The hurricane in Florida is the big story, but politics doesn’t stop.
AP:
For Trump and Ryan, a tortured relationship grows more so
The president has told those close to him that he regrets choosing to tackle the repeal and replace of Barack Obama’s health care law as his first legislative push. He has singled out Ryan for blame, saying the speaker assured him it would pass and instead handed him an early, humiliating failure, before ultimate House passage of a revived bill, according to three White House and outside advisers familiar with the conversations but not authorized to speak about them publicly.
GOP health care efforts collapsed in the Senate in July.
Here’s a better take, from Ryan Cooper:
What is perhaps most surprising is that it took this long for Trump to try this tactic — and long past when it would have possibly worked. Folks — and by the way, everyone is saying this, you'd be surprised — the president is stupid.
Eugene Robinson/WaPo:
Trump’s betrayal of the Republican leaders should surprise no one
What Trump clearly has already revisited is his belief in the ability of the conservative GOP congressional majorities to get anything meaningful done. He seems to be at least flirting with the idea of working instead with Democrats and GOP moderates — working not with but around the House and Senate leadership.
I just hope Schumer and Pelosi know not to trust him the way Ryan and McConnell did.
Ta-nehisi Coates/Atlantic:
The name Barack Obama does not appear in [Mark] Lilla’s essay [here], and he never attempts to grapple, one way or another, with the fact that it was identity politics—the possibility of the first black president—that brought a record number of black voters to the polls, winning the election for the Democratic Party, and thus enabling the deliverance of the ancient liberal goal of national health care. “Identity politics … is largely expressive, not persuasive,” Lilla claims. “Which is why it never wins elections—but can lose them.” That Trump ran and won on identity politics is beyond Lilla’s powers of conception. What appeals to the white working class is ennobled. What appeals to black workers, and all others outside the tribe, is dastardly identitarianism. All politics are identity politics—except the politics of white people, the politics of the bloody heirloom.
If it’s Coates, it’s a must read.
TPM:
During an interview with CBS’ Charlie Rose this week, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon claimed that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) lost a role in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet following Christie’s perceived lack of support for then-candidate Trump after the release of lewd comments Trump made about women.
In a clip that aired Friday morning on CBS, Bannon revealed how some of Trump’s allies reacted to the October release of Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape. Bannon revealed that Reince Priebus, then the chair of the Republican National Committee, told Trump that he would likely lose the presidential race after the tape was publicized. Bannon said that he told Trump at the time that he had a “100 percent probability of winning.”
Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:
Trump’s party is convinced that climate change isn’t real but that massive, unproven voter fraud is. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) wants to talk about evidence-based policymaking. No, really. The party that makes up a crime wave, denies environmental science, lies about immigrants stealing jobs and murdering our children, and thinks trillions in tax cuts will pay for themselves wants evidence-based policymaking? The gall takes one’s breath away.
David Frum/Atlantic on DACA:
The truth is that border barriers can play an important role. The 1990s-vintage fencing between San Diego and Tijuana cut illegal migration at that crossing point. But there are hundreds of miles of Mexico-Texas border that get almost no traffic even unfenced—and where concerns over private property, the environment, and plain value-for-money make a physical wall a ludicrously pointless notion.
But Trump, himself a notorious employer of cheap foreign labor on his building sites and at his Mar-a-Lago resort, has never been interested in immigration as an issue, only as a means to mobilize political emotion. And so he now seems to have fastened on the concept of trading some update of the Dream Act to secure Democratic votes for the Trump Wall.
As so often, he did not think it through. Democrats have no incentive to make his deal—and every incentive to thwart it. If Santa asked Minority Leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer what they would like most for Christmas this year (Trump is president now, so we can say the word “Christmas” again), they might reply: “Some spectacular deportations of people brought to the United States sometime during the 2018 congressional cycle would be perfect.” Trump’s call on Congress to do something—who knows or cares what?—about DACA by spring of 2018 is a formula to unite Democrats, split Republicans, and achieve nothing. It puts the immigration spotlight on precisely the GOP coalition’s weakest point, in the misplaced hope of getting ungettable votes for the GOP’s dumbest idea.
BuzzFeed:
One post I saw on Facebook, months after Gov. Kasich had left the race, declared that “John Kasich Left the GOP!” It had nearly 40,000 shares. Aside from the fact that this is an absurd claim, the reach of that one post sent shivers down my spine. That was the day I realized how widespread this had become.
Which brings us back to those Russian accounts and their 200,000 clicks. It’s very conceivable that millions of people actually saw the message that was being promoted, in ways that wouldn’t show up in traditional ad reporting.
This isn’t a bug — this is the power of Facebook. And it’s why there is a huge migration happening away from things like TV and mail in the political advertising space, and why modern campaign organizations are investing so heavily in Facebook and other digital advertising methods to shape voter opinions.