And then there's Devin Nunes. The California congressman kicked off the Trump Era by sneaking onto the White House grounds—after switching Ubers! spy shit!—to receive intel from an administration official geared towards propping up the president's spurious claim he was "spied" on during the campaign. Nunes, then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was theoretically supposed to provide oversight of the administration—not run interference for them. By the time the Ukraine fiasco hit, the House Republicans were in the minority, so Nunes was the ranking member of the committee. Still, it would have been nice for him to mention, while he sat next to Adam Schiff overseeing the hearings, that he had been in contact with a core operator in the scheme. No wonder Nunes spent the entire time reading off batshit conspiracy theories to create clips packaged for Facebook and Fox News.
Anyway, all this led to a hilarious public face plant from Nunes, who always looks like a cow stuck in the headlights anyway.
He didn't recognize the name! Could have been any Lev, any Parnas. His office gets a lot of phone calls! Suddenly he remembers talking to the guy he said he didn't talk to.
Contrast this rambling asshole with what Parnas had to say about him.
If Nunes had any shame, he would resign—but of course, he's only there because he doesn't. I think often about something historian Douglas Brinkley said to me for a piece on Trump's Great American Heist: "It's by nature almost impossible for Trump to build an administration of quality," he said. "It's not about good governance or ethics or even dead-rock patriotism. It's about full-bore allegiance to him, to Trump."
As this era has worn on, the president's allies in his administration and in Congress have steadily declined in quality, as anyone with even a modicum of competence or shame has jumped ship. He lost the Adults in the Room in his Cabinet, not that they were doing much good anyway. Ex-Speaker Paul Ryan, an anti-government extremist with at least a modicum of primal cleverness, has quit and been replaced with the comically incompetent Kevin McCarthy. (The House Republican leader also has a photo with Parnas.) The intelligence has steadily leaked out of the Republican side of government, and all that's left is Devin Nunes. Rudy Giuliani—a man who appears in similar cognitive decline to the president's—is running Stupid Black-Ops in the post-Soviet world. The only intelligent ally Trump has left is the megalomaniacal Mitch McConnell, who is ruthlessly effective in part because of his incredible shamelessness.
Time will tell if the latest Trumpian turncoat will make a lick of difference. History says no. Maybe the sheer stupidity and public shamelessness of all the corruption will anesthetize the American public once again—although support for removing the president from office was at 52 percent before his Ukraine henchman formally roped him into the plot on national TV. Again, maybe Parnas is lying, but it's unlikely federal investigators will give him a sweetheart plea deal for spouting off false information about the president. Maybe, just maybe, Donald Trump has all these sketchballs in his orbit because he is a fucking mobster who operates on the principles of force, leverage, and the steadfast belief that the rules do not apply to him. |
