Donald Trump has one go-to tactic in what passes for his political toolbox: personally create a crisis, rail loudly about it and make threats, and then "solve" the crisis and claim it was the biggest victory of all time. He's used this tactic over and over again, and he really doesn't care who pays the price for his political flim-flam job -- Dreamers, farmers, manufacturers, consumers, or anyone else. But an interesting thing just happened with his most recent deployment of flim-flammery: absolutely nobody bought it this time around. The media didn't fall for it and the public certainly didn't fall for it. Maybe this boy has cried "Wolf!" once too many? Because it certainly feels like something has changed.

Perhaps it was the constricted time scale which helped usher in this newfound skepticism. The entire "crisis" only took place over roughly one week's time, from beginning to end. Usually Trump counts on people forgetting that he personally caused the crisis in the first place, which (if successful, especially in the media) allows him to focus everyone's attention on his "solution" to the crisis (which usually consists of some form of going back to the status quo ante). But when the whole charade happens within a single week, it's downright impossible not to remember what (and who) started it.

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The field has been set, the cattle calls have begun, and the first debate round is looming on the horizon. In other words, the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination contest has moved into a new phase. If the polls can be believed, the people of Iowa are once again taking their "first in the nation" status seriously, and have begun examining the candidates much more closely than voters in other states. That should come as no surprise, since almost all the candidates are now investing heavily in doing well out in corn country. At least, the ones who have raised enough money to invest heavily in any state, that is.

Campaign News

The big news over the weekend was a new Des Moines Register poll, which showed only seven of the 24 candidates getting any sort of traction at all with Democratic voters. Joe Biden led the field with 24 percent, while three others were neck-and-neck in the battle for second place: Bernie Sanders (16 percent), Elizabeth Warren (15), and Pete Buttigieg (14). The other three who moved the needle at all were: Kamala Harris (7), Beto O'Rourke (2), and Amy Klobuchar (2). The other 17 candidates all registered at a single percentage point or worse.

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Something's wrong from the moon, my friend
Something's wrong from the moon
As I look down at you, my friend
Something's wrong from the moon

-- Crack The Sky, "Nuclear Apathy"

Well, we certainly never thought we'd use that particular lyric as a headline, but it's just too tempting to pass up this week. Because President Donald Trump just tweeted the following bit of wisdom:

For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon -- We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!

Um, OK. Let's just examine what absolute lunacy this tweet is. Firstly, Trump himself has been the one pushing NASA to get back to the moon as soon as possible. Even stranger, the Moon is not actually "part" of Mars. It just isn't. It's a long way from Mars.

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In may ways, this is going to be an irreverent article. Just to warn everyone up front. I didn't really have time to write a new article today (for reasons unrelated to politics), so I went searching for a column to re-run. I went back and read every column I had posted around June 6 throughout the years, and was kind of embarrassed that I'd never written explicitly about D-Day before. The closest was when I wrote an introduction to a column when President Barack Obama attended the 70th D-Day memorial ceremony, but this was really a column originally written for Memorial Day. I found other interesting columns (as I always do when traipsing through the site archives), including the interview I did in 2008 with then-Senate candidate Al Franken. And I found one article that just made me laugh, so I thought I'd run it again today for anyone else out there who might be in need of a smile.

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Even Richard Nixon never dreamed that his "madman theory" tactic would become the entire playbook for a United States president on any foreign policy issue, but that's where we now find ourselves, apparently. Nobody -- including even his own closest aides -- has any idea what Donald Trump is about to do next. Will he slap a five percent tariff on Mexico next Monday, or is it all just a big bluff to increase his leverage in trade talks? Nobody knows. White House aides say one thing, and the president then contradicts them within hours. Then they say something different, and Trump contradicts that, too. Sometimes Trump seems incredibly determined to levy a new tax on imported Mexican goods no matter what the outcome, and sometimes he seems like it's all just a giant ruse. Welcome to "madman trade theory," in other words.

Trump professes a love for tariffs, and he's certainly used them with abandon before. But then again, he has also threatened many other tariffs which have never actually materialized. With respect to Mexico, a few months back Trump was threatening to "shut down the border" completely, but then he quickly backed off this threat after seeing an enormous political backlash against the idea. Tellingly, the issue under contention then was the same one he's using now to threaten a new tariff -- Mexico's handling of immigrants heading for the U.S. border. But any analysis of past performance is essentially meaningless when it comes to Trump, since he makes all his decisions on the fly and off the cuff, without even a rudimentary understanding of the possible ripple effects such knee-jerk trade policy has on the economy. So it's really anyone's guess how this spat will play out.

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The 2020 Democratic primary calendar has experience a shift of Biblical proportions since this time around "the last shall be first," at least out here in California. I know that's not entirely accurate, but it's close enough. In 2016, California was one of the last states to hold its primaries, on June 7. This time around, the guaranteed early-voting states (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada) will technically be first, but California will now be among those states in the "first among all the others" category, voting on Super Tuesday in early March. Since California is somewhat of an 800-pound gorilla when it comes to the sheer number of delegates, this is going to shake up the campaign strategies of all the Democrats running. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is open to interpretation, though.

California has flirted with being an early-voting state before, with mixed results. The Sacramento politicians absolutely hate the early schedule, because for them a June primary means a shorter general election season, meaning less money has to be raised for the campaign chest. But whether they like it or not, this time around we will hold our primary early. Way early. First in line, in fact.

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Although it is still pretty early in the process, the first phase of the 2020 Democratic nominating contest is going to hinge on one simple question: Can anybody beat Joe Biden? At this point, the former vice president has such a commanding lead that the race could wind up resembling the last hotly contested primary race -- that of the Republicans in 2016. Back then, even though most of the media refused to acknowledge it until far too late, there was one clear frontrunner all along who was challenged -- unsuccessfully -- numerous times by the underdogs. Donald Trump, of course, won that race because his support never really faltered all that much and the rest of the field was busy bickering with each other. Again, it's far too early to predict such an outcome for the 2020 Democrats, but at this point it seems pretty probable that much of the beginning of the race is going to see a lot of jockeying among the underdogs, all arguing that they'd be better than Biden in the general election.

This may wind up being wildly premature, of course. Such is the nature of political prognostication. Early favorites often stumble badly once the race really heats up. Remember Jeb Bush? Or Hillary Clinton in 2008? Early dominance of the polls is no guarantee of ultimate success, obviously. But so far, Biden has been doing an admirable job of keeping his head above the fray.

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Robert Mueller broke his two-year silence this week, as he strode boldly to the podium and loudly announced: "ITMFA!" and then withdrew. 'This caused the term to spike in Google searches to a level never seen before on any subject, ever.

Well, no. That's not what happened. Many now think that's what should have happened, but unfortunately it did not.

Instead, Mueller all but begged Congress not to force him to testify, and warned that if he had to testify, he would strive to merely read excerpts from his written report and not answer any tangential questions at all (heavily implying that this would be a waste of time, and therefore why bother?). He reiterated in the strongest possible terms that Justice Department guidelines prevented him not only from indicting a sitting president, but also from accusing a sitting president of any crime in any way whatsoever (even indirectly) -- which includes making any sort of recommendation to Congress on the question of whether Donald Trump should be impeached. Doing so would be a de facto accusation of a crime, which the guidelines say Mueller should not do (under Mueller's interpretations of them).

This annoyed Trump no end, since Mueller also explicitly pointed out once again that if he had found no evidence of any crimes Trump committed, then his report would have clearly stated this in order to exonerate Trump -- but that he could not reach this conclusion at all. Trump even backed off from his "no collusion, no obstruction" claims as a result, and the best tweet he could come up with responding to Mueller was: "Nothing changes from the Mueller Report. There was insufficient evidence and therefore, in our Country, a person is innocent. The case is closed! Thank you." In other words, you couldn't prove it, so therefore it must not have happened. That's a significant change from the language Trump was using before Mueller spoke, to put it mildly.

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I generally try to avoid writing more than one article per week on any given subject, and although official Democratic debate rules is a wonky thing to write about to begin with, it is going to be critical to how the 2020 presidential nominating contest plays out. So I thought it was worth a second look, because the debate surrounding the Democratic debates just got a little more intense.

In the first article I wrote this week, I pointed out that after the first two debates, the rules would have to be tightened in some fashion to limit the sheer number of candidates allowed to participate. I predicted this would be "painful for many," and it's looking like that's already becoming true. Just after posting my previous article, the Democratic National Committee announced the rules for inclusion in the third debate, to be held in September (the D.N.C. has planned at least one debate every month this year, although August will be skipped for some reason).

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Robert Mueller spoke in public today. This was a newsworthy event because it is the first time he has done so since the start of his tenure as the special counsel investigating the 2016 election, Russian interference, and Donald Trump's obstruction of justice. If Mueller has his way about it, it will also be the last public statement he makes on any of these subjects. However, Mueller also announced his office was closing and he was ending his status as a Justice Department employee, meaning that as a private citizen there will now be nothing stopping him from testifying before any congressional committees which want to speak with him. Mueller all but begged not to be called by any of these committees, stating as plainly as he could that his written report should be considered as his whole testimony, and that he won't be going beyond its bounds should he appear in person.

This, of course, punts all the decision-making to Nancy Pelosi. Mueller is a careful writer and speaker, with each sentence parsed within an inch of its life. He did not openly call for impeachment proceedings to begin -- he didn't even use what President Trump now calls "the I-word" -- but he also made it pretty plain that the decision as to what happens next is entirely up to Congress, and that impeachment was not out of the question at all.

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