Trump likes to hire people based on TV appearances and the announced nomination of Stephen Moore to join the Federal Reserve board is no different. Moore has long been a cable news staple. His record in that medium is worth reviewing,
This morning the president’s lawyer tweeted:
The below excerpt from Wikipedia, if true, is another indication that the Steele Dossier about Russia is a phony work of political opposition research. Comey never bothered to check when Steele was last in Russia. So where was it written and who wrote it? We demand answers!
— Rudy Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) March 22, 2019
I’ve been thinking more about why Donna Brazile’s decision to join Fox News as a contributor bothers me so much. The core problem is normalization. She was hired so that Fox News could pretend to be a mainstream media outlet that provides diverse viewpoints.
Reports that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump haven’t been complying with security and record keeping regulations naturally provokes Democrats to cry hypocrisy, given the outsized attention Hillary Clinton’s emails received in the 2016 election. But as eagle-eyed blogger Marcy Wheeler notes, the power couple is merely the most public manifestation of a much more pervasive problem.
The New York Times, among others, is reporting that Joe Biden and his advisors are trying to come up with ways to address voter concerns about his age if he enters the Democratic presidential primaries: “Mr. Biden and his top advisers are considering nodding to the rising next generation in Democratic politics — and elevating an heir — by announcing a running mate early, well before the nomination is sealed. Also under discussion is a possible pledge to serve only one term and framing Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign as a one-time rescue mission for a beleaguered country, according to multiple party officials.” Stacey Abrams has been named as a possible running mate.
How New Zealand handles one mass shooting:
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand on Thursday announced a national ban on all military-style semiautomatic weapons, all high-capacity ammunition magazines and all parts that allow weapons to be modified into the kinds of guns used to kill 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch last week.
“What we’re banning today are the things used in last Friday’s attack,” she said, adding: “It’s about all of us, it’s in the national interest and it’s about safety.”
President Trump’s continuous badmouthing of the late Senator John McCain dominated headlines on Wednesday. The words were certainly bonkers even by Trump’s standards. “I gave him the kind of funeral he wanted, which as President I had to approve,” Trump said, falsely. “I don’t care about this, I didn’t get a thank-you, that’s okay. We sent him on the way. But I wasn’t a fan of John McCain.”
Donna Brazile, one of the preeminent political strategist in the Democratic Party and twice interim head of the DNC, is jumping on the Fox News ship, becoming a contributing writer for the right-wing cable news network. In an interview with Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker, Brazile was asked how she could reconcile her strong progressive politics with working for a network that often functions like the propaganda wing of the Republican party and is sometimes openly racist.
We have every reason to believe that Donald Trump is the most corrupt American president since at least Warren Harding and perhaps ever. The fact that his adult sons continue to manage his business while serving as informal White House advisors is itself a major scandal. A big reason for wanting the Democrats to win back the House of Representatives in 2018 was the promise that they would do the work of oversight that the congressional GOP had avoided. But now that congressional oversight is here, we’ve entered a period of unprecedented stonewalling.
Maybe it’s just a matter of degree, but I’m not sure I’ve seen President Trump contrast as starkly as he did today his own legitimacy (63 million votes/304 electoral votes in 2016!) with what he portrays as the utter illegitimacy of the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller (“never got a vote!” as Trump put it).
His attacks on the rule of law are legion at this point, but watch him today and see if he doesn’t have a heightened sense of urgency and an alarming new tone.