"Trump has not got to this historic point by being the blustering and crooked buffoon portrayed by his enemies. He is a cunning and pitiless enemy. This is political mortal combat, and in evidentiary as in electoral matters, you can’t fight something with nothing."
Editor Note: If I were Donald Trump going into "political mortal combat", I would be giddy with joy having the likes of Woodward, Bernstein, The New York Times Editorial Board, CNN, Flake, Corbin, McCain (God rest his soul), Waters, Pelosi, Durbin, Booker, Harris, Sanders, Warren, Slick Willy, Crooked Hilary, and Over-the-Hill Barry O, leading the cause of my sworn enemies.
The
unusually eventful summer has reinforced the stark division between the supporters
and enemies of the administration. And in this case, there is no point engaging
in the traditional sportsmanlike nomenclature of describing the opposition as
“adversaries.” They are enemies and the president would not wish it any other
way. He ran for office against both parties, the lobbyists, almost all the
national political media, and the politically active elements of Wall Street,
Hollywood, and Silicon Valley. Keeping this in mind, it was disappointing but
not surprising that the protracted obsequies of Senator John McCain became a
shadow lamentation of the absence in the current president of the qualities
that most of the official mourners posthumously discovered in Senator McCain.
His patriotism and courage are not at issue; his flawless selflessness and
judgment are less clear. It was a shameful thing to exploit a state funeral in
this way, but illustrative of the fight to the political death between the
all-party, multi-vocational, entrenched political establishment and the
ferocious Trump movement.
Trump has won the first three rounds,
the Republican nomination, presidential election, and effective takeover of the
Republican congressional delegation and party apparatus. But his enemies, in
both parties, didn’t realize they were under serious threat until Election
Night. With Speaker Paul Ryan and Senators Bob Corker and Jeff Flake departing,
the only prominent Never Trumper in Congress who is visible to the public is
Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who finesses it at times, indicating that even some
of those Republican officeholders with a strong aversion to Trump will at least
vote with the administration as long as the president is winning. By its
nature, this battle can’t lead to compromise, just as there was no honeymoon.
This level of division and antipathy can be resolved only by a decisive win or
almost terminal mutual attrition.
American election campaigns normally
begin right after Labor Day, and on the first day this year, there were three
blockbuster events. First, the start of the confirmation hearings for Supreme
Court justice-designate Brett Kavanaugh identified the Democrats implicitly
with the shrieking hecklers who were evicted from the committee room. And
Senator Richard Durbin’s effort to stigmatize Judge Kavanaugh because he was
chosen by “Donald John Trump,” who is (apparently) demonstratively
“contemptuous of the rule of law,” and similar essays of enraged self-puffery
by some of his colleagues, won’t fly. The softer edge of the anti-Trump
Resistance knows that despite frenzied efforts to extort and suborn evidence
against Trump for two years, none has been found. All that can be said in
defense of Durbin’s nonsense is that it effectively exonerates Richard Nixon,
an outstanding, if sometimes careless and slightly neurotic president. The
Durbin Trump-moral-leprosy argument is bunk. The president’s taste can be
challenged at times, but even in this war zone, you can’t remove people from
office or reject their well-qualified nominees for that.
Also on Tuesday, the Democrats fired
an instantly fizzling cannon with the inevitable Bob Woodward’s customary
pastiche of fabrications, unsourced misquotations, and malicious gossip.
Woodward’s credibility has been impugned by almost all of the last nine
presidents; his original co-mythmaker Carl Bernstein has almost battered
himself into insensibility with his pronouncements in the last six months that
Trump was finished because under the 25th Amendment he was mentally incompetent
and then because the Manafort and Cohen cases put him into the legal
self-ejection seat. Woodward, the old sniper who never dies, on Tuesday had the
distinction of being called a liar by two four-star Marine generals, John Kelly
and James Mattis, both among the very few holders of high public office in
living memory whose integrity could not be and never has been questioned. In
this toxic atmosphere they were confirmed in the Senate last year by a combined
vote of 186 to 12, nonpartisanship’s last gasp, for a while.
The United States is now like Egypt,
in that the armed forces are the only respected institution left standing. A
narrow majority disapprove of the president, and steadily larger majorities are
doubtful of the judiciary, despise the Congress, loathe the academy, and detest
the national media. In a democracy, somebody will pay for this, and it is
unlikely to be Donald John Trump, the principal accuser of the others. Woodward
should never have survived as an author after inventing the deathbed confession
of a comatose William Casey in his nasty novel Veil about the
Iran-Contra fiasco, but this time he took one for the losing team and shot
himself in the head with a howitzer. Sending him into battle to win it for the
Democrats two months before the election is like dispatching a small brigade of
very aged arsonists to fight one of the California summer forest fires that the
new prophet of the Democrats, Bernie Sanders, says was caused by this
president’s opinion of climate change.
Finally (still on the first day of
the campaign), Robert Mueller accepted written answers to questions from the
president on collusion matters. Inspector Javert is hanging up his badge. This
is a concession that he can’t subpoena the president and has no evidence of
Trump–Russia collusion and no chance of a perjury trap. The thought, expressed
by many in the media, that Mueller could still hang tough on questioning of the
president about obstruction of justice is, like the Democratic-media echo
chamber’s joyous ululations over the Woodward drivel, rubbish. That circus has
flopped; strike the tents. Day One was a disaster for the Democrats.
Either the Democrats will win the
House of Representatives and force an utterly hopeless impeachment trial on the
Senate with only the ravings of Maxine Waters and the false pieties of Dick
Durbin et al. as a case, or they will win the House but recognize that they
have no case and leave it there after an excruciatingly futile debate; or the
Republicans will hold the House and Donald John Trump will grind his heel in
the faces of his rabid enemies. The conventional wisdom remains that the
Democrats will win the House. I don’t think so. No president has ever run a
midterm campaign remotely as determined as this president will, his objective
performance in office is good — the economy, the border, and trade; his only
weaknesses are stylistic, but he is a good deal more substantial and even
likable than his gutter-sniping enemies.
My uninformed suspicion is that the
president has not accepted Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s letter of
resignation of last May, and has delayed ordering the release of all the
documents the congressional committees have demanded from the Justice
Department, for a reason. The right moment for the documents is very soon. The
president has made a hero out of Sessions to the Democrats, although all 48
Democratic senators opposed his confirmation and Elizabeth Warren promised
vengeance on the Republicans for installing him. If Sessions repossesses his
office as collusion evaporates, it will be difficult for the Democrats to
change lanes again on Sessions. It would also not be surprising if something
were heard in the next two months from John Huber, the U.S. attorney for Utah,
whom Sessions appointed ten months ago to look into the FISA and Clinton
Foundation–Uranium One matters. He would be a much more dangerous rabbit to
emerge from the pre-electoral hat than the Ancient Mythmaker, Woodward.
Trump has not got to this historic
point by being the blustering and crooked buffoon portrayed by his enemies. He
is a cunning and pitiless enemy. This is political mortal combat, and in
evidentiary as in electoral matters, you can’t fight something with nothing.
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