It’s so hard to keep up. Michael Cohen comes across as a crook who knows a lot, and Sean Hannity a stooge who knows very little.
Lots of Pulitzers awarded.
Remember that Syria war? Was that a year ago?
How about those Russian sanctions? Where did they go?
Did you know Pompeo met with Kim Jung Un?
Well, here’s what the pundits have to say.
Paul Waldman/WaPo:
It’s more important than ever that we see Trump’s tax returns
At this point, no one can deny that Trump is never, ever going to release his returns voluntarily. So the only answer is to compel him to do so. If Democrats take back the House, they’ll be able to: According to an obscure provision in the law, the congressional tax-writing committees have the power to demand anyone’s tax returns from the IRS, and then make them public if they choose. Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee tried to invoke this law and get the returns last September, but Republicans voted down the move. If Democrats have the majority come next year, this should be one of their first orders of business.
Then maybe we’ll learn just what Trump has worked so hard to keep secret from all of us.
Robert Wheel/VICE:
With Paul Ryan Gone, the Midterms Are Going to Get Weird
The latest high-profile Republican retirement is set to make House races even more chaotic.
It’s a bit late in the cycle for a wave of more congressmen to call it quits, but it’s not out of the question. Thanks to Geoffrey Skelley’s excellent work, we know that few members of the president’s party retire after filing deadlines—Representative Ryan Costello was only the seventh congressman to do so since 1974 when he peaced last month. So I suspect that those already running for reelection in the 33 states where those deadlines have passed are going to ride out the storm. But there are 44 Republican congressmen who haven’t called it quits yet but still have time to do so. (The head of the Republicans’ House campaign arm predicted there wouldn’t be any more than ten future retirements.)
Considering our 2016 experience I’m loath to say seventh months before the election that Democrats will retake the House, though I do think that if the election were held today Republicans would lose the House.
Margaret Sullivan/WaPo called this one:
Fox News must take tough action on Sean Hannity’s ethical failure. Don’t hold your breath.
Does Fox News deserve the second part of its name? Does it deserve to call itself a news organization?
If so — a big if — the cable channel’s brass must discipline its biggest ratings star and apologize to viewers for Sean Hannity’s appalling and undisclosed conflict of interest revealed Monday.
Edward-Isaac Dovere/Politico:
The GOP ‘Has Become the Caricature the Left Always Said It Was’
Trump’s use of identity politics, [Jennifer] Rubin told me in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast, “is a dead end for the party. It’s a dead end because it’s immoral and anti-American to base an entire political movement on one racial group, and it’s a dead end because that’s not America and [what America] is becoming.”
For Rubin, author of the Washington Post’s “Right Turn” blog, it’s been a fast trip from conservative apostle to apostate.
What better APR material than a pundit interview?
Newsweek:
TRUMP AND WHITE EVANGELICALS: SUPPORT FOR PRESIDENT GROWS, BUT MILLENNIALS LEAVE MOVEMENT
Historian and writer Christopher Stroop, 37, and an instructor at University of South Florida, was raised in a fundamentalist Christian community. He has spearheaded a number of social media hashtags, including #EmptyThePews and #RaptureAnxiety, to provide an online platform for ex-evangelicals to share experiences on everything from being forced to go on “mission trips” to evangelize indigenous peoples, to having to deal with what they call “rapture anxiety”—the belief, drummed into them from a young age, that God will swoop down at any moment and take all the good people away to heaven, leaving nonbelievers to die in the horrible, Biblically predicted Apocalypse.
“I have seen evangelicals say they left after Trump,” Stroop said. “I see people distancing themselves from the label.”
“The ex-evangelicals support group continues to grow,” he added.
Lawfare:
Procedural Hurdles for the Mueller Protection Bills
With speculation about whether President Trump will fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller continuing to swirl, we’ve seen several developments related to legislation that would protect the special counsel. In both the House and Senate, however, potential procedural hurdles lie ahead.
Jill Lawrence/USA Today:
James Comey is back to remind us how Donald Trump got elected. Where's our apology?
The main takeaways from what's already overkill are that as FBI director, Comey knows he handled investigations of two presidential nominees completely differently and has few regrets. Also, Trump is an unethical, impetuous, irrational person who shouldn’t be running the country much less leading the world. These are not new insights, thanks to three years of excellent reporting and opinion journalism. …
The truth is that Comey is once again injecting himself into an election cycle. This time he could end up inadvertently helping Democrats in their fight to win control of Congress in November. But it’s just as possible he will drive conservative as well as liberal turnout, and thereby help Republicans. It’s Comey’s law of unanticipated political consequences. Either he hasn’t learned they are inevitable, or he doesn’t care.