The Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Has Some Thoughts This Morning
All seriousness aside, this is a good time for the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center to get out of Dodge, because there is some big time terrorism on the way from the Middle East, and it’s understandable that the Director doesn’t want to be blamed for failing to counter it.t
When Your Smart Bombs Think You’re Stupid
Brer Khamenei, Brer Trump, and the Tar Baby Quagmire
The Wall Street Journal—Yes, THAT Wall Street Journal—Expatiates on the Quagmire Trump Has Created
If Trump proclaims victory, stops the bombing and begins to withdraw the huge air and naval assets he assembled in the Middle East, it could soothe global markets, at least in the short term, and reassure American voters uneasy about the prospect of another forever war.
But leaving in place Iran’s theocratic regime—angry, defiant and in possession of its nuclear stockpile and what remains of its arsenal of missiles and drones—would essentially grant Tehran control over the world’s energy markets. It would also sacrifice the security of America’s partners and allies, and possibly make another, more devastating, regional war likely.
Sensing impatience in Washington, Iranian officials say they will fight on, until an agreement is reached on Iran’s terms, including America paying reparations to Tehran. “We must strike the aggressor in the mouth so it learns a lesson and never again thinks of launching an aggression against our dear Iran,” Parliament speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf said Tuesday in a social-media post.
Oil held hostage
Iran is still believed to have plenty of short-range missiles and drones—not to mention naval mines—that it can use to choke off oil and natural-gas exports by making the Strait of Hormuz too risky for tankers. Around 20% of the world’s oil supplies transited the strait daily before the war started. Just on Wednesday, three vessels were hit in the area.
“If the regime holds on—even a rump regime—what is to stop its missiles and drones from threatening tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, and the energy infrastructure of America’s Gulf allies at the time of their choosing?” said Andrew Tabler, a White House official in Trump’s first administration and senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Its ability to impact energy prices would be enormous.”
An additional twist is that Iran is letting its friends, including China, take oil out of the Gulf, while preventing everyone else.
Now that Tehran has demonstrated the capacity—and global implications—of choking off the Hormuz strait, it has created significant geopolitical leverage for itself, and an incentive for Gulf states to appease it in the future. Reopening the strait, military analysts say, may require a ground operation to seize the Iranian coastline. That would mark an open-ended escalation, potentially leading to much higher American casualties.
American deterrence weakened
The performance of the U.S. military is, of course, closely watched by China—and America’s Asian allies. The U.S., alongside Israel, has unleashed high-precision firepower, establishing air superiority over Iran and eliminating much of its navy and air forces.
Yet 12 days into the war, Iran keeps firing missiles and drones across the Middle East, albeit at a slower rate. Iran’s ability to destroy with precision strikes some of the most sensitive and scarce U.S. military targets in the Middle East, such as radars for air-defense installations, didn’t go unnoticed. Should America abandon its Gulf partners after exposing them to existential danger, there will be inevitable repercussions in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.
“This war hugely damages U.S. standing in the world, which means that China has much more scope to establish its own standing in the Middle East and the Global South generally,” said Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London.
“Meanwhile, everyone is observing that Iran has, at best, a middling military capability—and the Americans can’t take them out,” he said.
Nuclear-weapons race
“There is no easy way out of this once we’ve started it,” said Marc Sievers, a former U.S. ambassador to Oman who is now a political commentator based in Abu Dhabi.
“The regime lost a lot of its military capability, but not all of it clearly,” he said. “If they are left standing, they will do everything they can to rebuild, and to do once again all these things that they were doing that triggered this.”
Iran’s stockpile of 60% enriched uranium—close to weapons-grade in its purity and buried underground after last June’s American airstrikes—remains as a potential pathway to a rapid nuclear breakout.
“The bad news is you would leave Iran potentially in a position where it can produce nuclear weapons, and you also leave Iran potentially with more motive to produce nuclear weapons,” said Eric Brewer, an expert at the Nuclear Threat Initiative who served in senior nuclear-related roles in the White House and the U.S. intelligence community. “That’s a big risk.”
Taking out this enriched uranium, if the regime remains defiant, would require a risky ground operation. “America and Israel are witnessing the limits of what air and naval power alone can do,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.
“Strategic priorities, like opening the Strait of Hormuz and securing what remains of Iran’s nuclear stockpile, will likely require some ground troops if no diplomatic options are pursued,” he said. “What we are looking at is potentially a very messy situation.”
Gulf monarchies under threat
One nightmare scenario, in particular for America’s Gulf partners now bearing the brunt of Iranian attacks, is that the U.S. and Israel would stop, then Iran would continue harassing strikes to cow these oil-rich monarchies into submission. The fear is that Tehran will try to pressure them to expel U.S. bases and sever their dependence on an America that failed to protect them.
“There are many dangers. A wounded, angry Iran is not the best-case scenario for the Gulf states. While the U.S. has to a large degree castrated Iran in terms of its ability to attack Israel, this gives Iran only one other option: to attack the Gulf states and to weaponize the Strait of Hormuz,” said Dania Thafer, executive director of the Gulf International Forum think tank. “Militarily speaking, the U.S. is on the winning side. But politically speaking, the U.S. and Israel have really gotten nowhere when it comes to Iran.”
Gulf leaders aren’t voicing in public their anger with the Trump administration, which dragged them into this war. This is in part because their nations are so dependent on American air-defense supplies to protect from the expected next round of Iranian attacks, something that neither China nor Russia can provide. Yet under the surface, many are starting to wonder whether the alliance with the U.S. is more of a liability than an asset—especially if the Iranian regime survives and rearms after the war.
“We are stuck between two outcomes, each of them worse than the other,” said Mahdi Ghuloom, a fellow at the ORF Middle East think tank in Bahrain. “One is that the regime stays intact, and the second is the power vacuum in Iran. The Trump administration’s Middle East policy has not been thought through completely, the decision to conduct this war was taken in haste, and its ramifications miscalculated.”
“While the Gulf-American relationship will remain resilient, a lot of diplomatic frustration will be expressed,” he said.
Grief and Destruction
Trump is His Own Worst Enemy. And Thank God for That.
This morning, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has four important points to make. I’ll summarize them and then let Mr. Bouie speak for himself.
1. In an alternative universe, in his second term, a politically skilled and disciplined Trump could probably have engineered a dictatorship in the United States.
2. But in this universe, Trump is “so solipsistic, so plainly consumed with narcissism, so deeply indifferent to the details of governance and so eager to satisfy his basest impulses that there was little chance he’d ever complete the authoritarian consolidation of his dreams.”
3. The second Trump term, we have “a presidency in terminal decline, if not outright collapse.”
4. If you don’t understand that “presidential commands are never self-executing,” then you don’t understand what the hell is going on.
Jamelle Bouie (N.Y. Times), Trump Is the Anti-Trump:
There is an alternate universe in which Donald Trump is the popular, successful president of his imagination.
In this world, Trump has a clear view of the political landscape. He knows he won a narrow victory, not a landslide. He knows that his key voters — the ones who put him over the top, as opposed to his core voters — elected him to lower the cost of living and turn the page back to where it was before the pandemic. And while he has the advantage of an unpopular predecessor — an easy repository for blame should things go wrong — he also starts the clock with a small and finite amount of political capital. The modern American public is wary, fickle and quick to anger. The right move is to invest that capital carefully, not gamble with the people’s trust.
This hypothetical President Trump would take the path of least political resistance. He would work with the Republican majority in Congress to send a new round of stimulus checks, rehashing the most important political success of his first term and fulfilling his promise to lower costs for most Americans. He would work with Congress to pass modest tariffs on critical goods and he would take a less draconian path on deportations, focusing, as he promised, on people in jails and prisons — “the worst of the worst.” And he would put hard political limits on his most fanatical aides and deputies, like Russell Vought and Stephen Miller. This Trump wouldn’t give Elon Musk his run of the executive branch and he would sideline his own desire for retribution against his political opponents, or at least channel his rage into something more productive. He would also decline to hand management of the federal government to an ignominious cadre of hacks, apparatchiks and television personalities.
In short, this Trump would rerun the approach of his first term. He would still be corrupt. He would still stretch the limits of common decency. He would still be bombastic, transgressive and contemptuous of political norms. But he would be restrained, somewhat, by the practical realities of governance. And this restraint would give our hypothetical Trump the leeway to pursue his more authoritarian goals; to curtail civil society and consolidate power over the entire federal government, courts and Congress included.
From the perspective of liberal society and constitutional government, this alternative world, in which a more cautious and methodical Trump successfully builds public and political support for the transformation of the United States into a full-throated authoritarian regime, would have been the worst-case scenario for a second Trump term.
We are lucky, then, that this alternate reality is unimaginable. There is no apparent evidence that Trump is capable of even the slightest bit of deferred gratification. If life is a series of marshmallow tests, then he has failed one after the other, kept afloat only by his immense wealth and privilege. The actual Trump is so solipsistic, so plainly consumed with narcissism, so deeply indifferent to the details of governance and so eager to satisfy his basest impulses that there was little chance he’d ever complete the authoritarian consolidation of his dreams.
All of this is simply to contrast what might have been with what plainly is: a presidency in terminal decline, if not outright collapse. Consider the big picture. Trump is nearly as unpopular now as he has ever been. His average approval ranges from a net negative of about 13 points to a net negative rating of nearly 20 points. He is underwater on every issue of consequence. The Supreme Court nullified his signature economic program and his immigration enforcement actions are so toxic with voters that they’ve forced him to fire his head of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem. He has wrecked the coalition that brought him into office with major reversals among Latinos, young men and Black Americans, and he is treading water with his core supporters, white voters without college degrees.
Trump insists, of course, that he is as popular as ever, but even Republican lawmakers see the writing on the wall. There has been a historic number of retirements from Congress, led mostly by Republicans.
Last, but far from least, is the president’s foolhardy, reckless and immoral war in Iran, which was launched with neither public buy-in nor Congressional authorization. It didn’t take long after the bombing began before it destroyed an elementary school, killing more than 175 people, most of them children. Just two weeks in, the conflict has already grown beyond its initially limited scope, involving other belligerents and threatening the global economy. It is no surprise, then, that this is also the most unpopular war in modern American history, with few supporters beyond the president’s fellow partisans.
It is tempting to think that the president’s political collapse doesn’t really matter — that, as the Teflon Don, he suffers no particular consequences for his bad behavior. And it is true that the shamelessness, celebrity and cult of personality that defines Trump (and Trumpism) also works to buoy him in the face of political catastrophe. He might sink below water, but he’ll never go under. To end the story there, however, is to miss the larger relationship between presidential standing and presidential power.“Presidential commands are never self-executing,” the political scientist Jeffrey Tulis observes in his book “The Rhetorical Presidency,” paraphrasing another political scientist, Richard Neustadt. “Their efficacy depends upon artful wielding of informal power through bargaining — by showing other politicians that they will be helped, or at least not hurt, by doing what the president wants.”
The second Trump administration is defined by its total embrace of the “imperial presidency” and the “unitary executive.” But a key weakness of both concepts is that they treat presidential power as rigid, well-defined and highly formal — the “core duties” of Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion in Trump v. United States.
The reality is more complicated. It may seem as if presidents have the power to command, to issue orders and see immediate results. But as Tulis reminds us, successful presidents do not order as much as they coax, cajole and persuade, for the straightforward reason that the formal authority of the presidency is limited compared with other actors in government. A skeptical lawmaker or recalcitrant bureaucrat can derail a presidential agenda and leave the chief executive at the mercy of an angry public. It’s for this reason that the most able men to hold the office of chief executive have rarely seen fit to act as tyrants, raining demands down onto the rest of the executive branch. They act instead as conveners, working to align different interests in pursuit of a single goal.
Presidential standing, in this paradigm, is the currency that makes presidential power work. A popular and well-liked president has more resources to deploy in pursuit of his agenda. He has the informal power he needs to bolster his more circumscribed formal authority. A distrusted, divisive and unpopular president, on the other hand, quickly finds that he is unable to work his will on political actors who are more worried about their own fates than the president’s interests and appetites.
And that is what we’ve seen with this president, a year after he gambled his political capital away in a disastrous attempt to reshape the nature of the American political system. His fast-eroding position has curtailed Trump’s ability to pressure lawmakers into backing his agenda: See the president’s empty demands for Congress to pass the SAVE America Act or the ongoing shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security. This rapid decline has also lowered the cost of institutional resistance to the administration’s attempts to curtail civil society and done the same for judicial opposition to the president’s most aggressive power grabs. I do not think it is an accident that the two most consequential rulings against Trump issued by this Supreme Court were decided as the president’s standing entered a tailspin.
You will notice that after months of teasing the possibility, Trump has mostly stopped talking about serving an unconstitutional third term. Perhaps he still intends to. Or perhaps he has enough self-awareness to know that he is not the triumphant leader of his imagination. That he is, instead, a lame duck whose White House is in disarray and whose actions have plunged the world into chaos. He thought he might remake the country in his own image. Instead, he’s likely to leave it like one of his casinos: broke, broken and in desperate need of new management.
If impeachment weren’t a dead letter, then we could remove him and end his misrule. As it is, we have nearly three more years to live through. It’s an open question whether we survive it intact.
Iranians Rally Round the Flag: “Now I Wonder, Even if the Islamic Republic Falls, What Will we Inherit: a Land in Ruins?”
If, like me, you were unfamiliar with the name Najmeh Bozorgmehr, let me inform you that, for the last 26 years, she has been the Financial Times’ Tehran correspondent. And that, ladies and germs, is nothing to be sneezed at.
Today, she writes, Iranians rethink the price of regime change: Destructive US and Israeli war and Islamic republic’s relilience have alarmed even those who supported foreign intervention:
After thousands were killed in a brutal crackdown on anti-regime protests in Iran in January, Mandana gave up hope for reform from within. She came to the conclusion that the Islamic republic’s leaders had to go even if it meant US and Israeli-led regime change.
So when the two countries attacked the compound of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28, killing him and several of his family members, Mandana — who like others interviewed used a pseudonym — believed the change she coveted had finally come.
Her experience in the terrifying days since has shattered that belief. Air strikes have targeted not just military sites and senior regime figures but have repeatedly hit civilian infrastructure.
Over the weekend, Tehran was enveloped in toxic black smog after Israel bombed fuel depots around the city; on Tuesday, massive explosions caused widespread blackouts.
“We weren’t supposed to be bombed,” Mandana said, her voice trembling after a massive explosion near her apartment by Vanak Square in central Tehran. “Our city, our country, this wasn’t supposed to happen. How is it that Venezuela . . . saw clean, bloodless regime change, but not here?”
The scale of destruction and the apparent resilience of the Islamic regime, which appointed Khamenei’s son Mojtaba as the new supreme leader in an act of defiance, has prompted many Iranians to rethink hopes that foreign intervention might bring about its end.
Approaching two weeks into the war, no signs exist of the sort of anti-regime unrest that broke out across the country in January before being crushed in a brutal crackdown that killed thousands.
Instead many, even those who loathe the Islamic republic, appear to have recoiled at the destruction and comments including Donald Trump’s threat to target electricity production facilities if the regime escalated. The US president also said Iran’s map will “probably not” be the same after the war, sparking fears the conflict could break apart the country.
One sociologist in Tehran, who is critical of the regime and the war, said there was anecdotal evidence of a growing “sense of nationalism emerging from the war” as happened during Israel’s 12-day conflict against Iran last year, when people rallied around the flag.
“The fear of Iran’s destruction is increasingly uniting people as they fear the consequences of such a large-scale conflict,” the sociologist said, asking not to be named.
Non-military sites have become collateral damage, as air strikes target police stations, military facilities and officials living in residential neighbourhoods. More than 1,000 civilians have been killed and over 8,000 homes damaged or destroyed, according to official figures.
The scenes of devastation — to schools, a desalination plant, passenger aircraft and historic landmarks such as Tehran’s Grand Bazaar and Golestan Palace — have shocked many Iranians.
“If they wanted to assassinate the supreme leader, why are they waging full-scale war?” asked one woman. Before the war, she — like many anti-regime Iranians inside and outside the country — had welcomed military intervention.
Expatriate communities staged large rallies in western capitals, calling for an end to the Islamic republic. Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the late ousted Shah, also supported military action, promising to return to lead Iran once the regime had collapsed.
“Maybe he should come now with his three daughters and see how it feels to be bombarded,” said one woman, who opposes the current regime but also rejects a return to monarchy. “Those who supported the war should take responsibility now. But I doubt they will.”
When many Iranians put aside their disillusionment with their leaders to embrace patriotic gestures during the June war, the regime presented this as proof of public support and ignored calls for reform after the conflict was over.
This time, Iranians — traumatised by the crackdown in January — have been more hesitant, fearing that expressions of patriotism or anti-war sentiment will again be co-opted by the authorities.
In northern Iran, a woman whose son was killed in the protests stopped wearing black the day Khamenei died, feeling that some revenge had been exacted. In Tehran, another woman baked a cake for her neighbours to celebrate the supreme leader’s demise. But she was so shocked by the scale of the subsequent attacks that she later left the city.
The Islamic republic, for its part, is taking no chances. Authorities have filled squares with loyalists each evening, drawing on the vocal minority of regime supporters to project strength and support. They also patrol the streets on motorcycles carrying loudspeakers that blare out religious songs.
“These are our real supporters,” said one regime insider. “This is genuine loyalty, rooted in Shia Islam — something the Americans can never understand. Even if the leader of the Islamic system is killed, the system will survive because Shiism is alive.”
The regime’s apparent resilience in the face of the greatest conflict since the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s has led some to question whether even a prolonged war would bring about its demise.
After Mojtaba Khamenei was selected as the new supreme leader on Monday, supporters across the country also took to the streets.
But Khamenei has not been seen since the war started and he is yet to speak to Iranians about his plans. The US and Israel have threatened to assassinate whoever takes over and rumours are rife that he was injured during the war.
His selection has stunned many anti-regime Iranians, who fear a supreme leader who will continue his father’s hardline agenda, resistance to reform and hostility to the west.
“If things stay like this, we’re in a worse place now than before the war,” said Mahboubeh, a translator. “A country destroyed; Khamenei replaced by another Khamenei, 30 years younger.”
Meanwhile, monarchists support Pahlavi and back the US and Israeli intervention despite its toll. But analysts believe the exiled royal may have lost support from more recent converts to his cause as the brutal reality of war sets in.
The majority of Iranians who see the January killings as unforgivable are lost over how to push for change. This includes Sara, a teacher in her forties who once hoped for the regime’s overthrow but now admits she has changed her mind.
“I’ve come to terms with the bitter reality: the Islamic republic is resilient,” she said. “I never thought I’d say this, but if someone from within the regime becomes a real reformer, why not? In the end, we just want peace and welfare.”
Marjan, a housewife, could not hide her emotions when news of Khamenei’s death broke. She had believed it would usher in the regime’s collapse. “Now I wonder, even if the Islamic republic falls, what will we inherit: a land in ruins?”
In My Experience, It’s Hard to Explain That Which You Do Not Actually Understand
The Mind Boggles
Even for those of us who despise Trump, the mind boggles at the thought of his walking into a major war without clear objectives, devoid of any understanding about how the war is going to end.
However, boggle as it may, the mind must accept that this is exactly what is happening. See, among many other examples, Reuters, Trump seeks to justify Iran war, but stated objectives shift.
Trump cannot explain his war aims and how they will be achieved because he is delusional—and misapprehends many vital facts about the situation—because he has no rudimentary understanding of the relation between cause and effect, and because he thinks that whatever horrific misjudgments he makes can be wiped out by his magical bullshit.
The New York Times this morning elucidates the consequences for public opinion:
A Suggestion for Discussion with Your Red Hatted Friends
If you chance to speak to one of the 41 percent who say they support the Iran war, you might consider trying this: Have a discussion about what they think Trump’s war aims are. Try to get them to be specific. Having done so, try to find agreement on an objective criterion to determine whether or not their imagined war aims have actually been achieved. Finally, agree on a date to schedule a follow-up conversation to discuss the actual state of the war, in light of what they imagine its objectives to be and whether their objective test of success has been met.
Too Late to TACO
Meanwhile, Ed Luce of the Financial Times tells us that Taco on Iran will come too late for Trump:
Sometime soon Donald Trump will ring the closing bell on his Iran war. That moment will have less to do with whether his mission is accomplished (whatever that is) than how much pain he can endure. We can safely assume that Iran’s pain threshold is higher than his. Trump will nevertheless present his exit as a victory. Iran will have every incentive to ensure nobody believes him. That is the crux of his self-inflicted dilemma.
Anticipating this would have served Trump well. One step would have been to build up America’s strategic petroleum reserves, which dropped sharply after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and were never replenished. Oil and natural gas prices may have soared but an ounce of prevention is still worth a pound of cure. A second would have been to win the Gulf monarchies round to his war plan in advance. That he had no fixed goal made that difficult. Now he is faced with an increasingly irascible Gulf. A third would have been to prepare the US public for a longer conflict. Ditto.
The question is whether Trump has become aware of the drawbacks of not thinking ahead. Were he on a learning curve, he would know that even a severely degraded Iran can continue to frighten oil tankers from the Gulf and shutter much of the region’s energy production. Short of occupying Iran, Trump cannot guarantee safe passage in the Strait of Hormuz. Drone production is decentralised and hard to eradicate from the air.
Nor can Trump handpick a new Iranian leadership. Others have observed it took America two decades to replace the Taliban with the Taliban in Afghanistan. It took Trump just over a week to replace one Khamenei with another. Since Mojtaba, the new supreme leader, is considered more hardline than his father, Trump will likely draw a blank on securing an Iranian ceasefire, let alone an “unconditional surrender”. Which leaves him with a couple of very risky gambles.
The first would be to send US or Israeli commandos to Isfahan to seize what remains of Iran’s 400kg stockpile of enriched uranium. Success would offer Trump a spectacular off-ramp. Indeed, the temptation of a lightning operation that upends the Taco narrative could be overpowering. Hovering over that is the ghost of Jimmy Carter. His failed 1980 Iranian hostage rescue mission helped to sink his presidency. Having so often announced the obliteration of Iran’s nuclear programme, Trump would not survive an equivalent setback.
His other gambit would be to occupy Iran’s Kharg island to shut off its oil exports. Such a move could be even riskier because it would involve many more US boots on the ground than a commando raid — and for much longer. It would strangle Iran’s main revenue source and worsen the oil shock. But its risk-reward ratio looks reckless. After barely a week, public support for Trump’s Iran war is at the same level it was for the Vietnam war in late 1967 following more than 11,000 American deaths. There is no US tolerance today for even a few dozen casualties. Taco — “Trump always chickens out” — is thus a question of when.
Trump would still pay a high price for a unilateral declaration of victory. The biggest risk is that nothing will happen. By walking away, the US president would have given Iran knowledge of his price point, which is soaring energy prices. Iran also has a vote in deciding when this conflict ends. It would have every reason to sustain its disruption to global energy markets as a deterrent to Trump changing his mind. Iran has now been attacked by Israel four times in the past two years — twice with Trump’s America in the lead. Iran will want to raise the costs of another resumption a few months from now.
The Iranian regime’s surest route to safety would be to go nuclear. Good intelligence can keep making a rubble of Iran’s nuclear capacity but that is no sure bet. Iran’s logic of dashing to North Korea’s status will be compelling. Others, notably Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, may be tempted to help. Regimes everywhere are making the same calculations with fresh immediacy.
One piece of damage that Trump cannot repair is to trust in America. Long after oil prices have stabilised, the world will recall his administration’s glory in the imagery of “lethality”, as his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, calls it. Trump chose to go to war and has taken explicit satisfaction in his power of life and death. War is a grave step after all other options have been exhausted. That Trump had other courses of action is well understood. That he preferred this one is hard to unsee.
The Illegal News for Thursday
The Guardian, ‘A subversion of the justice system’: DoJ shifts into Trump’s ‘political wing’ as criminal investigations accelerate
Subhead: “President has ‘succeeded in completely politicizing’ justice department, experts say, using it to punish his enemies
Well, yes, but what they have not succeeded in doing is indicting the bloody ham sandwiches. Tim Miller of The Bulwark marshals the facts about the Justice Department’s many failures in pursuing bogus legal cases against Trump’s political adversaries:
They have also succeeded in generating many, many state bar investigations into illegal conduct by Justice Department lawyers. See, for example, lawandcrime.com, AG Pam Bondi claims ‘right’ to take over state bar investigations of her lawyers’ ethics or else, cites ‘unprecedented weaponization’ of complaints.
Thank you, Sir. May I Have Another, Sir?
Meanwhile, earlier this week, in the Mother and Father of All Legal Clusterfucks, the Justice Department told the district court in Washington, DC, that it no longer wished to appeal its shellacking in the four cases brought by Perkins Coie, Jenner& Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey. Then, the next day, the Justice Department said “Never mind,” and tried to take it all back, asking the district court for permission to withdraw its motion of the previous day to voluntarily dismiss the appeal.
The court will have to rule on this mess. As I write, it has not yet done so.
One possibility is that, before the court acts, it will haul Team Trump into court, put them under oath, and demand that they explain what the hell happened.
Finally, legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin has taken time off from private pleasures to write an op-ed in the New York Times headlined Trump Has Elite Law Firms on a Punishing Merry-Go-Round. Toobin tells a tale of winners and losers, and casts Trump as the big winner against Paul Weiss and the other eight Cowardly Lion Law Firms.
In my opinion, his tale is misleadingly incomplete. For what it’s worth—and that’s probably not very much—Paul Weiss and the other capitulators plainly thought they recognized a familiar pattern: a dispute that can be made to go away when Party A doesn’t have to give up much of anything that it actually values, while Party B gets bupkis of real value but is allowed to make uncontradicted boastful claims of a famous victory.
As it has turned out, the nine cowardly firms underestimated the severity of the ongoing hits to their reputation. And they surely did, as Toobin states, act like cowards. So, yes, they are indeed losers.
That said, I dissent from describing Trump as a winner in this episode.
Like the craven cowards they are, Team Trump tried to pull the plug on their dispute with the Courageous Four: Perkins Coie, represented by Williams & Connolly; Jenner & Block, represented by Cooley LLP; WilmerHale, represented by Paul Clement; and Susman Godfrey, acting pro se, with the support of 700 other lawyers organized as Law Firm Partners United in Support of Susman.
Then someone—in all likelihood, Orange Mussolini himself—got wind of what was happening and ordered Team Trump back into the fray.
Team Trump’s Monday filing was effectively an admission that their legal case has no merit at all. It didn’t have any merit on Monday, when the pulled the plug. It doesn’t have any merit today. And it still won’t have any merit at whatever point down the road the court of appeals, or maybe the Supreme Court, drives the final nail into the coffin.
Orange Mussolini is, once again, cruisin’ for a bruisin’.
Before the Biblical Divorce
To celebrate yesterday’s results in the Texas Republican primary, please grab your favorite snack and your preferred beverage and enjoy this 2016 musical offering from the then Mrs. Ken Paxton.
The ex-Mrs. Paxton’s 2016 musings on her husband’s frequent absences are especially pregnant in light of allegations that Paxton’s current lover is a married mother of seven.
The Paxtons’ “biblical divorce” is further explained here:
An Amusing Afterword
YouTube apparently decided that I would be interested in songs about love gone wrong. After viewing the ex-Mrs. Paxton’s 2016 musical offering, YouTube speculated that I would probably enjoy Norwegian chanteuse Heidi Hauge’s version of The Tennessee Waltz.
Indeed, I enjoyed it immensely, and hope you do as well.
It was a popular song—the English version that is, not the one in Norwegian—back when (in my father’s words) I was only knee high to a grasshopper.
My mother always said that, if you lose your Little Darling in the course of one dance, then she was probably never your Little Darling in the first place.
Likewise, I am afraid that Ken was probably never Angela’s Little Darling. How sad to see love gone wrong.
We have another two months—until the Texas Republican primary runoff—for John Cornyn to tell us all about what a lying, corrupt, adulterous son of a bitch he’s running against.
Facing MAGA 