Walter Pincus/The Cipher Brief:
Don’t be diverted by gossip and bizarre tweets. The most important record of events shows that President Donald Trump and his allies are taking the U.S. federal government down a road toward authoritarianism, starting with their early attempts to destroy the integrity of the Justice Department, FBI and the intelligence community.
If successful, Trump’s activities as president will cause permanent damage to these institutions and the rule of law in this country. On the other hand, the potential harm might be reduced because those same activities have drawn the full attention of Special Counsel Robert Mueller III’s investigative team, which is looking into them for possible charges of obstruction of justice.
James Hohmann/WaPo:
Trump systematically alienates the Latino diaspora — from El Salvador to Puerto Rico and Mexico
THE BIG IDEA: A Manchurian Candidate who was secretly trying to alienate Hispanics would be hard pressed to do as much damage to the Republican brand as President Trump
Laurie Roberts/USA Today:
Which gets me to my second point.
If you’re the Democratic Party, the sun is surely shining upon you today.
Arpaio’s entry into the Senate race seems to boost Rep. Kyrsten Sinema's chances of becoming Arizona’s next senator — the first Democrat to hold the post in 30 years. (Cue Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in a dead faint.)
Nate Cohn/NY Times:
With President Trump starting the new year with a blizzard of tweets and fresh controversy seemingly every day, there are still debates about whether he is as weak as he looks. After all, he managed to win the presidency with terrible favorability ratings a little over a year ago. Analysts have understandably been cautious about assuming that his weak ratings will doom him or his party again.
But it seems clear that Mr. Trump’s approval ratings betray significant political weakness.
David Remnick/New Yorker:
The Increasing Unfitness of Donald Trump
The West Wing has come to resemble the dankest realms of Twitter, in which everyone is racked with paranoia and everyone despises everyone else.
In the meantime, there is little doubt about who Donald Trump is, the harm he has done already, and the greater harm he threatens. He is unfit to hold any public office, much less the highest in the land. This is not merely an orthodoxy of the opposition; his panicked courtiers have been leaking word of it from his first weeks in office. The President of the United States has become a leading security threat to the United States.
WaPo:
The White House struggles to silence talk of Trump’s mental fitness
Trump privately resents the now-regular chatter on cable television news shows about his mental health and views the issue as “an invented fact” and “a joke,” much like the Russia probe, according to one person who recently discussed it with him.
Doubts about Trump’s state of mind have been whispered about in Washington’s corridors of power since before he was elected and have occasionally broken into the open, such as when Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said last August that Trump lacked “the stability” and “some of the competence” to be successful as president.
But Wolff’s book has thrust the topic to the forefront of public debate, prompting the White House to confront the issue directly.
That’s too bad. Tsk Tsk.
James Poniewozik/NY Times:
What Politicians Could Learn From Oprah Winfrey
But to argue that Ms. Winfrey should run for president — or shouldn’t — simply because she’s a celebrity oversimplifies the issue. Most celebrities would make terrible candidates. (No offense, Kid Rock.) The real consideration here is why Ms. Winfrey is a celebrity, and all those qualifications were on display in that speech.
It’s a master’s stage performance. It builds from kitchen confession to mountaintop thunder. It shifts perspective cinematically — close in on young Ms. Winfrey sitting on the linoleum floor, pull back to a panorama of America. It uses preacherly rhythms and even cliffhangers (“a young worker by the name of … Rosa Parks”).
But above all, it’s a story. And it’s a story about stories. It moves from the personal (young Ms. Winfrey watching Sidney Poitier win an Oscar) to the communal (women in Hollywood, and women working on farms and even “some pretty phenomenal men”). It links “your truth” and “absolute truth.” It tells the audience: I have my struggle, and I know you have yours, and that connects us all in the sweep of a global struggle.
Conventional politicians can do that too, though it’s not easy or common. Barack Obama was no one’s idea of a shoo-in when he announced his campaign. But he synthesized his biography (as the “kid with a funny name”), his country’s current struggles and an idea of generational social progress into one evocative narrative — change.
Let the chatter continue. In a meta sense, it’s “let’s fantasize about someone else rather than Trump be president. we are sick of him.”
Vann R Newkirk II/Atlantic:
How Letting Felons Vote Is Changing Virginia
Under Governor Terry McAuliffe, the state embarked on a campaign to grant clemency more often, and to restore the civil rights of convicted felons
Although since a 2015 state supreme court ruling Virginia has been perhaps the most stringent state on teacher’s qualifications—barring all people with anyfelonies from working as a teacher in any district—throughout the South’s history, prohibitions against people with crimes of moral turpitude of any degree have gone hand in hand with legalistic efforts to disenfranchise black people and permanently render them second-class citizens. People in Virginia charged with such crimes, even misdemeanors, cannot work as teachers, marriage therapists, real-estate agents, or registered nurses, and may lose or be denied licensure for dozens of other jobs.
Paul Waldman/The Week:
How Bannonism got Trumped
If there's anything the innumerable "In Trump Country, Trump Supporters Continue to Support Trump" articles have taught us, it's that the support of Trump's base is overwhelmingly personal. They'll follow their leader through as many substantive flip-flops and betrayals as Trump can serve up, whether it's stocking his administration with Wall Streeters when he said he'd stick it to the elites, trying to cut Medicaid when he said he'd protect it, or never getting around to building that wall and making Mexico pay for it. What they love is Trump himself, not what he does.
Bannon helped create that cult of personality, and now it can't be undone. The Republican Party is essentially divided between one group that wants the traditional GOP agenda — tax cuts, less regulation on corporations, abortion restrictions — and another group that wants whatever will serve the greater aggrandizement of Donald Trump. There is no genuine populist Bannonite force in the middle. As for the enemies abroad that Bannon would like to fight, the truth is that as much damage as Trump may do in foreign affairs, the rest of the world regards him as sui generis — yes, they think he's a lunatic halfwit, but don't be surprised when the next American president resets our relations with the globe to the pre-Trump status quo that Bannon found so unacceptable.
Dan Kennedy/WGBH:
When I make the Times my first read, it’s because the writing is better, it offers a broader range of topics, and it carries greater social currency. For all the Post’s success under Bezos and executive editor Marty Baron, it just hasn’t become part of the national conversation to the same extent as the Times. But there is a timidity to some of the Times’ political coverage — a deep institutional need to offer balance when the truth is overwhelmingly on one side, to cover Trump as though he is an undisciplined, falsehood-spewing, but essentially normal president.
In the Times, Trump’s awfulness is too often portrayed as a matter of degree rather than of evidence that our media and political system is fundamentally broken. The picture that emerges is of a news organization often out of sync with its mostly liberal audience and that is way too concerned about what conservatives might say. The media observer Jay Rosen recently criticized executive editor Dean Baquet’s quest for balance in his reporters’ use of social media. Although I largely agreed with Baquet’s order that straight-news reporters refrain from opinionated tweets, Rosen’s assessment of the Times’ and the Post’s use of social media spoke to deeper truths about both news organizations:
The New York Times and the Washington Post are known to keep a close watch on each other. Dean Baquet should be asking himself: why isn’t the Post choking and wheezing on its social media policy? Why is he spending entire days trying to discipline his troops? Is Marty Baron investing his time that way? I doubt it. Baron and the Post exude confidence — in their reporting and the voices that bring it to life on other platforms.
What’s remarkable about this is that it has no effect whatsoever on Christie’s ego or opinion of himself.