The Comey Rule

 Opposition Research by Nancy Ohanian Did you watch the "loyalty dinner" scene in Billy Ray's excellent mini-series, The Comey Rule? Writer-director Ray and actor Brendan Gleeson portray Trump as a repulsive mob boss demanding personal loyalty from an very uncomfortable James Comey. Comey made a half-assed attempt to placate Trump but Trump wasn't buying it and it led to Trump's smear campaign against him and eventual humiliating firing. Something tells me Trump's animus towards Dr. Anthony Fauci is even greater than his hatred for Comey was-- but, for whatever reason, Trump has felt he couldn't fire him before the election. No doubt Fauci will get his walking papers in November. On Monday Fauci told Jake Tapper that the Trump campaign should stop running a misleading ad that implies Fauci:

a- thinks Trump did a good job on the pandemicb- is endorsing or even voting for Trump

Neither a nor b is true and Fauci said he thinks "it’s really unfortunate and really disappointing that they did that. It is so clear that I am not a political person and I have never either directly or indirectly endorsed a political candidate. To take a completely out-of-context statement and put it in what is obviously a political campaign ad, I thought, was really very disappointing." Here's the deceitful ad in question, which Trump refuses to stop running, even though it has been debunked as completely false and even though Fauci doesn't want to be associated with Trump's campaign: Fauci's official statement to the media: "The comments attributed to me without my permission in the GOP campaign ad were taken out of context from a broad statement I made months ago about the efforts of federal public health officials." Fauci replied to a question from Tapper about the safety of Trump's super-spreader campaign events. More of what Trump will absolutely see as disloyalty to himself: "We know that is asking for trouble when you do that. We’ve seen that when you have situations of congregate settings where there are a lot of people without masks, the data speak for themselves. And now is even more so a worse time to do that... It's going in the wrong direction right now, so if there's anything we should be doing, we should be doubling down in implementing the public health measures that we've been talking about for so long, which are keeping a distance, no crowds wearing masks, washing hands doing things outside as opposed to inside, in order to get those numbers down... We’re entering into the cooler months of the fall and ultimately the cold months of the winter and that's just a recipe of a real problem. If we don't get things under control before we get into that seasonal challenge." And Fauci's not the only insider unhappy with the way things are going pandemic-wise. A startling-- but not unpredictable-- NY Times piece yesterday, Trump’s Virus Treatment Revives Questions About Unchecked Nuclear Authority. This is something Ted Lieu has been talking about for several years because, as David Sanger and William Broad reported "Even before the president was given mood-altering drugs, there was a movement to end the commander in chief’s sole authority to launch nuclear weapons." Doctors say the steroids he's on can produce delusions, euphoria, bursts of energy "and even a sense of invulnerability."

Trump’s long rants and seemingly erratic behavior last week-- which some doctors believe might have been fueled by his use of dexamethasone, a steroid, to treat Covid-19-- renewed a long-simmering debate among national security experts about whether it is time to retire one of the early inventions of the Cold War: the unchecked authority of the president to launch nuclear weapons. Mr. Trump has publicly threatened the use of those weapons only once in his presidency, during his first collision with North Korea in 2017. But it was his decision not to invoke the 25th Amendment and turn control over to Vice President Mike Pence last week that has prompted concern inside and outside the government. Among those who have long argued for the need to rethink presidents’ “sole authority” powers are former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, considered the dean of American nuclear strategists, who has cited the fragility of a nuclear-weapons control chain and the fear that it can be subject to errors of judgment or failure to ask the right questions under the pressure of a warning of an incoming attack. A Culture Of Violence by Nancy Ohanian

Mr. Trump’s critics have long questioned whether his unpredictable statements and contradictions pose a nuclear danger. But the concerns raised last week were somewhat different: whether a president taking mood-altering drugs could determine whether a nuclear alert was a false alarm. ...Peter D. Zimmerman, a physicist and former government arms scientist, said few things better illustrated the confused nature of the American effort to prevent a single individual from launching a nuclear strike than the “two-man rule” in nuclear silos, submarines, bombers and the nation’s coast-to-coast atomic complex. The rule requires the presence of two authorized people for any step involving access to the armaments or the launching of a nuclear strike. “No unaccompanied person ever approaches a nuclear weapon,” Dr. Zimmerman wrote in a 2017 opinion essay. “It’s a basic precaution against theft, misuse or sabotage.” But it does not apply to the commander in chief, whether in the Oval Office or at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. A president could misjudge the situation or become impulsive, Dr. Zimmerman noted in an interview. “And the consequences,” he said, “would be horrendous.”

I asked Ted Lieu about the bill he introduced several times seeking to deal with this problem before it becomes a catastrophe. "No one should have the sole authority to start a nuclear war-- least of all Donald Trump," he told me this morning. "That is why Senator Ed Markey and I have introduced the 'Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act' for the past three congressional terms. We believe that a nuclear first strike constitutes an act of war and thus requires congressional authorization. It is important to note that our legislation does not prevent a president from responding to a nuclear threat in kind-- it just prevents a president from unilaterally starting a nuclear war. There are a myriad of risks associated with not having clear restrictions on a nuclear first strike. There is a risk of miscalculation or misunderstanding escalating to an all-out nuclear war. And there is also the risk that a president becomes completely unhinged and orders a nuclear strike on a whim. We all recall hearing the terrifying stories of the end of the Nixon presidency. I believed in 2016 what I still believe now: launching a weapon that has the power to kill millions of people is an obvious act of war. Regardless of who sits in the Oval Office, Congress has the constitutional duty to decide when a nuclear first strike is warranted."