Trump has changed the picture on his Twitter account to one that shows him chairing a meeting of FEMA in anticipation of hurricane season—just to add that extra frisson of horror you didn’t know you were missing. But rather than writing at length his morning, here’s a tale in the space of three tweets.
Look, it’s not as if I want Donald Trump to be in Washington. So what if he’s spent 53 days vacationing at tax payer expense in his first six months? Honestly, that’s the best thing Trump has done. We’d all be happier if Donald Trump had spent six months of his first six months playing golf. Happier still if he would spend the next three and a half, or two and a half or however long it takes the investigation, grand jury, pardon process to play out. A sensible America would make sure there’s never a bad tee time for Donald Trump. A sensible America would have an extra-wide cart fueled up and waiting at his bedside. A sensible America would have a Department of Gee Sir I Think There’s Time for Another 18.
I know this doesn’t make us perfectly safe. Trump did find a way launch cruise missiles while sharing some super delicious chocolate cake and baring the details of military decision making to a few hundred of his very close $400,000 a seat friends. But no plan is perfect.
Now, let’s go read some pundits.
This week’s absolutely incomplete look is absolutely more incomplete than usual. After all, this week didn’t just see musical chairs at the White House. It included the news that Trump had threatened to fire the generals in Afghanistan after giving them a lecture in which he compared the war to remodeling his favorite tony lunch spot. It included Trump whining about Russian sanctions that passed the Senate 98-2, but finally signing them after he realized the Senate intended to run out the clock on the possibility of a pocket veto. It included at least two ill-conceived and DOA notions on how to “explode” Obamacare. It included the DOJ searching for volunteers to turn the Civil Rights division into a means to defend white privilege. It included not just the news that Trump had indeed drafted up Junior’s “adoption” excuse, he had done so on Air Force One, just a few hours after telling everyone that the main subject of his meeting with Vladimir Putin was … adoption.
Clearly, what’s needed here is a national vacation. A minimum of 17 days off for everyone. Can we get someone to watch the place while we’re away? You know. Water the plants. Walk the dog. Issure some sensible policy? How about that Obama guy? I hear he’s good.
And hey, I‘m kind of failing to live up to my promise to not write so much this morning. So …
Julian Borger looks at what Bob Muller is up to.
The legal net around Donald Trump’s beleaguered presidency tightened dramatically this week with news that a grand jury has been established a few hundred yards from the White House, to pursue evidence of collusion with the Kremlin. …
“This sets the scene of action for criminal trials, where charges will be laid, in the worst possible jurisdiction for Trump,” said Scott Horton, a lecturer at Columbia Law School. “Compared to Virginia, Republicans in DC are few and far between.”
Trump supporters have already jumped in to say that a DC-based grand jury is bound to be unfair, because it will be singularly lacking in rich, white, old guys who were born not just on third base but one step from home and who have never done a day’s labor in their entire lives. Actually, there is a good supply of such folks in DC. The problem they are all in Trump’s cabinet.
On Tuesday, after adamant denials from Trump’s lawyer, the White House admitted that Trump had “weighed in as any father would” in drafting a misleading statement about his son’s June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer with strong Kremlin and intelligence links.
What father would not write a note that ultimately throws his son to the wolves in order to preserve his own skin? Don’t worry, Jr. Daddy has the pardon pen ready. He might need to play some golf first, but he will get around to it.
Ruth Marcus calls Trump a “one-man assault on the rule of law”
Reports that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is using a grand jury to collect evidence reaffirmed what was already obvious to legal observers: This probe — and for the president, this problem — is not going away anytime soon.
Marcus is wrong about the one-man assault, thing. Trump’s conspiracy to bring down the American election was a team effort.
Once again, he diminished the significance of Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election and demeaned the findings of the U.S. intelligence community: “The Russia story is a total fabrication. It is just an excuse for the greatest loss in the history of American politics.”
Once again — as the West Virginia crowd chanted “Lock her up!” — he said the focus should be on his vanquished opponent, not him: “What the prosecutor should be looking at are Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails. And they should be looking at the paid Russian speeches. And the owned Russian companies. Or let them look at the uranium she sold that is now in the hands of very angry Russians.”
Don’t be surprised if Trump’s reaction to any indictment against his campaign team is to get Jefferson Sessions to cobble up some charges against Clinton. Trump may well think he can hold Hilary hostage for his sins.
Anne Applebaum doesn’t think highly of America’s chances in Cold War II.
In the 1940s, the British government created a covert research group, the Information Research Department, that put together material on the realities of Soviet life and quietly passed it on to politicians and journalists across Europe. In the 1980s, the U.S. government set up the Active Measures Working Group, a small interagency team that kept track of constantly changing Soviet narratives and came up with responses. Eventually the United States would threaten the U.S.S.R. with sanctions unless it stopped pushing the “CIA created AIDS” mythology. There were ups and downs, successes and failures. But in the end Soviet propaganda failed to win hearts and minds, in part because the United States and its allies pushed back.
But that was before one party in the United States stopped pushing back, and started begging for more.
At the moment, there is no systematic U.S. or Western response to Russian, Chinese or Islamic State disinformation. Attempts to keep track of it are uneven. There is no group or agency inside the U.S. government dedicated solely to this task. And, thanks to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, it looks like there won’t be anytime soon.
Despite a congressional decision allocating $80 million for this purpose, Tillerson has refused to spend the money. This is most certainly not, as Tillerson’s aide R.C. Hammond has claimed, because there is no plan to spend the money: Officials at State have told me that discussions on the issue are well advanced. Nor is it because State doesn’t have the capacity to spend it, or because the department has too many bureaucrats. From the beginning, the plan was always to create a small internal group to spend a large chunk of the money outside the department and outside the government, for example supporting Russian-language media, which can debunk myths told in the Russian media far better than outsiders could.
Think about that for a second: The Trump regime is refusing to spend money that Congress has already allocated for fighting against Russian propaganda. Why? Because Trump, and Tillerson, feel that Russian propaganda is a good thing. Every day they’re helping erode the value of the free press, playing up Trump’s mythology, planting false attacks on his enemies. If Tillerson could just give the money to the Russians, he would.
Natalie Nougayrède on fake history.
[Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán] is on the record as saying Miklós Horthy, the Hungarian leader who cooperated with the Nazis, was an “exceptional statesman”. …
Controlling memory is at the heart of the Putin regime in Russia. Not only has Stalin been rehabilitated, with new monuments built to honour him across the country, but historians and human rights activists who work to document Stalinist crime have come under political pressure. …
In Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, school books have been modified to de-emphasise Ataturk, the founder of the secular republic. …
In Xi Jinping’s China, any mention of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution or of the Tiananmen square massacre is stamped out because it’s seen as a challenge to Communist party rule. …
As clearly as I can tell you where I was on 9/11, I remember where I was and what I was doing on the day the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square to end what had seemed to be a hopeful, peaceful, joyful defense of human rights. That moment when the man who has often been identified as 19-year-old student Wang Weilin facing off against tanks … that’s one of the most incredible images of my lifetime. But even history that we witnessed can still be written out of the history books.
And while it’s tempting to think the rewriting of history is something found exclusively in illiberal or dictatorial systems, it has increasingly become a feature of democracies. Donald Trump’s speech in Warsaw last month strove to cast Poland’s historical struggle for freedom and independence as a “civilisational” battle for family values, “tradition” and “God”, rather than an aspiration to democracy. The narrative entirely left out of the rich and varied political tapestry that gave rise to the solidarity movement. In a strange twist, Trump also drew a parallel between the threat Islamist terrorism poses to “the west” and the “danger” of “bureaucracy and regulation”. His nativist vision of the west as an embattled fortress of Christian nations in cultural danger reflected not only a personal political credo, but a wider attempt to rewrite the history of liberal democracies and the principles they are meant to uphold.
Bet you knew that was coming.
Carol Anderson and the real Trump voters.
White resentment put Donald Trump in the White House. And there is every indication that it will keep him there, especially as he continues to transform that seething, irrational fear about an increasingly diverse America into policies that feed his supporters’ worst racial anxieties.
If there is one consistent thread through Mr. Trump’s political career, it is his overt connection to white resentment and white nationalism. Mr. Trump’s fixation on Barack Obama’s birth certificate gave him the white nationalist street cred that no other Republican candidate could match, and that credibility has sustained him in office — no amount of scandal or evidence of incompetence will undermine his followers’ belief that he, and he alone, could Make America White Again.
Many of the daily or weekly pieces I wrote during the campaign could definitely use an update by this point. But my thoughts on Donald Trump as he entered the race are still just as valid as ever.
The guiding principle in Mr. Trump’s government is to turn the politics of white resentment into the policies of white rage — that calculated mechanism of executive orders, laws and agency directives that undermines and punishes minority achievement and aspiration. No wonder that, even while his White House sinks deeper into chaos, scandal and legislative mismanagement, Mr. Trump’s approval rating among whites (and only whites) has remained unnaturally high. Washington may obsess over Obamacare repeal, Russian sanctions and the debt ceiling, but Mr. Trump’s base sees something different — and, to them, inspiring.
This is your Go Read It All assignment for the morning.
Christine Emba on the pointless crusade behind the DOJ’s announcement this week.
According to a memo leaked to the New York Times, the Trump administration is planning to redirect Justice Department resources to investigate and potentially sue colleges that use “intentional race-based discrimination” in admissions. The project was quickly understood to be targeting affirmative action policies that many on the right see as “discriminating” against white applicants — in particular, ones that might give black and Latino students an edge. This move comes despite the Supreme Court upholding the use of affirmative action to diversify campuses just last year.
Why did quitting never cross Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III’s mind when Trump was attacking him? Because this is his dream job.
Affirmative action is a consistent hobbyhorse on the right because it combines real anxieties with compelling falsehoods. College admission — especially to the elite institutions most often hit with affirmative action lawsuits — has become more selective and is an increasingly important factor in the creation and perpetuation of wealth and opportunity. Elite colleges serve as steppingstones into politics, finance, law and Silicon Valley; higher incomes tend to follow. Even so, 80 percent of top students who apply are accepted into at least one elite school, if not their No. 1 choice. But measures that help historically disadvantaged populations to take advantage of the same opportunity are nonetheless characterized as zero-sum.
Trump may praise Sessions for going after leaks, and attack him when it comes to recusal. But on racism, they’re always on the same page.
The New York Times asks when the winning will begin.
The president’s preferred image of himself as a shrewd, hard-nosed negotiator took a hit last week when The Washington Post published transcripts of his phone conversations in January with President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia. Mr. Trump admitted to Mr. Peña Nieto that he couldn’t make Mexico pay for a border wall, as he had promised many times to roaring crowds at his rallies, but he implored Mr. Peña Nieto to maintain the fiction in public, seemingly oblivious that the Mexican president had every reason not to do so. His bullying tone with Mr. Turnbull could not hide his lack of understanding of the refugee pact with which Mr. Turnbull wanted him to comply.
This is the man who opened his 1987 book, “The Art of the Deal,” by boasting: “Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.”
It bears repeating that Tony Schwartz wrote The Art of the Deal. He wrote the first word. He wrote the last word. He wrote all the little words in between. Pretending that The Art of the Deal has something to say about Donald Trump is simply lazy.