We begin today’ s roundup with Dana Milbank at The Washington Post:
[Trump] has boasted about the booming market in tweets no fewer than 54 times since taking office. Including boasts he has made in speeches, he has celebrated stock market gains roughly 100 times. In January alone had extolled the “record stock market,” the “most explosive stock market rally,” the “incredible” gains, and more.
And how is that boast working out for him now?
Paul Krugman says don’t read too much into the stock market’s ups and downs, but reminds us:
It’s surely not a good thing that Trump got rid of one of the most distinguished Federal Reserve chairs in history just before markets started to flash some warning signs. Jerome Powell, Janet Yellen’s replacement, seems like a reasonable guy. But we have no idea how well he would handle a crisis if one developed.
Meanwhile, the current secretary of the Treasury — who declared of Davos, “I don’t think it’s a hangout for globalists” — may be the least distinguished, least informed individual ever to hold that position.
So are we heading for trouble? Too soon to tell. But if we are, rest assured that we’ll have the worst possible people on the case.
John Cassidy at The New Yorker:
Having boasted as the Dow was rising, Trump can hardly complain if people now associate him with it as it falls. Indeed, a fear of being held responsible for a downturn on Wall Street was one of the reasons that Barack Obama didn’t boast much about the market’s rise, which began way back in March, 2009.
Damian Paletta and Erica Werner:
President Trump and congressional Republicans have spent much of the past year trying to connect a giddy stock market rally with their economic agenda, but stocks’ precipitous plunge in the past five days has delivered a sobering reality: What goes up can come back down — quickly and with little warning. [...]
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin briefed Trump on the market’s fall Monday during a trip to Ohio, where the president made no mention of the financial troubles in public remarks. Mnuchin is a close Trump adviser, but his views on how the government should respond to market volatility are not well-known since he had little experience in Washington before joining the administration.
Meanwhile, James Fallows at The Atlantic says we should call the Trump era by its proper name:
… A “dying” of democracy? That is the implication of the new book How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of Harvard. Like Frum’s book, this one works against an “it can’t happen here” complacency about the durability of American institutions. The country is so strong, it has bounced back from so much, it has withstood so many “end is nigh!” warnings, that it becomes natural to think that its health and resilience are guaranteed.
Paul Waldman explains how Republicans have discredited themselves in trying to attack the Russia investigation:
On Monday, the committee took another vote on the Schiff memo, this time voting to allow it to become public.
Now here's the amusing part. According to House rules, final approval for this kind of declassification rests with the president. So Trump will be forced to either let the world see Schiff's rebuttal — which by all accounts will beat the already pathetic Nunes memo into mush — or refuse to do so, and thereby only heighten the controversy.
Eugene Robinson writes about the Nunes talking points and why it confirms our worst fears about the GOP:
A bunch of law-and-order, war-on-terrorism, lock-’em-up Republicans suddenly sound like spokesmen for the American Civil Liberties Union, so grave is their concern that our government might in any way trespass upon sacred due process. Imagine how such guardians of the Constitution would protest if, say, that selfsame government were to hold suspects in detention for a decade or more without charges or trials. Wait, my bad: I seem to recall Republicans applauding with gusto when Trump, in his State of the Union address, announced that the prison at Guantanamo Bay will remain open.
Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, packed so much half-truth and distortion into four short pages that it’s hard to know where to begin. His hope must have been that everyone would get lost in thick weeds of arcane detail, losing sight of the big picture. Which is not a picture at all.
On DACA, Kurt Bardella at USA Today gives Democrats some key strategic advice:
I spent the better part of a decade working on Capitol Hill for Republicans in the House and Senate, including the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. During my time there, it became the epicenter of confrontation in Congress with high-profile hearings serving as the weekly battleground for the parties to collide. [...]
Somehow, as the story of DACA has unfolded, Democrats have allowed the public to forget that this crisis was entirely of Trump's making. It was Trump, through his Justice Department, who made the unilateral decision to end DACA last September. And yet, last week he tweeted that “Democrats are doing nothing about DACA” and encouraged people to “Start pushing Nancy Pelosi and the Dems to work out a DACA fix, NOW!”
Our recipe for success in the minority at the Oversight Committee revolved around two very basic principles: 1) Manage expectations and 2) Define success.
On a final note, Glenn Carle at The Daily Beast writes about the Republican attacks on our democratic institutions:
I have lived this process. Its multiple levels of review make it just about certain that FISA requests are based on solid concern about foreign intelligence activity.
So, I can state with confidence that the reaction in the FBI and the CIA to the Nunes memorandum will be disdain for what Madison calls, the “vicious arts” in it. It will be seen for what it truly is: an attempt to protect what appears to be the Trump entourages’ ties to Russian intelligence. And there will be irritation at the groundless slurs it casts on FBI officers, and anger at the harm it could cause the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Justice.