By Denny Gulino
THE WHITE HOUSE (MaceNews) -It’s not just the sinking Fall sun casting long shadows on the White House,
On a Friday afternoon, after a tumultuous week for President Donald Trump, the press room is quiet although as always, coiled like a spring in case there’s a two-minute warning for pool reporters to enter the Oval, or because someone notable is suddenly making themselves available on the driveway outside.
There have been no public events during the day other than 20 minutes in the Roosevelt Room for that conversation with the first two women astronauts during their space walk. Which is fine with those reporters and photojournalists who accompanied him south on Thursday, for a rally in Dallas and other appearances, not to return until 1:31 a.m. ET.
However, if there was an inflection point in this presidency, after which nothing is quite the same, it was the singular event this week on Capitol Hill that is the candidate. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told his Republican colleagues to prepare for a trial of the president – and it could last for weeks.
Suddenly weeks of numbing charge and countercharge, slowly deepening testimony and contorted explanations clicked into sharp focus and the new reality clanged like a bell. A trial. Hours and hours of must-see TV, new revelations, sober testimony, not the quick finessed dismissal of the charges most in either party expected of McConnell.
Perhaps Thanksgiving to Christmas, Senate sessions six days a week. Emails and memos brought to light that their authors had hoped would be forgotten or lost. Layers of White House aides, State Department staff and functionaries in agencies and departments whose names few would recognize now wondering if the bell tolls for them.
First comes impeachment, now assumed to be nearly accomplished although many witnesses are still to be heard from. Tuesday it’s William Taylor, who is the acting U.S Ambassador to Ukraine. His emails objected to White House maneuvering. Wednesday it’s State Department official Philip Reeker, then White House national security official Michael Duffey. Thursday the Defense Department’s Laura Cooper and the National Security Council’s Alexander Vindman.
Who are these people, the president has asked, saying he’s never heard of most of them before. The White House ban on testimony is now being thoroughly ignored and one set of testimonies can lead to another set as new facts are revealed.
In the press room on a late Friday afternoon, the podium is empty, unlike Thursday when acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said many things. Which of them were intentional because someone decided they had to be brought to the surface now and which, if any, were unintentional slip-ups can only be the subject of conjecture.
For many reporters who listened his later clarification statement was a case of, what-I-said-is-not-what-I-said. The statements at the time were live tweeted at @MaceNewsMacro and the clarification can easily be Googled for anyone who wants to see for themselves.
Running the impeachment effort, of course, is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, prominently in that picture both she and President Trump tweeted Wednesday, as she stood and scolded the president in the meeting she walked out on with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Both sides accused the other of a “meltdown.”
It became just a footnote to an explosive week, but before that meeting the House voted to overwhelmingly admonish Trump’s moves in Syria, a vote that saw 129 Republicans join Democrats in the 354-60 tally. An expression of sentiment, not an enforceable directive, the vote seemed to contribute to the testy atmosphere at the White House.
Thursday night in Dallas the president repeated about Pelosi, “Crazy Nancy,” prompting the crowd to boo.
Trump also repeated Turkey President Recip Tayyip Erdogan is a gentleman. It was akin to the lavish praise that he heaped upon Erdogan following what Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in their Thursday visit to Ankara, called a five-day cease-fire. Turkey officials called it a “pause” to allow the Kurds to vacate the territory Turkey intends to be a buffer zone on the border, one way or another. Erdogan Friday said he still wants to respond to Trump’s letter which he threw in the trash.
Meanwhile Pence has been given another assignment, to deliver a speech on trade Wednesday in a visit to Wisconsin, sending a shudder through the stock markets which remembered how his tough talk on China in the past sent stocks plummeting. This speech may include China yet is more likely to be focused on the push to pass the new NAFTA, a project even Pelosi said this week is moving along.
Four long blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue a study in contrasts, the Fall meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, drawing finance ministers and central bank governors from around the world, with Trump seemingly the top subject in the hallways.
At the IMF’s two tall buildings, dozens of side meetings, seminars, speeches, studies unveiled, an orderly heaven for policy wonks, seeing the world in broad brushstrokes.
Government policy, carefully considered, and the efforts to improve it were the focus, as usual, all the while as the policymakers try to figure out the policies down the street at the White House and anticipate what’s next.
More than a few may also be wondering if they should make reservations for the June G-7 Summit at Trump’s Doral Miami resort, another Mulvaney disclosure, or wait and see.
A prevalent theme at the IMF, whether from the German finance minister or the head of Australia’s central bank, has been that the global economy is about to recover from its sagging fortunes, that there are antidotes to negative interest rates and the mountainous tide of savings and aversion to investment.
The weeks immediately ahead will reveal whether the fragile optimism holds about all those walls of worry, the U.S.-China trade truce – more tariffs are due in mid-December, the Brexit parliamentary decision Saturday, the state of U.S.-EU relations now that new tariffs went into effect Thursday. So much depends on the man in the Oval Office and how he navigates despite the effort to remove him from office.
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Reach this reporter at: denny@macenews.com
(Photo credit: (Joyce N. Boghosian, The White House)