Analyzing the news of the past 24 hours
The
theme of this morning’s news updates from Washington is additional
clarity emerging, rather than meaningful changes in the field. But this
clarity is enough to give us a sense of what we just saw happen, and why
it happened the way it did.
I’ll separate what’s below into the raw news reports and analysis; you may also find these two pieces from yesterday (heavily referenced below) to be useful.
News Reports
(1) Priebus made two public statements today. One is that the ban on Muslims will no longer be applied to green card holders.
Notably absent from his statement was anything about people with other
types of visa (including long-term ones), or anything about the DHS’
power to unilaterally revoke green cards in bulk.
The other was that the omission of Jews from the statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day was deliberate and is not regretted.
A
point of note here is that Priebus is the one making these statements,
which is not normally the Chief of Staff’s job. I’ll come back to that
below.
(2) Rudy Giuliani told Fox News
that the intent of yesterday’s order was very much a ban on Muslims,
described in those words, and he was among the people Trump asked how
they could find a way to do this legally.
(3) CNN has a detailed story
(heavily sourced) about the process by which this ban was created and
announced. Notable in this is that the DHS’ lawyers objected to the
order, specifically its exclusion of green card holders, as illegal, and
also pressed for there to be a grace period so that people currently
out of the country wouldn’t be stranded — and they were personally
overruled by Bannon and Stephen Miller. Also notable is that career DHS
staff, up to and including the head of Customs & Border Patrol, were
kept entirely out of the loop until the order was signed.
(4) The Guardian is reporting (heavily sourced) that the “mass resignations”
of nearly all senior staff at the State Department on Thursday were
not, in fact, resignations, but a purge ordered by the White House. As
the diagram below (by Emily Roslin v Praze) shows, this leaves almost nobody in the entire senior staff of the State Department at this point.
As
the Guardian points out, this has an important and likely not
accidental effect: it leaves the State Department entirely unstaffed
during these critical first weeks, when orders like the Muslim ban
(which they would normally resist) are coming down.
The
article points out another point worth highlighting: “In the past, the
state department has been asked to set up early foreign contacts for an
incoming administration. This time however it has been bypassed, and
Trump’s immediate circle of Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, son-in-law
Jared Kushner and Reince Priebus are making their own calls.”
(5) On Inauguration Day, Trump apparently filed his candidacy
for 2020. Beyond being unusual, this opens up the ability for him to
start accepting “campaign contributions” right away. Given that a
sizable fraction of the campaign funds from the previous cycle were paid
directly to the Trump organization in exchange for building leases,
etc., at inflated rates, you can assume that those campaign coffers are a
mechanism by which US nationals can easily give cash bribes directly to
Trump. Non-US nationals can, of course, continue to use Trump’s hotels
and other businesses as a way to funnel money to him.
(6)
Finally, I want to highlight a story that many people haven’t noticed.
On Wednesday, Reuters reported (in great detail) how 19.5% of Rosneft,
Russia’s state oil company, has been sold to parties unknown.
This was done through a dizzying array of shell companies, so that the
most that can be said with certainty now is that the money “paying” for
it was originally loaned out to the shell layers by VTB (the
government’s official bank), even though it’s highly unclear who, if
anyone, would be paying that loan back; and the recipients have been
traced as far as some Cayman Islands shell companies.
Why is this interesting? Because the much-maligned Steele Dossier
(the one with the golden showers in it) included the statement that
Putin had offered Trump 19% of Rosneft if he became president and
removed sanctions. The reason this is so interesting is that the dossier
said this in July, and the sale didn’t happen until early December. And
19.5% sounds an awful lot like “19% plus a brokerage commission.”
Conclusive? No. But it raises some very interesting questions for journalists to investigate.
What does this all mean?
I
see a few key patterns here. First, the decision to first block, and
then allow, green card holders was meant to create chaos and pull out
opposition; they never intended to hold it for too long. It wouldn’t
surprise me if the goal is to create “resistance fatigue,” to get
Americans to the point where they’re more likely to say “Oh, another protest? Don’t you guys ever stop?” relatively quickly.
However, the conspicuous absence of provisions preventing them from executing any of the “next steps” I outlined yesterday,
such as bulk revocation of visas (including green cards) from nationals
of various countries, and then pursuing them using mechanisms being set
up for Latinos, highlights that this does not mean any sort of backing down on the part of the regime.
Note
also the most frightening escalation last night was that the DHS made
it fairly clear that they did not feel bound to obey any court orders. CBP continued to deny
all access to counsel, detain people, and deport them in direct
contravention to the court’s order, citing “upper management,” and the
DHS made a formal (but confusing) statement that they would continue to
follow the President’s orders. (See my updates from yesterday,
and the various links there, for details) Significant in today’s
updates is any lack of suggestion that the courts’ authority played a
role in the decision.
That
is to say, the administration is testing the extent to which the DHS
(and other executive agencies) can act and ignore orders from the other
branches of government. This is as serious as it can possibly get: all
of the arguments about whether order X or Y is unconstitutional mean
nothing if elements of the government are executing them and the courts
are being ignored.
Yesterday was the trial balloon for a coup d’état against the United States. It gave them useful information.
A
second major theme is watching the set of people involved. There
appears to be a very tight “inner circle,” containing at least Trump,
Bannon, Miller, Priebus, Kushner, and possibly Flynn, which is making
all of the decisions. Other departments and appointees have been
deliberately hobbled, with key orders announced to them only after the
fact, staff gutted, and so on. Yesterday’s reorganization of the
National Security Council mirrors this: Bannon and Priebus now have
permanent seats on the Principals’ Committee; the Director of National
Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have both
been demoted to only attending meetings where they are told that their
expertise is relevant; the Secretary of Energy and the US representative
to the UN were kicked off the committee altogether (in defiance of the
authorizing statute, incidentally).
I
am reminded of Trump’s continued operation of a private personal
security force, and his deep rift with the intelligence community. Last
Sunday, Kellyanne Conway (likely another member of the inner circle) said that “It’s really time for [Trump] to put in his own security and intelligence community,” and this seems likely to be the case.
As
per my analysis yesterday, Trump is likely to want his own intelligence
service disjoint from existing ones and reporting directly to him;
given the current staffing and roles of his inner circle, Bannon is the
natural choice for them to report through. (Having neither a large
existing staff, nor any Congressional or Constitutional restrictions on
his role as most other Cabinet-level appointees do) Keith Schiller would
continue to run the personal security force, which would take over an
increasing fraction of the Secret Service’s job.
Especially
if combined with the DHS and the FBI, which appear to have remained
loyal to the President throughout the recent transition, this creates
the armature of a shadow government: intelligence and police services
which are not accountable through any of the normal means, answerable
only to the President.
(Note, incidentally, that the DHS already has police authority within 100 miles of any border of the US;
since that includes coastlines, this area includes over 60% of
Americans, and eleven entire states.
They also have a standing force of
over 45,000 officers, and just received authorization to hire 15,000
more on Wednesday.)
The
third theme is money. Trump’s decision to keep all his businesses (not
bothering with any blind trusts or the like), and his fairly open
diversion of campaign funds, made it fairly clear from the beginning
that he was seeing this as a way to become rich in the way that only
dedicated kleptocrats can, and this week’s updates definitely tally with
that. Kushner looks increasingly likely to be the money-man, acting as
the liaison between piles of cash and the president.
This
gives us a pretty good guess as to what the exit strategy is: become
tremendously, and untraceably, rich, by looting any coffers that come
within reach.
Combining all of these facts, we have a fairly clear picture in play.
- Trump was, indeed, perfectly honest during the campaign; he intends to do everything he said, and more. This should not be reassuring to you.
- The regime’s main organizational goal right now is to transfer all effective power to a tight inner circle, eliminating any possible checks from either the Federal bureaucracy, Congress, or the Courts. Departments are being reorganized or purged to effect this.
- The inner circle is actively probing the means by which they can seize unchallenged power; yesterday’s moves should be read as the first part of that.
- The aims of crushing various groups — Muslims, Latinos, the black and trans communities, academics, the press — are very much primary aims of the regime, and are likely to be acted on with much greater speed than was earlier suspected. The secondary aim of personal enrichment is also very much in play, and clever people will find ways to play these two goals off each other.
If you’re looking for estimates of what this means for the future, I’ll refer you back to yesterday’s post on what “things going wrong” can look like. Fair warning: I stuffed that post with pictures of cute animals for a reason.
Note: If you want the full feed of what I write, follow me at google.com/+YonatanZunger and @YonatanZunger on Twitter. There’s too much to put on Medium!
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