We begin today’s roundup with Peter Nicholas and his analysis of the president’s disturbing tweetstorm:
As Trump and his staff have sparred over his Twitter practices, the president has contended that they’re part of an authentic image. But some aides have worried his tweets are a form of self-sabotage. In his book Fear, the journalist Bob Woodward described a scene in the Oval Office in 2017 after Trump tweeted that Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski had been “bleeding badly from a face-lift” when he saw her at his Mar-a-Lago estate. “I know what you are going to say,” Trump told his then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, according to Woodward’s reporting. “It’s not presidential. And guess what? I know it. But I had to do it anyway.” [...]
The president has shown little indication that his instincts have changed. Amid record-setting staff churn, Trump is more and more untethered to the conventions and norms that past presidents observed, and he has steadily purged the senior officials with the stature to tell him hard truths. John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, came in as chief of staff in 2017 with a mandate to bring more discipline to White House operations. But Kelly’s clout eroded as Trump made plain he didn’t want a gatekeeper. In December, Kelly was replaced by budget chief Mick Mulvaney. But Mulvaney is serving in an acting capacity, meaning he is still auditioning for the permanent job and may be less empowered to tell Trump he’s wrong.
In a very important piece, Congressman David Cicilline writes about the need to investigated Facebook for potential antitrust violations:
A year ago, the world learned that Facebook allowed a political consulting company called Cambridge Analytica to exploit the personal information of up to 87 million users, to obtain data that would help the company’s clients “fight a culture war” in America.
Since then, a torrent of reports has revealed that the Cambridge Analytica scandal was part of a much broader pattern of misconduct by Facebook. [...]
And in its pursuit of dominance, Facebook gave at least 60 device makers direct access to its users’ data. Those actions are under criminal investigation, The Times reported last week. Facebook has also engaged in campaigns to obstruct congressional oversight and to smear and discredit critics — tactics reminiscent of the big tobacco playbook.
Meanwhile, Damon Linker at The Week calls on Democrats not to fall into the middle of the road trap:
If Democrats want to unify the country, they should stop talking about wanting to unify the country.
That's one of the paradoxes of living in a highly polarized political culture. What once might have sounded uplifting and public spirited now sounds banal and naïve. Democrats need to propose a distinctive account of the country's past and present and an alternative vision of its future — one that contrasts sharply with the one emanating daily from the White House and the president's Twitter account. Positioning themselves above it all, as ready and eager to work and compromise with the party of Donald Trump, can't help but make them sound weak and defensive. It certainly won't defeat the president and win back the Senate from the GOP in 2020. The time for such pabulum is over.
Joel Mathis calls out Donna Brazille for her cozying up to Fox “News”:
Simply put, Fox News is a propaganda outlet for the Republican Party, and any Democrat expecting a fair hearing on the network's airwaves is fooling themselves.
This is all true, as far as it goes, but it's important to take the argument one step further: It's not just Fox News that's the problem — it's the whole structure of cable news, and CNN and MSNBC aren't much better. If you want to restore some semblance of civility to American politics, TV isn't the place to do it.
Conflict is part of the cable news business model, after all.
At The New York Times, Michelle Goldberg analyzes the Kushner-Trump entitlement:
According to “Kushner, Inc.,” Gary Cohn, former director of the National Economic Council, has told people that Ivanka Trump thinks she could someday be president. “Her father’s reign in Washington, D.C., is, she believes, the beginning of a great American dynasty,” writes Ward. Kushner, whose pre-White House experience included owning a boutique newspaper and helming a catastrophically ill-timed real estate deal, has arrogated to himself substantial parts of American foreign policy. According to Ward, shortly after Rex Tillerson was confirmed as secretary of state, Kushner told him “to leave Mexico to him because he’d have Nafta wrapped up by October.”
As political actors, the couple are living exemplars of the Dunning-Kruger effect, a psychological phenomenon which leads incompetent people to overestimate their ability because they can’t grasp how much they don’t know.
Former FBI special agent Erroll G. Southers, writing in USA Today, urges the administration to do more to combat the rise of white supremacism and its terror threat:
We could certainly learn a lesson from New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who unflinchingly labeled the incident a terror attack in her first news conference. The Southern Poverty Law Center found that in 2018, there was a nearly 50 percent increase in the number of white nationalist groups in the United States. Last year, right-wing terrorists killed at least 40 people in the United States and Canada, a massive increase from the 17 who were killed by white supremacists in 2017.
Overall, between 2008 and 2017, right-wing and white supremacist terrorists accounted for 71 percent of fatalities from extremist violence in the United States, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
The attacks that make headlines and those that do not are all rooted in the same hateful ideology. None of the attackers embraced unique or isolated ideas; they didn’t need to. The white supremacist ideology already contains all of the components needed to propel a radicalized individual to violence. And we have hard data showing the threat is regularly materializing. So why is there so much controversy over whether right-wing racially motivated violent extremism is a growing threat?
On a final note, don’t miss this piece over at New York magazine, where Rebecca Traister interviews Stacey Adams and chats about her next move:
She is a serious introvert, yet her work requires glad-handing extroversion; she is excruciatingly aware of the electoral challenges that face her as a black woman who grew up what she calls “genteel poor” in rural Mississippi, yet she pushes forward politically with the drive and confidence of a white man; she devours romance novels and soap operas, yet she is also a science-fiction, math, and tax-law geek; she can come off as one of the most relatable politicians out there, yet she is a total egghead who drops million-dollar vocabulary words, once sending me to the dictionary to confirm what panegyric means (I mostly got it through context!). And she is a woman who, having just run in a historic election that many of her fellow Democrats expected her to lose, is now being counted on to win, and perhaps save her party, by prevailing in an equally difficult Senate contest, or maybe the race for the presidency. The deepest irony, of course, is that what Abrams wants to do is fundamentally rebuild the electoral system that failed her, just as the system itself wants to pull her in.