Donald Trump has achieved a real paradigm shift in America. He’s performed on such an exemplary level that some statements have simply disappeared from the nation’s vocabulary. Vanished. Statement’s such as “well, it can’t get any worse” and even the concept of a “bad week” seem ever so quaint. No one in America can fill in the blank on a sentence starting with “I’m sure Trump will do better next ...”
Because Trump doesn’t just keep digging when he’s in a hole. He brings an excavator. And dynamite.
In the second week of his regime, Trump called a 13-year veteran of the federal bench a “so-called judge” for ruling against the first version of his Muslim ban. That seems bad. But is it really “Telling the Russian ambassador that you fired that ‘nut job’ of an FBI director and boy that should take some pressure off that whole investigation about me and you” bad? It is not.
Remember when it seemed insane that Kellyanne Conway would endorse Ivanka’s clothing line from the White House briefing room? Now put that on the table next to Trump sending everyone else out of the room, then leaning on James Comey to drop his investigation into Michael Flynn. One of these things is not a shocking attempt to suborn justice like the other, one of these things isn’t quite the same.
Remember when Trump appointed as his EPA director a man who has eight open lawsuits against the EPA and who lets oil companies draft his memos for him? But … okay, that one has held up pretty well.
The point is … it can always get worse, and Donald Trump is an expert at finding more bolgias for the Inferno than Dante ever put in the place. Things that seemed earthshaking two months ago, seem like minor blips next to the F-U titans of today.
Now that Trump is outside the US borders, can we surprise him by building that wall he always wanted?
Hey, what say we go read some pundits?
The New York Times says we’re not yet at Watergate levels of presidential wrong-doing.
Now that Robert Mueller III has been appointed special counsel to investigate ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russia, Democrats and even a few Republicans are drawing comparisons between the present mess and the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon. …
The national interest and the integrity of the democratic process are undeniably at stake in the investigation. And it may turn out that the president and his associates have engaged in an attempt to obstruct justice; really bad stuff could turn up. But Watergate? We’re not there yet.
And … the Times editorial board is wrong. The potential damage of the crimes originating in the Trump campaign is so harmful to the nation that they make Watergate look like a cap gun in Desert Storm. Think about this one: Donald Trump and Mike Pence were both aware that Michael Flynn was acting as a paid agent of the Turkish government, but they still allowed him to intervene to block a plan that was favorable to US goals but didn’t please Flynn’s bosses in Ankara. In doing so, Flynn endangered US strategic goals, along with both US service personnel and allied forces. Then both Trump and Pence lied, repeatedly, about knowing that Flynn was acting as an unregistered foreign agent. They also enlisted surrogates to repeat the lies. That alone is worse than anything that anyone did in Watergate. And that issues doesn’t even involve colluding with Russia, or money laundering for oligarchs, or mocking NATO, or oil deals that could threaten European stability. If all Trump had done was exactly what Nixon did in Watergate, it would have already been forgotten.
Scott Armstrong is also in a Watergate state of mind.
President Trump’s firing of the F.B.I. director, James Comey, drew immediate comparisons to Richard Nixon’s order to dismiss the special Watergate prosecutor, Archibald Cox, in October 1973. Mr. Trump’s insinuation that he had taped meetings with Mr. Comey recalled the secret White House recordings that ultimately brought a president down. And the demands today for aggressive congressional investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election remind me of the pressures on House and Senate investigations into the 1972 Nixon presidential campaign.
As a 27-year-old investigator for the Senate’s Watergate committee, I saw up close how that inquiry unfolded. Our committee helped unearth the most damning evidence against the president. But the special prosecutor’s office played a crucial role in making that evidence public. The two entities overcame partisan and jurisdictional conflicts to bring about the president’s resignation — and their work offers a valuable lesson for today, when hyper-partisanship dominates.
Skip the Time’s piece and read Armstrong’s whole column for a lesson on the history not of the Watergate break-in, but the Watergate investigation.
Eric Posner and Emily Bazelon wonder if Trump will go down first, or the White House.
As President Trump stumbled from crisis to crisis this past week, he reminded the country of a lesson it didn’t really need to learn: A president’s greatest asset is trust. Once he has lost it, he can’t govern. Mr. Trump’s serial recklessness may change not just the course of his presidency but also the office itself. Whatever happens to him, it’s not too soon to wonder what will happen to the presidency when he’s gone.
It’s hard to say that Trump ever had any trust to lose. Even among the minority that voted for him, many readily acknowledged that he regularly folded, spindled and mutilated the truth.
President Trump’s words and actions are straining the relationship between the executive and the other branches of government in ways that may ultimately diminish the power of the office. By showing he’s unworthy of the trust that a president customarily enjoys, Mr. Trump has essentially been daring Congress, the courts and even the bureaucracy to act against him.
Donald Trump is getting his whiny blame-anyone-but-me weakness all over the White House. By the time he hands back the presidency, it may be much smaller thing than when he took it.
Alison Gopnik on the disrespect we are showing to toddler-American’s when we compare them to Donald Trump.
The analogy is profoundly wrong, and it’s unfair to children. The scientific developmental research of the past 30 years shows that Mr. Trump is utterly unlike a 4-year-old.
Four year olds are far more truthful than Trump. They’re also curious and open to learning new things—but then Trump did get a whole ten minute lesson in North Korea from the president of China, so he can occasionally, for very short periods, focus on a topic that doesn’t start with Donald and end with Trump.
Four-year-olds have a “theory of mind,” an understanding of their own minds and those of others. In my lab we have found that 4-year-olds recognize that their own past beliefs might have been wrong. Mr. Trump contradicts himself without hesitation and doesn’t seem to recognize any conflict between his past and present beliefs.
Trump’s ability to completely reverse himself with no apparent recognition that he’s suddenly arguing the other side of an issue may be his one true superpower.
Leonard Pitts actually wrote this one earlier in the week, but I liked it better than his weekend column, so … encore!
Dear Republicans:
So how much more will it take? What else do you need to see?
Seriously: What Rubicon must yet be crossed, what crisis must be borne, what tragedy must befall, before you stop smiling queasy, nothing-to-see-here smiles, stand like grown-up women and men and say, finally, that enough is enough?
How much? Infinitely much. That question from the McCarthy hearings? The one where Joe Welch says “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” There’s no reason to ask that any more. Republicans have given definitive demonstration that the answer is “nope, not one bit.”
Sorry, Republicans, but that will not do. In recent years, your party has been an engine of perpetual outrage and permanent investigation on matters great and small that embarrassed Democrats. From Bill Clinton’s sex life, to Hillary Clinton’s emails, to Barack Obama’s birth certificate, to the tragedy at Benghazi, you have seldom missed a chance to appear before the people in moist concern and righteous indignation.
Jon Klein doesn’t seem to have enjoyed his annual dinner with Roger Ailes, and who can blame him.
That worldview of unending grievance was the cornerstone upon which Ailes, who died Thursday, erected the Fox News Channel. When the network launched in 1996, few realized that Ailes had hatched the prototype news organization of the 21st century: information with attitude; facts yoked to a point of view, the more provocative the better; a tribal vibe, outsiders unwelcome and openly scorned. The Internet did not, as is so often alleged, usher in the siloed media environment in which we find ourselves today and likely forever. Ailes did that — by proving that there is money, influence and power to be found in serving well-defined interest groups instead of trying to please the widest possible audience.
Ailes did more damage to the United States than any enemy, foreign or domestic, in the last fifty years. And in case it’s not clear, that’s an opinion.
... Ailes popularized the notion that all journalists are biased. “At least we’re honest about who is offering opinion, unlike CNN,” Ailes would often say. A lifelong political operative, he could not imagine journalistic scruples trumping partisan goals.
It’s not that facts have a liberal bias. It’s that conservatives are supporters of so many lies.
Erick Erickson has a bit on how Donald Trump is going to cause disaster for the Republican Party.
A Republican reckoning is on the horizon. Voters are increasingly dissatisfied with a Republican Party unable to govern. And congressional Republicans increasingly find themselves in an impossible position: If they support the president, many Americans will believe they are neglecting their duty to hold him accountable. But if they do their duty, Trump’s core supporters will attack them as betrayers — and then run primary candidates against them.
I have to say I’ve always looked on Erickson as sort of the ultimate example of get-me-somebody-ism. The same editorial pages and “news roundtables” that somehow always manage to have eight Republicans for every Democrat cried out with one voice “we need someone who can be the right-wing digital guy, even if his site is rather pitiful and his opinions are a rehash of whatever Fox said the previous day.” And lo, they brought forth Erickson. But he did, at least, not discover an unfettered love for all things Trump the moment Donald passed Lyin’ Ted in delegates. So he deserves some credit … and that was it.
Dana Milbank on how Trump attacked the people with the ink.
The president has the greatest self-pity. The best!
“No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly,” Donald Trump said this week as he heard the special prosecutor’s footsteps.
Thus did our assured head of state, equal parts narcissistic and uninformed, rank his treatment worse than that of Benito Mussolini (executed corpse beaten and hung upside down in public square), Oliver Cromwell (body disinterred, drawn and quartered, hanged and head hung on spike), Leon Trotsky (exiled and killed with icepick to the skull), William Wallace (dragged naked by horses, eviscerated, emasculated, hanged and quartered) and the headless Louis XVI, Mary Queen of Scots and Charles I.
For all of those people, Trump has a resounding “Who?”
Trump hasn’t been treated badly. He has been treated exactly as he deserved, a reaction commensurate with the action. He took on the institution of a free press — and it fought back. Trump came to office after intimidating publishers, barring journalists from covering him and threatening to rewrite press laws, and he has sought to discredit the “fake news” media at every chance. Instead, he wound up inspiring a new golden age in American journalism.
If Trump’s worse crime was making fun of Katy Tur, he would have some grounds to complain (and don’t get me wrong, I really like Katy Tur). It’s not that Trump attacked the press. It’s that he attacked the press while doing a lot of other things that made for big, fat, meaty articles. I’d like to think that, had Trump been an asshole to the press, but not also a manipulative liar, he wouldn’t be getting bad headlines. After all, one side of this issue comes with something called ethics.
Ross Barkan points the finger at the real culprit in Trump’s troubles.
The degree of paranoia, self-sabotage and incompetence endemic to this Trump White House is staggering. By stacking his inner circle with blindly loyal neophytes and assuming he knows far more than he does, Trump guarantees daily chaos. Consider the decision to suddenly fire Comey: how could this make strategic sense, given that any FBI director knows how to leak dirty secrets to the press? Was Trump aware doing so would only raise suspicions that he’s taking part in a vast, Watergate-level cover-up?