White House President Stephen Miller has no problem with a long, long government shutdown. Neither does Trump's base. Jennifer Epstein at Bloomberg News reported that "Negotiations are at a standstill and no more talks are scheduled for the weekend or early next week. The White House scuttled efforts to reach a deal on Capitol Hill on Thursday, and Trump’s budget team is drawing up contingency plans for a shutdown that extends through the end of February, according to an administration official... An attempt Thursday by moderate Republican senators to broker a deal that would have traded immigration protections for undocumented “Dreamers” brought to the U.S. as children in return for wall money collapsed after Vice President Mike Pence rejected it." And extremists are demanding Trump declare a probably unconstitutional state of emergency and just build the wall with funds earmarked by Congress for amelioration of disasters in Puerto Rico and northern California.On Friday, Thomas Friedman was on CNN with Wolf Blitzer. He made the point that although Trump has "formal authority," he has "no moral authority... When you have a president with no moral authority, when it comes to a crisis... no one trusts this man; no one believes a word out of his mouth anymore... He started with the B-team. A lot of the B-team left. Now's he's got the C-team. And if we face a crisis with a president who no one believes, who surrounded by a C-team in a dysfunctional White House, then God save us... We have a core problem: we have a president without shame who is backed by a party without spine that is supported by a network called Fox News without integrity. And a president without shame, backed by a party without spine and a network that amplifies it without integrity-- and we face a crisis?-- fasten your seatbelt."Friedman concluded, "We have a disturbed man as president; that's very clear. And we have a party that is not ready to stand up to it... When he lies, day after day, and you as a party say nothing, what do you think is the corrosive impact of that over time?"Maybe worse than just "disturbed." He absolutely flipped out this morning over the FBI probe of him as a Russian agent. The NY Times story seems to have driven him bonkers. "In the days after President Trump fired James Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests... The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence...The investigation the F.B.I. opened into Mr. Trump also had a criminal aspect, which has long been publicly known: whether his firing of Mr. Comey constituted obstruction of justice."Historian Jon Meacham told Brian Williams on MSNBC: "We’ve really never had-- and if we have, it’s classified and lost to history at least so far-- a president of the United States who is considered to be possibly an asset of a foreign government. This is what the founders were worried about in the 1790s." Meacham identified Robert Mueller and Chief Justice John Roberts as the two most important individuals in the country.
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