Trump is who we always said he was, a damaged man unfit for office. But where are the Republicans? Are they also who we said they were, creatures who lust after money and power and nothing else? Yes. Yes, they are.
Tom Nichols:
It's not that I disagree about policy with Trump supporters. It's that I know they don't give a shit about policy. There's no way to have a policy argument with people whose eyes are always looking up to the television for a cue from Dear Leader about what to say next. /1
As
@JVLast once said, Trumpism is non-falsifiable. Whatever Trump does is right. There are no principled arguments to be had, because if Trump changes his mind or tweets something off the wall, Trumpers change their position immediately.
/2
This would basically be a cult except for one thing: most Trumpers do not believe their own bullshit. Yes, some of them really are stupid enough to think Trump is a good man and all that crap, but most of them are only interested in Trump as a vehicle of social disruption. /3
It isn’t about what’s good for Trump. It’s about what’s good for the country. Vote them out at every opportunity.
Thomas Wright/Atlantic from 2 months ago:
The Biggest Danger of North Korea Talks
Kim Jong Un is offering a deal at a price that could be way too high—and that the president could easily accept.
North Korea has offered such a deal before. It has held out the prospect of denuclearization in exchange for a peace treaty that included an end to the U.S.-South Korea alliance. The United States has always rejected such a deal. Many experts believe that one reason the North pursued ICBMs was to put pressure on the United States to “decouple” from South Korea.
David Leonhardt/NY Times:
Trump Tries to Destroy the West
In Quebec, he made excuses for Russia’s annexation of Crimea and argued that Russia should be readmitted to the G-7. Jay Nordlinger, the conservative writer, asked, “Why is he talking like an RT host?” — RT being Russia Today, a government-funded television network.
I don’t know the answer. But it’s past time to take seriously the only explanation for all of Trump’s behavior: He wants to destroy the Western alliance.
Maybe it’s ideological, and he prefers Putin-style authoritarianism to democracy. Or maybe he has no grand strategy and Putin really does have some compromising information. Or maybe Trump just likes being against what every other modern American president was for.
Whatever the reason, his behavior requires a response that’s as serious as the threat. As the political scientist Brendan Nyhan pointed out, this past weekend felt like a turning point: “The Western alliance and the global trading system are coming under the same intense strain that Trump has created for our domestic institutions.”
David Frum/Atlantic:
“He’s like Heath Ledger’s Joker—but without the operational excellence.” That was the grim after-action assessment of one senior G7 official with whom I spoke in the shocked aftermath of President Donald Trump’s savage post-summit tweets.
...
Trump’s revenge-tweets from Air Force One back at his Canadian hosts probably did not lose him any friends in Canada, for the basic arithmetic reasons that a few alt-right YouTubers aside, he had no friends in Canada left to lose. Trump’s attacks on Trudeau will only boost the prime minister’s popularity. But this is more than a personal story. Trump is day by day abdicating U.S. leadership. “He is testing to the breaking point relationships that there was never any reason to test in the first place,” said the G7 official, resignedly. (The official spoke on condition of anonymity, due to the confidential nature of the discussions.)
The governments of the G7 are America’s closest partners and allies: “None of us has the luxury of being pissed off,” the official said. But from Canada, Trump has arrived in Singapore to meet North Korea’s Kim Jung Un. It is a good guess that he will show himself much more respectful and conciliatory to this dictatorial adversary than to America’s democratic friends—by now, that’s a familiar pattern of Trump behavior.
Trump is locked into a cycle in his top-level diplomacy: bully-cringe-bully-cringe. He bullies traditional friends and allies; he cringes to adversaries, dictators, and potential funding sources for Trump enterprises. Bullying the G7 was the weekend’s story; cringing to North Korea—and behind it, China—will be the story of the week ahead.
Adam Davidson:
I am becoming increasingly convinced that the biggest journalistic challenge of the Trump presidency is not uncovering more dirt (though we need to keep doing that).
It is more important to make clear what we already know to the low information news consumer.
1/
Of course, the Always-Trumpers are unmovable.
But there is a large number of Americans who just find it all confusing and overwhelming and can't get a grip on the core narrative.
How do we communicate clearly to them? For real. I'm genuinely asking.
2/
It reminds me of the financial crisis. I helped create
@planetmoney for just this reason: not to add more incremental details, but to place the flood of news into a clear narrative context.
3/
I would love to work with folks who want to think this through.
And not just journalists.
SV Date/HuffPost:
The United States had been working on an agreement with the European Union nations, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, but that effort was abandoned after Trump won the presidency. Japan and Canada are part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a multi-country pact that Trump pulled out of after taking office.
“The whole purpose of T-TIP was to open the U.S. market to Europe and vice versa. Now that’s been thrown under the bus along with TPP,” said Monica de Bolle, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
She said Trump wrongly cites trade balances with individual countries, a largely meaningless metric, to attack trade deals. “Trade is a web. It’s not a buy-sell thing. It’s a web,” she said. “The stupidity of this is hard to exaggerate.”
Charlie Cook/National Journal:
Numbers Show House GOP Still in Deep Trouble
Republicans trail badly in voter intensity, as more people say they want representatives who will be a check on President Trump.
On the generic congressional ballot, Democrats have a 10-point advantage, 50 to 40 percent in the new poll, compared to a 7-point Democratic edge among registered voters in the April survey, and precisely the same as in the poll prior to that in March. The generic-ballot test is being more closely watched than in any other election in memory, and I had been anxious to see the findings in this particular survey, as the vast majority of generic-ballot-poll findings over the past two months have been from either online or robo-polls, not from live telephone interviewers calling both cell phone and landline numbers (which I strongly prefer).
One finding that should be particularly troubling to Republicans in the new NBC/WSJ poll is that when respondents were asked if they would be more or less likely to support “a candidate who promise to provide a check on Donald Trump,” 48 percent said they would be more likely, and just 23 percent said they would be less likely. By a 10-point margin, they would be less likely to support a candidate “who supports Donald Trump’s policies on immigration and border security. By a 6-point spread they are less likely to support a “candidate who supports Donald Trump’s tax-reform bill” and by a 22-point margin, 53 to 31 percent, they would be less likely to support “a candidate who has supported President Trump’s issue positions over 90 percent of the time.” Conversely, by a 24-point margin, they would be less likely to back a candidate “who would support Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House if Democrats take control.”
NY Times:
The turnover, which is expected to become an exodus after the November elections, does not worry the president, several people close to him said. He has grown comfortable with removing any barriers that might challenge him — including, in some cases, people who have the wrong chemistry or too frequently say no to him.
Mr. Trump, who desires a measure of chaos at all times, is reveling in the effects of his own mercurial decision-making, the people said.
Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, said in an interview that Mr. Trump’s love of conflict had driven his approach to the presidency. “This is how he won,” Mr. Bannon said. “This is how he governs, and this is his ‘superpower.’ Drama, action, emotional power.”
Mr. Trump believes that he is gaining ground by trying to set the terms of news coverage around a number of issues affecting his White House, according to interviews with a dozen White House advisers, former aides and people close to the president. He has repeatedly promoted his performance at the one-year and 500-day milestones of his term, sowed confusion about his knowledge of hush payments to a pornographic film actress, and disparaged the special counsel’s Russia investigation, as well as railed against trade imbalances and scored a once-unthinkable meeting with the North Korean leader, to be held Tuesday in Singapore.
This is what happens when people vote for a Chaos Agent to be in charge. They don’t even know when they are screwing up. And that includes a compliant press that still doesn’t understand they are being played.
Health care, immigration, international affairs, Puerto Rico, selling out to the Russians and getting us into a trade war. Conspiracy, corruption and Mueller.
The only way they’ll get it is when you vote them out.
NBC:
Democrats' October 'surprise' in the midterms? Hint: It has to do with health care costs
An array of state and national progressive groups are already laying the groundwork to attack Republicans for expected premium increases.
In focus groups and polls, Democrats are honing a message that they say will link health care problems to voter skepticism of private insurers, the Republican tax bill and donor influence on policies.
"One argument that has an enormous amount of power with voters is that Trump and the Republicans gave both the insurance companies and the drug companies huge tax cuts — and they're continuing to jack up people's costs nevertheless,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster.
Yep. Take that to the bank. Well, if you trust the bank.