Jonathan Chait has been reading those Paul Manafort / Sean Hannity emails.
New York Magazine
Robert Mueller was famously unable to establish a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. Possibly this was because no such conspiracy took place, but it is also very possible that Mueller was thwarted by the refusal of the two campaign aides most closely involved with Russia’s election operation, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, to cooperate with his probe. Mueller found that Manafort passed 75 pages of polling data to a suspected Russian intelligence agent during the campaign, but couldn’t figure out what the data was used for.
Newly-released text messages between Manafort and Fox News host Sean Hannity in 2017 and 2018 give more insight into Manafort’s relationship with Trump, and why he may have withheld cooperation. In the texts, Manafort repeatedly lavishes superlative praise on Hannity, who in addition to hosting slavish pro-Trump propaganda, also gives the president private advice frequently. “You are so important to saving our country,” Manafort says, at one point complaining that in a fair world, Hannity would get a Pulitzer prize.
I’m kind of wondering what Pulitzer prize that would be. Public Bootlicking? Maybe it would be the award for Explanatory Reporting—in the sense that it’s Hannity’s task to explain the Fox policy to Trump.
Manafort repeatedly assures Hannity (and, therefore, Trump) that he won’t flip on the president. “I won’t give in,” he insists. At one point, Hannity asks why Manafort does not “get a sweetheart deal like [Rick] Gates?,” his former partner who cooperated with Mueller in exchange for a dramatically reduced prison sentence. Manafort replies, “They would want me to give up dt [President Trump] or family, especially jk [Jared Kushner]. I would never do that.” Hannity tells Manafort to “stay strong.”
Especially Kushner? Why especially Kushner? Was it the Trump Tower meeting, or something else? Can we drag Manafort out of whatever prison he’s in this week and ask him?
Paul Krugman is here to talk about rich people.
New York Times
While popular discourse has concentrated on the “1 percent,” what’s really at issue here is the role of the 0.1 percent, or maybe the 0.01 percent — the truly wealthy, not the “$400,000 a year working Wall Street stiff” memorably ridiculed in the movie Wall Street.
And … yeah, that sent me looping right back out of the article. Because while Krugman’s point is that the handful of people whose wealth is measured in billions have an impact on the nation as outsized as their bank accounts, let’s just admit there’s no so thing as a $400k “working stiff.” Not only that, someone who collects a bonus that all on it’s own is several times the national average for annual income has more in common with the billionaires than with the real working class—no matter how many zeroes are missing from their total wealth. These are people who never have to think about whether they can pay the utility bill this month. Never have to sit down with the checkbook and figure just which things might go another few weeks without resulting in too many angry phone calls. These are people don’t have take two buses to get to their jobs, because they can afford to live in the same cities where they work, and if they don’t, can afford that shiny BWM to make the trip as pleasant as possible. No, they don’t have the ability to sway national policy to same degree, but their day to day concerns are a world away from those people who worry that a flat tire, or a kid with a broken arm, could put them on the brink of losing their home.
Okay, cycling back in …
Where does this influence come from? People often talk about campaign contributions, but those are only one channel. In fact, I’d identify at least four ways in which the financial resources of the 0.1 percent distort policy priorities:
1. Raw corruption. We like to imagine that simple bribery of politicians isn’t an important factor in America, but it’s almost surely a much bigger deal than we like to think.
2. Soft corruption. What I mean by this are the various ways short of direct bribery politicians, government officials, and people with policy influence of any kind stand to gain financially by promoting policies that serve the interests or prejudices of the wealthy. This includes the revolving door between public service and private-sector employment, think-tank fellowships, fees on the lecture circuit, and so on.
I’ve cut short Krugman’s list, but it’s a good one. And the example he gives of how decisions in 2011 were made to save the wealth of the wealthy, rather than stimulate the economy to help the working and middle classes, is definitely something that needs to be better understood.
Renée Graham is pushing an approach on civil rights issues that I really like.
Boston Globe
Near the end of her keynote speech at a recent Lawyers for Civil Rights event, Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins praised the organization for representing the Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy, whose students and teachers of color were subjected to alleged racist profiling and invective at the Museum of Fine Arts during a class trip.
“I will happily join you in this fight — not as an ally — and this is my favorite thing to say. Allies send a text or whisper to you when no one is around, ‘Keep it up. I believe in what you’re doing,’” Rollins said, dropping her voice to a barely audible level. “I am an accomplice, and hopefully, one day, a co-conspirator.”
That’s not just powerful messaging, it’s an empowering way of thinking about it for all involved.
Given the reception Rollins received from the audience, they understood exactly what she meant. With rights and justice on the line, it’s not enough to be an ally. We need accomplices.
Of course, that word is weighted with criminal connotations. As defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, it’s “a partner in wrongdoing.” Yet in matters of social justice, the emphasis is on “partner.”
This is the point that Rollins, who wants to transform criminal justice by addressing racial disparities — and has ruffled more than a few feathers in this state’s white male political establishment — wanted to make. Allyship can be passive, even dissonant. It’s the person who backed athletes kneeling to protest racial injustice, but wished they wouldn’t do it during the national anthem. It’s those who endorse LGBTQ rights, but believe their issues would garner more favor if they weren’t so “in your face.”
I think it’s all right that there is some edge to the term “accomplice.” More than all right. It’s important it maintain some of the edge.
Michael Tomasky has his finger on the biggest hole in democracy’s dike.
Daily Beast
Joe Biden got hammered for invoking segregationists, but I have another beef with what he was apparently trying to say, which I took to be: If we got along back then with all our differences, we can get along today, too.
Actually, they did get along better back then. But today—we can’t. It ain’t gonna happen.
And it ain’t gonna happen for one reason and one reason only. Rhymes with Fitch Fuhfonnell. And as long as the Democrats—presidential candidates, Senate candidates, House Democrats, whomever—run around acting like Mitch McConnell isn’t a huge impediment to progress in this country, in his way a bigger one than President Trump, and not calling him out as the one-man Berlin Wall of reaction that he is, they’re wasting everyone’s time.
It’s not that getting rid of Mitch McConnell is some partisan dream. It’s not that refusing to seek common ground with McConnell is seeking perfection rather than progress. It’s that McConnell has to go if we’re to save the future of the nation. McConnell doesn’t view any act of compromise as comity. He views it as weakness, and as an opportunity to twist the knife that much harder in the near future.
McConnell knows this is his role, and right now, he’s enjoying it way too much, the way he’s taken to repeatedly calling himself the “Grim Reaper” of the Senate. Recently, he went a little too far even by his own Vaderesque standards. He called any attempts to bring statehood to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico “full-bore socialism.” He walked that back a little Tuesday when an aide told The Washington Post that statehood wasn’t socialistic, but “another example of government overreach.”
Right. Because like, why should citizens of the United States, which residents of D.C. and the Island of Enchantment are (the latter since 1917), have voting representation in Congress? To McConnell, there’s only one reason why they should not: “They plan to make the District of Columbia a state—that would give them two new Democratic senators—Puerto Rico a state, that would give them two more new Democratic senators.”
The only thing wrong with making D.C. a state, and Puerto Rico a state, is that we shouldn’t stop there.
Will Bunch looks at what Russia did in 2016, and what they may do in 2020.
Philadelphia Inquirer
As 2016′s do-or-die presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton drew near, many students at North Carolina Central University, a historically black institution in the city of Durham, couldn’t wait to cast their ballots, to Soar to the Polls, in the name of an early-voting rally staged by campus activists.
“These Millennials are not alienated," Jarvis Hall, an NCCC poli-sci professor, said when the rally was held late that October. "They are engaged, involved and concerned, and they want to draw attention to and take advantage of the early voting.” But those students who instead waited until the fateful Election Day of November 8, 2016, to vote at a campus polling place didn’t soar, but instead came in for a crash landing.
And then, a funny thing happened.
The electronic poll books — records of who’s eligible to vote, to be manned by workers with laptops — had crashed, and Durham County soon took the whole system off-line. The hasty switch to printed poll books, with many voters forced to cast paper provisional ballots, was a comedy of errors — some poll workers dashed out to the Fed Ex store to copy ballots because there were so few — that grew into lines stretching out the door. Facing waits as long as four hours, frantic hotline callers told Greenhalgh they had to take kids to school or deal with an elderly relative, and didn’t think they could come back later in the day and vote in the presidential race. …
Just days before the 2016 voting, Greenhalgh and other activists had heard the first reports that Russian operatives had tried to hack into an election technology company called VR Systems. She wondered that day if VR Systems was Durham’s vendor.
It was.
Did Russia directly intervene to drive North Carolina voters from the polls? Honestly, while that might have sounded like a conspiracy theory on the night of the election, everything we’ve learned about the Russian effort in 2016 has made it harder and harder to dismiss such claims. And harder and harder to swallow the effort Mitch McConnell is putting into keeping America open for hacking in 2020.
Nancy LeTourneau on why Republicans are so unwilling to accept bad poll numbers.
Washington Monthly
Some Democrats don’t want to hear poll numbers that favor their party in the 2020 election because they assume that being in an underdog position is more motivating for prospective voters. I suspect that they are also overcompensating a bit for the shock we all felt when Trump was elected in 2016.
But it is interesting to note that Republicans take the exact opposite approach and will do almost anything to avoid bad poll numbers. In the lead-up to the 2012 election, we saw them suggest that the polls were skewed, while one pundit eschewed them altogether, preferring to count lawn signs. More recently Trump fired his pollsters for bringing him bad news.
In the meantime, it appears that Trump and his supporters have come up with an alternative to polls: crowd size at rallies. We heard inklings about this in 2016 from both the Trump and Sanders campaign. They touted the fact that they were able to draw much larger crowds than Clinton—assuming that meant that they enjoyed greater support from the electorate.
Since his election, Trump has reveled in the size of the crowds that attend his campaign-style rallies. For someone who thrives on adoration, he assumes that seeing a lot of people fawn over him indicates that the whole country (or at least those who matter) loves him.
For Trump the people who fawn over him are the only people who matter. Though, of course, he holds nothing but disdain for them. Everyone else he just hates.
If Trump were leading in the polls right now, we wouldn’t be hearing so much about crowd sizes. Instead, we’d be hearing endlessly about how Trump was wiping the floor with the opposition. In other words, Republicans don’t share the idea that being in the underdog position is preferable and will do just about anything to paint themselves as “winners,” no matter how badly they’re losing.
David Von Drehle on Republicans flinging “socialism” at everything.
Washington Post
A very long time ago, via a series of unlikely turns, I found myself — a 19-year-old nobody from the Denver suburbs — splitting a bottle of expensive champagne with William F. Buckley Jr. The celebrated conservative was charming and amused as I explained, as only a college sophomore can, all the ways in which he was mistaken about the world. For example, the Chrysler Corp. was seeking a government bailout at the time, and I scolded Buckley that capitalists would have a lot more credibility while extolling the free market if they didn’t go begging to the government every time the market ruled against them.
“Ah, David,” Buckley replied, arching his brows and flaring his nostrils in his characteristic way. “I suppose if Lee Iacocca were here with us, he would give you this answer.” The Chrysler boss was perhaps the most famous businessman in America at the time, and the idea that he might parry my thrust was so heady that I leaned forward eagerly. Buckley paused a beat, then hit me with a simple two-word f-bomb.
A lot of what I thought at 19 I no longer believe to be true, and I’m suspicious of anyone much older than 20 who can’t say the same. But that insight into the hypocrisy of corporate socialists — a government for me but not for thee — remains unrebuttable, except with a middle finger.
It’s still hard to believe that’s not a middle finger that a lot of Americans are ready to throw.
Charles Pierce on the disgusting treatment of children held in detention centers.
Esquire
When the Second Boer War erupted in 1899, [Emily Hobhouse] got involved in relief organizations in England. The war was placed in the hands of Herbert, Earl Kitchener, one of the worst of the British Empire’s whack-the-bloody-colonials species of general. To bring the South African guerrillas to heel, Kitchener burned people off their farms. He sent the men off elsewhere in Africa. He confined the women and the children to camps to live in tents. And, yes, because this was the British Empire, there were separate camps for the white South Africans and for black South Africans. By the time Kitchener and the British were done, almost 30,000 detainees had died in the camps from starvation and disease.
When awful reports started filtering back about the horrible conditions in the camps that were set up to confine South African women and children, Emily Hobhouse decided to go there and see for herself. She left England in 1900 for Cape Colony. Things were worse than she’d ever imagined. She wrote lengthy reports back to England, informing the government and the English people about the horrors being done in their names. Emily Hobhouse wrote very, very well.
I’m not going to be able to give you enough of the story Pierce wants to relate to even get back to where it wraps into the current situation. Just go read it all.
Mike Littwin on the way the Democratic primary is already starting to seem long in the tooth.
Colorado Independent
We’ve got a long way to straighten this all out, but, as Yogi Berra liked to say, it’s getting late early. The good news is we’re nearing the end of Stage One of the primary race — when the field came together — and heading toward Stage Two, the debates, which should begin the culling process.
Hickenlooper and Bennet — each polling under 1 percent — are clearly in jeopardy, but both got a break by drawing their way into the second-night debate on June 27. The two nights of debates will each feature 10 contenders. But, by luck of the draw, four of the five top polling leaders — Joe Biden, Sanders, Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris — will be in the second debate. Warren is the lone polling leader in the first debate.
On the upside, Hick and Bennet will get ratings on the second night. On the downside, with the polling leaders on stage, they may have a harder time getting noticed. I mean, Biden and Sanders have never been on the same stage in this race. It will be hard to focus on anything else. But if Bennet and Hickenlooper are going to play with the big boys (and girls), this is their chance.
It would seem that the first debate would offer much more space for some previously overlooked candidate to come forward. The second debate might draw more eyeballs overall, but I’d be worried that “and now we go to Gov. Hickenlooper...” might be heard and “and here’s your chance to refill that coffee cup” in a lot of households.
Anne Applebaum on why we really needed a reminder about Chernobyl.
Washington Post
It wasn’t possible to learn that much about Chernobyl when you were at Chernobyl five years after the accident. The number of deaths was disputed, even then, and it remains so now. As I wrote at the time, the official number then was 31; the scientific director of the exclusion zone thought the number was closer to 7,000; other Soviet nongovernmental organizations used much higher numbers, speculating that early deaths as a result of the accident would hit 300,000. Those figures have changed, but the range hasn’t. There was no way to be certain of the fatalities then, and there still isn’t now. Nobody had measured the radiation at the time of the explosion; nobody kept track of the people who had been evacuated to new homes all over the country; nobody even knew the fate of the soldiers and plant employees who had taken part in the cleanup.
Anyone who has watched HBO’s recent brilliant five-part series, “Chernobyl,” or read Serhii Plokhy’s prize-winning 2018 book, “Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe,” knows that there were deeper problems, too. Layer upon layer of lies and falsehoods surrounded the accident from the beginning. First the reactor’s leadership, then the Soviet leadership, covered up the explosion. Later, they tried to cover up the human errors that led to the disaster. That was why measurements were not made, assessments were not completed, victims were not informed.
And when someone lies, then covers up, and then lies about the cover up, there’s an accumulating problem.
In due course, the extent of the lying created a further problem: Trust in Soviet institutions — medical, scientific and political — plunged, especially in Ukraine. Rumors replaced information. Conspiracy theories replaced explanations. As a result, Chernobyl became an important inspiration for the nascent Ukrainian independence movement; Chernobyl also persuaded the last general secretary of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, to launch his program of glasnost, or openness. He thought that if Soviet institutions began to tell the truth, other Chernobyls could be avoided, and the Soviet Union would remain intact. Instead, it melted down, too.
Hopefully, our dumpster fire won’t pile up the same body count as that reactor fire before someone decides that radical truthfulness is required.
Dana Milbank on how Trump is campaigning on an economy that’s falling apart.
Washington Post
At his 2020 campaign launch this week, President Trump rehashed a familiar boast. “Thanks to our tariffs, American steel mills are roaring back to life. You know that,” he said.
His supporters may indeed think that. In reality, the exact opposite is happening. A few hours before Trump made that boast at his campaign kickoff, U.S. Steel announced that, because of falling steel prices and softening demand, it was mothballing some operations. “We are idling two blast furnaces in the United States and one blast furnace in Europe,” the company said.
Roaring back to life.
That Trump’s steel tariffs failed should be no surprise. As I wrote in March 2018, the industry’s woes have little to do with imports. The tariffs allowed U.S. steel-makers a short-term price hike — long enough for Trump to boast repeatedly that steel was “coming back” (“like never before!”) and to invent a false claim that U.S. Steel was “opening up six major facilities” — before things returned to where they were before. Actually, worse: The tariffs probably cost U.S. producers long-term market share.
Steel. Coal. Cars. Trump is lying about all of them. And just counting on the media to ignore it.
This jarring disconnect between Trump’s fictitious boasts and a grim reality is beginning to repeat itself elsewhere. The house of cards that is the Trump economy is collapsing. This isn’t to say a recession is imminent; the business cycle responds to animal spirits that are not easily predicted. The stock market has been rallying — not because the economy is booming but because investors expect the Federal Reserve to fight growing weakness with rate cuts. The underlying health of the economy is deteriorating. …
The Morgan Stanley Business Conditions Index had its largest drop ever this month and stands at its lowest level since December 2008, right after the crash. Rail traffic has dropped considerably, as shipments contract.
Trump could crawl into a rally over smoldering piles of radioactive waste along streets lined with bodies and he would still be bragging about how great things were. And he starving supporters would shout their agreement.