New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand on Capitol Hill in Washington. Photo / AP
Nicola Lamb, analysis
NZ Herald Foreign Editor
America, the lone superpower, is in strange times.
Despite the decades-old experience of Watergate, it also seems to be in a freefall into the political unknown.
New lows are set and then smashed.
In Donald Trump, the US has a President who relishes, like a juvenile hoon, overturning furniture and forecasts.
Republicans in Congress are still largely content to oil his wheels as they focus on getting tax cuts passed.
The ongoing investigation into alleged Russian meddling into the 2016 election threatens to draw in even more senior figures in Trump's orbit.
Accusations of sexual misconduct against the President, raised before the November election, have flared in the #MeToo glare. Trump today lashed out at Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand - who had called for him to resign - in a loaded tweet seen as sexist by many.
Alabama's special election today could have resulted in a Republican accused of harassing teenage girls when he was in his 30s being sent to the Senate.
As it was, Democrat Doug Jones' shock win was powered by the support of African Americans in particular, women and voters under 45. Women overall preferred Jones by 15 points, including 97 per cent of black women, and voters under 45 went for Jones by 23 points.
It's very likely a female and/or African American will figure on the Democratic presidential ticket in 2020. Democratic turnout and enthusiasm, boosted by disgruntled Republicans, pushed Jones over the line. The voter identification was: Democrat 37 per cent, Republican 43 per cent, and Independent 20 per cent.
Amy Walter of Cook Political Report tweeted: "Jones got 94% of Clinton vote. Moore took just 50% of Trump vote. This over performance by D, under by R has been pretty consistent in 2017 specials."
White college-educated women in Alabama preferred Moore by 11 per cent but that's down when compared with the 55 per cent advantage Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney had in 2012.
Atlantic and CNN analyst Ronald Brownstein noted: "Something is happening in the Trump era. Per exit Jones is winning 46% of college + white women (vs. 22% for Obama in 12) and 36% of col+ wh men (vs 19% Obama). It's still low overall but consistent with big Dem gains w/those voters in NJ & VA Gov races."
A few days ago author Steve Silberman tweeted that Trump's endorsement of Roy Moore in Alabama "is about Trump's ability to hypnotise his base to support even a blatant molester. The farther he moves them from their own moral centre, the more power he has to define their reality. It's barely about politics. It's about his cult, his power, HIM".
Previously politicians nervously tiptoed around any hints of scandal. Trump and Moore wear a lack of shame like armour. But Trump's electoral teflon and feared connection to his "base" have now been badly tarnished by defeats in Virginia, New Jersey and now Alabama.
Polling agencies have shown a consistent 60-65 per cent disapproval, 30-35 per cent approval for Trump generally, with some erosion of his support among Republicans.
And that unpopularity is having practical electoral consequences. Trump won Alabama by 28 points a year ago.
Next year we will get answers to these key questions: Will the Democrats be able to win control of Congress next November? What will happen to special counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation?
To win the Senate, the Democrats have to keep their own seats and pick up Arizona and Nevada.
Like the All Blacks this year - a year away from facing the white wall of England and two years from the World Cup - time is on Trump's side.
Trump, willing to go where others won't, just served a reminder of what a harsh opponent he can be in blasting Gillibrand, a likely 2020 presidential candidate.
He inherited and is keen to take credit for a well-performing economy. The unemployment rate is at 4.1 per cent. He's counting on that continuing and riding it to re-election in 2020. He's counting on that trumping all else.
Here are two takes below on some of these issues.
TRUMP'S TWEET IS JUST THE BEGINNING OF THE #METOO BACKLASH
Paul Waldman, comment
With all the prominent men being accused of various forms of sexual harassment and abuse, we've become used to a certain kind of statement the men make when the news breaks.
Sometimes they deny the accusations, sometimes they apologise if their behaviour stepped over the line, sometimes they take complete responsibility, but nearly all of them are sure to include words asserting their belief that women deserve to be free of harassment in their work and personal lives.
Except one: President Donald Trump.
Yesterday, three of the more than a dozen women who have accused the President of various forms of harassment and abuse renewed their call for an investigation into all the claims against him.
Trump's response, as it has been in the past, is that they're all liars, even those who are saying he did what he himself is on tape bragging about his ability to do with impunity. He does not bother saying that women should be treated with respect. He does not pay lip service to contemporary values about equality. He attacks them.
Today, he added a senator to his list of targets, in a characteristically vulgar way.
First Trump tweeted that the Democrats are promoting "the false accusations and fabricated stories of women who I don't know and/or have never met. FAKE NEWS!" This is a lie. As Washington Post reporter Ashley Parker notes: "The list of women includes a former Apprentice contestant, a former business partner, a woman who has a photo of the two of them together, a contestant in one of his pageants and a People reporter who interviewed him."
Then Trump took direct aim at New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, (D). The proximate cause is that Gillibrand, having called for Al Franken to resign over accusations of sexual impropriety, was soon asked whether the President should resign as well, and yesterday said that he should. So here's what Trump tweeted about her today:
"Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office "begging" for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump. Very disloyal to Bill & Crooked-USED!"
This is the part where I'm supposed to acknowledge that Trump's words had just enough ambiguity to them that he might not be saying what he seems to be saying.
Maybe when he said she "would do anything" for a campaign contribution, he was implying that Gillibrand would promise to support legislation her donors favoured, or would sing Highway to the Danger Zone if they asked.
But let's not kid ourselves. We all know what he was saying. In so many words, the President basically just shouted "Whore!" at a US senator.
Gillibrand is functioning as a surrogate for Trump's accusers here, but the attack would be familiar to many women who have resisted advances from men with power over them. "She wanted me, but I turned her down" is a message men often spread in order to humiliate and denigrate the women who aren't willing to submit to them, knowing that there are few surer ways to harm a woman's career than to paint her as attempting to use her sexuality to get ahead.
There's another closely related message here, too, an important one for Trump: "I could have nailed her." This is a longstanding pattern with him, to make public proclamations about the women he either did or could have had sex with. It's the mark of a desperately insecure man, and it's something he has been doing for decades.
As a real estate developer in New York and a fixture in the gossip pages, Trump would call up journalists pretending to be his own PR agent, going by the name "John Barron" or "John Miller," regaling them with tales of all the beautiful and famous women who supposedly were desperate to date him. When he dumped his second wife, he spread a false rumour that he was dating model Carla Bruni. Bruni says that not only did they not date, she only met him once, at a charity event. "Trump is obviously a lunatic," she said.
As we saw when all the accusations against him rolled in, Trump displays his dominance over women who criticise him by asserting that not only are they to be judged primarily by whether he wants to have sex with them, but also that they don't measure up.
That was a key aspect of his response to the many women who accused him of various forms of sexual harassment: Not only are they liars, but the proof is that they're too ugly for me to abuse.
"Believe me, she would not be my first choice, that I can tell you," he said about a woman who charged that he groped her on an airline flight, the assumption being that it's his right to choose which women he's going to assault. "When you looked at that horrible woman last night, you said, 'I don't think so.'" About another woman who accused him of sexual assault, he said, "Check out her Facebook, you'll understand," to the laughs of the crowd.
That even extended to Hillary Clinton. After he debated her, he told another rally, "When she walked in front of me, believe me I wasn't impressed." In all that went on in the campaign, you may have missed that Trump proclaimed his displeasure with the quality of his opponent's rear end.
One of the most important characteristics of Trump's political persona, and one that was particularly thrilling to many of his supporters, is his steadfast refusal to accept many of the political and social values that politicians of all parties take as a given. It's that refusal that granted so many people with despicable views, particularly white supremacists, the permission they sought to express those views more openly.
And when Trump responds to charges of sexual harassment by claiming that a senator would have traded sex with him for money, he's telling every man who doesn't like all this talk about harassment and abuse: To hell with these women, thinking they can tell us what we can and can't do to them. We'll show them.
A number of feminist writers have warned that there's a backlash to the #MeToo movement on its way. If it comes, there's now little doubt about who'll be leading it.
AMERICA IS HEADING FOR AN UNPRECEDENTED CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS
Max Boot, comment
White House lawyer Ty Cobb has been attempting to keep the first client in check by telling him that Robert Mueller's investigation will soon be over and result in his exoneration. Back in August, Cobb was confident that it would all be over by Thanksgiving. When that didn't happen, Cobb, like a millenarian cultist adjusting the date of doomsday, claimed that it would end by Christmas.
Now Christmas is almost upon us, and no light is visible at the end of the tunnel. Far from it. The investigation, which has already resulted in two indictments and two guilty pleas of Trump advisers, appears to be accelerating and drawing ever closer to the Oval Office.
What will Trump's reaction be when he figures out he's been duped - and that the Mueller probe, far from a "nothing burger," is a carafe of strychnine that poses an existential threat to his presidency? The likely result is that Trump will either pardon everyone involved or try to fire the special counsel, or both. And then the nation will be plunged into a constitutional crisis the likes of which we have not seen since Watergate.
The storm is not yet upon us, but the dark clouds are already visible on the horizon. Ever since the guilty plea from former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn on December 1, Trump and his enablers have been throwing a hissy-fit at the FBI, the "Justice" Department (the sarcastic quote marks are the President's own), and the special counsel's office by seizing on "evidence" that all three are biased against him.
Mueller inadvertently fanned the flames by quietly relieving a senior FBI agent, Peter Strzok, for sending disparaging texts about Trump to an FBI lawyer with whom he was romantically entangled. You would think that this would be evidence of Mueller's determination to avoid any taint of bias, even though FBI agents, like other federal employees, are allowed to express political views without fear of retribution.
But no. Trump has cynically twisted Mueller's action to suggest that the removal of an anti-Trump agent is somehow evidence of … anti-Trump bias. Strzok, a widely respected special agent, has now been elevated by the far-right media machine into an archfiend who unfairly exonerated Hillary Clinton and framed Trump.
Trump & Co. are also in a froth about another Mueller subordinate, lawyer Andrew Weissmann. His crimes? He apparently attended Hillary Clinton's election night party and sent an email to acting Deputy Attorney-General Sally Yates saying he was "proud" of her for refusing to enforce Trump's initial ban on Muslim visitors to the United States - the very ban that was subsequently deemed unconstitutional by numerous courts and totally rewritten by the administration to pass legal muster.
Add these attacks to all the other innuendos and smears emanating from the Trump camp. There is the claim that Mueller is biased because he is friends with fired FBI Director James Comey, who is anti-Trump even though Comey did as much as anyone to elect Trump. That members of Mueller's staff have made campaign donations to Democrats. That the FBI erred in showing interest in the dossier on Kremlin-Trump links compiled by a respected former MI6 officer. That FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe's wife received money from Hillary Clinton (in fact, she received campaign funds from the Democratic Party of Virginia and a political action committee associated with Virginia's Democratic governor when she ran for a state Senate seat in 2015).
Based on such flimsy reasoning, Trump besmirches not just Mueller's team but the whole FBI, tweeting: "After years of Comey, with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more), running the FBI, its reputation is in Tatters - worst in History!" At his Pensacola rally last weekend, held to promote the Senate candidacy of an accused child molester, Trump decried the entire American government for being biased against him:
"This is a rigged system," he said. "This is a sick system from the inside. And you know there's no country like our country but we have a lot of sickness in some of our institutions." It doesn't take much imagination to figure out which "institutions" he is talking about.
Naturally, the most fervent Trumpkins have gone even farther than Trump himself; in fact, they are said to be frustrated by the "restraint" he has shown in his war against Mueller. Listen to what the talking heads at state TV, aka Fox News, are saying.
Sean Hannity calls Mueller "a disgrace to the American justice system" and "the head of the snake". Jeanine Piro, sounding very much like a budding commissar, claims: "There is a cleansing needed in the FBI and the Department of Justice. It needs to be cleansed of individuals who should not just be fired, but who need to be taken out in handcuffs."
Greg Jarrett compares the FBI to the KGB, as if the G-men were running gulags in Alaska: "I think we now know that the Mueller investigation is illegitimate and corrupt," he says. "And Mueller has been using the FBI as a political weapon. And the FBI has become America's secret police. Secret surveillance, wiretapping, intimidation, harassment and threats. It's like the old KGB that comes for you in the dark of the night banging through your door."
And, right after the commercial break, the Fox hosts will excoriate Democrats and NFL players for being "anti-police" and glorify Trump for championing "law enforcement". In fact, to judge by his public pronouncements, Trump is only in favour of enforcing the law against black and brown people. If it's a matter of saving his own skin, he and his partisans will gleefully burn the nation's premier law enforcement agency to the ground.
It doesn't matter to them that Robert Mueller is a decorated combat Marine, professional prosecutor, and - ahem - Republican who has been universally revered for his probity. No less an authority than Newt Gingrich said on May 17: "Robert Mueller is superb choice to be special counsel. His reputation is impeccable for honesty and integrity." But now that Mueller is closing in on Trump, Gingrich scoffs, "How can you seriously say this guy (Mueller) is neutral?" and claims: "At the very top, the Justice Department and the FBI became corrupted."
If you take seriously such accusations, you would have to conclude that only Republicans are allowed to investigate a Republican president - and not just ordinary, apolitical Republicans like Mueller but very partisan Republicans.
Does that mean, therefore, that only Democrats can investigate Democratic presidents? Hardly! After all, most of Trump's defenders were also defenders of Kenneth Starr, an active Republican who was appointed to probe Bill Clinton in 1994 after an earlier independent prosecutor, Republican Robert Fiske, was judged to be insufficiently zealous. So apparently the rule is that Democrats are simply not allowed to be prosecutors. Or only Democratic presidents should be investigated. Or something.
The Trump cheering section cannot fathom the possibility that FBI agents and prosecutors might be able to separate their political views from their actions - that just because Peter Strzok might be critical of Trump or Andrew Weissmann a Clinton supporter, they nonetheless take seriously their oaths to enforce the law without fear or favour.
Trump has made plain that he would love to use the justice system to exact vengeance on political foes such as "Crooked Hillary," and he can't fathom the possibility that anyone else in a position of power might act differently. As with so many of Trump's hyperbolic criticisms, his vilification of the Justice Department, the FBI and the special counsel's office for carrying out a political vendetta represents yet another case of projection.
But given how unfounded and outrageous the attacks are, it is striking and dismaying how few Republicans are rushing to defend Mueller and his team. That is an ominous sign of what will happen if and when Trump tries to fire the special counsel. The GOP has made it clear that it is committed not to the rule of law but to the rule of Trump.
The contemptible conduct of Trump's overzealous supporters is well summarised by one of America's most eminent political pundits, who said: "There is something profoundly demeaning and destructive to have the White House systematically undermine an officer of the Justice Department. And when I watch these paid hacks on television, to be quite honest, I am sickened by how unpatriotically they undermine the Constitution of the United States on behalf of their client."
That was Newt Gingrich speaking in 1998 about attacks on Ken Starr. (Hat tip to Jack Pitney for the quote.) Gingrich's criticisms apply with equal force today - to himself and to the other Trump defenders who are aiding and abetting the president's attempts to obstruct justice.
Six people have now died in a suspected mass methanol poisoning event.