Donald Trump has time to tweet about the Oscars and the cable news shows, but he doesn’t apparently have time to tweet about the hate crime in Kansas or the widespread targeting of Jewish community centers. We begin today’s roundup with an editorial from The Kansas City Star:
At some point, embarrassingly late begins to verge on something more disquieting.
President Donald Trump has silently planted himself in that space.
Nearly a week has passed since two India-born engineers were singled out and shot at an Olathe bar, presumably because they were immigrants, darker in skin tone and possibly viewed by the shooter as unwanted foreigners.
People around the world were immediately and rightfully horrified.
But our president? Mum. Not a word has been spoken, tweeted or prepped for Trump’s teleprompter. [...]
Tuesday night, the country and the world will be watching when Trump addresses a joint session of Congress. He should use the opportunity to thoughtfully —and belatedly — address this brazen act of violence.
Because with each passing day, Trump’s silence is even more telling.
The New York Times:
Mr. Trump’s denunciations of and policies targeting Mexicans, Muslims and others have reawakened and energized the demons of bigotry. Hate crimes and other incidents of bias have flared up, as documented by many news organizations. Mr. Kuchibhotla’s murder is one end of a continuum of hate. Elsewhere, people have defiled or threatened violence at Jewish cemeteries and synagogues.
Mr. Trump has been shockingly slow to condemn these acts of hate. [...]
Each act of hate is easily explained away as the work of a disturbed person. Yet, had these attacks been perpetrated by a Muslim or an undocumented immigrant, the president would surely have claimed that he was right all along.
Rather than tamp down hate, the president has stoked it.
Matt Flegenheimer and Eric Lichtblau preview Trump’s address to Congress:
[L]awmakers are looking to the speech as a moment for Mr. Trump to steady himself, and his allies, as they prepare to slog through a period of turning rhetoric into legislation.
Tax reform? The border wall? Repealing the health care law? It is unlikely that the president will offer all the specifics that some members are seeking. But the administration’s broad budget outline this week did offer a preview: He is calling for sharp increases in military spending and drastic cuts to domestic agencies. [...]
Officially, the Democratic rebuttal to Mr. Trump’s speech will come from Steve Beshear, the former governor of Kentucky, who will defend the Affordable Care Act.
But inside the House chamber where Mr. Trump is speaking, Democrats plan to assemble a cadre of human symbols, bringing as guests several people imperiled by the president’s policies. Eschewing wide-scale boycotts of the speech — a feature of Mr. Trump’s inaugural address — members of Congress have used their invitations as another form of protest.
Speaking of healthcare, former Representative Henry Waxman has an op-ed the Washington Post about Republican attempts to end Medicaid as we know it:
[W]hat Trump and the GOP are trying to do below the radar might even be more alarming — ending Medicaid as we know it by imposing a “per-capita” cap or block grant.
This radical plan has nothing to do with the ACA and everything to do with conservatives’ long-standing ideological goal to cap and cut federal Medicaid spending. Medicaid has been a pillar of our health-care system for 52 years and now insures nearly 1 in 5 Americans. A per-capita cap (sending a fixed amount to the states for each beneficiary) or a block grant (sending a fixed amount to the states for their entire program) would be an unprecedented abandonment of federal responsibility by giving states substantially less federal funding than they would get under Medicaid today, with the cuts growing larger each year. That would pass the buck to the states, our health-care safety net and all Americans — and deny care to the most vulnerable among us.
David Leonhardt says the healthcare fight has turned:
Thanks in part to a surge of activism — town hall meetings, online postings, calls to Congress — the politics of Obamacare have flipped. Many Americans have come to realize that the care part of the law matters much more than the Obama part. As a result, the Republicans no longer have a clear path to repeal.
President Trump, in his speech to Congress on Tuesday night, will probably pretend otherwise. He may repeat the same magical promises to pass a bill that’s better and cheaper and covers everyone. Privately, though, he and his aides have begun to realize the mess they have made by promising the impossible.
Catherine Rampell says the president’s budget outline puts Americans “last”:
Trump is nominally a fiscal conservative (with the help of some fuzzy math). So he also promised that his increase in defense spending would be offset by equivalent cuts to non-defense spending.
And who suffers as a result? Regular Americans, including millions who voted for Trump. [...] It’s difficult to argue that reducing Americans’ access to food, health care, housing and other necessities is putting their needs “first.”
At The Atlantic, Molly Ball looks at Trump’s presidency so far:
[M]uch of Trump’s appeal was that, as a businessman and artist of The Deal, he could cut through the dithering and gridlock and partisan bickering. Instead, in his first month, Trump has mostly been the loser in his battles against entrenched institutions. Rather than bend Washington to his will, Trump has, in his first month, mainly bent his priorities to the will of Republicans in Washington.
And, on a final note, the always excellent Eugene Robinson:
The question is inevitable: How much does the president even know about his administration’s policies?
Not much, it appears. [...]
You might think the president would be fully engaged in some of these issues, but you’d be wrong. Instead, he has been waging a ridiculous war against the media. His cries of “fake news” may play well with the base, but he’s not running for president at the moment. He’s supposed to be doing the job.