John Harwood/CNBC:
Yet the tax-cut has yet not sheltered Republicans as much as they once hoped in the gathering 2018 campaign storm. The party holding the White House nearly always loses Congressional seats in mid-term elections, but Republicans fear results of recent special election foreshadow losses large enough to hand Democrats control of both chambers of Congress.
Last November, Republicans suffered a stunning Senate loss in Alabama. This week, a poll in Tennessee showed Democratic ex-Gov. Phil Bredesen leading GOP Rep. Marsha Blackburn for the Senate seat of retiring GOP incumbent Bob Corker.
Last month, Democrats captured a Pennsylvania House district that Trump won easily in 2016. So far, 38 House Republicans have declined to seek re-election in a year Democrats need to gain 23 seats to recapture their majority.
Dave Wasserman, a top analyst of House races at the Cook Political Report, draws a striking conclusion from the failure of ads touting tax-cuts to save the Republican seeking that Pittsburgh-area seat. Public support for the tax cuts is weak enough, he says, that attention on tariffs or even the president's relationship with porn star Stormy Daniels helps Trump's approval ratings, and his Republican allies, more.
WaPo:
Kelly is the latest high-profile example of a West Wing Icarus — swept high into Trump’s orbit, only to be singed and cast low. Nearly everyone who has entered the White House has emerged battered — rendered a punchline (former press secretary Sean Spicer), a Justice Department target (former national security adviser Michael Flynn) or a diminished shell, fired by presidential tweet (former secretary of state Rex Tillerson).
No one knows how many days remain for Kelly, but when he leaves — either by the president’s hand or because of his own mounting frustration — he is almost certain to limp away damaged.
EJ Dionne/WaPo:
Trump’s politics of outrage is failing him
A fifth of the country can provide an ample audience for a cable network and a lot of radio hosts. It is not enough to win an election. In the nominally nonpartisan Wisconsin judge’s race, as Michael Tomasky notedin the Daily Beast, several counties that had moved from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016 swung back to Rebecca Dallet, the choice strongly endorsed by Democrats. And this came in a low-turnout race. In the Obama years, small turnouts benefited Republicans. The energy gap means that this pattern is now reversed.
A Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll released Friday brought home additional concrete results of this imbalance. It found an astonishing 1 in 5 Americans reporting that they had joined protests and rallies since the beginning of 2016 — and that 70 percent of them disapproved of Trump.
The dilemma for Republican politicians tempted to cut and run from Trump is that doing so might only further dispirit the party’s core and diminish Trump’s already parlous popularity. For his part, Trump knows only the politics of outrage. It is looking like a strategy with a very short shelf life.
Nitsuh Abebe/NYT Magazine:
Why Have We Soured on the ‘Devil’s Advocate’?
A little more than a decade ago, around the same time online sentiment began to turn against the devil’s advocate, it also seized on a close cousin: the “concern troll.” If the devil’s advocate playacts disagreement with you for the sake of strengthening your argument, the concern troll is his mirror image, a person who pretends to agree with you in order to undermine you. The concern troll airs disingenuous worries, sows doubt, saps energy, has reservations, worries that things are going too far. At first, the term described purposeful double agents — people like the congressional staffer suspected, back in 2006, of posing as a Democrat to leave comments on liberal blogs suggesting everyone abandon the candidate vying for a Republican incumbent’s seat. But the term has evolved in such a way that, at this point, a person can very easily qualify as a concern troll without even knowing it.
NY Times:
Farmers’ Anger at Trump Tariffs Puts Republican Candidates in a Bind
“It’s not possible to have true gain without the pain,” said Dan DiMicco, a trade adviser to Mr. Trump during the presidential campaign. “The battle is worth the victory, and we will win.”
But farm-state Republicans like Mr. Cramer believe that their constituents could be a casualty, and they are begging the Department of Agriculture to intervene.
WaPo:
RALLYING NATION
In reaction to Trump, millions of Americans are joining protests and getting political
The poll offers a rare snapshot of how public activism has changed in the 50 years since large street protests and rallies last dominated the political landscape. Back in the turbulent Vietnam War era, college students were the face of protests. Today, many activists are older, white, well-educated and wealthy, the findings show.
I still am of the opinion that "Donald from Queens, first time caller, long time listener" is not good prep work for foreign policy.
Jonathan Cohn/Huffpost:
Trumpcare Is Coming To Iowa, And Your State May Be Next
Republicans have other options, but they keep refusing to try them.
As of 2016, just 20 percent of Iowans eligible to get plans through HealthCare.gov had signed up, according to figures compiled by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. That was the lowest of any state, well below the national average of 40 percent.
Those numbers aren’t simply a byproduct of poor outreach. An unusually large number of Iowans are holding on to “grandfathered” or “transitional” plans ― policies that existed before the Affordable Care Act took effect and that remain cheap, mainly because they originally enrolled people who were in relatively good health. As of last year, these holdover policies accounted for more than half the total market, according to estimates by Charles Gaba, the Michigan-based policy analyst and proprietor of the website ACAsignups.net.
The Obama administration is partly responsible for this: It gave state officials discretion over whether to allow the transitional plans and for how long. But Iowa is among the states where officials have made maximum use of that discretion. One reason may be the political power of Wellmark, the state’s dominant insurer, which happens to operate the old plans.
Jeet Heer/TNR:
Any rock star or Hollywood actor would envy the puff pieces Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman currently enjoys in the American press. Thomas Friedman got the ball rolling in The New York Times last November, praising bin Salam as the Middle East’s great hope, a tireless reformer leading an “Arab Spring, Saudi style” which would modernize the oil-rich autocracy and promote a more tolerant Islam. “After nearly four hours together, I surrendered at 1:15 a.m. to M.B.S.’s youth, pointing out that I was exactly twice his age,” Friedman wrote of their interview, in language recalling Penthouse Forum more than The New York Times Opinion page. “It’s been a long, long time, though, since any Arab leader wore me out with a fire hose of new ideas about transforming his country.”
The column received a devastating rebuke from a group of Middle Eastern scholars led by University of Richmond’s Sheila Carapico, who pointed out that bin Salman’s autocratic attempt to impose social change had nothing in common with the Arab Spring, a genuine mass movement for democratization. Bin Salman’s “growing power has been accompanied by a ramping up of censorship, arrests, imprisonments without (fair) trials and other forms of violent repression against dissent,” the scholars wrote, also noting that Saudi military intervention in Yemen had caused of one of the greatest humanitarian crisis in recent years.
The rest of the thread is here (or click the tweet).
Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:
Congressional Republicans made their Faustian bargain with President Trump: They would look the other way on personal finances and corruption and disregard his racist, anti-democratic outbursts for help in delivering tax cuts, a Supreme Court justice and some deregulation. (We find the bargain morally and politically indefensible, but it’s what Republican House and Senate leaders decided to accept.) When legitimate questions are raised about Trump’s unfitness and chaotic administration, they tell us, “But Gorsuch!” And, in the same vein, “But corporate tax cuts and Environment Protection Agency dismantling!” Now, however, their support for Trump may cost them majorities in the House and Senate as well, as losses in governors’ and state legislative races. The bill is coming due on their short-term gamble.
When you now look at the bargain the GOP has struck, it is evident that Republicans have gotten everything they were ever going to get. The tax cuts passed; Justice Neil M. Gorsuch is on the Supreme Court. But now what? The Trump-GOP agenda is effectively over, as you’ll be able to tell by an utter lack of legislative output for the remainder of the year. In other words, it is all downhill from here. The very likely flip of the House of Representatives to Democratic control (possibly the Senate, as well) will mean, at best for the GOP, a stalemate.
Trump for some time (as we’ve seen in 2017 and 2018 elections) has become a hindrance for the GOP. He’s now also a hindrance to Republicans’ agenda, not a help.
Politico:
How Trump thrives in ‘news deserts’
The results show a clear correlation between low subscription rates and Trump’s success in the 2016 election, both against Hillary Clinton and when compared to Romney in 2012. Those links were statistically significant even when accounting for other factors that likely influenced voter choices, such as college education and employment, suggesting that the decline of local media sources by itself may have played a role in the election results.
That gives new force to the widely voiced concerns of news-industry professionals and academicians about Trump’s ability to make bold assertions about crime rates, unemployment and other verifiable facts without any independent checks. Those concerns, which initially were raised during the campaign, were largely based on anecdotes and observations. POLITICO’s analysis suggests that Trump did, indeed, do worse overall in places where independent media could check his claims.