All Bets are Off

Wednesday was a big news day. We were intrigued by the celebrity college admissions cheating scandal. There was a Boeing 737 Max plane down in Ethiopia. Our own FAA kept American carriers’ Boeings in the air, and to show confidence, the head of the FAA climbed on board one for a flight.

 Wednesday morning, President Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort was found guilty on eight counts of conspiracy and given a piggyback sentence which, with prison time he’d just been handed on other counts, amounts to more than seven years behind bars. 

Moments later, New York authorities announced new charges filed against Manafort that would be potentially damaging to Mr. Trump.

Within an hour, a different FAA official (the sudden “acting head”) suggested that new evidence warranted grounding the entire US fleet of Boeing Max planes. President Trump straightened his necktie and jumped on television to address the nation with the announcement. 

The eerily convenient timing of the FAA about-face and Trump’s television address bumped the Manafort story out of top position on the news channels. And it bought Mr. Trump time. At a press conference following his speech, most of the questions to the president had to do with airline safety and Boeing. One reporter did ask if Mr. Trump was planning on pardoning Mr. Manafort.

“I haven’t even given it a thought as of this moment,” the president replied firmly. “It is not something on my mind.”

Of course it was on his mind. And of course he will pardon Mr. Manafort, unless Manafort chooses to tell prosecutors things about Mr. Trump that would jeopardize the president or bring Congress closer to impeaching him, an action House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has publicly discouraged. (There’s not telling why she’s taken this position, as by every indication, she’s a Trump anti-fan and would love to see him impeached.) If Manafort gives Trump-related information to New York prosecutors in exchange for a reduced sentence, he will join the long list of former Trump loyalists who defected Trump-dom and found themselves in purgatory or worse. Trump is all about loyalty and allegiance—not to America, but to him personally. 

But Manafort will not give up Trump. Because he knows he's being pardoned. And Trump absolutely will pardon Manafort. It's gotten too hot in the kitchen for Trump's handlers to allow him not to, even if the optics are awful and it's politically damaging to Mr. Trump. 

About those optics:

The pardon will happen on a Sunday, sometime late afternoon, after the Sunday morning news shows and probably during the afternoon sports broadcasts. It'll be too late for the evening network on the east coast. ABC, NBC and CBS will do a second, updated version of their broadcasts for the west coast, as happens when a big story is developing and a three-hour-old report is creaky and out-of-date. But Fox News, CNN and MSNBC will be in repeats and documentaries for the evening. The story will still get attention the following day, but it'll be a full news cycle old at that point.

The pardon will come just after the New York court finds Manafort guilty of some of all of the charges he’s facing, and will probably be just before a predictable "other" positive news story from the White House. 

If not on a Sunday, it will be first thing Friday before the 8:30am announcement of a favorable jobs report.

Or that’s what would happen in 2019 in a White House running according to expectations and with a savvy understanding of internet/news media and how to promote or bury a story. 

But we do not have a predictable White House. 

The most volatile and (some would say) dangerous thing in the west wing weights 6.2 ounces and fits in the President’s hand. It’s his iPhone X. And it’s connected to the Internet. And Twitter is on the Internet. And while Trump’s announcement of the FAA pulling the Boeing fleet was executed slickly and with marvelous timing, the grown-ups at the White House can’t count on being lucky twice in a row with our president when he has time to stew on things and has that damned phone in his hand.

So all bets are off. More to come.

Dear Hobgoblin

RECOVERY JOURNAL

March 9th 2019

Hobgoblin,

I made this bed and we’ve lay in it for too long, sweating and sputtering, your wickedness slipping inside my blessings. You turn to me and leer at me with dirty, failing teeth and I leer back. I gasp a little gasp and cough. Uh-huh, yeah. 

I squeeze my eyes shut and lie very still. 

I hear you, then, in the dripping of water, in the barking of dogs, in footfalls on the pavement outside 1-2, 1-2. In garbage trucks. In the muffled laughter of the neighbors through the wall. 

You come with false prophesy. You whisper lies, little lies and little lies and big lies. You shout at me in my head until I’m off my head and off my rocker and I rock, cringing, knees tucked to my chest, palms pressed against my ears and you won’t shut up.

You are indecent. You bring me perversions, first fresh then ripe then rotten. Ill-begotten. I suckle your sweet nectar ’til it turns sour, then I keep suckling because I’ve forgotten how to drink anything else.

But I’m starting to remember. 

I will rise from this bed, from this tangle of sheets and funk. I will open the windows and open the doors and go outside. At first I will stagger, then walk, then run. But it can’t stop there. Because when I go on a run, you catch me. Always, every time. And you drag be back to that room of tucked knees and cringing.

I will fly. Man can fly when that which lifts him is a power greater than himself, fly with fingertips spread whistling in the wind. And the wind and the dogs and the trucks and the laughter will tell the truth and I will laugh with the neighbors, laugh with everyone, cry with everyone, be with everyone in exuberant caterwauling congress.

You will hold no quarter then, for the quarter you hold will be that stinking room, the room I have as of this writing left. Goodbye and goodnight. This night, this greatest of nights, I don’t wish you farewell, for you’re not fair and I hope your well runs aching-bone dry. 

Don’t try to follow me. This time, for the first time, I’m not leaving you a trail of bread crumbs. I am up, up overhead. And up is not somewhere you know how to look.

Sincerely,

Benjamin