Gonna start with this excerpt from a decade-old Huffington Post article to lay the groundwork here:
A Russian tsar was expected to have two qualities, described in Russian as batiushka and grozny. Batiushka means literally “little father.” The term, one of affection, was often applied to the reigning tsar as a term of endearment. The tsar was supposed to be like a little father to his people, expressing interest in their welfare and concern about their problems.
A common Russian expression among the downtrodden peasantry was the statement that “if only the little father knew”. Presumably, any problem brought to the Tsar’s attention would quickly be set to right.
This brings us, naturally, to Donald Trump.
The administration is marked at the moment by several characteristics: Its assertion of authoritarian powers. Its unpopularity, in part, because of that authoritarianism. And its occasional unwillingness to just own up that all the bad things that are happening are things that Donald Trump wants to be happening.
Let’s start with Jay Powell.
The Fed chair is under investigation by the Department of Justice, and I could tell you what his supposed crime is, but the truth is that Jay Powell hasn’t brought interest rates down as fast as Trump wants them brought down and so the president is literally making a federal case of this. The problem is that the financial markets — and a whole lot of Republicans — aren’t really fans of destroying the Fed’s independence.
Which is why we get stories like these.
White House officials are heaping blame on DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro over her office’s criminal investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell, faulting her for blindsiding them with an inquiry that has forced the administration into a dayslong damage control campaign, four people familiar with the matter told CNN.
Trump is hardly shy about trying to engineer criminal investigations of his political foes. But even against that backdrop, the investigation into Powell threw into disarray the White House’s plan to wait out the final months of his term in relative peace.
Pirro went rogue! If only the little father knew!
Or let’s take the chaos in Minnesota. Apparently that’s not the president’s fault, either!
Now, as the chaotic scenes from Minnesota play out around the clock on TV and social media, Axios has learned that some Trump advisers quietly are talking about “recalibrating” the White House’s approach — though it’s unclear what changes Trump would embrace, if any.
“I wouldn’t say he’s concerned about the policy,” a top Trump adviser told Axios. “He wants deportations. He wants mass deportations. What he doesn’t want is what people are seeing. He doesn’t like the way it looks. It looks bad, so he’s expressed some discomfort at that.”
“... [T]here’s the right way to do this. And this doesn’t look like the right way to a lot of people.”
It’s not the policy that’s bad, it’s the optics. Trump doesn’t want it to look this way. If only the little father could do something about it!
You get the point. You shouldn’t believe what Trump’s people are saying.
There’s no reason to think Pirro is going rogue. For one thing, Trump has hinted at a criminal probe of Powell for months. And more to the point, as CNN points out, he’s really mad at the Justice Department for not prosecuting his enemies more vigorously.
Trump’s criticism that the Department of Justice isn’t prosecuting his political foes quick enough has ramped up in recent weeks, with Trump complaining that both the US attorneys in specific jurisdictions and Bondi aren’t following through on some of the outstanding investigations into perceived political enemies, including California Senator Adam Schiff, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Trump was also frustrated that prosecutors couldn’t re-charge former FBI Director James Comey, after a judge threw out the original case, another source said.
Maybe Trump didn’t directly tell Pirro to put Powell under pressure. But it seems evident she knew which way the wind was blowing.
Similarly, Trump’s desire to launch militarized crackdowns on blue cities has been evident since his first term. And he was very clear about it in the runup to the 2024 election.
Here’s Trump’s 2024 interview with Time Magazine on how he would enable mass deportations:
Sir, the Posse Comitatus Act says that you can’t deploy the U.S. military against civilians. Would you override that?
Trump: Well, these aren’t civilians. These are people that aren’t legally in our country. This is an invasion of our country. An invasion like probably no country has ever seen before. They’re coming in by the millions. I believe we have 15 million now. And I think you’ll have 20 million by the time this ends. And that’s bigger than almost every state.
So you can see yourself using the military to address this?
Trump: I can see myself using the National Guard and, if necessary, I’d have to go a step further. We have to do whatever we have to do to stop the problem we have. Again, we have a major force that’s forming in our country, when you see that over the last three weeks, 29,000 people came in from China, and they’re all fighting age, and they’re mostly males. Yeah, you have to do what you have to do to stop crime and to stop what’s taking place at the border.
It’s reasonable to conclude, then, that the crackdown in Minneapolis doesn’t look pretty because A) it was never meant to look pretty and B) it never could be pretty. A surge of thousands of badly trained, poorly vetted ICE agents was only ever going to have one result — rough men doing rough things that people hate — and we can see with our own eyes what it is.
Here’s the biggest reason, though, that you can tell that things are going pretty much how Donald Trump wants them to go: They’re still going.
If Pirro was going rogue, Trump could have reined her in by now. He hasn’t.
If he wanted the ICE crackdown to proceed less violently, he could make that order as well. He hasn’t.
The little father knows perfectly well what’s going on. Nothing’s changing. Donald Trump is responsible for this mess. Don’t forget it.
What I’m reading
“Joan Crawford: A Woman’s Face” by Scott Eyman: Crawford has become a joke since her death thanks to the lurid portrayal as a child-abusing shrew in “Mommie Dearest.” Eyman doesn’t avoid that — she is very much the tough broad you might have suspected from some of her onscreen roles — but he does paint a broader picture of the actress' hardscrabble beginnings, the studio system that made her a star, and a look behind the scenes of both her classic movies — “Grand Hotel,” “Mildred Pierce” — as well as some of the turkeys. You don’t come away thinking she was a good person, really, but maybe a more understandable one. What happens when a broken person gets everything they thought they wanted?
