We begin today’s roundup with The New York Times and its piece on the cult of Trump:
Assuming that American democracy endures, a party organized around a single extreme personality seems like a brittle proposition. But Mr. Trump’s grip on the Republican psyche is unusually powerful by historical standards, because it is about so much more than electoral dynamics. Through his demagogic command of the party’s base, he has emerged as the shameless, trash-talking, lib-owning fulcrum around which the entire enterprise revolves.
Forget the longstanding Republican orthodoxy about the wonders of free trade. If Mr. Trump says tariffs are the way to go, his base is good with that. Even Republican lawmakers who fear a trade war seem disinclined to push very hard to prevent one. (Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, has dismissed proposed legislation aimed at curbing the president’s tariff fever as an “exercise in futility.”)
Michael Shear previews the G-7 meeting:
Mr. Trump is the black sheep of this family, the estranged sibling who decided to pick fights with his relatives just before arriving to dinner. The dispute, Larry Kudlow, the president’s top economic adviser, acknowledges, is “much like a family quarrel,” but with the potential for vast diplomatic and economic consequences for the world.
The anger of American allies, over Mr. Trump’s decision to impose tariffs, is palpable.
“Patently absurd” is what Liam Fox, the British trade minister, called them. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said they were “illegal,” while Mr. Trudeau said they were “insulting and totally unacceptable” — and that was in the carefully worded public statement. In a phone call with Mr. Trump, he was said to be even more blunt.
Here’s Catherine Rampell’s take at The Washington Post:
Trump clearly believes he’s being “tough” with these other countries, and protecting American jobs, with his ineptly-designed tariffs. In fact, he’s putting many more jobs in other industries at risk. A report released this week by the Trade Partnership, a consulting and research firm, estimated that the ratio of jobs lost to jobs gained from Trump’s trade actions will be about 16 to 1: 26,280 steel and aluminum jobs gained, compared with 432,747 jobs eliminated throughout the rest of the economy.
And that’s presumably not even counting any of the hundreds of jobs now held by Trump’s fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Michael Tomasky explains that Trump is a direct result of the Republican Party’s playbook:
When the conservative counter-offensive started, back in the 1970s, conservatives who wanted to dramatically remake and reorder American society knew they had a big job in front of them. All kinds of presumptions about how life and society worked were lodged deep in people’s minds. Many—most, indeed perhaps nearly all—of those assumptions were kind of liberal. The Republicans caused the Depression. Roosevelt saved the country. Unions helped us prosper in the postwar era. Science was noble, and experts were to be venerated. Religion was to remain private. The generals got us into an unwinnable war in Vietnam and so on.
Philip Bump points out that Trump’s cruel “deterrent” of tearing families apart at the border isn’t working:
President Trump has been frustrated by the rise in entry attempts along the border with Mexico, after that number sank during the first year of his presidency. In March, there were 50,296 apprehensions at the border with Mexico, up from 36,682 the month before. In April, it increased to 50,924. In May, according to new data, the number rose to 51,912.
The number of family units apprehended at the border rose from 5,474 to 8,873 in March, then to 9,653 in April before ticking slightly downward to 9,485 in May. That May figure is the highest since 2014, when violence in Central America led to a surge in border crossings. That recent increase drove a substantial part of the overall apprehensions number, which is one reason the government is apparently trying to deter families from trying to enter the United States.
Adam Serwer at The Atlantic explains why Trump’s take on presidential power is so dangerous:
While many conservative writers and several Republican legislators have publicly scoffed at Trump’s assertion of unlimited criminal-justice powers, none of them are as influential with the president as the red-faced television personalities Trump live-tweets during “executive time.”
Those who assert such unrestrained authority for Trump hold out impeachment, not prosecution, as the proper remedy for any misconduct. But if the president can prosecute anyone for any reason, it renders impeachment as a remedy for presidential misbehavior all but moot. Those who push to impeach the president could be prosecuted for doing so. And even if the president were somehow successfully impeached, he could pardon himself in advance for any crimes he might be charged with after being removed from office.
And on a final note, don’t miss Susan Glasser’s analysis of Trump’s destructive “America First” perspective:
Ever since Trump took office, America’s allies have desperately sought to avoid this moment. Over the last year and a half, though, many of them have come to realize, with growing dread, that it was inevitable. The rift between the world’s great democracies that Trump’s election portended is coming to pass, and it is about far more than Iran policy, obscure trade provisions, or whether Germany spends two per cent of its G.D.P. on nato. Many senior European officials speak of it, as one Ambassador to Washington did to me recently, as nothing less than a “crisis of the West.”
As Trump’s dramatic moves have played out this spring and hardened into a Presidential narrative of American victimization at the hands of free-riding allies, senior government officials in Washington, London, Berlin, and other European capitals have told me they now worry that Trump may be a greater immediate threat to the alliance than even authoritarian great-power rivals, such as Russia and China. Equally striking is the extent to which America’s long-term allies have no real strategy for coping with the challenges posed by such an American President. Trump may be reorienting U.S. foreign policy away from its closest historical friends, such as Great Britain and Germany, and toward those with whom Trump is more politically aligned in Israel, the Gulf, and along Europe’s restive fringes, but his traditional partners have no real strategy for how to respond.