20 June 20
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20 June 20
Frank Rich, New York Magazine
Rich writes: "While the White House staff is down to C- and D-list toadies in year four, surely at least some of them knew that this lawsuit was a terrible idea for Trump, just on selfish political grounds."
One other possible result of Trump’s legal action may also be salutary — the potential for his suit to claw back Bolton’s royalties even while failing to kill the book itself. An author who chose the title The Room Where It Happened was clearly counting on a Hamilton-scale payday. But a man who has betrayed his country on Bolton’s scale — from hawking the fictional Bush administration intelligence to justify the disastrous invasion of Iraq to staying silent about presidential criminality during impeachment — deserves nothing but contempt.
In any event, most of the reported contents of his book either confirm or fill in additional details of what we already know. We certainly don’t need Bolton to tell us that Mike Pompeo thinks Trump is “so full of shit,” which is not only self-evidently true but also a naked instance of psychological projection by Pompeo, who is doing his best to go down in history as America’s worst secretary of State. So familiar is much of Bolton’s brief against Trump that it’s amazing Trump still thinks he can cover it up — whether with lawsuits, lies, Twitter trolling, or counterprogramming.
Which leads me to wonder if the pointless but rowdy legal action against Bolton may have another purpose entirely: to distract from and drown out an arguably more pressing reality that Trump wants to cover up — the surge of COVID-19 cases in (mostly) red states. On a parallel track to the Bolton fracas, both Trump and Mike Pence have been engaged in a campaign to falsify and downplay news of the pandemic, as if they were locked in a primary race to be the mayor from Jaws. Though in this case the jurisdiction is not Martha’s Vineyard but Tulsa, where 19,000 Trumpists have already started lining up to pack into a hall for Saturday night’s rally.
So what if these MAGA-ites have to agree to a waiver relieving the Trump campaign of liability should they get ill? So what if Tulsa’s own chief health official has said there’s a “huge risk factor” in attending? So what if masks aren’t required? No worries. This week Trump has said the coronavirus will go away without a vaccine (even as he falsely promises a vaccine imminently). Pence has said projections of a “second wave” of the coronavirus are “overblown” by the media. (The sidelined Anthony Fauci says we’re still in the first wave.) Both men, as well as their political and media allies, are dismissing the rise in cases as simply the result of the rise in testing (false) and attributing the new outbreaks mainly to nursing homes, prisons, and meat-packing plants (tell that to the infected barflies of Florida). When Tulsa reported its highest number of new COVID cases to date yesterday, the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, took it as her cue to say the rally offered “a safe opportunity to congregate” and Trump went on Hannity to declare that the virus is “fading away.”
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