Frank Rich On How This Might End

In the current New York:

“Just Wait.  Watergate didn’t become Watergate overnight, either.”

The differences of course are many.  For starters, Nixon actually wanted the job, won it by the largest margin in history, and was both qualified and prepared to fill it — a brilliant student of history who’d been, among other things, Vice President for eight years.  His “flaws” were egregious . . . but pale beside Trump’s.

(A friend who used to golf with Trump calls him, “About the worst person I can imagine to be POTUS. A dangerous man with no sense of truth, proportion or ethics. Horrible. Just awful.  Full stop.”  This from a Romney supporter who knocks Clinton and Obama at every opportunity and would save millions in taxes if Trump succeeds at shifting health care to wealth care.)

But how about something hopeful for a change?

My pal Josh Gottheimer, former wunderkind Bill Clinton speechwriter and now a first-term Congressman from New Jersey, has joined with 20 D’s and 20 R’s to form the Congressional Problem Solvers Caucus.  In an ideal world, this caucus would have 435 members and change it’s name to . . . “Congress.”  But it’s a start.  Read all about it.

Okay,  Back to the nightmare.

How ridiculous is this 90-day Muslim ban?  It was first imposed without warning, lest the bad guys take advantage of even a few days’ notice to hop Air Iraq and start blowing us up.  Now, they’ve had five months to get in — with no apparent harm — and are we to believe, given the urgency with which Trump views the problem, his Administration has waited all this time before starting its 90-day review?

Surely someday, somewhere, a refugee who’s navigated the extreme vetting process Obama already had in place will do something awful.  But after 160 days’ review, not just 90, what have they concluded?  Is the extreme vetting that’s already in place enough to protect us from refugees, as this piece argues? (“In the 14 years since September 11, 2001, the United States has resettled 784,000 refugees from around the world, according to data from the Migration Policy Institute, a D.C. think tank. And within that population, three have been arrested for activities related to terrorism. None was close to executing an attack inside the U.S.  Two of the three were caught trying to leave the country to join terrorist groups overseas.”)