Well the time difference is finally catching up to me. So I should probably sign off. So what have we learned tonight?

Well as of this moment the Labour party has surpassed expectations and gained 20 additional seats, but looks like they will still fall well short of a majority. The Liberal Democrats have gained four and the SNP has come down from its stratospheric results of 2015 to lose 14. This still leaves them as by far the largest party in Scotland, and I would view as more of a correction than anything else. That vote was unsustainable. But the big story is that, at time of writing, the Conservatives were down 9 seats. That puts them squarely into minority government territory, and for my money dooms May’s short-lived premiership. More interestingly they are perilously close to losing enough seats that even a deal with their natural ideological allies the Democratic Unionist Party from Northern Ireland  wouldn’t be enough to reach a majority, even assuming such a deal was feasible. If more of the seats yet to be declared in England turn red, which seems distinctly possible, all bets are off and we are in for quite a spectacle of bloodletting, recrimination and uncertainty.

 

3:39 AM: Continuing the long history of UKIP leaders failing to win parliamentary seats Paul Nuttall has come up short in Boston and Skegness.

3:15 AM: Not to harp on the results of the Lib Dems, but their intense campaigning in the South-West has paid off with the party gaining Bath from the Conservatives.

2:57 AM: The electorate giveth and the electorate taketh away. On the back of the loss of Sheffield Hallam  Vince Cable has  retaken the London seat of Twickenham for the Lib Dems.

2:48 AM: Nick Clegg, former leader of the Liberal Democrats, has lost his seat of Sheffield Hallam to Labour. The Lib Dems were already crushed at the last election, decades of careful progress undone in 3 years. This was meant to be the start of their fight-back to relevance. Now it looks like the electorate is delivering them yet another rebuke.

2:35 AM: The BBC has updated its forecast, revising down their expectations of Labour performance but still predicting the tories will lose their majority.

2:30 AM: The SNP is getting yet more bad news, with their leader in Westminster losing his seat of Moray as well as two others, bringing their total to the night so far to -5. The strong Tory showing north of the border means that their net total losses are being held at 1 now, their Scottish performance compensating for losses in England. But the relatively small number of seats in Scotland means that even if their numbers there hold up that is not sustainable, especially as Labour also appears to be making something of a comeback there.

 

2:15 AM: Results are in for Ealing Central, and its not good for the Blue team. This was a seat where the Tories hoped to dislodge the sitting Labour MP and…they didn’t. In fact they lost ground. 8 points in fact, with the Labour candidate increasing her majority to 15% at the expense of the Tories and minor parties.

2:05AM: Labour has taken two more scalps, Shipley and Battersea, both exactly the sort of places May was hoping her working-class Tory message would resonate and gain her ground. Instead Labour appears to be consolidating support and building on its vote. The swing is, however, still fairly moderate. We are now in the realms of a lost Tory majority, but not  a Labour government. The days of a strengthened mandate for May are gone. Leadership speculation begins to bubble. One can almost picture Boris Johnson practicing his attack lines in front of the mirror in a greenroom somewhere…

1:55 AM: The Tories have gained a seat in Scotland for the SNP in the constituency of Angus. Their performance here was always going to be one of the more interesting parts of the evening. Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson caused quite a stir in the last Scottish election by leading her party out of the doldrums and back to relevance. That coupled with the performance of the SNP in the post-indyref blitz of the last Westminster election almost certainly representing a high-water mark means there is nowhere really to go but down.

 

1:50 AM The first Labour gain from the Conservatives for the night in Vale of Clwyd. One of several promising seats for Labour. All talk of the swing being illusory can now be put away. This is important as at the beginning of the campaign there was a great deal of talk of Labour actually losing seats to the Tories. That looks like a very remote possibility now, and May will be under tremendous pressure from her party for what was widely perceived to be a weak campaign which is now costing them members.

1:42 AM(Its ok, I’m in New York. But lets use London time so as to keep things consistent with reporting) So far there are 22 seats for Labour, 11 for the Conservatives. Labour would need to secure 97 additional seats to win. Currently the only seat changing hands is Rutherglen & Hamilton West, moving from the SNP to Labour. If this is the start of a significant swing to Labour it could seriously upset the prevailing wisdom as far as electoral arithmetic goes, but the SNP majorities in some of the seats after the last wave are so large that it would require a lot of doing to overcome.

The first thing to note about this election is that nobody really knows what is going to happen. So perhaps its not such a bad thing that my predictions are absent, based as they would have been upon the output of the laughably ineffective British polling industry. Just to give you an idea, the final polls I looked at ranged from giving the contest to May and her Conservative Party by 12 points to predicting an upset Labour victory of 2 points. And the average error is about 4, so anyone who tells you they know what is happening because of some poll or other is having you on.

Having failed to finish my prediction post about the UK Election because of the tyranny of new employment I have decided to do a little live blog here and reconfigure that piece as a post-game analysis over the weekend. So, without further ado, Election 2016!

Donald Trump lies. At this point that should be about as controversial as saying the sun rises in the east or that water is wet. In fact, he is one of the great oral fabulists of our time, writing fiction with his mouth with a breathtaking rapidity and diligence. And while the content of what he says may be amusing, enraging or depressing it is much less important than why he is actually doing it. Because there are two reasons Donald trump lies.

The first reason he lies can be best related by the old parable of the scorpion and the frog. A scorpion comes up to a frog, sitting on a river bank, and asks the frog to help him cross the water. The frog is understandably reluctant, claiming the scorpion will sting him. The scorpion promises not to, because if it does it won’t be able to cross. The frog, wary but credulous, lets the scorpion on its back and starts swimming them both across the river. Half-way over, the scorpion stings him. The frog cries ‘Why would you do that? Now we’ll both drown!’ and the Scorpion apologizes, saying that he can’t help it. It’s in his nature to sting.

It is in Donald Trumps nature to lie as it is in the scorpions to sting. It is a constitutional requirement, a habit of existence developed over long years and no longer subject to any kind of rational necessity. He lies because he prefers the fiction to the reality, because he yearns for those around him to believe he is who he wishes he was, not who he is. He is not alone in this. Many people lie for the same reason, its just most of them don’t become President.

At this point his defenders would say that all politicians lie. There is some truth to this, but not enough. What all politicians actually do is bend the truth and lie by omission. That is using the lie as a defensive weapon. These lies are usually about intentions and values. Is a program successful? Is that fair? Is this position consistent with your previous stance? All the usual political lies fall under this rubric. But there is something qualitatively different about Trump’s speakings. He lies about facts. What is more, he lies about facts that are abundantly clear. When he claims he is a multi-billionaire. When he denies having ever said things he said repeatedly the same afternoon and that he will say again tomorrow. He constructs a new reality around himself, a reality that is like its creator in every important respect; fatuous, shallow, facile and bankrupt.

 

The second reason he lies is much more insidious. That it is reminiscent of the Eastern-European, post-soviet authoritarians is probably not a coincidence considering his aide Paul Manafort worked for so long for the Russian client government in the Ukraine. The Russian word for the concept as so practiced is dezinformatsiya. It isn’t just the untruth that is important here but the scale of the deception. You don’t just tell one lie about a thing, you tell a dozen. For instance, take the Russian destruction of the Malaysian Airines flight over Ukraine. Everybody knows it was Russian weapons wielded, at the very least, by Russian-trained seperatists and possibly by Russian soldiers themselves. A normal lie would be flat out denial. Instead, Putin and his state-controlled media suggested that it was actually Ukranian forces. And that it was American jet-fighters. And that it was shot down while attempting to prevent an airstrike on the Russian Presidents plane. And that it was an elaborate hoax, where dead bodies were loaded into an aircraft and crashed to discredit Russia. The airwaves are filled with conflicting reports, all bald-faced lies, which muddy the water and prevent a clear appraisal of the facts.

 

The purpose of this strategy is to promote a world-weary sigh, a shrug of the shoulders and a lamentation that ‘We’ll probably never know’. That is why Trump lies so rapidly, and so often. Not just because its in his nature but because he knows that his critics and the media will be struggling to check and cover the lie he told this morning, meanwhile  he lies three more times before lunch.  Thus we find ourselves in this bizarre situation: If he lied only half as much, if he were only half as bad as he is, he would seem much worse.

 

 

 

Republican lawmakers and interest groups have backed away from Paul Ryan and Donald Trump’s proposed Obamacare replacement legislation. More accurately they have fled screaming from the room, lobbing bombs over their shoulder and salting the earth as they go. By all that is the end of it. Just like that, one of the very few verifiable promises made by Trump and repeated ad nauseam is abandoned. You don’t need to have crystal ball to know that it simply won’t do. The GOP has won elections since 2010 on the promise of destroying Obamacare and conjuring up loathing and resentment against the Democrats signature achievement. People are unlikely to forget it exists.

But it gets even worse for The Donald. This isn’t just another piece of legislation. This was his first big test. And he failed in an utterly spectacular fashion. True, President Clinton tried and failed to pass comprehensive health care reform. But he spent over a year lobbying congress, negotiating with lawmakers and advocating in public for it before he finally gave up. That’s what putting your back into it looks like. Trump, by contrast, seems to have spent about as much time golfing at his Mar-A-Lago estate in Florida as he did trying to get the law off the ground.

Some of the blame must rest with Paul Ryan. The bill was compromised from the start. Its very true that bills are often compromised by the end of the process, indeed its virtually compulsory, but they need to be attractive at the beginning. Ryan committed the cardinal sin of negotiating with himself, attempting to pre-empt the objections of the loose confederation of warring tribes that constitutes his caucus. So by the time they first saw the bill, nobody at all wanted to touch it. If he had started out with a bill someone liked and was willing to fight for, he might have had more success.

But the frankensteinian monster he created made no friends. Moderates hated it for gutting Medicare and Medicaid, knowing that would put them in hot water with their older constituents. The more conservative elements of the GOP such as the House ‘Freedom Caucus’ were aghast that it didn’t go nearly far enough and were unable to justify voting for what was in their eyes still a big government program to provide healthcare.

All of this might have been worked through if the President had been strongly behind it. But Trump seemed to be more occupied with shaving strokes off his handicap than with actually carrying out one of his signature campaign promises. A few speeches, a phone call here and there and that was it. The bill died for lack of anyone to fight for it. Steve Bannon, one of Trumps chief aides, intervened disastrously by essentially threatening several House Republicans with political retribution if they failed to fall into line. Apparently that only served to stiffen their resolve while simultaneously making any future such threats less effective. All in a days work for Steven.

So the healthcare law is dead. But this whole shambolic display raises a question: Is the Trump Presidency fit for purpose? The administration seems unable to meet what were previously basic expectations of competence and self interest. Resignation in scandal for high profile appointees, multi-round losing battles with the judiciary, embarrassingly demonstrated lies to the national media, congressional investigations into impropriety and now a humiliating defeat in congress. All this in only 68 days. This was meant to be the low-hanging fruit. Tax reform was meant to be on the agenda, and if you think healthcare is complicated wait until you see the U. S. Tax code.

Adding further doubt is the nature of the Republican party right now. To be blunt, the GOP is composed of groups who can’t stand each-other. Pro-business moderates, tea-party conservatives, religious conservatives, libertarians, constitutionalists and populists are all pulling the party in different directions, vying for control. This is the reason why John Boehner packed it all in to go back to Ohio and fret about his vegetables.  Even a talented and committed leader with a clear plan would have difficulty getting that mess to stand in line. Whereas Trump’s performance has been foolish, dissolute and aimless,

Mario Cuomo said that campaign in poetry but govern in prose. ‘Build the Wall’, ‘Repeal and Replace’, ‘Make America Great Again’. These are all fine poetic sentiments as far as campaigning goes. And so they should be. Campaigning is about glittering generalities, declarative sentences and clear contrasts. But governing is messy, granular, specific and murky.

Trump has proved himself a better poet than prosaist. To illustrate this, let me leave you with a quote that has been going around from his own magnum opus, ‘The Art of the Deal’, that is simply too appropriate to pass up:

“You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on”

 

Familiarity breeds contempt, the old saying goes. And with the advent of television over the last few decades the Presidency has been thoroughly demystified, stripped of the ineffable majesty that once it possessed. People started thinking that anybody could do it. And then when Watergate rolled around it seemed to confirm the worst fears of all those who had looked with suspicion upon the occupants of high national office. Namely, the suspicion that they were all crooks.

Many people seemed to fall back on this notion to counteract their despair or justify their support for the Trump administration. How much damage could he really do? Didn’t thousands of officials and public servants really run the country, rather than the President? Did it really matter that much which of the two dull and uninspiring choices were picked? And, most of all, wouldn’t the nature of the job, the snugness of the strait-jacket of official responsibility force any occupant into roughly the same mould?

The answer, it turns out, is no. It is indeed possible to do this important job badly. This became abundantly clear to everyone watching Trump receive German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the White House recently. For starters there was the awkward proffered handshake from the Chancellor, either rebuffed or unnoticed by the President. But much more worrying was the press conference after. Lets just take a moment to examine why.

U.S. power in the world has for decades been built not just on their military might but on a series of treaties and undertakings for mutual and multi-lateral defense. These have allowed the projection of global American power in a way impossible for even the great Imperial powers of days gone by. Networks of bases across the world and support from allies enable American power to be projected anywhere in the world extremely quickly. Key among these arrangments is NATO, originally designed to provide security for Western Europe and balance Soviet hegemony of the East (what would become the Warsaw Pact). The key to this organisation is a comittment to mutual defence, that an attack on one part would be responded to by all members. This freed them from the risk of intimidation and invasion by larger powers, underwritten by the military might of the United States in whose interest it is to preserve a grouping so advantageous to their own security and power.

This is why it was so concerning during the campaign to hear Trump say that support for NATO allies was conditional upon them ‘paying their fair share’. Concerns that Trump was confusing NATO with a mafia protection racket were fully realised when he told the German chancellor that some countries (like Germany) owed ‘vast sums of money’ to NATO for their common defense.

This is simply not how it works. NATO (More specifically, the North Atlantic Council) has set a target of defense spending amounting to 2% of GDP for each member state. That is, they should provide for their own defense to the amount of 2% of their GDP. Trump seems to think that the arrangement involves them cutting cheques to NATO or Washington for that amount to subsidize others defending them, like a contractor sending an invoice for services rendered. That is to leave entirely to one side the valube of 2% as a metric. Small nations could increase their spending to that level while achieving no appreciable increase in military capacity. Even large nations could easily increase funding without buying anything the Alliance really needs. You could double the size of the German army, for instance, but without adequate logistics, sea and airlift capacity and armarment it would just mean more soldiers wandering around in Bavaria.

There are several problems with him having said this. Firstly, it is an unedifying spectacle for the President to be seen chasing money like some two-bit loanshark. It is especially problmeatic considering he is asking for money he is not, in fact, owed. Even worse is that he is doing it in the presence of one of the few truly important U.S. allies, upon whose co-operation U.S. hegemony rests. But all of these are mere irritations compared to the real issue with this kind of public snub, this televised airing of the ignorance and stupidity of the most powerful man on earth. Beause such a man is unlikely to inspire others to follow him, and therefore unable to provide leadership.

Such outbursts hasten the decline of Americna power. If Trump was trying to kill Pax Americana, the system of U.S. backed alliances and undertakings that has kept much of the world free from major wars since 1945, he could scarcely do a better job of it. He killed the TPP, and whatever you think of that agreement it was orchestrated by the U.S. Countries were draged, cajouled, bribed and begged to join. American soft power was expended in a way it has not been for years in pursuit of this new arrangment to establish global trade rules for the coming century. Even if killing it was a good thing (a proposition I think is debatable at best), how receptive will those same states and governments be to trust the word of the U.S. Government now that they have been left standing at the altar? Abandoned at the eleventh hour without a word of apology or any kind of consolation after, in many cases, expending their own political capital at home to back the deal?

It is hard to imagine they will be as receptive as they were before. In such ways are great powers undone, and hegemonys lost. So much of this stuff is about perception, and of the two on the stage during Merkel’s visit  to Washington only one looked like the leader of the Free World. And for the first time in living memory, it wasn’t the American President.

 

 

 

 

Many sayings are attributed to Sam Rayburn, the longest serving Speaker of the House in American history. One seems particularly helpful in understanding the current situation: ‘Any jackass can kick over a barn, but it takes a skilled carpenter to build one’. Repealing the Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare) was always going to be the easy part. Replacing it with something else is considerably more difficult.

As I have mentioned before the Republican Party under Trump is far from unified in philosophical terms, still less when it comes to the specifics of policy. It was one thing when President Obama was in office and the troops could be reliably rallied in opposition to his agenda, but now that the GOP finds itself alone in a room with a blank piece of paper the cracks are well and truly forming.

The House, under the leadership of Speaker Ryan, has released its proposed replacement to Affordable Care Act, cementing Ryan’s position as the man with the most thankless task in American politics. Reviews have not been good.

To Conservatives this bill still contains many of the objectionable parts of the original act. Direct subsidies will in many cases be replaced with tax refunds, but this is still the Federal government writing cheques to people to pay for healthcare. It is not the kind of free-market, consumer driven healthcare system they want. Worse still from their perspective is the inclusion of the tax hikes used to pay for the ACA, which will annoy both Republican donors and the Tea Party anti-tax crowd.  As if to demonstrate the truth of the old adage that ‘you reap what you sow’ the phrase ‘Obamacare-Lite’ has even been bandied about by some of the more adventurous souls on the right wing. They like the removal of the individual mandate, but that is nowhere near enough metaphorical sugar to make the medicine go down. This is not a cohort schooled in compromise.

All of that would be much less of a problem if Liberals were in favor of the bill. Even with the overwhelming loathing they feel for Trump and his administration, it may have been possible to chip off enough votes from the Democrats to pass the thing. We seem to be witnessing one of those rare moments of bipartisan consensus. Unfortunately for Trump it is against the bill, rather than for it.

Democrats loathe almost everything about it. Not only is there no mechanism to fund the rebates after the old tax increases are grandfathered out, but the removal of the mandate makes the whole thing unworkable. If insurance companies are being asked to pay more that money will either come from higher premiums or more government subsidy. They are understandably skeptical of protestations that neither will occur. To them, it ammounts to throwing out everything worth having in the messy and compromised ACA and throwing the very Americans it was designed to help under the bus. Senators from left to right have come out in opposition to this bill, and it seems certain that it would not pass even if a filibuster is avoided.

The bigger problem for the GOP is that ‘Obamacare’ is having a bit of a renaissance as far as public opinion is concerned. Public support for the provisions of the bill has increased substantially over the last few months, and it seems quite clear that a repeal without a salable replacement would be politically risky at best. And so they must try and reconcile the irreconcilable.

It must have no mandates for coverage, but cover pre-existing conditions. It must have no subsidy, but not increase premiums. It must lead to better coverage for more people without providing more money to fund that coverage. These circles cannot be squared. But as with so much in Washington the question isn’t whether you will do it or not, but how exactly you are going to not do it, and who exactly you can afford to alienate.

In any case, those who wondered if the entire edifice of the Republican party would meekly fall in behind Trump and whatever he proposed have their answer. As we watch this bill die, either drowned in amendments or suffocated quietly in some committee, spare a though for Paul Ryan. This isn’t the first time he has had to be in charge of the sacrificial lamb, and it certainly won’t be the last.

In a move that should surprise nobody Donald Trump is conducting his presidency thus far in much the same way as he conducted his campaign. Late night tweet battles with celebrities, knee-jerk pronouncements, chaotic and dysfunctional organization and recourse to the Orwellian doublespeak of ‘alternative facts’. The news has been dominated by his controversial executive order banning migration from certain countries to the United States. The familiar strategy of staking out a radical and non-specific position, moderating slightly, splitting the difference and claiming victory is plain to see. This is what we bought, people. Its how he operates.

I say split the difference because while this is policy wildly outside of established norms it isn’t actually what he promised. I’m somewhat torn about the legitimacy of describing this as a ‘Muslim ban’, as many are doing.  He has repeatedly stated a ban on Muslim migration, imposing a religious test for immigrants. The order, on the other hand, applies only to certain states rather than all Muslims or even all Muslim majority countries.  Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen are all covered under the three month ban. But migration from many of the largest Muslim majority states will not be effected at all, for example Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. This last one seems a particularly odd omission considering how many of the September 11 perpetrators were Saudi nationals. So for those reasons I’m reluctant to describe it as a ‘Muslim Ban’.

On the other hand, there are no non-Muslim majority countries on that list. I find it hard to believe that is a coincidence. It would also seem highly likely given what he has said previously that the end goal of the policy is to prejudice the migration of Muslims to the United States. The total halt to resettlement of Syrian refugees, for example, seems clearly to be a case of prejudice against a particular group. So perhaps it would be most accurate to say it is a ban directed against Muslims rather than a ban on them.

In any case, it has not worked out terribly well. The order was shoddily crafted, leaving it very unclear what if any exemptions existed or how this order interacted with established law. The execution was botched, with key National Security and Immigration officials only finding out about it when they saw it on the news. That isn’t how you are meant to do business.And what is more troubling it seems plausible that it isn’t even constitutional.

The acting Attorney General was fired after stating her opinion that it was not legal and therefore would not be defended in court by the Justice Department. This is fairly unprecedented. If nothing else the country’s chief legal officer saying your orders are illegal is a pretty bad look. The court has currently put a hold on the order while the legality is adjudicated, but much damage has already been done. Green-card holders and people with valid visas returning or coming to the United states were turned back, and tens of thousands now are either stranded overseas or unable to leave for fear of being stranded.

The moral aspect of this whole thing is well documented elsewhere. Sufficed to say I think it is deeply antithetical to the values upon which the United States was founded, and which it has defended and propagated throughout the world. But what about the politics?

There is a school of thought that Trump is immune from scandal. Fundamentally it holds that the people who vote for him don’t trust or watch mainstream media,  that the media they do watch will give them a favorable view of Trump and that therefore negative things about him will either not be heard or not be believed. I have two problems with this analysis.

The first problem is that it presupposes that the far-right or at least the right wing ecosystem of blogs, podcasts, radio shows and interest groups will always be on his side, that they will never turn on him over issues and give him negative press. This seems unlikely considering how easy it is to get on the bad side of the Conservative movement these days. Its almost at the stage that unless you are in favor of an assault rifle in every classroom, strip mining Yosemite a abolishing social security you are the enemy.  For years now being the most conservative guy in the room has been synonymous with being the most angry, the loudest and the least willing to compromise. So either Trump channels that guy (which is hard to do in practice, as facts get in the way) or daylight appears between him and the archetypal Jane Q. Teaparty. And once that happens, he will be in serious trouble. Because the beast must be fed. It can subsist only on anger, resentment and an endless siege mentality. Someone has to play the Judas to their Messiah, and there are no Democrats left to blame.

The second problem is that the hard right are not the people who won him the election. They are not numerous enough, for a start. Trump was elected with about 46% of the vote. There is not a lot of margin for error there, its a very small starting pool of support. And it gets smaller when you consider the 8% of people who had a negative view of Trump but voted for him anyway. Those people are not rusted on supporters impervious to dissuasion. And without them, the math becomes unworkable. The crucial voters who swung the contest to Trump were in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Most of the time they were people who had voted for Obama in the previous two cycles. These are not the people reading Breitbart and listening to Alex Jones. And polling would indicate most of them didn’t vote for Donald Trump because they wanted him to get rid of all the brown people.

They voted for him because they want jobs. If he is seen to be tilting at racist windmills instead of trying to get another shift put on at the local steelworks that could easily sway some voters. And he has so few to lose. The question is, can he reach such a level of unpopularity that Republican lawmakers break with him on key issues, or perhaps even treat him like a lame-duck?

The migration ban executive order won’t do it. But if this is the honeymoon I would be very cautious about predictions of a long and happy marriage.

Since the election there has been an idea floating around that the Trump presidency might not be so bad if Trump picks reasonable and smart people to run his administration for him. Hope springs eternal and all that. He is a pragmatist, they say. A businessman. He will seek out talent and use it for his own benefit, and that will improve the quality of his administration. He has talked about ‘draining the swamp’ endlessly. For those of you who are not up to date on your English to Trump dictionary this is taken to mean smashing the nexus of power in Washington that links business and special interests to government via corrupt insider dealing and influence peddling through the medium of the much maligned lobbyist. A lot of people see this mode of doing business as a problem, including many who dislike trump. Some seem to think this offers some ray of hope, that his policies may not be totally antithetical to good governance. He might appoint Anti-Swamp people to the Government, and end up with good policy despite himself.  Unfortunately this is predicated on two assumptions that don’t really hold up.

The first is that Trump knows that he doesn’t know anything and must find people who do. The second is that he could recognize people who knew the answers when he saw them. So now that his cabinet nominations have been named and are working their way slowly through the process of confirmation, how did he do?

It is difficult to put into words the mediocrity of Donald Trump’s proposed cabinet.  Now most of the time Cabinet secretaries are pretty dull. If they were shapes they would be beige cuboids, non-threatening but seemingly solid and dependable. Known quantities.

The people His Orangeness has chosen are, however,  baroque and abstract shapes depicted in lurid and eye-watering color. These are the raging mediocrities, those souls not content merely to be foolish, ignorant and misled but feel the need to encourage it in others.

It is one thing to simply not be terribly clever. Most of us fall into this category. And while mediocrity is not a mortal sin it is a dubious foundation on which to build. So who are these people poised to wear the Secretarial crowns, now that the Ancien Regime has been cast out?  Who are these bold new Tribunes of the Plebs, ready to ‘drain the swamp’ and save the country from the dominion of cronies, kleptocrats and the dreaded Washington Insider?

Secretary of State- Rex Tillerson

Rex Tillerson is 64. He enjoys drilling for oil, selling oil, frustrating environmentalists and long walks around the dacha with his good friend Vlad. While he was head of Exxon Mobil Putin awarded him the Order of Friendship, one of the highest honors the Russian Federation can grant a foreign national. While he took a more moderate tack than his predecessor at the head of Exxon Mobil (I.e. he admitted global warming might be a thing), the company under his leadership was still one of the biggest sponsors behind the opposition to international climate treaties. Treaties he will now be in charge of negotiating as America’s chief diplomat. Needless to say little should be expected on that front, but equally concerning is his deep connection with Exxon’s expansion into Russia, currently on hold because of international sanctions.  If Tillerson should decide to lift those sanctions, Exxon could resume its contracts with the giant Russia state-owned gas company to exploit millions of square miles of arctic reserves.

Also worth noting is that Tillerson comes to us without any record in government or public policy, nor any considerable body of opinion on international affairs or foreign relations. In fact his confirmation hearing was a masterly performance of non-disclosure. From Iran to Israel, from gunboats in the South China Sea to warcrimes in Syria he seemed to have no recommendations, opinions or insights whatsoever. Under pressure he just about admitted that Cuba was indeed a place. This total failure to worship at the altar of traditional Republican neo-conservative foreign policy has alarmed many Republican senators, notably Rand Paul and Marco Rubio. The last time time Senators blocked the nominee of their own party for a Cabinet job was nearly a century ago, but with the numbers so tight and Democrats so vehemently against Trump’s chosen candidates even one or two defections could put the process in jeopardy. So it’s a bit difficult to know what to expect, although I will be very surprised if this is the last we hear of the Secretary for Exxon.

Secretary of Defense – General James Mattis 

I must confess Mattis is something of an exception on this list. He is a retired Marine Corps general, and as such has a wealth of experience in military affairs. Ok, so his callsign might be ‘Mad Dog’. That isn’t great for the look of the thing. But he was responsible alongside General Petraeus for the counter-insurgency manual used in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition to which he has a history of strategic and military scholarship we can review.  So he is qualified, and will probably do an ok job. There is the slight wrinkle that he will need a waiver, as he was employed by the Federal Government (as a General) too recently and fall afoul of the anti-lobbying and corruption rules.

Homeland Security– General John F. Kelly

Another Marine Corps general. He was previously the head of Southern Command, which includes the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. To say he is viewed with suspicion by human and civil rights groups would miss an opportunity to use words like ‘dismay’, or ‘apoplectic rage’. Considering Trump’s record of calling for mass deportations, religious migration tests and border walls the fact that the new head of Homeland Security has in the past been responsible for press blackouts and prison crackdowns seems like relevant information. But as with General Mattis these military men can be hard to reed, and are in some senses blank slates. Much of their opinion is not known, or has simply never come up practically. Institutions often attempt to mould such men and imprint their institutional biases upon them. So what emerges can be somewhat difficult to predict, even without the added variable of the latest installment of ‘Stuff Trump Decides to Care About Today’.

Director of Central Intelligence – Mike Pompeo

Pompeo is a retired congressman from Kansas. He is known for calling for the execution of Edward Snowden, supporting bulk data collection by the NSA and other government organizations, opposing the closure of Guantanamo Bay and defending torture as heroic. He appears to believe in few if any safeguards for individuals against the collection of metadata, including what is euphemistically called ‘lifestyle data’. Not only is he fairly new, having only come in on the Tea Party wave of 2010, but he has no real experience of running an organization as large and complex as the CIA. And that is to leave entirely to one sid ethe fact he appears to yearn for some kind of national electronic panopticon.

Secretary of the Treasury – Steve Mnuchin

Mnuchin comes to us by way of Goldman Sachs. A hedge fund manager, he acquired the nickname ‘The Foreclosure King’ after buying a bank during the financial crisis which was then rescued by the Federal Government and making huge profits picking up distressed mortgages and evicting people. Mnuchin, like Tillerson, also has no previous government experience. So his record in the private sector is really what he must hang his hat on, so to speak. That is something of an issue, because Steve is not the sort of man rural industrial voters in the mid-west had in mind when they elected The Donald to ‘drain the swamp’. M of the more working-class Trump backers concerned over the Treasury being handed over to a man whose main engine of wealth creation was kicking people like them out into the street.  The fact his top priorities are huge cuts to personal income and corporate taxation are not helping with the impression. Another big swing and a miss as far as a bold new post-swamp reality goes.

Attorney General- Jeff Sessions 

When the Supreme Court struck down a crucial part of the Voting Rights Act a few years ago Sessions called it ‘a good day for the south’. That should tell you about all you need to know about this fellow. But on the off chance that fails to paint the metaphorical picture his past causes célèbres include suing voting rights activists, fighting to preserve the prison chain gang as an institution and  curtailing the activities of the NAACP. And that is only counting the last time he was an Attorney General in Alabama. As a senator he has fought against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, against allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the military and against any kind of immigration reform. His response to climate change is that carbon dioxide is plant food and that therefore everything is going to be fine. This is the kind of intellect with which we are dealing. Now, while its not good to have racist, crazy, homophobic old men running any part of the U.S government the Justice Department is a particular problem. Because the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department is where the most of the actual work of enforcing federal civil rights, voting rights and other protections is done. And now it is under the control of a man who has shown his hostility to the achievements of the civil rights movement of the 60s and 70s in every way possible. For decades. Its much like putting the fox in charge of the hen-coop.

Secretary of Labor – Andrew F Puzder

Puzder is a restaurant-chain executive. In particular the Carls Jr and Hardee’s brands. He is vehemently against raising the minimum wage, business regulation and being made to pay for his employees health insurance. As Secretary of Labor he will be responsible for enforcement of workplace regulations. More likely he will be responsible for the non-enforcement of workplace regulations, carrying out his professed belief that business should be free to do pretty well whatever it wants in terms of pay and conditions to say nothing of healthcare. If this sounds like some pretty swamp-adjacent activity to you, rest assured you are not alone.

 

Secretary for Health and human services – Tom Price

Tom Price is a six-term Republican congressman from Georgia. He was a doctor, and is one of the Republican lawmakers most vocal on the topic of healthcare and healthcare reform. Specifically he speaks often about how terrible the Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare) is. He has put forward several replacement plans. All of them are great, unless you are in thrall to some crazy notion that the healthcare system should heal the sick. If that is your kind of thing you may not like them so much. Price is also strictly and staunchly anti-abortion rights, helping to lead the charge to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood and virtually anyone else engaged in women’s reproductive healthcare and family planning. So not much to look forward to here.

 

Secretary of Energy – Rick Perry

Secretary Rick Perry. Don’t laugh, thats unkind. Sure, there was that one time at the debate where he couldn’t remember the names of the three Federal agencies he wanted to abolish. But in hindsight perhaps that was for the best, because one of them was the Department of Energy. He is not a believer in man-made climate change, so you can forget about any expansion of renewable power infrastructure or raising energy efficiency standards. More likely it will be open slather for the Oil companies in particular.

 

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development -Ben Carson

Housing and Urban Development is functionally the secretary for African American people. So it should be unsurprising that Trump has picked an African American man for the position. Unfortunately for us Carson seems not to believe in doing any of the things HUD usually does. Housing desegregation, urban planning and housing affordability are all businesses he seems to think the Federal Government should get out of. This is consistent with the rest of his far-right stances on Abortion rights, social security and healthcare. Once again he has no government experience and no clear stance on a variety of issues. More concerning to me, however, is that he seems to be half-asleep most of the time. He has taken being politically disengaged and turned it into a form of art, alternating between the slow articulation of inane pablum and the spreading of bizarre conspiracy theories. He has compared Abortion with slavery and seems to believe same sex marriage and pedophilia are somehow closely related. Whether one can be a neurosurgeon and an idiot simultaneously is justly debatable, but Carson gives every outward sign of an intellect at rest rather than at work.

Environmental Protection Agency- Scott Pruitt

Scott Pruitt has been selected to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. His previous involvement with that body has been repeatedly suing it to try and stop it from protecting the environment. To say he is a puppet of the fossil fuel industry is to do a great disservice to puppets. As Attorney General of Oklahoma he once received a letter from an oil company, put his letterhead on it and filed it with the EPA virtually without change. Naturally he thinks Climate Change is some kind of vast left-wing conspiracy and that environmental regulation is an intolerable burden on business. Since Trump has already nominated a Secretary of Labor who dosn’t believe in labor rights perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that he has also put forward an EPA director who dosn’t believe in protecting the environment. Exactly what he will do as director remains to be seen, but it probably won’t involve tighter regulations or saving the spotted owl.

Secretary of Commerce – Wilbur Ross

Ross is a billionaire famous for taking over failing steel and industrial companies and extracting profit from their closure, sale or reorganization. Again, another wealthy white man with no government experience. More concerning is his past business ties to Trump, having helped him stave off the closure of his Taj Majal casino in the 1990s. Like Trump he also believes that U.S. trade deals have been a bad idea, particularly NAFTA. There has not been a protectionist Secretary of Commerce for a very long time, so nobody quite knows what to expect.

Secretary of Transportation – Elaine Chao

Chao is both non-white and female. She also has previous government experience, having served as George W. Bush’s secretary of Labor. But in case you thought she was a real departure from the aforementioned nominees, she is in fact very rich. She is also married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.  As far as ‘draining the swamp’ goes she also leaves something to be desired, having spent time on the boards of a number of huge companies and with close links to most of the people who compose the metaphorical Swamp. As Transportation Secretary she will be responsible for administering much of any infrastructure investment the Trump administration does. In that connection it should be concerning that she is against government direct investment, favoring tax breaks and public-private partnerships to encourage spending. Hardly what the lefties clutching at straws to find something to like in Trump’s program would desire.

 

Secretary of the Interior – Roy Zinke 

One of the main jobs of a Secretary of the Interior is administering the national parks. So picking someone from Montana like Zinke makes some kind of sense as Montana and the plains states are largely composed of national park. And from all I can find he does seem to have a genuine concern for the preservation of the national estate and the protection of the natural wonders that he will be in charge of. But he is also a pro-business pragmatist, which is another way of saying he is OK with drilling for oil in said natural wonders if the price is right. On the whole he is probably one of the more reasonable Trump picks, but that is a rather low bar.

 

Secretary of Education- Betsy deVos 

DeVos has been selected to run the Department of Education, despite never having attended a public school or university, sent her children to a public school or university or running a public school or university. Her experience in the field of education is pretty much limited to slashing public school budgets and reassigning the cash to ‘vouchers’, redeemable at private charter schools by parents to give them more ‘choice’ in education. Programs like this are usually code for cuts to education spending. Rather than ensuring everyone has access to education, this scheme puts the onus on the parents to pick a good school and relegates the Federal Government to simply writing checks. From that position its then easy to move to parents paying a larger and larger part of the cost of education themselves until there is, in effect, no public school system. From her confirmation hearings so far she also seems not to actually know anything about education, the metrics by which success and failure can be established, the current funding models or really anything else. So it seems pretty likely she will be a terrible Secretary. On the Swamp front she is no better. Her brother is one of the founders of Blackwater, the infamous private security firm, and the fortune she inherited from her father secured her position in the Michigan state Republican party for her fundraising prowess. Not exactly the type to storm the bastions of the corrupt establishment.

Small Business Administration – Linda McMahon

McMahon along with her husband founded the WWE, turning pro-wrestling in the U.S. from a carnival sideshow into a huge money-making machine. She used this money to buy a Yacht named Sexy Bitch. That fact isn’t politically significant, just amusing. She also used that cash to run for the Senate a couple of times, losing both, and then to help bankroll The Donald’s campaign. I’m not sure if you can call WWE a ‘small business’, but I suppose it counts as experience. But appointing major campaign donors to your administration is pretty swampy behavior.

 

That is the list so far. Wrestling executives, oil-industry shills, oil-industry bosses, labor exploiters, billionaires daughters, theocrats, environmental vandals and at least one racist bigot. As a group they have a greater net worth than the 43 million poorest American households.

It may be that the most concerning part of the Trump Administration will be the Administration, rather than the Trump. Far from pragmatists who will restrain Trump’s bombastic and reactionary impulses, he has picked exactly the sort of cabinet that will draw him further and further down the rabbit hole of his own paranoid reactionary neurosis. And to all those who say that these people are the grown-ups we have been looking for I would pose a question: Who is more foolish? The fool or the fool who follows him?

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of Trump’s main campaign promises was to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. You may know it better as Obamacare, a sobriquet devised by those opposing the scheme that has now passed into near universal usage. Republicans have been promising this for years, but now that Obama will no longer be in office to veto a proposed bill they might actually attempt to do it.

Let’s start with  the repeal part of this promise. Republicans really, really hate Obamacare. So the will is certainly there. But as I have mentioned so many times before it is much easier to stop things happening in the American system than to push them forward. Witness the soul-crushing, years-long slog Obama, Pelosi and Reid had to go through to pass the dashed thing in the first place. Repealing it would be a long and hard campaign for the GOP, not least because they can count on stiff Democratic opposition.

Many Democrats, particularly the now ascendant Liberal wing of the party, didn’t like the Affordable Care Act because it was a messy compromise. Many wanted a system analogous to the rest of the developed world where the government simply paid for medical treatment for those who need it. They were brought along kicking and screaming, eventually acceding to the reality that there were not the required 60 votes for such a proposal in the Senate. The Republicans can probably repeal it. But if the Democrats choose, and I think they will, they can make the process time costly in both time and political capital. The increasingly desperate and angry progressives who wanted more to start with will not go gently into the night.

That brings us to the replace part of the plan. This, friends, is where the wheels really start to come off. Trump has at this stage promised to keep the parts of the law that make it illegal to refuse coverage to those with pre-existing medical conditions. That is good. He has also said he want’s to have ‘universal health care’. That is also good. But Trump says he will do it without mandating individuals purchase health insurance on the one hand or providing government insurance on the other.

This is total nonsense. You can’t have universal healthcare without either mandating private healthcare or providing public healthcare. That isn’t what those words mean. Moreover, one of the problems with Obamacare is that not enough young and healthy people signed up, meaning the risk pool wasn’t sufficiently diverse and premiums kept rising to try and make up the difference. Remove the mandate and the numbers get much worse. It just doesn’t  work.

The Republican plan a la Paul Ryan would basically make healthcare cheaper to those who don’t need it and more expensive for those who do. The bottom line is that if you want everyone to have healthcare, and insurance companies to cover people on whom they will never make a dime because of chronic and pre-existing conditions, someone has to pay. Either other consumers or the taxpayer.

Trump is essentially trying to have his cake and eat it as well. Nobody really likes the individual mandate, but it’s the part that makes the whole thing function. So his promise and stated policy are obviously bunk. What then should we expect?

Well, it’s pretty clear what his pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) wants, and it isn’t anything good. Tom Price has been one of the harshest critics of health care reform, advocating repeatedly and vociferously for measures that would totally the progress that has been made over Obama’s two terms in the oval office. If Trump wanted a conciliatory plan that protected the most vulnerable he certainly picked the wrong guy to execute it.

Of course, this isn’t really news. It shouldn’t surprise any of us that Trump obviously has no understanding of the American healthcare system. I myself doubt if he understands any system at all with the possible exception of bankruptcy courts. But it demonstrates very neatly the problems he will run into as he tries to make headway with what we may charitably call his policy program.

Because Trump wasn’t elected as the leader of a party of pragmatic center-right conservatives. Doing what he seems to genuinely be his inclination, keeping exemptions for pre-existing conditions and ensuring everyone has health care, will require measures utterly unacceptable and antithetical to both his base and the cavalcade of sycophants and mediocrities with which he now surrounds himself.

A time is rapidly approaching when Trump can’t simply exist in the world of tweets and word-salad, easily forgotten by the next news cycle and impervious to decryption. He cannot be all things to all people as President. He will have to take a stance and codify his position in black and white. And once he does that there are going to be a lot of very, very angry people on one side of politics or the other.

And in case you thought he might have some master plan up his sleeve, if he waits too long he will lose the initiative. Paul Ryan knows exactly what he wants to do about health care. He has been thinking, writing, filling ring-binders with detailed tables and spreadsheets for years. The same goes for many of the hardline, anti-government conservatives within his party. If Trump fails to take the lead on the issue he is likely to be led by the nose as the congressional wing of his party, scared witless by the rabidity of the base they must face in only two years, starts writing the next chapter without him.

 

While gubernatorial elections in the United States get a lot less media attention both domestically and internationally than contests for federal office they are extremely important. There are two main reasons for this.

Firstly there are the governmental reasons. Governors are quite powerful. Like the President they sit atop large bureaucracies of state organisations, administer large budgets and wield great political influence. Governors really can change states, setting priorities and shepherding legislation through state legislatures. Gun control, healthcare, law enforcement, infrastructure and a host of other issues have all been pushed by various governors across the country during their time. Franklin Roosevelt used to conceive of the state governments as fifty laboratories for testing policy, and history has shown a great deal of truth to this.

The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare if you would rather, gained considerable inspiration from Mitt Romney’s experience reforming healthcare in Massachusetts. They can also set precedents and give the lead to other states as California did with its emission standards and carbon reduction schemes. So from a policy and governance standpoint winning gubernatorial elections is important.

Secondly there are political reasons to care about performance in these contests. It is usually governors who run for Senate and President, so the more you have the deeper your bench of talent is. This is how one avoids the sad state of affairs in the Democratic party in the recent cycle, where the pool of high-profile and top-tier candidates was depressingly small, mostly due to Republicans thrashing them in gubernatorial contests across the country during the Obama years.

Having a large contingent of proven politicians with executive experience to run for higher office is of inestimable value to a political party. It also provides you with partners in state government to help with the implementation of federal laws and initiatives. By contrast it is often quite difficult to force a recalcitrant governor into compliance, draining political capital and slowing down the process of reform even further.

There are also other political dividends that can accrue form good performance in gubernatorial contests. For instance, influence or control of state redistricting boards to try and redress the gerrymander currently benefiting the Republican party or just make sure that election law is fairly and properly implemented.

The governorship will be up for grabs in 36 states in 2018, and while some of these are states like Texas or Arkansas where the Democrats have little chance of unseating incumbents in conservative states many others are up for grabs. This is either because the incumbent is term-limited, retiring or a Democrat, as well as a few others where Republican incumbents will be running in what are largely Democratic or swing states.

Connecticut, Oregon, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Hawaii should all be pretty easy to keep in the blue column. These states have Democratic incumbent governors in pretty safe states.

Of the rest the most promising looking targets to me are states with term-limited or retiring Republican governors. Florida, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio will all have open seats as well as having given their electoral votes either to Clinton or to Trump by a small to moderate margin. If the Democrats can nominate good candidates in these races and resource them properly there is no reason why any should be unbelievable. That is important, because some of these states are large with powerful and influential state governments. For political purposes its also pretty useful to have a guy hanging around in the wings who can deliver Ohio, Florida or Michigan. That is a pretty good feather  in the cap for a Presidential aspirant, as well as making it easier to challenge sitting Republican senators in any of those states.

The other category worth mentioning are states where a Republican incumbent is running for re-election but might be vulnerable, or where the incumbent isn’t running. Places like Illinois, Maryland, Massachusets, New Hampshire, Vermont, Wisconsin and Iowa spring most obviously to mind.

Previously Democrats have allowed their performance in Gubernatorial contests to slide. Partly I think this is because Liberals in particular tend to think in a to-down fashion, without the emphasis on local solutions and offices that Conservatives often evince. The increasingly liberal ideology of the democratic party is much more focused on national solutions and programs, as are their donors and activists.

But there has also been a part for hubris. Excellent performance at the federal level during the Bush years, where they could run against an increasingly unpopular Republican program and incumbent was seen as a protection against more conservative State administrations. And then the election and re-election of President Obama provided something of a false sense of security. It didn’t matter so much that they kept getting creamed in races for governor, because they had the Presidency.

Now no such reasoning can be employed. Democrats have a reasonably favorable map, a soon-to-be President with historically low approval ratings to run against and a base that is virtually being galvanized for them by the daily toxic emissions from the Trump camp.

Being at the nadir of your political powers is disheartening and sad for any party. But from here the only way is up, and it seems like a lot of people have realized that the best route back to serious national power for the Democratic party runs through governors offices all around the country, and not from a myopic focus on the House and Senate.

 

One of the most interesting questions going around right now is exactly what will happen to Trump’s business empire now he is safely on the road to the White House. Interesting because this has never really happened before, but also important because without action corruption seems unavoidable.

For example, Trump’s new luxury hotel opening in Washington. Not only is it mere blocks from the West Wing but it is located on land leased from the federal government. He would, in effect, be his own landlord.

But it gets worse. There are reliable reports that he has discussed permits and approvals for his international properties and developments with other heads of state and government representatives. That Trump would receive some commercial benefit both from the campaign and the presidency was unavoidable. He is primarily in the business of brand management, and his brand is certainly more notorious now than two years ago if not more lauded.

His defence against accusations of corruption has been that he will hand over control of the Trump Organisation to his heirs. But in my opinion that is a total non-starter. He has already shown why. His daughter, who under this plan would be one of the prime movers behind the Trump Organization in his absence, has already sat in on a number of meetings and phone calls with representatives of countries where Trump has business interests. The president of Argentina has alleged he was asked about permit approvals on one such call.

This isn’t a small thing. Using an office of public trust to access business opportunities unavailable to the pubic at large is corrupt. No less corrupt is allowing commercial relationships to influence government policy or access to the consideration of the President, even implicitly.   Clinton was rightly criticized for influence peddling while at the State department, not least by Trump himself. We should not apply a lower standard now, especially to someone like Trump who has proved himself so petty and vindictive in his business dealings.

And if international diplomats choose Trump’s hotel as their destination when visiting Washington in order to curry favor then Trump is experiencing commercial benefit as a businessman on the expectation of consideration from him as a president. Which is concerning since many diplomats have already said off the record that they would certainly stay in his hotel.

Handing it over to his children would not avoid conflicts of interest, as Trump has an obvious interest in the enrichment of his heirs. Are we really to believe he wouldn’t care if his company and progeny go bankrupt in his absence? I believe they call that Nepotism. Handing it over to the Trumps Minor would also require him to completely ban them from having any part in his administration while they were running the company.

Even if his children were not involved, we can’t expect some kind of arms-length administration by paid executives to avoid conflict of interest and corruption. The buildings have his name on them. He isn’t going to just forget where and what they are.

So what would put a stop to all of this for him? There are two options that would seem at least somewhat viable to me. Firstly, he must sell of all his international assets as well as those in politically sensitive areas like Washington.  Corruption in terms of these properties is pretty much unavoidable. Secondly he would have to stop leasing his name to hotels and resorts and other such things that he does not in fact own. That would leave him with properties like golf courses that are less susceptible to such attacks.

But that wouldn’t really do it. To really avoid corruption he would need to sell the entire Trump Organization in a public offering, then put his assets in a blind trust. That is the option put forward by several editorial boards and commentators. But I don’t think he will do that.

That leaves us basically where we we started. Donald Trump is corrupt, and seems to be dealing corruptly. To assume anything else is naive and unrealistic in the extreme. He knows what would be necessary to avoid this perception. If he does not do it he has nobody to blame for the endless stream of negative stories, the Chinese water torture of allegations still to come, but himself.