Trump to Hold Next Rally in Bunker

Satire from The Borowitz Report, by Andy Borowitz:

TULSA (The Borowitz Report)—Stung by the paltry turnout at his Saturday-night rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Donald J. Trump’s campaign has announced plans to hold his next rally in the bunker beneath the White House.

In announcing the rally, Brad Parscale, the chairman of Trump’s reëlection campaign, denied that the choice of venue reflected a tepid level of enthusiasm to see the candidate speak.

“The bunker holds forty people,” Parscale said. “That is a much larger seating capacity than Joe Biden’s basement.”

Despite the choice of such an intimate venue, however, Trump campaign sources are privately worried that they may have difficulty filling the bunker.

According to one source, Jared Kushner spent all of Sunday morning on the phone begging people to attend the bunker rally.

“All of Jared’s friends said they’re coming, so that’s five seats right there,” the source said.

Yeah, Jared. All of Them Handpicked by Trump.

From the NYT:

Mr. Kushner, who has been overseeing Mr. Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign, has generally stayed quiet on the impeachment investigation. On Wednesday, he waved away the impeachment proceedings as “silliness” and said he preferred working on immigration reform and infrastructure.

Mr. Kushner also noted that over his three years in government, the White House has “cycled out a lot of bad people,” but he declined to name names.

 

Jared Kushner Sounds Like Three Geese Trying to Honk the “Messiah”

From Esquire, by Charles P. Pierce:

In the annals of terrible White House staff work, the decision to send Jared Kushner out there alone and unarmed against Jonathan Swan of Axios is going to rank right up there with Alexander Haig’s one-man coup d’etat after Ronald Reagan was shot. When he was not being transparently ill-informed, the Dauphin was being transparently dishonest. And in all cases, he looked like a misbegotten princeling in some kind of weird internal exile, one with pool privileges, private jets, and the ability to speak for a country he can’t begin to understand.

The sad point behind this debacle is this: Jared Kushner doesn’t care if he sounds like three geese trying to honk the Messiah. He doesn’t care that he’s supposed to be doing all these important jobs and clearly doesn’t know any more about the Middle East than he knows about the sacrificial rituals of the Aztecs. This is not a drawback in anyone’s effort to rise in this administration*. Marry the boss’s daughter is an extra, for sure. But this guy was born to be a Trump.

I Love This.

From The New Yorker:

“Cool, I got an official White House security clearance!”

Cut Them Some Slack. They’re Just a Couple of Kids.

From the Washington Post:

White House officials said there has been a deliberate effort during the Khashoggi controversy to sideline Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and adviser, who has developed a strong relationship with MBS. Trump has grown frustrated with Kushner, White House officials said, though he offered his son-in-law some support in the Post interview.

“Jared doesn’t do business with Saudi Arabia. They’re two young guys. Jared doesn’t know him well or anything,” he said. “They are just two young people. They are the same age. They like each other I believe. Jared has done a very good job. I think he’ll make peace with Israel. But there are a lot of setbacks. This is a setback for that.”

(From The Onion)

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ History Lesson

From CNN:

During the meeting with interns, Kushner additionally touched on the issue of brokering a peace deal in the Middle East — a task given to him by Trump.

In audio obtained by Wired, Kushner talked at length about how he’s been approaching the role, saying it’s a very “emotionally charged situation” that he’s tried to read and to meet with many people about.

“Everyone finds an issue, that, ‘You have to understand what they did then’ and ‘You have to understand that they did this.’ But how does that help us get peace? Let’s not focus on that. We don’t want a history lesson. We’ve read enough books. Let’s focus on how do you come up with a conclusion to the situation,” he said.

Aw, Cut Them Some Slack. They Were New to This.

From CNN:

Following his release on Twitter of the email exchange between himself and Goldstone, Trump Jr. did an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, a staunch supporter of the President. Trump Jr. said he would be willing to go under oath to speak about the meeting.

Sekulow [President Trump’s lawyer] pointed to Trump Jr.’s comments in the interview that he had now disclosed everything about the meeting.

“I think it speaks for itself,” Sekulow said.

Sekulow also maintained the meeting was legal and said people should not criticize the Trump campaign members for attending the meeting given the breakneck speed of the presidential campaign.

“I don’t think that’s fair to Donald Trump Jr., to Jared Kushner or to Manafort for that matter,” Sekulow said.

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Poor Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort. How can we expect them to know it’s illegal to conspire with a hostile foreign power in order to win an election? These guys were just babes in the woods caught up in the dizzying election campaign and it’s very unfair to hold them accountable.

Y’all should be ashamed of yourselves. Until the next shoe drops.

Hell Has Officially Frozen Over: I Agree with Charles Krauthammer.

From his column in the Washington Post:

“The Russia scandal has entered a new phase, and there’s no going back.

For six months, the White House claimed that this scandal was nothing more than innuendo about Trump campaign collusion with Russia in meddling in the 2016 election. Innuendo for which no concrete evidence had been produced.

Yes, there were several meetings with Russian officials, some only belatedly disclosed. But that is circumstantial evidence at best. Meetings tell you nothing unless you know what happened in them. We didn’t. Some of these were casual encounters in large groups, like the famous July 2016 Kislyak-Sessions exchange of pleasantries at the Republican National Convention. Big deal.

I was puzzled. Lots of coverup, but where was the crime? Not even a third-rate burglary. For six months, smoke without fire. Yes, President Trump himself was acting very defensively, as if he were hiding something. But no one ever produced the something.

My view was: Collusion? I just don’t see it. But I’m open to empirical evidence. Show me.

The evidence is now shown. This is not hearsay, not fake news, not unsourced leaks. This is an email chain released by Donald Trump Jr. himself. A British go-between writes that there’s a Russian government effort to help Trump Sr. win the election, and as part of that effort he proposes a meeting with a “Russian government attorney” possessing damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Moreover, the Kremlin is willing to share troves of incriminating documents from the Crown Prosecutor. (Error: Britain has a Crown Prosecutor. Russia has a Prosecutor General.)

Donald Jr. emails back. “I love it.” Fatal words.

Once you’ve said “I’m in,” it makes no difference that the meeting was a bust, that the intermediary brought no such goods. What matters is what Donald Jr. thought going into the meeting, as well as Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, who were forwarded the correspondence, invited to the meeting, and attended.

“It was literally just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame,” Donald Jr. told Sean Hannity. A shame? On the contrary, a stroke of luck. Had the lawyer real stuff to deliver, Donald Jr. and the others would be in far deeper legal trouble. It turned out to be incompetent collusion, amateur collusion, comically failed collusion. That does not erase the fact that three top Trump campaign officials were ready to play.

It may turn out that they did later collaborate more fruitfully. We don’t know. But even if nothing else is found, the evidence is damning.

It’s rather pathetic to hear Trump apologists protesting that it’s no big deal because we Americans are always intervening in other people’s elections, and they in ours. You don’t have to go back to the ’40s and ’50s when the CIA intervened in France and Italy to keep the communists from coming to power. What about the Obama administration’s blatant interference to try to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu in the latest Israeli election? One might even add the work of groups supported by the U.S. during Russian parliamentary elections — the very origin of Vladimir Putin’s deep animus toward Clinton, then secretary of state, whom he accuses of having orchestrated the opposition.

This defense is pathetic for two reasons. First, have the Trumpites not been telling us for six months that no collusion ever happened? And now they say: Sure it happened. So what? Everyone does it.

What’s left of your credibility when you make such a casual about-face?

Second, no, not everyone does it. It’s one thing to be open to opposition research dug up in Indiana. But not dirt from Russia, a hostile foreign power that has repeatedly invaded its neighbors (Georgia, Crimea, eastern Ukraine), that buzzes our planes and ships in international waters, that opposes our every move and objective around the globe. Just last week the Kremlin killed additional U.N. sanctions we were looking to impose on North Korea for its ICBM test.

There is no statute against helping a foreign hostile power meddle in an American election. What Donald Jr. — and Kushner and Manafort — did may not be criminal. But it is not merely stupid. It is also deeply wrong, a fundamental violation of any code of civic honor.

I leave it to the lawyers to adjudicate the legalities of unconsummated collusion. But you don’t need a lawyer to see that the Trump defense — collusion as a desperate Democratic fiction designed to explain away a lost election — is now officially dead.”