We begin today’s roundup with Paul Waldman at The Week and his piece explaining Donald Trump’s lack of loyalty:
Republican leaders don't want to take more debt ceiling votes because of their own lunatic fringe, which is happy to push the United States to the brink of default if they might be able to use the crisis to squeeze out some cuts to the safety net (which is one of the reasons why we should get rid of the debt ceiling entirely). They don't want to have to face their own misinformed voters saying, "Why did you vote for more debt?" when that's not what increasing the debt ceiling means — a misconception they themselves have encouraged for years.
But Trump didn't much care. He wants to be seen as doing deals, and bipartisan deals are more newsworthy and notable than ones with his own party.
Second, Republicans are surprised when everything comes back to the personal with Trump. He's been perturbed by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell's inability to produce legislative "wins" for him — he and McConnell are barely on speaking terms, according to multiple reports ("It's fine," McConnell says unconvincingly of their relationship. "Everything's fine.") — and when Trump gets mad at you, he's going to screw you over, preferably in a way that involves public humiliation.
Writing in The New York Times, Michael Tomasky cautions Democrats against making a deal with Trump on border wall funding and DACA:
The simple fact is that voters support the “liberal” position on DACA. In one recent poll, 58 percent of respondents said the program’s participants, known as “Dreamers,” should be allowed to stay and have a path to citizenship. An additional 18 percent favored letting them become legal residents, but not citizens. Only 15 percent opted for deportation. [...]
At the same time, Americans do not support a border wall. A survey in late July — conducted by the polling company Rasmussen, generally considered to lean toward Mr. Trump — found that 56 percent of respondents opposed the wall, and 37 percent backed it. This is a big change from late January, the week after Mr. Trump took office, when in another Rasmussen survey a slight plurality supported the wall.
Now toss into the mix the president’s own sagging approval numbers. On Tuesday, Gallup had him at 37 percent. [...] Under these circumstances, making a DACA/wall deal would be like Rafael Nadal saying to his 75th-ranked opponent, “Sure, I’ll let you win half the time.”
Paul Krugman:
The idea that there are a fixed number of jobs, so that if a foreign-born worker takes a job he or she takes it away from a native-born worker, is completely at odds with everything we know about how the economy works. Hearing it from a conservative is especially surreal.
The truth is that letting the Dreamers work legally helps the U.S. economy; pushing them out or into the shadows is bad for everyone except racists.
Here’s Eugene Robinson’s take at The Washington Post:
Does it really surprise anyone that President Trump betrayed the Republican leaders who have been trying their best to carry water for him on Capitol Hill — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) — and is playing footsie with their Democratic rivals? It shouldn’t.
One thing that should be blindingly obvious by now is that political loyalty, for the president, is a one-way street. Yes, McConnell and Ryan embarrassed themselves and squandered precious political capital in a long, fruitless attempt to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Yes, the Republican leaders have held their tongues time and again when Trump has manifested his unfitness for office. Yes, they have pretended not to notice the glaring conflicts of interest between Trump’s private business affairs and his public responsibilities.
Ryan Cooper says Trump lost a chance at capitalizing on bipartisanship earlier:
Given these facts, Trump's best strategy for gaining some popular backing, splitting his opponents, and preparing for re-election would have been to downplay the racist rhetoric and attempt to negotiate with Democrats to pass some big-ticket economic populism. Sideline the despised congressional leadership of his own party and push a big infrastructure package, a renegotiation of various trade deals, some pro-union rules, and perhaps a big new expansion of welfare. Coming out in favor of, say, putting everyone under 26 on Medicare would drive a wedge between the anti-Trump die-hards, and the Medicare-for-all die-hards. If he couldn't get it passed, he could then at least portray himself as fighting for popular policy against a hapless Congress — the most despised political institution of all.
The problem, as was quickly apparent, is that Trump is so ignorant that he has only the faintest idea of how federal policy works or even what the various programs are. He staffed his administration with hard-right ideologues like Mick Mulvaney, his director of the Office of Management and Budget, who quickly churned out typical Republican fare.
Evan Osnos at The New Yorker provides an on-the-ground look at North Korea:
Americans are accustomed to eruptions of hostility with North Korea, but in the past six months the enmity has reached a level rarely seen since the end of the Korean War, in 1953. The crisis has been hastened by fundamental changes in the leadership on both sides. In the six years since Kim Jong Un assumed power, at the age of twenty-seven, he has tested eighty-four missiles—more than double the number that his father and grandfather tested. Just before Donald Trump took office, in January, he expressed a willingness to wage a “preventive” war in North Korea, a prospect that previous Presidents dismissed because it would risk an enormous loss of life. Trump has said that in his one meeting with Barack Obama, during the transition, Obama predicted that North Korea, more than any other foreign-policy challenge, would test Trump. In private, Trump has told aides, “I will be judged by how I handle this.”
And, on a final note, here’s Michael Daley at The Daily Beast:
The playground of big-shot climate-change deniers becomes subject to a hurricane evacuation order as of 5 p.m. Friday.
And were it not for all the innocent souls who have been and likely will be hurt by Hurricane Irma, you might see poetic justice in homes owned by President Trump and billionaire David Koch and commentators Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter being battered by a storm made the most powerful ever recorded in the Atlantic with a boost from warmer water and moister air. [...]
From his oceanfront radio studio in Palm Beach, Limbaugh has been saying the hurricane warnings were part of a conspiracy between the media and businesses looking to capitalize on public panic by selling water and batteries.