There was enough news crammed into yesterday to fill a small book. And yet there is no guarantee that today or next week won't have the same flood of chaos and conflict and disturbing revelations that yesterday had.
We started with the news that Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker was told to recuse himself from the Mueller probe, so he simply ignored them and turned to political advisers who told him not to. Again, remember the howling shitstorm because Loretta Lynch met briefly with Bill Clinton while the Justice Department was investigating Hillary's email server? Clinton acted indiscreetly, but there is zero evidence it had any impact on Lynch or the Justice Department, but it led to days of coverage. This is a more significant story and it was snowed over before the reporting had been completed.
We have the continued drop of the stock market, which is caused by both an over-expansion or the market caused by the supply-side tax cut, Trump's trade wars, Trump's unstable governance and Trump's looming government shutdown. The Trump Recession is coming, and his incompetence and fealty to bad conservative ideas will likely make it much worse than it needs to be.
Ah, yes, the government shutdown. Congress basically had found a way to get out of yet another inability to govern, when Trump got berated by the Howler Monkeys of the Far Right. Limbaugh, Coulter, Fox and Friends and others lambasted him for not getting his stupid, expensive and inefficient wall. So he's going to shutdown the government. Right before Christmas. Newt Gingrich - possibly the next White House Chief of Staff - saw his political ascendancy derailed when he shut down the government at Christmas time. Trump is already spiraling, so it will be interesting to see what effect this will have on his poll numbers. He might rally he base, but this will further drive independents towards the Democrats, and make independents of a few more Republicans.
Finally, the day ended with the bombshell that James Mattis will resign. There is a legitimate debate over how long America should remain tethered to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq/Syria there is at least the compelling interest of containing and defeating ISIS while supporting our only true friends in the region: the Kurds. I've lost track of why we are staying in Afghanistan, besides the fact that the people who likely take over Afghanistan are objectively terrible.
The real issue is that Mattis was one of the few people surrounding Trump who wasn't a toady or an incompetent. Secondarily, there is the issue of WHY Trump decided to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place. The people who benefit from this decision are - roughly speaking - Putin, Erdogan, Bin Salman and perhaps Khamenei. Certainly Putin benefits by seeing Americans leave Afghanistan and his proxy state in Syria. Erdogan could see an opportunity to chastise the Kurds. One group of people who were clearly not consulted were the National Security establishment - the very group that has been alarmed by Trump's closeness with our enemies.
Meanwhile, we had the spectacle of the House GOP pushing through a bill to fund that stupid wall that will die in the Senate, which will hasten the government shutting down in a few hours. So craven and lickspittle is the Republican legislature that they meekly roll over whenever Trump barks the latest nonsense he heard on Fox News or Limbaugh.
Things will not get better when the Democrats take the House in two weeks. If they had captured the Senate, things might have gotten better, because they could exercise real constraints on Trump's Cabinet appointments. Instead, while we will get a clearer public picture of Trump's criminality, it will only enlarge his feeling of being besieged. All the "bright red lines" he spoke of in 2017 - his taxes, his real estate business, his charities - will come under investigation. We already know he's guilty of serial crimes. As more and more comes to light, as his children, perhaps, get arrested, he will lash out more and more trying to distract from the closing circle.
And yet, as yesterday showed, there is increasing evidence that the GOP will do absolutely nothing to protect the country from his increasingly erratic tantrums.
We haven't hit rock bottom.
I'm not sure we even know what that looks like.
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