Republican Views of the Steele Dossier

So, let me return to the subject of the Trump investigation.  Republican consensus is unanimous that, seeing Russian attempts to rig the election in favor of Trump and strange ties to Russia by numerous members of the Trump campaign, any investigation of whether these things were related should have been absolutely off the table. 

But above all else, Republicans unanimously condemn the Steele Dossier.  They disagree on whether it is acceptable to accept dirt from foreign operatives, but all agree that one way or the other, the Steele Dossier is definitely worse than the Trump Tower meeting, and that while the Trump Tower meeting may have been attempted collision with the Russians, the Steele Dossier was actual collusion.

This is a remarkable conclusion to reach.  The position here appears to be that if the Clinton campaign had wanted to investigate whether Donald Trump had suspicious business dealing with Russia, any talking to real live Russians should have been out of the question.  How you are supposed to learn about Trump's dealings in Russia while scrupulously avoiding talking to Russians is rather less than clear.  At another link I cannot find someone compared this to a candidate suspected of ties to organized crime.  The Republican viewpoint, if taken seriously, would say that a political opponent must not hire a retired cop to talk to his tipsters and inside sources, and that to do so is exactly equivalent to accepting help from organized crime directly.

Well, what about the ban on accepting assistance in campaigns from foreigners, Trump supporters ask.  If assistance includes opposition research, doesn't the ban apply to allies as well as adversaries? Here I must confess to ignorance.  I know that Christopher Steele was not working for the Democratic Party directly.  Rather, the Democratic Party hired Fusion GPS to do opposition research and Fusion GPS hired Steele, not telling him who their client was.  Whether the Democratic Party was aware who Fusion GPS hired is not clear, though as I understand it, the usual practice is not to ask opposition researchers too many questions where they are getting their information.  Is this a sufficient laundering of the information to make it legal?  I don't know, but presumably the parties involved knew enough about the letter of the law to stay within it.  Is accepting such information as legal so long as it is laundered through an opposition research firm that doesn't reveal its sources and methods hypocritical?  Yes, obviously, but them's the breaks. 

It also appears that Fusion GPS is considered "reputable" within the sleazy bounds of opposition research, meaning, at a minimum, that they do not resort to Watergate-style illegality such as break-ins or wire tapping.  They do milk the rumor mill, a perfectly legitimate beginning for gathering information.  What Steele was doing was milking a particular rumor mill -- the Russian rumor mill.  This opens him up to two absolutely reasonable forms of criticism.  One is that milking the rumor mill is not a reliable source of information, and that all sorts of unverified gossip could have found its way into his report.  The other is that the Russians may have figured out what he was up to and seeded the report with deliberate misinformation.  This probability seems a lot stronger since the revelation that Steele and Bruce Ohr, his contact in the FBI has been cultivating Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska as an informant.  Deripaska is widely believed to be Paul Manafort's handler and assumed to have passed everything he heard up the chain.  So there is, indeed, a strong probability that the Steele Dossier was deliberately seeded with false information.

But this does not appear to be what Republicans are alleging.  Republicans are alleging, not merely that Steele may have been played for a fool, or that as an seasoned intelligence agent, he may be unable to admit that to himself.  What Republicans are alleging appears to be that Steele, the Clinton campaign, the Deep State, and the Russians deliberately worked together to concoct the dossier in order to slander Trump.  There is no evidence for this belief whatever. 

Furthermore, it makes no sense.  Why would the Russians go to such lengths to slander Trump even as they were attempting to rig the election in his favor?  The usual answer is so the could then use the information to undermine if in case he won the election.

Why would Steele, hitherto a reliable and reputable source of intelligence, suddenly start fabricating?  The usual answer given is out of hostility to Trump.  But this is to reverse any common sense line of causation.  It assumes that Steele, as a Briton, had such a strong dislike for a US candidate that he would go to extraordinary lengths to fabricate a dossier against him.  Surely a more plausible explanation is that Steele, investigating Trump's ties to Russia, came across evidence (real or fabricated) of conspiracy and as a result became strongly hostile to him.  Republicans seem to believe that researchers (and FBI agents) should be will-less automatons, unaffected by anything they may discover.

Finally, why would Clinton and the Deep State go to such lengths to concoct a slander and then keep it secret?  The usual answer given is that they expected Clinton to win anyhow and were simply keeping the dossier in reserve as an "insurance policy" against Trump winning.  This seems wildly improbable.  People don't go to such lengths to fabricate materials they don't expect to use.  Even if the Clinton campaign and the Deep State expected her to win, why not use of the information they supposedly went to such lengths to fabricate to make that probability a certainty?  Leaking even a small portion of the dossier (and any veteran campaign knows how to make such leaks while maintaining plausible deniability) could have gone a long way towards countering the horror over the security threat posed by Clinton's e-mails.  The FBI was already indirectly aiding the Trump campaign by revealing that it was investigating Clinton while keeping its investigation of Trump a secret.*  Above all else, when Comey's announcement that the FBI was reopening its investigation into the Clinton e-mails caused her numbers to tank, why didn't attempt to offset by announcing that Trump was also under investigation.  Note here that I am not seeing he should have done so.  But if there was truly a Deep State plot against Trump, then to all appearances the announcement was seriously undermining it.  Wouldn't one expect the Deep State to bring out its heavy artillery when faced with the real chance of failure?

What actually happened was much simpler.  The Clinton campaign, and many media outlets received the Steele Dossier.  However, what that had was pure rumor.  Neither the campaign nor the media, with two notable exceptions,** published the report because there was not enough evidence to support it.  The FBI did not reveal that it was investigating Trump because its normal practice is not to reveal counterintelligence investigations lest it jeopardize them.  So the public went to the polls believing one candidate was under FBI investigation, and that the investigation had recently been reopened, while unaware that the other was under investigation at all.  And ever since then Trump and his supporters have been claiming the Deep State was out to get him because it investigated at all.

I have quoted this article before and I will quote it again:

Trump’s position, and the consensus position of the conservative movement, is that, having become aware of a foreign intelligence service’s successful efforts to infiltrate a major party presidential campaign, the FBI should have done nothing about it, because the campaign in question happened to be a Republican one.

. . . . . . .

Where Trump’s campaign was open for business with high-bidding autocrats, the people who saw what was happening, and understood it was wrong, didn’t think to rush to the Clinton campaign, or leak their intelligence in a manner designed to maximize harm to Trump. As representatives of a rules-based order, they understood that it was a matter for the FBI, which in turn understood that it had to hold its investigation very tightly, in order to protect the innocent and avoid tampering with the election. (This was a norm and a courtesy that the FBI famously did not offer Hillary Clinton.)

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*And yes, I know they had legitimate reasons for doing so.  The Clinton investigation was of past and well-publicized actions.  The Trump investigation was of ongoing and highly secret actions and might have been jeopardized if it had become public.  But the result, though perhaps inevitable, was no less real for that.
**One report was a Yahoo News Article by investigative reporter Michael Isikoff dated September 23, 2016.  It reported that Carter Page was a businessman with extensive ties to Russia (true) a longstanding Russian apologist (true), and that he had traveled to Moscow in July, 2016 and made a speech at the New Economic School in which he denounces US criticisms of Russia (true).  It also reported that he was believed to have discussed lifting sanctions with Igor Sechin, chairman of Rosneft oil company and Russian official Igor Divekin.  The source of this report was Michael Steele, although the author appears to have spoken with officials in Congress and implied that those officials were his source.  The article did not attract significant attention at the time.  The other, better known report David Corn, writing for Mother Jones.  reported that an unnamed "former Western intelligence officer" deemed a credible source had found evidence that Trump was directly conspiring with the Russians.  The report was extremely vague about details, saying only that “[T]here was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit,” that the “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance,” that Trump “and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals,” that Trump had been "compromised" and could be blackmailed.  Emphasis was more on the existence of the dossier than its contents.  Coming as it did right after Comey's announcement that he had reopened the Clinton investigation, it looked like the flailing of a desperate campaign in trouble.  But Corn's source does not appear to have been either the Clinton campaign or the FBI, but Steele.

Where is the Heartland of Real America?

I don't know why and am writing on this but the map below is taken from this article arguing that the real divide in whether people support or oppose Trump is not rural-urban, but based on the "eleven nations" named in the map below, and explained in greater detail in the article.

The article called most maps breaking down the vote by counties, or by precincts, etc. as misleading, which they certainly are.  Such maps are misleading because they create the impression of a vast Republic sea with only a few tiny democratic islands, ignoring the difference in population density.  It claims that the map below, which breaks down the vote by regions, conveys a more accurate picture.

The map below has obvious problems like, for instance, showing Clinton winning Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania when she quite notoriously didn't.  It ignores the rural-urban divide, which is very real.  But I do think the map is revealing for another reason.

The map is revealing, I think, because it reveals a certain dispute between Trump supporters and media elites about where the mythical "Real America" is located, and also why the geography of Trump's win was such a shock.

There is plenty that both groups agree on.  Both agree that the New York to Washington corridor is definitely not part of Real America.  Though less clear, they would probably agree that New England and the West Coast are also not part of Real America, while everything else is at least somewhat real, but not equally real.  Both seem to agree that white voters are more authentic that black or Hispanic voters, that blue collar voters are more authentic than white collar voters, and that small town voters are more authentic than voters in the big cities.  Both also agree that some geographic part of the United States is called the Heartland and is the most authentically Real American part of the country and therefore has the greatest moral weight.

The difference, I believe, is on where this "Heartland" of "authentic Real America" is located.  Looking at the "Eleven Nations" map and its margin of victory, it should surprise exactly no one that Trump's greatest margin of victory was in the area designated as Greater Appalachia.  I would say that Republicans  would identify the Heartland, the most authentically "real American" part of the country entitled to the greatest moral weight with Greater Appalachia.  Other people's authenticity and real American-ness can be measured by the extent to which they adopt the Greater Appalachian culture.

Our media elite, by contrast, have probably written off Greater Appalachia as a hopeless cause and instead locate the Heartland of Real America in the midlands.  If asked which state is most authentically Real American, I am guessing most of our media elite would say Iowa, with strong points for Wisconsin (which they would probably place in the Midlands) and Illinois (the prairie parts of Illinois, that is, not Chicago, although Chicago prides itself in being the biggest city still to be part of Real America).   So it must have come as a shock to see not only Greater Appalachia (clearly a hopeless cause), but much of the Midlands and even parts of Yankeedom (i.e., Michigan and Wisconsin) go over to anyone as obviously unfit to be President as Trump.

The author of the article argues that the rural-urban divide is strongest in the Midlands.  If that is where you locate the Heartland of Real America, it makes sense that you would give that division special emphasis.

And finally, it explains all the articles about journeys to Trump Country to see if people have changed their minds.  Particularly if you associate the Midlands with Real America, it makes sense to scour it to see if the Heartland has come to its senses.  Because only if it does will opposition to Trump carry the real moral conviction that it speaks for Real Americans.

Other Things That Will Not Turn Economic Royalists Against Trump

So, granting all that, what about the other problems with Trump?  My guess is, economic royalists will acknowledge some, not acknowledge others and not see any but one as a deal breaker.

What about the extraordinary levels of dysfunction in the White House?  Ordinary Trump supporters have generally either dismissed that as something that elites get upset about but doesn't affect ordinary Americans, or else applaud it as evidence that Trump is draining the swamp and the swamp is fighting back.  My guess is that economic royalists will incline toward the latter explanation.  Remember, economic royalists oppose any concept of workers' rights beyond the right to quit if the job is unbearable.  To acknowledge any other rights in employees is to restrict the employer's right to deploy resources as the employer sees best.  Thus economic royalists are apt to have a certain perverse approval of an abusive workplace -- it shows power lies where it should and besides, if it was really so bad, why is anyone still there? 

What about pointing out that Trump is not merely an abusive employer, but everyone is at cross-purposes and the White House really is badly managed?  Presumably economic royalists do not approve of workplaces that are so dysfunctional that it interferes with their ability to get the product out.  But government is a different case since the "product" it gets out consists of laws, regulations, and services, all of which royalists disapprove of, so the more inept and dysfunctional the government the better.

What about the threat Trump poses to democracy and the rule of law?  It should be obvious by now that none of that is a deal-breaker so far as economic royalists are concerned.  And, if truth be known, libertarians have always been skeptical of democracy.  After all, if you believe that all government is bad, and democracy is a form of government, then the conclusion about democracy is obvious.  Libertarians are apt to see democracy simply as tyranny of the majority over the minority.  Everyone agrees that there are some minority rights that should be beyond the power of a democratic majority.  Our Bill of Rights protects unpopular religious and political views and guarantees certain criminal procedural rights.*  Economic royalists would simply broaden the areas beyond the authority of a democratic majority to ban all redistributionist taxation and all constraints on profit making.  Within those restrictions, they are presumably all in favor of democracy.  But so long as the people are not willing to accept those restrictions, democracy is not a libertarian priority.

What about the rule of law?  Business needs regular and consistent laws to flourish.  Why aren't economic royalists concerned that Trump seems to see the law as an instrument to shield his friends and harass his opponents, including hostile business interests?  My guess is that to an economic royalist the real problem is that there are too many laws and that if you repealed 90 plus percent of all laws on the books today, the ability to use law to harass opponents would disappear.  Declining to enforce economic regulations, wrecking regulatory agencies by corruption and incompetence, and appointing economic royalist judges to strike down what is left must seem like a good enough start.

Well, what about Trump's deviation from economic royalism?  His immigration crackdown is (at least in theory) a violation of free market principles of labor mobility, and some of it, like his child separation policy, look a whole lot more like despotism in the making than, say, Social Security or Medicare.  I certainly don't think that economic royalists are at all happy about Trump's immigration crackdown.  They just don't see it as a really serious violation of economic liberty, not on a par with, say, requiring employers to use e-verify.  So they are willing to put up with it in return for cutting taxes, gutting regulations, and appointing economic royalists as judges.

What about Trump's protectionist policies?  Why aren't libertarians up in arms about them?  Look, there is ample evidence that economic royalists are not happy with this aspect of the Trump administration.  But compared to a tax cut, regulatory rollback and judicial appointments, they will grit their teeth and bear it.

Well, what about Mike Pence?  He'd make exactly the same judicial appointments (literally, the Federalist Society is the one making the choices; any Republican President would simply rubber stamp them) and support the same tax cuts and regulatory rollback, but without the erratic behavior, with respect for basic rule of law, and maybe even relaxing the protectionism?  I suppose Pence might be less effective at wrecking through corruption and incompetence than Trump and therefore less desirable from an economic royalist perspective.  But presumably the main reason economic royalists show no interest in removing Trump is that the recognize it would involve the Republican Party in an internal war and therefore harm its electoral prospects.

Well, what about the scary revelations in Woodward's new book?  Including the ones that Trump considered preemptive war with North Korea and had to be talked out of a tweet that the North Koreans could have mistaken for an act of war?  My guess is that nuclear war, or even a large-scale conventional war with a significant risk of going nuclear is a deal-breaker for economic royalists.  After all, if you fail to roll back the New Deal this election cycle, you can always live to fight another day.  Nuclear war, on the other hand . . . .  But the good news is that we seem to have moved past the risk of war with North Korea and that, although there is still room for a foreign policy disaster, at least the disaster is not going to go nuclear.

The bad news is that means that nothing is going to be a deal breaker for economic royalists.  Why, they would probably support Trump even if he shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

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*And, I realize, other things that judges have written into it, but more on that later.

Why The Republican Elite Thinks the Judges Make it All Worthwhile

Some people ask if there is any sort of dubious behavior that will lead Republicans to vote against confirming Brett Kavenaugh.  Others complain about how warped Republicans are to put up with Trump and his corruption, dangerously erratic behavior and attempts to subvert the rule of law, all for the sake of tax cuts, regulatory rollback, and federal judges.

To which I can only answer, you don't understand economic royalists.  While the number of true economic royalists in the US is small, they make up basically the entire Republican elite.  From an economic royalist perspective, the US has not been free since 1933.  Ever since the New Deal was implemented, we have existed under the jackboot of despotism.*  Their top priority is therefore rolling back the New Deal.

This has proven problematic.  They had high hopes when Ronald Reagan became President in 1980, but he was thwarted by a Democratic Congress.  They had high hopes when Newt Gingrich took over Congress in 1994, but he was thwarted by a Democratic President.  When Republicans controlled both Congress and the Presidency in 2000, they didn't make any effort whatever and even expanded the abomination by introducing Medicare-D.  The last hope for economic royalists was the Tea Party, which denounced Obama deficits, fought Obamacare, and demanded massive spending cuts, even to the point of threatening a debt ceiling breach.  But the American people reelected Obama and sided with him over the government shutdown and debt ceiling.  And economic royalists were forced to the conclusion that the American people had become hopelessly corrupted, that they would never roll back the New Deal with the elective branches of government, and that their only hope was through the federal courts.  The Federalist Society has assembled an essentially unlimited supply of economic royalist judges and the Republican elite has made no secret that they were holding their noses and voting Trump for one reason only -- federal judges in general and the Supreme Court in particular.**

Trump has not disappointed, and the reason is obvious.  He neither knows nor cares anything whatever about federal judges.  To Donald Trump, judges matter only insofar as they earn him plaudits.  The Federalist Society has a ready-made supply of judges for Trump to appoint, and he earns regular plaudits for doing so.  He can therefore be counted on to appoint economic royalist judges.

There is also the matter of tax cuts and regulatory rollback.  Yes, I know it is ridiculous to applaud tax cuts and be outraged by the deficits that result, but Republicans have been playing this game since Ronald Reagan's day.  To an economic royalist, taxes and deficits are unrelated.  Cutting taxes doesn't increase deficits, it merely returns money to the people who earned it.  The fact that deficits go up just shows that the tax cuts should have been accompanied by spending cuts, but can never call tax cuts into question.  Besides, eventually one of two things will happen.  Either the tax cuts will precipitate a fiscal crisis and force some future government to cut spending, or else there will finally be enough economic royalist judges to to declare all that spending unconstitutional.  Of course, no current office holder wants to still be in office when that happens.

And then, of course, there is regulatory rollback.  The Trump administration is declining to enforce regulations, which is good as far as it goes, but has the disadvantage that some Democratic administration might start enforcing them again.  Better, from an economic royalist perspective, is wrecking the administrative agencies by corruption and incompetence because that will prevent some future Democratic administration from being able to repair those agencies.  But one loophole remains.  Private citizens feeling aggrieved under some regulation may sue for enforcement.  But that just emphasizes the importance of appointing economic royalist judges who will always rule against the regulation and perhaps someday hold regulatory agencies unconstitutional.

So, yes, to an economic royalist these are the truly important things. That is not to say that they like everything about the Trump Administration.  But things that bother journalists may not seem so important to an economic royalist.


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*Some economic royalists may trace our loss of liberty back to the Progressive Era and the first Roosevelt's measures such as the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.  A few may even see the rot as setting in with the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887.  But most, I think can live with these and see the New Deal and when we lost our freedom.

**Social conservatives also voted Trump in hopes that they would like his Supreme Court appointments, but I am more sympathetic  In allowing the New Deal to stand, the Supreme Court is, after all, deferring to the elective branches and the will of the people.  In upholding the rights of unpopular religious and political views, they are following a clear constitutional mandate. But in declaring abortion or gay marriage constitutional rights, the Supreme Court is imposing a political program nowhere mentioned in the Constitution that could not be passed by the ordinary political process.  I intend to write more on this subject in the future.

The Awkward Question of What Trump's Staff Should Be Doing

The shocking-but-not-surprising revelations that people around Trump are thwarting some of his worst impulses raises two serious problems.

One is problem of unelected staffers and bureaucrats thwarting a duly elected President.  To the extent that the bureaucracy upholds the rule of law against Trump's worst impulses, we should certainly applaud it.  But most of the thwarting appears to be taking place either within the realm of foreign policy, where the President's discretionary authority is extremely broad, or in foreign trade, where the law has foolishly delegated way more power to the President than it ought.  This also means, by the way, that electing a Democratic Congress will not make that much difference.  Congress has quite limited power to restrain the President in matters of foreign policy.  And although Congress could hypothetically pass legislation to take back its power on trade, any such law would require enough Republican votes to pass over Trump's veto.

The other problem it raises is the whole the anti-Trump paradox.  Staffers, bureaucrats, and members of Congress of both parties, as well as political activists, very properly want to avoid the sort of catastrophes portrayed in "But her emails."  The best way to keep Trump from breaking free from his minders and causing -- well, maybe we shouldn't think too much about it -- is to remove him in one of the two ways allowed by law -- either by impeachment or by finding him unfit to hold office under the 25th Amendment.

Impeachment requires a majority vote in the House of Representatives and a 2/3 vote in the Senate.  The 25th Amendment requires a majority of the Cabinet and 2/3 of both houses of Congress to vote that the President is incapable of carrying out his duties.  These are high hurdles to meet, incapacity even higher than impeachment, and rightly so.  The will of the people should not be lightly overturned

The will of the people is precisely what is at stake.  The President is impeachable for "Bribery, Treason and other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."  "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" is a vague formulation.  For all intents and purposes, an impeachable offense is whatever public opinion says it is.  And "public opinion" does not mean 50% plus one.  It means a very strong consensus in favor of impeachment.  The Zero Percent Approval Rating is not a thing in real life, but by the time Nixon was impeached, his approval rating was at 24%.  It will not be possible to remove Trump from office without significant Republican cooperation.  That is not going to happen until a significant portion of the Republican public turns against him.  In these highly polarized times, Donald Trump could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and most Republicans would not consider it an impeachable offense.

The only thing that could bring Trump's approval rating into impeachment-grade territory is if he actually harms his loyal followers.  Unfortunately, there is no way for him to do that without harming a great many innocent bystanders in the process.  This commentator makes something like that point:

[A]re senior officials who steal memos and thwart orders from the president actually doing more harm than good by screening the ‘real’ Trump from the democracy that has to live with its choices, and choose again in two years?

Two responses illustrated the dilemma well.  One answered:  "Yes. Same as enablers of alcoholics who keep them from facing natural consequences until a catastrophe happens."  To which another replied, "There's a difference between someone who shields an alcoholic from embarrassment or ridicule, Verses someone with the good sense to hide the keys to the car."

I would agree.  You hope that alcoholics facing the consequences of their drinking will finally decide to quit.  If the alcoholic causes an accident and is killed, all such hope vanishes.  And, worse, yet, the alcoholic is risking not only his or her own life by driving drunk, but the lives of innocent bystanders.

So, what price respecting the will of the people in choosing their duly elected leader?  And what price in allowing the leader to show himself for what he is and prove the need to get rid of him? I am not talking now about Congress declining to pass his agenda, bureaucracies in following the law instead of his whims, or courts striking down illegal actions.  I am talking about top-ranking staffers illegally thwarting the lawful actions of a duly elected President.

Well, looking at the actions that we now know about:

• Withdrawing from NAFTA, which could spark a diplomatic and economic crisis.  I would say let him proceed.  An economic crisis, quite unnecessarily created, is just what is needed to get the attention of Trump's followers.  I am confident that any economic and diplomatic crisis created would be recoverable.  Granted, a lot of innocent Canadians and Mexicans would suffer, but this is the sort of lesser crisis I would be willing to tolerate now to avoid a worse crisis in the future.
• Trade war with China.  Let him proceed.  We are there already.  It is not creating a crisis, but is causing problems.  Let them get worse.
• Invading Venezuela.  I do not have a clear sense of how this would end up.  Would there be Iraqi-style resistance, or merely a godawful mess that was now our responsibility, and with the least competent administration ever in charge?  On the one hand, my guess is the damage would be limited by Trump getting bored and soon leaving.  On the other hand, I suspect this would be the sort of thing that causes serious damage to the invaded country but not much at home.  Is that a good reason to approve or disapprove?
• Cutting off aid to Pakistan.  I don't know enough to have an opinion here.
• Withdrawing from the free trade pact with South Korea and/or withdrawing our troops.  There was an excellent explanation of why this is a serious threat to national security, and why preventing it was such a high priority.
• Large-scale intervention in Syria.  I plan to do a whole post on this.
• Preventive war against North Korea.  Yikes! Absolutely, I am in favor of staff intervening with our President to stop this.  I don't care about legal nicities here; I just want to avoid nuclear war.

And one final thought.  Some might ask, is it worth removing Trump from office if Mike Pence will take his place.  I would say, see all the things staffers have kept Trump from doing you will see the answer is hell, yes!  I don't like Mike Pence's politics and would expect to oppose almost anything he would want to do as President.  But at least there would be no need to handcuff him, stuff something in his mouth and lock him up in the closet.

How is Trump's Staff Thwarting Him?

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I was going to make further posts on Trump and Russia, but the first leaks from Woodward's book have lead me to a detour

When Donald Trump made his first run for President in 2012, I had no idea he had anything to do with Russia.  I did not know his entire business career was based on fraud, although I may have suspected it at some level. I had no idea what his position on any issue was (other than birtherism) and took for granted that he had none.  I regarded him a sort of a male Paris Hilton -- a playboy, mostly harmless, but absolutely useless, and an obvious disaster as President.

My reasons for being horrified at the thought of Trump as President had nothing to do with ideology or any particular issue.  They were simple.  The man was nothing but so much hot air.  He knew nothing whatever about any issue and showed no sign of being willing or able to learn.  He wouldn't know political or moral principle if it punched him in the nose.  He had the attention span and impulse control of a small child.  He had no concept of the public good as apart for his own private interests and, if elected, could be expected to regard the federal government as his own private property.   He as an obvious authoritarian with no regard for the rule of law.   Ross Perot inspired jokes about how shocked he would be when if found out the President could not fire Congress.  Trump was so ignorant and so authoritarian that such things would not be jokes.  But above all else, he was the sort of person who in case of crisis you would want his staff to handcuff him, stuff something in his mouth, and lock him in a closet until it blew over.

And yet here he is as President and nothing catastrophic has happened yet, except in Puerto Rico.  The upshot of Woodward's shocking but not surprising book is that the reason is that his staff has restrained him.  They have not gone so far as to physically restrain him (yet), but they have regularly stolen papers or engaged in delays or distractions in hopes that he would forget about the original insane project, and flat-out disobedience.  Examples included:

• Withdrawing from the US-South Korea free trade pact (stolen paper)
• Withdrawing troops from South Korea (discussions)
• Invading Venezuela (numerous cases of talking him down)
• Starting a trade war with China (delays by Gary Cohn, begun now, after Cohn left)
• Cutting off all aid to Pakistan (discrete undermining)
• Large-scale intervention in Syria (a cross between disobedience and talking him down)
• Withdrawal from NAFTA (another stolen paper)
• Preemptive war against North Korea (at least discussed)

Giving credit where it is due, Trump's stopped clock has occasionally been right.  Trump is impatient with the never-ending war in Afghanistan.  And he recognized that his war of words with North Korea's Kim Jong-un was a man-to-man showdown and would not escalate.  But the general impression is that we have avoided disaster because Trump's advisers have overruled their boss.

The New York Times anonymous editorial by an unnamed official described the general atmosphere, but is short on specifics.  It says both that "We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous," and also that "[T]he president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic."  So the author wants Trump to succeed and thinks that his policies have made America "safer and more prosperous," but that he is nonetheless "detrimental to the health of the republic"?  The answer appears to be that the Administration has brought about "effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more," but that Trump's style makes it really difficult to get any of this done.  As for specific actions in which the White House staff has thwarted their boss, the author mentions sanctions on Russia and expelling Russian diplomats.

This confirms the general impression in the other articles -- that Trump's staff have been thwarting him primarily in foreign policy and secondarily in foreign trade.  If he has been thwarted in domestic policy, it has been by the failure to pass legislation in Congress (such as the repeal of Obamacare).  But on the whole staffers are not interfering with Trump's domestic policy -- probably because they agree with it.

Seriously, What Do Republicans Think We Should Have Done?

Republicans seem unanimously of the view that the Deep State definitely should not have opened a counter-intelligence investigation of Trump and Russia during the election.  They point out (correctly) that investigating a candidate for office, especially for Presidency, is an extremely sensitive topic, and that there have been serious abuses in that regard, culminating with the Watergate break-in.

But pointing out that investigation of a political opponent is a sensitive topic is one thing.  Concluding that it should therefore never be done no matter what the evidence is quite another.

And consider the evidence the Intelligence Community was looking at.  (Here let us grant (1) a lot of things are public knowledge now that the Intelligence Community did not know at the time and (2) the Intelligence Community knew (and knows) a lot that is still not public knowledge.  But let's go by what we know they knew).

They knew the Russians had hacked the DNC server and John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager.  At a minimum, they knew this because the FBI and two cyber security firms examined the hack and traced it back to Russian intelligence.  And to judge from the degree of detail in the Mueller indictment, there may have been other sources as well.

They knew that Wikileaks, an organization at least suspected of ties to Russia, was releasing the hacked material in a manner calculated to cause maximum damage.  The Mueller indictment  (paragraph 47) identifies the precise e-mail in which the Russians conveyed this information to Wikileaks. 

They apparently had a source inside the Kremlin that confirmed that Vladimir Putin was directly behind the hack.  (And, I recall but have not found a link, that the purpose was to sway the election for Trump).

They knew Trump was a Putin cheerleader.  Trump ran an openly pro-Russia campaign and, despite seemingly having no concept of a mutually beneficial relationship, somehow managed to make an exception for Russia.  He regularly quoted talking points from Russian propaganda sources.

They knew the Trump campaign had members with suspicious Russia ties.  Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser, had extensive business ties to Russia, strongly pro-Russian views, and had once been targeted for recruitment as a Russian spy.  During the campaign he traveled to Moscow and made a pro-Russia public speech.  Paul Manafort, who served several months as campaign director, was an adviser and propagandist for the pro-Russian party in Ukraine.  Michael Flynn, a major foreign policy adviser who Trump even considered for Vice President, was a semi-regular commentator for Russia Today  who did a photo op with Putin.

They knew that Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos drunkenly boasted about being approached by Russian assets who offered him "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of e-mails.

Finally, and most controversially, there are unconfirmed reports that allied intelligence agencies, in the course of routine surveillance of Russian communications, kept picking up suspicious contacts with the Trump team:

It is understood that GCHQ [Government Central Headquarters, the British intelligence] was at no point carrying out a targeted operation against Trump or his team or proactively seeking information. The alleged conversations were picked up by chance as part of routine surveillance of Russian intelligence assets. Over several months, different agencies targeting the same people began to see a pattern of connections that were flagged to intelligence officials in the US.

To the best of my knowledge, mainstream Republicans do not dispute most of these points.  The Russian hack and release to Wikileaks are disputed by some in the crazy conspiracy fringe, but not the mainstream.  Trump's pro-Russian stance and advisers with Russian ties are matters of public record beyond dispute.  And Papadopoulos appears to have admitted to his drunken boast.

That leaves the purported spy in the Kremlin and the reports from allied intelligence of contacts between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.  These are more nebulous matters, highly secret information that necessarily cannot be disclosed and therefore is easy to dispute and hard to confirm. 

Even so, we have the Russian government hacking into the e-mails of one party and campaign chair and arranging the release of the materials in a manner calculated to do maximum harm.  And we have the other candidate showing a general hostility to all other countries except Russia and running a team with at least three members who had extraordinary Russia ties.  And a member (admittedly not high level) who was contacted by Russian agents and offered "dirt" on the other candidate.

Granted, all of these things could have been unrelated.  On the other hand, there is that alarming but real possibility that they might be related.  And wouldn't one want the Intelligence Community to find out whether these things were related or not?  To which Republicans answer no, Trump was running for President, so any investigation was simply too politically sensitive to be done.

So, if their view is to be taken seriously, running for President should be taken as an immunity, not only from prosecution, but even from investigation.  Except for the obvious.  Republicans did not extend any such immunity to Hillary Clinton.  Quite the contrary, the Republican (or at least Trumpite) consensus on Hillary was that she should not only be investigated, but that any investigation that did not terminate in prosecution, conviction, and imprisonment was obviously rigged in her favor.

Admittedly, once can reconcile these two views.  Incumbent Presidents can hardly be suspected of abusing their power investigating their preferred successor, so investigation of a candidate of the President's party is fine.*  But an opposing candidate is above the law, and the Deep State must turn a blind eye to any developments, no matter how alarming.  Or, as this article comments:

Trump’s position, and the consensus position of the conservative movement, is that, having become aware of a foreign intelligence service’s successful efforts to infiltrate a major party presidential campaign, the FBI should have done nothing about it, because the campaign in question happened to be a Republican one.

And if that is your view, it raises serious questions about how far this principle should go.  If candidate Trump shot someone in front of Washington Monument** should that, too, go uninvestigated? 

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*Presumably this would not apply to a primary opponent.

**If he had committed murder in the middle of Fifth Avenue, it would have been a matter under New York law, so the feds would not have been involved.