DC Deciphered

Months ago, DC Deciphered featured a post in which I argued that incompetence on the part of not just Trump, but the GOP Congress as well, would prevent them from passing many of their major legislative initiatives.  Expanding on an idea originated by national security expert Benjamin Wittes (he talked about it specifically in the context of Trump’s Muslim ban), I noted that we should be thankful that their cruel agenda would be tempered by their incompetence in getting it enacted.

I cautioned in a follow up, however, that there was still plenty of damage the Trump administration would be able to do, even if he was never able to get a single significant piece of legislation passed, by using other methods at his disposal for instituting policy & regulatory changes. One of the main areas where I expected he’d be able to make the most significant changes was in the area of climate/environmental regulation.  Unfortunately, so far this prediction has proven to be correct. Continue reading →

Donald Trump has a super power.  Do you want to know what it is? It’s the ability to remain completely shameless in the face of even his largest flaws or misdeeds. The most maddening example of this was his anti-Obama birther crusade.  There have been so many times in the last two years that Trump has disgusted and/or infuriated me that I wouldn’t even been able to list them all.  But I don’t think anything made my blood boil like one particular moment from the first general election debate in September of 2016.  Continue reading →

It’s weekly news roundup time, at the end of what was certainly the most surreal week of the very surreal Trump presidency.  The week was, of course, dominated by the aftermath of the heinous events in Charlottesville, VA, where white supremacist groups invaded the small college town last weekend.  Their violent protests resulted in the death of 32 year old counter-protester Heather Heyer.

Trump’s bizarre, inadequate and ultimately just grotesque response to the weekend’s emotional events has led to him – at week’s end – being the most isolated he’s been since taking office. Business executives – whom Trump likes to consider his peers – loudly rebuked him, military leaders publicly broke with his “many sides” positioning, charities canceled events his Mar-a-Lago club, and even congressional Republicans have almost entirely left him to fend for himself, with several of them affirmatively speaking out against his handling of the events.  However, he still manages to have strong support from his base of voters out in the country on this issue, and that will keep fueling his belief that he’s right and everyone who disagrees with him is wrong.  And that will likely lead us towards lots more trouble.  But for now, there was other news this week.  So what else happened this week that you might have missed? Continue reading →

There was a topic I’d been planning to write about months ago, but then I got sidetracked by more immediate news of the day, and I never came back around to writing about it because new, more demanding topics kept arising.  What I’d wanted to address was the idea among many on the left that people on “our side” or people who agree with us or who share our values, basically anyone we think of as working for the forces of “good,” that these people should not be willing to work with or advise Trump in any way.  A couple prominent people who got particularly hammered for their decision to work with Trump early on were Elon Musk, Tesla founder & CEO and Travis Kalanick who was at the time CEO of Uber. Continue reading →

Moments like this weekend – observing the heinous events taking place in Charlottesville, VA – these types of overwhelming moments are both the easiest and, paradoxically, the hardest moments for me to express my thoughts in writing.  Passions in these moments are so strong, that so many thoughts want to come spilling out at all at once, and the challenge is to just get them onto paper (or computer screen) in a somewhat coherent form.

The first portion of this post is the immediate set of thoughts I had as I was taking in that terrible scene Saturday morning, just a couple hours after the chaos in Charlottesville began, exactly as I shared them on Facebook. So the thoughts may be slightly less than coherent, but I think being able to see genuine in-the-moment reactions are often the most interesting, so I wanted to share them here as-is.  The horror show of a day continued for many hours after I wrote this, and I’ll touch on that as well. Then I’m going to end this entry with the main reason I’m addressing any of this here on this blog, despite the fact that the day has already been dissected endlessly by pundits & prognosticators: I have a message for Trump supporters.  But first here’s what I wrote on Facebook early in the day Saturday: Continue reading →

Apologies are in order, because DC Deciphered has missed the last two weeks of “What Did I Miss?” Ironic, I know.  But now we get to return with a rare week in which the news wasn’t dominated by the Russia investigation.  Unfortunately, that’s only because it was pushed aside by the terrifying showdown between the U.S. and North Korea, highlighted by the battle to see which country’s leader could spout the craziest bluster.

But while the news was filled with increasingly frightening threats of nuclear confrontation, there was other news this week. So what else happened this week that you might have missed? Continue reading →

Senator John McCain may have sealed his legacy with his “no” vote on the GOP “skinny repeal” health care bill last month.  He’s been lauded as a hero by Obamacare supporters and bashed as a traitor by the law’s detractors.*  The story of how his vote came to be has been dissected from every possible angle and even documented with photos labeled like evidentiary offerings.

The night has reached legendary status for those following the health care saga.  His vote led me to write a post in which I acknowledged that he had proven my skepticism of him wrong and that, to my surprise, he had actually backed up his words with actions to match.

But a few days ago, I remembered something that made me realize maybe McCain’s actions on the health care bill shouldn’t have been such a surprise.  We actually might have had some foreshadowing of McCain’s health care vote a few months ago, immediately after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. Continue reading →

By now you’ve almost certainly heard or read about the leaked transcripts of President Trump’s phone calls with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.  The content of these transcripts has, if possible, even further reduced the esteem with which the rest of the world holds our current leader.

Setting aside for now any discussion about whether this leak was appropriate, I want to just focus on one specific exchange in the transcripts that I found especially bizarre.  This exchange, between Trump and Peña Nieto about their disagreement over paying for the border wall, has already received a lot of attention, as it obviously reveals (or perhaps just reinforces) quite a bit about our President and how he interacts with foreign leaders.  It also demonstrates the political trap he set for himself by misleading his own base about one of his biggest campaign promises.  But this exchange was interesting to me for even an additional reason: because it made me flash back to something from my own personal experience. Continue reading →

I don’t want to jinx anything, ‘cause it ain’t over till the guy in the White House sings (or until we vote him out of the White House), but last week ended up being a surprisingly good week for those of us rooting for Obamacare.  And now, we have another bit of good news on the Obamacare front.

In Tuesday’s post, I told you that I feared Trump might be ready to make good on his threat to cut off funding for Obamacare’s cost sharing reductions (CSRs), which would badly damage the Obamacare insurance markets.  I also included a re-post of a detailed explainer from several months ago about the CSRs – how they work, why they’re so important, and how we got into the situation where Trump is even able to legitimately make such threats.

Well, late Tuesday we got a really important court ruling on that topic.  This new ruling might not prevent Trump from going through with his sabotage, but it’s going to make it a lot harder for him to walk away from such a scheme unscathed. Continue reading →

Right about now, many of us who are rooting for the survival of Obamacare would love to just sit back, relax for a little while and luxuriate in the comfort of the GOP health care fail.  But we all know that Obamacare won’t really be safe from repeal as long as Republicans control all of Washington.  Many of them will never give up the dream of overturning Obama’s signature legislation.

At the same time, however, Friday morning’s failed vote was quite different from all the other stops and starts this effort has seen over the last few months.  Bringing a bill to the floor for a vote, only to see it go down in flames, is something that rarely happens in Congress these days.  So when it does happen, it makes a statement.  And President Trump is making it clear that he did not like what he heard. Continue reading →