RUTHFULLY YOURS

January 20, 2017, was inauguration day for president Donald Trump and last day on the job for national security advisor Susan Rice. At 12:15 p.m. that day, Rice sent herself an email about a January 5 meeting with POTUS 44, FBI boss James Comey, deputy attorney general Sally Yates, and vice president Joe Biden.

In this meeting, Rice wrote, “The president stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.” From a national security perspective, however, the president “said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.”

Senators Lindsey Graham and Charles Grassley, among others, found the email highly unusual. Former White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler countered that Rice was simply “memorializing an important discussion for the record.” The discussion did not involve the Steele dossier and “any insinuation that Ambassador Rice’s actions in this matter were inappropriate is yet another attempt to distract and deflect from the importance of the ongoing investigations into Russian meddling in America’s democracy.” Others offered a different explanation for Rice’s eleventh-hour message.

“She’s obviously trying to rewrite history,” Judge Andrew Napolitano told Fox News. “She’s trying to make it look as if something happened that didn’t happen.” Those present “learned something between January 5th and January 20th which caused them to want to change the narrative about this meeting.”

At least 17 people were killed as a former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., opened fire on campus today.

Nikolas Cruz, a 19-year-old expelled from the school for disciplinary reasons, fled the scene but was apprehended and arrested a short time later. Misspellings of his first name were circulating earlier among media and social media.

Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel told reporters that the shooting began outside of the school. Twelve of the victims were found in buildings, two were killed outside on school grounds, and one person was shot to death outside of school property on Pine Island Road. Two more shooting victims died at a hospital.

Israel noted that victims among the 17 wounded taken to hospitals are still undergoing surgery. Three people were in critical condition.

Though he didn’t have a breakdown of how many victims were students and how many were teachers, the sheriff said the deceased were a mixture of young people and adults.

Israel said investigators have begun dissecting Cruz’s social media, and “some of the things that have come to light are very, very disturbing.” He said the shooter had multiple magazines and used at least one AR-15.

Some witness accounts said the shooter may have pulled a fire alarm to get people out of rooms; the sheriff wouldn’t comment on the report. But Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), after receiving a federal briefing, told CNN that Cruz had a gas mask and smoke grenades, and did pull the fire alarm.

“We were told last year that he wasn’t allowed on campus with a backpack on him,” math teacher Jim Gard, who said Cruz had been in his class last year, told the Miami Herald. “There were problems with him last year threatening students, and I guess he was asked to leave campus.”

Students who spoke with local media after the shooting expressed little surprise that Cruz was arrested as the suspect. One told WFOR-TV that other students “knew it was going to be him.” Student Matthew Walker told ABC News that “everything he posts [on social media] is about weapons”; he said Cruz’s selection of victims appeared to be random. CONTINUE AT SITE

You hear it all the time from Trump supporters: “I like a lot of what he’s done, especially the judges and tax cuts. But I wish he’d stop tweeting and picking fights. I wish he acted more presidential and stopped insulting reporters, entertainers, senators, foreign leaders and Gold Star families.”

Sounds right, seems smart. Yet for millions of Trump voters it misses the point entirely. Mr. Trump’s style is part of his substance. His most loyal supporters back him because of, not despite, his brash behavior. He would not be in the Oval Office today had he followed a conventional path or listened to the advisers telling him to tone down his rhetoric and discipline his behavior. If Republican primary voters had wanted a border wall, tax cuts and sound judges without the drama, they could have picked Ted Cruz. Instead they elected Mr. Trump for exactly the reasons that the mainstream media, late-night comics, and party elites cannot stand him.

GOP voters have traditionally demanded their leaders demonstrate fealty to conservative principles through life experience: by offering a spiritual conversion story, standing with a supportive spouse and children, talking about the deer bagged during last year’s hunting season. The apparent authenticity mattered, given that many competing politicians converged around the same policies. Hence the damage when a candidate came across as inauthentic, as in 2007 when Mitt Romney said he had hunted “a number of times,” mostly “small varmints.”

The reality was that voters trusted candidates who were like them in beliefs, habits and appearance. Knowing this, candidates tried to find common ground with regular people. That’s why Democrats in red states cut ads showing them shooting guns and professing their faith. It’s why Marco Rubio repeatedly told the story of his father, the immigrant bartender, and why John Kasich offered paeans to his father, the mailman.

But what was really achieved by all those years of supporting politicians with perfect church attendance and lifetime memberships in the National Rifle Association? Relatively little in enacted legislation. That’s why in 2016, after years of broken promises about repealing ObamaCare, balancing the budget and imposing term limits, conservative voters decided they’d had enough. They decided to support someone whose primary virtue was that he would not back down from fighting for them. CONTINUE AT SITE

The unveiling of the portraits of the Obamas for the National Portrait Gallery puts me in mind of Winston Churchill’s reaction to the ghastly Graham Sutherland portrait (left) presented to him for his 80th birthday, which Churchill (a talented painter in his own right, keep in mind—see his great short essay “Painting as a Pastime”) called “a remarkable example of modern art,” to much laughter in the audience. That was, of course, his way of saying he didn’t like it. Clementine Churchill later had the painting destroyed in a backyard bonfire, which the artist, Sutherland, complained bitterly was “an act of vandalism.”

The real vandalism was letting Sutherland paint Churchill in the first place. And ponder the vandalism that is the official portraits the Obamas apparently chose for themselves and approve. You may think the Obamas simply have no taste, but the departure from the traditional mode of presidential portraits is yet another subtle signal of their contempt for American traditions. They won’t have the good sense to throw these ghastly portraits on a bonfire. (And remember: Trump is vulgar.)

To the contrary, these portraits fuel the bonfire of their vanities, especially their vanity of being different and better than the ordinary run of Americans and the presidents they followed. Just take a look, and spot the one that doesn’t belong: