Josh Kraushaar/National Journal:
GOP Panic Spreads to Pennsylvania
Republicans have spent over $9 million in a blue-collar district Trump carried by 20 points. If the GOP can’t win there, they’re in deep trouble.
Republicans are learning an uncomfortable reality about the political environment for 2018: Tax cuts, conservative culture-war staples, and even Nancy Pelosi herself probably won’t be enough to overcome the deep hole that President Trump has put them in. With the White House awash in scandal and struggling to articulate its agenda, the political mood has turned so grim that Republicans are in danger of losing an upcoming special election in the heart of Trump country.
That’s the lesson to draw from the surprisingly competitive campaign Democrat Conor Lamb is running in a Pittsburgh-area district Trump easily carried by 20 points, surviving millions of dollars in outside GOP attack ads portraying Lamb as a liberal in disguise. Even a close loss in such a reliably conservative area would raise red flags that Democrats are on the verge of a major landslide in the November midterms.
Because they don’t care. Did you know 82% of wage earners get their checks direct deposit? Many of them don’t even see a pay stub anymore (you have to go fetch it online). How does that affect whether you ‘feel’ you got a tax cut?
The tax cuts, which don’t hit everyone the same, are being countered with: it’s a set-up to take your Medicare. In any case, there’s also character and service:
Good ad. He may win. But the story is that it’s close when it shoudn’t be.
David Frum/Atlantic:
Trump Repeats Nixon's Folly
This president isn’t the first to embrace a “trade war” to bolster his populist credentials—but in the end, it’s ordinary people who will bear its cost.
Donald Trump is often compared to Richard Nixon in his disdain for law and ethics. The parallel applies to economics too. Nixon in 1971 quit the Bretton Woods agreement and imposed a surtax on all imports. The “shock” disrupted the world economy and profoundly angered formerly trusting friends already uneasy over the war in Vietnam. But Nixon, who knew little and cared less about economics, had his eye fixed on one concern only: the 1972 election. His emergency economic measures—joined to a loosening of monetary policy and a big increase in Social Security payouts the next year—were selected with an eye to one concern only. In the words of Allen Matusow, the shrewdest student of Nixon’s economic policy, “Somehow he had to make the economy hum by 1972 or face likely defeat in his quest for reelection.” What that meant in practice, Matsuow wrote, was that Nixon governed not according to what would work in the long term, but according to “the prevailing mood of the two-thirds of the country he called the ‘constituency of uneducated people.’”
Jack Shafer/Politico:
Standing at the hole’s unstable rim and looking into the chasm is presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner. He had a very bad week, suffering a humiliating downgrade from a top-secret clearance to one lower than the White House chief calligrapher. But that bad news wasn’t the worst. Although still a free man with no charges filed against him, Kushner exudes legal liability, blithely mixing business interests with his role as an adviser to the president of the United States. Mueller will seize on Kushner’s conflicts of interest like signposts to guide his investigative voyage.
Dan Balz/WaPo:
Women and young voters will decide the 2018 elections. If they actually vote.
President Trump continues to define the political conversation of the country with Twitter blasts, public statements and often alarming reports of his behind-the-scenes behavior and moods. But two groups of voters — women and young people — will define the politics of this year, and probably 2020 as well.
These are the voters who stand most apart from the president and who are most at odds with many of the priorities he has advanced in office. Their opposition and energy will determine the level of losses Republicans suffer in the November midterm elections. Come 2020, they are likely to determine whether the president wins a second term, should he indeed seek reelection.
They’re showing up not just to vote but to run.
Peter Wehner/NY Times:
Character is fate. That’s as true for a president as it is for anyone else, and so it’s no surprise that the Trump presidency is engulfed in chaos.
The policy process is broken and incoherent, with the White House lurching from one position to another. Factions are warring. Top aides are embroiled in scandal and bailing out. President Trump is escalating his attacks on his own advisers, especially his attorney general, and is increasingly isolated and embittered.
The Republican Party is learning what should have been obvious from the outset: Mr. Trump’s chaotic personality can’t be contained. Indeed, combining it with the awesome power of the presidency virtually guaranteed he would become more volatile and transgressive. His presidency is infecting the entire party.
Eugene Robinson/WaPo:
The ceaseless barrage of news — both real and fake — from the Trump administration can be numbing, so it’s important to step back every once in a while and look at the big picture: Never have we seen such utter chaos and blatant corruption.
None of what’s happening is normal, and none of it should be acceptable. Life is imitating art: What we have is less a presidency than a cheesy reality show, set in a great stately house, with made-for-television histrionics, constant backstabbing and major characters periodically getting booted out.
Virginia Heffernan/LA Times, speaking of character:
Ivanka Trump: Born to legitimize corruption and make the shoddy look cute
On July 27, 2017, near the end of the one of the most compelling hearings yet on the Trump-Russia affair, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) offered an extraordinary insight. It shot through the proceedings like a comet.
"Corrupt kleptocrats and international criminals make themselves rich in criminality and corruption," he said. "Then at some point they need the legitimate world in order to protect and account for their stolen proceeds."
What? Whitehouse sketched a new bipolar world order, in which the so-called legitimate world, which includes the United States, is not at war with, but rather deeply enmeshed in, the corrupt one, where governments are built on bribery, kleptocracy, electoral fraud, slush funds, legal plunder and nepotism.
In honor of the WV teachers strike, this labor moment brought to you by Gabriel Winant:
That's why the classic union song "Miner's Lifeguard" starts the way it does: "Miner's life is like a sailor's / On board a ship to cross the waves / Every day his life's in danger / Still he ventures, being brave"
Sailors, of course, were famously the first unambiguous proletarians in the modern world, and ships—as CLR James noted long ago—were the first factories.
"To strike" comes from "to strike the sails"
So for the miners to sing, "Miner's life is like a sailors" was a way of saying, "The miner's freedom is an illusion"; for the teacher to put on a red bandanna is to make just this kind of argument about herself by invoking the miner.
Marc Caputo/Politico:
'Everyone sees the difference'
Many lawmakers — particularly those who represent gay and minority communities — say Tallahassee’s disparate responses to the Feb. 14 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando aren’t coincidental, and speak to the intersection of race, privilege, sexual orientation and the priorities of the GOP-led Legislature in the nation's third-largest state.
Put simply: The Parkland high school students hailed from a heavily white and affluent community. The Pulse victims didn’t.