The “president” is back at “work” today after an extended golf outing / unconstitutional personal business enrichment exercise at his Disgraceland estate in Florida. Trump has resumed his arduous schedule of live-tweeting Fox & Friends and is busily disgorging a backlog of delusions, self-congratulations and undemocratic demands on Twitter. A sample:
Crooked Hillary Clinton’s top aid, Huma Abedin, has been accused of disregarding basic security protocols. She put Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents. Remember sailors pictures on submarine? Jail! Deep State Justice Dept must finally act? Also on Comey & others
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2018
This “Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents” description makes it sound like Abedin personally handed over passwords to spies, but you’ll be unsurprised to learn it’s bullshit. Abedin used a Yahoo email account at home and sometimes forwarded work emails to herself at home, as we’ve known for years thanks to the most exhaustive inquiry into email usage ever conducted. Years after Abedin forwarded emails that were retroactively classified, Yahoo experienced an enormous data breach that compromised hundreds of millions of Yahoo email accounts.
There’s no evidence that “foreign agents” accessed Abedin’s emails or found anything sensitive there. Trump is calling for the DoJ to prosecute and jail a private citizen because of a Daily Caller hit piece mentioned by one of the sofa squatters on Fox & Friends. That’s it.
Benjamin Wittes published an interesting piece at Lawfare yesterday detailing the “deep state’s” surprising resilience in the face of Trump’s autocratic demands to turn the DoJ and federal law enforcement agencies into his personal protection instruments. May it continue to hold!
In other news, Trump took credit for the lack of commercial aviation disasters in 2017:
Since taking office I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation. Good news – it was just reported that there were Zero deaths in 2017, the best and safest year on record!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2018
The Post’s Philip Bump debunked this nonsense barely an hour after Trump made the claim:
“I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation,” Trump says of his first year in office, a claim that is not only hard to back up but fairly easy to debunk. A check of Factba.se, a database of Trump’s comments, shows only a handful of mentions of air travel as president. One of the primary moments during which he did so was when he unveiled a short-lived effort to reform the air-traffic control system last June.
“If we adopt these changes, Americans can look forward to cheaper, faster, and safer travel,” Trump said, “a future where 20 percent of a ticket price doesn’t go to the government, and where you don’t have to sit on a tarmac or circle for hours and hours over an airport — which is very dangerous also — before you land.”
That’s Trump saying that the existing system is dangerous. That system didn’t change, but 2017 was indeed the safest year in history for commercial air travel. So how does Trump get credit for this again?
Especially given two complicating aspects to that statistic. The first is that this was a global statistic. One reason 2017 saw fewer fatalities among commercial flights is that 2016 saw a fatal accident in Colombia in November — the last time there had been a fatal passenger jet airliner accident. Did Trump spend his first year quietly bolstering the safety of airlines in Colombia, Lithuania, Tanzania and Indonesia?
The other complication is that the number of deaths on American commercial airlines didn’t change in 2017 relative to 2016 — because it’s hard to go lower than “zero.” The last time someone died in the crash of an American commercial flight was in February 2009 — less than a month after Barack Obama first took office. Yet apparently we are supposed to believe that Trump’s eventual election reached its grip back eight years in time to ensure that flights would be safer moving forward.
And then there’s this:
Democrats are doing nothing for DACA – just interested in politics. DACA activists and Hispanics will go hard against Dems, will start “falling in love” with Republicans and their President! We are about RESULTS.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2018
Yeah, that’s totally gonna happen.
Fellow citizens, I think we can safely conclude that “lie less often,” and “develop a rudimentary understanding of constitutional boundaries” and “be more humble and realistic” did not make the cut on Trump’s list of New Year’s resolutions.