Trump New Lows Tracker. Bulletin No. 8 (Nos. 34-39)

After the last New Lows Tracker was published on June 20, our wayward president did not rest idle. On the contrary, the usual rhythm prevailed: After each New Low, one seldom had to wait long for the arrival of the next. And, with the election campaign heating up, the pace will doubtless accelerate, so this seemed a good moment get caught up with a few of the highlights.

No. 34. Trump and Roger Stone. New Low No. 23, described Trump’s attacks on the court and the jury in the Stone case but noted that, unless Trump intervened with a pardon, Stone was finally headed for prison. Trump did intervene, on July 11, not with a pardon but the next best thing from Stone’s point of view, a commutation of his sentence. As the Washington Post observed, “The president may have had the power to help his longtime friend. But that does not make it any less a perversion of justice — indeed, it is one of the most nauseating instances of corrupt government favoritism the United States has ever seen.”

To be clear, the commutation was not merely favoritism for a friend, but carried the distinct aroma of a payoff. In Lawfare, Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes spelled out the evidence of Stone’s role as a go-between for Trump with Wikileaks, as well as the impact of Stone’s lies on the Mueller investigation. They summed it up:

Roger Stone isn’t just Trump’s confidante or friend. According to newly unsealed material in the Mueller report, he’s also a person who had the power to reveal to investigators that Trump likely lied to Mueller—and to whom Trump publicly dangled rewards if Stone refused to provide Mueller with that information. Now, it seems, the president is making good on that promise.

David Frum in the Atlantic added further details:

Just today, this very day, Stone told the journalist Howard Fineman why he lied and whom he was protecting. “He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t.” You read that, and you blink. As the prominent Trump critic George Conway tweeted: “I mean, even Tony Soprano would have used only a pay phone or burner phone to say something like this.” 

No. 35. Trump and Michael Flynn. On July 15, only a few days after Trump commuted Roger Stone’s sentence, he told Catherine Herridge of CBS that he would welcome Michael Flynn back to the White House. Flynn, it will be recalled, served briefly as Trump’s National Security Adviser before Trump personally fired him for lying to Vice President Pence about Flynn’s conversations with Russian Ambassador Kislyak. Flynn later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI on the same subject, but Trump told Herridge that he would welcome Flynn back to a position in the White House:

I would. I think he’s a great gentleman. He’s a great — he’s been in the military for many, many decades, actually. Highly respected. What General Flynn went through is so unfair.”

At the time of Trump’s praise of Flynn, it appeared that, through the effort of Trump’s ever helpful Attorney General, Bill Barr, Flynn might be able to escape the legal consequences of his lying to the FBI. Despite Flynn’s guilty plea, Barr’s DOJ filed a motion to dismiss the charges against Flynn and a panel of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals ordered a reluctant trial judge, Emmet Sullivan, to grant the motion. Subsequently, however, on August 31, the full court ruled that Judge Sullivan was permitted to inquire into the basis for the DOJ motion. Judge Sullivan has scheduled a hearing on the DOJ motion for September 29. It remains unlikely that Flynn will end up spending any time in jail—Trump will no doubt step in with a pardon if necessary. Still, the hearing before Judge Sullivan may be illuminating and it is unlikely to burnish Flynn’s credentials for a return to the White House.

No. 36. Trump and Russia. It was widely reported that, according to U.S intelligence agencies, a Russian agency had offered bounties to the Taliban for killing Americans. Yet, Trump remained dismissive of the subject. In a July 1 tweet, he shrugged off the bounty issue as “just another made up by Fake News tale that is told only to damage me and the Republican Party.”

On the other hand, the Washington Post reported on July 1 that according to the National Security Adviser, Robert O’Brien, senior intelligence officials “viewed the information as credible enough to warn the Pentagon and allies so they could ensure they had measures in place to protect their forces in Afghanistan, and to begin developing options for responding to the Russian operation.” In addition, the Times reported that in a phone call with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei V. Lavrov on July 13, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sternly warned Lavrov “against Moscow paying bounties to Taliban-linked militants and other Afghan fighters for killing American service members.”

Still, Trump himself remained impervious, clinging to a position markedly different from the views of Pompeo and the intelligence community. When questioned in an interview on July 31, Trump said that he had not mentioned the bounties in a July 23 phone call with Vladimir Putin, “No, that was a phone call to discuss other things, and frankly, that’s an issue that many people said was fake news.” As usual, Trump did not identify the “many people” to whom he was referring, but clearly they did not include his own Secretary of State and National Security Advisor.

Trump similarly showed little interest in the poisoning of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny even after Germany, where Navalny had been flown for treatment, determined that he had been poisoned by a military-grade chemical nerve agent used by Russia’s Novichok group. The European Union endorsed the German finding and NATO condemned the attack “in the strongest possible terms” and cited “the use of a nerve agent from the banned Novichok group.” Supporting statements were issued by the U.S. State Department and National Security Council, but Trump himself was determined to waffle, insisting that the United States had no proof yet of what had happened.

Trump’s obeisance to Vladimir Putin was also apparent in two other developments this summer: his sudden order of a major troop reduction in Germany and his failure to express any support for the massive democratic uprising in Belarus against Putin’s beleaguered puppet, Alexander Lukashenko. Trump’s move in Germany drew a stinging rebuke from retired Admiral James Stavridis, former supreme allied commander of NATO, who called it an “outright gift” to Putin. After explaining how it would weaken NATO’s military capability, he further pointed out:

The Russian leader will use this sudden withdrawal to posture at home (“the U.S. is afraid of getting into a war with Russia”), within Europe (“the U.S. really isn’t committed to your defense”), and internationally in the Middle East and elsewhere (“see how fickle the Americans are toward their supposed allies?”).

In the case of the protests in Belarus, Trump supported Putin by his silence. As former Ambassador Daniel B. Baer, wrote in Foreign Policy, “Once more, we have to wonder whether President Donald Trump is more worried about ruffling feathers in Moscow than he is about advancing democratic values and U.S. national security interests.”

Trump’s performance this summer was consistent with his extensive past record in which he has consistently refrained from ever uttering so much as an unkind word about Vladimir Putin. That record was put in sharp relief by a pre-publication excerpt from Bob Woodward’s book, Rage. Woodward writes that Daniel Coats, Trump’s former Director of National Intelligence,”continued to harbor the secret belief, one that had grown rather than lessened, although unsupported by intelligence proof, that Putin had something on Trump.” Woodward continues, writing that Coats felt, “How else to explain the president’s behavior? Coats could see no other explanation.” Alarming as such an assessment is, coming from Trump’s own most senior intelligence official, it tended to get lost in the plethora of revelations from the Woodward book. It deserves more attention from the media, the public–and the Biden-Harris campaign.

No. 37. Trump and QAnon. As I have previously reported, QAnon consists of a collection of lunatic, but toxic conspiracy theories that has has come to have an increasing presence at Trump rallies and in the Republican Party. On August 19, Trump was asked about QAnon and gave a deeply troubling response. As reported in the Wall Street Journal:

President Trump welcomed the support of followers of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory Wednesday, saying he knew little about the theory but suggesting that those who subscribe to it are patriots who back his presidency.

During a White House press briefing, Mr. Trump said: “I’ve heard these are people that love our country.”

He added: “I don’t really know anything about it, except that they do supposedly like me.”

QAnon is a far right-wing, loosely organized network and community of believers who embrace a range of unsubstantiated theories. These views center around the tenet that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles have long controlled much of the “deep state” government, which they say seeks to undermine Mr. Trump.

Trump’s professed lack of any specific knowledge about QAnon was at best disingenuous, given its prominence at Trump rallies and the increasing publicity it has finally received in the mainstream media. Notably, Trump has also praised two Republican winners of Congressional primaries who have supported QAnon, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Laura Loomer of Florida. And the redoubtable Michael Flynn, while hoping to escape from Judge Emmet Sullivan’s courtroom and to rejoin the White House staff, posted a video on YouTube showing his recital of the QAnon pledge “Where we go one, we go all.)

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris should not let Trump’s dalliance with QAnon pass unnoticed.

No. 38. Trump and the Military. In 2018, Trump traveled to Paris for ceremonies commemorating military sacrifices in World War I. Yet, on the trip, Trump canceled a scheduled visit to a ceremony outside Paris honoring Marines killed in a celebrated battle at Belleau Wood. Although heavy rain was cited as reason, leaders from other countries, as well as senior American officials all managed to attend, and Trump’s absence was conspicuous. A September 3 article in the Atlantic by editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg offered an explanation:

Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

Although Trump emphatically disputed the comments attributed to him, Goldberg is a highly respected journalist and Trump’s belittling of military heroes (most notoriously John McCain) was nothing new for him. Indeed, my personal reaction to friends when the piece appeared was that “The most shocking thing about this article is that there is nothing particularly surprising in it.” When the military reporter for Fox News, Jennifer Griffin, confirmed key aspects of the Atlantic article, Trump predictably demanded that she be fired. Griffin, however, was vigorously defended by several colleagues and Fox has, thus far, resisted Trump’s demand.

A few days later, Trump cast an appalling slur on the motivation of Pentagon leadership: “I’m not saying the military is in love with me; the soldiers are,” Trump said at a news conference. “The top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.” It was an odd complaint from an eager salesman of armaments to dubious customers such as Mohammed Bin Salman. In any event, the comment reportedly drew incensed phone calls to the White House from Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mark Milley and Army Chief of Staff, Gen. James C. McConville, even offered a public rebuke to the assertion that private companies could influence decisions to take military action. He stated strongly that “senior leaders would only recommend sending troops to combat when it’s required for national security and a last resort.” (As for soldiers loving Trump, a Military Times poll in August showed that the troops favored Biden 41% to 37%.)

No. 39. Trump’s Nevada Rally. On September 13, Trump held an indoor rally in Henderson, Nevada in clear violation of the state’s law limiting public gatherings to 50 or fewer people. Few of the attendees wore masks and social distancing was observed only in its absence. It is inevitable that, like Trump’s earlier Tulsa rally, it will spawn Covid-19 infections not only among the reckless participants but among their families, friends and business and social contacts. The only question is how many will be infected and how many will die, all in the cause of pumping up the Trump ego.

There are other candidates for designation as a New Low, but with deference to the stamina of readers, I will only mention briefly a few:

–Citing with approval a doctor, Stella Immanual, a proponent of various bizarre medical theories. When Trump was questioned about it at a press conference on July 29, he abruptly ended the conference.

–Making the inane and despicable claim on August 7 that Joe Biden would “hurt the bible, hurt God.”

–Lashing out at the Supreme Court on August 10, after decisions he didn’t like concerning the DACA program and the protection of gay and transgender individuals under the Civil Rights Act. In both cases, the majority opinions were written by Republican appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Gorsuch respectively. Yet Trump tweeted “These horrible & politically charged decisions coming out of the Supreme Court are shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives.” In a second tweet, Trump whined plaintively: “Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?”

–Admitting on August 13 that he opposed funding for the Postal Service because it could allow more people to vote by mail. As noted in the Washington Post, “The president has also previously admitted that he believes mail voting would allow more Democrats to cast ballots and hurt Republican candidates, including himself.”

–Claiming on September 10 that we have “rounded the final turn” on the coronavirus pandemic. The Woodward book exposed the gulf between what Trump knew and what he would say to the public in order to “play down” the crisis. Trump’s statement on September 10 showed that he is a recidivist, still hopelessly addicted to the play down gambit. In this case, the indomitable Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, whose knowledge and integrity are matched by his fortitude, stepped up to apply a corrective. “I have to disagree with that, because if you look at the statistics, they are disturbing. We’re plateauing at around 40,000 cases a day. And the deaths are around a thousand.”

The schedule of New Lows cited here is not exhaustive and, as in the past, readers are invited to submit additional nominations. In any case, we can all be sure that more will be arriving soon.