James Hohmann/WaPo:
Email to Donald Trump Jr. could be a smoking gun, as Russia connections deepen
THE BIG IDEA: There is a paper trail.
Last night, the New York Times reported: “Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email. The email to the younger Mr. Trump was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped broker the June 2016 meeting. In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was interested in receiving damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, but gave no indication that he thought the lawyer might have been a Kremlin proxy. Mr. Goldstone’s message, as described to The New York Times by the three people, indicates that the Russian government was the source of the potentially damaging information."
HuffPost:
Americans are overwhelmingly suspicious of Russia and its leader, the new poll finds. Among all respondents, just 17 percent consider Russia friendly or an ally of the United States, while 37 percent call it unfriendly and 24 percent say it’s an enemy. Only 14 percent hold a favorable opinion of Putin, while 63 percent view him unfavorably.
But just 9 percent of Americans rank Trump’s relationship with Russia as among the two issues most important to them. In contrast, 49 percent say that health care is among their top issues, and 37 percent name the economy.
Reed Galen:
Whether or not Donnie JT Jr. committed a crime or not will be decided by Robert Mueller and his team. What we’re discussing now are not legal issues, they’re political. How long will Republican leaders on Capitol Hill continue to defend the president, his family and the strange actions related to one of our foremost foreign opponents. When will they drop the mantle of the old, tired elephant and instead serve as the phalanx of the United States? When will they decide, in the face of extremely unpleasant realities, that a sitting president of the United States and his family have compromised his office and violated his oath?
Rick Wilson/Daily Beast:
A lot of the anger and distress stems from the constant irritations of a Trump reality-tv Presidency, but in many ways, my party has no one to blame but itself. Republicans had seven years not just to come up with a policy alternative to Obamacare, but even more damning, they had seven years to plan the public relations and communications plan for its repeal.
It’s pretty obvious by now that neither plan was ever in place, an act of political malpractice that makes me conclude that my party is missing some of the core competencies. Instead of having a plan, the House gurgled and groaned and then vomited out a bill so odiously unpopular and politically poisonous that even Donald Trump bashed it as “mean.” It’s not a defense of Obamacare to remind leadership that we had seven years to be ready for this fight. Seven years that went by without even the barest framework to read and then shape the public perception of the most fraught, emotionally and intensely personal policy battle of all time.
New York Mag on Benjamin Wittes:
The Man Who Made Liberals Newly Enamored of the Deep State
After the FBI director was fired in May, Wittes relayed to the New York Times a bombshell conversation he’d had with Comey about Trump’s apparent attempts to sway the bureau’s Russia investigation. Then Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that he’d asked a close friend to disclose yet more Trumpian impropriety to the Times. “And that was Mr. Wittes?” asked Senator Susan Collins. It wasn’t, but no matter.
Suddenly, he was D.C. famous; the very next day, Collins and Wittes bumped into each other in the Morning Joe greenroom. “It used to be that what was going to be written on my tombstone was ‘Benjamin Wittes, former Washington Post editorial writer,’ or ‘Benjamin Wittes, who wasn’t even a lawyer,’ ” he says. “Now it’s just, like, ‘Benjamin Wittes, who’s a friend of Jim Comey’s.’ ”
Click the tweet to see them all. Ed Rogers updates as we go through the day.
Christian Schneider/USA Today:
Donald Trump's ‘modern day’ presidency sets us back a century
To paraphrase 'The Princess Bride,' Trump keeps using the word 'presidential.' I do not think it means what he thinks it means.
Craig Garthwaite/WaPo:
Why replacing Obamacare is so hard: It’s fundamentally conservative
As a life-long Republican who has spent months contemplating this question, I’ve come to an answer that will be hard for many conservatives to swallow: Passing an Obamacare replacement is difficult because the existing system is fundamentally a collection of moderately conservative policies.
Vox on why fact checking matters:
Trump supporters know Trump lies. They just don’t care.
A new study explains the psychological power — and hard limits — of fact-checking journalism.
The thinking here: If anyone should be able to incite a backfire effect among Trump supporters, it’s Trump’s campaign director. Manafort gives Trump supporters cover. They can reject the correction and cite one of the most influential figures in the campaign. And if there’s a time backfire ought to occur, it’s during a presidential campaign, when our political identities are fully activated.
But it didn’t happen. On average, all the study’s participants were more likely to accept the correction when they read it. Trump supporters were more hesitant to accept it than Clinton supporters. But that’s not backfire; that’s reluctance. Manafort’s assertion that the FBI statistics were not to be trusted didn’t make much of a difference either.
“Everyone’s beliefs about changing crime over the last 10 years became more accurate” in the face of a correction, Nyhan says.
Charles P. Pierce/Esquire:
This Is Voter Terrorism
Don't yield to Kris Kobach.
True, the story says that many of these people will sign back up again when the Kobach threat is over, but that doesn't mitigate the damage. People have died for this right, and not just in the military overseas, either. Stop doing this. They win if you do. You can't self-deport from self-government. It's a bigger betrayal than even Kris Kobach ever conceived.
Read this, especially the boys.