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When even Shameless Sarah Sanders can’t spin you, you’ve got trouble. Yet here was the Smokey-Eyed One trying to explain Thursday how she had previously managed to tell reporters that President Donald Trump, the White House spokeswoman’s boss, had not paid $130,000 to porn actress Stormy Daniels, only to see Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani go on TV Wednesday night to admit that Trump had.
“I gave you the best information that I had,” Sanders told reporters. And since her information came from the president, well, do the math.
That, children, is the sound of a woman (figuratively) holding a laser measurement device to assess the distance from the deck of the Good Ship Trump-i-pop to the water below.
“This 180 degree turn by @POTUS on the Stormy Daniels hush money demonstrates again the hazards of acting as his [White House] spokespeople,” chortled David Axelrod, President Barack Obama’s senior adviser, over Twitter. “It’s a great job. All you have sacrifice is your integrity and credibility.”
All this Trumpiness is blowing the jobs report off the front pages — as it should. The Labor Department reported Friday that the economy added 164,000 jobs in April, bringing the unemployment rate to 3.9%, the lowest since December 2000. Average hourly compensation has risen 2.6% over the last year.
The striking thing about the economics of all this is that job and wage growth are about the same as they have been for several years, or a little less. On the job side, Barack Obama’s economy added more jobs in 2014 and 2015 than Trump’s economy is now, and higher inflation, especially in energy, means that real wage gains are slightly less rapid now.
That’s why markets haven’t responded much on Friday. As I wrote this, the S&P 500 and the Dow jones Industrial Average both were up by less than one-fifth of 1%, a move that could evaporate by lunchtime. (Update: In fact, it went the other way.The market was up 1% by noon, an equally random occurrence).
Nothing about the jobs report changes the picture much, and we’re used to that now. The economy has recovered from the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, slowly and steadily, with some help from politicians but not much. Now it’s chugging along near full employment, without much sign of impact from Trump’s corporate tax cut, mopping up pockets of excess labor capacity. The president’s enthusiasts may point to manufacturing hiring, and it’s doing well, but not breaking any records, as this chart shows.
With that out of the way, let’s turn to what is driving markets — real-time assessment of the level of Washington crazy. Which is getting high enough to make the leap from boat to water seem more survivable than unquestioned loyalty to Trump.
Economic news gets overshadowed by news about the relationship between the president and his tormentor du jour — whether it’s independent counsel Robert Mueller, who’s investigating Trump’s conduct during and after the 2016 campaign, or Daniels.
The big dispute now is over whether the president can be subpoenaed by Mueller, or even indicted in the not-unlikely case that Mueller ultimately finds that the president and his senior team committed serious crimes for which a Republican House of Representatives declines to impeach him.
The conventional wisdom on the indictment question is that the president can’t be touched — but that is almost certainly wrong.
The indictment part has never been litigated before (presidents can and have been subpoenaed, so that argument isn’t serious), so the honest answer is that the commentators are kind of making it up, and kind of working from what they can infer from earlier cases that are not quite the same. But as I dusted off my rarely used law degree to look at this question, the rationale for presidential immunity is weak, and is based mostly on a case not much like Trump’s situation.
Back in Richard Nixon’s day, the thing that got him sued wasn’t Watergate — it was a dispute with a Pentagon whistleblower that Nixon fired. The whistleblower sued, and the Supreme Court ruled that Nixon couldn’t be sued. But the rationale is the key:
“The Court held that the President ‘is entitled to absolute immunity from damages liability predicated on his official acts,’” says a summary by Oyez.com. “This sweeping immunity, argued Justice Lewis Powell, was a function of the ‘President’s unique office, rooted in the constitutional tradition of separation of powers and supported by our history.’”
The key words here are: “damages liability” and “predicated on his official acts.” Neither much applies to the Trump case.
The Court didn’t address the more serious issue of what happens when a president is accused of criminal wrongdoing, much of it happening before he took office. Any criminal conspiracy to encourage Russian interference with the 2016 election, for example, clearly fails both of these tests — collusion-related charges would not be a damages action, and anything Trump did before being inaugurated isn’t an official act.
The tougher case — but not that tough — concerns criminal charges like obstruction of justice after Trump took office, especially his attempts to restrain (and then fire) former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey.
There, courts will have to settle whether immune official acts include corrupt ones. But all manner of legal privileges, beginning with attorney-client privilege, have always given way when abused to expedite a crime or cover it up. The president’s authority to run the FBI, for example, doesn’t extend to making the bureau help launder money through, say, some golf courses or hotels. Neither does it let this president tell Comey or other Justice Department officials to ignore the Russia mess.
If the acts are criminal, they are not official, in other words. The question is whether impeachment is the only mechanism for enforcing that law.
Will the Supreme Court decide that a partisan, openly political means of dispute resolution is the only one available to bring a sitting president to justice for actual crimes? When the same president can be sued in civil court for private acts? Really?
That’s not a bet the president’s supporters should make lightly. And it’s one more reason for markets to prepare for a world in which Trump is either gone or (more likely) loses much of his power in a nasty congressional election this fall.