour of economic and financial liberalisation. It shifted political energy towards populist extremes, particularly towards the xenophobic right. It weakened the legitimacy of European integration. The world of the established high-income countries fell into flux. Anything now seems possible.

 

If these are the book’s broad conclusions, what are some of the more detailed ones?

 

One is that this was a crisis of the north Atlantic region, which emanated from an irresponsible and poorly regulated financial sector. Tooze details how deeply engaged European banks were in the pre-crisis madness. “The central axis of world finance was not Asian-American, but Euro-American.”

 

This was not just a crisis of north Atlantic finance, but also of dollar-based finance. European banks had built up huge dollar liabilities and assets, with nearly all of those liabilities consisting of short-term market borrowing. When this lending froze, these foreign banks were in grave danger. It was the Federal Reserve, directly and via swap lines — dollar loans to other central banks, especially the European Central Bank and the Bank of England — that saved the day.

 

Furthermore, because the banking systems had become so huge and intertwined, this became, in the words of Ben Bernanke — Fed chairman throughout the worst days of the crisis and a noted academic expert — the “worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression”. The fact that the people who had been running the system had so little notion of these risks inevitably destroyed their claim to competence and, for some, even probity.

 

Given the scale of the crisis, no alternative to a comprehensive state-backed rescue existed. And, given that this was a dollar-based financial system, it had to be led by the Americans. Moreover, because political pressure had already mobilised against fiscal policy action by as early as 2010, central banks, not elected representatives, had to take most of the needed action. But their policy actions, particularly “quantitative easing” — the buying of assets held by the private sector, especially government bonds — became noxious to those who viewed these actions as an unnatural distortion of markets, an unwarranted reduction in returns to savers, or an unjustified boost to the wealth of the already wealthy. Nevertheless, these actions were both appropriate and successful.

 

The scale and nature of the required response had significant political consequences. The public was enraged by the size of support for the banks and, even worse, by the payment of the bonuses apparently due to the bankers. This was made more infuriating by the fact that hundreds of millions of ordinary people suffered by losing their homes and jobs, or by being the victims of post-crisis fiscal austerity. Many were also enraged that so few senior individuals were charged. The trust that must exist in any democracy between elites and everybody else collapsed. With trust gone, conspiracy-mongers and political mountebanks had their day.

 

Perhaps most startlingly, conservative politicians in the US, the UK and Germany successfully reframed the crisis as the result of out-of-control fiscal policy rather than the product of an out-of-control financial sector. Thus, George Osborne, chancellor of the exchequer in the UK’s coalition government, shifted the blame for austerity on to alleged Labour profligacy. German politicians shifted the blame for the Greek mess from their banks on to Greek politicians. Transforming a financial crisis into a fiscal crisis confused cause with effect. Yet this political prestidigitation proved a brilliant coup. It diverted attention from the failure of the free-market finance they believed in to the costs of welfare states they disliked.

 

At the same time, the financial crisis really had left most countries permanently poorer than had been expected. People were in aggregate worse off. That misery did need to be shared out. The question always was: how.

 

The crisis also revealed the lack of preparedness of the eurozone. Tooze details the long and painful history of the crisis in the single currency and the intellectual, political, economic and institutional failings that made it unnecessarily drawn-out and deep.

 

Conservative politicians reframed the crisis not as the product of an out-of-control financial sector, but as the result of out-of-control fiscal policy

 

Resistance to necessary and just debt restructuring, particularly in Greece and Ireland, notably by the ECB, under Jean-Claude Trichet, is just one, albeit crucial, part of this story. Still more important was the failure to force the recapitalisation of the European banking system, in the way that the Americans did so successfully.

 

Yet another part of this story is the divergence between an increasingly exasperated US and a recalcitrant Germany over how to handle the crisis. Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, said in 2011, “I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say so, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity. You have become Europe’s indispensable nation. You may not fail to lead.” Action did come, but it was always too little and too late.

 

Yet, with judgment and some luck — above all, the luck to have the pragmatic Angela Merkel as chancellor of Germany and the competent Mario Draghi as president of the ECB — the eurozone struggled through. But it was a close-run thing. Tooze explains, for example, that Draghi’s crucial “whatever it takes” remark in London in July 2012 was spontaneous, not planned. Above all, the tensions between domestic political accountability on the one hand, and a supra-national currency on the other, remain. The drama of the euro is most definitely not over.

 

The book also analyses the consequences for eastern Europe and Russia. It explains how the crisis led directly to the election of the Fidesz party in 2010 and so put Hungary on the path to Viktor Orban’s “illiberal democracy”. The impact of the shattering financial crisis transformed the relationship between the Russian government and the oligarchs. As the economy continued to struggle, it also promoted Russia’s dangerously nationalist turn.

 

Much more still is here: the extraordinary response of China to the shock of the crisis, with a stimulus programme amounting to 12.5 per cent of gross domestic product, probably the biggest such programme in peacetime ever; and the vulnerability of emerging economies to the tides of dollar-based finance, as money poured into the US, then out.

 

Also present are some huge political stories: the meddling of the EU in Ukraine and the consequent bitter clashes with Russia, the Brexit referendum and the rise of Trump. All these changes, too, reflect in part the political pressures created, or exacerbated, by the crisis. The ripples caused by this shock move onwards into the future.

 

Even a story this complete has omissions. Tooze focuses on the idea that the growth of the financial sector’s balance sheets was ultimately the cause of the crisis. He does not pay enough attention to why policymakers needed this to happen. The explanation, as I have argued in my own book, The Shifts and the Shocks, was the global savings glut and associated global macroeconomic imbalances. Huge external surpluses in some countries necessitated huge deficits in others. Central banks needed the credit growth if they were to hit the macroeoconomic targets.

 

Another underplayed question is whether the financial sector has been made sufficiently robust. It is arguable, alas, that balance sheets remain too large, that many of the underlying weaknesses of the financial sector survive, that pressures for deregulation are now growing and, not least, that some of the unconventional actions taken during the crisis by the Fed would now be impossible. That is worrying.

 

What, finally, are the biggest results? One comes from Tooze’s remark that “the optimistic dogma under which democracy and markets were seen as necessary complements — the mantra of the aftermath of the cold war — was dead. In its place the crisis had put a more realistic awareness of the potential tensions between the two.” This is surely right.

 

Yet another of these big results is that power and politics are back. US power dealt with the crisis. German power shaped the eurozone’s response. Rightwing politics reimagined a financial crisis as a fiscal one. A similar politics also shifted the emphasis from the dangers of economic insecurity and inequality to the threat from immigration. The crisis has, alas, awoken the sleeping ogres of fear and hatred.

 

How, if at all, will liberal democracy survive the age of Trump, Brexit, Putin and Xi? That is the biggest question raised by this transformative decade.

Short version:

 

The trust that must exist in any democracy between elites and everybody else collapsed.

 

With trust gone, conspiracy-mongers and political mountebanks had their day.

 

The optimistic dogma under which democracy and markets were seen as necessary complements — the mantra of the aftermath of the cold war — was dead. In its place the crisis had put a more realistic awareness of the potential tensions between the two.

 

It is arguable, alas, that balance sheets remain too large, that many of the underlying weaknesses of the financial sector survive, that pressures for deregulation are now growing and, not least, that some of the unconventional actions taken during the crisis by the Fed would now be impossible. That is worrying.

 

Will liberal democracy survive?

[jjbrr]

I see it more simply than do the pundits quoted above. Imagine one of those psychology things where you are given a word and you are to respond with the first word that comes to mind:

Love ---- --MarriageWar--------PeaceLife---------DeathClothes---HorseThat sort pf ting. Two weeks ago:Trump-----BelligerentNow, after the trip and the clarification that he inadvertently forgot a "not" in what he said:Trump-----Pathetic

Quoting Chait from above "And so on Tuesday afternoon, he delivered a forced recantation. Of sorts. Trump’s defense, that he accidentally said the opposite of what he meant to say, was difficult to believe under the best of circumstances. The context of his remarks, in which he dismissed allegations of Russian election interference, made it hard to believe he had intended to insinuate Russia was actually guilty."No. It is not "difficult to believe". It is absolutely impossible to believe. Of course we all occasionally mis-speak. But it is simply impossible to watch that news conference and think that Trump was intending to express skepticism of Putin's denial of interference. His entire performance, his demeanor, his other comments make it clear that he regards the denial as very acceptable.

 

So, going back to an earlier post, he goes to NATO and insults everyone, he goes to Helsinki and cozies up to Putin, He comes back and after broad criticism explains that he mis-spoke. He lies? That's not new. But this was pathetic. Some people might want to stand next to a belligerent bully when he is winning. Nobody wants to stand next to someone who looks foolish.

We are watching the unraveling of a presidency. This is a very dangerous time.

 

This pen is blue. Its ink is the color of the sky. Its hue has a wavelength of about 470nm. When I think about the pen, I'm reminded of clear oceans and Donald Duck's shirt - not the bow he wears, that's a completely different color, I mean the shirt itself.

 

...

 

I meant to say this pen is red.

[Winstonm]

From Martin Wolf's review of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze:

 

 

Short version:

 

The trust that must exist in any democracy between elites and everybody else collapsed.

 

With trust gone, conspiracy-mongers and political mountebanks had their day.

 

The optimistic dogma under which democracy and markets were seen as necessary complements — the mantra of the aftermath of the cold war — was dead. In its place the crisis had put a more realistic awareness of the potential tensions between the two.

 

It is arguable, alas, that balance sheets remain too large, that many of the underlying weaknesses of the financial sector survive, that pressures for deregulation are now growing and, not least, that some of the unconventional actions taken during the crisis by the Fed would now be impossible. That is worrying.

 

Will liberal democracy survive?

 

Here is the key takeaway - the propaganda that continues to work:

 

Transforming a financial crisis into a fiscal crisis confused cause with effect. Yet this political prestidigitation proved a brilliant coup. It diverted attention from the failure of the free-market finance they believed in to the costs of welfare states they disliked.

 

As long as the elites can continue to successfully sell to suckers their free-market snake oil god, there can be no positive change, only chaos built on rage.

[kenberg]

From Martin Wolf's review of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze:

 

 

Short version:

 

The trust that must exist in any democracy between elites and everybody else collapsed.

 

With trust gone, conspiracy-mongers and political mountebanks had their day.

 

The optimistic dogma under which democracy and markets were seen as necessary complements — the mantra of the aftermath of the cold war — was dead. In its place the crisis had put a more realistic awareness of the potential tensions between the two.

 

It is arguable, alas, that balance sheets remain too large, that many of the underlying weaknesses of the financial sector survive, that pressures for deregulation are now growing and, not least, that some of the unconventional actions taken during the crisis by the Fed would now be impossible. That is worrying.

 

Will liberal democracy survive?

 

As I have siad, I learn a lot from reading the WC. I am completely serious about this.Just for starters, I cannot recall ever hearing of either Adam Tooze:or Martin Wolf. And there are many things that I am at best vague about.

 

" It is arguable, alas, that balance sheets remain too large," Does this mean that companies are carrying too much debt?

 

"Transforming a financial crisis into a fiscal crisis confused cause with effect." (Winston chose this one). Imagine yourself on a street corner in downtown Chicago. Or Los Angeles. Or St. Paul. You stop the first 100 people as they pass by, and you agree that you will give them $50 if they can coherently explain the difference between a financial crisis and a fiscal crisis. If you bring only $200 with you, I doubt that you will have either a financial crisis or a fiscal crisis running this experiment.

 

Many years ago I and some friends drove to a regional that was maybe a couple of hours away. At the time, Fermat's Last Theorem had recently been proved and this received a lot of coverage. My friends were interested. I think that by the end of the 2 hour trip I had given them some understanding of what the Theorem said and what it meant to prove a Theorem, maybe clearly enough that they understood why the proof necessarily had to be conceptual rather than calculational. My point being that while I am sure that Tooze and Wolf are very intelligent educated people, it does not follow that I can read what they say and follow it with confidence. And no, I did not give my friends a summary of the proof of FLT, I have never read the proof myself and I am sure it would take me a year (at least) to get the background knowledge to be able to read it.

 

I do like seeing material of this sort. I am not joking about that. But I will hold off on agreeing or disagreeing.

[Winstonm]

As I have siad, I learn a lot from reading the WC. I am completely serious about this.Just for starters, I cannot recall ever hearing of either Adam Tooze:or Martin Wolf. And there are many things that I am at best vague about.

 

" It is arguable, alas, that balance sheets remain too large," Does this mean that companies are carrying too much debt?

 

"Transforming a financial crisis into a fiscal crisis confused cause with effect." (Winston chose this one). Imagine yourself on a street corner in downtown Chicago. Or Los Angeles. Or St. Paul. You stop the first 100 people as they pass by, and you agree that you will give them $50 if they can coherently explain the difference between a financial crisis and a fiscal crisis. If you bring only $200 with you, I doubt that you will have either a financial crisis or a fiscal crisis running this experiment.

 

Many years ago I and some friends drove to a regional that was maybe a couple of hours away. At the time, Fermat's Last Theorem had recently been proved and this received a lot of coverage. My friends were interested. I think that by the end of the 2 hour trip I had given them some understanding of what the Theorem said and what it meant to prove a Theorem, maybe clearly enough that they understood why the proof necessarily had to be conceptual rather than calculational. My point being that while I am sure that Tooze and Wolf are very intelligent educated people, it does not follow that I can read what they say and follow it with confidence. And no, I did not give my friends a summary of the proof of FLT, I have never read the proof myself and I am sure it would take me a year (at least) to get the background knowledge to be able to read it.

 

I do like seeing material of this sort. I am not joking about that. But I will hold off on agreeing or disagreeing.

 

Ken,

 

Hope this aids understanding:

 

Fiscal policy can be used to stabilize the economy over the course of the business cycle. ... There is some overlap in meaning between the terms: financial, meaning (obviously) 'involving financial matters', is a subset of fiscal, which has the additional meaning of 'relating to government revenue and taxes'.

 

To be clear, the crisis of the Great Recession was a financial crisis - aided in its materialization by government policies over a number of years. It was not a creature of over-taxation and over burdensome regulation but its birth came as a result of a blinding chase for ROI coupled with regulatory changes and lack of enforcement of existing regulations, i.e., by allowing free market principles to operate unfettered.

 

Btw, Bill Clinton was a guilty as anyone on the right in embracing free market ideology in order to push his agenda.