Donald Trump, as you may have heard from the Secretary of State this week, is not very bright. He had the good fortune to be born wealthy, and, well, that’s pretty much it. Except that Trump’s lukewarm oatmeal level of dullness is turning out to be a big issue for the entire world.
As was clear well before the election, Trump has only one negotiating technique: Bluster and threaten. In last two weeks, we’ve been reminded that Trump tells his negotiators to act as if he’s crazy and uncontrollable—which may be the easiest acting job on Earth. And we’ve seen again that Trump’s one and only tactic is to drop an offer on the table, splutter like any counteroffer is a deadly insult, and threaten to leave the room if he doesn’t get his way. That was fine when the worst thing that could happen when negotiations fall apart was that a condo in downtown Mumbai went without an official Trump nameplate, but the stakes are a little higher now.
During the campaign, Trump frequently announced that if he couldn’t get what he wanted from America’s partners in NAFTA, he would walk away from the table. Or if China wouldn’t agree to his terms on trade, he’d walk away from the table. The problem with that answer is that it makes no sense whatsoever. No trade deal is simply the worst trade deal possible.
And even that isn’t as awful as how Trump has played this tactic when it comes to nuclear agreements. At this point, Trump has signaled he will take the first step in walking away from the Iran agreement next week. To which the response in Iran will probably be parades and a week-long holiday. They may even order up a few Trump statues. It took years of forging international agreements and the imposition of crushing international sanctions, easily as tough as the ones now applied to North Korea, to bring Iran to the table and bring about an agreement that has halted its development of nuclear weapons. The only thing keeping Iran in that agreement is the concern that breaking the terms would lead to a return of the sanctions regime. How can Iran escape the agreement without worrying about the price of bread in Tehran? Let Donald Trump do it for them.
They cannot believe their luck.
If America steps away from the Iranian agreement even though Iran is certified to be following the agreement … America doesn’t win. And the odds of ever getting together the international consensus that would be required to bring are back to the table aren’t slim to none. They’re just none.
Which brings us to North Korea, the place that’s the obvious receiving end of numerous threats during the week which culminated on Saturday with the statement that “only one thing will work” when it comes to getting Kim Jong Un to put down his missiles.
At this point, it’s not clear whether Trump is continuing his one negotiating tactic of acting crazy and threatening to leave the table, or if he’s genuinely crazy enough to act. It is clear that it no longer matters. Because there’s no one to negotiate with. Donald Trump has nothing that Kim Jong Un wants. He did, a few days ago, before Trump made it blindingly clear that a treaty with the United States has no value. But now, no, Trump has nothing to offer. Now we’re all just balanced on the edge of when Kim Jong Un decides that using his weapons is less risky than holding onto them.
I would sincerely like to beleive that Trump is sitting on some super secret technology that makes him sure the United States could disable North Korea’s weapons before they could sling a missile at Tokyo or let off an artillery barrage at Seoul. But it’s a very good bet that he’s not. It’s just that … Donald Trump is not that bright.
Now, assuming we’re all still here, let’s go read pundits.
Hurricane Nate clipped across the Mississippi Delta last night, and reached the Gulf Coast near midnight. However, for once a storm actually dropped energy at the last minute and came in with lower wind speeds than had been predicted just a few hours earlier. Nate still made it to shore as a hurricane, and we’ve had plenty of opportunity this fall to see that the combination of wind, rain, and storm surge can be deadly. However, the relatively reduced strength and the rapid movement means that no one area is going to receive all that much rain from Nate and we can hope that the damage from this storm will be minimal.
By the time this story actually appears, Nate is expected to be down to a tropical storm, carrying 50-60 mph winds as it crosses into central Alabama, already a hundred miles inland from the coast and proceeding to the northeast. By tonight, the remnants of the storm will be in East Tennessee.
Leonard Pitts mourns, not the lack of truth, but the like of desire for the truth.
Back in 2010, after I recounted in this space an astonishing feat of World War I heroism — a small African-American soldier named Henry Johnson, wounded 21 times, single-handedly fighting off a company of Germans. In response, a guy named Ken shot off an angry email calling the story “PC bull.”
Judi, my assistant, sent Ken documentation. I wrote a follow-up column listing history books and contemporaneous news sources that verified the event. Ken was unmoved. …
These days, you may prove your point to a fare-thee-well, use The New York Times, a study from Harvard, federal statistics, but the skeptical reader will still brush it all aside like a blurry Polaroid of Bigfoot.
I do think that, more and more, this is the war we’re fighting. It’s not left vs right, it’s simply truth vs fiction. Which is scary for all kinds of reasons.
It’s not just Ken who makes me doubt. It’s also Fox “News” and talk radio. It’s Donald Trump’s lies, his war on journalism and people’s tolerance for both. And it’s studies dating to the 1970s, when researchers at Stanford first documented a counterintuitive phenomenon. Namely, that people tend not to change their minds when facts prove them wrong. Instead, they double down on the false belief.
We shouldn’t be surprised that fiction is winning. We may say “truth is stranger than fiction,” but fiction is often more satisfying. After all, fiction has a narrative, a story vector that can connect seemingly unrelated ideas. People like the idea that there is secret writing on the back of their stop signs and that somewhere a council of elders is plotting that one world order. History can seem like just one damn thing after another, while lies—especially ones that tell people they’re more important than they may seem, or that apparently important people are really terrible—are much more pleasing.
Kathleen Parker on Trump’s stream-of-distraction chaos.
When President Trump said a few days ago that now isn’t the time for a debate about gun control, presumably he meant that we should respect a decent interval of time for mourning after the Las Vegas shooting before launching into a political discussion that historically has led nowhere.
If that’s how he felt, it would have been easy enough (and sane) to say. But he didn’t.
More likely, Trump doesn’t want any distraction from (a) his brilliant PR idea to toss paper-towel rolls to thirsty, hurricane-sogged Puerto Ricans (cake to follow); (b) his photo-op Thursday evening with leaders of the armed forces and their spouses during which he teased the “fake news” media he had summoned that the dinner gathering with military brass could be “the calm before the storm.”
“What storm, Mr. President?” an intrepid reporter queried.
“You’ll find out.”
I’m still half convinced that Trump saw a preview for the hackneyed action pic Geostorm and believes he has a network if giant hailstone-producing weather bots at his beck and call. And I believe no one should disabuse him of this idea.
Trump has mastered the Art of Distraction, lately to keep our eyes off the firefight within the White House and the ever-obvious fact this administration is staring at an eclipse without glasses and this president couldn’t lead a starving dog to a tenderloin buffet.
If Trump attempted to negotiate with the dog the way he does with people, he’d get bitten. Which is why Trump doesn’t own a dog.
Ruth Marcus lays out a week in the life of America’s hairball.
On Tuesday, the president tossed rolls of paper towels to hurricane victims in Puerto Rico like T-shirts at a sporting event. He contrasted the disaster they are enduring to the “real catastrophe” of Hurricane Katrina and lauded the “great job” his administration has done responding to Hurricane Maria.
On Wednesday, Tillerson non-denied an NBC News report that he had called the president a “moron.” The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee opined that Tillerson, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly “are those people that help separate our country from chaos.”
You can tell that Marcus wrote the piece a few days back, because she caught Trump’s insistence that the Senate investigate the press on Thursday, but missed Friday’s escalating threats on North Korea. If she started drinking before Friday, it’s hard to say she was wrong.
Doug Sosnik says something that no one is going to like.
Since Trump’s inaugural address, his focus has been on maintaining his support among this loyal base rather than expanding it. As counterintuitive as it may seem, this could be a winning political strategy.
First, Trump knows that gaining the support of a majority of voters in a presidential election is not a requirement; it’s simply an aspiration. In fact, two out of the last three presidents were elected despite losing the popular vote.
That would be the two Republican candidates.
Second, the continued decline in support for both political parties works to Trump’s advantage. The lack of voters’ faith in both parties increases the probability that there will be a major third-party candidate on the 2020 ballot. It will also lead to other minor-party candidates joining the presidential race. The multi-candidate field will further divide the anti-Trump vote, making it possible for him to get reelected simply by holding on to his current level of support.
The Democratic Party is polling within 1 point of where it was in 2012. What is this “decline in support for both political parties” of which Sosnik speaks? The whole point of his piece seems to be “Trump will win if Democrats are stupid and third party candidates get lots of votes” which … yes, I think we kind of knew that.
Jordan Ellenberg on high efficiency gerrymandering.
On Tuesday, the justices heard oral arguments in Gill v. Whitford, reviewing a three-judge panel’s determination that Wisconsin’s Republican-drawn district map is so flagrantly gerrymandered that it denies Wisconsinites their full right to vote. A long list of elected officials, representing both parties, have filed briefs asking the justices to uphold the panel’s ruling.
Other people don’t see a problem. Politics, they say, is a game where whoever’s ahead gets to change the rules on the fly. It’s about winning, not being fair.
Sure. I think that’s in the rules somewhere, isn’t it? One man, as much vote as the ruling party will give him.
Gerrymandering used to be an art, but advanced computation has made it a science. Wisconsin’s Republican legislators, after their victory in the census year of 2010, tried out map after map, tweak after tweak. They ran each potential map through computer algorithms that tested its performance in a wide range of political climates. The map they adopted is precisely engineered to assure Republican control in all but the most extreme circumstances.
There used to be a joke about socialist dictatorships amounting to having a democratic vote … once. The same thing turns out to be true of alt-Reich dictatorships.
David Callahan on how Trump has demonstrated that the social concerns of the 1 percent are exactly one tax cut deep.
Trump’s retrograde presidency has revealed the profound contradictions at the top of the US income ladder. In the wake of the president’s various actions toward immigrants and inflammatory remarks on race, we’ve gotten glimpses of a wealthy class with a powerful social conscience and the potential to offer leadership on some of the most divisive social issues of the day, as well as other urgent matters like climate change.
Yet don’t expect an enlightened new establishment to command moral authority any time soon. That can’t happen until the wealthy and business leaders extend their vision of inclusiveness to the most important sphere of American life: the economy.
In other words, business leaders are right there with you. Except when it counts.
The coming battle over taxes offers an important test in this regard. Will the same CEOs and billionaires who’ve stood up against Trump’s travel ban and support of white supremacists also stand up against tax proposals that would make the rich richer while ballooning the deficit and leading, inevitably, to yet more cuts that hurt vulnerable communities?
That seems unlikely.
Honestly, I wouldn’t expect them to. They didn’t become extremely wealthy through generosity and sacrifice. I just wish that, on this topic at least, everyone else would remember that the one percent … should only get one percent of the votes.
The Washington Post last week published a list of other mass shootings in the wake of the Las Vegas shooting. It’s worth noting that there have actually been so many that this week, they’re publishing another list of the shootings they missed the first time.
Mr. Palmer was right. The DeKalb shooting was not listed. Nor was the March 12, 2005, shooting at the Living Church of God in Brookfield, Wis., that killed seven people. Or the Oct. 12, 2011, shooting at a beauty salon in Seal Beach, Calif., that killed eight people. Or the Sept. 27, 2012, shooting at the Accent Signage Systems in Minneapolis that killed six people. Sadly, we could go on — and that in itself is stark commentary about the epidemic of gun violence in this country. …
So when politicians say they won’t talk about gun control out of respect for victims and their families, it infuriates Ms. Mace. What disregards the families, she said, is not talking about things that can prevent gun violence and not taking any action that could spare other families the pain of losing loved ones.
And the Post also has another related editorial on mass shootings.
“Our hope is that we never become numb to these terrible, preventable events . . .” Those were our words two years ago when we listed the names of some of the people killed in mass shootings in the United States since the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999. The list was compiled as the country reacted to the latest massacre of innocents — nine people killed at a community college in Oregon.
Two years on, the list has grown. There have been mass killings in a clinic, at a holiday party, at an airport, at a nightclub. This week, at an outdoor festival of country music. Young victims and old, male and female, of various religions, races and ethnicities. All needlessly lost to gun violence.
Charles Sykes on one of of Washington’s greatest partnerships.
For years, Republicans have effectively outsourced their thought leadership to the loudmouths at the end of the bar. But perhaps the most extreme example of that trend has been the issue of guns, where the party has ceded control to a gun lobby that has built its brand on absolutism.
And now, again, we are about to see the consequences of that abdication. Congress did nothing in the wake of the mass murder of children at Sandy Hook, and except for a largely symbolic ban on bump stocks, it’s likely that nothing meaningful will happen in the aftermath of the shootings in Las Vegas. Instead, Republicans will round up all the usual clichés and excuses for inaction.
I’m still going to be surprised if we even manage a ban on bump stocks. I expect it to either be turned over to the Trump ATF for infinite study, or end up in legislation attached to something like a universal requirement that every kindergarten teacher (if not student) come to school packing heat.
I saw firsthand how the N.R.A. worked six years ago when I was a conservative radio talk show host in Wisconsin. The context is important here: I was a longtime supporter of Second Amendment rights and had backed state legislation that would allow law-abiding citizens who passed training courses and background checks to carry concealed weapons (as every state now allows in some form). More than 16 million Americans have the permits.
Read on to see how Sykes made the mistake of asking for a modicum of reasonableness in a regulation, and how it turned him into an NRA target
Lily McCaulou speaks out for hunters.
I want my kids to grow up to be what I am: a responsible gun owner.
Last week’s mass shooting in Las Vegas is a reminder that this is a perspective our country needs to hear more from: that of gun owners who favor safer gun laws. We should be helping lead the national conversation about gun control, because we are uniquely suited to move the debate away from polemic and toward effective compromise.
I’m not sure I can agree on either of these points. I’m a gun owner. My son is not. I can’t say that I had one thought while he was growing up that I wanted him to be a gun owner. That’s not to say I would have been dead set against it, just that “gun owner” wasn’t in the list of things I had in mind when I thought of his potential achievements.
And the idea that gun owners should be leading the conversation about gun safety laws, that they—we—are “uniquely suited” to move the debate forward suggests that owning a gun somehow makes you more sanguine about gun safety which … check in with the daily statistics on accidents, suicides, and just plain idiotic use of firearms to see how much that means.
This is my reality as a gun owner: I use guns for an activity I love, but I also worry about gun violence. Like most Americans, I want stronger gun laws such as nationwide universal background checks. I don’t support the National Rifle Association, which seems as if it’s just a few years away from arguing that the Second Amendment guarantees our right to buy nuclear warheads. (On Thursday the N.R.A. did make a rare concession, suggesting that a federal agency reconsider the legality of devices like those used by the Las Vegas shooter to make semiautomatic weapons fire almost as rapidly as automatic ones.) I’m not alone in this position: Approximately 90 percent of gun owners do not belong to the N.R.A.
And that’s great. Now, the 90 percent of non-NRA gun owners need to make our voices heard, along with the 75 percent of Americans who don’t own guns. As long as we don’t speak up, then we’re part of the problem.
Frank Bruni on America’s Nazi whisperer.
Remember all the talk, before Steve Bannon was expectorated from the Trump administration, that he’d be a worse menace on the outside than on the inside?
Turns out it was true.
He popped up last week in a picture as unsettling as any image from Puerto Rico, North Korea or Las Vegas. It showed the potbellied Pygmalion beside a new protégé, Michael Grimm, who is hoping to reclaim, from a fellow Republican, the congressional seat that he had to vacate a few years back when he was convicted of felony tax fraud and sent off to the clink. Bannon apparently wants to help.
Tax fraud? Hell, tax fraud is a badge of honor among Republicans. Just about the only thing that would get more conservatives behind Donald Trump would be a nice tax fraud conviction.
That picture of the two of them in Bannon’s Washington townhouse — the Breitbart Embassy, it’s called — was a declaration of Bannon’s real intent, which is to inflict as much pain and ugliness on the G.O.P. as he can. He’s not an ideologue. He’s an arsonist. And he doesn’t care who or what is reduced to ashes.
If Bannon was restricting his fires to the GOP, I’d be cheering him on. But the bonfires of his vanity tend to spread.