USA Today:
Trump critics are writing postcards to 'President' Bannon
An embarrassment. Anti-American. Chaotic.
That's how critics have described former Breitbart News chief Stephen Bannon's performance as an adviser to President Trump over the past two weeks. And there's one other epithet: "President Bannon."
Chaotic? That word is everywhere.
Let’s be clear. Trump is incompetent and the GOP agenda as currently constructed sucks. So it’s a matter of time (no one can say short or long) before the whole thing collapses. The trick is minimizing the damage, which can and will be be considerable.
Jonathan Chait/New York:
Obamacare Repeal Is Failing Because It Was Based on a Lie
Last week, Richard Hanna, a Republican from central New York who just retired from Congress, admitted something that almost no member of his party in elected office has been willing to concede in public. “At the end of the day, the Affordable Care Act will in some form survive, and the millions of people who are on it will have insurance,” he said. “It’s something this country needed and something people want. Politically, it’s untenable to just wipe it away. So who really won? In my argument, the president, Obama, won. At the end of the day we will have some sort of national health care that’s going to look very similar to what we have.” The mania for destroying the law is faltering because the Republican crusade to kill Obamacare was always based on delusions that are no longer possible to conceal.
Baltimore Sun:
Ordinary Americans carried out inhumane acts for Trump
A week ago, men and women went to work at airports around the United States as they always do. They showered, got dressed, ate breakfast, perhaps dropped off their kids at school. Then they reported to their jobs as federal government employees, where, according to news reports, one of them handcuffed a 5-year-old child, separated him from his mother and detained him alone for several hours at Dulles airport.
At least one other federal employee at Dulles reportedly detained a woman who was traveling with her two children, both U.S. citizens, for 20 hours without food. A relative says the mother was handcuffed (even when she went to the bathroom) and threatened with deportation to Somalia.
Philip Bump/WaPo:
It’s not unusual that Trump’s approval ratings sagged. It’s unusual that they’re this low.
Talking Points Memo, for example, looked at Gallup daily approval ratings for the president and noted that his net approval — those who said they approved of his job performance minus those who said they disapproved — moved from even to minus-8 over the first week of his presidency. The Los Angeles Times took a different tack, noting that weekly averages of presidential approval give us a better comparative sense of how Trump is faring.
Those numbers, made available by demographic group, let us see what changed for Trump over the first two weeks of his presidency. The upshot? Groups that disliked him drove his overall numbers lower as their perceptions of how he was doing fell further.
While it’s true that those who like him still do, those that don’t are disliking him more and more. He is doing nothing (and will do nothing with Bannon in the WH) to win them over. Sean Spicer and KellyAnne Comway are laughing stocks, and Steve Bannon is out in the spotlight. Not going the way they planned.
Follow the indies, not the Trump/GOP support. That’s your key to interpreting this.
Jeet Heer/TNR:
Blaming Trump for the Next Big Terrorist Attack
The president is accusing the courts of making America vulnerable to terrorism. Here's how the opposition should respond.
Since Trump is preemptively trying to insulate himself from blame for terrorist attacks, it’s up to the Democrats and the broader anti-Trump coalition to push a counter-narrative immediately. The opposition should harp on the fact that Trump narrowly defines terrorism to mean only Islamic terrorism, even though right-wing extremists pose a greater threat to Americans. So if there are future attacks like those in Quebec and Charleston, Trump’s critics will have primed the public about Trump’s turning a blind eye to white supremacist violence.
Might as well blame Trump because you know he is going to blame you. Besides, it has the virtue of being true. His poorly thought out, poorly executed Muslim ban is making us less safe.
Tom Nichols/WaPo, never Trump conservative:
Chill, America. Not every Trump outrage is outrageous.
Constant panic undermines his critics and boosts his base.
And what about the appointment of senior adviser Steve Bannon to the National Security Council? The early narrative was that Bannon was “replacing” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, a claim that is flatly silly since the chairman is, by law, a statutory adviser and cannot be “replaced.” However, the law allows the president to authorize members of his personal staff to attend council meetings and to have a voice in their deliberations. The National Security Council exists to serve the president; it has no statutory maximum size, and no one was “replacing” anyone. It is also possible, as has happened in other administrations, that the council will not be that important and that real power over national security will rest in more informal mechanisms in the Trump White House.
Tom is a good guy, but making a big mistake in underestimating Bannon. He is not alone. This is arguing niggling points and missing the Big Picture. Ah, well, we shall see.
Lawfare:
Apart from Spicer’s comments at the press briefing, which noted that Trump “offered his condolences and thoughts and prayers” to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and pledged support to Canadian law enforcement and intelligence agencies, neither the White House nor the President in his individual capacity has denounced the attack or publicly expressed sympathy with the victims and their families.
This conspicuous silence is all the more notable given the recent news that the Trump administration plans to “revamp and rename” the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program into something called “Countering Islamic Extremism” or perhaps “Countering Radical Islamic Extremism,” and intentionally exclude right-wing extremists from the program’s scope. As J.M. Berger wrote last week in the Washington Post, CVE as it now stands has given scant attention to violent ideologies outside militant Islamism, but explicitly abandoning this supposedly equal-opportunity approach would be “a powerful symbolic statement.”
On Betsy DeVos:
Communication4Health:
Advocacy versus Activism: What is the difference?
Apparently ‘activism’ is a ‘dirty word’ based on how people think about activists and how activists are depicted in the media (UBC, 2010; Cucow, 2011). And who knew? I certainly didn’t … and I’ve been calling myself a human rights activist for years.
To get a sense of the differences, I googled ‘activism’ and ‘advocacy’ on Google Images to see what kind of imagery is associated with each term. Below are two photos that may demonstrate the way that people may think about both change agents...
Advocacy is often seen as working “within the system” whereas activism is seen as working “outside the system” to generate change (UBC, 2010). The implications of this understanding are discussed in length between two professors; Dr. R. Deibert and Dr. J. Kennelly in a panel at the University of British Columbia titled “Advocate or Activist: What is the best way to effect change?” (podcast available here). Dr. Kennelly discusses her ethnographic research with activists across Canada describing how activists “often feel left out of public discourse, and/or feel that they don’t always fit in” to the political and/or social process (UBC, 2010).
Is it possible that people that call themselves ‘activists’ have given up on working ‘within the system’ and feel like more ‘radical’ actions is necessary to bring about true and transformative change? If ‘advocating’ for a healthier society does not produce results, as public health change makers, when do we become ‘activists’ that work ‘outside the system’? What are the advantages and disadvantages of working ‘within the system’ or ‘outside the system’?
NPR:
The Theory That Explains The Anger Of Our Political Moment
The left isn't 100 percent unified, but the power of relative deprivation has helped more or less bridge what was one of the bitterest political divides — between many Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton supporters. After Democrats lost a presidential election (plus some Senate and House races) that almost every forecaster saw as a likely win, the divided party suddenly seemed to come together, as one organizer of the women's march told CNN.
"We have already proven that Hillary and Bernie Sanders supporters can work together against fascism, xenophobia and racism," said Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York.
Nothing unites, it seems, like the sense of vulnerability that comes from a blistering defeat.