What have we learned from 2018? Well, what has happened since I wrote that last post on January 1? Policy-wise, legislatively, not a lot. I haven't commented on the criminal justice bill because I don't really have anything to say about it. There are people whose lives are affected by it, and there are people to whom it matters, and sure. Congress did something, but on the grand scale, this isn't world-historic stuff. Congress hasn't done jack shit. What has happened, politically, and what have we learned?
Let's start with what has started. The trade war. Yes, our President really is a mercantilist. Such fools still walk the earth, centuries after they should have died out. Not only has Donny begun imposing tariffs, he has done so in bizarre ways, claiming national security concerns about Canada. Like we're living in fucking South Park, or something. And the Republican Party, which supposedly exists for the sole purpose of opposing all taxes, has rolled over and shown Trump its belly, and then just... presented. So now, we're in a trade war because Tariff Man!!! must have his TARIFFS!!! And then he complains that Jerome Powell might turn him into Herbert Hoover. Is anyone else imagining Santayana doing a facepalm?
What does this teach us? Several things. First, one of the problems with Trump is that he is such a fucking liar that it is frequently hard to know when he is actually telling us something he believes. To the degree that it can be said he "believes" anything, given what a fucking liar he is. There are people as dishonest as Trump, but nobody in the history of opposable thumbs has ever been more dishonest than Donald J. Trump. So, can you disregard everything he says as necessarily false and insincere? Apparently not. He really did mean that trade war idiocy. Go figure that the stuff he meant was the most idiotic and self-destructive stuff. Fucking moron... (source: Tillerson, Rex) Where does the trade war go? I have no idea. Trade wars can escalate, they can de-escalate, and all sorts of crazy shit can happen. They are stupid, and self-defeating, though. Will Trump get anything good out of it? No.
There's more to the trade war, though. One of the things that I keep noting about this is how odd it is that nobody in the GOP seems to care that Trump is imposing TAXES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Are you paying any attention, Grover Norquist? Where did you go? Where did any of these tax-opponents go? What's going on here?
What's going on is that we have learned something. A couple of things, actually. First, remember that stupid tax bill, which had more holes in it than Trump's Russia alibi? Remember how it raised a bunch of taxes, and the hardcore anti-tax people didn't seem to give a flying fuck, and Grover Norquist was willing to give everyone a pass? Here's what's going on in my assessment. We have learned how much of the anti-tax rhetoric was nothing more than rhetoric. "Tariffs" don't sound like taxes. You know how Donny is too fucking stupid to understand that tariffs are actually taxes paid by Americans rather than foreign governments? Because he is... say it with me... the dumbest motherfucker in the history of politics? I'm coming around to the position that this is basically where the rest of the GOP is on "taxes." It's time we start putting the word in quotation marks because the party just doesn't understand what those damned things are. Tariffs are taxes. A party that can't wrap its brain around that doesn't understand policy. A party that can't understand such a basic concept is a party stupid enough to, oh, I don't know, make Donald J. Trump the President of the United States.
What else? Some of the Republicans in Congress actually are free-traders, and you can hear that in their responses to the tariffs. And you know what? Congress could do something. As I have written a bunch of times, Congress could, statutorily, revoke the president's authority to pull this shit. Why don't they? The other thing we have learned from this trade war. Of course, this is something that I pointed out in my 2017-In-Review post. The GOP is completely in Trump's thrall. Even the ones who know how stupid and self-destructive the trade war is can't bring themselves to oppose him because they are all Trump's... well, they rolled over, showed their bellies, and presented. Butters had a bottom one. Is this new information? No, but the trade war has laid it bare.
I'm spending a bunch of time reminding you of this because it is important, still going on in the background, and not getting enough attention. It is easy for people to forget about this, with headlines devoted to other stuff. Like small-scale but naked cruelty. Child separations, for example. Did we really learn anything from this? Did anyone not already know that Trump is a raging psychopath and racist? Did anyone not already know that he, Stephen Miller, and people like that get their rocks off by causing small-scale suffering for anyone with dark skin, especially children? Did anyone not already see these people as cartoonishly villainous? (Anyone who isn't, themselves, sociopathic?)
10,000 people die every day due to waterborne pathogens, and you never think about it. We could do something about that, quite easily. Malaria? Netting. This stuff is easy, but out-of-sight, out-of-mind. This is why humanity sickens me. Cheap displays of phony empathy from self-righteous windbags who just want to posture, and never actually think about what really needs to be done around the world... that's what we get in response to headlines instead of real action in response to mass death. If anyone ever wants to know why I'm a misanthrope, that's it, right there. Phony empathy versus sociopathy. That's humanity. In ole' Bill Shakespeare's nutshell.
Still, the family separations happened. I consider them completely uninformative. Sickening? Yup. Revealing? Not in any way, because we already knew everything on display as they happened. Will Americans learn any lesson from it, or do anything about it? Fuck no. This is America. Posturing phonies on one side, and racist psychopaths on the other, with 10,000 people dying every day around the world from waterborne pathogens, ignored by everyone, while the climate spins inexorably towards a point at which human civilization will radically alter in some very unpleasant ways. YEEEEHAW!
And where are we now? A stupid shutdown, over a border wall that will never be built, that Mexico will never fund, because Trump is a liar, a con artist, and too stupid to know that he can't win this hand. I won't rehash yesterday's post here, but the point is, what does this show us? Well, Trump knows he can't fulfill his promise to make Mexico pay. He isn't even trying. He's just lying, and trying to shift the discussion, and get away with sticking us with the bill. What do we learn? Well, his stupidity isn't news, nor is his inability to tell when he can't win. Nor is his dishonesty. What is new and interesting is the fact that he got manipulated into the shutdown, arguably, by conservative media figures. Until a bit before the shutdown, he sounded like he had backed off. Then, he got excoriated by the conservative media, so he went back to demanding a shutdown, in typical Trumpian fashion, as stupidly as possible by saying that he wanted the blame. Wow. Dumbest motherfucker in political history. We have a President who is at the whims, mercy and manipulability of the media. That's... new. And rather scary.
This really is a terrifying level of power for Fox News, conservative talk radio, and the other people who have Trump's attention. The man doesn't have the capacity to think for himself, and he can be goaded into something as stupid and self-defeating as a shutdown. What will the shutdown cost us, in the long-run? Nothing. Yeah, it sucks for the people who aren't getting a paycheck, but the bigger worry is what happens when Fox News demands that he go nuke Belgium because Steve Doocy had a bad Belgian waffle at IHOP. Geneva's next, motherfucker! John Bolton warned us about the UN! We really do need to worry about the Axis of Stupidity.
And of course, we have to bring things around to Russia and the Mueller investigation. What have we learned? Well, Mueller runs a tight ship, so all we have really learned is what has come out in the indictments. And there's more to come. Look, I said back in my 2017 wrap-up post that nothing will ever get the GOP to turn on Trump, and I think I continue to be vindicated on that point at every turn. They will never, under any circumstances, turn on Trump. Stop asking about impeachment, the 25th Amendment, or any of that shit. Ain't gonna happen, no way, no how. Not one, single, solitary Republican at the congressional or Cabinet level will ever turn on Trump.
Until they're fired and/or indicted, at which point, they don't count. Hi, boys! How ya' doin' with those gymnastics exercises?
This is just an annual wrap-up post, and I couldn't even begin to cover all of the revelations we've had about Trump's criminality that have come out this year. Remember how he got all his money by funneling it illegally from daddy without paying any taxes, and all of that business crap was bullshit?
Oh, who cares about that. What we really want to know is what's going on with Russia, Roger Stone, Jerome Corsi, Flynn, Manafort...
… Michael Cohen...
Let's just skip to Cohen because of the most recent news. Cohen pled guilty to buying women's silence, for campaign purposes, and not reporting it. That's a campaign finance violation, and you've got a mess of stuff there implicating Trump in some federal crimes. In the federal paperwork. And it's pretty damned solid. And that's the minor, petty stuff. It looks like Cohen's cell phone can be traced to Prague for that meeting with Russian spies, which was mentioned in the Steele dossier. Cohen, and the Trump people have always said that Cohen has never, in his life, been to Prague, and tried to use that to discredit the Steele dossier. If Cohen was there, that raises some big questions, like... what was he doing, and why lie? The likely answer: colluding like a colluder. He was Trump's go-between with the Russians. Most likely. Could be business-related. Could be blackmail. Who the fuck knows? Right now, it's a cell phone ping, but the ferocity of the lie makes it look like something really big was going on. Like... Steele was onto something. Add in the fact that Corsi and Stone were Trump's go-betweens with WikiLeaks, knowing full-well that the DNC emails were stolen by Russia, and if you still think Trump and his people are innocent of "criminal conspiracy," you are what Tillerson called Trump: "a fucking moron." Note the phrase, "criminal conspiracy," rather than, "collusion," because there isn't a federal crime called, "collusion." Don't get bogged down in Trump's bullshit rhetoric. Criminal conspiracy. Cohen was in Prague exactly when Steele said. If he kept lying about it for that long... why? Probably for the same reason that Corsi and Stone were doing what they were doing. And that's without getting into Manafort, Don Jr., or any of the other Russia-compromised actors in Trump's circle. (Isn't that pretty much all of them?)
So, we know a lot more about how deep Trump's campaign ties to Russia went.
And none of this will matter. The probability of an impeachment is absolute, mathematical zero. The probability of Trump facing any criminal charges, ever, for anything, is an absolute, mathematical zero. I keep writing about my general philosophy of a Bayesian approach to statistics. That means you begin with a "prior" probability-- an assessment of the likelihood that a statement is true, given some baseline level of uncertainty. Then, you update your level of certainty as new information becomes available. You may notice that I am not updating my probability that Trump gets impeached or otherwise removed from office. Why not? For the same reason that I don't update my probabilistic assessment that 2+2=4. It isn't a statement subject to uncertainty, so new information cannot affect my assessment of its likelihood of being true. There is no mathematical chance at all, in the universe, for Trump to be impeached, or removed through the 25th Amendment. He could strip naked and run screaming through the streets, with a tin foil hat on his head, ranting about how Mueller is using mind control rays because he is secretly the leader of the Lizard People, and everyone needs to burn their houses down and eat their own shit* to immunize themselves from Mueller's mind control rays. Would that get the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment? No. Fox News and congressional Republicans would demand an investigation into whether or not Mueller really is a Lizard Person. And everyone on Fox News would be wearing tin foil hats while issuing the demand.
So I return to the comments I made in my 2017 wrap-up post. The crumbling rule of law. As more and more evidence has been revealed about Trump's criminality, what has the GOP done? It has circled the wagons ever more tightly around Trump. Again, my point is not that the crumbling rule of law is something new to 2018, but rather that it is something that should have been known, but that has been laid bare by the events of 2018. 2018 was the year it should have become clear that the rule of law doesn't exist in the United States of America.
The law constrains politicians only to the degree that politicians allow it to constrain them in a collective way. This is especially true at the level of the presidency. Presidents can be removed through impeachment, but that requires a supermajority vote, and political dialog, according to conventional norms, requires most of punditry to treat any claim as at least semi-legitimate if an entire party makes it. I'm going to go ahead and say that 2+2= 345 is wrong, and anyone who says otherwise, well, I'm not a eugenicist, but I do worry about Idiocracy. May I interest you in some birth control? However, political norms require us to say that if one party unifies around the 345 answer, we have to pretend like it isn't idiotic fucking bullshit, and that arithmetic is debatable. This creates a hole in the concept of the rule of law. Rule of law depends on bipartisan support for the enforcement of the law because of supermajority requirements. If a party decides it wants to be immune from the law, all it has to do is to say, en masse, that its politicians are all innocent, no matter what the facts are. By getting everyone to go along with this bullshit, they make the concept of the law a debatable proposition, and political norms then require everyone to treat 2+2 as potentially equaling 345. Rule of law ceases to be possible, simply because one party decides it wants to be immune from it. That party is the Republican Party. They have decided that, no matter what information is revealed about Trump's criminality, he will lie, and they will support those lies, thereby allowing any criminality to go unpunished because the concept of the law becomes a partisan dispute.
This is a glitch in the system. It comes from a combination of supermajoritarian requirements, political norms, and general stupidity. Could we get rid of supermajoritarian requirements for impeachment? No confidence votes on a bare majority? It might not be a bad idea, even though it'll never, ever happen. It would make things more fluid, but how much more chaotic can things get? The problem of norms? That's actually harder. How do you deal with the problem that people assume, inappropriately, that any claim made by an entire party should be taken seriously? I don't know, but that claim is no longer sustainable when a party goes as crazy as the GOP has.
I won't even pretend to know a fix here, but the basic point is that 2018 has made it truly apparent how flimsy the rule of law was. Install the most crooked politician in history as president, and as long as his party decides that they are afraid of the electoral backlash that would come from nationwide acceptance of his guilt, they'll do anything to cover up and obfuscate his guilt, thereby undermining the concept of the rule of law. The cowardice and cravenness of the congressional GOP as we have seen in 2018 has put a lot of this in perspective.
That may be the real story of 2018-- the immovability of Republican support for Trump, in the face of the worst corruption in American history, and what that means. The end of any pretense to the rule of law.
*This would, at least, explain Doocy's bad Belgian waffle.