E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Trump has made our politics ridiculous:
The most corrosive aspect of Donald Trump’s presidency is its rousing success in making our politics ridiculous.
The political class (yes, including columnists) is obsessed with his most unnerving statements, especially on Twitter. These are analyzed as if they were tablets from heaven or the learned pronouncements of a wise elder.
Various kinds of strategic genius are ascribed to Trump. He’s getting us to focus on this because he doesn’t want us to focus on that . He’s shifting attention away from a Republican health-care bill that breaks a litany of his campaign vows. Maybe he posted that video of his imagined wrestling match with the CNN logo because he realized that in attacking MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, he strayed from his central, anti-CNN message.
No matter how idiotic one of his tweets might be, there will always be commentators who see it as a shrewd way to charm his “base.” Although Trump’s core supporters constitute a static or even shrinking minority, the punditry often endows them with a hallowed status enjoyed by no other demographic.
The Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times concludes—North Korea’s missile test was ominous, but a military response could be disastrous:
North Korea’s testing of a missile capable of reaching U.S. soil is an ominous development. For residents of Los Angeles — which is routinely cited as a potential target for such a weapon — it is especially so. [...]
On Wednesday, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said: “The United States is prepared to use the full range of our capabilities to defend ourselves and our allies. One of our capabilities lies with our considerable military forces.”
But military action could be disastrous, leading to war on the Korean peninsula and the death of thousands of people. As the president’s military advisors will surely tell him, even “surgical” airstrikes designed to destroy North Korea’s nuclear weapons probably would trigger retaliation by the North against South Korea, using conventional weapons already amassed on the border. Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis has warned that the result “would be probably the worst kind of fighting in most people’s lifetimes.”
Carol Anderson at The Guardian writes—Don't call it the Trump administration. Call it a regime:
Trump tweeted another string of bullying, misogynistic, anti-press rants and signaled once again the stark differences between a presidential administration and a White House regime. In the wake of his caustic blasts at TV personalities Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, and then his physical assault on a CNN logo, Republican congressional representatives begged him to start acting presidential.
But the difference between an administration and a regime is not just cloaking coarseness and crudity with a veneer of civility. Lyndon Johnson, for example, was notoriously crude. Yet he and other presidents, even the incompetent ones such as Warren G Harding, did something else too. They actually had administrations.
They recognized the importance of governing and putting in the time and long, hard work of getting things done – be it partnering with or fighting against Congress, negotiating substantive treaties, and crafting and implementing economic and domestic policies.
Then there is Trump. He has no desire or intention to govern. He wants to rule. Where his word is our command. That’s why he admires the regimes in the Philippines, Russia and Turkey – and despises administrations such as Angela Merkel’s and Justin Trudeau’s. That is why he stages rallies where he is showered with adoration by hand-picked fans and, just as significantly, why he abhors town halls and press conferences.
Joe Stiglitz at The Guardian writes—Tell Donald Trump: the Paris climate deal is very good for America:
Under President Donald Trump’s leadership, the United States took another major step toward establishing itself as a rogue state on 1 June, when it withdrew from the Paris climate agreement. For years, Trump has indulged the strange conspiracy theory that, as he put it in 2012: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” But this was not the reason Trump advanced for withdrawing the US from the Paris accord. Rather, the agreement, he alleged, was bad for the US and implicitly unfair to it.
While fairness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, Trump’s claim is difficult to justify. On the contrary, the Paris accord is very good for America, and it is the US that continues to impose an unfair burden on others.
Katie Mitchell at Rewire writes—Quick to Condemn State-Sanctioned Brutality Abroad, Trump Refuses To Do the Same Here:
Trump’s pro-police, anti-Black rhetoric projects beyond the campaign trail and the Twittersphere into the real world.
His first month in office was the deadliest for police brutality since 2015, with 105 people being killed by the police. In January alone, Trump had 105 chances to publicly reach out to the family members of an American slain by the police. Trump had 105 chances to write a statement offering condolences while condemning the perpetrators of deadly violence. Trump had 105 chances to rightly state those who died at the hands of the police had lives that mattered. Instead, during National Police Week, Trump described the police as “the Thin Blue Kine between civilization and chaos” and lamented that the police had been “subject to unfair defamation and vilification“—a view he does not extend to Black Americans.
With Trump’s uncritical praise of the police, Black people are even more vulnerable. Trump has shown that he will not offer the same empathy for Black victims of violence as the previous administration. The new administration has ushered in an overt disregard for violence against Black Americans in more tangible ways as well. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a Trump nominee, ordered Justice Department officials to review consent decree agreements made with troubled police departments to address the police brutality that disproportionately affects communities of color. If the decrees are still in place after the review, it is unlikely a Sessions-led Department of Justice will enforce them.
While the branches of government are separate, the president has the far-reaching influence of the bully pulpit. This influence has the potential to have a regressive impact on the judicial and legislative branches, leading to a proliferation of “Blue Lives Matter” laws passed by lawmakers and reinforced by the judicial branch. The most powerful man in the country is an existential threat to Black people and an exemplification of a society that will continue to question the worth of Black life.
Paul Pilar at LobeLog Foreign Policy writes—The Plummeting of U.S. Standing in the World:
The Pew Research Center released last week the results of one of its periodic surveys of global views of the United States and its leadership and policies. More than 40,000 people were polled in 37 countries across six continents between February and May. The most salient finding is a dramatic drop in confidence in the United States and, more specifically, in the current U.S. leadership.
When asked about “confidence in the U.S. president to do the right thing in world affairs,” 22 percent of those surveyed expressed confidence in Donald Trump and 74 percent expressed no confidence. This is a huge reversal from the last time the same question was asked about Barack Obama late in his presidency, in which 64 percent expressed confidence and 23 percent no confidence.
The rapidity as well as the magnitude of the change is striking. Trump’s numbers approach those of George W. Bush near the end of his presidency, but in Bush’s case those depths were reached only after a long decline during his two terms. Trump has managed to bum people out around the world during his first four months in office.
Gail Collins at The New York Times writes—Women Move, World Improves:
Women’s involvement in politics seems to be skyrocketing — they’re doing everything from petitioning Congress to planning their own campaigns. Groups that help prepare women to run for office are reporting an unprecedented number of website visits, training-school sign-ups and meeting attendance.
Everything is going to get better! There’ll be more bipartisanship in Congress, more rationality in foreign affairs and better government on the state and local levels. Corruption will drop, voter satisfaction will soar and never again will the governor of a major state spend a holiday sunbathing on a public beach that’s closed to the rest of the public due to a budget crisis.
All right, we’re only totally positive about the last one.
Robert Reich at TruthDig writes—Trump’s Escalating Assault on the Press:
“President Trump is not well,” Scarborough and Brzezinski concluded after the Trump tirade against them. Maybe the strain of being a thin-skinned narcissist under the continuous and critical glare of the press is finally tipping him over the edge.
But I fear an even more menacing reality.
Trump began his presidency attacking the press for “fake news.” Then he called the networks and publications that criticized him “enemies of the people.”
His new attacks seem to be going a step farther – mobilizing his supporters against media personalities and executives that are critical of him.
As the tweets and rallies become shriller and more provocative, their clear message is that Trump’s critics are bad people who are conspiring to undo his presidency – people whom Trump supporters must “not let” silence him, who deserve to be slammed the way Trump took it out on CNN in the mock video he posted Sunday morning.
It’s a narrative that’s showing up increasingly on right-wing websites.
Linda Greenhouse at The New York Times writes—Trump’s Life-Tenured Judicial Avatar:
So Neil M. Gorsuch, the aw-shucks humble servant of the law whom the country encountered during his mind-numbing confirmation hearing, turns out to be a hard-right conservative. No real surprise there, and by now, no real news either, given that nearly every account of the Supreme Court term that ended last week took note of Justice Gorsuch’s budding alliance with Justice Clarence Thomas on the court’s far right.
Missing from much of the commentary, however, was the sheer flamboyance of the junior justice’s behavior. [...]
Whether out of ignorance or by deliberate choice, Neil Gorsuch is a norm breaker. He’s the new kid in class with his hand always up, the boy on the playground who snatches the ball out of turn. He is in his colleagues’ faces pointing out the error of their ways, his snarky tone oozing disrespect toward those who might, just might, know what they are talking about. It’s hard to ascribe this behavior to ignorance — he was, after all, like three of his colleagues, once a Supreme Court law clerk. But if it’s not ignorance, what is it? How could the folksy “Mr. Smith Goes to the Senate Judiciary Committee” morph so quickly into Donald Trump’s life-tenured judicial avatar?
Harvey J. Kaye at Moyers & Company writes—We Are Radicals at Heart — Don’t Forget It:
Listen closely. Listen closely to Thomas Paine’s argument in Common Sense that “[w]e have it in our power to begin the world over again;” to Thomas Jefferson’s phrases in the Declaration: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness;” to the framers’ first three words of the preamble to the Constitution, “We the People.”
Listen well. Listen well to Abraham Lincoln speaking at Gettysburg in 1863: “[T]hat this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth;” to Franklin Roosevelt calling on Americans in 1941 to secure “Freedom of speech and expression… Freedom of worship… Freedom from want… Freedom from fear;” and to Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963: “I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day…”
Those are not just great, moving and memorable words. They are revolutionary, radical and democratic words — words that at critical times have proclaimed, affirmed and articulated anew America’s historic purpose and promise.
And those words speak to you, don’t they?
They speak to us as Americans because — for all of our faults and failings, for all of the tragedies and ironies that have marked our history, and for all of the efforts by the powers that be to make you forget it — we are radicals at heart.
Marin Cogan and Nick Tabor at New York Magazine write—Should They Stay or Should They Go? Federal Employees Talk About the Ethics of Sticking It Out With the Trump Administration:
On the same day in early June that an intelligence contractor was arrested for leaking a document on how Russia hacked into voter-registration systems, a State Department diplomat resigned in protest of the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. Meanwhile, some 180 federal workers signed up for a February workshop where legal experts counseled them on how to express civil disobedience, and others have sought help from whistle-blower-protection groups.
But for every story of resistance to Trump’s government from the inside, there are thousands of stories of civil servants who have quietly stayed in their jobs, keeping their heads down, carrying on their work with varying degrees of consternation or joy, as the case may be. Many are weighing whether it’s better for the country if they stick it out or leave, and what their personal red lines will be — what action of the administration would make staying impossible for them.
The decision to leave can be a wrenching choice.
Jarrett Murphy at The Nation and City Limits writes—It Will Take Tenacity and Guts to Shutter One of the Country’s Most Notorious Jails:
When he was running for mayor four years ago, Bill de Blasio promised he’d create a universal pre-K system. It was up and running within nine months of his inauguration. He said he’d reduce the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk, and he did so. He vowed to create affordable housing, reduce the speed limit, create new sick-leave and living-wage provisions, reinvigorate the city’s ferry system, create new rental vouchers for the homeless. And he has done or is doing some degree of all these things.
So why does no one seem to believe the mayor when he says he wants to close Rikers, the vast jail complex that has come to symbolize some of the worst abuses of the criminal- justice system?
In part, it’s because for two years, as the chorus of voices calling for New York City to shutter the island’s outmoded and isolated jail grew larger and louder, de Blasio dismissed them. Then, when de Blasio finally changed his mind on the last day of March, he announced it at a hastily arranged Friday-night press conference, 48 hours before an independent commission was almost certainly going to recommend closure. Since then, he has dragged out the timeline for emptying Rikers, suggesting a 10-year timetable as a minimum estimate, not an outside figure. And when the mayor finally released his plan for closing the complex—nearly three months after announcing his new position—the blueprint placed a large share of responsibility for achieving Rikers closure on other officials and said little about where new jails would go.
Clio Chang at The New Republic writes—Why Urban Dictionary Is Horrifically Racist—The crowd-sourced repository of internet slang is rife with racist and sexist content. But owner Aaron Peckham doesn't seem to care:
Almost everyone has used Urban Dictionary at some point or another to look up the meaning of a slang word or phrase. Started in 1999 by then-computer science student Aaron Peckham, the crowd-sourced online dictionary that The New York Times calls the “lexicon of instant argot” has grown over the past two decades into an internet behemoth. In 2014, Peckham claimed that the site boasted more than seven million definitions. The same year, he said that Urban Dictionary’s mobile app had been downloaded more than three million times. According to Quantcast, it is the 25th-biggest site in the United States, and had 130 million global views over the last month.
It defines Barack Obama as “the chocolate Jimmy Carter.” The second top definition for Serena Williams is “a large, muscular, ape whose Hollywood credits include the lead role in 1998’s Mighty Joe Young.” Under Michelle Obama, one of the top entries reads: “Mannish wife of Barack Obama. Widely regarded as being more masculine and certainly more gangsta than Barack. Was rejected by the WNBA for ambiguous gender reasons. Some have argued that Barack is actually gay and believed that he was marrying a man when he married Michelle.”
Black people? “A potentially great people who have a lot of problems that need to be addressed. Quite rightly they feel a great injustice has been done to them in the past, but this tends to negate any ability they might have to look upon themselves self critically…thus perpetuating a cycle of crime and underachievement.” Racism? “Pure Bullshit.”
Sarah Lazare at In These Times writes—The Police State Can Come After Trump Protesters, But It Can’t Make Them Cooperate:
Roughly 200 people arrested at an Inauguration Day anti-fascist march in Washington, D.C., are facing charges punishable by up to 75 years in prison, a level of repression that many believe is designed to quell protest.
Those detained were part of a coordinated day of action across the U.S. capital, that saw thousands take part in rallies, blockades and marches to protest the hate and exclusion of the Trump administration and “set a tone of resistance,” according to “Disrupt J20” organizers.
Now, the majority of the defendants are uniting behind the principle that, while the state can come after them, it can’t force them to collaborate with the prosecution or turn on each other.
“We will not cooperate against any of our codefendants, nor accept any plea deals that cooperate with prosecutors at the expense of other codefendants,” reads a unity statement. The declaration has been signed by 135 defendants, according to Kris Hermes, one of many providing legal support.