Trump Tweeting Tough

Last night things did not go well for Trump and the GOP on the season premier of 60 Minutes. Worse, performance wise, than even the repeat whitewashing of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's refusal to answer basic questions about the telephone conversation between Trump and Zelensky, the transcript of which was published last week.

The Republican Party appears to be shakily lining up behind the president with a "see no evil" defense, leaving it to the president himself to throw the haymakers. According to Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker in "Trump Was Repeatedly Warned That Ukraine Conspiracy Theory Was ‘Completely Debunked’":

Mr. Trump continued his bellicose attacks on his accusers. “I want Schiff questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason,” he wrote on Twitter. And he threatened the whistle-blower, who is protected by law from retribution. “Was this person SPYING on the U.S. President? Big Consequences!”

[snip]

The White House put out Stephen Miller, the president’s senior adviser, to offer his defense on the Sunday talk show circuit. Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Miller denounced the whistle-blower as a “deep-state operative” who is part of a cabal of “unelected bureaucrats who think they need to take down this president.”

Patrick Martin noted that

Trump took to Twitter Saturday morning to denounce his Democratic opponents as “savages,” listing by name Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler, chair of the Judiciary Committee, and “AOC Plus 3,” a reference to four liberal Democratic congresswomen, all from minority backgrounds: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley.

It was widely noted in the media that Trump had chosen to target two Jews and four women of color as “savages,” a word with longstanding racist connotations that he has generally reserved for Central American gang leaders. His tweets will undoubtedly be followed by a new volley of threats of violence from Trump’s ultra-right supporters directed against the targeted Democrats.

This week the American public is about to enter the maze of Ukrainian politics. I'll be surprised if Schiff can maintain a coherent focus (see "How a Shadow Foreign Policy in Ukraine Prompted an Impeachment Inquiry" by Kenneth Vogel, Andrw Kramer and David Sanger):

Among the subjects covered in a subpoena sent Friday by House Democrats to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and demands for depositions from American diplomats was Mr. Trump’s decision to freeze a $391 million military aid package to Ukraine this summer not long before his July 25 call with Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who defeated Mr. Poroshenko this spring.

Democrats are also looking into the recall in the spring of the United States ambassador to Kiev, Marie L. Yovanovitch, a career foreign service officer who was seen as insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump by some of his conservative allies. On Friday evening, the State Department’s special envoy for Ukraine, Kurt Volker, abruptly resigned, not long after receiving a summons from House Democrats to sit for a deposition in the coming week.

So far, so good. At the end of this both Trump and the permanent Washington Consensus are going to be weakened.