“The only national emergency is that our president is an idiot.”

Well, I never expected to totally agree with anything Ann Coulter would say, but in this case I definitely do! That idiocy was on full display during Trump’s rambling, disorganized WH rose garden speech and press conference (mostly due to the lack of a teleprompter) in which, apparently at the recent direction of Sean Hannity, the president of the Republican base and of Fox finally announced a national emergency to scrape up more money for his campaign promise folly wall. Among other things, including praising Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and taking a swipe at Coulter, Trump doubled down on blatantly false statistics, which he claimed came mostly from the Department of Homeland Security, continued to lie about already building a lot of the wall, claimed some unnamed generals were in favor of stealing money from approved Pentagon projects for the wall (which really strains credulity), and actually said that he is being given more border security money than he knows what to do with for everything except building The Wall!! And despite probably correctly predicting that his national emergency move will be challenged in court and will likely lose until it gets to the Supreme Court, he stepped all over his own case by actually stating that he didn’t need to do this, and is just doing it because he wants to get the wall built faster! So what kind of emergency is that?! Moreover, there are already lawsuits at the border to prevent government appropriation of people’s land for building barriers, which will undoubtedly multiply and may drag on for years. And at this point, with most of the border security money appropriated over the past two years still unspent, it would be impossible to complete anything close to the amount of barriers Trump is proposing over the next two years. This is definitely all part of his political scheme, preserving this key divisive issue to use for his 2020 campaign. There will also be a resolution against his actions coming out of the House, but even if enough Republican senators decide to oppose him to get it through the Senate, it would certainly not withstand a guaranteed veto. 

Meanwhile, more tantalizing tidbits have surfaced from the Mueller investigation, including release of claimed evidence of direct communications between Roger Stone and WikiLeaks, and the importance of Manafort’s contacts with Russian contact Konstantin Kalimnik while Trump’s campaign chairman. The significance of all this remains unclear, since there are as yet no indictments for conspiracy related to this. Also, Paul Manafort has been affirmed by a federal judge to have intentionally lied about some things to investigators during his period of supposed cooperation, thus voiding his cooperation agreement and subjecting him to probably decades of prison time (with a recommended minimum sentence of 19 1/2 years!), unless he gets a presidential pardon. I wouldn’t put that past Trump, especially as he hopefully heads out the door after this term, although I’m sure most of his advisers would oppose it. It is probably a good thing that Matt Whitaker has now been replaced by William Barr as AG, but it remains to be seen how much of Mueller’s eventual report we ever get to see.