Susan B Glasser/New Yorker:
President Trump Is a Better Dealbreaker Than Dealmaker
His blown-up North Korea summit proves it.
Even before the collapse of the North Korea negotiations, it was clear that this week was not going to do much for Trump’s vaunted self-image as a dealmaker. Not only were the prospects for the Kim meeting in doubt, there were setbacks regarding Trump’s two other top priorities: China and Iran…
Sixteen months into the Trump Presidency, it is finally time to say: we really do know. There are no deals with Trump, and there are increasingly unlikely to be. Not on nafta. Not on Middle East peace. Or Obamacare or infrastructure. On tax cuts, the one big deal that did get passed, Republicans in Congress agreed to give their grandchildren’s money to American corporations and wealthy families and put it all on the nation’s credit card; Trump championed it but, by all accounts, played little role in shaping the legislation, and did nothing to build consensus with skeptical Democrats. On North Korea, Trump spontaneously (and over the fears of his advisers) agreed to meet a dictator whose family, for three generations, has made the acquisition of nuclear weapons the centerpiece of its national security; Trump’s negotiating strategy was to demand that the Kim dynasty completely give them up. How surprised are we that it didn’t work out?
The NY Times calls it a ‘bold and innovative approach’. Bullshit. It was a poorly conceived and incompetently arranged gesture, for show, that had no chance of working:
“Zero warheads was never going to be on the table,” said Robert S. Litwak, a senior vice president of the Wilson Center for International Scholars, who wrote a detailed study of how to deal, gradually, with defanging the North Korean threat. He said Mr. Trump needs to move to something closer to the 2015 Iranian deal, which constrained but did not eliminate Tehran’s nuclear abilities.
That, of course, is the deal Mr. Trump walked away from a few weeks ago, meaning that he now has two nuclear crises on his hands at once,
Axios:
Jeff Prescott, a National Security Council senior director under President Obama, said Trump "has been acting like a politician seeking a political 'win' rather than a statesman acting in our national interest."
- Why it matters, per Prescott: "[W]e ... find ourselves with heightened risk of war, dimmer opportunities for engagement with North Korea, isolated from our partners, and blamed for today’s outcome."
- "[T]he risks of war are again unacceptably high."
Ian Bremmer, founder of the Eurasia Group, said the announcement is "a big embarrassment for the president, no matter how he tries to spin it."
- "[T]he language in the letter is harsh, and reopens talk of military preemption," Bremmer said. "[T]his is a direct slap in the face to [K]im."
- Bremmer said Trump killed the summit because the risk of a blowup was rising: North Korea wasn't about to accept unilateral denuclearization, and wasn't likely to show up and give Trump personal credit for the breakthrough.
NY Times:
Federal Agencies Lost Track of Nearly 1,500 Migrant Children Placed With Sponsors
The official, Steven Wagner, the acting assistant secretary of the agency’s Administration for Children and Families, disclosed during testimony before a Senate homeland security subcommittee that the agency had learned of the missing children after placing calls to the people who took responsibility for them when they were released from government custody.
The children were taken into government care after they showed up alone at the Southwest border. Most of the children are from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, and were fleeing drug cartels, gang violence and domestic abuse, government data shows.
Michael Gerson/WaPo:
Are Republicans abetting a demagogue — or something worse?
Because Trump lives here, his authoritarian instincts are unlikely to dominate a government thick with balancing institutions. But the stakes of our politics have dramatically changed. If Trump were a typical politician, other Republicans could keep their heads down and wait for the storm to pass. If his ambitions are autocratic, the cowardice of elected Republicans is indefensible and near to unforgivable. Trump’s enablers in politics and the media are reducing the political cost of undemocratic rhetoric and behavior. They are hurting the country in sad and lasting ways. And it has become urgent to wake their sleeping courage.
Laura Bassett/HuffPost:
Ireland’s Historic Vote On Legalizing Abortion Is Haunted By Trump And Brexit
American influence could tip the referendum
The conventional wisdom may have it wrong, he worried. The polls suggest the referendum will be an easy walk for abortion rights supporters. A recent survey showed 56 percent of voters said they’ll vote “yes” to repeal the 8th Amendment ― a near total ban on abortion, except to save the life of the mother ― while roughly a quarter (27 percent) said they’ll vote to keep the ban in place.
But Sheridan wasn’t convinced. The “no” side, he explained, was running a much stronger and better-funded digital operation. Money was pouring into its coffers from God knows where. Irish voters were being bombarded with anti-abortion ads on Facebook and Youtube, some of which were carefully targeted at undecided voters. If you knew where to look, you could discern the fingerprints on the “no” side of American anti-abortion groups and some of the same firms who contributed to the surprise outcomes in the Trump election and Brexit.
Charles P. Pierce/Esquire:
It's All Just Noise as Long as Robert Mueller Has a Job
It's not taking too long, just as it wasn't during Watergate.
That’s a story about how investigations are supposed to work—with all the various players skating their wings, as the hockey coaches say. It’s also a story about how, in any investigation of similar magnitude, there is always an extended period of sitzkriegin which everybody involved gets the nervous fidgets and starts panicking to all points of the compass.
That seems to be where we’re at with Robert Mueller’s investigation now. Mueller’s people are still grinding away and nobody knows what they have, except that they have a lot more than anyone anywhere thinks they have. Outside those offices, the president* and his ever-expanding crew of acolytes, enablers, and otherwise unemployable suckfish are beating whatever tin drums are handy, especially on the topic of what the president* is insisting on calling SpyGate, as though he weren’t his own Gordon Liddy.
Some Democrats are starting to quiver, and the tremulous souls on The New York Times opinion pages are beginning to look haltingly in the direction of the lifeboats. ..
As long as Mueller has a job, he will keep working and he will force an increasingly impatient nation with a decreasing attention span to sit quietly while he finishes his work—on Russian ratfcking, on money-laundering, on influence peddling, and on god alone knows what else. As long as he has a job, nothing that is being said outside his offices is any more than the evening breeze.