Mother Jones:
Latest News on Donald Trump Jr. Sparks A Trump Tweet Rant About the “Witch Hunt”
The president responds to the “failing and crooked” New York Times’ “boring” scoop
It’s a pretty damning story, at first glance. But on Sunday President Donald Trump offered alternative read on it—it actually vindicates him, because the disclosure of the meeting meant that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the election had gone nowhere.
The story never actually says that, because that doesn’t make any sense. Mueller’s probe has already indicted 19 people—including 13 Russian nationals—and wrung a guilty plea from the president’s first national security adviser. His campaign manager has been indicted. And the Times story notes that Mueller was investigating this second meeting specifically to see if it, too, had been coordinated in some way with the Russians.
How are things going with the Koreas? Uhm… not so well. Robert E Kelly/Twitter:
Thoughts on Moon’s meeting with Trump tomorrow: 1) It increasingly looks like the Moon administration overstated North Korea’s willingness to deal. Moon will probably get an earful over that.
2a) Moon likely exaggerated this to tie Trump to a diplomatic track to prevent him from backsliding into last year’s war-threats which scared the daylights out of South Koreans. If Trump were less vain and had allowed his national security staff to vet the NK offer, he might have
2b) learned this. But instead, he accepted the NK summit offer 45 minutes after he was told of it, without even telling the White House staff, and then drank his own kool-aid watching Fox telling him for weeks that he deserved a Nobel. Now comes the hang-over.
3) Flattering Trump into diplomacy is likely also why Moon’s government credited Trump with driving NK to negotiation through maximum pressure and suggested that Trump receive a Nobel peace prize….
6a) The great irony, which US conservative media will never admit of course, is that Trump actually drove SK to the table, not NK. Trump scared SKs so much last year, that Moon’s approval rating has shot up into the 80s%, even though he won with just 41% a year ago, and approval
6b) of the summit process is in the 90s%. So if you are a NK hawk, Trump's rhetoric last year made things worse, not better, by scaring up a dovish consensus for Moon to make concessions and keep Trump at bay.
Then again, that’s what predictably happens when incompetents are in charge. What could go wrong?
Ron Brownstein/Atlantic:
The Republican Party's Generational Bet
The GOP is doubling down on its older white base—and hoping the more diverse Millennials don't show up to the polls.
McSally’s rush to embrace that conservative wish list demonstrates how Trump is steadily tugging more of the GOP toward his nativist positions on immigration. But her move, in a state where non-whites will soon represent a majority of the population under age 40, also signaled how much of the GOP strategy for surviving the midterm elections is based on a generational wager. The Republican bet is that the party can mobilize elevated turnout among their older and blue-collar white base without provoking the young and racially diverse voters who personify the emerging next America to show up on Election Day to defend it. Few things are likely to shape November’s outcome more than whether that bet pays off.
Too bad, GOP. School shootings are upending that bet.
NY Times:
Young People Keep Marching After Parkland, This Time to Register to Vote
The pace of new voter registrations among young people in crucial states is accelerating, a signal that school shootings this year — and the anger and political organizing in their wake — may prove to be more than ephemeral displays of activism.
They could even help shape the outcome of the midterm elections. If voters in their teens and 20s vote in greater numbers than usual, as many promised during nationwide marches for gun control this spring, the groundswell could affect close races in key states like Arizona and Florida, where there will be competitive races for governor, the Senate and a number of House districts in November.
Because millennials care most about who is Speaker (it’s snark, they really don’t):
Charles P Pierce/Esquire:
Paul Ryan Is an Almost Comically Inept Speaker of the House
Our latest exhibit is the Farm Bill fiasco.
Ryan is an almost comically bad Speaker of the House. He has no control over his caucus and he is both unwilling and unable to cobble together any Democrats to work with him. (This, by the way, is because Nancy Pelosi is way out of Ryan’s league as a legislative politician, which is why so many Republicans are encouraging Democrats like Tim Ryan to toss her aside.) It is about at this point where we hear that poor Paul didn’t want to be Speaker in the first place, that he has heard that ol’ Rock River a’callin’ and begun a’yearnin’ for his ol’ Nationally Registered Historic Home.
He got what he came here for: a ludicrously unbalanced and economically laughable tax “reform” package that shoved ever more money upwards into the donor class for which he always has been a reliable marionette. Outside of that, the Republicans would have done better for a Speaker if they’d posted the job on Craigslist.
Charlie Cook/ NJ:
Why President Trump’s Numbers Barely Move
But in traveling around the country—I figure I’ve spent the night in 17 states since January 1—there is a group of Americans who don’t seem to be particularly far on the left or right, but still feel alienated from the media and have, as a result, tuned out. It’s not that they are seeking validation of a point of view—they don’t seem to believe anyone, from any point on the ideological or partisan spectrum. For them, the line between reporting and opinion, between news and commentary is no longer visible, or recognizable. That seems to be true among a substantial segment of readers, viewers, and listeners, and frankly, among quite a few journalists as well. As a result, a large segment seems to have tuned out of news and current events, thus disengaged from the political process. What this means for elections in 2018 and 2020 is anyone’s guess.
They don’t move up, either.
The relative stability in Trump’s numbers among Democrats owes to their intensity of feeling. The vast majority of Democrats (78 percent) strongly disapprove of the job he’s been doing. By comparison, slightly better than half of Republicans (55 percent) strongly approve. That intensity gap has been a constant throughout Trump’s term,.
Put another way, the big overall approval numbers for Trump among Republicans masks significant divisions when it comes to the depth of their support.
Our data show subgroups of Republicans that are more hesitant in their support for the president...
First, the roughly three in 10 Republicans and Republican leaners who describe their views on politics as moderate, liberal or otherwise not conservative. Their overall approval of Trump started out 14 points lower than among conservative Republicans in February 2017, and widened to a range of between 15 and 20 percentage points ever since…
Second, younger Republicans – especially younger Republican women – are another source of softness in Trump’s approval rating. While shown a similar modest decline and rebound in his numbers over the past 14 months, the differences when it comes to strong approval among these Republican subgroups is large: Trump’s strongly approve rating is currently 64 percent among Republican men over 45, compared to just 37 percent among Republican women ages 18 to 44.
The above two groups are persuadable and they are significant subsets (e.g., 3 in 10 Rs/R leaners are not conservatives).
Adam Serwer/Atlantic:
The Nationalist's Delusion
Trump’s supporters backed a time-honored American political tradition, disavowing racism while promising to enact a broad agenda of discrimination
What message would those voters have been trying to send by putting a Klansman into office?
“There’s definitely a message bigger than Louisiana here,” Susan Howell, then the director of the Survey Research Center at the University of New Orleans, told the Los Angeles Times. “There is a tremendous amount of anger and frustration among working-class whites, particularly where there is an economic downturn. These people feel left out; they feel government is not responsive to them.”
Duke’s strong showing, however, wasn’t powered merely by poor or working-class whites—and the poorest demographic in the state, black voters, backed Johnston. Duke “clobbered Johnston in white working-class districts, ran even with him in predominantly white middle-class suburbs, and lost only because black Louisianans, representing one-quarter of the electorate, voted against him in overwhelming numbers,” The Washington Post reported in 1990. Duke picked up nearly 60 percent of the white vote. Faced with Duke’s popularity among whites of all income levels, the press framed his strong showing largely as the result of the economic suffering of the white working classes. Louisiana had “one of the least-educated electorates in the nation; and a large working class that has suffered through a long recession,” The Post stated.
By accepting the economic theory of Duke’s success, the media were buying into the candidate’s own vision of himself as a savior of the working class. He had appealed to voters in economic terms: He tore into welfare and foreign aid, affirmative action and outsourcing, and attacked political-action committees for subverting the interests of the common man. He even tried to appeal to black voters, buying a 30-minute ad in which he declared, “I’m not your enemy.”
Vote them out.
ICYMI, Royal wedding notes:
Her husband was there to attend her.
Reuters:
Excitement revved up with each gesture acknowledging African-American heritage - from the fervent sermon of Reverend Michael Curry to a choir singing black spirituals to the performance of cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the first black musician to win the BBC Young Musician of the Year award.
“This little light of mine sung by a black choir to end the royal wedding. I am LIVING,” tweeted Morgan Palmer, an African-American college student in Athens, Georgia.