Reporter's Notebook

• The current U.S. president, as reported in Time Capsule #67;
• Apart from Gates, two other former CIA heads, including one who said Trump had become “an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation,” in #70;
• A former Prime Minister of Sweden, calling Trump “a serious threat to the security of the West,” #61;
• Some 50 former military, intelligence, and foreign-policy appointees from Republican administrations, “most reckless president in American history,” #72;
• Another 160-plus foreign policy experts—“Mr. Trump’s foreign policy vision has inspired alarm … in allied capitals throughout the world”—also #61;
• A former Republican president, by implication in saying that he would take the unprecedented step of voting for the Democratic rival, #107.

So it stands with 47 days to go, no tax records or non-Dr. Bornstein medical information forthcoming, and the Republican establishment saying: He’s fine.

To say it once more: nothing like this has happened before.

***

Colin Powell? Condi Rice? George Tenet? Your G.W. Bush-era Cabinet colleagues Robert Gates, and before him Henry Paulson, Michael Hayden, Michael Chertoff, John Negroponte, Tom Ridge, and others have set the precedent of doing the right thing. Dick Cheney will never do so, but you have the opportunity, and not just in leaked emails.

(*The Bull Moose / Republican tussle between Teddy Roosevelt and W.H. Taft in 1912 was a special case that doesn’t apply. The counterpart to today’s Bush-Trump news would be if Teddy Roosevelt, as a former Republican president, had endorsed Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat, rather than endorsing himself for another run at the White House.)

***

2. Fahrenthold and the Trump Foundation. This campaign has revealed a lot about our country, much of it unsettling. It is also revealing things both good and bad about our news media, in ways that are changing and unfolding every day, and that I’ll try to say more about sometime soon.

For now I’ll say: it’s impressive to see the NYT’s recent embrace of the “let’s call a lie a ‘lie’” philosophy; it is alarming that CNN has kept right on with Corey Lewandowski as a paid “analyst” while he is still on Donald Trump’s payroll, and it is encouraging for journalism in general and the Washington Post in particular that David Fahrenthold continues his extraordinary work on the Trump Foundation.

The story posted last night, about the foundation’s role in paying off legal claims against Trump’s for-profit businesses, is roughly ten times more dramatic—in evidentiary support, and in clarity of offense—than even the worst allegations about the Clinton Foundation. You can read the details yourself, but here’s a sample from the story:

“I represent 700 nonprofits a year, and I’ve never encountered anything so brazen,” said Jeffrey Tenenbaum, who advises charities at the Venable law firm in Washington. After The Washington Post described the details of these Trump Foundation gifts, Tenenbaum described them as “really shocking.”

“If he’s using other people’s money — run through his foundation — to satisfy his personal obligations, then that’s about as blatant an example of self-dealing [as] I’ve seen in awhile,” Tenenbaum said.

For Time Capsule purposes: through the centuries of U.S. history, various nominees have of course had their swirls of financial controversy. Lyndon Johnson’s rise to wealth was complex enough to occupy hundreds of pages of Robert Caro’s oeuvre. George W. Bush, of course born to a rich and prominent family, benefited greatly from a favorable deal involving the Texas Rangers. Spiro Agnew had to resign as vice president for taking cash bribes while in office. Suspicions that “something” must be awry with the Clinton family’s Whitewater dealings occupied the press and special investigators through much of the 1990s. And so on.

But to the best of my knowledge, nothing ever known or suspected about any previous national-level nominee comes close to what is now on the record about Donald Trump and his foundation.

And still he remains the only modern candidate to refuse to release his tax returns. And still the solons of his party say, He’s fine.

***

3. Kagan. Something must have happened yesterday to bring a four-month-old article to broader attention. I received several notes from readers wanting to be sure I’d seen an old WaPo essay by Robert Kagan.

I disagree with Robert Kagan on just about everything. But in the months since he originally published his essay, called “This Is How Fascism Comes to America,”  I think his arguments have come to seem more rather than less relevant. Especially this, with emphasis added:

We’re supposed to believe that Trump’s support stems from economic stagnation or dislocation. Maybe some of it does. But what Trump offers his followers are not economic remedies — his proposals change daily.

What he offers is an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence.

His incoherent and contradictory utterances have one thing in common: They provoke and play on feelings of resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger. His public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of “others” — Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees — whom he depicts either as threats or as objects of derision. His program, such as it is, consists chiefly of promises to get tough with foreigners and people of nonwhite complexion. He will deport them, bar them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut up.

Please also read Garrett Epps’s essay yesterday, to parallel sobering effect.

All this is part of what the country knows about this candidate, as it considers whether to make him president; and what the likes of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell know as well, as they stand beside him.

• Twelve years ago, Barack Obama first drew national attention as a “he could go all the way!” candidate with his speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. Very soon after that, conspiracy-minded bloggers and broadcasters from the right wing only—not anyone associated with Hillary Clinton or any other Democrat—began ginning up rumors that there was something “off” or “other” about Obama, apart from the obvious fact that he was black. Muslim? Indonesian? Communist? Kenyan? Saul Alinsky protege? Who knows. Back in 2007, Chris Hayes, then a Nation writer, chronicled the anti-Obama efforts along with other right-wing efforts of the time. This was the dawn of the birther age.
                                                                                                             
• As Obama rose to beat Hillary Clinton for the nomination and then John McCain for the presidency, birther activity again on the right intensified. Through Obama’s first year in office, the most prominent birther was a right-wing lawyer-dentist from California named Orly Taitz.  By the summer of 2009, Taitz’s role was so evident that the Daily Beast did a feature on her called “Queen of the Birthers.” The author of that piece was Beast writer Max Blumenthal; please take note of his name. The Beast’s intro to the piece set up the state of birtherism, and its GOP affiliation, as of that time:

  “A new poll finds 58 percent of Republicans doubt Obama is American. Orly Taitz, the mastermind behind the Obama birth-certificate controversy, tells The Daily Beast’s Max Blumenthal why the president should be jailed.”  

• In 2011, Donald Trump took up the mantle from Orly Taitz, and from then until very recently became the most prominent birther theorist.

***

Now, where do Hillary Clinton and Sid Blumenthal fit into this narrative? As far as I can tell, and to the best of my first-hand experience, they fit in only in an entirely fictitious way.

As discussed before in this space, I have known Sid Blumenthal for a very long time, since we were starting-out magazine writers in DC in the 1980s. We’ve agreed on many things and disagreed on others. The disagreements notably involved the 2008 Democratic primaries, in which he was a strong Hillary Clinton partisan and I favored Barack Obama (mainly because of their respective stands on the Iraq war). I think Sid Blumenthal’s magazine and book journalism of the 1980s and 1990s stands up very well. I think A Self-Made Man, the first installment of his multi-volume saga on Abraham Lincoln, is a magnificent look at 19^th century American political, economic, and cultural history, with understated but impressive resonance for our current day.

During the intensity of the 2007-2008 primary campaign cycle, even though I was living in China, I was on Sid Blumenthal’s email list for frequent (several times daily) updates on the state of the campaign. Mostly these updates involved why Hillary Clinton would be a stronger Democratic nominee, and Barack Obama would be weaker. They talked about foreign-policy experience. They talked about possible Republican lines of attack. They talked about the way the smear machine that had maligned John Kerry on the fraudulent “Swift Boat” attack might be arrayed against Obama.

But not once, to the best of my first-hand knowledge, did they ever mention citizenship, birtherism, or Kenya.

Just now I’ve gone back through my email archives again. The words “Kenya,” “citizenship,” “birth certificate,” and related terms do not appear in any of the very large corpus of mail I received from Sid Blumenthal in 2007 and 2008. Sid has his critics and his flaws, like any of us. But the idea that he either originated or propagated the birther view of Obama, to the best of my knowledge, is phony.

Remember Max Blumenthal, author of the takedown of Orly Taitz and her fantasies in 2009? He is Sid and Jackie Blumenthal’s son.

***

The article on which Kellyanne Conway based today’s attack is here. See if you find it credible; I do not. A very thorough deconstruction of it, by a conservative writer, is here. Sample:

Here’s what we’re lacking from [the author of the accusatory article] (that could be reasonably asked of him):

• detailed notes of his meeting with Blumenthal
• multiple, unbiased reporters confirming that he met with Blumenthal in 2008, and that the subject of the meeting was birtherism
• evidence that he sent an investigator to Kenya to pursue these claims
• the investigator who traveled to Kenya confirming the investigation, the reason for the investigation, and the source

Asher has provided none of this, nor has he hinted at being able to provide any of this. Instead, the only thing he has offered is Blumenthal’s business card.

Further deconstruction from The Washington Monthly is here. The author of TWM’s piece, D.R. Tucker, makes a point similar to my own:

It’s profoundly unlikely that Blumenthal would encourage journalists to pursue a path of inquiry that a) was ridiculous on its face, b) would obviously lead nowhere and c) would make both himself and Clinton look like colossal fools.

Why does this qualify for Time Capsule notice? Because I’m not aware of a previous case in which a nominee has trafficked in claims that a sitting president was illegitimately in office (because, by birther logic, he was not legally eligible)—nor tried, via psychological projection, to blame these false claims on someone else once forced to admit they were lies.

It’s 50 days and a few hours until the election; one nominee has refused to release his tax information; and the Republican leadership continues to say, “He’s fine!”

***

An ongoing theme of these time capsules, and a major focus of the Primary Concerns podcast I did with Brian Beutler this week, is the difficulty the “normal” press has had in coming to terms with a man who simply and continually lies, without the normal internal checks that hold most people back.

In particular we discussed the differing arcs of the New York Times and the Washington Post in grappling with this issue. Over the past decade, the NYT has become more and more obviously the dominant American news organization, and the Post has coped with many constraints and cutbacks. But in the past few months the news page of the Post has seemed much more direct in calling out what is happening.

Beutler and I go into details of this in our discussion. But here is an example, the contrasting breaking-news notifications the two papers put out, with the Times at the top and the Post at the bottom.

And the polls continue to draw closer, and the Republican leadership continues to say: Sure, this guy is fine.

First Donald Trump Jr., then campaign ally Jack Kingston said that that Trump Sr. couldn’t release the returns because people might find things in them. As Trump Jr., who tends to make his father’s points with less finesse, said in an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

When asked why his father has not released his tax returns as presidential candidates have traditionally done, Trump Jr. said, “Because he’s got a 12,000-page tax return that would create … financial auditors out of every person in the country asking questions that would distract from [his father’s] main message.”

Kingston, a former congressman who now works for one of D.C.’s biggest lobbying firms but is part of Trump’s “anti-insider” team, made a similar point today on CNN:

“If you put it on the table, you’re going to have 300 million Americans second-guessing what is this, what is that?”

Of course, asking what is that?, aka “second-guessing,” is why public officials have to make financial disclosures. It’s why both Kingston and Donald Trump Sr., and presumably Donald Trump Jr. as well, were hammering Hillary Clinton to release her emails. If all the information in medical records, financial reports, or official emails were flattering, no one would be required to release it. It’s only because it can lead to “second-guessing” that it’s expected of public officials.

***

I’m noting this in real time, at a moment when like so many other flaps it’s prominent on talk shows and news feeds. But like so many other “never before!” episodes in the Trump campaign, it’s likely soon to become “normalized,” and fade.

I note that with 53 days until the election, and with polls tightening, a nominee continues to defy a norm that his modern predecessors have all respected—and that his campaign has stepped away from his previous rationalized excuse and, out of nothing, invented a new alibi. And his party’s leaders say: That’s fine. People will look back on this time.

Donald Trump was made to look bad by one interviewer with the time, preparation, and guts to pursue a line of questioning, and by two women who discussed right in front of him the ugly things he has said.

If he shows up for this fall’s debates, he’ll encounter moderators with a lot of time to explore issues, and a woman with decades of onstage toughness behind her.

And it’s what you saw in this now-famous showdown in Flint, in which Trump meekly accepted correction in person from Pastor Faith Green Timmons, when she told him he was not supposed to be making a political speech—and then, once safely out of her gaze, flat-out lied about what had happened and had been captured on tape.

Here is what Trump told the never-disappointing Fox and Friends this morning:

“Something was up,” Trump told Fox and Friends on Thursday morning, calling the Rev. Faith Green Timmons a “nervous mess.”

“I noticed she was so nervous when she introduced me,” he said. “When she got up to introduce me she was so nervous, she was shaking. I said, wow, this is kind of strange. Then she came up. So she had that in mind, there’s no question.”

And here is what actually occurred:

***

Bonus travails-of-the-press point: NPR’s Scott Detrow did a very strong and pointed post contrasting the way Trump described the Flint episode and what actually occurred there.

But here is the way NPR headlined his post:

“Misstates Key Facts”? What, exactly, would be wrong with the word “lies”?

More in the hopper.

For some people, what I’m about to say is old news and obvious. But for many, perhaps most, it’s important to have the whole context laid out.

If you’ve spent any time in the thickets of “alt-right” activism in recent years, you know perfectly well who Pepe is and what he stands for. In the “Deplorables” poster he is of course the figure with green skin and Trump-style hair standing alongside The Man. But to people who would actually fit “the deplorables” standard of racial animus, Pepe is also the wink-wink insiders’ symbol not just of racism but even of outright exterminationism.

You can read an account of Pepe’s recent history via the Daily Beast a few months ago here. He also has a pre-racist internet meme history, which you can see here. I’m not going to share the Pepe variants I keep getting in the mail, but they include:

Pepe as a sly smiling gas-chamber operator, inviting Jews to take a “shower”; Pepe working the crematoria, after the gas chambers have done their job; Pepe at the glorious new southern Wall, grinning at the plight of Mexicans trapped on the other side; Pepe as an Orthodox Jew, smirking (because of the “inside job”) as the World Trade Centers come down 15 years ago; Pepe with a lynch mob.

Again, it’s old news, and that is the point. If you’re involved in politics, you know this. You know exactly what the image of Pepe signifies in political uses these days. So for the son and namesake of the Republican nominee to share with pride a poster including Pepe necessarily means either that he does not know about Pepe, which indicates incompetence—or that he does, which indicates something worse.

***

The episode should be more disturbing than the conceivably misunderstood six-sided star. In that case, an innocent if unlikely alternative explanation was at hand: No, really, it is just a sheriff’s star! What’s wrong with you, that you would think anything else?

But in this case, there is no “nice” version of contemporary political Pepe to fall back on. (Oh, you thought we meant the one from the death camps? Not at all! We meant the one from the lynchings! Sorry for the confusion.) With eight weeks to go until the election, this is what Donald Trump Jr. has been “honored” to send out.

I am not aware of anything like this having happened before.  

After the interview, Matthew Yglesias wrote an item in Vox with the headline “Donald Trump gave an interview this morning that should be shocking — but we’re numb.” Sample:

A few observations about all this:

• In a normal election cycle, a candidate making an offhand racist remark about a sitting US senator would be a big news story.
• In a normal election cycle, a candidate making an offhanded lie about the state of his personal finances would be a big news story.
• To be totally honest, even in a normal election cycle a candidate exhibiting total confusion about the mechanics and merits of monetary policy probably wouldn’t be that big of a news story but it would at least get some attention.

***

It’s 56 days and a few hours until the election; one of the candidates is still stonewalling about his tax returns; both of them, who will be 69 (HRC) and 70 (Trump) on election day should be offering full health information, but at least what Hillary Clinton has offered so far is not a self-evident joke; and the race tightens up. Just noting for now an interview that in any other year for any other candidate would itself be the stuff of campaign-altering news. I am trying not to remain numb.

2. Washington Post, “The Hillary Clinton email story is out of control.” An editorial-page counterpart to Bernie Sanders’s “We’re sick of hearing about your damned emails.” It concludes:

Imagine how history would judge today’s Americans if, looking back at this election, the record showed that voters empowered a dangerous man because of . . . a minor email scandal. There is no equivalence between Ms. Clinton’s wrongs and Mr. Trump’s manifest unfitness for office.

Imagine indeed.

***

3. New York Times, “A debate disaster waiting to happen.” This is the lead editorial, about Matt Lauer’s unfortunate handling of the “Commander-in-Chief Forum.” Sample:

If the moderators of the coming debates do not figure out a better way to get the candidates to speak accurately about their records and policies — especially Mr. Trump, who seems to feel he can skate by unchallenged with his own version of reality while Mrs. Clinton is grilled and entangled in the fine points of domestic and foreign policy — then they will have done the country a grave disservice.

Whether or not one agrees with her positions, Mrs. Clinton, formerly secretary of state and once a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, showed a firm understanding of the complex issues facing the country. Mr. Trump reveled in his ignorance about global affairs and his belief that leading the world’s most powerful nation is no harder than running his business empire, which has included at least four bankruptcies.

“Grave disservice.” “Reveled in his ignorance.” This is an editorial rather than a news item, but it marks a different tone from most campaign-year coverage of debates.

***

4. WaPo, “Gary Johnson’s Aleppo gaffe was bad. But Trump’s ignorance is worse.” The “gaffe” is of course Gov. Johnson’s “What is Aleppo?” question yesterday on the Morning Joe program. The significant word in this headline is “worse,” which sets up a distinction between, rather than the familiar “They’re all shading the truth!” false-equivalence grouping of, the errors and offenses of the candidates:

It’s refreshing, at least, to hear a national candidate [Johnson] acknowledge error and vow to do better.

Contrast that with Donald Trump, who in a televised national security forum Wednesday offered a staggering array of ignorant and mendacious assertions—and acknowledged no regrets about any of them.

***

One by one, sentiments like some of these have appeared in some outlets over the the weeks. Perhaps it’s a coincidence that they all appear at the same time. But perhaps it indicates how the unprecedented nature of the campaign has been provoking and requiring a different approach by the press. One way or another, it is worth noting with 59 days to go.

Mike Lofgren, the longtime Senate staffer and defense expert turned writer (The Party Is Over, The Deep State) expands on an implication of Hayden’s and Morell’s comments. That is, Trump’s comments are not merely indiscreet; they are also almost certainly untrue. Lofgren writes:

Two points:

1. Employees of the intelligence community who give briefings to high-level officials do not, repeat, do not advocate for their pet policies. These people would not be presidential appointees but almost certainly career civil servants (or the foreign or intelligence equivalent of a civil servant) If they were asked, “what do we do about X?” they would demur on the basis of it not being their department. They know they are not there to advocate for policies. This applies doubly for personnel briefing presidential candidates because of the extreme political sensitivity. As for criticizing the policies of their bosses to a human megaphone like Donald Trump, it is inconceivable they are that stupid.

Of course the briefers didn’t actually advocate anything, as Trump first implied, so he fell back on what philosopher Karl Popper would have called a statement devoid of factual content, because it cannot be falsified: the briefers’ body language told him they disagreed with Obama’s policies. Sure, it did …

What he’s managed to do is put those briefers in an extremely embarrassing situation. In a Trump presidency, we could expect a lot more of that: generals and civil servants being nonchalantly thrown under the bus as if they were contractors or tradesmen being stiffed on the bill for their services at Mar a Lago.

2. So what if Putin has an 82 percent approval rating? We can argue about the validity of that figure, but let’s assume it’s true. It is completely irrelevant with respect to which policies are ultimately in the U.S. national interest. I dare say Xi Jin-ping is similarly popular in China, particularly with regard to his aggressive assertion of sovereignty over virtually all of the South China Sea. But that popularity has no bearing on what US policy towards the matter ought to be, particularly when an international tribunal has rejected China’s claim. The point Trump is making is a pretty ominous one when you deconstruct it: authoritarian populist leaders ought to get their way because of their alleged popularity.

***

Here we are, 60 days until the election, with the nominee discussing the classified information he’s heard, and the GOP establishment from Ryan and McConnell on down still saying: He’s fine!