Different and interesting interpretations of where Trump stands with the public.
Matthew Yglesias/Vox:
After embracing orthodox Republicanism on all fronts, what’s the point of Trump?
Almost all of this was always half-baked and some of it was directly contradicted by other aspects of his 2016 campaign. But as of Election Day 2016 it was certainly possible to squint at Trump and see the outlines of an ideological shakeup — a figure who would attempt to represent the interests of the Republican Party’s electoral base of older-skewing, less-educated white people rather than hew strictly to the reanimated corpse of Reaganism like the vast majority of the party’s elected officials.
But with Steve Bannon fired and Breitbart.com left to snipe from the sidelines as Trump embraces a South Asia strategy pushed by Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and the uniformed military one must ask: What is the point?
Steve Kornacki/MSNBC:
Polls Show Trump Cratering? Not So Fast
As narratives of collapse take shape around Trump’s presidency now, the campaign should at least serve as a cautionary tale. It may look like his base is crumbling — and maybe it is — or maybe we’re living through a new version of what happened last year.
Consider the newest round of NBC polling from the three states that put Trump over the top. In Michigan, his approval rating is 36 percent, and in both Pennsylvania and Wisconsin it’s 33 percent. This looks brutal and it feeds the perception that Trump’s base is abandoning him. But is it different from his standing in these states during the campaign?
Obviously, he wasn’t president then, so there are no job approval ratings for comparison. But we can look at Trump’s personal popularity, and as Ryan Struyk shows, it turns out it’s pretty much the same now as it was last fall.
Garance Franke-Ruta/Yahoo:
The question of living as a Jew in America under Trump has provoked varying degrees of anxiety in the year since he tweeted out an anti-Semitic meme about Hillary Clinton — the infamous Star of David tweet — and then sought to defend it as a “Sheriff’s Star.” That’s when I first started to hear the half-panicked, half-joking conversations about exit strategies if Trump won and considerations about where to go if America were ever to become unsafe. A friend whose grandparents had fled Germany talked to her mother about going back there. A half-Jewish, half-Australian friend decided to pursue — and ultimately secured — dual citizenship and an Australian passport.
Contemplating worst-case scenarios is something practically encoded in the Jewish DNA, a legacy of 2,000 years of persecution culminating in the slaughter of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust less than a century ago. And given that most American Jews are Democrats and political progressives, the sense of foreboding that Trump has provoked has been compounded by his actions and rhetoric against other groups Jews have stood in solidarity with in America: refugees, immigrants, religious minorities, people fighting for civil rights.
Ex-white nationalist Derek Black/NY Times:
My dad often gave me the advice that white nationalists are not looking to recruit people on the fringes of American culture, but rather the people who start a sentence by saying, “I’m not racist, but …”
The most effective tactics for white nationalists are to associate American history with themselves and to suggest that the collective efforts to turn away from our white supremacist past are the same as abandoning American culture. My father, the founder of the white nationalist website Stormfront, knew this well. It’s a message that erases people of color and their essential role in American life, but one that also appeals to large numbers of white people who would agree with the statement, “I’m not racist, but I don’t want American history dishonored, and this statue of Robert E. Lee shouldn’t be removed.”
Adam Davidson/New Yorker:
Trump’s Business of Corruption
What secrets will Mueller find when he investigates the President’s foreign deals?
Several news accounts have confirmed that Mueller has indeed begun to examine Trump’s real-estate deals and other business dealings, including some that have no obvious link to Russia. But this is hardly wayward. It would be impossible to gain a full understanding of the various points of contact between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign without scrutinizing many of the deals that Trump has made in the past decade. Trump-branded buildings in Toronto and the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan were developed in association with people who have connections to the Kremlin. Other real-estate partners of the Trump Organization—in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and elsewhere—are now caught up in corruption probes, and, collectively, they suggest that the company had a pattern of working with partners who exploited their proximity to political power.
Emily Badger/Upshot with a good read:
The Showdown Over How We Define Fringe Views in America
Today in the United States, sweeping majorities of the public say they support fair housing laws and the ideal of integrated schools. Nine in 10 say they would back a black candidate for president from their own party, and the same say they approve of marriage between blacks and whites. That last issue has undergone one of the greatest transformations in polling over the last 50 years. In 1960, just 4 percent of Americans approved.
More than a triumph over private prejudice, these numbers reflect changing social norms. The country hasn’t extinguished racism. But society — universities, employers, cultural institutions, the military — has made clearer over time that people who hold racist views had better nurse them off in the corner.
But these norms may be fraying. Since the last presidential election, and particularly since white supremacists rallied this month, unmasked, in Charlottesville, Va., the line between acceptable and ostracized views has started to become less stark. When President Trump declined to condemn white supremacists more forcefully, he ignited a fight that at its core is about how we define norms in America: Who gets to be part of civil society, and whose views belong on the fringe?
Amber Phillips/WaPo:
Paul Ryan made it clear: He’s gone as far as he’s willing to on Trump and Charlottesville
“I do believe that he messed up in his comments Tuesday,” Ryan said at the town hall, “when it sounded like moral equivalency, or at the very least, moral ambiguity, when we need extreme moral clarity.”
Okay then, asked constituents and CNN host Jake Tapper. Will you ask the president to apologize, like Mitt Romney said the president should?
Ryan said he doesn’t think Trump needs to: “I think just he needs to do better and I think he just did.”
Would you support a censure of the president by the House? That’s a hard no.
Note the unpopular Congress above, even with R voters.
Reed Galen/Medium:
The Alt-Right’s Young Men of Means
Last weekend’s events in Charlottesville, Virginia still reverberate around the country. The white, nationalist, Nazi-inspired marchers invaded the idyllic college town and brought the fury of racial hatred and poisonous ideology with them. Watching myriad news reports it’s clear these were young men of some means. Many wore white polo shirts and khaki pants with an assortment of gloves, helmets and other quasi-tough guy accoutrements to round out their look. Some came as far as the west coast to protest the removal of a statute of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and turned Charlottesville’s Emancipation Park into a bloody, deadly melee in the process. These were not disassociated folks from the hollow. These young men fighting were fighting abhorrent ideology from the pedestal of the middle class.
How is it that these guys, who presumably did not miss a meal as children, came to be the face of virulent racism in America?
Houston Chronicle:
Doctors have a change of heart on single payer
A majority of doctors questioned nationwide now support a single-payer health care system - an almost exact reversal of their stance nine years ago.
Fifty-six percent of the 1,033 physicians who responded to the Aug. 3 Merritt Hawkins survey said they either strongly supported or somewhat supported a single-payer system.
That compares with 58 percent of physicians who, in 2008, said they opposed such a system. Back then, only 42 percent supported the concept.
The survey findings were released [a week ago] Monday,
The stark turnaround took many aback on Monday as doctors have often been among the most outspoken critics of single-payer health care, in which the government, rather than private insurers, cover health-care costs.
Medicare ≠ Medicaid ≠ single payer ≠ public option ≠ universal health care. They are all related but different ideas.