It’s been more than five days since President Trump figuratively stood by Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. As he was leaving the White House last Tuesday to spend Thanksgiving with his family at Mar-a-Lago, Trump stopped to talk with the press and told them Alabama does not need to send a “liberal Democrat” like Doug Jones to the Senate.
Pressed about the credible allegations that Moore pursued teenage girls for dates while he was a prosecutor in his thirties—including one woman who says he molested her when she was 14 years old—Trump noted that Moore “totally denies it.”
“You have to listen to him also,” Trump said. “I do have to say, 40 years is a long time. He’s run eight races, and this has never come up.”
But as Will Saletan at Slate lays out in detail, Moore’s defense is a sham. The former state supreme court justice’s denials of wrongdoing don’t stand up against the weight of the evidence and the credibility of the accusers. Nearly every Republican senator and GOP leader in Congress has said he believes the women who have accused Moore. The president had remained quiet on the issue of Moore since the initial Washington Post article about the accusations was published while Trump was abroad in Asia.
A few days before Trump’s gaggle with reporters, however, the White House seemed to be maneuvering away from any chance it would break ties with Moore. Over the weekend the New York Times reported on how Trump arrived at his decision to stick with Moore with just a couple weeks until the December 12 special election:
What’s missing from Trump’s calculations about Moore, according to the Times’s reporting? Any consideration of the near-term political ramifications of possibly ceding the seat to a Democrat. Mitch McConnell reportedly impressed upon Trump the medium- and long-term problems of embracing Moore for the GOP’s Senate majority.
“To Mr. McConnell, only the president could extinguish a fire that he sees as endangering Republicans’ Senate majority. But Mr. Trump, speaking by phone last Tuesday with Mr. McConnell, responded with the same argument he had been making for days inside the White House,” the Times reported. “The women who have called Mr. Moore a sexual predator, the president believes, may not be telling the truth.”
Photo of the Day
Pro- and anti-supporters of Donald Trump wave as the presidential motorcade passes by in Mar-a-Lago, Florida on November 26, 2017. (NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)
Is now the time for peace in the Middle East, and does the Trump administration have the team to do it? In the current issue of the magazine, I take a look at the White House effort to find a peace agreement, led in part by longtime Trump legal adviser Jason Greenblatt:
Read the whole thing here.
CFPB Watch—Who’s in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? That’s become a controversial question this week after the bureau’s previous director, Richard Cordray, resigned last Friday. Cordray tapped deputy director Leandra English as his interim replacement, but the Trump administration has designated White House budget director Mick Mulvaney to take his place instead.
Senator Rob Portman defended the White House’s position Sunday, saying that Cordray had resigned early in an attempt to circumvent the president’s ability to appoint a temporary successor.
“So my hope is, you know, that we won’t play those kind of games,” Portman said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “That, you know, that we’ll have an interim process here and that would be Mick Mulvaney or somebody else, the president chooses, and then Congress will get busy in confirming a new director.”
Portman also criticized the CFPB as an unaccountable body in need of substantial congressional reform.
“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has come under a lot of pressure because of the way it was established. It has no accountability, in other words, unlike other boards and oversight organizations there, there is no appropriations, so there is no way for Congress or the voters through their members of Congress to affect a decision,” Portman said. “So it is an unusual organization, and I think it is inconsistent with the accountability that’s in the federal government otherwise, and I think that’s a big problem. But I do think there needs to be a new director confirmed, and we should do that quickly.”
My nominee for lead of the year is from Adam White’s story on President Trump’s obsession with Time magazine: “Time waits for no man. Though one man waits for no Time. At least, that’s President Trump’s preemptive justification for not winning Time’s ‘Person of the Year’ award this year.”
Franken Watch—From the Star Tribune, Senator Al Franken says he’s “getting back to work” on Monday, more than a week after accusations of sexual misconduct first surfaced: “‘I’m embarrassed and ashamed. I’ve let a lot of people down and I’m hoping I can make it up to them and gradually regain their trust,’ said Franken, who has kept a low profile since four different women shared accounts of being groped, embarrassed and, in one case, forcibly kissed by the Minnesota Democrat.”
President Trump tweeted Saturday night a link to a sycophantic website that traffics in conspiracy theories and has aligned itself to the alt-right and white nationalist movements. Here’s the Trump tweet, which promotes MAGAPILL.com’s “President Donald Trump Accomplishment List”:
Wow, even I didn’t realize we did so much. Wish the Fake News would report! Thank you. https://t.co/ApVbu2b0Jd
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 25, 2017
The website’s name, MAGAPILL, references Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” along with the “red pill” concept popular among the online alt-right and white nationalist movements. Taking a red pill in these circles refers to being awakened to the “reality” of the alt-right worldview, an allusion to a plot device in the 1999 science-fiction film The Matrix.
MAGAPILL.com’s website appears to consist of links to archived news items from mainstream media outlets touting successes of the Trump presidency. “MAGAPILL is here to ensure that President Trump’s Legacy is properly documented,” reads the site’s about page. “It’s been recently reported that 95% of the News Media’s coverage of Trump is Negative, while only 5% is positive. This is the definition of an unfair bias and one of the main reasons why everyday American’s confidence in the ‘Main Stream’ media is at an all time low.”
A number of other old pages at the domain are inaccessible, but the website’s Twitter page remains active, tweeting out a mix of conspiracy theories, Fox News videos, news articles from mainstream outlets, and retweets of President Trump. In one recent tweet, MAGAPILL put out an unsourced image rife with outlandish conspiracies about the people and entities who control our institutions:
Interesting ‘Flow Chart’ of #TheSwamp pic.twitter.com/5THoB7J5XV
— MAGA PILL ?? www.MAGAPILL.com (@MAGAPILL) November 18, 2017
The image includes levels of the supposed conspiracy, each with an image of a rabbit going down a hole to the next level (another Matrix/alt-right allusion). Among the conspiracies listed are: “false flag terrorism”, genetically modified crops, the use of “algorithmic censorship” of social media, “rogue intel factions” at the CIA and Mossad, a “network of global corporate control,” “Luciferian rituals,” secret societies like the Knights Templar and the Jesuits, and “trauma based mind control.” At the bottom of the entire conspiracy are the “Overlords” from “Bloodline Families” that include the aristocracy and royalty, the papacy, and the banking families, all of whom apparently practice a Luciferian religion that worships “the Dark Side through rituals, including child/human sacrifice.”
And that’s just one tweet! Among the other crazy and baseless conspiracy theories MAGAPILL has promoted include the politically motivated murder of DNC employee Seth Rich, a cabal of members of Congress involved in satanic rituals and child sex abuse, and the existence of an anonymous internet poster with “Q-level” security clearance who is working to bring down the world order.
The tweet from President Trump appears to have brought an unprecedented amount of traffic to the bare-bones MAGAPILL website—enough to temporarily crash it.
Trump’s promotion of a fake-news site came shortly after another tweet of his blasting CNN’s international channel as “fake news.” The president regularly lobs this epithet at any legitimate news organization that he says is unfair or wrong in its coverage of him.
College Football Watch—Is the University of Tennessee (who my Vanderbilt Commodores defeated on Saturday) getting ready to hire Greg Schiano as its new head football coach? USA Today broke the news that the Volunteers are “working to finalize a deal” with Schiano, who is currently defensive coordinator at Ohio State.
Vols fans and even candidates for governor are sounding the alarm about Schiano, who has been accused of knowing about the sexual abuse of young boys by Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky back when Schiano was an assistant there. Schiano has denied this. But the outcry suggests Tennessee won’t be entertaining the idea for much longer.
Song of the Day— “Walk on By” by Dionne Warwick
