We begin today’s roundup with John Cassidy’s piece on Michael Wolff’s book on chaos in the White House:
There can be no doubt that Wolff relied on Bannon heavily. The book, a copy of which I obtained from the publisher, Henry Holt, on Wednesday, starts with the rumpled former investment banker having dinner with Roger Ailes, the late head of Fox News, in early January, 2017, and ends with Bannon standing outside the headquarters of Breitbart, the conservative news organization to which he returned after being ousted from the White House, in August. In the index, Bannon’s entry is considerably longer than anybody else’s except Trump’s.
Bannon wasn’t Wolff’s only source, though. The book is based on “conversations that took place over a period of eighteen months with the president, with most members of his senior staff—some of whom talked to me dozens of times—and with many people who they in turn spoke to,” Wolff writes in the author’s note. His original idea, he says, was to write a fly-on-the-wall account of Trump’s first hundred days. “The president himself encouraged this idea. But given the many fiefdoms in the White House that came into open conflict from the first days of the administration, there seemed no one person able to make this happen. Equally, there was no one to say ‘Go away.’ Hence I became more a constant interloper than an invited guest.”
Here is Eugene Robinson’s analysis at The Washington Post:
The White House is being used to stage some kind of dark, dystopian comedy in which all the humor is of the gallows variety. Somebody tell me how we survive three more years of this oppressive, exhausting show.
The revelations about the Trump administration from journalist Michael Wolff are, if true, stunning, jaw-dropping, gobsmacking — but also pretty much what many in Washington expected. The craziness and dysfunction were obvious from the beginning. Wolff simply documents what others say privately about an administration that is dangerously erratic and incompetent.
The central problem, according to Wolff’s forthcoming book, “Fire and Fury,” is President Trump himself. Voters elected to the nation’s highest office a man who is unfit to do the job, who has proved unworthy of the public trust and who seems, to be blunt, increasingly unbalanced.
John Nichols at The Nation:
In the wake of the Roy Moore debacle, which blew up on both men, the president is suddenly claiming that his “chief strategist” was little more than a loony hanger on. Following this week’s revelations about Bannon’s devastating critique of the president and his family in Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury, Trump insisted, “Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican Party.… Steve had very little to do with our historic victory…”
Bannon had everything to do with Trump’s election, the transition that followed, and the critical first months of Trump’s presidency. These two profoundly flawed men have finally fallen out with one another. But that does not change the fact Trump has for a very long time channeled Steve Bannon.
Catherine Rampell describes how Republicans are set to game the census:
The Founding Fathers must be spinning in their graves.
Not because of cavalier threats about nuclear apocalypse and attempted erosion of First Amendment rights (okay, maybe those things, too). Because our federal government is failing to execute one of its most basic constitutional duties: the decennial census.
The decennial census is the country’s largest civilian mobilization. It determines where billions of federal dollars flow each year, and how many congressional and electoral college seats each state gets. The results have enormous influence over the decisions of businesses and local governments, too.
Matthew Gertz at POLITICO details the Fox News/White House feedback loop, with a very important point:
Everyone has a theory about Trump’s hyper-aggressive early morning tweetstorms. Some think they are a deliberate ploy the president uses to distract the press from his administration’s potential weaknesses, or to frame the public debate to his liking. Others warn his rapid shifts from one topic to another indicate mental instability.
But my many hours following the president’s tweets for Media Matters for America, the progressive media watchdog organization, have convinced me the truth is often much simpler: The president is just live-tweeting Fox, particularly the network’s Trump-loving morning show, Fox & Friends. [...]
But here’s what is shocking: After comparing the president’s tweets to Fox coverage every day since October, I can tell you that the Fox-Trump feedback loop is happening far more often than you think. There is no strategy to Trump’s Twitter feed; he is not trying to distract the media. He is being distracted. He darts with quark-like speed from topic to topic in his tweets because that’s how cable news works.
At The Washington Post, Damian Paletta details how California may set the template for states in responding to the Republican tax scam:
A California Senate leader introduced legislation Thursday aimed at circumventing a central plank in the new Republican tax law, introducing a model that — if successful — could be replicated across the country.
California Senate President Pro Tempore Kevin de León (D) introduced a bill that would allow taxpayers to make a charitable donation to the California Excellence Fund instead of paying certain state taxes. They could then deduct that contribution from their federal taxable income.
The bill is meant to completely upend part of the tax law that congressional Republicans passed last year. That law contains a provision that sets a new cap of $10,000 on the amount of state and local property and income taxes that can be deducted from federal taxable income. De Leon’s office said that one-third of taxpayers, about 6 million people, itemized deductions on their tax returns and claimed an average of $18,438 for state and local taxes.
On a final note, The New York Times editorial board address the demise of the voter “fraud” commission (which was really set up to suppress votes):
The commission was a transparent sham from the start, nothing more than a cover to justify Mr. Trump’s reckless and unfounded claims about widespread voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election, which he blamed for his losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly three million votes. [...]All of this is laughable, but it would be a big mistake to assume that the collapse of the commission means the end of the voter-fraud inquisition. To the contrary, Mr. Kobach, who called Mr. Trump’s lie about millions of illegal voters “absolutely correct,” seems more than happy to continue his voter-suppression tactics in the dark. On Wednesday, Mr. Kobach told Politico, “Anyone on the left needs to realize that by throwing the food in the air, they just lost a seat at the table.” If you ask Mr. Dunlap, they never had a seat in the first place.
Mr. Kobach has already shifted his attention to the Department of Homeland Security, which might seem like an odd choice until you remember his anti-immigrant crusade. He’s especially keen on changing federal voting law, as he succeeded in changing Kansas law, to require all voters to show proof of citizenship. He claims this reduces fraud, even though there’s extremely little evidence of noncitizens voting anywhere.