By

Rick Noack

When it was first revealed in August that President Trump wanted to purchase Greenland from Denmark, many Danes initially assumed it was a joke. It was not until President Trump postponed a visit to Copenhagen — citing the Danish government’s lack of interest in selling the autonomous island — that many Danes realized he was serious about this idea.

The U.S. president may have been serious about it, but the whole notion was “absurd,” as Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen put it.

The awkward episode that has strained Danish-U.S. relations in recent months surfaced once again on Wednesday, when House investigators releaseGREENLANDd a transcript of the closed-door testimony of the acting ambassador to Ukraine, William B. Taylor Jr. As part of the ongoing impeachment inquiry, Taylor was supposed to testify on questions surrounding Trump’s decision to withhold military aid to Ukraine this summer.

But from a Danish perspective, the testimony took its perhaps most stunning turn on page 132. Buried within the document, the transcript quotes Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) asking about Taylor’s prior claim that several senior administration officials tried to arrange a meeting with Trump in August to persuade him to lift the hold on military aid to Ukraine, but that the meeting did not happen.

“What do you deduce from that, that our ally is fighting with the Russians, but all of these agencies that support this can’t get a meeting with the president to discuss it?” Schiff asked.

In his response, Taylor cited scheduling issues — before he added: “I think this was also about the time of the Greenland question, about purchasing Greenland, which took up a lot of energy in the [National Security Council].”

Danes reacted “with a combination of astonishment, worry and laughter” to the claims surrounding Trump’s Greenland moves, said Jon Rahbek-Clemmensen, an associate professor at the Institute for Military Operations at the Royal Danish Defense College. “It almost seems surreal.”

But Rahbek-Clemmensen cautioned that the testimony — which, from Denmark’s perspective, appears to prove how serious the Trump administration was about purchasing Greenland — may deepen concerns that the White House is attempting to drive a wedge between Denmark and Greenland.

In late October, a U.S. delegation with State Department counselor T. Ulrich Brechbuhl traveled to Greenland for high-level talks with government officials. He was accompanied by Pentagon and National Security Council officials, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first broke the story in August of Trump’s desire to purchase Greenland.

U.S. Delegation Visits Greenland Vivian Salama Months after President Trump expressed an interest in buying Greenland, a U.S. delegation was there for meetings…

Denmark’s foreign minister was also reportedly present during the talks. But some Danish politicians worry that the Trump administration may not be honest about its real intentions behind forging closer U.S. ties with Greenland.

“Every time I meet with the U.S. Embassy’s officials, their number one questions will always be about Greenland,” said Michael Aastrup Jensen, a member of the Danish Parliament with the center-right Venstre party.

Aastrup Jensen noted that the Trump administration continued to try to “put Greenland into the U.S. hemisphere of political interest,” even though it has culturally and politically long been tied to Europe.

“There’s nothing wrong in that per se, as long as it doesn’t drive a wedge between the Greenlandic people and the Danish people,” he said.

Despite having fewer than 60,000 residents — spread out across 850,000 square miles that are geographically part of North America — Greenland was strategically significant during the Cold War because of its location between the Arctic and the Atlantic oceans.

In the decades since, Greenland has again become a playing field for major global powers, which now also include China.

As climate change is melting Greenland’s ice, hopes for the discovery of new offshore oil resources are on the rise. China in particular has attempted to make inroads on the gigantic island.

To secure resources, China and Russia have also stepped up their military activities in the region. The United States has followed suit, and the failed purchase of Greenland is only the latest example.

But unlike other measures that have been mostly welcomed by host countries — such as increasing troops in Northern Europe — Trump’s purchase attempt has risked interfering with a delicate political situation.

Many Greenlanders have long sought complete independence from Denmark and found Trump’s idea of a purchase “very offensive,” said Rahbek-Clemmensen.

But achieving independence will be possible only if Greenland is able to attract substantially more foreign investment — either from China, the United States or elsewhere. This has helped to preserve U.S. influence in Greenland, even in the wake of Trump’s foreign policy maneuvering.

Meanwhile, the United States’ public wooing of Greenland has reawakened a largely cooled-off enthusiasm for the autonomous territory within Denmark.

“The whole idea of President Trump wanting to buy Greenland was a wake-up call to all of us here in the Danish Parliament” — just not in the way Trump would have liked, Aastrup Jensen said. Instead, Danish political parties have taken a new interest in helping Greenland pursue a more promising path within the kingdom of Denmark that would allow it to “steer clear of all the superpowers’ interests.”

NOVEMBER 8, 2019

by ROB URIE

Counterpunch

Photograph Source: Soman – CC BY-SA 2.5

The American obsession with electoral politics is odd in that ‘the people’ have so little say in electoral outcomes and that the outcomes only dance around the edges of most people’s lives. It isn’t so much that the actions of elected leaders are inconsequential as that other factors— economic, historical, structural and institutional, do more to determine ‘politics.’ To use an agrarian metaphor, it’s as if the miller was put forward as determining the harvest.

The American left has had an outsider role in this politics from the inception of the nation as a capitalist oligarchy to the improbable cobbling together of the idea that popular democracy can exist alongside concentrated wealth. If the powers that be wanted popular democracy, they could stop impeding its creation. The ‘first mover’ advantage, that once gained, power is used to close the door behind it, has be understood for centuries in the realms of commerce and politics.

As was probably the intent, the 2016 presidential outcome was used by the more persistent powers to divide the American left. The neoliberal left moved to a reflexive nationalism tied through class interests to state-corporatism in defense of the realm. Carnival barker Trump, an American political archetype for at least two centuries, was portrayed as a traitor to capitalist democracy— from the left. Emptied of analytical content, left affiliation was made a ‘brand.’

In more constructive terms, Bernie Sanders reached into red state territory to facilitate a class-based left political response to the failures of capitalism by promoting social welfare programs with historical precedent in the New Deal. Tied to an analytically sophisticated effort to shift power down and across political and economic hierarchies, something akin to popular democracy is in the process of confronting its long-mythologized ghost.

Graph: It is hardly incidental that as wealth has been concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, its power to affect political outcomes has been codified through official determinations like Citizens United. While the domination of politics by concentrated wealth may seem new, it ties to the conception of the U.S. as a capitalist oligarchy where rich, white, slavers determined political outcomes. The Senate, the U.S. ‘House of Lords,’ wasn’t popularly elected until the twentieth century. Source: inequality.org.

Part of the challenge of addressing this politics comes through dubious parsing of ‘the political’ from its objects. If an agent of the government tells people when to wake, what to wear, what they can and can’t say and what to spend their time doing, that is authoritarian. When an employer determines these, it is considered ‘free choice.’ In the neoliberal frame, economics is only political to the extent that elected leaders promote specific economic policies.

Even with the realization of late that money determines political outcomes, the distribution of income and wealth is considered economics while the use that these are put to in the political arena is considered politics. The unvirtuous circle of capitalism, where concentrated income and wealth are used to affect political outcomes so as to increase concentrated income and wealth, ties economics to politics through the incompatibility of capitalism with democracy.

Modern electoral politics replaces this relationship of economics to politics with color-coded branding— red or blue, where ‘our guy’ is what is good and true about America. The other party exists to pin ‘our guy’ into a corner that prevents him / her from acting on this goodness. Barack Obama was prevented from enacting his ‘true’ progressive agenda by Republican obstructionists. Donald Trump is being persecuted by deep-state, snowflake, socialists.

Left unaddressed and largely unconsidered has been the persistence of class relations. The rich continue to get richer, the rest of us, not so much. For all of the claims of political dysfunction, when it comes to bailouts and tax cuts, wars and weaponry and policing and surveillance, these opposition parties can be counted on to come together to overcome their differences. Likewise, when it comes to the public interest, partisan differences are put forward to explain why nothing is possible.

Graph: as illustrated above, in recent decades the greatest gains in the relative wealth of the rich came during the terms of liberal Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Lest this seem— or be framed as, incidental, the liberal Democrat’s support for the mechanism of this enrichment, Wall Street, explains the relationship. In economic terms, Democrats have been the party of the radical right— financialized, neoliberal capitalism, since the inception of neoliberalism in the 1970s. Source: inequality.org.

The unitary direction of this government response in favor of the rich may seem accidental, a byproduct of ‘our system’ of governance. In fact, the defining political ideology of the last half-century has been neoliberalism, defined here as imperialist, state-corporatism, controlled by oligarchs. And contrary to assertions that neoliberalism is a figment of the imagination of the left, its basic tenets were codified in the late 1980s under the term ‘Washington Consensus.’

What the Washington Consensus lays out is the support role that government plays for capitalism. Its tenets are short and highly readable. They provide a blueprint that ties Democratic to Republican political programs since the 1980s. They also tie neoliberalism to the Marxist / Leninist conception of the capitalist state as existing to promote the interests of connected capitalists. Left out, no doubt by accident (not), was / is a theory of class struggle.

When Donald Trump passed tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the rich and corporations, this was the Washington Consensus. When Barack Obama put ‘market mechanisms’ into Obamacare and promoted the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), this was the Washington Consensus. When Bill Clinton tried to privatize Social Security, this was the Washington Consensus. The alleged ‘opposition parties’ have been working together from a single blueprint for governance for four decades.

The intended beneficiary of this unified effort is ‘capitalism,’ conceived as multinational corporations operating with state support to promote a narrowly conceived national interest. An ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlement) clause was included in NAFTA when Bill Clinton promoted and signed it. An even more intrusive ISDS clause was included in the TPP when Barack Obama promoted it. The intent of these ISDS clauses is to give the prerogative of governance (sovereign power) to corporations.

It is no secret in Washington and outside of it that multinational corporations pay few, if any, taxes. The logic of this is two sided. On the one side, the neoliberal / Washington Consensus premise is that corporations can put the money to better use than government. The other is that the role of government is to support capitalism, not to constrain it. Barack Obama’s consequence-free bailouts of Wall Street, often at the expense of ordinary citizens, possessed an internal logic when considered through this frame.

An historical analog can be found in the relationship of the East India Company to the British empire. The East India Company drew financial, tactical and military support from the British monarchy as its global reach made it a key institution of imperial expansion. Its economic ties gave it a depth and breadth of reach that military occupation alone couldn’t achieve. Centuries later, Mr. Obama made this point when he argued that the TPP was crucial to ‘countering China.’

The rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s was intended to address the alleged failures of the New Deal. By the late 1980s, this new-old ideology had been codified as the Washington Consensus. Its proponents amongst national Democrats morphed into the New Democrats / DLC just as the Soviet Union was coming unwound. The twin ‘failures’ of the New Deal and communism led to the revival of dogmatic capitalism that saw the state as an appendage of capitalist institutions. Bill Clinton was more likely than not sincere when he declared that ‘the era of big government is over.’

The conflation of Democrats with ‘the left’ that first emerged to counter the New Deal in the 1930s, persisted through the 1990s and the 2000s because it was useful to both political parties. Republicans were the party of business while Democrats claimed to be the party of the people. While the New Deal was in place and from a liberal perspective, the Democrats did support a limited conception of the public interest domestically. However, by the time that Bill Clinton entered office, the public interest had been redefined to mean corporate interests.

This tension can be seen more clearly in the fight over NAFTA, which Republicans had been unable to pass before Mr. Clinton entered office. Mr. Clinton was able to use his liberal bona fides— and the fact that he wasn’t a Republican, to bring over just enough Democrats in congress to get NAFTA passed. He went on to divide bourgeois Democrats from the broader Democratic constituency through the use of race and class dog whistles. In this sense, he presaged Donald Trump. The net effect was to successfully divide the Democrat’s constituency by class.

Before Bill Clinton, the anti-NAFTA fight had a clear class component. Organized labor had lined up against the free-trade agenda that was being promoted by Reaganite Republicans. Through his rhetoric of ‘fair’ capitalism and a ‘level playing field,’ Mr. Clinton gave a liberal patina to an utterly retrograde, pre-Great Depression, form of capitalism. With no apparent irony, the Washington Consensus applied a Marxist / Leninist conception of the capitalist state without any pretense of it mitigating capitalist excess.

The clutter of party politics creates differences where there are none, or where they are different than as posed. Prior to being elected president, Barack Obama used the frame of the Washington Consensus to give an ideologically coherent explanation of why he wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare. It is one with the Republican explanation. It ties to his inclusion of neoliberal ‘market mechanisms’ in Obamacare. And it ties to his pivot to cut public expenditures—a.k.a. ‘austerity,’ by early 2010. And it ties to his support for the TPP.

As with Bill Clinton before him, Mr. Obama had a clear ideological predisposition that was at odds with how liberals and his supporters perceived and / or explained them. The historically based conflation of Democrats with ‘the left’ was a misrepresentation of the ideological drivers of the New Democrat’s policies. In significant ways, Messrs. Clinton and Obama were ideologically to the right of their Republican colleagues. And they governed like this was the case.

The invisibility of this shared ideology to most Democrats and liberals came through general ignorance of the genesis and tenets of the Washington Consensus, its relationship to neoliberalism, and the closed nature of Washington political culture. In a Gramscian sense, it reflects the belief system of ruling oligarchs, an ideology based on the interests of the rich submitted from above. The historical precedent was the use of American foreign policy to promote the business interests of connected industrialists and the corporations they controlled.

Why any of this matters is that capitalism has been tried and its consequences are becoming increasingly untenable. Environmental ills appear intractable, capitalist political economy is being held together with increasingly desperate measures, and its human toll can be measured in foreign genocides and domestic deaths of despair. Given the nature of neoliberal recessions, the U.S. is but one recession away from wholesale economic and political rebellion. And that recession is on the way. The value of left analysis is that it opens the range of political possibilities.

THE WASHINGTON POST

By Peter Hermann

November 8, 2019 at 9:59 a.m. EST

The last time Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Washington, members of his security detail overran police and were caught on video beating demonstrators at Sheridan Circle, violent clashes that drew condemnation and criminal charges against more than a dozen of the leader’s guards.

But newly revealed State Department memos show the two-day visit in 2017 was filled with other troubling antics and discord. D.C. police and federal officers who were supposed to be helping protect a visiting head of state were instead entangled with his security forces from the moment the delegation’s two planes touched down at Joint Base Andrews.

At one point, U.S. authorities intervened in a squabble among the Turkish guards. In another case, they seized a guard’s weapon and handcuffed him. They later admonished a security officer who accosted a passerby filming the entourage on a downtown street and barred a guard from traveling in a State Department car. In the course of the visit, several U.S. officers and federal agents were hurt, and at least one was punched.

Erdogan is scheduled to return to Washington on Wednesday, and D.C. police and the State Department are preparing for the possibility of new demonstrations amid a climate even more volatile than in 2017, following the withdrawal last month of American troops from northeastern Syria and Turkey’s invasion targeting Syrian Kurds.

D.C. police Chief Peter Newsham would not offer details of security plans but said his department “will take every measure possible to make sure we don’t have another conflict like we had the last time.” He said his staff has been in contact with the State Department.

Officials with several federal agencies — including the Secret Service, the State Department and the White House — did not comment or did not respond to questions about Erdogan’s planned trip.

Erdogan had considered putting off the visit after the U.S. House of Representatives on Oct. 29 recognized as genocide the century-old mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks, according to several media outlets. But President Trump tweeted on Wednesday: “Look forward to seeing President Erdogan next Wednesday, November 13th at the @WhiteHouse!”

Lusik Usoyan, one of the demonstrators who was injured two years ago, said she finds it incomprehensible that Erdogan would be invited back to the White House. “It’s just not how it should be,” the 36-year-old paralegal said.

Usoyan, a Yezidi Kurd born in Armenia who now lives in the United States, said she was repeatedly kicked in the head after being thrown to the ground and suffered memory loss and is unable to work.

“In this country, I had always felt safe,” said Usoyan, who fears some of the same security officers will return Wednesday. “I never imagined something like this would happen to me. I kept thinking, ‘I’m on the ground, why to they continue to beat me?’ I am no threat to them other than what I think.”

Usoyan, who is among several demonstrators suing the Republic of Turkey over the attack, said she will protest Erdogan’s return visit, joining others “raising our voices as the First Amendment allows.

“We will not be watching quietly,” she said.

Mayor Muriel E. Bowser announces criminal charges against members of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erodgan’s security detail in June 2017. (Peter Hermann/The Washington Post)

After the 2017 visit, two Erdogan supporters were each convicted of assault and sentenced to 366 days behind bars. The Turkish guards left the country before criminal charges were filed. Prosecutors eventually dropped cases against all but four of them, who remain indicted on felony counts of assault and are being sought on arrest warrants by the U.S. Marshals Service. It could not be determined if those officers are still on the Turkish president’s security detail or if they will attempt to enter the U.S. for his upcoming trip.

The visit in 2017 by Erdogan and his foreign minister got off to a difficult start as soon as the Turkish delegation arrived in Maryland on May 15.

The State Department memos were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by a law firm involved in civil lawsuits against Turkey and are included in public court filings. They say the dignitary protective division broke up a shouting match between the security detail’s leader and his staff on the tarmac. An agent told his Turkish counterpart that it was “unacceptable behavior.”

The next day, a State Department security official scolded a Turkish guard who grabbed a man and ordering him to stop recording Turkish officials as they walked from the St. Regis Hotel to a coffee house near the White House. The State Department memo says the diplomatic official told the Turkish guard that recording law enforcement in public is legal.

Video of the following day’s altercations at Sheridan Circle captured Turkish security guards outside the ambassador’s residence ignoring police commands and breaking through their lines. It shows them ripping posters, tackling and kicking people in the crowd, and fighting with police who struggled to maintain order. A 61-year-old man suffered a concussion and lost a tooth when he was kicked and beaten in the head, according to an account in the civil suit. A woman was attacked while pushing her child in a stroller.

Was Erdogan personally involved in attacks on demonstrators?

The State Department memos describe other, previously undisclosed details of the those clashes at the circle and along a stretch of Massachusetts Avenue that leads to the Turkish Embassy.

State Department officials watched helplessly as a Turkish security officer jumped from a vehicle in a motorcade “to join the fighting.” D.C. police and members of the Secret Service also physically restrained the leader of the Turkish security force and other guards to keep them from leaving the embassy to join the melee. A Turkish security officer punched a D.C. officer in the nose, “causing massive blood flow.”

Authorities detained two Turkish officers, putting at least one in handcuffs and seizing his weapon as authorities debated whether to make arrests and discussed the legal complexities of diplomatic immunity. The security officers were later freed and the gun returned as the men boarded the airplane home later that night. One memo says the Turkish ambassador had pleaded for the officers’ release from custody “by ‘looking past’ what had happened.”

Officials at the Turkish Embassy did not respond to calls and an email seeking comment.

Soon after, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) said the Turkish guards attacked “peaceful protesters,” calling the melee an “affront to our values.” The U.S. House of Representatives voted to condemn the attacks, and three dozen lawmakers demanded the Turkish officers be “arrested, prosecuted and jailed.”

In this image from a video provided by Voice of America, members of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s security detail are shown reacting violently to peaceful protesters during Erdogan’s 2017 trip to Washington. (AP)

Indictments filed against the guards describe the clashes as coordinated by Turkish officers in suits and olive-green military-style jackets who wore earpieces and appeared to communicate with each other. The indictment says “members of the conspiracy … rushed the anti-Erdogan protesters in a nearly simultaneous, coordinated throng,” as “Mehter March,” a Turkish nationalist song, played over loudspeakers.

The indictment quotes a Turkish officer telling a D.C. police officer that Erdogan was approaching and the demonstrators, some waving red, yellow and green Kurdistan flags, needed to be dispersed, “You need to take them; if you don’t, I will.”

Turkish leaders blamed the demonstrators, whom they linked to the separatist Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK, which both Turkey and the United States have designated a terrorist organization. They complained U.S. authorities allowed the group to get too close to Erdogan, who watched some of the fighting.

“The American police are not doing anything,” Erdogan told Turkey’s semiofficial Anadolu news agency at the time. Demonstrators denied being members of the PKK.

David Saltzman, one of the attorneys representing the Republic of Turkey in the two civil lawsuits, said his client hopes improved security awaits Erdogan’s visit on Wednesday, “so that agitated individuals sympathetic to a foreign terrorist organization cannot get dangerously close to a visiting head of state.”

In federal court pleadings, Turkey’s defense team wrote that police “failed to address a legitimate, perceived threat posed by the Anti-Turkey Group” and Erdogan’s security officers “had no choice but to react.”

The 2017 trip ended hours after the disturbance at Sheridan Circle. Back at Joint Base Andrews, the head of the State Department’s protective detail wrote in a report that the Turkish foreign minister “shook my hand and thanked me for our support,” but not before commenting on the chaos: “This was not good.”

The diplomatic officer wrote the foreign minister told him State Department security officers “were the main cause of the incident.”

The U.S. official responded that “this was indeed a regrettable incident, however, not one that [diplomatic officers] bear responsibility for.”

Carol Morello contributed to this report.

Turkey’s Cavusoglu denies taking money from disgraced US lobbyist

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The Washington Post

By

Dana Milbank

Columnist

November 8, 2019 at 2:37 p.m. EST

Most Americans don’t care what Lutsenko said to Giuliani about Yovanovitch. And we rarely take interest in Kiev if it isn’t preceded by “chicken.”

But if you take away the names and the Ukraine intrigue, what you’re left with from the thousands of pages of deposition transcripts released this week by impeachment investigators is a striking consensus — among Trump administration officials, Democrats and even, to some extent, Republicans — that the United States is currently being run by a toddler.

He has tantrums. He rips up paper. He disregards facts. He believes crazy conspiracies. He’s erratic and ill-informed. Those around him walk on eggshells, trying to prevent him from doing the geopolitical equivalent of sticking his finger in an electrical socket.

U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, a Trump donor and political appointee, described Trump’s style: “President Trump changes his mind on what he wants on a daily basis. I have no idea what he wanted on the day I called him.” Sondland also spoke about Trump’s “completely inconsistent” behavior: “The funny part is that he was railing about the problems with Ukraine in our meeting, but I think shortly after that he sent essentially an unconditional invitation to President Zelensky to come visit him.”

Sondland testified about Trump’s unreasonableness (“He sort of went on and on and on about how Ukraine is a disaster and they’re bad people”), limited attention (“He didn’t even want to deal with it anymore, and he basically waved and said, ‘Go talk to Rudy’”) and poor judgment (“Taking directions from the president, as I must, I spoke with Mr. Giuliani … Please know that I would have not recommended that”). Likewise, George Kent, the deputy secretary of state overseeing Ukraine, painted a picture of aides trying to soothe a childlike Trump. “Initially the president did not want to sign a congratulatory letter, and he actually ripped up the letter that had been written for him,” Kent testified. “But by the end of the meeting he’d been convinced.”

Republicans’ questions suggest they, too, accept that the president is not entirely rational; they urged witnesses to respond as “if you are in President Trump’s world,” whether Trump’s views are “reasonable or not” and “fair or not.”

For example: “If the president, for whatever reason, true or untrue, develops a feeling that he’s got an ambassador that isn’t loyal to him, he’s going to bring them home, correct?”

And: “If you try to get inside the president’s head, I mean, he may have been searching for the name ‘Burisma’ but couldn’t grasp it so he spits out ‘Biden’?”

The witness, Kurt Volker, Trump’s envoy for Ukraine negotiations, said Trump “would not know or even know how to pronounce or be familiar with the name of a company like that.”

Of course, you don’t need to read depositions to know this about Trump; you only need look at his recent public behavior. One moment he’s at a rally shouting “we are kicking their ass,” and the next he’s retweeting a message calling him a “bad motherf—–.” One moment he’s declaring that “this impeachment nonsense … is driving the Stock Market, and your 401K’s, down.” The next he’s announcing: “Stock Markets (all three) hit another ALL TIME & HISTORIC HIGH yesterday!” One moment he’s proposing a “fireside chat” reading of the infamous rough transcript. The next he’s threatening a government shutdown.

An anonymous administration official writes in a new book that Trump is “like a twelve-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding across the runway and the flights frantically diverting away from the airport.” Even loyalist Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) posits a dubious new defense of Trump’s Ukraine actions: “It was incoherent …They seem to be incapable of forming a quid pro quo.”

The depositions make clear Trump appointees and civil servants feel similarly. They describe “great confusion,” a “lack of clarity,” “the absence of “any coherent explanation” and a “vacuum.” The acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, “rarely responded to emails and almost never returned phone calls.”

They describe a president who is “confounding” and paranoid (he “kept repeating it … ’they tried to take me down, they tried to take me down’”) and volatile (“the president was really in a bad mood,” “it was almost like he hung up on me”). They testified about him being swayed by Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban, and about how they coached the Ukrainians on dealing with Trump. They spoke of keeping “dissonant information” from Trump. They talked of fearing tweets from Trump and his family attacking them. As a consequence, they reported feeling “discouraged,” “incredibly frustrated” and “pissed.”

Toddlers have a way of doing that to their caregivers.