Adam Davidson/NewYorker with a must read:
Michael Cohen and the End Stage of the Trump Presidency
This is the week we know, with increasing certainty, that we are entering the last phase of the Trump Presidency. This doesn’t feel like a prophecy; it feels like a simple statement of the apparent truth. I know dozens of reporters and other investigators who have studied Donald Trump and his business and political ties. Some have been skeptical of the idea that President Trump himself knowingly colluded with Russian officials. It seems not at all Trumpian to participate in a complex plan with a long-term, uncertain payoff. Collusion is an imprecise word, but it does seem close to certain that his son Donald, Jr., and several people who worked for him colluded with people close to the Kremlin; it is up to prosecutors and then the courts to figure out if this was illegal or merely deceitful. We may have a hard time finding out what President Trump himself knew and approved.
However, I am unaware of anybody who has taken a serious look at Trump’s business who doesn’t believe that there is a high likelihood of rampant criminality.
So, journalists, your mindset ought to be "maybe Trump is guilty of racketeering AND conspiracy, with obstruction thrown in", and not "maybe this is the long-awaited pivot" or “look, the US blew up some buildings! We won!”.
Just saying.
WSJ:
Trump Lawyer Michael Cohen Used the Same Delaware Company for Payment Deals to Two Women
Federal probe looks closely at money flowing in and out of Essential Consultants
On Friday, the government said in a legal filing: “Given that the crimes being investigated involve acts of concealment by Cohen, the USAO-SDNY sought and obtained a search warrant—rather than using a subpoena—so that it would not have ... to rely on Cohen to accurately make such a production.”
The above supplies more meat to the Cohen legal troubles.
And check these numbers:
That 36% is persuadable with more information.
Gautam Mukunda has a terrific thread on Trump’s competency:
Little if any of Trump’s behavior in office has been even slightly surprising. He is who he was before taking power. Corruption? Mismanagement? Erratic hiring and firing? Constant random outbursts of temper? Narcissistic boasting? Barely-coded racism? This is who he always was.
The big change has been the steady erosion of the buffers that have (more than most people appreciate) protected us from his worst traits. McMaster and even Tillerson pushed out, Kelly marginalized, etc. Trump is so awful that he makes even someone like Sessions look kind of good.
Worsening the situation is that Trump is (rightly!) terrified of investigations into his business practices. Whatever he did w/ Russia, it’s been clear that the “Trump Organization” is just a front for fairly inept white collar crime, particularly money laundering, for a while.
Maybe yes. And let’s stipulate in advance that to say “maybe yes” is not an invitation to complacency.
Josh Barro/Business Insider:
What should scare Trump most isn't the Deep State — it's the Regular State.
- Developments in multiple cases involving President Donald Trump and his associates prove the legal system is working.
- Trump is in a great deal of trouble.
- That's because the machinery of justice is operating as it should, even when Trump tries to intervene.
Ronald A Klain/WaPo:
The anti-anti-Trump cohort has a fatal flaw in its thinking
Let’s start with the fact that seems most vexing to the resistance critics: the failure of Trump’s approval rating to fall below 40 percent, even as bad news mounts. To be clear, at 40 percent, Trump remains as unpopular as he was when he was the most unpopular first-year president ever — 20 points below Gerald Ford after he pardoned Richard Nixon. True, Trump has not sunk further in this sub-sub-basement level of public support, but that misses the point: The success of the anti-Trump movement is in keeping him there, notwithstanding the low unemployment rate, stock market gains and billions in tax-cut stimulus surging through the economy. Only two other modern-era presidents enjoyed an unemployment rate below 4.3 percent in their terms and suffered an approval rating below 50 percent: Lyndon B. Johnson (during the Vietnam War) and Harry S. Truman (during Korea). Trump’s 40 percent approval rating doesn’t reflect a failure of his opposition: It reflects success in preventing Trump’s ratings from soaring the way any other peace-time president’s would under such conditions.
Politico:
Trump supporters rip decision to strike Syria
There was a clear sense of disappointment among a certain strand of Trump supporter as the president announced a “precision strike” against the regime of Bashar Assad on Friday in response to a suspected chemical weapons attack last week.
The anguish came from supporters who latched on to Trump’s “America first” promise during the campaign. They argued that Trump’s decision undermined his promise to disentangle the U.S. from global conflicts, saying it reeked of the same old, same old.
Krishnadev Calamur/Atlantic:
The Middle East is a “troubled place,” President Donald Trump said Friday night as he described his decision to use America’s “righteous power” in a retaliatory attack against government targets in Syria following a suspected chemical attack there.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad seems to have won the civil war in his country—but that doesn’t mean peace is coming. In fact, the conflict seems to be escalating—fueled by the many outside powers who have joined the Syrian battlefield with interests of their own.
“If you look at the literature on civil wars, it tends to suggest that the more foreign powers involved, the more difficult it is for a civil war to end—because most of those powers aren’t willing to quit until either they are exhausted or their claims and desires have been met,” said Christopher Phillips, author of the book The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East. “And because a lot of them are backing proxies, the cost isn't necessarily that high.”
Susan Campbell/Hartford Courant on the underlying racism that ruined cities:
Beneath the surface — beyond the purview of a 9-year-old — Hartford was redlining its neighborhoods, and beginning to pull funding from neighborhoods considered “undesirable” (read: racially mixed). New residents coming up from the south were moving into substandard housing, their children herded into schools that were inadequate. White families were following businesses out to the suburbs. Hartford was slipping, and the fault for that can’t be laid at the feet of the current residents. Bad policy built Hartford, bad policy built on racism and a short-sightedness that is stunning, in retrospect.
We post twitter a lot. This helpful essay explains why:
There are two things on the Internet
I might start with the basic functionality of Twitter. This begins with something that few realize: there are only two things on the Internet.
- Content. The stuff that we look at and consume. This can include media such as print, video or audio. It is the static information that we reference, read and learn from. Packer’s studies in journals are content. Content is enduring material that lives somewhere that we can access.
- Conversation. The the dialog that happens around the stuff we look at and consume.
It’s a simple way to look at the internet but helpful in putting twitter into a context that makes sense.
Here in APR, and on this site, we provide both. And twitter is a great place for content, and maybe a little dialog (caveat emptor).