Donald Trump spent the holiday at Bleak House, all by himself, reading about what a jerk he is. If he were normal, some of it would sink in. But he’s not normal, and the country is getting screwed as he acts out on pique and fantasy.
Neil Irwin/Upshot:
Economy Is Strong. Leadership Is Shaky. Which Will Win Out in 2019?
Sometime in the last couple of months, predictions of a major economic downturn or recession in 2019 went from being a crank view to the conventional wisdom.
It is true that the global economy is sputtering, and that the stock market is in its worst pullback in a decade, with the Standard & Poor’s 500 index down more than 19 percent since Sept. 20 as of Monday’s close. But this sense of gloom and pessimism has gotten ahead of the facts on the ground, especially concerning the United States economy.
The real risk is not that insurmountable challenges knock the economy off course. It is that poor leadership converts moderate economic shocks into a crisis.
Heather Long/WaPo:
Trump’s White House tried to calm markets. It backfired.
Many economists warned that President Trump’s focus on the stock market could have painful consequences. In recent days, it has become apparent why. Trump and his top deputies are focused on trying to stop the market slide, but they are helping drive the market down even further.
On Monday, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index closed in bear market territory, meaning the longest bull market for stocks in modern U.S. history is basically at its end. (A bear market is a 20 percent decline from the all-time high, which occurred in September.)
Trump blames Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome H. Powell, his own choice for the post, for the steep stock sell-off. Many on Wall Street say Trump deserves some blame, too.
The president has complained about Powell for months, but in recent days he’s been asking around about whether he can fire Powell, which would be an unprecedented act in the United States and one that would spook markets and banks.
These are important stories because in Trump’s mind, he needs the wall and a good stock market to be re-elected. Never mind that the wall isn’t going to be built, nor does it mean the same thing as border security, and the market is not the economy. Trump is fixated on them, regardless.
Poor baby.
How the neocons see Syria, from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies/Atlantic:
Trump Delivers a Victory to Iran
To their credit, Pompeo, Bolton, McMaster, Haley, and Mattis removed the rhetorical legerdemain surrounding the reasons for American troops being in Syria: They were there to squash the Islamic State and prevent its rebirth, and they were there to check Russia and Iran, which controls Syrian-regime ground forces as well as the indispensable foreign Shiite militias. This American engagement was easily the best bang for the buck that Washington had gotten in the region since 2001.
Nor were Bolton, McMaster, Pompeo, Haley, and Mattis operating outside congressional authorization: At any time, Congress could have cut off funding for U.S. forces if it thought they were straying too far from their original mandate. Congress didn’t do so. Syria may be the one locale where congressional Democrats and Republicans largely agreed about the use of American military power. And if the president were ever serious about rebuilding a transatlantic alliance against the Islamic Republic, Syria was the place to do it.
But Trump just couldn’t buy in. It’s ironic that the president snapped when discussing Syria with Turkey’s President Erdoğan, who is modern Turkey’s first real Islamist ruler and certainly not a friend of the United States. The president’s tweets are a muddle: At one moment, he thinks the Islamic State is destroyed, and therefore our soldiers can come home; at another, he suggests that ending the Islamic State isn’t even America’s business because the group is aligned against the Syrian regime, Iran, and Russia. (“Why are we fighting for our enemy, Syria, by staying & killing isis for them, Russia, Iran & other locals?”) All one can conclude is that the president just wants out of Syria, regardless of the consequences. Even more than Obama, Trump is post-post-9/11.
Again, the traditional conservatives and the populists are being split by this. Can’t be helping Trump. Nor is it true that nothing can budge Trump’s smallish base. In fact, the conservatives are likely a larger faction than the populists.
Timothy Gill/WaPo:
Why the power elite continues to dominate American politics
My research reveals that presidential Cabinets have remained heavily stocked with members of the elite corporate sphere. Since the Nixon administration, more than 70 percent of both Republican and Democratic Cabinets have been filled by either corporate veterans or by people who decamped to corporate America after serving in the Cabinet. George W. Bush (100 percent), Nixon (90 percent), and Ford (82 percent) possessed the highest percentage of these elite appointments, while the Carter (71 percent) and George H.W. Bush (71 percent) administrations had the lowest. Even Barack Obama followed this pattern: 81 percent of his Cabinet either came from or headed to corporate America, and that number may climb as more of his Cabinet members seek corporate perches.
And yet, Trump has taken this tradition to a new level. His administration has featured more individuals coming from the corporate sphere than any recent administration (72 percent). This included individuals such as former secretary of state Rex Tillerson, who was the CEO of ExxonMobil. This beat George W. Bush, the next-highest president, who pulled 64 percent of his Cabinet from the corporate world.
What impact does this have? The mere presence of corporate elites in an administration, of course, does not mean that Cabinets necessarily represent elite corporate interests.
But it does deeply influence what issues get discussed and what perspectives get considered as administrators grapple with policy questions. Stocking the Cabinet with corporate veterans enables elite corporate interests to communicate their preferences easily to both Democratic and Republican administrations. Average Americans don’t have the same advantage, and given the power that Cabinet members wield over government bureaucracies, this should alarm Americans. Whose voices get heard may be distorting our policies at the expense of all but the wealthiest Americans.
Andrew Ross Sorkin/NY Times:
How Banks Unwittingly Finance Mass Shootings
The New York Times reviewed hundreds of documents including police reports, bank records and investigator notes from a decade of mass shootings. Many of the killers built their stockpiles of high-powered weapons with the convenience of credit. No one was watching.
Could also amount for jail time.