We begin today’s roundup with Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns at The New York Times and their analysis of the Republican Party’s Donald Trump troubles:
Polls and every recent election show that Mr. Trump has galvanized liberal and moderate voters — especially women and those with college degrees — to oppose his party. Yet at the same time, personal loyalty to the president is increasingly the most crucial litmus test for Republicans.
This widening chasm has created a dilemma for Republicans, especially in liberal and swing states.
If they stay faithful to Mr. Trump they risk incurring the wrath of many in the political center during the general election, likely dooming their campaigns. But if they disavow the president, they risk depressing turnout from their core Republican voters and watching their pool of volunteers evaporate overnight.
Jonathan Allen at ABC News:
Status update on President Donald Trump's relationship with Republicans in politically competitive districts: It's complicated. [...] [T]here are districts where Trump is neither welcome nor likely to show up. He is at once the most effective tool Republicans have for turning out their base voters and a political lightning rod who has set the table for Democratic gains in November.
Lili Loofbourow at The Week:
Look, Daniels' story matters for several reasons. Yes, we learned that the president apparently responds well to being spanked with images of his own face — and that afterward, he stopped talking about himself and became (in Clifford's words) "appropriate." There may be a lesson there for how the American polity needs to treat him, with one caveat: Even in this "appropriate" mode, he persists in comparing women in whom he's sexually interested to his daughter Ivanka. This is unambiguously gross and worth condemning.
But that's the least important aspect of this case. From a purely legalistic point of view, the reason this story matters (and it does, immensely), is because this will very likely get Trump and Cohen in serious trouble for campaign finance violations.
The USA Today editorial board:
This might seem like small potatoes compared with some of the other things Trump has been accused of. But it was anything but minor for former senator John Edwards, who was prosecuted for similar third-party payments to a paramour in 2007 as he was beginning a quest for the Democratic presidential nomination. The case went to trial in 2012 and, while the jury did not reach a unanimous decision to convict, it came awfully close. The episode ended Edwards’ political career.
Turning to the topic of gun safety, The Los Angeles Times editorial board analyzes a blueprint for reform:
Given the lack of action in Congress, many states — including California — have adopted much more stringent restrictions than federal law imposes. For instance, it is illegal to buy or sell an assault-style rifle in this state, and county sheriffs can deny concealed weapon permits to applicants who do not make a plausible case for why they need one. So Capitol Hill isn't the only pressure point for gun control; statehouses across the country should be pushed as well. Many gun owners say they disagree with the absolutist positions of the NRA; this would be a good time to join with those seeking reforms to establish a common ground that could help marginalize the NRA's lobbying and ballot-box influence, especially in states with a long history of hunting-rooted gun culture.
Indiana University assistant professor Natalie Kroovand Hipple has an interesting piece in The Washington Post on the data of gun injuries:
Criminal nonfatal shootings are a better yardstick of a community’s safety. They are, in many ways, a superior indicator of violent crime, and determining their frequency would give a more precise snapshot of community safety and better inform police policy and practice. [...]
For the past several years, I have been working in partnership with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department to help the agency learn more about nonfatal shootings. Our work, going back to 2013, shows that nonfatal shootings occur roughly four times more often than homicides committed with a firearm. In Indianapolis, the 13th-largest city in the nation, someone is shot by another person and survives every day. Sometimes it happens more than once a day. Yet there is no system to nationally assess and compare these numbers with other cities.
Meanwhile, The New York Times praises the expulsion of Russian diplomats in the wake of the UK attack, but says the administration must do more:
Monday’s development offers some hope that Mr. Trump may finally be forced to deal with the threat that Mr. Putin poses to the United States and its Western allies.
Put the emphasis there on “hope.” Mr. Trump will have to go even further to push back effectively against Mr. Putin’s mischief, which runs the gamut from interference in the elections in America and other Western democracies to propelling the wars in Ukraine and Syria.
And on a final note, Sam Knight at The New Yorker takes a deep dive into Cambridge Analytica’s parent company:
Since last week, when stories ran in the Observer, the Times, and on Britain’s Channel 4 News about Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, the S.C.L. Group, the organizations have been portrayed as possessing frightening ability and power. According to a whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, who helped set up Cambridge Analytica, in 2013, the company managed to obtain the Facebook data of fifty million Americans, creating a digital platform of unprecedented influence and accuracy—“Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool,” in Wylie’s phrase—that was deployed by the Trump campaign in 2016. S.C.L. and its subsidiaries have also been linked to the two main Leave campaigns during Britain’s E.U. referendum of 2016, which boasted of their digital prowess. S.C.L. denies those links—which include documents, witnesses, and its own employees acknowledging their existence—to the point of incredulity. Which leaves you wondering exactly what it means when a political consultancy boasts of its methods in “behavior change,” “military influence campaigns,” “psychographic segmentation,” and other euphemisms for messing with your mind.