A Blog about the Pillars of Belief: Politics, Culture, Stories
In this episode:
The Alternative Factor, Star Trek’s first W.T.F episode. The plot is a mess, but it did give us one of TOS’s few strong female black guest roles, and that classic closing line… What of Lazarus…?
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Politico and the New York Times reported on Tuesday that on Friday the White House notified a number of staff who are on interim security clearances had their access downgraded from Top Secret to Secret information. Kushner was included in this.
The Washington Post reports that Kushner’s clearance is being held up in part because four countries have tried to manipulate him to gain access, and he held rogue meetings that the National Security Council was not aware of until after the fact.
Two business groups gave Kushner’s family company millions of dollars after White House meetings.
A New York Times analysis makes that astute comparison between Trump’s Apprentice TV show and how he runs these table meetings with lawmakers where he appears to go against GOP orthodoxy on immigration and guns, like he did this week. Trump enjoys these sessions and will probably do more of them, even though they will have no impact on actual policy making. Like with immigration a few weeks ago, he erased his gun control comments when he met behind closed doors with the NRA.
Reporters are writing that they are witnessing a more chaotic than usual White House.
The New York Time’s chaos story suggests that Trump has sent mixed signals about Kushner and Ivanka remaining in the White House, and that he has privately asked Kelly to push them out.
Yuval Levin in National Review writes “a White House dealing with an intense crisis needs to rely on established patterns of mutual trust and respect and familiar procedures for handling and channeling information, putting options before the president, and keeping things calm and organized. More than a year in, this White House lacks almost all of that. Confronted with a serious crisis, their system could easily crumple.”
The Washington Post interviewed 22 people close to Trump in the latter part of the week and into Saturday about the recent chaos. Many of them are worried about his emotional state, and that fact he is becoming more isolated. Some of this may be exacerbated by communication director Hope Hick’s announcement that she will resign.
In Russia News:
Two reports came out this week with information from people who have been interviewed by Mueller. The reporting has focused on when Trump began his ties with Russia, and how much Trump and Roger Stone knew about the stolen Podesta emails before it became public that they had been stolen.
And here is a WaPo story that says Mueller is investigating Trump’s efforts to push Sessions to resign in July and August 2017. Trump also tweeted criticism of Sessions on Wednesday.
Bob Baur on Lawfare explains why Sessions’s response to Trump is astounding and historic. Here is what Session replied: “As long as I am the attorney general, I will continue to discharge my duties with integrity and honor, and this department will continue to do its work in a fair and impartial manner according to the law and Constitution.”
Speaking of guns, NPR reports that a Kremlin-backed politician has been cultivating ties with the NRA for years, and that Russia may have used the NRA to funnel money into American politics.
David French argues that the Schiff memo undercuts the Nunes memo’s main argument. And here is Andy McCarthy saying the opposite.
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Trump’s Job Approval: 40.4%
Trump listened to grieving school shooting victims in the White House for about an hour. Some of them lost friends and family in the Parkland Florida shooting last week. He mentioned that he wants to strengthen background checks and increase the age limits to buy an AR-15.
The Washington Post reported Friday that the DOJ contacted the white house on February 9th to tell them there there was significant issues with Kushner they were investigating that would keep him from getting a security clearance any time soon. Trump also announced that he would let Kelly decide if Kushner can continue to receive classified information.
White House sources are leaking about who is up and down in the Kushner vs. Kelly story. Kushner is fighting the prospect of losing access to classified intel.
In Russia News:
Trump spent the weekend after the 16 indictments at Mar-A-Lago tweeting about how he has been vindicated. He failed to condemn Russia for what was revealed in the indictments.
Here is Haberman with the same story: “President Trump began the weekend believing that something good had just happened to him… The president’s mood began to darken as it became clearer to him that some commentators were portraying the indictment as nothing for him to celebrate, according to three people with knowledge of his reaction.
People are starting to openly worry about the implications of Trump not leading the charge against Russia for the election attacks. Here is Friedman and Frum.
A colleague of Gates and Manafort was indicted by Meuller and plead guilty.
On Friday, Gates plead guilty and is now cooperating with Meuller.
Three pieces this week where writers are musing about the Meuller investigation, and What It All Means. First Andrew McCarthy makes his case for why he things the Obstruction case among other matters are not going to lead to legal trouble for Trump.
Mathew Yglesias of Vox argues that there is a lot of evidence already public that the Trump campaign worked with the Russians.
And Douthat advises us (mostly liberals) not to blame the Russian menace for Trump and instead grapple with the fact that many Americans voted for him because they agreed with him.
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Trump’s Job Approval: 40%
The Porter story is dominating the news for a second week. The FBI now says they notified the white House with three reports about his domestic abuse allegations in their recommendations he not receive a security clearance, March, July and November. Sarah Sanders had to change her story that the FBI’s review of Porter was still underway last week. She said she was not sure if top White House officials like McGahn or Kelly knew about the allegations last summer.
Politico reports that the White House quietly stopped issuing interim security clearances to new hires last fall, but let current ones stand.
NBC reports that 130 White House staff are on interim security clearances, including 47 who report directly to Trump.
Trump’s long time personal lawyer Michael Cohen admitted this week that he paid the porn actress Stephanie Clifford (aka Stormy Daniels) out of his own pocket. There are questions over whether he broke any campaign finance or lawyer ethics rules in doing so.
Farrow of the New Yorker has a bodice ripper of a report about affairs Trump has had and covered up in the years leading up to his election.
John Kelly has issued an order that White House officials who have had an interim security clearance since July or earlier can no longer receive classified information. It is unclear what this will mean for Kushner, who can’t do his job without such access and is unlikely to ever receive security clearance.
Politico reports this week that the Kushner debt has increased significantly since they started work at the White House: “The changes take Kushner and Trump’s reported debts to a range of approximately $31 million to $155 million from the previously reported range of between about $19 million and $98 million.”
On Thursday, the Senate failed to pass a bill protecting DREAMers from deportation. Trump threatened to veto a bipartisan measure which failed to gain 60 votes, and his own immigration proposal failed to pass.
In Russia News:
On Tuesday the US intelligence chiefs, all appointed by Trump, told the Senate that the Russians were already gearing up to interfere in the 2018 elections. So far there is no evidence of direct voter rolls tampering. The operation is mostly a social media campaign to stoke Americans’ social divisions. The Trump Administration has so far not commented on Russia’s plans to interfere in the 2018 elections.
Rick Gates is moving closer to a plea deal, and Steve Bannon has had about 20 hours of interviews with Mueller’s team.
On Friday afternoon, Mueller and Rosenstein issued indictments of 16 Russian nationals for their role in interference with the 2016 election.
This report by the Times explains how the operation was intended to exploit divisions among Americans and sow distrust in the electoral process, namely by suppressing minority turnout, boosting support for Trump as well as third party candidates like Stein and Sanders. It reveals that the operation began in April 2014 less than one month after Russia annexed Crimea.
Here is a good analysis of how Trump responded. He thinks it vindicates him because the indictment says Americans who worked with the indicted Russians were “unwitting.” But it remains to be seen how Trump’s repeated assertions that Russia hacking is a hoax, and that he believes Putin when Putin denies involvement, will hold up after this.
Here is the 37 page indictment.
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Trump’s job approval: 41.4%
The week began with news of Trump asking the Pentagon to plan a military parade.
By the end of the week John Kelly was facing scrutiny over allowed an accused wife-beater Rob Porter to stay on White House months after he became aware of the allegations because it was holding up his security clearance.
A second White House staffer also resigned this week based on allegations of abused of his previous wife.
David Frum places the Porter case in context of other Trump orbit domestic abusers, from Banon to Trump himself.
Douthat makes yet another strong case that Trump’s authoritarian instincts and impulses are being effectively curtailed by mainstream members of his administration and Republicans in the Senate. He is rebutting a Ben Wittes piece in The Atlantic that explores all Republican voters to only vote for Democrats until the Tump threat has passed.
In Russia news:
With the Nunes memo a propaganda bust, Washington returned to more serious business. All of Trump’s lawyers but Cobb are counseling him to refuse to speak to Meuller in an interview.
The Trump Administration refused to allow the Democrats minority report rebuttal to the Nunes memo to be released. In an indication that the House Intelligence Committee will continue to be used for propaganda in ongoing partisan warfare, the Republicans are installing a wall between the Republican and Democratic staffers.
Finally, on Friday Rachel L Brand, the No.3 at the Justice Department announced she was taking a private sector job with Walmart. There is no news reporting on why she is leaving, though everyone is speculation it may have to do with the Russia investigation. If Rosenstein were to be removed, she would take his place as Meuller supervisor.
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Trump’s Job Approval: 40.8%
The State of the Union was Tuesday night. Both left and right commentators felt it was fine tonally but empty of policy goals and lacking directions for the Congress to follow this year, except for a four part immigration plan. Here is Ponnuru calling the speech “vacuous.”
And Douthat: “Apart from the Islamic State, North Korea and Guantánamo Bay, the foreign policy section was … strikingly empty. America First, it seems, means not having to bore viewers by bringing up anything about the world beyond our shores except our enemies…. The ideas are just things that the president would probably like to do but that someone will talk him out of, or that he’ll forget about, or that he’ll offer in a halfhearted way and that Congress will never bother to take up.”
In Russia News:
The Trump Administration released the list of Russian oligarchs who may be sanctioned, as required by last year’s sanctions law, but has said that it is unnecessary at this time to actually sanction anyone.
Sunday night the Washington Post reports for the first time on the contents of the Nunes memo followed by the New York Times: it directs criticism at Rosenstein for requesting a FISIA warrant against Carter Page, suggesting political bias was behind this decision. The implication is that this is pretense for removing or at least pressuring Rosenstein, who is Meuller’s supervisor and will be the person who decides how to act on the recommendations of the Meuller investigation.
On Monday evening, the House voted to release the Nunes memo. House rules say the White House has five days to decide whether or not to release the memo to the public.
Also on Monday, Rosenstein and Wray made a direct appeal at the White House to John Kelly not to release the Nunes memo. Trump disregarded their appeal, and on Friday the memo was released.
Immediate consensus is that there is not any new damming evidence in the Nunes memo. Even David French who has been critical of the Meuller investigation admits that the memo, “Ironically enough… confirms the necessity of the Special Counsel Robert Mueller.”
On Monday McCabe stepped down as deputy director fo the FBI (by starting a leave of absence that will extend his employment until March so he get’s his full pension). NBC News reported on a phone call between Trump and McCabe where Trump was incensed Comey was able to charter and FBI private jet home after being fired, and then berated McCabe’s wife for losing her election.
David Graham of The Atlantic writes about the mystery surrounding McCabe’s sudden exit and how the White House has no credibility after having lied about the reasons for Comey’s firing. He suggests that Wray, who read the Nunes memo on Sunday, might have encouraged McCabe to retire early because of its contents. McCabe turned out to be have been a figure in the contents of the memo.
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Trump’s Job Approval: 40.2%
On Monday night the government reopened after three day shutdown. The Democrats relented, fearing the politics of government funding for immigration reform. McConnell did promise to hold a Senate vote on DACA before the CR is up on February 8
Here is Haberman on Trump’s confused role in the shutdown.
Frum and Douthat debate how sever a autocrat Trump is or may become.
A lot of Russia News this week:
Axios reports that Sessions has been pressuring the FBI director Wray to go easy on Trump and clean out FRI people suspected of being against him, specifically McCabe.
Wray threatened to resign if this pressure about McCabe and others continues.
We learned this week that Meuller is looking to interview Trump soon, and on Wednesday Trump told reporters that he is willing and ready to comply on the record.
And on Thursday night the New York Times, with the Washington Post soon following, reported that in June Trump ordered the firing of Meuller. It did not happen because his White House Counsel Don McGahn threatened to quit.
According to a report that came out on Saturday by the Washington Post, on Wednesday Trump had John Kelly call Sessions and tell the DOJ to release the Nunes memo despite the fact that the FBI and DOJ have not cleared it for release. Apparently Trump is also talking about firing Rosenstein. Unclear whether this report is related to the Times piece about Meuller, but people speculate something is going on behind the scenes that is prompting these leaks about Trump’s state of mind regarding the Russia investigation.
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Trump’s Job Approval: 38.8%
Trump’s “shithole” comments continue to drive the news cycle. Durbin went on camera to say that Trump definitely made them and they they are vile and racist. Lindsay Graham endorsed Durbin’s comments but has not yet gone on camera to confirm he heard them. Others present like Senator Tom Cotton are claiming that they did not hear “shithole,” and some are suggesting he said “shithouse” instead. Here is a good account of how the meeting went down from the Washington Post.
Here is George Will with some history of how racism has been entangled with immigration policy in America’s past, with a dose of sanity about the pointlessness of Trump’s wall and the overblwon anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Here is a good explainer of the meetings that lead up to the government shutdown, including a a Friday lunch between Trump and Schummer where a deal was outlined only to have the White House nix it hours later, and leading Schummer to say negotiating with Trump is as impossible as negotiating with Jello.
The general consensus is that Trump’s lack of guidance on what he wants is what is driving the politics of the shutdown. Here is Mathew Yglesias: “The lack of clarity emboldened immigration hardliners in the GOP caucus while simultaneously raising hopes for a deal among immigration reformers. But Trump’s intervening behavior wound up salting the earth by leaving everyone feeling that he might screw them over at any moment. Consequently, nobody is quite sure exactly who is shutting down the government or what it is the White House is trying to achieve by rejecting a bipartisan proposal that would avert a shutdown.”
It was reported this week that Trump had an affair with a porn star names Stormy Daniels and had his lawyer pay her hush money one month before the 2016 election
Here is an important Ron Brownstein analysis of Trump’s approval numbers and how they dropped across the board in 2017.
In Russia News:
Steve Bannon testified before the House Intelligence Committee. He refused to answer questions, and his lawyer was on the phone with the White House during breaks to get guidance on which of the questions Bannon should answer or not. He must not have said anything of importance because it would have been leaked. Evan republicans were upset with Bannon’s stonewalling. Also, Mueller has subpoenaed Bannon.
Buzzfeed is focusing their Russia stories on the money trail and reported this week about money transfers around the election and inauguration that may become relevant as the investigation unfolds.
Trump’s Job Approval: 39.5%
While Star Trek: Discovery‘s spore drive and Mycelial network are universally praised as great sci-fi concepts, many fans are arguing that canon demands it be written out of the show and the sooner the better. If the spore drive was not available to Captain Kirk (and especially Captain Janeway) then it needs to be flushed down the memory hole before the prequel series gets too close to the eras we’ve already seen. No argument there. However, the spore drive must not, and I wager will not, be mothballed until the series is concluded. The unique way Discovery explores the Final Frontier is essential to the show.
Any Star Trek series has several main ingredients: dynamic characters; moral allegories; sci-fi whiz-bang. One essential element is the exploration of space, summed up by the tagline “the Final Frontier.” This evokes both an environment and an action. From a storytelling perspective, it is a combination of the setting and the plot of each episode. The means by which Star Trek crews explore space is more than just the backdrop for the episodes–it greatly effects the types of stories that can be told in the series. And each series does its exploring in a unique way. Let’s call this the Exploration Premise. Of all the Trek ingredients, this is the one that the franchises’ show runners keep reinventing with each series. Discovery‘s spore drive is only the latest example.
The Exploration Premise was the same for The Original Series and Next Generation: the Enterprise uses its warp drive to hop from one star system to the next, sometimes in an unexplored region of space but usually relatively close to home. Each week they visit a gaseous anomaly or dying star or asteroid belt or strange new world. On both of these shows, the exploration happens in a completely random direction with no thread connecting one mission to the next. Oh sure, in-universe, the Enterprise’s mission orders probably adhere to some Starfleet strategic imperative blueprint, but this is never mentioned on screen, and I’ve never even thought about such a document until I wrote this sentence. This simple premise allows for the type of episodic stories those shows excel at telling.
Deep Space Nine was the first spinoff to differentiate itself by changing it’s relationship to the Final Frontier. It kept the character templates, allegories and gadgets, but instead of warping into a random corner of the galaxy each week, it decided to spend the entire series exploring only one star system (Bajor) and it’s nearest neighbor (Cardasia). It further developed its own style of exploration with the use of the wormhole’s link to the distant side of the galaxy. This twin premise allowed for serialized stories that were more issues-driven and character-based, while the Gamma Quadrant depicted a more intense and sometimes terrifying sense of the unknown than TNG could in the familiar Alpha Quadrant.
Voyager went a step further and stranded the entire show across the distant Delta Quadrant. This allowed for stories about the danger and adventure of being alone in unexplored space without any hope of Starfleet support or resources. While the episodes were similar to TNG in that the Voyager explored different planets and nebulae, etc. each week, the viewer knew the direction of all these stories was pointed the same way: toward home.
Conversely, Enterprise‘s Exploration Premise was pointed in the opposite direction: branching out and away from Earth. Except since it was a prequel, the show depicted what it was like exploring nebulae and strange worlds for the first time. Tellingly for the purpose of this essay, even this premise was not deemed different or interesting enough compared to the previous shows. So the element of time travel was added to its version of exploration, in the form of the Temporal Cold War. The NX-01 could not travel through time, but other ships in the series could, and so did the characters, many times over.
When the time came for a 5th spinoff series, the Discovery show runners were going to have to come up with yet another new premise for exploring space and telling stories in the process–“a new way to fly.” In keeping with the fact that Discovery tends to Go For It! in all things, it equipped its ship with a spore drive than enables a Final Frontier trifecta: instantaneous travel to any point in the universe, travel to parallel universes, and time travel. Now that we’ve seen the first season, it is hard to imagine this show or any new Trek show plodding from one sector to the next at warp 5 or warp 8 or even warp 13. Watching the DISCO spin like a top and pop out of existence makes us realize what Trek’s producers intuited back in 1992: the TOS/TNG Exploration Premise had gone stale, and no new Trek–no matter what time period it is set in–should be locked into the same narrative framework that ran out of steam with the end of TNG’s run.
Beyond storytelling, there is another reason why the spore drive is an essential upgrade to the Exploration Premise. The act of spore jumping, and the limitless possibilities of this type of travel, opens the viewer’s mind to a sense of wonder and unknown possibility each week. Fifty and thirty years ago, TOS and TNG were able to do this simply by warping into planetary orbit each episode. But that kind of space travel came to feel routine in the same way Americans who were awestruck by the Apollo missions became bored by the space shuttle launches. In both cases, we needed a higher dosage of wonder.
TNG all but admitted this in its final episode, with the “All Good Things” Q Speech:
“Is that all this meant to you? Just another spatial anomaly, just another day at the office. We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind and your horizons, and for one brief moment you did. For that one fraction of a second you were open to options you had never considered. That is the exploration that awaits you–not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.”
Star Trek cannot merely tell us we are witnessing this unfold on our TVs, it has to show us with a mix of physical settings and plot events, hence the importance of continually revising the Exploration Premise. “All Good Things” accomplished this with a temporal anomaly that evolved backwards through time and linked Picard to three different phases of his life. DS9 took us inside a wormhole inhabited by beings who exist outside of linear time. Discovery shows us by taking us into the Mycelial Network, which is depicted like we are traveling along synapses of the Universe’s brain.
Since we are told and shown how this network connects all points in space and links all life, the show’s writers will not have any trouble making us believe we are experiencing Q’s “unknown possibilities of existence” on a regular basis. This is why, even though the spore drive cannot continue to operate during the other Trek time periods, it will and must continue to operate for the rest if Discovery‘s run. The Mycelial spores are this show’s most important characters.
In a meeting with congressional republicans and democrats, Trump suggested he is open to a deal on immigration and approving DACA. But mostly this was an opportunity for the White House to showcase Trump in action to push back on the media narrative that he is mentally incapable for the job. The meeting was televised for 55 minutes, and showed that Trump does not have a strong grasp of the particular policy implications around immigration.
Here is a list of most striking moments from the meeting, with video clips. Most interesting is when Trump agrees to the democratic plan for a clean DACA bill, only to be corrected by Kevin McCarthy.
Here is David Grahm on the three times this week when Trump has publicly contradicted his own White House’s policies: on DACA, FISIA and Infrastructure.
David Brooks splashes cold water on the Fire and Fury hubub with the “inconvenient observations” that the Trump White House is becoming more functional not less, and quietly enacting its agenda under the cover of all of Trump’s drama. It’s an antidote to the comforting illusion that Trump is unraveling or will soon be undone.
This was becoming a popular counter-narrative in moderate punditry, a attempt to push back against the Fire and Fury narrative that Trump is so far gone as to be out of his mind. While a helpful push for fervent anti-Trumpers not to get complacent, this counter-narrative did not survive Thursday’s Oval Office meeting…
In a Thursday meeting with Durbin and Grahm, among a handful of immigration hardliners, to hash out details of a bipartisan immigration deal Trump said: “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Reports came out of the White House that on Thursday night Trump was calling people excited about how his comments would resonate with his base. But by Friday morning, he wrote a tweet that denied he used those words.
The IRS is rushing to implement the new tax law so that taxpayers can reap some benefit this year, but there is a worry that people will underpay in 2018 and have to pay some back in 2019. The W-4 forms employers must use this year are out of date. An internal report says that the IRS is not prepared to correctly implement the tax law this year.
The Trump Administration will now allow waivers for states who want to make their Medicaid recipients work or do volunteer service. There are many caveats: “The Trump administration said that states imposing work requirements must have plans to help people meet those requirements and should help arrange job training, child care and transportation as needed. But, it said, states cannot use federal Medicaid funds to pay for such “supportive services.”
Trump’s average Approval Rating: 39.1