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Well, the so-called peace summit with North Korea has come and gone. And as anyone anyone with a scintilla of intellect could’ve predicted, Trump made a fool of himself.

Basically, dictator Kim Jong Un ran rings around the wannabe dictator. He suckered Trump into giving him legitimacy on the world stage, sidestepped any substantive discussion of Kim’s human rights abuses and agreed to suspend or end U.S. military exercises with allied South Korea. In return, the supreme deal-maker got squat: No specific North Korean commitments to surrender any nuclear weapons, no timetable, no verification process.

Trump lauded Kim as “very talented.” That may or may not be true, but compared to the sap-in-chief, Kim is indeed a Mensa genius.

The press asked Trump whether he trusts Kim. Trump said yes. Then he said something truly revealing: “I may be wrong, I mean I may stand before you in six months and say, ‘Hey I was wrong.’ I don’t know that I’ll ever admit that, but I’ll find some kind of an excuse.”

Indeed he will. He’ll likely blame Obama or Hillary or the “deep state.” But it was refreshing to hear him acknowledge, in rare moment of candor, his instinctive refusal to admit error or take responsibility for anything.

This remark was equally revealing: “They have great beaches (in North Korea). You see that whenever they’re exploding their cannons into the ocean. I said, ‘Boy, look at that view. Wouldn’t that make a great condo?'” Alec Baldwin didn’t say that. The Onion didn’t say that. Trump himself said that – and it explains a lot. He views his sham presidency as a massive business opportunity. If he makes nice to Kim, with or without denuclearization, maybe Kim will let him build a few hotels and beach resorts. Something terrific, located far from the gulags.

Which brings us to Trump’s supreme remark. In praise of Kim, he said this: “His country does love him. His people, you see the fervor. They have a great fervor.”

Remember when Republicans used to condemn anti-democratic regimes that abused human rights? Remember when they assailed Obama for talking to Cuba – which they denounced as “a concession to tyranny?” That was so four years ago. Now they sit in silence, abetting Trump’s fetishistic love of dictators, gargling his snake oil.

Trump wants what Kim has – public spectacles of “love” and “fervor.” If only Trump didn’t have to deal with pesky checks and balances, constitutional restraints, and freedom of the press, he could fully unleash his id and do what Kim routinely does to ensure that “love” and “fervor.” Here’s the gist of what Kim does, according to a massive 2014 report by the United Nations:

“Inmates are imprisoned, usually for life, in camps without ever having been brought before a judge … They have never been charged, convicted or sentenced… (Many) are incarcerated based solely on the principle of guilt by family association. Some are even born prisoners… The living conditions in the political prison camps are calculated to bring about mass deaths. Forced to carry out grueling labour, inmates are provided food rations that are so insufficient that many inmates starve to death…

“These crimes against humanity entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution… the forcible transfer (and) the enforced disappearance of persons and … knowingly causing prolonged starvation. (These crimes) resemble the horrors of camps that totalitarian states established during the twentieth century.”

Trump was too besotted with the “fervor” for Kim to care a whit about how that “fervor” is manufactured. He demanded no concessions from Kim, on human rights or demilitarization, and he got none. He betrayed our democratic values, got played for a sucker, and got nothing substantive in return. (He doesn’t need a verification process, because, in his words, “I have one of the great memories of all time.”)

Remember Trump’s rhetoric during the 2016 campaign, when he claimed that countries around the world were laughing at us? Well, mission accomplished. Rest assured that Trump’s sponsor in Russia, and his dictatorial counterparts the world over, are laughing at us now.

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Copyright 2018 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a “Writer in Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at [email protected].

Election day is nearly six months away, and conventional wisdom decrees that Democrats will surf a blue wave and seize the House of Representatives. But I’m not so sure.

On paper, there are surely good reasons to believe the conventional wisdom. History shows us that the “out” party typically performs well in midterm elections, especially when the ruling party’s president is unpopular. Democrats need to flip only 24 House seats, and it just so happens that 23 seats held by the GOP are in districts where Hillary Clinton won the presidential voting in 2016.

It would appear that Republicans have virtually nothing to offer their voters. They’d planned to trumpet their tax cut law, but public sentiment is tepid at best – which is no surprise, because the tax cuts are a plutocratic gift to the upper brackets. Republicans had also hoped to boast about killing Obamacare, but thanks to their failed efforts, Obamacare has become more popular. Indeed, Democrats voters appear to be more enthusiastic about 2018 than their red counterparts; last Tuesday, in Pennsylvania’s House primaries, they outnumbered Republican voters statewide by roughly 100,000.

And yet.

Given the shocking results of Nov. 8, 2016, one of the darkest days in American history, we should all be wary of conventional wisdom. Permit me to offer some counter-programming. Republicans might actually keep the House (along with the Senate, an easier task), and sustain our downward spiral as a nation, for these reasons:

The GOP’s midterm base is reliable. As we saw in the 2010 and 2014 midterms, Republicans and ideological conservatives (which are older and whiter than the general electorate) tend to swamp the congressional elections. Trump remains broadly popular with the base, and the base hates the Democratic “enemy” as much as ever – especially now, with Robert Mueller on the march. Trump’s relentless attacks on the Russia probe are obviously fueled by his terror of being held accountable for the first time in his life, but we should not underestimate his feral political cunning. Assailing the probe gins up base enthusiasm for the midterms. And Sheldon Adelson, the right-wing billionaire who’s thrilled about Trump’s alliance with hawkish Israel, has agreed to donate $30 million to abet Trump’s vile 2018 message.

The Democrats’ midterm base is not reliable. The party’s coalition of liberals, minorities, and young people typically stay home on congressional election day. It happened in 2010, and Democratic fears about 2014 came true. We keep hearing that things will be different this time – that young people in particular are registering to vote in droves, spurred by the GOP’s enslavement to the NRA – but I’ll believe it when I see it.

The economy is in decent shape. Thanks to the long Obama recovery from the Bush recession, Trump can boast about job numbers. Granted, his fans in the old factory towns aren’t doing any better than they did before, but it’s fair game for the party in power to reap the political benefits of bullish economic stats. As the national Quinnipiac poll reported last month, “American voters approve 51 – 43 percent of the way Trump is handling the economy, his highest score on this issue since he was inaugurated.”

Democrats’ leftward tilt is sowing disunity in the ranks. I honestly don’t know how this trend will play out. Perhaps the triumph of progressive candidates in House Democratic primaries – like Kara Eastman, a Bernie Sanders fave who defeated a moderate last week in Nebraska; and Susan Wild, who defeated a moderate last week in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley – will stoke grassroots liberal turnout in November. But it’s also possible that some of these candidates could be a bad fit for winnable districts, particularly in Nebraska, Texas, and Colorado. The bottom line is that pragmatic Democrats are battling ideological Democrats for the direction of the party, and the timing is not ideal.

Maybe I’ll be proved wrong. I hope so. But it pays to be skeptical, because this year the most dire threat to our democratic values (aside from Trump) is complacency. Doubling down on vigilance and voter mobilization is the surest way to trump the factors I’ve listed, and the only way to win back power and restore checks and balances.

As the historian Garry Wills warned last September, “The truth is gradually dawning that there is no parallel to this thing we have lodged in our sacred Oval Office… He degrades us. The nation needs purification. May it come before it is too late.”

If it doesn’t come in November, it may well be too late.

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Copyright 2018 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a “Writer in Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at [email protected].

The U.S. Constitution has been reduced to a scrap of parchment, rendered irrelevant by the profiteer-in-chief.

President Trump relentlessly railed against China on the campaign trail (“It’s the greatest theft in the history of the world, what they’ve done to the United States, they’ve taken our jobs!”), but days ago he suddenly tweeted his desire to save ZTE, China’s telecommunications giant, to help it “get back into business fast. Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!”

Wait, did Trump’s fans care about Chinese jobs? Is that why they voted for him? Funny, I must’ve missed that.

When Trump shared his sudden love for ZTE and Chinese jobs, he somehow omitted an important development that occurred 72 hours prior to the tweet: China agreed to pump $500 million into an Indonesian theme park that will feature Trump-branded properties, a boon to the Trump Organization. In other words, Trump has gone belly up on China because China has pledged to line his pockets.

Until this week, ZTE was deemed to be a threat to our national security. It has violated U.S. sanctions by selling its smartphones to Iran and North Korea. And the Pentagon has banned the use of ZTE phones on its military bases, fearing that the phones could be used to track the location of our soldiers. The Trump regime recently announced that American firms would stop selling components to ZTE, and as a result, ZTE was on the verge of shutting down. But now, all of a sudden, Trump wants to help it “get back into business fast.”

It’s amazing how speedily Trump can flip on national security policy when his wallet is being fattened. As one press report points out, “marketing materials … refer to the theme park and Trump properties as flagship elements of the development, and corporate filings and internal documents show the Trump Organization and the president’s sons have been directly involved in various stages of its planning.”

This is what happens when an ostensibly democratic nation devolves into a craven kleptocracy. For what it’s worth, Section 1, Article 9 of the Constitution specifically bars all federal officials (no exceptions) from profiteering while in office. From the emoluments provision:

“… no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatsoever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

In the wake of Trump’s election, there was a brief flurry of concern about his blatant and unprecedented conflicts of interest. White House ethics lawyers, from past Democratic and Republican administrations, warned Trump in a letter that presidential profiteering is unAmerican: “You were elected to the presidency with a promise to eliminate improper business influence in Washington. There is no way to square your campaign commitments to the American people, and your even higher, ethical duties as their president, with the rampant, inescapable conflicts that will engulf your presidency if you maintain connections with the Trump Organization.”

And Trevor Potter, a former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission, presciently sounded the alarm: “Some foreign businesses and foreign leaders will want to cozy up to the Trump family, because that is how they are used to doing business and conducting foreign policy. The children will get a raft of proposals for new hotels and golf courses … This is a colossal mistake. It will produce conflicts of interest of an unprecedented magnitude… We will look like the very sort of kleptocracy we criticize in corrupt dictatorships elsewhere.”

But now we’re so numb to the Trump family’s abuses that few of us bat an eye. Trump is being sued in federal court for violating the Founding Fathers’ emoluments provision, but as we all know, these kinds of cases proceed with the speed of a snail. And when a Trump White House spokesman was asked whether China’s decision to enrich Trump was a breach of the Constitution, the flack basically shrugged it off: “You’re asking about a private organization’s dealings that may have to do with a foreign government. It’s not something I can speak to.”

Actually, the press corps was asking about a president’s dealings. The flack’s attempt to hide behind the “private organization” precisely illustrates the abuse.

Some Senate Republicans were stunned earlier this week about Trump’s ZTE flip flop, and they reportedly vowed to raise the issue during a closed-door Tuesday meeting with the profiteer. You don’t have to be a seer to know what happened next. None of them had the guts to tell Trump that China has found the perfect way to play him for a sap.

And none of the Republican senators, confronted with Trump in person, had the guts to say anything that even remotely approximates what Alexander Hamilton warned about in 1788: “In the general course of human nature, a power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.”

I can’t top that one.

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Copyright 2018 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a “Writer in Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at [email protected].

Rudy Giuliani’s first big televised gig as a Trump attorney, a tragicomedy Wednesday night on Fox News, stirred my memories of the old New York Mets. You’ll see where I’m going with this.

On the very first play of the hapless 1963 season, Mets third-baseman Charlie Neal snared a dribbler and promptly chucked the ball in the general vicinity of right field. First play, instant error. What a way to start the season. And so it went with Rudy, whose infamous motor mouth promptly made things worse for his lying client. Heck, he committed multiple errors.

Rudy, who’s long past his prime as the 9/11 mayor, whose political career was capped by a disastrous 2008 presidential bid (he spent $60 million and got one delegate), and who has never functioned as a high-profile defense lawyer, was so hilarious I could barely take notes. Trump hired Rudy because he loves a TV brawler, but it serves Trump ill if his brawler proceeds to implode in the friendliest studio space on earth.

At one point, amidst the string of softball queries from Michael Cohen client Sean Hannity, the Stormy Daniels affair surfaced in conversation. As you may recall, the White House line is that Trump knew nothing about Cohen’s hush money. When Trump was asked last month about whether he knew about the payment, he told the press: “No.” A month earlier, propaganda minister Sarah Huckabee Sanders said: “I’ve had conversations with the president about this … There was no knowledge of any payments from the president and he’s denied all of these allegations.” And Cohen has insisted that he paid the hush money from his own pocket without Trump’s knowledge.

Over to you, Rudy. Trump didn’t know anything about the payment, right?

Rudy: “He did know about the general arrangement … That was money that was paid by his lawyer, and the president reimbursed that over the period of several months … (Cohen) funneled it through a law firm, and then the president repaid it.”

As Homer Simpson would say, “D’oh!”

So, according to Rudy, not only did Trump know about the coverup payment on election eve, Trump ultimately financed the coverup – which potentially worsens his legal exposure, because he failed to disclose that campaign-related expenditure on the required disclosure forms. Thanks for telling us, Rudy!

And if anyone still believes that muzzling Stormy had nothing to do with the campaign, Rudy has set us straight. He surfaced Thursday morning on “Fox & Friends” to declare that, in fact, it was all about the campaign. I kid you not. Here’s what he said: “Imagine if that came out on October 15, 2016, in the middle of the last debate with Hillary Clinton.” Thanks for that too, Rudy!

Rudy is actually under no obligation to say anything about Stormy. He was hired to deal with Robert Mueller and the Russia probe; the Stormy-Cohen case is being handled (or mishandled) by a separate set of Trump lawyers. But Rudy loves to blab. It’s a way to make himself relevant, to show us that he’s in the know.

He did it again – to Trump’s detriment, again – when he brought up the firing of FBI director James Comey. The official White House line, long discredited, is that Trump fired Comey for allegedly mishandling the Hillary email investigation. But Rudy said something very different last night: “He fired Comey because (Comey) would not, among other things, say that (Trump) was not a target of the (Russia) investigation … So he fired him, and he said ‘I’m free of this guy.’ ”

Translation: Comey, in the midst of an ongoing national security investigation, refused to peremptorily clear a potential future target of the investigation – thus prompting the potential target to fire him. Which sounds like a classic obstruction of justice. Thanks again, Rudy!

How bad was Giuliani? So bad that even Trump hack Laura Ingraham clanged the alarm on Fox News, appealing to the White House: “I love Rudy, but they better have an explanation.”

Well, they don’t. A Trump spokesman subsequently told Fox News: “We have nothing to say about it.”

What can they say? Here they are, claiming that Mueller and sore-loser Democrats and the Deep State are conspiring against Trump’s greatness … and they wind up getting screwed on the Hannity show by one of their own lawyers. How can they possibly spin their way out?

I guess this is what happens when you hire “the best people.”

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Copyright 2018 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a “Writer in Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at [email protected].

Need a break from Trump? Come with me to Missouri.

Where else can you find a Republican governor who’s under indictment on a felony charge of invading the privacy of his extramarital mistress?

This is surely the most under-reported scandal of the year, probably because the national press pays insufficient attention to flyover country. But the meteoric rise and spectacular fall of Eric Greitens is seriously story-worthy – not just because the details are so despicably dirty – but because his bunker mentality is so Trumpian. And the stench of the scandal is so bad that even Sarah Huckabee Sanders calls it “very concerning.”

Up until the moment in February when he was arrested and booked at a St. Louis jail, Greitens seemed destined for the fast track to national Republican glory. A full scholarship at Duke (where he majored in ethics), a Rhodes Scholarship, a doctorate from Oxford, a stint abroad as a Navy SEAL (where he won a Bronze Star and Purple Heart), creator of a nonprofit group that helps veterans, author of three books, a handsome hunk with a wife and two kids… wow, this guy had it all.

Plus, he had a hairdresser who doubled as his mistress.

According to a new report commissioned by the Republican-run state legislature, the mistress was a victim of physical and sexual assault. She spoke to the investigators, and was deemed credible. In 2016, Greitens invited her to his home while his wife was away. She says that Greitens ripped her shirt open, pulled down her pants, tied her to a piece of exercise equipment, tried to spit water into her mouth, blindfolded her, snapped a photo of her on his phone without her permission, and told her that if she ever mentioned his name to anyone, he would ruin her by ensuring that the photo went viral.

Or, in his alleged words, “I’m going to take these pictures, and I’m going to out them everywhere I can. They are going to be everywhere, and then everyone will know what a little whore you are.” She says he then coerced her into performing oral sex because she feared for her “physical self.”

The legislative report, released last week, jibed with evidence that was presented earlier to a grand jury – which indicted Greitens for committing a felony, “invasion of privacy in the first degree.” The charge is punishable by up to four years in the slammer. He goes on trial May 14 – not the ideal situation for a sitting governor.

There’s a lot more seamy stuff, but let’s skip to the political ramifications. This is where the fun begins.

In a new Missouri poll, 58 percent of Republican voters want the governor to keep his job. (He even got a standing ovation at a GOP fundraiser last weekend. This, from the so-called party of high moral character.) Thus emboldened, Greitens is refusing to resign. He says his liaison with the hairdresser was merely “a personal mistake,” and that the indictment is a “disappointing and misguided political decision,” a “fake charge” based on “lies.”

A smattering of Republican lawmakers have demanded Greitens’ resignation. The sole GOP leader to do so is Josh Hawley, the state attorney general. Hawley just so happens to be the top Republican contender for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Claire McCaskill, a top target.

But Hawley clearly fears that beating McCaskill will be tough if he’s weighed down with Greitens’ baggage. Which is why the Republican attorney general is at war with the Republican governor, and vice versa.

Clearly, the GOP has a problem. There’s some talk of trying to impeach Greitens. One Missouri Republican calls him “a classic sociopath” and the big question is whether or how the Trump regime weighs in. Trump would love to see Hawley knock off McCaskill, without the burden of Greiten’s baggage, but how can Trump credibly demand that Greitens quit? How can a misogynist credibly accused of sexually harassing 19 women possibly pass judgement on an indicted harasser who styles himself as Trump’s Mini-Me?

By the way, Missouri’s Republican headquarters is on record about the indictment. It says the whole thing was orchestrated by… take a wild guess… George Soros. As always, all roads lead back to the party’s favorite bogeyman.

I happen to believe that the blame should be placed on Greitens, but, then again, I’m old enough to remember when the GOP touted itself as the party of personal responsibility.

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Copyright 2018 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a “Writer in Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at [email protected].