As Roger Simon puts it, “The re-election of Donald Trump will be dated from the evening of May 23, 2019.”
It would have happened sooner or later, but Nancy Pelosi’s out-of-control behavior—accusing Trump of a cover-up before meeting with him (sheesh), demanding his family stage an intervention (double sheesh), etc.—clearly forced the president finally to issue a memo giving Attorney General Barr authority to declassify the 2016 campaign surveillance documents. (He undoubtedly had it in his hip pocket for a while.)
Unlike Simon, who himself seems to waffle a bit on the subject, I don’t think Trump was “forced” to do this at all. He’s said all along he was going to declassify the material. I think he did have this memo in his hip pocket for awhile, but I also think he was waiting for the best (for the Democrats, the worst) possible time to issue it.
And Pelosi just could not keep her yap shut and play nice with the President while her underlings, dripping saliva from their slack mouths like rabid dogs, continue to press for impeachment where there is no impeachable offense. Nope. The Trump Derangement Syndrome is strong with this one. So you want to play cover-up games, Madame Speaker? Try covering this up once it’s revealed to the public in all of its ugly glory. And either way Simon wants to slice it — forced or unforced — he still ends up with this:
Result: game changer. The re-election of Donald Trump will be dated from the evening of May 23, 2019. And the supposedly politically-savvy Ms. Pelosi will be marked down as the instigator.
Yeah, I know I already put that up top. I’m savoring it, it’s my blog, and fuck you if you don’t like me repeating it.
I know there are a lot of folks out there even on the GOP side who pooh-pooh the idea that Donald Trump is playing 4D intergalactic chess while the Democrats and everyone else who opposes him are playing checkers. As I keep repeating, Donald Trump is not a politician. He’s a businessman. He did not get where he is today without understanding the elements of how a business deal works, and how you get to the deal not only through negotiation but also by grandstanding and brinkmanship. You call people belittling names and talk about their poor levels of cognition. You understand that a trade war with a country that sells us a lot of stuff but doesn’t buy nearly as much in return* can be won with tariffs (something the Wall Street Journal editorial board doesn’t seem to understand). You just keep slugging and slugging and slugging until the other guy screams “Uncle!”
And that’s why Donald Trump is playing at troll level Intergalactic Grand Master when it comes to dealing with politicians both domestic and foreign. And they do not understand how to fight back, or even how to defend themselves against that sort of attack, because “nobody in government does that!”
Donald Trump does. We can’t spare this man. He fights.
And I would not have said that even three years ago.
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* Please don’t tell me how much corn and soy China buys from US farmers, and how tariffs are going to kill the small family farmer. The Chinese can threaten all day to stop buying food from us, but only if they want famine in their country. Farmers are planners, all over the world, and you can’t simply walk over to another country and say, “We want to buy this year’s soybean crop from you,” when that soybean crop was already sold two years ago to someone else. China is beginning to discover to its dismay the realities of the market, and regardless of tariffs, they’ll still buy US soybeans and corn, and pork, and all kinds of other foodstuffs, because they simply won’t be able to buy them anywhere else. Oh, and if China starts a war with the West? Hope they have lots of rations stuffed away, because they can’t even begin to feed their own people if their western partners shut off the supply. Japan found that out at the end of WWII. The Brits would have been in that sort of trouble throughout WWII if it hadn’t been for US convoys shipping them food (one of the reasons we had to ration food during the war), and the Brits were still rationing food until 1954, nine years after the war ended, and fourteen years after rationing started in 1940. So don’t tell me the Chinese can just buy their food elsewhere. They can’t even nuke us into submission and come and take it from us, unless they want to die from eating irradiated food.