If this were a movie, John McCain's death and celebration of his life would cause a number of Republican Senators to find their backbone in his honor, starting with his Senate best friend, Lindsey Graham.
Don’t hold your breath. This isn't a movie.
He made huge mistakes, like Sarah Palin, but he was a genuine iconoclast who could surprise you. I’d take him over any other current Republican Senator you can name, especially those with the character of a Susan Collins or Bob Corker (can you imagine them opposing their party and being the vote that killed a bill that Mitch McConnell wanted? Collins voted no on ACA repeal, but would she have if she were the only R no vote? McCain would have because he thought it was wrong and would hurt his constituents. And he did.)
Whatever McCain was, he was not a coward. But this also… he was not representative of the Republican Party. Not any more. That party, alas, died with him.
Here’s a good thread and comment on McCain from Michael Cohen (the columnist):
And now back to our regularly scheduled FUBAR politics:
NBC/WSJ poll:
Despite the durability of Trump's approval even after one of the most dire weeks of his presidency, most voters are not convinced that Trump himself is completely insulated from the legal woes of his associates.
Asked if they believe that the six Trump associates who have pled guilty or been found guilty of crimes signals only that those individuals committed crimes or that Trump himself may have participated in wrongdoing, 27 percent cite just the individuals (not Trump), 40 percent say Trump may be involved with potential wrongdoing and 30 percent don't know.
A majority of voters also say that Trump has not been honest and truthful when it comes to the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Twenty-one percent strongly agree that he has been honest and truthful, 17 percent agree somewhat, 10 percent disagree somewhat and a plurality — 46 percent — disagree strongly.
Inside those numbers, however, there's some evidence that Republican defense of Trump's truthfulness is relatively soft. Among Democrats, 81 percent strongly disagree that Trump has been honest. Among Republicans, just 46 percent strongly agree that he has been honest.
And just about half (53 percent) of Republicans say that the guilty pleas by Trump's associates are limited only to those individuals and not the president, while a third — 35 percent — don't know enough to say.
Among Democrats, 71 percent say that Trump may be implicated in wrongdoing.
When people say they don’t know, or wait and see, they mean they have an idea. They just want to see it for themselves. If Republicans think the Mueller report will have no effect, they are fooling themselves. As for me, count me in the 71%.
By the way, the generic ballot is now D +8, up from +6.
WaPo:
Trump’s Midwest is a gubernatorial battleground in 2018
Today just about everything is in play gubernatorially. The Cook Political Report puts Iowa, Michigan and Ohio in the toss-up category, leans Wisconsin toward the GOP and leans Illinois and Minnesota toward the Democrats. The one exception is Pennsylvania: Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, who played a key role in forcing the drawing of new congressional district lines that are likely to give his party additional House seats in the next Congress, is rated to be in good shape for reelection.
And then there is Kansas, which Trump carried by 21 points. That state too is listed among the toss-ups, because the Republicans just concluded a contentious primary battle that saw incumbent Gov. Jeff Colyer, the establishment favorite, lose to Secretary of State Kris Kobach.
Kansas will be a reach for Democrats; few are counting on it. But Kobach, a Trump ally who led the flawed commission tasked with investigating Trump’s unproven claims of voter fraud, carries baggage and a divided party into the general election.
Peter Wehner/NY Times:
The Full-Spectrum Corruption of Donald Trump
Everyone and everything he touches rots.
All that has changed with Mr. Trump as president. For Republicans, honor and integrity are now passé. We saw it again last week when the president’s longtime lawyer Michael Cohen — standing in court before a judge, under oath — implicated Mr. Trump in criminal activity, while his former campaign chairman was convicted in another courtroom on financial fraud charges. Most Republicans in Congress were either silent or came to Mr. Trump’s defense, which is how this tiresome drama now plays itself out.
It is a stunning turnabout. A party that once spoke with urgency and apparent conviction about the importance of ethical leadership — fidelity, honesty, honor, decency, good manners, setting a good example — has hitched its wagon to the most thoroughly and comprehensively corrupt individual who has ever been elected president. Some of the men who have been elected president have been unscrupulous in certain areas — infidelity, lying, dirty tricks, financial misdeeds — but we’ve never before had the full-spectrum corruption we see in the life of Donald Trump.
Ariel Edwards-Levy/HuffPost:
We Asked 1,000 People What Happened On Tuesday. Here’s What Some Of Them Said.
Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, someone’s lost cat and Post Malone.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted of federal charges, and former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to charges in a separate federal case. The week was one of the worst of Trump’s presidency, with questions about how much he was involved in illegal campaign finance schemes.
And here’s how a 50-year-old California man saw it who said he spent a little under half an hour reading the paper and checking Facebook and Twitter: “Nothing special. Just a ho-hum day.”
The CW is that the SDNY granted immunity to get information on the shady business practices of Don Jr, Eric and Javanka. They’re federal and Trump can pardon. But the state is pardon proof and they are interested as well. As one pundit put it, in assessing how aggressive states will be on this, every public figure in New York State wants to be president.
Roger Cohen/NY Times:
How Far America Has Fallen
The thing with every shocking revelation about Trump is that it's already baked into his image. I've never met a Trump supporter who did not know exactly who he is.
There’s a deeper question, which comes back to the extraordinary Western landscape and the high American idea enshrined in it. Americans elected Trump. Nobody else did. They came down to his level. White Christian males losing their place in the social order decided they’d do anything to save themselves, and to heck with morality. They made a bargain with the devil in full knowledge. So the real question is: What does it mean to be an American today? Who are we, goddamit? What have we become?
Trump was a symptom, not a cause. The problem is way deeper than him.
For William Steding, a diplomatic historian living in Colorado, American individualism has morphed into narcissism, perfectibility into entitlement, and exceptionalism into hubris. Out of that, and more, came the insidious malignancy of Trump. It will not be extirpated overnight.
Matt Yglesias/Vox:
Michael Cohen’s guilty plea underscores congressional Republicans’ total abdication of responsibility
There’s a lot more worth investigating in Trumpworld.
Republicans’ constitutional abdication, not really explained
The sophisticated thing to say: We are witnessing the poisonous fruit of partisan polarization.
When the founders envisioned a constitutional system based on the separation of powers in which ambition would check ambition, they failed to foresee the central role of political parties in mass democracies. The American system worked tolerably well as long as elites maintained a tight grip on party nominations and ideological incoherence left American parties weakly disciplined. Today, however, we have sharply polarized parties organized around systematic ideological conflict, and so the system doesn’t work.
It’s a pretty good explanation, but I’m honestly not entirely sure I buy it. Senators like Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) are clearly willing to defy party leadership on high-profile issues like Affordable Care Act repeal when they want to. And senators like John McCain (R-AZ), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), and Bob Corker (R-TN) aren’t running for reelection, have nothing to fear from the party, and have been very clear in their statements that they believe Trump’s presence in office is a serious problem for the country.
Remember these groups from Pew:
Skeptics, like Converts, had cold or neutral feelings for Trump in April 2016. Unlike Converts, however, Skeptics did not have warm feelings toward Trump nearly two years later, after he became president. Skeptics, who constitute 12% of Trump voters, reported voting for him, and their feelings for the president became somewhat warmer in the wake of the election. But their views of him grew more negative after he became president.
A very small segment of Trump voters, the Disillusioned, had warm feelings for him in April 2016 – and reported voting for him that November – but had cold or neutral feelings for him in March 2018. The Disillusioned make up just 6% of Trump voters.
6% (think WI, PA and MI) is a lot but 18% (skeptics and disillusioned combined) is an enormous number in an election. So long as our own base is not abandoned, that’s a legitimate target, not enthusiasts (59%) and converts (23%).
The latter are aka “their base”, and don’t bother. But that also means Fox will run Willie Horton-style tv from now until November, including The White Power Hour with Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham.
Overall, whites with a four-year college degree or more education made up 30% of all validated voters. Among these voters, far more (55%) said they voted for Clinton than for Trump (38%). Among the much larger group of white voters who had not completed college (44% of all voters), Trump won by more than two-to-one (64% to 28%).
Non-college whites need to be outvoted but not abandoned. Trump rally voters? Only time will tell as to how that goes. But for starters, here is a begrudging opinion piece in the Orange Country Register by Carl Cannon:
But the telltale sign that this is more about following the letter of the law was making Cohen plead guilty to a campaign finance violation. That was an easy thing to overlook. For starters, it’s not really a crime. Campaign finance law says nothing about paying off ex-girlfriends, and when the Justice Department leveled similar charges against former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, he beat them in court...
Speaking of sneaky behavior, why is an editor — even an editor of a supermarket tabloid — paying sources for dirt and then not publishing salacious scoops about newsworthy people like Donald Trump? That’s not journalism at all.
Which brings us back to Paula Duncan. Now here is someone who did her job, and did so conscientiously. Going into the Manafort trial, she considered the Mueller investigation a “witch hunt,” as Trump has called it. She was even more convinced afterward.
“America chose,” she said, referring to the 2016 election. “The other half of America that lost doesn’t want to accept those of us who won. I didn’t vote for Obama but I had to accept him as my president. We’re getting derailed by this whole special counsel thing — let the man [Trump] do his job. “
Yet Duncan followed the oath she took at the outset of Manafort’s trial — and voted to convict. She lives in Virginia’s Loudoun County, where the suburbs of Washington, D.C., end and Middle America, you could say, begins. Where Americans are pretty great already.
She thinks it is a witch hunt because she’s been told that by Trump and Fox News, and hasn’t seen the evidence otherwise. More importantly, when confronted with evidence she voted to convict.
If you want to know how the enthusiasts see it, try this Michael Goodwin/NY Post column:
How Trump can survive the onslaught against his presidency
How? Well, remind the base that payoffs to women are a mere campaign finance technicality, Trump can release the hidden DOJ documents proving his enemies tried to steal the election (which for some unknown reason Jeff Sessions refuses to do) and, besides, Trump supporters will rise up and prevent a blue wave. In other words, Trump will prevail because Trump is John Edwards plus Qanon plus Unskewed Polling.
Huh.
Well, that’s what I mean about not bothering to engage the enthusiasts.