The following is not a joke. This is the beginning of an actual statement from Donald J. Trump released by the White House.

America First!

The world is a very dangerous place!

The country of Iran, as an example, is responsible for a bloody proxy war against Saudi Arabia in Yemen, trying to destabilize Iraq’s fragile attempt at democracy, supporting the terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon, propping up dictator Bashar Assad in Syria (who has killed millions of his own citizens), and much more. Likewise, the Iranians have killed many Americans and other innocent people throughout the Middle East. Iran states openly, and with great force, “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” Iran is considered “the world’s leading sponsor of terror.”

And then it goes on for several more paragraphs, basically saying that it was just awful what was done to that poor Mr. Khashoggi. Mr. Khashoggi was probably a dangerous anti-American terrorist, because that’s what the Saudis say, but it was an awful thing nonetheless. But we need Saudi Arbia because because because and, anyway, nobody really knows what happened no matter what U.S. intelligence agencies say. The last paragraph:

I understand there are members of Congress who, for political or other reasons, would like to go in a different direction — and they are free to do so. I will consider whatever ideas are presented to me, but only if they are consistent with the absolute security and safety of America. After the United States, Saudi Arabia is the largest oil producing nation in the world. They have worked closely with us and have been very responsive to my requests to keeping oil prices at reasonable levels — so important for the world. As President of the United States I intend to ensure that, in a very dangerous world, America is pursuing its national interests and vigorously contesting countries that wish to do us harm. Very simply it is called America First!

Very simply it is called Trump is a sniveling, un-American coward! If you ask me. Oil is more important than rights or values or anything else, it says. We must prostitute ourselves as a nation for oil and because the Saudis gave The Creature a gold medal.

Do see the Washington Post‘s annotated version of this atrocious statement.

Karen Attiah at WaPo:

In a juvenile, clumsy White House statement on Tuesday full of falsehoods, Trump repeated the Saudi lie that Jamal was an “enemy of a state” and that the “United States would stand steadfastly by Saudi Arabia,” even though its regime lured, killed and dismembered a peaceful Post op-ed writer who lived in Virginia.

In effect, Trump is doing his best to help the Saudi regime get away with the murder of a U.S. resident and one of the Arab world’s most prominent writers. If the administration continues down this path, it will further destroy whatever is left of America’s moral credibility on global human rights and freedom of expression. It puts truth-seekers and journalists who dare challenge the Saudi regime and other intolerant governments in grave danger, no matter where they live. Trump’s refusal to act gives a symbolic green light to the young, power-drunk Mohammed bin Salman so he can continue his reckless exploits in Saudi Arabia and the Arab world, for possibly the next 40 to 50 years, and face zero consequences.

“If we allow a murderer to get away because we think we can make some deals with him, we are just reinforcing the idea that money can silence everybody,” says Abdullah Alaoudh, a senior scholar at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University.  “And this is the dangerous message that created Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gaddafi. We can better protect the good relationship with Saudi Arabia in the long run through building a relationship with the Saudi people, institutions and even the majority of the royal family. Or we can risk losing all that by protecting one powerful individual who has been implicated in a horrible crime.”

Zack Beauchamp at Vox:

President Donald Trump’s public comments regularly reveal him to be unsuited to hold the most powerful office in the world, both temperamentally and intellectually. But nothing of late has made that quite as clear as the new White House statement on Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination.

The statement, a defense of maintaining close ties with Saudi Arabia’s government published on Tuesday afternoon, reads like it was written by the president personally. It begins with a strange declarative statement –“The world is a very dangerous place!” — that seems tonally out of place on official White House letterhead. It then goes on to make a series of egregious factual, analytic, and moral errors, excusing Saudi Arabia’s murder of a US resident in a way that gives a green light to dictators around the world to kill their own citizens.

In a responsible White House, this statement would never have been drafted, let alone sent out to the entire world to read. But this is not a responsible White House, and will not be until we have a responsible commander-in-chief.

After dismantling the statement line by line, Beauchamp concludes,

This conclusion captures the enormity of the statement. Everything from siding with a dictator over US intelligence to the moral repulsiveness of the geopolitical logic to even the juvenile writing style screams an obvious fact: A man who released this under his name is not fit to run the world’s oldest democracy and most powerful country.

Jonathan Chait:

The first two sentences — “America First! The world is a dangerous place!” — set the basic predicate for his argument. People get murdered, dismembered, dissolved in acid, all the time, and we need to look out for our interests.  …

…Nowhere in his statement does Trump reiterate the point he made in 2015 — he personallyÂhas business with the Kingdom, including $270,000 in spending in Trump’s Washington hotel alone, just last year.

Trump seems to think that the Saudis are doing us a big favor by selling us oil and buying our military ordnance, so we must be deferential and kiss their butts. I don’t think so. This is one of the most shameful official statements ever issued by a U.S. president. I can’t think of a worse one, actually.

I was feeling kind of meh about the midterms last week, but as more House races are called things are looking up. Stanley Greenberg wrote,

It was transformative, knocking down what we assumed were Electoral College certainties. We didn’t immediately see this transformation because we assumed that Mr. Trump and the polarization in his wake still governed as before.

First of all, Democrats did not win simply because white women with college degrees rebelled against Mr. Trump’s misogyny, sexism and disrespect for women. Nearly every category of women rebelled. …

… Yes, House Democrats increased their vote margin nationally among white women with at least a four-year degree by 13 points compared with the Clinton-Trump margin in 2016. But Democrats also won 71 percent of millennial women and 54 percent of unmarried white women (who split their votes two years earlier). In 2018, unmarried white women pushed up their vote margin for Democrats by 10 points. In fact, white women without a four-year degree (pollster shorthand for the white working class) raised their vote margin for Democrats by 13 points.

Greenberg documents that there was a move among white working-class men toward Democrats also, although it wasn’t as dramatic as the move among white working’class women.

Last week, Lindsey Graham lamented that Republicans lost votes among suburban women. “We’ve got to address the suburban woman problem,” he said. Miz Lindsey also was saying the day after the midterm that the Senate vote had been Brett Kavanaugh’s revenge, because red state Democrats who had voted against Kavanaugh lost.

Somebody send him Greenberg’s analysis. Whether the Kavanaugh vote actually made any difference to Claire McCaskill or Heidi Heitkamp is not that clear. McCaskill toward the end was running a very cautious race emphasizing how centrist and moderate she is, and I suspect she might have done better in the urban districts if she’d come out promising to fight Donald Trump. That centrist red state Democrats lost doesn’t necessarily mean they would have done better if they were even more centrist.

But now we’re hearing that women across the board were more likely to vote for Democrats. Hmm, I wonder why?

 Liberal political commentator Anushay Hossain told the Fix:

“When we say ‘suburban,’ we are really talking about white women, and while they make up the majority of Trump supporters, current and past, I think it is impossible for them to continue to ignore Trump’s basic disregard for women and our rights, both culturally and politically, with his policies and rhetoric.”

But suburban voters’ concerns with the GOP weren’t limited to the commander in chief. They found the positions and behavior of legislators like Graham troublesome as well.

The veteran lawmaker had what some deemed a “meltdown” as he defended Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who was facing accusations of sexual assault. In his desire to protect Trump’s nominee, he made public his disbelief of Christine Blasey Ford, the clinical psychologist who accused Kavanaugh of inappropriately touching her without consent while the two were in high school.

I doubt Senate Republicans to this day realize what they did to themselves and their party in those hearings.

After Republicans voted in favor of Kavanaugh, Graham and others on the right believed that women voters would see their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons in Kavanaugh, and side with Republicans aiming to protect men facing accusations of sexual assault. … But women largely disagreed and decided to back lawmakers, many of them women, who voted against confirming Kavanaugh, who continued to face low approval ratings from women, according to a Washington Post/ABC poll.

And I don’t think that disagreement is going to go away.

That Republicans kept the Senate is largely a factor of the particular electoral map of 2018; most Senate races Dems needed to win were in conservative states. Given voter suppression tactics, Florida’s historic inability to count votes and that the Georgia race was stolen in plain sight, the Senate was just too big a hill to climb this time.

Philip Bump provides data showing that a Trump endorsement, or even a Trump rally, didn’t do much to help Republicans.

Our first look at Trump’s tweeted endorsements showed that his candidate won about half the time, meaning that an endorsement from Trump was about the same as an endorsement from George Washington (in coin form, once flipped). …

…In the House districts where he held rallies — usually not on behalf of the House candidates — the vote relative to the 2016 election was more heavily Democratic in 20 of 25 districts. If we consider a national shift of about three points to the Democrats (the 2016 national margin, compared with the national House vote as of Nov. 15, which favors the Democrats by about five points), 17 of 25 House districts where Trump rallied moved more to the Democrats than the country did overall. …  [In Senate races] Trump visited only two states he didn’t win in 2016: Nevada and Illinois. Democrats picked up a Senate seat and a governor’s mansion in those states, respectively. They also got that Arizona Senate seat won by Sinema.

Also,

Orange County, California, is now solid blue for the first time since 1940.

And do read ‘Nothing on this page is real’: How lies become truth in online America. It’s horrible and fascinating.

The Creature is on his way to California, supposedly to meet with firefighters and first responders. If past trips to disaster areas are any indication, he’ll be safely away from the effects of the fire and anyone suffering from them, so he might as well have stayed on the East Coast somewhere.

It’s not just the fire; it’s the toxic particulates in the smoke that can do a lot of harm.

More than a thousand people are missing.

Dana Milbank, While Trump feasts on Thanksgiving, troops on the border eat rations and await Pancho Villa:

Since the election, Trump has forgotten about the mortal peril posed by the caravan “invasion” — he has mentioned the “caravan” only once, and only when asked — but the troops he ordered to act in this political advertisement can’t forget. They will remain on the border through Thanksgiving, the New York Times reported, eating MRE rations, living in tents without electricity, receiving neither combat pay nor hostile-fire pay. …

…Mattis tried another way to give meaning to the troops’ aimless mission on the border. “I would put this in a little historic context,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “I think many of you are aware that President Wilson 100 years ago, a little over 100 years ago, deployed the U.S. Army to the southwest border. . . . The threat then was Pancho Villa’s troops, a revolutionary raiding across the border into the United States.”

So, troops, if you see this guy, do spring into action.

Now, that was a caravan. They don’t make ’em like that any more.

The CIA has concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Like most of us hadn’t figured that out. The Creature promptly said that Saudi Arabia is a “spectacular ally.”

Times may be bad, but at least it’s not 536 any more.

Do read “Five days of fury: Inside Trump’s Paris temper, election woes and staff upheaval” by Josh Dawsey and Philip Rucker at WaPo. I think the part that most got to me was that the Creature was angry with his staff for not telling him that skipping the Belleau Wood cemetary observance would make him look bad. As if any American wouldn’t care enough to want to go; as if any American wouldn’t realize how it would look to cancel. He has no sense whatsoever of American history and tradition; anything that happened before him is of no interest to him.

Paul Waldman writes that the White House is in meltdown.

New reporting paints a picture of the administration descending into a thunderdome of backstabbing and resentment as staffers jockey for position or wonder whether they should get the heck out, all presided over by an erratic, unhappy president….

…Nothing is more upsetting to Trump than being considered a loser, even temporarily. But I suspect that the prospect of having his tax returns made public has him even more frightened. We don’t know what they will reveal, but suffice to say that no sane person believes that all we’ll discover when they’re opened up is that Trump took advantage of some loopholes and did some creative accounting here and there. Everything we know about Trump’s career — not least the recent revelation that he and his family engaged in a years-long conspiracy to commit tax fraud on an absolutely massive scale — suggests that those returns will be a Pandora’s box of scandal.

And he was a moron to assume that every bad deed he ever did wouldn’t be sniffed out, eventually. Presidents can’t keep secrets any more, or at least they can’t keep them forever.

Then, do read This Is All Donald Trump Has Left by David Roth. Brilliant writing. Says it all.

Oh, and Mitch McConnell published an op ed on the Fox News website slamming Democrats for being too partisan. No, really, he did that. I am not making this up. Go ahead and take a few minutes to process. There were some, um, reactions on Twitter.

It’s hard to tell. “Cracked” Trump isn’t that different from “normal” Trump. But it’s a theory going around.

Today’s tweet:

Emmanuel Macron suggests building its own army to protect Europe against the U.S., China and Russia. But it was Germany in World Wars One & Two – How did that work out for France? They were starting to learn German in Paris before the U.S. came along. Pay for NATO or not!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 13, 2018

Granted, he never did understand what the NATO thing was all about. I’m sure a lot of people have tried to explain it to him. But Trump doesn’t do learning curves; his brain flatlined some time back.

I learned late last night that the Creature not only skipped World War I commemorations in Paris, as previously noted; he didn’t bother to go to Arlington on Veteran’s Day. Not that I want his odious corruption anywhere near where my brother is buried, but it does seem odd. And he’s changing the story about why he didn’t go to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France on Saturday. Now he’s saying the Secret Service told him not to go.  Did the Secret Service tell him to not go to Arlington also? Or (more likely, I suspect) did he just not want to bother?

One strongly suspects he was meeting with Putin all those times he wasn’t at a scheduled event in Paris. Trump and Putin both turned up late in separate cars at the Arc de Triomphe, like nobody would suspect a thing.

It’s worth going to Twitter to read the comments left to this tweet, btw. Some are brilliant.

The story in the New York Times concerning North Korea developing missile bases is inaccurate. We fully know about the sites being discussed, nothing new – and nothing happening out of the normal. Just more Fake News. I will be the first to let you know if things go bad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 13, 2018

For example:

Anyway — Jennifer Rubin wrote a couple of days ago that Trump is cracking up politically, if not mentally.

… the press and the country at large should keep in mind that Trump acts out when he is weak, humiliated and cornered. He’s all those things right now:

*His performance in Europe was panned.
*The election results get worse for Republicans with each passing day.
*His great North Korea diplomacy, contrary to the gullible pundits and political spinners, was a bust. (He was snookered.)
*We now have two major Middle East problems — Iran and out-of-control Sunni despots who think (not unreasonably) they can lead him around by the nose.
*He is not winning the trade war, and it may be one of many factors leading to an economic pullback before the 2020 election.
*Mueller plows ahead, with possibly more indictments (e.g., Roger Stone, Donald Trump Jr.). The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (aided by Michael Cohen’s cooperation) has its own case(s) to pursue against Trump and/or his helpmates.
*Obamacare is here to stay. It’s more popular than ever, and red America has fallen in love with Medicaid expansion.
*Trump’s finances are no longer protected from scrutiny, nor are his daughter and son-in-law’s.

In sum, we should continue to tally Trump’s constitutional offenses just as we keep a running count of his lies. However, these offenses are part of a bigger picture of a failing president and a party incapable of breaking with him. Trump is cracking up, as is the GOP.

Nancy LeTourneau writes,

It is worth noticing this series of events over the last week:

1. Trump held a news conference after the midterm elections in which his affect was clearly depressed, until he engaged in a confrontation with CNN’s Jim Acosta.
2. The president traveled to Paris to take part in the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the signing of the treaty that ended WWI. He had previously cancelled his plans for a military parade, saying that he would honor the military in Paris instead.
3. On Saturday, Trump skipped the ceremony at Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France. The White House suggested that it was because of the weather, but that didn’t stop other world leaders or Trump’s staff from attending the event.
4. The president arrived two hours late to a dinner that evening with world leaders.
5. The White House announced that the president will not attend the ASEAN or APEC summits in mid-November.
6. Monday morning brought this announcement:

Trump won’t be leaving the White House today, per press office. No visit to Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day.

— Philip Crowther (@PhilipinDC) November 12, 2018

It is hard to avoid the idea that there is a pattern to all of this.

LeTourneau goes on to speculate that Trump is coming unglued mentally and emotionally. Not that he was glued all that well to begin with.

Oh, and now that the midterms are over — there are reports Bob Mueller is about to issue some new indictments.

Updated: This is in the Los Angeles Times:

Thanks, dude.

I’ve run this photograph before, but you might not remember it. The fellow still in uniform is my grandpa, Corporal Robert John Thomas, just back from the Great War in the summer of 1919. On this day one hundred years ago he was literally in the trenches on the Western Front. That’s my dad, born in October 1918, on his lap, and Grandma Dora, of course. See also The Day the Guns Fell Silent and The War That Never Ended.

Trump continues to be slammed for skipping the observance at Aisne-Marne American Cemetery yesterday.  But he did it again today — the other world leaders walked up the Champs-Elysees together to a ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe. Trump and Putin skipped the walk and arrived separately for the ceremony.

Trump has been sullen and grumpy and difficult this whole trip, news reports say, with the exception of the time he spends with Putin. This photo was taken today:

French President Emmanuel Macron has been going out of his way to let Trump know he’s not putting up with his shit.

With U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin sitting just a few feet away listening to the speech via translation earpieces, Macron denounced those who evoke nationalist sentiment to disadvantage others.

“Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism: nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism,” Macron said in a 20-minute address delivered from under the Arc de Triomphe to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One.

“By pursuing our own interests first, with no regard to others’, we erase the very thing that a nation holds most precious, that which gives it life and makes it great: its moral values.”

See also Trump’s Bromance With Macron Fizzles Spectacularly.

Tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of the World War I Armistice. Many world leaders are gathered for the observervance. Guess which pathetic weenie wouldn’t take his fat ass out in the rain for a scheduled wreath laying at Aisne-Marne American Cemetery and Memorial, and canceled? All the other heads of state went ahead with scheduled wreath-layings.

This just in — Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner on Saturday ordered machine recounts in three statewide elections – U.S. Senate, governor and agriculture commissioner. You can follow the ongoing vote counts in Florida, Georgia and Arizona at the New York Times. See also The Arizona, Florida, and Georgia election recounts, explained.

California is on fire again; nine people, so far, are dead. Trump threatens to withhold fire aid because he thinks the fire is the state’s fault.

Remember the caravan? Republicans, apparently, don’t; they stopped talking about it as soon as the midterms were over. But 5,600 troops are still stuck on the border, living in tents.

Hold the phone (do people still say that?) — the margins in both the senate and gubernatorial elections in Florida have narrowed into recount territory. The senate race is especially close. Rick Scott is screaming foul.

Standing on the steps of the Governor’s Mansion, Mr. Scott announced on Thursday night that his Senate campaign had sued the Democratic elections supervisors of Broward and Palm Beach Counties. He then asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which he helps oversee as governor, to investigate them.

Scott also said,

“Late Tuesday night our win was projected about 57,000 votes. By Wednesday morning that lead dropped to 38,000 votes. By Wednesday evening, it was around 30,000 votes. This morning, it was around 21,000. Now, it is 15,000” Gov. Rick Scott said.

Yes, because it takes longer for urban areas to count all the votes. The rural precincts are the first to turn their totals in. Duh.

It looks like there will be a recount in the Georgia governor’s race also. Fingers crossed.

There are a number of House seats still undecided. The Democratic majority is not threatened; it might get bigger. Also,

The Arizona Senate race is also up in the air. There, Republican Martha McSally has a lead of some 15,000 votes over Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, but some 600,000 mail-in ballots have yet to be counted, a process that could take a week or more to complete.

Finally, the special election for a Senate seat in Mississippi goes to an automatic runoff between the top two finishers, Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith, who was appointed to the position, and Democrat Mike Espy. That will take place on Nov. 27.

In brief, the fat lady ain’t sung yet.

A couple of lawyers have written an op ed for the New York Times saying that the appointment of Matthew Whitaker as acting Attorney General is unconstitutional. The primary issue is that Whitaker has never been confirmed by the Senate to do anything, and apparently this makes him ineligible to be AG, even temporarily.

See also Marty Lederman at Just Security:

The Department of Justice’s formal view is that the VRA provides the President with an alternative authority, in addition to the AG Succession Act, to designate who shall perform the AG’s functions and duties during a vacancy in the office. Thus, for example, when AG Alberto Gonzales resigned in 2007, President George W. Bush named the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division, Peter Keisler, to be the Acting Attorney General, when the AG Succession Order in effect at the time, issued pursuant to the AG Succession Act, would have assigned those functions to the Solicitor General, then Paul Clement.

As far as I know, however, the “appointment” of Whitaker would be the first time in U.S. history that the President has designated as an “acting” Attorney General someone who was not then serving in an office to which he or she was appointed by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, and it’d be the first time since 1868—i.e., since Congress enacted a specific AG Succession statute—that the “acting” AG would be anyone other than a sitting Senate-confirmed DOJ officer.

John Bies writing at Lawfare calls this an unresolved constitutional question.

The Appointments Clause of the Constitution provides that the president can nominate, and “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate,” appoint officers of the United States, and further allows that “Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.” Consequently, while the clause permits Congress to authorize the appointment of “inferior officers” by the president alone or by the head of a department, it requires that any “principal officer” be appointed by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.

The attorney general—a Cabinet-level official who is the head of a major executive department and reports only to the president—is plainly a principal officer. The chief of staff to the attorney general, on the other hand, is an inferior officer appointed by the head of a department, and not subject to the Senate’s advice and consent, so Whitaker has not been confirmed to his current position by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. While the FVRA allows the president to appoint another Senate-confirmed official to fill a vacancy, here the president has elected to rely on another FVRA provision that allows him to appoint a senior Department of Justice official who was not Senate-confirmed.

There remains an open question of whether it is constitutional to rely on of the FVRA to appoint an official not serving in a Senate-confirmed position to act as a principal officer, such as the attorney general. Some—including Justice Clarence Thomas—have argued that an acting principal officer must be appointed in conformance with the Appointments Clause, i.e., by and with the advice and consent of the Senate: “Appointing principal officers under the FVRA . . . raises grave constitutional concerns because the Appointments Clause forbids the President to appoint principal officers without the advice and consent of the Senate.”

Of course, how the current SCOTUS would rule on that is anybody’s guess. The Notorious RGB is in the hospital with rib fractures, btw. I propose we keep her in bubble wrap for a while.

It’s plain as day that Whitaker was chosen to shut down the Mueller investigation. He’s expressed hostility to it and says he won’t recuse himself from it. There appears to be a difference of opinion among legal experts whether Whitaker would be guilty of obstructing justice if he shut down the investigation.

Elura Nanos writes for Law & Crime,

Let’s face it. Mueller has known from the start that Trump might fire (or order someone else to fire) him.  There’s no way Mueller would be blindsided. Mueller, a veteran prosecutor, has always been a step ahead of Trump; when the state prosecutions ramp up, Trump will have no power to either inhibit them or to shield himself from the consequences. As we’ve discussed before, the Attorneys General of New York and California have already made significant headway in filling in any prosecutorial gaps left by a Mueller firing.

In other news, yesterday CNN’s Jim Acosta was banned from the White House for doing his job, and today Sarah “Mouth of Sauron” Sanders released a doctored video that purported to show Acosta being aggressive with a woman intern who was attempting to take a microphone away from him while he was asking questions of The Creature. No shame. Various people are calling for the White House Press Corp to boycott White House briefings, which are all a pack of lies anyway.

People are so upset about the Attorney General situation that a mass shooting in California barely made headlines. The shooter is a former marine, and this may be one of those rare times in which the perp really did have mental health proplems.  The weapon used was a .45-caliber handgun with an “extended magazine,” which I’m taking to mean it was a semiauto.