Atlantic from 2017:
And America can’t allow such a “madman” to get to that point, at whatever cost to non-Americans.
Donald Trump agrees, Graham added, and he knows that because he’s heard it straight from the president: Trump has “got to choose between homeland security and regional stability,” Graham argued. “Japan, South Korea, China would all be in the crosshairs of a war if we started one with North Korea. But if [North Korea gets] a missile they can hit California, maybe other parts of America.”
“If there’s going to be a war to stop [Kim Jong Un], it will be over there. If thousands die, they’re going to die over there. They’re not going to die here. And [Trump’s] told me that to my face,” Graham said. “That may be provocative, but not really. When you’re president of the United States, where does your allegiance lie? To the people of the United States.”
Graham has the same logic about Iran, and the difference between Obama and Trump could not be more stark — and more consequential. For this reason alone, Trump was never an acceptable American president, let alone the other stuff.
NY Times:
An estimated 40,000 Irish men and women living abroad were eligible to cast ballots, and thousands of them traveled to Ireland to vote.
Many shared stories on social media with #hometovote. The majority of posts were by those voting in favor of repealing the amendment, but some shared stories of traveling to vote against the repeal.
James Hohmann/WaPo:
THE BIG IDEA: Donald Trump once again showed friend and foe alike on Thursday that the United States is no longer a reliable negotiating partner.
Trump’s decision to abruptly cancel next month’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un may very well have been the right call at this point. But the way the president went about it will likely have second and third order consequences that he does not appear to have grappled with, from empowering China to straining alliances and undermining future nonproliferation efforts.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s national security adviser told reporters on the flight to Washington earlier this week that there was a “99.9 percent chance” the summit would go on as planned in Singapore on June 12.
Soon after Moon and his entourage arrived back in Seoul from their meetings at the White House, they were blindsided by Trump’s announcement that the summit in Singapore was off. One of America’s closest allies, with as much to gain or lose from the talks as anyone, found out the same way everyone else did that they won’t happen: The White House blasted out an open letter from Trump to Kim.
WaPo:
President Trump credited his “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions and threats with bringing North Korea to the negotiating table to discuss its nuclear weapons program. Now, having abruptly decided to call off an unprecedented summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore next month, Trump looks poised to revert to a hard-line approach.
There’s just one problem: “The multilateral pressure coalition has fallen apart,” says Mira Rapp-Hooper, an East Asia expert at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center.
The United States had relied on Beijing to enforce international sanctions against North Korea, given that 90 percent of the isolated state’s trade goes to or through China. Now, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying Thursday that more sanctions are coming, China will be needed more than ever.
But in Asia, many hold Trump, not Kim, responsible for the sudden collapse of diplomacy.
Trump is a BS artist. Stop giving him so much deference. There's an awful lot of dancing about what happened with the Korean summit, but the main issue is that Trump was unprepared and incapable of participating in something this complex. Even if it’s back on (and we don’t know that), it’s a disaster waiting to happen because he’s still unprepared and incapable, even if the pressure to hold the summit is overwhelming.
Tom Nichols/USA Today:
North Korea summit collapses in a chaotic end to Donald Trump's bad idea
Donald Trump is right to cancel the U.S.-North Korea summit, but the damage is done: Kim Jong Un has proved nuclear threats and hostage-taking work, and Pyongyang is Washington's peer.
This escapade has damaged U.S. security in several ways. First and foremost, the North Koreans have proved that nuclear threats and hostage-taking work: Pyongyang is now Washington’s peer. Meanwhile, American inconstancy has put distance between the United States and our allies in South Korea, who pitched this whole idea as a way, apparently, of talking Trump off the ledge about war. The two Koreas might now, with China smiling quietly in the background, start making their own arrangements, without U.S. involvement. This would suit both Pyongyang and Beijing just fine, but it is an outcome inimical to America's interests.
And once again, the president has demonstrated that his foreign policy is a product mostly of impulse, with no real thought to consequences or even basic process. Every incident like this is a master class for other powers in how to manipulate a reactive, uninformed president and a dysfunctional White House. It is also a reminder that in this administration, national security is not an end in itself, but one of many goods to be traded away for the sake of purely transactional dealmaking.
Trump is unfit to be president, not a new observation but a salient one.
Eric Levitz/New York:
Jordan Peterson Does Not Support ‘Equality of Opportunity’
The reason (most) progressives posit the gender-wage gap — or racial disparities in incarceration, or income inequality — as self-evident testaments to injustice is not that they are committed to “equality of outcomes.” Rather, it is that they believe that in a society as racist, sexist, and economically stratified as our own, it is safe to assume that such inequalities are not solely rooted in meritocracy or social utility.
Jordan Peterson’s default assumption is that in “Western societies” such inequalities primarily reflect “hierarchies of competence” that redound to benefit of the public as a whole. The left, by contrast, assumes that the gender-wage gap (at least partially) reflects the fact that women have been so thoroughly and durably subordinated in the United States, men in Oklahoma and North Carolina still had the legal right to rape their wives as recently as 1993.
Norman Eisen and Elizabeth Holtzman/USA Today:
Donald Trump should not assume he's above the law. A sitting president can be indicted.
That brings us to the ultimate reason that Giuliani and the president would be unwise to rely on the Justice Department policy. Even if Mueller did acknowledge that as special counsel he cannot indict the president, as Giuliani claims, that is not definitive. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein may give him permission to override that limit.
The special counsel regulations and the authority Rosenstein enjoys as acting attorney general over this matter allow him to make that decision. Because of the legal infirmities of the OLC opinions we have described, that outcome cannot be considered off the table. Then it would be for the courts to resolve, and as we have shown, they have been hostile to similar presidential claims.
Make no mistake — we are not suggesting that the forbearance on prosecution that Jaworski and Starr demonstrated is a bad model for Rosenstein and Mueller. The indictment of our democratically elected leader would be an unprecedented and somber moment for our democracy.
Instead, we are arguing that pursuing an indictment of a sitting president is a last resort that is entirely consistent with our constitutional values and democratic norms. It should be on the table not because it is a perfect option, but rather because it is preferable to a world in which our president is above the law and can engage in criminal conduct with impunity.
Noah Rothman/Commentary:
This Is How We Forget Who We Are
Civic propriety vs the people.
Donald Trump’s critics are becoming more strategic. Democrats
who contend that the left should be
more selective with what they chose to become outraged over have been
winning the
argument. Most influential Republicans in and out of elected office stifle their criticisms of the president lest they anger the majority of their constituents who support him. These are sound political strategies, but they leave us with a conundrum. Just because it is politically imprudent to condemn Donald Trump’s divisive impulses doesn’t mean that those impulses are unworthy of criticism. Indeed, even at the risk of sacrificing political capital, Trump’s reckless rhetorical flourishes must be called out for what they are if the country’s humane and republican character is to be preserved.
I frequently give Noah a hard time but then he reminds us there is plenty of common ground.
This is also who we are, alas: What Separating Migrant Families at the Border Actually Looks Like, and yet another reason Trump is unfit to be president.