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Stevenson’s army, October 4

Extra weekend reading: the Volker testimony to the House committees;  the texts released by the House committee chairs.
The texts show a bureaucratic political game, as described in the first part of this Post column: twice Amb. Sondland, a political appointee who donated $1 million to the Trump inaugural committee, tries to cut off Amb. Taylor, the career official now acting ambassador [charge] in Kyiv, when Taylor raises the link between military aid and investigating the Bidens. But after Taylor raises the point a second time, Sondland very formally gets into the record “there is no quid pro quo.”  You can read; you decide.
CJR has a good explanation of how hard this issue is for the news media.
I especially liked this section: The press, on the whole, does not consistently use language commensurate with overt wrongdoing. (The Times’s print headline this morning, calling Trump’s admission a “brash public move,” is a case in point; so was Jonathan Karl’s claim, on ABC, that “this is becoming less a question of what the president did than a debate over what is right and what is wrong.”) As journalists, we’ve been taught to believe that the biggest scandals are those that require intense, meticulous digging; as human beings, we’ve been taught to believe that no right-minded person would own up to wrongdoing in such a haphazard way. And so, as ever with Trump, we seek rationality in the irrational. The effect, as the Washington Post’s Ashley Parker wrote recently, is that “Trump’s penchant for reading the stage directions almost seems to inoculate him from the kind of political damage that would devastate other politicians….
When it comes to Trump and his media supporters, shamelessness and misinformation are two sides of the same coin. The more shameless Trump is, the less we can see the boundaries between right and wrong, between believable and unbelievable. If you’ll say anything, nothing is implausible, which, in turn, makes a wild conspiracy sound just as plausible as the truth. Someday, the house of cards might collapse. But not today.
Yesterday I noted the pro-oil decision that angered farmers. Today the administration made a pro-farmer announcement on ethanol.

So far only CNN seems to have the story that Trump told Xi in June that he would go easy on Hong Kong while the trade talks continued.
Earlier this week, I noted that NYT said the administration actually did a cost estimate on Trump’s suggestion of a border moat filled with snakes and alligators. We haven’t seen that estimate. Maybe it’s on the supersecret WH server. But Peter Singer, tongue in cheek, has his own estimate, roughly $2.5 billion in set-up costs, plus annual operating costs of $1.8 billion.

My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. If you want to get it directly, To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).