Calamities are coming faster
In the course of a week, President Donald Trump convulsed the markets and American business with a protectionist initiative which, if carried out, risks setting off a trade war. He scrambled Republicans by promising to back a bunch of gun measures he probably doesn’t intend to back once his aides explain that the National Rifle Association and his base oppose most of what he embraced. And he refused to empower his national security team to protect our election system against future manipulation by Russia.
Speaking of which, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is, according to NBC News, “assembling a case for criminal charges against Russians who carried out the hacking and leaking of private information designed to hurt Democrats in the 2016 election.” Even more alarming—given Trump’s invitation for Russia to hack into Hillary Clinton’s emails and the attendees of the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower designed to get “dirt” on her—“one source suggested that a new indictment could include unnamed American co-conspirators as part of a strategy to pressure those involved to cooperate.”
Collusion may begin to show up in indictments.
Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner (who attended that Trump Tower meeting with Russians) lost his top-secret-level interim security clearance and was found to have received hundreds of millions of dollars ($184 million from Apollo Global Management and $325 million from Citigroup) in business loans after meeting with top executives at the White House.
Now Ivanka is potentially in hot water as well. CNN reports that U.S. counter-intelligence officials are scrutinizing one of Ivanka Trump’s international business deals, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
Meanwhile, Trump is back to publicly berating Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who responded with a pointed statement—then went out to dinner with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein in a very public sign of solidarity.
Anyone who is surprised by the utter chaos, the ethical sleaze, the policy incoherence and the nepotism/cronyism was not paying attention during Trump’s career in real estate or during his campaign. This is how Trump ran his family operation, stumbling through one failed venture after another. This is how Trump wound up declaring bankruptcy multiple times. No one—not John Kelly, Ivanka, Jared, the GOP Congress—can keep him on task. Trump is still indifferent to learning policy and is prone to prattle in public about subjects he doesn’t bother to study.
Republicans who empowered him and refused to stand up to him have a giant mess on their hands—a dysfunctional government and a looming electoral disaster. Trump will either be compelled to leave office or will continue to spin out of control. Aides tell the press this is a new level of chaos. Don’t worry. It’ll get worse.