Sunday Long Read: One Versus A Country

Our Sunday Long Read this week comes from essayist Alexander Chee in GQ, writing about his experiences with his father's lessons on self-defense, self-reliance, and self-awareness being Korean in America, something very relevant given the massive rise in hate crimes here against AAPI folks.

Born in 1939 during what would be the last years of the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea, my father, Choung Tai Chee, also called Charles or Chuck or Charlie, came to the United States in 1960. He was flashy, cocky, unafraid, it seemed, of anything. Wherever we were in the world, he seemed at home, right up until near the end of his life, when he was hospitalized after a car accident that left him in a coma. Only in that hospital bed, his head shaved for surgery, did he look out of place to me.

A tae kwon do champion by the age of 18 in Korea, he had begun studying martial arts at age 8, eventually teaching them as a way to put himself through graduate school, first in engineering and then oceanography, in Texas, California, and Rhode Island. He loved the teaching. The rising popularity of martial arts in the 1960s in Hollywood meant he made celebrity friends like Frank Sinatra Jr., Paul Lynde, Sal Mineo, and Peter Fonda, who my father said had fixed him up on a date with his sister, Jane, in the days before Barbarella. A favorite photo from his time in Texas shows him flying through the air, a human horseshoe, each of his bare feet breaking a board held shoulder high on each side by his students.

When I complained about my wet boots during the winters growing up in Maine, he told me stories about running barefoot in the snow in Korea to harden his feet for tae kwon do. His answer to many of my childhood complaints was usually that I had to be tougher, stronger, prepared for any attack or disaster. The lesson his generation took from those they lost to the Korean War was that death was always close, and I know now that he was doing all he could to teach me to protect myself. When I cried at the beach at the water’s edge, afraid of the waves, he threw me in. “No son of mine is going to be afraid of the ocean,” he said. When I first started swimming lessons, he told me I had to be a strong swimmer, in case the boat I was on went down, so I could swim to shore. When he taught me to body-surf, he taught me about how to know the approach of an undertow, and how to survive a riptide. When I lacked a competitive streak, he took to racing me at something I loved—swimming underwater while holding my breath. I was an asthmatic child, but soon, intent on beating him, I could swim 50 yards this way at a time.

For all of that, he was an exceedingly gentle father. He took me snorkeling on his back, when I was five, telling me we were playing at being dolphins. There he taught me the names of the fish along the reef where we lived in Guam. He would praise the highlights in my hair, and laugh, calling me “Apollo.” And as for any pressure regarding my future career, he offered something very rare for a Korean man of his generation. “Be whatever you want to be,” he told me. “Just be the best at it that you can possibly be.”

Only when I was older did I understand the warning about being strong enough to swim to shore in another context, when I learned the boat he and his family had fled in from what was about to become North Korea nearly sank in a storm. In Seoul as a child, he scavenged food for his family with his older brother, coming home with bags of rice found on overturned military supply trucks, while his father went to the farms, collecting gleanings. His attempts to teach me to strip a chicken clean of its meat make a different sense now. I had thought of him as an immigrant without thinking about how the Korean War made him one of the dispossessed, almost a refugee, all before he left Korea.

When I began getting into fights as a child in the U.S., he put me into classes in karate and tae kwon do for these same reasons. He loved me and he wanted me to be strong. I just wasn’t sure how I was supposed to take on a whole country.

A country that would accept you, to a point, as long as you were one of the "good ones". Yeah, I can relate.

Last Call For Mark Of The Millennials

It's pretty easy to slag on older Boomers and Silent Generation septuagenarians as being the ones wrecking the planet, but there's five Millennial men in particular who are very convincingly making a bid to be Earth's Legion of Doom for the next 40 or 50 years.  The Cut's Noreen Malone

So here we are, a generation munching on the last greens of its salad days, saddled with dull, decade-old complaints about our coddledness, our entitlement, our selfies, our political correctness — most blah-blah-blah of all, by the boring cliché of our avocado toast. In a more self-serving version of this narrative, we are the generation that disrupted salad days and made them Sweetgreen days. The generation of AOC and Rihanna and DeRay Mckesson and Glossier! Of hope and protest and changing norms!

No. The world’s five most powerful millennials now, and maybe for the rest of our lives, are Jared Kushner (b. 1981), Kim Jong-un (b. 1984), Mark Zuckerberg (b. 1984), Stephen Miller (b. 1985), and Mohammed bin Salman (b. 1985). The globe is their avocado — to be splayed and robbed of its core and smashed, then spread before them for the taking — and we’re toast.
As for whether these are truly the five most powerful, yes, there is enormous influence in being the most visible member of Congress, in using your platform as a historically great athlete to do good, or in being Beyoncé. But is it unchecked power, of the kind that can move markets and armies unilaterally, swiftly, and on what can amount to a whim? Three of these men are the de facto heads of nation-states, if you count Facebook as a nation-state. The other two, with their mysterious influence, have more power in the Trump administration than anyone, arguably including the president.

These are men who, barely having hit their stride, can tout such accomplishments as: the undermining of an American election, the erosion of privacy norms and attention spans, the desiccation of journalism, the destabilization of the Middle East, a genocide, the creation of modern American internment camps, the beheading of a journalist, the flooding of the world economy with huge investments in unsustainable tech start-ups that undercut smaller merchants, public mass executions, the threat of nuclear war, and whatever other assorted horrors might be happening behind the cloak of secrecy that surrounds North Korea, Saudi Arabia, the Trump administration, and the inner sanctum of Facebook. I am probably leaving a few things out.

Okay, you might be thinking. These men are technically millennials but not in spirit or practice. They are too unusual, too geopolitically unique, to function as members of any generation. No. They are, in fact, textbook exemplars of theirs. Name me a so-called millennial characteristic and I can name a fuckboy-despot who possesses it.

Yeah, I'm gonna go with the five most nihilistically dangerous assholes on the planet are all five to ten years younger than I am.

Which means, we're fucked for decades.  If you think today's adults are going to save us, understand they're not.  Especially the white ones.

And oh yeah, they helped elect Trump.  Did we forget this somehow?

Korean Off The Track

After his G20 Summit checkin with his boss Vladimir, Trump decided to etch his name into the history books with a stunt to visit the DMZ and to become the first US leader to set foot in North Korea, a massive coup for Pyongyang and an embarrassing nadir for America.

With wide grins and a historic handshake, President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un met at the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone on Sunday and agreed to revive talks on the pariah nation’s nuclear program. Trump, pressing his bid for a legacy-defining deal, became the first sitting American leader to step into North Korea.

What was intended to be an impromptu exchange of pleasantries turned into a 50-minute meeting, another historic first in the yearlong rapprochement between the two technically warring nations. It marked a return to face-to-face contact between the leaders after talks broke down during a summit in Vietnam in February. Significant doubts remain, though, about the future of the negotiations and the North’s willingness to give up its stockpile of nuclear weapons .

The border encounter was a made-for television moment. The men strode toward one another from opposite sides of the Joint Security Area and shook hands over the raised patch of concrete at the Military Demarcation Line as cameras clicked and photographers jostled to capture the scene.

After asking if Kim wanted him to cross, Trump took 10 steps into the North with Kim at his side, then escorted Kim back to the South for talks at Freedom House, where they agreed to revive the stalled negotiations.

The spectacle marked the latest milestone in two years of roller-coaster diplomacy between the two nations. Personal taunts of “Little Rocket Man” (by Trump) and “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” (by Kim) and threats to destroy one other have given way to on-again, off-again talks, professions of love and flowery letters.

“I was proud to step over the line,” Trump told Kim as they met in on the South Korean side of the truce village of Panmunjom. “It is a great day for the world.”

Naturally, Minister of Propaganda Tucker Carlson was there to record the event for Trumpsterity.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson was spotted with Donald Trump at the Demilitarized Zone on Sunday during the president’s historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un. The American contingent for the trip also included Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, both senior White House advisers. Carlson was present when Trump walked into the pariah nation, and became the first sitting president to set foot into North Korea. The controversial host is reportedly a guest of the White House press pool on the trip, and will interview the president at some point on Sunday for a segment that is scheduled to air Monday night.

FOX News is state television, let's get this out of the way first.  Imagine how fast the impeachment would come if a Democratic president dragged Rachel Maddow around as a "special guest" of the WH press pool and repeatedly gave her interview access.

We accept whatever Trump does as the new normal and shrug.

The Drums of War, Con't

Last night I said we were looking at three wars, one political, one trade, one shooting, this morning we're looking at maybe maybe four.

The United States is deploying a carrier strike group and a bomber task force to the Middle East to send a clear message to Iran that any attack on U.S. interests or its allies will be met with “unrelenting force,” U.S. national security advisor John Bolton said on Sunday.

Amid rising tensions between the United States and Iran, Bolton said the decision was “in response to a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings.”

“The United States is not seeking war with the Iranian regime, but we are fully prepared to respond to any attack, whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or regular Iranian forces,” Bolton said in a statement.

It marked the latest in a series of moves by President Donald Trump’s administration against Iran in recent weeks.

Washington has said it will stop waivers for countries buying Iranian oil, in an attempt to reduce Iran’s oil exports to zero. It has also blacklisted Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The Trump administration’s efforts to impose political and economic isolation on Tehran began last year when it unilaterally withdrew from the nuclear deal it and other world powers negotiated with Iran in 2015.

“The United States is deploying the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group and a bomber task force to the U.S. Central Command region to send a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime that any attack on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force,” Bolton said.

Bolton, who has spearheaded an increasingly hawkish U.S. policy on Iran, did not provide any other details.

Now US naval carrier task groups being sent to the Middle East is certainly nothing new, every president since Carter has done it at one time or another.  But Trump miscalculates badly, and Bolton plus Iran is nitro and glycerin on top of that.  We've already got North Korea spiraling out of control this week along with Venezuela, Trump's picking a full-on trade war with China, and now this?

The man will do anything to keep the headlines off of Putin and the Mueller report, won't he?

Trump Cards, Con't

Again, I keep hearing how Donald Trump is all talk and no action on things.  At the same time, I keep seeing Trump continually violating presidential norms to do whatever he wants.  18 months ago Trump was obsessed with North Korea, and apparently he made it clear that while he was visiting Puerto Rico to survey damage from Hurricane Maria that he can start a nuclear war anytime he feels like it.

He was there to survey the path of destruction left by Hurricane Maria. But when President Donald Trump visited Puerto Rico in October 2017, the island's dire predicament was hardly the only topic on his mind. 

People familiar with the visit said the President was distracted by other matters -- including his then-devolving war of words with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un -- as he toured devastated neighborhoods and took an aerial tour of the damage. 

At one point, Trump pointed to the "nuclear football" -- a briefcase always in the President's vicinity that can be used to authorize a nuclear attack -- and claimed he could use it on Kim whenever he felt. 

"This is what I have for Kim," he said, according to three people familiar who witnessed the remark.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the incident. 

So why are we only hearing about this now?  Guess.

The episode came amid an increasingly acrimonious period that saw Trump boast of the size of his "nuclear button" and threaten to rain "fire and fury" on North Korea. Since then, he and Kim have developed a warm friendship and met for two summits. 

But at the time, the casual reference to his nuclear capabilities was another sign of the spiraling rhetoric that marked his early interactions with Kim. 

And, to some officials, it was an indication of Trump's disinterest in the plight of Puerto Ricans, who suffered for months without power and limited resources as their island recovered from the walloping storm. 

"There were other topics that were being discussed and my view is that the sole focus of that trip should have been on Puerto Rico," said Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló in an exclusive interview on Thursday.

Trump had made life hell for Puerto Rico, abandoning Americans because Trump hates them so much for being Americans when he doesn't think they count.

Now Gov. Rossello has returned the favor.

Last Call For Kim's Inconvenience

Donald Trump's dog and pony show in Vietnam collapsed completely as he walked away from the summit table with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un having earned nothing.

President Trump and Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, abruptly ended their second summit meeting on Thursday after talks collapsed with the two leaders failing to agree on any steps toward nuclear disarmament or measures to ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

“Sometimes you have to walk,” Mr. Trump said at an afternoon news conference in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam.

He said Mr. Kim had offered to dismantle the North’s most important nuclear facility if the United States lifted the harsh sanctions imposed on his nation — but would not commit to do the same for other elements of its weapons program. That, Mr. Trump said, was a dealbreaker.

“It was about the sanctions,” Mr. Trump said. “Basically they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, but we couldn’t do that.”

The premature end to the negotiations leaves the unusual rapprochement between the United States and North Korea that has unfolded for most of a year at a deadlock, with the North retaining both its nuclear arsenal and facilities believed to be producing additional fissile material for warheads.

It also represents a major setback at a difficult political moment for Mr. Trump, who has long presented himself as a tough negotiator capable of bringing adversaries into a deal and had made North Korea the signature diplomatic initiative of his presidency.

Even as the talks began, Mr. Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, was delivering dramatic and damaging testimony in Congress, accusing him of an expansive pattern of lies and criminality.

There's that.  Trump ran away because he had to get back to Washington and deal with the absolute disaster that the Cohen testimony was for him and his family.  They are all going to prison and for a very long time.

Trump will still spin this as a victory, his rabid fanbase will call him brilliant for being "brave" and walking away from a summit that he never could have made an agreement on, but even Trump appeared deflated on this.

He knows he has a much, much bigger problem to deal with back home.

The Pyongyang Shuffle

Looks like Kim Jong Un has left Donald Trump an early Thanksgiving gift, and of course Tang the Conqueror looks like a giant turkey as North Korea's suddenly revealed new missile bases are now in play.

North Korea is moving ahead with its ballistic missile program at 16 hidden bases that have been identified in new commercial satellite images, a network long known to American intelligence agencies but left undiscussed as President Trump claims to have neutralized the North’s nuclear threat.

The satellite images suggest that the North has been engaged in a great deception: It has offered to dismantle a major launching site — a step it began, then halted — while continuing to make improvements at more than a dozen others that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads.

The existence of the ballistic missile bases, which North Korea has never acknowledged, contradicts Mr. Trump’s assertion that his landmark diplomacy is leading to the elimination of a nuclear and missile program that the North had warned could devastate the United States.

“We are in no rush,” Mr. Trump said of talks with the North at a news conference on Wednesday, after Republicans lost control of the House. “The sanctions are on. The missiles have stopped. The rockets have stopped. The hostages are home.”

His statement was true in just one sense. Mr. Trump appeared to be referring to the halt of missile flight tests, which have not occurred in nearly a year. But American intelligence officials say that the North’s production of nuclear material, of new nuclear weapons and of missiles that can be placed on mobile launchers and hidden in mountains at the secret bases has continued.

And the sanctions are collapsing, in part because North Korea has leveraged its new, softer-sounding relationship with Washington, and its stated commitment to eventual denuclearization, to resume trade with Russia and China.

Moreover, an American program to track those mobile missiles with a new generation of small, inexpensive satellites, disclosed by The New York Times more than a year ago, is stalled. The Pentagon once hoped to have the first satellites over North Korea by now, giving it early warning if the mobile missiles are rolled out of mountain tunnels and prepared for launch.

But because of a series of budget and bureaucratic disputes, the early warning system, begun by the Obama administration and handed off to the Trump administration, has yet to go into operation. Current and former officials, who said they could not publicly discuss the program because it is heavily classified, said there was still hope of launching the satellites, but they offered no timeline.

The secret ballistic missile bases were identified in a detailed study published Monday by the Beyond Parallel program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a major think tank in Washington. 

In other words, Trump was outmaneuvered completely by North Korea, and he now looks more like a fool.  Kim has gotten everything he could want: broken sanctions, US legitimacy, trade with Russia and China, and total diplomatic victory over the United States.

Democrats should absolutely hold hearings on Trump's abject failure, but there really isn't much to discuss here: Trump is simply a moron, and so are all the people working for him.

Second Verse, Same As The First

Donald Trump's "crowning diplomatic achievement" of a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has now been revealed to be nothing more than an embarrassing sham as Pyongyang unceremoniously dumped Secretary of State Mike Pompeo off without actually meeting Kim.

North Korea accused the Trump administration on Saturday of pushing a “unilateral and gangster-like demand for denuclearization” and called it “deeply regrettable,” hours after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said his two days of talks in the North Korean capital were “productive.”

Despite the criticism, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, still wanted to build on the “friendly relationship and trust” forged with President Trump during their summit meeting in Singapore on June 12. The ministry said Mr. Kim had written a personal letter to Mr. Trump, reiterating that trust.

The two sides have a history of veering between harsh talk and conciliation. Mr. Trump briefly called off the Singapore summit meeting over what he called North Korea’s “open hostility,” only to declare it back on after receiving what he called a “very nice letter” from Mr. Kim.

On Saturday, Mr. Pompeo and his entourage offered no immediate evidence that they had come away with anything tangible to show that North Korea was willing to surrender its nuclear and missile weapons programs. He did not meet with Mr. Kim but held talks with Kim Yong-chol, a senior official who has been country’s point person in talks with the United States, South Korea and China.

“These are complicated issues, but we made progress on almost all of the central issues,” Mr. Pompeo said before boarding a plane for Tokyo. He called the meetings “productive.”

But the North Korean Foreign Ministry’s assessment was decidedly less upbeat.

“The attitude and demands from the U.S. side during the high-level talks were nothing short of deeply regrettable,” the ministry said, accusing American “working-level” officials of trying to destroy the agreement struck in Singapore.

Mr. Pompeo came to Pyongyang to try to get the North Koreans to match their vague commitment to denuclearization — signed by Kim Jong-un in the June meeting with President Trump — with some kind of action. Among the first priorities were a declaration of weapons sites, a timeline of deconstruction efforts and, perhaps, a written statement that the North’s definition of denuclearization matched Mr. Pompeo’s.

Asked if he had gotten any of those, Mr. Pompeo declined to divulge details.

Spoilers: Pompeo got exactly nothing, including no chance of a meeting with Kim himself.  After all, the North Koreans have already won this round, recognized by the most powerful country on Earth as a legitimate nuclear power.  Any further diplomacy on Pyongyang's stance will be bilateral deals, with Kim holding his brand-new nuclear cards.

Besides, Pompeo knows full well he has lost.

Privately, Mr. Pompeo has said that he doubts the North Korean leader will ever give up his nuclear weapons. And those doubts have been reinforced in recent days by intelligence showing that North Korea, far from dismantling its weapons facilities, has been expanding them and taking steps to conceal the efforts from the United States.

Mr. Trump has said his summit meeting with Mr. Kim was a success, and he has declared the North “no longer a nuclear threat.” Squaring Mr. Trump’s evaluation with what increasingly seems like a more troubling reality has become one of Mr. Pompeo’s greatest challenges as the United States’ chief diplomat.

It was Mr. Pompeo’s third trip to Pyongyang, but the first time he had spent the night. Even so, it appeared to have been his least productive visit.

There had been hopes that Mr. Pompeo would get the North to agree to release the remains of American war dead. But Mr. Pompeo said that another meeting had been set up for July 12 for further talks on repatriating the remains, a dialogue that will be led by the Defense Department.

No such talks will happen.  North Korea now knows it can bring the world to the table by rattling its nuclear saber and that it can get away with making increasingly bellicose demands.  I'm not sure how the world will deal with a nuclear North Korean going forward, but I do know that the Trump regime is the least prepared and most ill-equipped American administration possible in being able to deal with it.

Trump's failures with Pyongyang this year will go down as one of the greatest international blunders in history.  He's likely to only eclipse that dubious honor as his term grinds on.

Mad Dog In The Doghouse

Not that Trump's decision Friday to officially drop joint military exercises between the US and South Korea didn't already prove this beyond a doubt or anything, but yes, Defense Secretary James Mattis is clearly getting the Rex Tillerson treatment these days as his Pentagon tenure appears to be increasingly in trouble.

Defense Secretary James Mattis learned in May from a colleague that President Donald Trump had made the decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Iran nuclear deal, and scrambled to get his boss on the phone before a formal announcement was made. It wouldn't be the last time he was caught off guard by a presidential announcement.

A month later, Mattis was informed that Trump had ordered a pause in U.S. military exercises with South Korea only after the president had already promised the concession to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Last week, Trump again blindsided and overruled his defense secretary by publicly directing the Pentagon to create a sixth military branch overseeing operations in space.

The way these recent presidential decisions on major national security issues have played out, as detailed by current and former White House and defense officials, underscores a significant change in Mattis's role in recent months. The president is relying less and less on the advice of one of the longest-serving members of his cabinet, the officials said.

"They don't really see eye to eye," said a former senior White House official who has closely observed the relationship.

It's a stark contrast to Trump's early enthusiasm for the retired four-star Marine general he proudly referred to as "Mad Dog." And while the two men had disagreements from the start — on the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects, for instance — Trump still kept Mattis in the loop on major decisions and heeded his counsel.

"He's never been one of the go-tos in the gang that's very close to the president," a senior White House official said. "But the president has a lot of respect for him."

In recent months, however, the president has cooled on Mattis, in part because he's come to believe his defense secretary looks down on him and slow-walks his policy directives, according to current and former administration officials.

The dynamic was exacerbated with Trump's announcement in March that he had chosen John Bolton as national security adviser, a move Mattis opposed, and Mike Pompeo's confirmation as secretary of state soon after.

The president is now more inclined to rely on his own instincts or the advice of Pompeo and Bolton, three people familiar with the matter said.

There's no question now that Bolton and Pompeo are running our military policy on the Middle East, North Korea, Iran, China, Russia and Europe.  Whether or not he'll make enough noise on the way out the door may play a role, but at this point there's no reason to believe that Mattis has any clout anymore.  This is exactly what happened to former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

Also, compare Mattis, who is repeatedly overruled and marginalized by Trump, to EPA head Scott Pruitt, who by all rights should have been fired months ago for his obvious corruption and incompetence, but he's still riding high as Trump loves the guy because he's doing what Trump wants.

Maybe Mattis will survive the way Trump's Chief of Staff John Kelly has, by keeping his mouth shut and rolling over.  But Kelly, Mattis and Tillerson were supposedly the "adults in the room" keeping Trump's authoritarian impulses in check.  If anything, Trump is riding roughshod over them, and they are doing nothing while Trump calls for the end of due process.

Tillerson is gone, replaced by the totally subservient Pompeo.  Kelly has rolled over completely, not that he wasn't a seething racist to begin with like his boss.  Now we learn Mattis has effectively been replaced by John Bolton's mustache.  The "moderating influences" on Trump by the professionals are completely gone.

Now we have Trump unleashed upon the world.

 

Last Call For That Poll-Asked Look

As I keep saying, Trump is the metastasized symptom, the cancer is the Republican party.

More Republicans view North Korean leader Kim Jong Un favorably than do House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), according to a poll released Monday. 

The Ipsos survey conducted for The Daily Beast found that among Republicans, 19 percent indicated they hold a favorable opinion of Kim, while 17 percent said they have a favorable opinion of Pelosi. 

Sixty-eight percent of Republicans said they held an unfavorable opinion of Kim, while 72 percent said they had an unfavorable view of Pelosi.

Republicans have long criticized the Democratic leader, using her in campaign ads to rally up their base, while the survey results come just one week after President Trump’s historic summit with Kim in Singapore, where the two leaders discussed reining in Pyongyang's nuclear program.

America First, for certain definitions of "America".  Besides, Republican voters get to decide who's "American" right?

Nearly every day, voters have been confronted with heart wrenching stories about immigrant children being separated from their parents upon crossing the border into the United States.

The president incorrectly blames his administration’s policy on Democrats, but regardless of his attempt to pass the responsibility, self-identified Republicans have his back, according to a new Ipsos poll done exclusively for The Daily Beast. 

The poll of roughly 1,000 adults aged 18 and over, and conducted June 14-15, asked respondents if they agreed with the following statement: “It is appropriate to separate undocumented immigrant parents from their children when they cross the border in order to discourage others from crossing the border illegally.” 

Of those surveyed, 27 percent of the overall respondents agreed with it, while 56% disagreed with the statement. Yet, Republicans leaned slightly more in favor, with 46% agreeing with the statement and 32 percent disagreeing. Meanwhile, 14 percent of Democrats surveyed supported it and only 29% of Independents were in favor. 

The sample, according to Ipsos, included 339 Democrats, 335 Republicans and 204 Independents.

Nice people, Republicans.  Hell, Quinnipiac actually has a majority of Republicans approving of this. 

It's not Trump.  It's the people who voted for him.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

It's been an abysmal week for the Trump regime, with the White House's North Korea summit narrative disintegrating under the deluge of bad news:

• Jeff Sessions's ghoulish and indefensible child separation policy for immigrants crossing the border and putting them into internment camps is even stirring Paul Ryan into action, 
• the DoJ's long-awaited Inspector General's report on the Clinton email investigation was correct to spare Clinton and nailed James Comey for essentially assisting Trump in winning the election,
• the major lawsuit filed yesterday by NY AG Barbara Underwood against the Trump Foundation for campaign finance violations and charities fraud,
• Trump lawyer Michael Cohen facing a deadline today to turn over evidence and all but threatening to flip on his client,
• Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort, already facing federal and state tax fraud and illegal lobbying charges, could have his bail/house arrest arrangement revoked today over attempted witness tampering in his case,
• and the White House press staff falling apart as both Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders and deputy Raj Shah are rumored to be leaving.

Things have now gotten so bad that  Rudy Giuliani was on FOX News last night demanding Robert Mueller's head.

President Donald Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani said Thursday evening that special counsel Robert Mueller's probe should be suspended and Friday is the last chance for Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to "redeem themselves."

"I believe that Rod Rosenstein and Jeff Sessions have a chance to redeem themselves and that chance comes about tomorrow," Giuliani told Fox News host Sean Hannity.

Holding up a copy of the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General report, Giuliani argued that Mueller's probe must cease so top FBI officials named in the report can be investigated.

The report, compiled by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz and his staff, found that the FBI's handling of the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server was not affected by political bias. However, multiple agency officials, including former FBI Director James Comey, made decisions that went against department norms and others, like agent Peter Strzok, made inappropriate comments critical of then-candidate Trump.

"Tomorrow, Mueller should be suspended and honest people should be brought in, impartial people to investigate these people like Strzok," Giuliani continued. "Strzok should be in jail by the end of next week."

Giuliani’s call for Mueller to be suspended represents a major turning point for the Trump lawyer. Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of a White House event at the end of May, Giuliani said he didn’t think the special counsel job was in jeopardy. “I don’t think he’s going to fire Mueller. Mueller is creating his own problems,” Giuliani said.

At this point we have to assume that Rudy's appearance on Hannity last night is what Donald Trump wanted the world to hear, both the demand that Mueller be stopped and a new investigator brought in by Trump, and that Sessions and Rosenstein have "one day" to "redeem" themselves. 

Odds of that Saturday Night Massacre™ happening this weekend just went up astronomically in my book.  If there were ever a weekend where Trump blows his stack and makes his move against the DoJ, it's this one.

We know he's tried to fire Mueller before.  He was always going to try again.  When he realizes that Jeff Sessions can't make all of this go away, especially the NY state case involving Ivanka, Eric, and Don Jr. and the Trump Foundation, he might just take a flamethrower to it all.

Maybe somebody talks him down again. Maybe this is the weekend where he can no longer be talked down.  Stay tuned.

Mr. Trump Goes To Singapore

Donald Trump managed to get a number of vague statements out of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, but basically nothing in the way of details or verification of "denuclearization" while the US apparently is giving up joint military exercises with South Korea in exchange for a piece of paper.

President Trump said he “developed a very special bond” with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during their historic summit here Tuesday and proclaimed the start of a new era that could break a cycle of nuclear brinkmanship and stave off a military confrontation.

“Yesterday’s conflict does not have to be tomorrow’s war,” Trump said at a news conference in Singapore following more than four hours of talks with Kim.

Trump said Kim “reaffirmed” his commitment to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and also agreed to destroy a missile site in the country.

“We’re ready to write a new chapter between our nations,” the president said.

Trump sounded triumphant following his meeting with Kim, expressing confidence that the North Korean leader was serious about abandoning his nuclear program and transforming his country from an isolated rogue regime into a respected member of the world community.

But Trump provided few specifics about what steps Kim would take to back up his promise to denuclearize his country and how the United States would verify that North Korea was keeping its pledge to get rid of its nuclear weapons, saying that would be worked out in future talks. 

“We will do it as fast as it can mechanically and physically be done,” he said of the process to rid North Korea of nuclear weapons.

Trump announced that he will order an end to regular “war games” that the United States conducts with ally South Korea, a reference to annual joint military exercises that are an irritant to North Korea.

Trump called the exercises “very provocative” and “inappropriate” in light of the optimistic opening he sees with North Korea. Ending the exercises would also save money, Trump said.

The United States has conducted such exercises for decades as a symbol of unity with Seoul and previously rejected North Korean complaints as illegitimate. Ending the games would be a significant political benefit for Kim, but Trump insisted he had not given up leverage.

“I think the meeting was every bit as good for the United States as it was for North Korea,” Trump said, casting himself as a leader who can secure a deal that has eluded past presidents.

South Korea’s presidential office seemed blindsided by the announcement on the joint exercises.

“We need to try to understand what President Trump said,” a spokesman for South Korean President Moon Jae-in said.

So in the last 48 hours, Trump has effectively isolated the US from its G-7 allies, directly angered Canada and insulted PM Justin Trudeau, backed out of a joint statement with our oldest allies, and then signed on to a statement with arguably the most repressive and bloody dictator on earth.

The pundits are absolutely correct to call this both historic and unprecedented, and none of it is a good thing.  The message this sends to both our allies and to the world's most vicious dictators is unmistakable: the legitimacy you crave is for sale by Trump.  The scale and magnitude of Kim's propaganda victory here can't be overstated.  Trump has proven that pursuit of a nuclear program will get you recognition by the US as a potential ally.  There isn't a dictator on earth who isn't now considering a nuclear weapons program as the path to power and legitimacy.

This has been the worst week for US diplomacy in decades.

Oh, and South Korea wasn't consulted at all.  They had no clue.  Trump is more accommodating to Kim than he is Moon. And recall that Republicans were screaming at how awful the Iran nuclear deal supposedly was, and they're falling all over themselves calling Trump the greatest president in US history for a "promise" from a dictator not to lie.

China is laughing up its sleeve.  Russia couldn't be happier.

Trump is the Dunning-Kruger poster boy in the party of cognitive-biased fools.
 

Last Call For The Drums Of War, Con't

I say "North Korean summit", you say "high-level diplomatic meeting with Pyongyang", let's call the whole thing off.

President Trump has notified Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, that he has canceled their much- anticipated meeting, which was set for June 12. 

In a letter dated Thursday to Mr. Kim, the American president said he would not attend the summit due to “tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement.” 

He was referring to recent comments from a North Korean official who described Vice President Mike Pence as “ignorant and stupid.” 

“Some day, I look very much forward to meeting you,” Mr. Trump concluded.

The letter is pure Trumpian hogwash.

We greatly appreciate your time, patience, and effort with respect to our recent negotiations and discussions relative to a summit long sought by both parties, which was scheduled to take place on June 12 in Singapore. We were informed that the meeting was requested by North Korea, but that to us is totally irrelevant. l was very much looking forward to being there with you. Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting. Therefore, please let this letter serve to represent that the Singapore summit, for the good of both parties, but to the detriment of the world, will not take place. You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.

It's kind of funny for somebody other than the North Korean leader to be the childish, petulant little pissant in this oft-repeated scenario over the last couple decades where that denuclearization summit never happens, but there you are.

Sadly, this is where we are now. America under Trump is very much an untrustworthy, unreliable, and unstable nuclear rogue state that's far more of a global threat and even more dangerous than the North Koreans are.

The prospect of a diplomatic miscalculation leading to deadly shooting war before the end of the year just became exponentially more real with two belligerents facing off rather than just one, yes?

Everything I said 12 weeks ago is still 100% true.

The Dotard Strikes Back

Donald Trump doesn't like being made fun of, he has no tolerance for it, and after last week's move by North Korea to squeeze the US for more concessions on nuclear talks, Trump is finally realizing that he's been played from the beginning and is looking for a way out.

President Trump, increasingly concerned that his summit meeting in Singapore next month with North Korea’s leader could turn into a political embarrassment, has begun pressing his aides and allies about whether he should take the risk of proceeding with a historic meeting that he had leapt into accepting, according to administration and foreign officials.

Mr. Trump was both surprised and angered by a statement issued on Wednesday by the North’s chief nuclear negotiator, who declared that the country would never trade away its nuclear weapons capability in exchange for economic aid, administration officials said. The statement, while a highly familiar tactic by the North, represented a jarring shift in tone after weeks of conciliatory gestures.

On Thursday and Friday, Mr. Trump peppered aides with questions about the wisdom of proceeding, and on Saturday night he called President Moon Jae-in of South Korea to ask why the North’s public statement seemed to contradict the private assurances that Mr. Moon had conveyed after he met Kim Jong-un, the 35-year-old dictator of the North, at the Demilitarized Zone in late April.

The president’s conversation with Mr. Moon, which was first reported by The Washington Post, came just three days before the South Korean leader was scheduled to arrive in Washington to meet with Mr. Trump on Tuesday. It was a sign of Mr. Trump’s discomfort, some officials speculated, that he could not wait to discuss the issue until Mr. Moon arrived for his meetings here, though there is no indication that the president is considering pulling out of the North Korea talks.

Mr. Trump’s aides have grown concerned that the president — who has said that “everyone thinks” he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts — has signaled that he wants the summit meeting too much. The aides also worry that Mr. Kim, sensing the president’s eagerness, is prepared to offer assurances that will fade over time.

Moreover, Mr. Trump’s decision this month to withdraw from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal raises the stakes for the North Korea negotiation. If he emerges with anything less than what President Barack Obama got, which in Iran included the verified shipment of 97 percent of all nuclear material out of the country, it will be hard for Mr. Trump to convince anyone other than his base that the negotiation was a success.

This is a very polite way of saying that Trump has no idea what he's doing here, that he's in well over his head, and that when all of this is over he'll have nothing to show for it. Anyone could have told you that.

He'll be a loser and a failure. Again, common knowledge.

That's when things get ugly.  That too should come as no surprise when Trump eventually turns to military action and lashes out.

Stay tuned.

Mad Dog Versus The Mustache

I know that the conventional wisdom is that incoming National Security Adviser John Bolton will be whispering sweet war stories in Trump's ear, and there's very good reason to believe that Bolton being a part of the regime dramatically increases the odds of America going to war during Trump's term.  But what does Defense Secretary Jim Mattis think of all this?

Yeah, there's a reason he's called Mad Dog, the guy definitely knows his way around a sand table or two and didn't exactly shy from blowing stuff up as Obama's CENTCOM head.  The guy's record goes all the way back to the first Gulf War as a battalion commander with the Marines. He's seen the elephant, and he's put men in harm's way and seen some of them not come home.

And you know what?  He doesn't like John Bolton one bit.

Washington is now consumed by a debate over whether Mr. Trump’s new team plans to govern as far to the right as it talks.

So far, the incoming national security adviser, John R. Bolton, has declared that his past comments are “behind me.” Hours after his selection was announced, Mr. Bolton vowed that he would find ways to execute the policies that Mr. Trump was elected on, but that he would not tolerate slow-walking and leaks from bureaucrats he dismissed as “munchkins.”

Some who know Mr. Bolton and his operating style predict titanic clashes.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, the retired general who has argued for keeping the Iran deal intact and warned that military confrontation with North Korea would result in “the worst kind of fighting in most people’s lifetimes,” told colleagues on Friday that he did not know if he could work with Mr. Bolton. The White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, another retired four-star general, was also unenthusiastic about Mr. Bolton’s hiring.

I've given up on Kelly, he's an unapologetic racist asshole anyway.  But Mattis is the guy actually running the Pentagon, and I'm hoping he'll put a leash on Bolton.

The problem is that's what McMaster was supposed to do as NSA and he's gone, the triumvirate of "Trump's generals" were supposed to be the "adults in the room" protecting America from Trump's worst impulses.

That's not coming to pass.  One is gone.  One has been rumored on the way out for months.  Only Mattis seems to be the stable one.

Last July, James Mattis and Rex Tillerson arranged a tutoring session at the Pentagon for President Donald Trump in the secure, windowless meeting room known as “The Tank.” The plan was to lay out why American troops are deployed in far-flung places across the globe, like Japan and South Korea. Mattis spoke first.

“The postwar, rules-based international order is the greatest gift of the greatest generation,” Mattis told the president, according to two meeting attendees. The secretary of defense walked the president through the complex fabric of trade deals, military agreements and international alliances that make up the global system the victors established after World War II, touching off what one attendee described as a “food fight” and a “free for all” with the president and the rest of the group. Trump punctuated the session by loudly telling his secretaries of state and defense, at several points during the meeting, “I don’t agree!” The meeting culminated with Tillerson, his now ousted secretary of state, fatefully complaining after the president left the room, that Trump was “a fucking moron.”

Trump is said to divide the members of his Cabinet into first-tier “killers” and second-tier “winners.” Mattis is indisputably a killer, but he’s also something rarer: a sometime loser — of policy arguments, that is — who manages to disagree with the president without squandering his clout or getting under Trump’s skin. He opposed Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate change accord, decertify the Iran deal, slap tariffs on steel and aluminum, and move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He opposes the president’s proposed ban on transgender service members and has reportedly ignored requests from the White House to see plans for a military strike against North Korea.

Yet Mattis has been able to present the president with views he doesn’t like without bearing the brunt of his frustration. The departure of H.R. McMaster, his national security adviser, was announced Thursday amid rumors that the president is poised to fire beleaguered Cabinet secretaries like David Shulkin of Veterans Affairs and Ben Carson of Housing and Urban Development, and is agonizing over whether to dismiss John Kelly, his chief of staff. Mattis’ name has been conspicuously absent. One senior administration official called him “bulletproof.”

Of the Cabinet selections and staff picks cheered by Trump critics, including McMaster, Kelly and former chairman of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, Mattis is the only one who seems to still have job security. Trump remains as enthused about Mattis, one of his first Cabinet picks, as he was when he tapped him for the job in December 2016, according to several White House aides.

For now.

The one thing standing between Trump and war with Iran and North Korea is a guy nicknamed "Mad Dog".

Let that sink in.

Cry Havok, And Let Slip The Mustache Of War

I've said time and again that John Bolton joining Trump's foreign policy team basically guaranteed war with Iran, North Korea, or both. That catastrophic scenario has now come to pass, as Bolton will be replacing National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in a few weeks.

President Trump named John R. Bolton, a hard-line former American ambassador to the United Nations, as his third national security adviser on Thursday, continuing a shake-up that creates one of the most hawkish national security teams of any White House in recent history.

Mr. Bolton will replace Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the battle-tested Army officer who was tapped last year to stabilize a turbulent foreign policy operation but who never developed a comfortable relationship with the president.

The move, which was sudden but not unexpected, signals a more confrontational approach in American foreign policy at a time when Mr. Trump faces mounting challenges, including from Iran and North Korea.

The president replaced Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson last week with the C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, a former Army officer and Tea Party congressman who has spoken about regime change in Pyongyang and about ripping up the Iran nuclear deal.

Mr. Bolton, an outspoken advocate of military action who served in the George W. Bush administration, has called for action against Iran and North Korea. In an interview on Thursday on Fox News, soon after his appointment was announced in a presidential tweet, he declined to say whether Mr. Trump should go through with a planned meeting with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un.

General McMaster will retire from the military, ending a career that included senior commands in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had discussed his departure with Mr. Trump for several weeks, White House officials said, but decided to speed it up because questions about his status were casting a shadow over his exchanges with foreign officials.

Mr. Trump, the White House officials said, also wanted to fill out his national security team before his meeting with Mr. Kim, which is scheduled to occur by the end of May.

With Pompeo at State and now Bolton running the NSC, the odds that Trump is talked into direct military action against Pyongyang or Tehran is ludicrously high.  I know I make a lot of predictions, and use quote a bit of superlative hyperbole to get my points across, but guys?

I'm scared.

This is deadly, deadly serious, and I am 100% convinced the question now isn't whether we attack Iran and/or North Korea, but when, and in what order.  Voting for Democrats this fall and taking back the House and Senate as a check on Trump's military aspirations is now a moral imperative.  Fred Kaplan at Slate has the right of it despite his long history of being a smug asshole.

Bolton has repeatedly called for launching a first strike on North Korea, scuttling the nuclear arms deal with Iran, and then bombing that country too. He says and writes these things not as part of some clever “madman theory” to bring Kim Jong-un and the mullahs of Tehran to the bargaining table, but rather because he simply wants to destroy them and America’s other enemies too.

His agenda is not “peace through strength,” the motto of more conventional Republican hawks that Trump included in a tweet on Wednesday, but rather regime change through war. He is a neocon without the moral fervor of some who wear that label—i.e., he is keen to topple oppressive regimes not in order to spread democracy but rather to expand American power.

In the early days of the George W. Bush administration, Vice President Dick Cheney finagled Bolton a job as undersecretary of state for arms control—an inside joke, since Bolton has never read an arms-control treaty that he liked. But his real assignment was to serve as Cheney’s spy in Foggy Bottom, monitoring and, when possible, obstructing any attempts at peaceful diplomacy mounted by Secretary of State Colin Powell.

When Powell got the boot, Cheney wanted to make Bolton deputy secretary of state, replacing Richard Armitage, who resigned along with his best friend Powell. But Powell’s replacement, Condoleezza Rice, who had been Bush’s national security adviser, blocked the move, fully aware of Bolton’s obstructionist ideology.

As a compromise, Bush nominated Bolton to be United Nations ambassador, but that move proved unbearable to even the Republican-controlled Senate at the time. It was one thing to be critical of the U.N.—it’s a body deserving of criticism—but Bolton opposed its very existence. “There is no such thing as the United Nations,” he once said in a speech, adding, “If the U.N. Secretariat building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a lot of difference.”

More than that, he was hostile to the idea of international law, having once declared, “It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so—because over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrain the United States.”

We're going to another disastrous war.  Maybe two.  Hell, maybe more.  With Mueller closing in, there may not be a way to stop it.  Most of the groundwork for an attack has already been set.  When Trump's May meeting with Kim Jong-Un fails spectacularly or fails to even happen in the first place, the bombs will start falling later this year.

I almost guarantee it at this point.

Terminus Mortuus Est Rex

The Trump regime spring cleaning dirtying continues, and this one's big: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is out, with CIA Director Mike Pompeo taking over.

President Trump has ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and plans to nominate CIA Director Mike Pompeo to replace him as the nation’s top diplomat, orchestrating a major change to his national security team amid delicate negotiations with North Korea, White House officials said Tuesday.

Trump last Friday asked Tillerson to step aside, and the embattled diplomat cut short his trip to Africa on Monday to return to Washington.

Pompeo will replace him at the State Department, and Gina Haspel — the deputy director at the CIA — will succeed him at the CIA, becoming the first woman to run the spy agency, if confirmed.

In a statement issued to The Washington Post, Trump praised both Pompeo and Haspel.

“I am proud to nominate the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mike Pompeo, to be our new Secretary of State,” Trump said. “Mike graduated first in his class at West Point, served with distinction in the U.S. Army, and graduated with Honors from Harvard Law School. He went on to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives with a proven record of working across the aisle.”

The president continued, “Gina Haspel, the Deputy Director of the CIA, will be nominated to replace Director Pompeo and she will be the CIA’s first-ever female director, a historic milestone. Mike and Gina have worked together for more than a year, and have developed a great mutual respect.”

Trump also had words of praise for Tillerson: “Finally, I want to thank Rex Tillerson for his service. A great deal has been accomplished over the last fourteen months, and I wish him and his family well.”

The president — who has long clashed will Tillerson, who he believes is “too establishment” in his thinking — felt it was important to make the change now, as he prepares for talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, as well as upcoming trade negotiations, three White House officials said.

Two things:  Trump definitely now feels he is unfettered and can do whatever the hell he wants to right now.  He's not wrong, nobody's going to try to stop him.  House Republicans surely proved that yesterday.  Trump says he told Rex on Friday that his services would no longer be required, Tillerson says that he was never told, but this announcement came just hours after Tillerson remarked that the State Department believed Russia was "clearly" behind the chemical weapon attack in Britain last week that put ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the hospital.

The second is that the odds of US military action against Syria and North Korea just went skyward.  Bringing in the CIA head as your new chief diplomat is not even pretending peace was ever on the table.  The only question now is the timeframe.

War is definitely coming.  In his own thoroughly corrupt but predictable way, Tillerson was the last holdout for diplomacy.  It's all swamp monsters now, and they're packing thermite and Everclear.

Last Call For Nixon In The Bunker

Donald Trump isn't talking to paintings yet, but as Gabe Sherman of Vanity Fair tells us, he's decided that the problem is everyone in the White House who isn't him, and it's time to take out the trash.

With the departures of Hope Hicks and Gary Cohn, the Trump presidency is entering a new phase—one in which Trump is feeling liberated to act on his impulses. “Trump is in command. He’s been in the job more than a year now. He knows how the levers of power work. He doesn’t give a fuck,” the Republican said. Trump’s decision to circumvent the policy process and impose tariffs on imported steel and aluminum reflects his emboldened desire to follow his impulses and defy his advisers. “It was like a fuck-you to Kelly,” a Trump friend said. “Trump is red-hot about Kelly trying to control him.” 

According to five Republicans close to the White House, Trump has diagnosed the problem as having the wrong team around him and is looking to replace his senior staff in the coming weeks. “Trump is going for a clean reset, but he needs to do it in a way that’s systemic so it doesn’t look like it’s chaos,” one Republican said. 

Sources said that the first officials to go will be Chief of Staff John Kelly and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, both of whom Trump has clashed with for months. On Tuesday, Trump met with John Bolton in the Oval Office. When he plans to visit Mar-a-Lago this weekend, Trump is expected to interview more candidates for both positions, according to two sources. “He’s going for a clean slate,” one source said. Cohn had been lobbying to replace Kelly as chief, two sources said, and quit when he didn’t get the job. “Trump laughed at Gary when he brought it up,” one outside adviser to the White House said. (The White House declined to comment.) 

Next on the departure list are Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Trump remains fiercely loyal to his family, but various distractions have eroded their efficacy within the administration. Both have been sidelined without top-secret security clearances by Kelly, and sources expect them to be leaving at some point in the near future. One scenario being discussed is that Kushner would return to New York to oversee Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign with his ally Brad Parscale, who was hand-selected by the Trump family. One Trump friend referred to it as a “soft landing.” Ivanka will likely stay on longer, perhaps through the summer, before decamping home to New York to enroll the children in a Manhattan private school. Both are presumed to remain in close contact with Trump, who often places significant value on the opinions expressed outside his administration, anyway.

I'll believe it when I see it, but if Trump has decided he can now do whatever he wants to and will no longer even pretend to listen to anyone but himself, the chances that he fails catastrophically are extremely high.  Good news for Democrats in November, bad news for America and everyone living there. 

If this is all true, then we're already seeing "nothing to lose" Trump in action with North Korea and trade tariffs, and at this point if Trump figures he takes a big enough gamble he can avoid the Mueller axe by making a big enough move to win everyone over and save the GOP, who will then be so grateful to him that they will end the investigations.

The reality is that Trump will come ever closer to making a fatal miscalculation that could pretty much wreck everything.  If he's listening to people like John Bolton's Mustache, we're all in for a world of hurt.

We'll see.

Donny's Pyongyang Adventure

The North Korean regime has been trying to invite a US president to Pyongyang for direct talks for two decades now in order to prove to the world that its nuclear program is powerful enough to bring even the leader of the free world to its doorstep to negotiate as the regime's equal on North Korea's terms.  

Clinton, Dubya, and Obama all passed on such an obvious diplomatic trap that would accomplish nothing but upside for the Kim regime and establish a new diplomatic paradigm that the world should be coming to Pyongyang directly at its whim.

No major world leader would be blockheaded enough to give the North Koreans exactly what they wanted: proof that their nuclear program is absolutely justified as a tool to get America and the western world to the table and assure to the rest of the planet that a nuclear program is exactly what your tinpot dictatorship needs in order to get respect on the global stage.

So guess what goddamn idiot Donald Trump announced he was going to do this spring.

North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, has invited President Trump to meet for negotiations over its nuclear program, an audacious diplomatic overture that would bring together two strong-willed, idiosyncratic leaders who have traded threats of war.

The White House said that Mr. Trump had accepted the invitation, and Chung Eui-yong, a South Korean official who conveyed it, told reporters that the president would meet with Mr. Kim within two months.

“He expressed his eagerness to meet President Trump as soon as possible,” Mr. Chung said at the White House on Thursday evening after meeting the president. Mr. Trump, he said, agreed to “meet Kim Jong-un by May to achieve permanent denuclearization.”

The president expressed his optimism about the meeting in a post on Twitter, saying that Mr. Kim had “talked about denuclearization with the South Korean Representatives, not just a freeze.”

“Also, no missile testing by North Korea during this period of time,” Mr. Trump added. “Great progress being made but sanctions will remain until an agreement is reached. Meeting being planned!”

Mr. Chung, whose talks with Mr. Kim on Monday in Pyongyang resulted in the invitation, noted that the North Korean leader said he understood that joint military exercises with the United States and South Korea would go ahead as scheduled after the end of the Paralympic Games this month.

For Mr. Trump, a meeting with Mr. Kim, a leader he has threatened with “fire and fury” and has derided as “Little Rocket Man,” is a breathtaking gamble. No sitting American president has ever met a North Korean leader, and Mr. Trump himself has repeatedly vowed that he would not commit the error of his predecessors by being drawn into a protracted negotiation in which North Korea extracted concessions from the United States but held on to key elements of its nuclear program.

Meeting Mr. Kim now, rather than at the end of a negotiation when the United States would presumably have extracted concessions from North Korea, is an enormous gesture by the president. But Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim share a penchant for bold, dramatic moves, and their personal participation in a negotiation could take it in unexpected directions.

Sure, those "unexpected directions" include "going completely off the rails with a nuclear adversary". The rank amateurism and sheer stupidity of the agreement cannot be overstated, as Ankit Panda explains.

For Kim, a meeting with Trump will be an unalloyed propaganda victory. Trump will assuredly not “achieve permanent denuclearization,” despite what he told Chung. Instead, Kim will be given the opportunity to stage-manage a photo-op with a U.S. president. The costs of a freeze in nuclear and ballistic missile testing for the next two months are relatively minor for North Korea compared to the benefits of a meeting with Trump.

In a normal world, too, there could be a serious opportunity in direct leader-level talks between the United States and North Korea, but Trump is far from a normal president. The United States is woefully lacking in subject matter expertise on the Korean Peninsula at the highest levels of government, with the State Department’s special representative for North Korea policy, Joseph Yun, having just stepped down last week and the post of ambassador to Seoul still vacant. Trump has the intelligence community behind him, but it’s doubtful that he’s capable of being successfully briefed.

A face-to-face meeting with Kim would require Trump to exercise cautious, measured engagement. He’d have to hear out what the North Korean leader has to say and know where the red lines lie. North Korea’s long-term play on the Korean Peninsula is to “decouple” the United States and South Korea.

During his campaign for the presidency, Trump showed more interest in sitting down for a “hamburger” with Kim than he did in the alliance with South Korea, complaining about the costs of maintaining a forward-based military presence there. Those instincts still live within Trump and are ripe for exploitation by North Korea, which has had plenty of time to study him.

Trump has shown time and again a deep misunderstanding of the basic rules of statecraft (as well as economics, physics, and pretty damn well near everything else.)  The odds of him getting rolled by Kim like a drunk bum at an Staten Island policemen's ball are approaching 199%.  Disaster doesn't begin to cover it.

But, much like the GOP tax bill, the dismantling of Obamacare, and the new trade war ignited by Trump's steel and Aluminum tariffs, the effects of this catastrophe won't be fully felt until it's far too late for the next person in the White House to even begin to clean it up.

Last Call For The Drums Of War, Con't

As the Mueller trap closes in on Trump, I become more and more convinced he will attempt to order a catastrophic military conflict with North Korea in order to provide the chaos he'll need to resist the consequences, because at this point the Pentagon is running wargames of military strikes on Pyongyang and the resulting troop deployments and mass casualties.

A classified military exercise last week examined how American troops would mobilize and strike if ordered into a potential war on the Korean Peninsula, even as diplomatic overtures between the North and the Trump administration continue. 

The war planning, known as a “tabletop exercise,” was held over several days in Hawaii. It included Gen. Mark A. Milley, the Army’s chief of staff, and Gen. Tony Thomas, the head of Special Operations Command. 

They looked at a number of pitfalls that could hamper an American assault on North Korea’s well-entrenched military. Among them was the Pentagon’s limited ability to evacuate injured troops from the Korean Peninsula daily — a problem more acute if the North retaliated with chemical weapons, according to more than a half-dozen military and Defense Department officials familiar with the exercise. 

Large numbers of surveillance aircraft would have to be moved from the Middle East and Africa to the Pacific to support ground troops. Planners also looked at how American forces stationed in South Korea and Japan would be involved.

Pentagon officials cautioned that the planning does not mean that a decision has been made to go to war over President Trump’s demands that North Korea rein in its nuclear ambitions.

Sure it hasn't, it's just readiness exercises.  No need to be alarmed, citizens!

A war with North Korea, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has said, would be “catastrophic.” He and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have argued forcefully for using diplomacy to address Pyongyang’s nuclear program. 

Commanders who attended the exercise in Hawaii were told that roughly 10,000 Americans could be wounded in combat in the opening days alone. And the number of civilian casualties, the generals were told, would likely be in the thousands or even hundreds of thousands. 

The potential human costs of a war were so high that, at one point during the exercise, General Milley remarked that “the brutality of this will be beyond the experience of any living soldier,” according to officials who were involved. 

So, too, would be the sheer logistical enterprise of moving thousands of American soldiers and equipment to the Korean Peninsula. Moreover, senior military officials worry that after 17 years in Afghanistan and Iraq, American troops have become far more used to counterinsurgency fighting than a land war against a state, as an attack on North Korea would likely bring. 

But Mr. Mattis also has ordered top Pentagon leaders to be ready for any possible military action against North Korea. Already, ammunition has been pre-staged in the Pacific region for ground units. 

And Mr. Trump’s words — “Military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely,” he said in an August post on Twitter — have left senior officers and rank-and-file troops convinced that they need to accelerate their contingency planning.

It's one thing to simply say "the Pentagon is keeping its options open" if the point was saber-rattling.  This is a very specific leak of very specific information on preparations for what would be one of the bloodiest wars in human history.

If anything I hope this leak is being made to convince Trump and the people around him that military action against North Korea will result in hundreds of thousands, if not millions of casualties.  Trump would go down as an absolute monster and the horror sinking in of the first major American war in the era of instant social media would be completely unprecedented.

Meanwhile, John Bolton's Mustache is penning op-eds in the Wall Street Journal calling for pre-preemptive strikes on North Korea.

Pre-emption opponents argue that action is not justified because Pyongyang does not constitute an “imminent threat.” They are wrong. The threat is imminent, and the case against pre-emption rests on the misinterpretation of a standard that derives from prenuclear, pre-ballistic-missile times. Given the gaps in U.S. intelligence about North Korea, we should not wait until the very last minute. That would risk striking after the North has deliverable nuclear weapons, a much more dangerous situation. 

In assessing the timing of pre-emptive attacks, the classic formulation is Daniel Webster’s test of “necessity.” British forces in 1837 invaded U.S. territory to destroy the steamboat Caroline, which Canadian rebels had used to transport weapons into Ontario. 

Webster asserted that Britain failed to show that “the necessity of self-defense was instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation.” Pre-emption opponents would argue that Britain should have waited until the Caroline reached Canada before attacking.

Would an American strike today against North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program violate Webster’s necessity test? Clearly not. Necessity in the nuclear and ballistic-missile age is simply different than in the age of steam. What was once remote is now, as a practical matter, near; what was previously time-consuming to deliver can now arrive in minutes; and the level of destructiveness of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons is infinitely greater than that of the steamship Caroline’s weapons cargo.

Those drums of war are getting extremely loud now.  It may be only a matter of time.  Exactly who would alter Trump's course on this?  Where's Defense Secretary Mattis?

Why, Mad Dog is busy clearing the decks and removing the people who might stop Trump's war.. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster is now leaving this mess behind and not of his own volition.

The White House is preparing to replace H.R. McMaster as national security adviser as early as next month in a move orchestrated by chief of staff John Kelly and Defense Secretary James Mattis, according to five people familiar with the discussions. 

The move would be the latest in a long string of staff shakeups at the White House over the past year and comes after months of strained relations between the president and McMaster. 

A leading candidate to become President Donald Trump’s third national security adviser is the auto industry executive Stephen Biegun, according to the officials.

Whoever they are, I hope they save us, but it's not looking good.  Bolton's Mustache is also reportedly in the running for McMaster's job, and if that happens, the odds of a military conflict with North Korea moves well above 50%.

Millions will die, and that's just the opening few stanzas of this blood-soaked epic.  It's a race now between Mueller and the military.