Is Trump Russia’s Useful Idiot, or Has He Been Irreparably Compromised?
That’s the question that needs answering. Everything else is a distraction.
The big question is whether Trump and his aides participated in the Russian hack-and-leak campaign to influence the U.S. presidential election in his favor. Or was Trump just an unwitting beneficiary of Russian meddling? The FBI is now seeking answers in an unprecedented investigation of a sitting president’s ties to a hostile foreign power.
Rather than facilitate the inquiry, Trump and his followers have launched a slash-and-burn campaign to shift the focus away from him and onto his predecessor, former President Barack Obama. Trump launched this counteroffensive in earnest on March 4 when, following revelations that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had lied under oath about his contacts with the Russian ambassador, he tweeted out of the blue that “Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower.” “Bad (or sick) guy,” he said of Obama, comparing him to “Nixon/Watergate.”
This vile accusation, which was later extended to include Britain’s GCHQ intelligence agency, has been refuted by Trump’s own FBI and NSA directors. But that is no obstacle for Trump, who keeps brazenly repeating this falsehood.
NY Times:
President Trump’s Record-Low Approval Rating Continues to Slide
President Trump’s job approval, the lowest of any commander in chief since Gallup began tracking the initial months of a president’s term in 1953, has declined again — and not just among Democrats. According to Gallup’s most recent weekly survey, Mr. Trump’s support among Republicans, while still high, has dropped eight percentage points from late January.
Quinnipiac:
American voters give President Donald Trump a negative 35 - 57 percent job approval, with negative approval among men and white voters, leaving him below former President Barack Obama's worst approval rating, a negative 38 - 57 percent in 2013, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today.
Today's job approval rating compares to a negative 37 - 56 percent approval rating in a March 22 survey by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University.
President Trump is behind among key elements of his base:
- Men disapprove 51 - 39 percent;
- Republicans approve 79 - 14 percent;
- White voters disapprove 48 - 43 percent.
WSJ:
Trump Gains With Rural Supporters, Slips With Military Communities
On the whole, the aggregations of daily Gallup data show only a small dip in Mr. Trump’s job approval. It fell to 35.9% for all of March from 36.9% in February.
But in rural, working-class counties largely based in Appalachia, Mr. Trump saw a 7-point spike in approval, to 61.9% in March. That compared with 54.9% in February.
In counties located around military posts, by contrast, Mr. Trump’s approval fell more than 8 points, to 41.4% in March, down from 50.1% in February.
Bruce Bartlett/NY Times:
Jared Kushner, the Assistant With the Big Portfolio
If President Trump wishes Mr. Kushner to have such big responsibilities, he needs to give him a commensurate staff. Unless he plans to enlarge the White House staff, he will have to take workers from someplace else. Even if he plans to get employees detailed from the departments and offices, he needs to find somewhere near by to house them for Mr. Kushner’s benefit. That means moving people around, which will ruffle feathers and create bureaucratic enemies for Mr. Kushner among those who feel he may be taking responsibility away from them and diminishing their power.
All this can be done; past presidents have done so for various reasons. But I am not sure if President Trump or Mr. Kushner have yet grasped the necessity of staff for the fulfillment of his responsibilities. Without it, Mr. Kushner is just a dilettante meddling in matters he lacks the depth or the resources to grasp.
Krystal Ball/HuffPost:
Preventing The Next Trump
How Democrats lost the working class, and what they must do to reclaim it.
The central issue riling the developed world is the fact that our global economy has polarized into a relatively small, highly rewarded, knowledge economy and a low-skilled low wage service sector which caters to the whims of the fortunate. We can pretend all we want that if everyone got a college degree, then everyone could have access to a middle class life, but this is pure fantasy. There are simply not enough good jobs to go around and this situation is only going to become worse. Globalization has led to an international wage race to the bottom. Automation has undercut the number of workers required to do any particular task. The most common jobs in our new economy are in the low wage professions of fast-food worker, sales clerk, and cashier. To add insult to injury, all three of these most common professions, as well as many more, are likely to be taken over by robots in the not so distant future. Some researchers estimate that nearly half of our jobs are threatened by automation. Towns across middle America are already emptying out as the brightest young people flee what is increasingly an economic apocalypse. We tend to think of these crumbling towns as relics of the past when in fact, on our current path, they are harbingers of the future. In case you are reading this and thinking “I’m a professional ― phew, that won’t happen to me,” well, I have news for you too. Lawyers, accountants and doctors are not safe, these jobs are all also subject to the same automation trends, albeit more slowly. Because these groups have economic and political power, through membership in the donor class, they may be able to keep the robots at bay a little longer, but the result will be the same. The machines don’t just drive trucks better than we do, they read MRIs better than we do, they read litigation documents faster than we do and they find tax loopholes better than we do. H&R Block is already using IBM Watson to do people’s taxes-how long do you think it will be before they are doing higher level tax accounting?
Two differing views of Trump voters:
P. Bump/WaPo:
The web of conspiracy theorists that was ready for Donald Trump
“There were these weird claims the ocean floor was going to collapse and there was going to be a tsunami of oil coming ashore,” Starbird said when we spoke by phone last week. “It was confusing. I remember people were emotionally affected and scared about this, people that lived in the area.” One woman who lived in Louisiana even sent Starbird a panicked message asking if that risk was real. It wasn’t, of course. But the story was shared within that community as though it might be, including by one Twitter user central to the conversation whose main focus during the spill was using it to be critical of Barack Obama.
After the 2016 election, Starbird revisited that discussion and noticed something resonant.
“I went back and tracked some of these articles using the Wayback Machine and they cited Russian scientists, and they went through right-wing blogs that we might call alt-right now,” Starbird said, referring to the Internet Archive’s tool for cataloging the history of websites. “At the time, I didn’t notice what was going on, but with the benefit of hindsight, you notice that this stuff was happening for a long time.”
While Starbird didn’t document any direct influence from Russian actors in her analysis, it would not have been the only instance of their behaving in that way. In his analysis of a Russian disinformation agency for the New York Times in 2015, journalist Adrian Chen documented an incident from 2014 in which Russians actively spread a news story about a disaster at a chemical plant in Louisiana, going so far as to create fake Web pages and news videos to add realism to the effort. Why? As Chen later explained, the intended effect “was not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space.”
Thank you for smoking.
Sarah Kliff/Vox:
I ran a focus group with Trump voters. Half said they support single-payer.
Republican support for universal coverage is increasing
We were in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, sitting in a sparse conference room at a big white table. Perry, who co-owns the research firm PerryUndem, asked the six-member group a question: Who likes Canada's health insurance system? Who wishes we had something like that?
Half of the hands shot up.
This surprised both of us! We hadn't planned to bring up single-payer health care; the focus group was about the Affordable Care Act. But one Trump voter had raised the idea that we'd be better off if we had a health care system like Canada's — where the government runs one health insurance plan for everyone — and wanted to see who agreed.
"There's a lot of countries that it works very successfully in," Michelle said of a Canadian-style single-payer system. (Focus group participants agreed to have their first names published.)
Jeffrey Young/HuffPost:
Trump Says He Should Let Obamacare ‘Collapse.’ That’s Cruel And Irresponsible.
Donald Trump is president now and it’s his job to run this government, whether he likes it or not.
Let’s be plain about what these politicians are threatening to do.
The president of the United States and members of the party that controls Congress are saying that they see problems in the health care system and their plan is to stand by and do nothing while people suffer.
This is breathtakingly cynical, and reveals the Republican Party’s priorities. Getting rid of the dreaded Obamacare at any cost is more important to Trump and his party than acting to improve the health care system for the people they represent.
Barack Obama is no longer president, but thumbing him in the eye and destroying his biggest accomplishment still outweighs taking even the most basic steps to provide relief to the health insurance consumers whose plight Republicans have so often and so vividly bemoaned.