On Friday, Donald Trump took great pleasure in cutting CNN off and refusing to let their reporter ask a question at a joint press appearance with UK Prime Minister Theresa May. On Saturday, Trump eagerly watched CNN, but was disappointed to find that his childish example of censorship wasn’t the lead story. So he tweeted about it, hoping to goad CNN into a response. But … nada. Then on Saturday evening, Trump issued orders that John Bolton, who was scheduled to appear on a CNN program on Sunday morning, wasn’t allowed to appear after all. So it’s clear where Trump is this morning — wearing his gold jammies and perched on the end of the bed, checking to see if this time he’s made CNN cry. But fortunately, we can leave him sitting there and check in with the morning pundits.
Since Trump is still across the Pond, let’s let The Guardian have first go …
Richard Wolffe wishes everyone would just say it—Trump is a racist.
Nato is both a rip-off and very strong. Theresa May’s Brexit plan is both pathetic and terrific. Trump’s interview with the Sun was both fake news and generally fine. Trump has all the consistency of Katy Perry’s Hot N Cold, except when it comes to two things: immigrants and Vladimir Putin.
Immigration is where Trump’s journey begins and ends: the message running all the way through this stick of rock. Trump told the Sun that immigration in Europe was “a shame”. Why such concern? “I think it changed the fabric of Europe and, unless you act very quickly, it’s never going to be what it was and I don’t mean that in a positive way.”
This has been the most startling, most disturbing, most anti-American part of Trump’s interview from the beginning. While a lot of the emphasis has been on personal slights to May and others, Trump’s interview with tabloid The Sun was rife with the language of a KKK pamphlet. His rhetoric, combined with previous claims about immigrants “infesting” America, and lies about Germany facing “spiraling crime” due to immigrants, isn’t just similar to comments from neo-nazi supporters. It’s lifted straight from white nationalist propaganda.
They better watch themselves because you are changing the culture. There’s a polite way to say this, but the time for good manners has long gone. The president of the United States just threatened the safety and security of immigrants the world over. …
So now we know. The reason Trump ordered the separation of thousands of immigrant children from their parents – some never to be reunited again – was because they better watch themselves. They are changing the culture and it better stop or else they’ll get hurt.
Trump has made it clear that he views himself as not just the leader of white America, but white Europe. And much of Europe has also made it clear that fighting Trumpism isn’t just something that America is doing alone.
Okay. Let’s continue the fight after the break ...
Trump, Russia, and the Special Counsel Investigation
Ruth Marcus wishes that Trump had even a fraction of the integrity demonstrated by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
Trump, briefed in advance about the indictment and knowing that it was about to be unsealed in a few hours, could not summon the palest imitation of Rosensteinian outrage at Russian interference with — attack on, really — a U.S. election. Not then — he brought up the “witch hunt” unbidden, in response to a question about Russian occupation of Crimea.
Not, even, after the indictment was released. “Alleged hacking,” White House deputy press secretary Lindsay Walters termed Russia’s actions in a statement that offered zero condemnation of the interference.
The only response of Trump’s White House to the latest indictments has been to clutch at the straw that these indictments included no charges against Americans as part of the Russian conspiracy. But if there’s anything the text of the indictments makes clear, it’s just what a thin straw that assertion really is. Before Friday, it was easy to believe that Robert Mueller might bypass charges of conspiracy related to the election interference. I certainly did. I read other actions as a signal that Mueller was going let most of that area drop and concentrate on the money-laundering and illegal lobbying aspects of the case, with a possible side order of obstruction. But after Friday’s charges, it seems almost certain that Mueller intends to pursue a case against members of Trump’s campaign, as well as others who knowing negotiated with criminals for access to stolen goods. Which, by the way, was still a crime even if they claim they didn’t know the crooks they were dealing with were Russian crooks.
At this point, Trump’s indifference to the Russian threat has lost its capacity to shock. His instinct in the aftermath of the indictment was, as always, to lash out at a perceived threat to his validity rather than to acknowledge the gravity of the situation, looking back at 2016 or ahead to November and beyond.
The reasons that the Republicans are so anxious to stop Rod Rosenstein right now, is because it’s clear that right now might be the last moment when anyone, Trump included, can continue to say “no collusion, no collusion” without disagreeing with charges from a Grand Jury.
Randall Eliason is another of those who think the details of Friday’s indictments spell out upcoming actions from the special counsel.
Recall that this past February, Mueller indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies for interfering with the 2016 election, primarily through the use of fake social media accounts. That indictment left two key questions: 1) What about the known Russian hacking of Democratic emails; and 2) did any associates of the Trump campaign knowingly participate in the Russian misconduct?
Friday’s indictment answers the first question. It details the hacking by Russian intelligence officials into computers owned by Democratic political organizations and the Clinton campaign to steal emails and campaign documents.
The second question isn’t explicitly answered in the Friday indictments — as Rod Rosenstein was careful to point out when he laid out the indictments. The way he related these charges to the press, saying that they contained no allegations that any American knowingly cooperated in the conspiracy, was presumably just how he expressed it to Trump. But what he probably did not say was just how much these charges made it possible to apply exactly those allegations Real Soon Now.
… if Mueller does have evidence of American involvement in any of the Russian wrongdoing, that would be the logical next shoe to drop. Although no Americans are charged in this indictment, there is plenty of evidence that a number at the very least benefited from these Russians’ efforts. For example, the indictment charges that the hackers, posing as Guccifer 2.0, sent stolen documents to a candidate for Congress that related to the candidate’s opponent. Guccifer 2.0 also allegedly sent stolen data concerning Democratic donors to a state lobbyist and sent documents about Black Lives Matter to a journalist. Perhaps most important, the indictment charges that Guccifer 2.0 offered assistance to a person — widely assumed to be longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone — who was in “regular contact with senior members” of the Trump campaign.
When it comes to the Trump campaign, Stone would seem to be the guy whose goose was most cooked. Only … Mueller has still not revealed what he got from the testimony of George Papadopoulos or Michael Flynn, or any information from Rick Gates related to the election. The public knowledge in this area shows a dozen different arrows pointing at the Trump campaign. But as every round of indictments from Mueller has demonstrated, he has uncovered a lot more than what is already known by the public.
David Van Drehle says it’s no coincidence that Robert Mueller brought charges against the Russian government just before Trump was about to meet with Putin.
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has indicted a dozen members of the Russian military intelligence branch on charges of hacking American computers, proving that someone in Washington will stand up to Vladimir Putin. Now it’s the president’s turn.
If there has ever been a moment for President Trump to deploy his arsenal of denigration, this is it. His willingness to let fly with brutal candor is one of the traits his supporters love best. And the impolite thing that needs to be said at the two leaders’ impending summit is that Putin is not “a strong leader,” as Trump has claimed obsequiously in the past. Putin is the emperor with no clothes, the criminal head of a failing state, the latest in a long train of dismal leaders to darken the tragic history of the Russian people.
But where did we leave Trump? Back in bed, upset because he hadn’t managed to make CNN upset. Hurting the free press makes Trump happy. But upsetting Vladimir Putin … why would Trump do that?
Van Drehle gives a good account of how, starting from similar positions, the US and Russia ran anything but paralell races. And ended up as anything but equals on the world stage.
The divergent paths of the two nations over those two centuries could not be more shocking. The United States found its destiny as the wealthiest and most influential nation in the world, with a gross domestic product that will soon be $20 trillion per year. Russia, by contrast, is stalled, its population shrinking and its economy stagnant. Despite its lion’s share of the planet’s resources, Russia’s GDP is estimated to be less than $1.5 trillion. Three U.S. states — California, Texas and New York — each generate more economic output than the entire Russian nation.
There’s some neat history to absorb in this piece. But the scariest thing should be that the Russian path — one of oligarchs who control everything, leadership that’s free to do as it pleases, press that’s subservient to the ruling class, and an economy built around extraction industries, is exactly the path Trump wants for America.
Dana Milbank on why Republicans just could not stop attacking FBI agent Peter Strzok, even when it was clear their attacks were not working.
The purpose of interrogating Strzok for 10 hours Thursday (after 11 hours in a private session) was clear: ritual humiliation. In fairness, the vast majority condemned Strzok over his texts to his lover without invoking the affair. But then there was Rep. Karen Handel (R-Ga.), picking up where Gohmert left off. “Engaging in the kind of behavior that you have been engaging in, especially with the extramarital affair, it opens up an agent to exploitation and even blackmail,” she proclaimed.
If Republicans really want to go there, they’ll need to investigate the vulnerabilities of some of Strzok’s inquisitors on their glass-house committee:
Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.), who needled Strzok about “text messages with your friend.” DesJarlais, according to divorce filings, had multiple extramarital affairs and encouraged his ex-wife and a patient with whom he had an affair to get abortions.
Desjarlais is not the only one. Just the Republicans who were in the room to question Strzok were Mark Meadows, who is under investigation for sexual harassment, and Mark Sandford, who took a famous walk on the Appalachian Trial all the way out of the governor’s mansion and down to Argentina, And there’s Jim Jordan, who was one of those bashing Strzok hardest while at least a half-dozen former college wrestlers have now come forward to state that Jordan was aware of sexual abuse of athletes under his charge.
The actual outcome — the FBI released damaging information about Clinton on the eve of the election but kept mum about damaging information about Trump — suggests that, if anything, the bias went the other way.
But by all means, let’s hear more about Peter Strzok’s affair.
Republicans understand that if they’re going to move against Rosenstein and Mueller in time to prevent a report that does include charges against members of Trump’s campaign, and possibly against Trump himself, it’s going to have to be soon. They were really, really hoping Strzok would give them something they could use for leverage against the DOJ and FBI. Instead, what Strzok gave them was a pounding. And Democrats are going to release the transcripts of the other 11 hours of Strzok, which promises to be at least as good.
NATO and Russian Agression
David Ignatius agrees with Trump that getting along with Russia would be a good thing. So long as we understand what that means, and what it costs.
Trump obviously relishes this latest installment in the reality-television series that is his presidency. The danger is that the summit will implicitly condone Putin’s brutal tactics in Ukraine, Syria, the European Union and the United States — and foster further discord within the NATO alliance, a Russian goal for nearly 70 years. Trump should consider the possibility that “Helsinki” could someday become a symbolic name for appeasement, like Munich in 1938 or Yalta in 1945.
Russia’s new diplomatic ascendancy is a Kremlin dream fulfilled. When I was in Moscow last summer, Sergey Karaganov, the head of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, bluntly proclaimed Russia’s hope to dissolve the “liberal international order” symbolized by NATO and the other institutions that long sustained American power. “That order we did not like, and we are doing away with it,” he said.
They have a goal. And they have the instrument to make it happen.
Trump’s recent sideswipes at a “captive” Germany and an “unfair” NATO deepened European worries that, in a showdown with Russia, the United States wouldn’t risk nuclear war to defend its allies. Once the credibility of this U.S. commitment is gone, NATO’s ability to deter Russia becomes hollow. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas lamented last month that under Trump, “the Atlantic has become wider.”
Russia has never been in a position to genuinely match the United States on the battlefield. But so long as Trump is willing to allow Putin to saw off a Syria here, a Ukraine there, and maybe a few Balkans for dessert … it doesn’t have to be.
Kathleen Parker wonders if how Trump has handled NATO is the worst act of his time in office … and decides that it’s really hard to pick a needle out of a haystack. Made of needles.
The president’s topsy-turvy approach to foreign policy seems to be: Love thy enemies as thyself — and screw your pals. The result is that our enemies think us foolish and our allies find us both inscrutable and untrustworthy.
Contrary to what some Trump supporters might wish, this isn’t the work of a genius whose strategy is too sophisticated for the ordinary mind to grasp. It is the work of a man who thinks the tools of his former trade as a real estate developer can be as easily applied to complex, global, diplomatic challenges.
Parker often hedges her bets in her attacks on Trump, but these are words I wouldn’t mind having on a sign.
The differences are manifest. If a Trump hotel falls through, the wheeler-dealer moves on to the next, filing for bankruptcy if necessary to fund the next project. If a denuclearization agreement falls through, ka- boom! — the world tips on its axis at a precarious angle. In particular, NATO’s increasing fragility, thanks to Trump’s recent barking performance in Brussels, invites a range of potentially catastrophic repercussions, including, not least, a strengthened Russia with a bearish taste for empire expansion.
Racism / White Nationalism
Sheri Berman on which side of American politics is really using “identity politics” as the basis of its policies and positions. Republicans have found a well-spring of racism that was deeper than any polls, or election results previous to Trump, seemed to suggest.
Rather than being directly translated into behavior, psychologists tell us beliefs can remain latent until “triggered”. In a fascinating study, Karen Stenner shows in The Authoritarian Dynamic that while some individuals have “predispositions” towards intolerance, these predispositions require an external stimulus to be transformed into actions. Or, as another scholar puts it: “It’s as though some people have a button on their foreheads, and when the button is pushed, they suddenly become intensely focused on defending their in-group … But when they perceive no such threat, their behavior is not unusually intolerant. So the key is to understand what pushes that button.”
What pushes that button, Stenner and others find, is group-based threats. In experiments researchers easily shift individuals from indifference, even modest tolerance, to aggressive defenses of their own group by exposing them to such threats. Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson, for example, found that simply making white Americans aware that they would soon be a minority increased their propensity to favor their own group and become wary of those outside it.
And it Trump seems a long way from the kind of expert who might know where people’s buttons are located — he didn’t have to figure it out for himself. Both Steve Bannon and the Russians (and it very well could be Steve Bannon and the Russians, in every sense) were in the field years before Trump ran, test marketing phrases and approaches designed expressly to crack American society open along racial lines.
Russia has always understood — and by always, going back at least to the 1920s — that racial divisions were the easiest lever for them to use against America. They didn’t have to create racism and intolerance, they just had to use it. Highlight it. Press that button.
Leonard Pitts on what seems to be the unending string of white Americans calling the police on black Americans for being black Americans.
Not that there is anything new here. To the contrary, this behavior is as old as the Republic. The only difference is that now we see it on video and more attention is being paid. But if, for some of us, this is a trending topic, it is, for the rest of us, just life. We’ve never known a country wherein some white people did not feel they had the absolute, God-ordained prerogative to regulate us — nor the right to call police when we declined to be regulated.
Why else do you think George Zimmerman felt empowered to stalk 17-year-old Trayvon Martin through a Sanford, Florida, neighborhood? He would require this unknown boy to explain himself. He would get answers. He ended up killing the child instead.
But while “more cameras” is probably a big part of the reason for the increased visibility of this behavior, that doesn’t mean there’s not simply more vile behavior.
... many white people never question their “right” to regulate African Americans. It never occurs to them that black people, who work, pay taxes, go to school, raise their kids and get dinner on just like normal people, deserve to expect, just like normal people, that they’ll be left the heck alone when bothering no one and minding their own business.
That they have the inherent right to regulate black people, brown people, and all those eggheads, city folk, gays, atheists and libtards, is exactly the ticket that Trump is selling. He’s a bully. He’s promising that white Americans will always be protected in their God-given right to bully. Where, you know, bully can mean anything from mocking, to denying a job, to shooting. Fifth Avenue optional.
Immigration
Carl Hiaasen on the sad silence of evnagelical leaders faced with a genuine chance to step up and demonstrate the tenants of their faith.
It feels surreal, as our country approaches the 242nd anniversary of its freedom, to be celebrating the fact that our government is no longer pulling crying toddlers and infants away from their parents along the southern border.
Equally strange has been the sluggish response of some evangelical leaders, whose notion of biblical mercy is one that shines less brightly on immigrants. Rev. Franklin Graham, for example, only last week acknowledged that the U.S. policy of separating migrant families was “disgraceful.”
That word should have thundered two months ago from his pulpit. And other words, too: Heartbreaking, inhumane, cold-blooded, shameful, un-Christian, un-American, immoral, indefensible.
Graham saves those words for talking about gay couples in a loving relationship. Or any American who doesn’t believe that Graham personally has the right to determine what they do in their bedroom or their lives.
Even when he finally spoke out against the separating of migrant families, Graham refused to blame the president. “This is not the administration’s fault. I don’t point the finger at Trump,” said the son of the late, iconic Billy Graham.
He then shrunk behind the same outlandish lie that President Trump’s allies had been using to defend what was happening: Immigration law requires border officers to yank some kids away from their parents. It’s all the fault of Congress!
Well, a big part of that is that Graham’s a coward. And … cowardly.
True evangelicals try to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, a man who would be sickened by what’s happened here, and would never have waited so long to speak up.
It’s good to see Hiassen back and writing forcefully, And still terribly sad to think that his brother was one of those killed in the shooting at the Capital Gazette.
Supreme Court / Brett Kavanaugh
Lawrence Douglas wonders what everyone has a good reason to wonder: Given his expressed views, why should we not believe Brett Kavanaugh would allow Trump to skate away from any crimes?
Had Republicans not obstinately blocked Obama’s own supreme court nominee, Merrick Garland, in 2016, the choice of Kavanaugh would be less consequential. Garland, an eminently qualified centrist, would be concluding his second year as an associate justice on the supreme court. A progressive-centrist majority of Breyer, Kagan, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Garland would now control the court.
Your regular reminder that Mitch McConnell deserves to have his name stamped on the bottom of every urinal in the nation. Douglas’ piece touches on the make-up the court, the nature of the conspiracy among Republicans that got us to this point, and looks at some of the possible steps an unchecked executive might take to cement even greater power.
In Poland, another ruler of authoritarian bent, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of the Law and Justice Party, has launched a frontal assault on that nation’s supreme appellate court. By lowering the mandatory retirement age of judges to 65, Kaczynski aims to stack the court with party hacks and loyalists. The president of the supreme court Malgorzata Gersdorf, who is 65, has refused to resign, declaring: “I’m doing this to defend the rule of law and to testify to the truth about the line between the constitution and the violation of the constitution.”
Poland’s experience reminds us that there’s more at stake in Kavanaugh’s appointment to the supreme court than the future of abortion rights or affirmative action, crucial as these matters are. Weighty questions may face this court: whether a president can ignore a subpoena; whether a president can pardon himself; whether a sitting president can be indicted. Such questions, should they need to be settled, will challenge the legitimacy of the court as a guardian of the constitutional order.
That legitimacy was kicked in the head during Bush v Gore. McConnell stabbed it the back. Now Trump is going in for the kill.
Jill Abramson on Kavanaugh’s version of “textural originalism.”
Ed Meese was the cherry on top.
The 86-year-old former attorney general was one of the first dignitaries Donald Trump trotted out at his carefully orchestrated, prime-time roll-out of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the US supreme court. Meese, Ronald Reagan’s right-hand man from California, is the godfather of “original intent”, the crackpot, rightwing legal theory that will, if Kavanaugh is confirmed, be enshrined for decades to come. For the first time since Reagan began stacking the court with originalists like the late justice Antonin Scalia, they will, if Kavanaugh is confirmed, have a solid, unbending court majority.
It’s worth remembering that, far from being some fresh-from-the-founding-fathers view of the Constitution that has been defended by conservatives since time out of mind, original intent is a new idea. It’s not the tradition. It’s a radical rewrite of the intentional flexibility and situational appropriateness that everyone had previously understood was baked into the system.
Kavanaugh’s nomination, no surprise, is a huge victory for the originalists, conservative legal thinkers who believe in a strict, textual interpretation of the constitution. They believe in adhering to the intent of framers of the constitution, white men whose outlook reflected 18th-century realities and whose thinking the originalists believe they have a unique ability to divine.
Even those men wouldn’t have understood what the orignalists were doing. The idea of them ignoring the situations they were facing, and instead trying to parse out what was on the mind of the men who signed the Magna Carta would have been laughable. It should be laughable. Instead, it’s stupid, but not funny at all.
Trump is a liar
Joe Scarborough drops by the Washington Post to remind everyone of something of which we get an ample daily demonstration, but … okay.
On June 1, just less than 500 days into the president’s term, The Post had counted 3,251 false or misleading claims by the commander in chief. Trump continued that dizzying pace during Thursday’s NATO news conference, and then launched his visit to Britain by trashing that country’s prime minister and brazenly lying about it a few hours later.
Just to be clear — the Washington Post is being extremely generous to Trump with these numbers. He lies a lot more often than that.
“I didn’t criticize the prime minister,” Trump said, shortly after criticizing the prime minister. He blasted Theresa May’s handling of Brexit and declared that her fiercest political rival, Boris Johnson, “would be a great prime minister.” Hours later, Trump dismissed the reprinting of his own words as “fake news,” even though the Rupert Murdoch-run Sun tabloid had his attacks on tape.
Trump’s bizarre denials mirrored a claim the president made a week earlier when he tweeted that he had never supported a GOP-drafted immigration bill, this despite tweeting three days earlier, in all caps, that “HOUSE REPUBLICANS SHOULD PASS THE STRONG BUT FAIR IMMIGRATION BILL.”
I need some kind of macro that will shoot these things via email, one lie per email, at people who email me in defense of Trump.
Brexit / AKA “That thing that Trump did NOT predict”
Nick Cohen on the painful position of the UK’s Brexit planners, and the inescapable fact that the whole idea was idiotic on its face.
If you try to understand as well as condemn the architects of Brexit, you see at once that their hopes are in pieces. The strategic basis for Brexit was that Britain would cut its ties with its European allies and set out across the oceans to create a new alliance with America. They believed that some as yet undiscovered hereditary principle guaranteed that the Anglosphere – the white Commonwealth plus America – promoted free trade and prosperity.
So, you know, white nationalism triumphs. What could go wrong?
In vain did their opponents argue that our trade with the EU vastly exceeded our trade with the US and that a strong America would turn on a weak Britain and force it to accept chlorinated chicken and the privatisation of NHS services. Tories of all people were meant to know that life wasn’t fair, we said. The classically educated among them ought to have learned Thucydides’s warning that in international affairs, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”. Trump was an America First protectionist who no more believed in free trade than he supported the #MeToo movement.
Yeah. Misery loves … Wait. No it doesn’t. I’m genuinely sorry we got our Trump on your Brexit. Either one is bad enough on its own.
Sad Animal Facts
Erik Vance on how conservation efforts are barely a roadbump in the growing numbers of human-caused extinctions.
The northern white rhino isn’t going out with the thundering charge that it’s due. It won’t go out in a blaze of glory, fighting a pride of lions, as would befit such an inspiring creature. It’s going to die sad and old, withering away under armed guard in central Kenya while dozens of scientists — and millions of other humans around the world — look on, helpless.
It’s not that scientists have given up on the animal. They haven’t. But even the researchers who are pouring immense resources into technology to preserve the subspecies, which recently lost its last male, acknowledge that we are past the point of no return.
If you feel like you’ve heard this story before, you have. It’s the same way the western black rhino and Vietnamese Javan rhino went out. It’s the same story as the Chinese river dolphin, the Pinta Island tortoise (including the famous “Lonesome George”) and the passenger pigeon.
Suck it up and go read the rest. Redoubling our efforts in this area isn’t enough. We need to retriple them. Re-centi-milli … Let’s just say this needs to get a lot more attention. While Trump is badgering Europe about raising their level of unnecessary military spending to 2 percent of GDP, how about America cuts its military spending to just 2 percent … and spends the resulting hundreds of billions on saving some of the world.
Seriously, finding out a few weeks ago that every wild creature — every zebra and wildebeest, every porcupine, ‘possum and trash panda, every deer in the woods and anteater in Africa — make up just 4 percent of Earth’s animals, while all the rest are us and the animals we specifically raise for our benefit … I’m not over it. I don’t want to be over it.