One of the abiding mysteries of the Trump saga is just who those five initial foreign policy advisers were, the ones he announced at an editorial meeting with The Washington Post on March 21st, 2016. It was an odd group: five guys, half with sordid pasts and others no one had ever heard of. One of them actually had Model UN work listed as one of his job qualifications! They weren’t sending their best!
This was at the point when Trump had no foreign policy advisers and he’d recently said he got his ideas on the topic from watching generals on the cable networks. Because of all this, it’s always been plausible that the whole question of how these guys were picked is radically over-determined: maybe the list was just five guys someone grabbed off their rolodex in a panic in time for the Post editorial board meeting. Who knows?
One more point about the ‘un-masking’ story, picking up on my piece from last night. You’ll remember that early on, Chairman Nunes told Speaker Ryan and others that his source was a “whistleblower-type person.” This always struck most people as rather ridiculous, and rightly so: People at the White House leaking pro-White House information really don’t qualify as “whistleblowers.” But again, I would suggest that this bit of weirdness fits perfectly with the scenario I set out last night.
My read on Eli Lake’s story about Susan Rice ‘unmasking’ Trump transition officials is that it’s a rather elaborate attempt to make a scandal out of something that isn’t scandalous at all. Given what we know just about Mike Flynn’s activities in November and December of 2016 alone, Rice’s alleged actions don’t seem that surprising at all. National security experts seem to agree.
But here’s something in the story that got my attention.
Read this paragraph, the third graf down in the story.
We’re seeing a slow but now steady stream of stories suggesting that Trumpcare may not be dead after all. They’re working on it in the background, making progress, getting ready for even more winning.
Put me down as quite skeptical.
Professor Amr Amr will join us in the Hive for a chat about archeology and his latest project, The Day After, which works to cut down on looting of ancient artifacts in Syria. Feel free to drop questions at any time or join us on Wednesday at 2 p.m. If you’d like to participate but don’t have TPM Prime, sign up here.
President Trump’s dismal poll numbers continue to be one of the few sources of joy and mirth in the bleak political hellscape his presidency has created. From a low of 35% a week ago in the daily Gallup Approval tracking poll, his approval number perked back up to 40%, only to fall back this weekend to 38%. Sad!, as they say.
Trumpers looking for ways to sideline intelligence community and gain access to raw intel as they monitor Trump/Russia probe.
I mentioned in my post below that there’s a very tight timeline or chain of events tying Trump’s claims of Obama wire-tapping and the various doings of Ezra Cohen-Watnick. Let’s walk through it.
Just a thought. But as I survey the whole horizon, it has occurred to me more than once that the geopolitical dimension of the Trump/Russia scandal, questions of collusion, coordination, potential blackmail … these may end up being dwarfed by the related story of President Trump’s vast and overlapping ties to the post-Soviet criminal underworld.
Obviously, these two stories are far from distinct.