What's with Trump? Part II

Things are veering in the wrong direction fast.

A few days ago, I discussed my concern with the administration’s decision forcibly to dismiss the Eric Adams corruption prosecution. It did this through Acting Deputy AG Emil Bove, who ordered then-Acting US Attorney Danielle Sassoon of the Southern District of New York to file a motion to dismiss. Ms. Sassoon, a former clerk to Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson and Justice Antonin Scalia refused, believing that the prosecution was meritorious and was brought in good faith. When Bove persisted, she resigned. Bove then transferred the case to the Public Integrity Section at Main Justice. The chief and one other high-ranking career lawyer there sided with Ms. Sassoon’s position and likewise resigned. Reportedly, every lawyer in the Section also threatened to resign, but stepped back when one senior lawyer nearing his retirement date agreed to sign the dismissal motion in order to save his younger colleagues’ careers.

Now perhaps these lawyers are part of the Deep State at DOJ that’s actually a Democratic cabal aiming to subvert Donald Trump at every step. I personally think there are such lawyers at DOJ (and the FBI while we’re at it). There could be quite a few of them. But the idea that all the lawyers noted above are part of such a cabal is not merely questionable; it’s paranoid and it’s false. We need to ask whether the President and his people are doing any good for their professed cause of restoring a de-weaponized Justice Department by effectively forcing the resignations of professional, long-serving lawyers merely for believing, correctly, that the Adams prosecution is well grounded in fact and law, and — if the absence of political influence is truly the goal — should proceed in the same way any other such prosecution would proceed. This is especially so in light of Deputy AG Bove’s astonishing admission in his correspondence that he never reviewed the merits of the case.

(The latest news is that the judge who will hear the dismissal motion has appointed my friend, former Bush administration Solicitor General Paul Clement, to present the now-orphaned position that the motion to dismiss should be denied. (My prediction: Paul will make his typical brilliant argument but will lose because the court is bound by the established principle that the executive branch alone decides whom it wants, and whom it does not want, to prosecute)).

But I digress, slightly. Along with this significant and worrisome misjudgment, Trump has recently made too many others.

First, he nominated for a high position at the Defense Department a fellow, Elbridge Colby, who has taken a very problematic position on allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. As Fox reports:

Colby has previously suggested that the U.S. living with a nuclear Iran is more plausible than countering the country's nuclear assets, a position that reportedly is causing concern from a key Senator whose support could determine his confirmation.

You probably don’t need a translation: The previous promise, made by Trump and even Joe Biden, that Iran would not under any circumstances be permitted to obtain nukes has become, in the immortal word of Ron Ziegler, “inoperative.”

The key Senator sounding the alarm, incidentally, is Tom Cotton, a resolute backer of the Trump agenda but, more importantly, an honest, serious and principled man who understands the consuming importance of keeping Iran from getting The Bomb. Why on earth is Trump nominating a high Defense official who seems to lack this understanding?

Second is the Ukraine pivot (or, if one were to be less charitable, sellout). Trump has accused Zelensky of being a dictator. That alone would not decide the question whether we should continue to help Ukraine resist the Soviet Russian invasion, but even if it did, who does Trump think Vladimir Putin is? Mr. Democracy? Stuff like this just adds to the liberal complaint that Trump is a Putin tool. And Trump’s recent turn against Ukraine appears largely to be driven by his view that Ukraine started the war — a view that’s flat-out false.

Trump’s seriously misguided steps on Ukraine merit a future full post, but for now I will simply note this excellent piece by staunch conservative Abe Greenwald of Commentary:

The president is poised to give Putin everything he could ask for, including no NATO peacekeeping troops on the ground in the event that a settlement is reached. Trump is setting up Putin to push forward the moment that Trump’s successor takes office. It’s a deal that allows Trump to say he brought peace for the duration of his presidency and lets Putin regroup for the inevitable resumption of the invasion. And when that happens, Trump will blame it on the next president, Republican or Democrat….

There’s not much that a decent, struggling, war-ravaged country can do once the U.S. determines you’re the enemy. Illiberal countries faced with that dilemma can choose to join the U.S.-led liberal alliance. Ukraine was already in that club; America is the one leaving it. So Ukraine will appeal to its European allies. They’ll hold emergency meetings, but that won’t stop the momentum of Trump’s turn toward Moscow. With Putin and Trump now working against Ukraine, Zelensky is all but checkmated.

Is a sellout to Russia what we voted for last November? Peace is one thing; peace at the cost of a thinly-disguised surrender, and a surrender that invites future aggression — aggression that at some point we will have no choice but to confront — by the world’s thugs is something very different.

Third, remember just a few days ago when Trump said with his characteristic gusto that, unless Hamas released all remaining hostages this last Saturday, “all hell is going to break out” (story here)?

Did Hamas release all remaining hostages? Of course not. In a celebration too disgusting to describe, it “released” all of four corpses, including the corpses of two young children, and the corpse of a woman who, so far as biological analysis shows, wasn’t a hostage at all. There were no further releases — if you can call handing over dead bodies a “release” to begin with.

Did “all hell” break out?

Nope. Nothing broke out except useless (if of course understandable) grief and wailing. Trump, after his bravado warning, has done nothing — nothing in the face of barbarian violence and a brand of gutter cruelty that threatens not just Israel but the most basic standards of civilized life.

The chances that the world’s other henchman haven’t noticed the emptiness of Trump’s ultimatum are approximately zero.

And then there’s today’s news, which, amazingly, is what I wanted mainly to talk about when I started this entry. From the candidate who ran on a well-justified law-and-order platform:

U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday said he had made Alice Johnson, a Tennessee woman who was serving a life sentence for a drug crime before Trump commuted her sentence, a "pardon czar" to advise him on further acts of clemency.

Trump made the announcement at a Black History Month reception at the White House, roughly four weeks after he returned to office and began implementing sweeping rollbacks of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives across the federal government.

Trump, who commuted Johnson's life sentence in 2018 and granted her a full pardon in 2020, asked her to advise him on other cases where pardons were warranted.

Let me break that down for you. Trump, while effectively hectoring out of the Justice Department well-regarded career prosecutors and a stalwart conservative US Attorney in Manhattan, installs in a position of honor and influence a convicted felon and a years-long, important player in a major drug conspiracy — a person certain to take a one-sided, pre-fab, self-serving view of clemency. He does this in a Black History Month observance, as if black people had a special stake in leniency for drug crime even while — as Trump knows or ought to know — black people are grossly disproportionately the victims of hard drugs, and even more disproportionately the victims of the violent crime that surrounds the drug trade.

Ladies and gentlemen, trouble is brewing.

One last note. Paul and I have been anything but shy in criticizing the Democrats and their ignorant, dishonest, dangerous, race-huckstering, America-despising policies. We will continue in that vein. The Democrats have spent decades earning it, and I’ll be delighted to serve it to them. But when President Trump starts ominously in the wrong direction, then, for his sake and more importantly the country’s, and because we owe it to our readers to be honest, we will say so.