Well, that was a dud of a speech last night. More reaction to it tomorrow after people write their pieces. Look for the Dara Lind thread below because she nailed it before it happened.
WaPo:
Paul Manafort shared 2016 polling data with Russian associate, according to court filing
Paul Manafort shared 2016 presidential campaign polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, an associate the FBI has said has ties to Russian intelligence, according to a court filing.
The information is in a filing that appears to inadvertently include details not intended to be made public and indicates a pathway by which the Russians could have had access to Trump campaign data.
The former Trump campaign chairman on Tuesday denied in a filing from his defense team that he broke his plea deal by lying repeatedly to prosecutors working for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III about that and other issues.
Because, c’mon, who doesn’t share proprietary closely held campaign polling with Russian intelligence?
Uhm…. now back to real news:
Jonathan Chait/New York magazine:
Trump’s Campaign Manager Gave Polling Data to Russian Agent
One question about Russian social-media messages, and a key potential avenue for collusion between Trump’s campaign and Moscow, is how Russia targeted its messaging so precisely. The Russians may have studied the American electorate closely on their own. But it seems more likely that they tapped their contacts for data to help them figure out what messages to use, and where.
So the fact that Manafort apparently “lied about sharing polling data with Mr. Kilimnik related to the 2016 presidential campaign” is quite important. It’s possible the polling had nothing to do with any of Russia’s political operation, and was nothing more than gossip. But the fact that Manafort shared the information suggests he was offering information that Kilimnik couldn’t just find from public polls. And the fact Manafort lied about it, and is being charged with the lie, raises the very strong possibility he was painting the target for Moscow.
wsoctv.com:
Emergency Exit: Mark Harris trips alarm trying to evade Channel 9 in uptown
Harris and a group of three or four other people used a fire exit to leave the Government Center as reporters attempted to ask questions.
After Harris opened the door on the ground level, an alarm sounded.
That’s the NC09 GOP “winner” that cheated his way to the “win.”
Stephen Collinson/CNN:
Prime-time Trump faces credibility crisis
President Donald Trump will face one huge obstacle when he appeals to Americans in a prime-time Oval Office address Tuesday to unite behind his crusade for a border wall: Himself.
Trump has spent years exploiting
immigration -- one of the nation's most divisive fault lines -- during an insurgent campaign and a presidency sustained by the fervor of his committed political base.
Jay Rosen:
Over the last few days, it's become clearer and clearer to me that, without intervention, coverage of the 2020 campaign is likely to be a disaster for everyone except Trump and his core voters, who want to watch it all burn anyway. In this thread I describe the danger I see.
By "disaster for everyone," I mean all candidates opposing Trump, journalists themselves, voters from all sides (except those who have exited from the news system by merging with his hate campaign against the news media) and anyone who seeks the repair of American democracy.
Bill Scher/Politico:
Trump’s Best Shutdown Move Is to Fold Now
It’s time for the president to quit while he’s behind.
If the shutdown was successfully galvanizing his supporters, you would expect fiery exhortations from Fox News anchors to attract the eyeballs of Trump’s base. But on the first Wednesday and Thursday of the new year, all of Fox News’ prime-time shows scored viewership below their daily averages for 2018. Fox News’ tentpole show, Hannity, which averaged 3.3 million daily viewers in 2018, hasn’t reached 3 million since December 12th, a week before the shutdown began.
Meanwhile, the lefty lineup over at MSNBC performed better last week than its daily 2018 average. In particular, The Rachel Maddow Show pulled in 3.5 million viewers Thursday night, 1 million more than Hannity. Perhaps sensing he doesn’t already have the attention of the television-watching public, Trump is forcing his way on to our screens Tuesday night with his first prime-time Oval Office address.
How can this be? Trump was goaded into the shutdown by conservative media figures like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh. This is supposed to be a championship bout over Trump’s signature issue, the one that revs up the base like no other. Back in the 2016 primary, Trump admitted to the New York Times editorial board, “You know, if [a rally] gets a little boring, if I see people starting to sort of, maybe thinking about leaving, I can sort of tell the audience, I just say, ‘We will build the wall!’ and they go nuts.”
Trump now faces a similar problem. This time, it’s the shutdown that’s boring. And for once, “We will build the wall” isn’t making it more interesting.
Will Bunch/philly.com
U.S. ‘national emergency’ law a disaster waiting for a demagogue like Trump
All it takes is a brief, half-hearted Google search to compile a nightmarish list of human-rights and often dictatorial abuses conducted around the world in the name of “a national emergency,” from Egypt (in an anti-democratic emergency state almost continuously since 1967) to every Fox News Channel host’s favorite nation-state, Venezuela. You know who else declared a “state of emergency”? Germany’s 20th-Century Article 48, and its abuse by the newly elected Nazis after 1933′s infamous Reichstag fire, is the mother of all national emergencies. The rest is History Channel.
So, yeah, it’s definitely a big (insert Bidenism here) deal that President Trump is said to be leaning heavily in favor of declaring a “national emergency” aimed at bypassing a balky Congress and ending the lengthy government shutdown by giving his White House authority to use defense monies to begin building a wall, or some type of barrier, on the southern border. We’ll find out for certain when the 45th president addresses the nation from the Oval Office on Tuesday night.
Ramesh Ponnuru/Bloomberg:
The Two Trump Traits That Led to the Shutdown
He knows and fears his constituency. But he has failed to devise a long-term strategy for placating it.
The president's critics often liken Fox to state-run media outlets in repressive regimes. In this case, however, the president followed Fox’s lead rather than the reverse.
Trump is not acting as though he can take his supporters for granted. He is acting, instead, as though an important subset of his supporters will abandon him if he does not deliver something they want.
That political judgment may be right. The number of people who would turn on Trump over lack of progress on the wall — who would refuse to accept that he had tried but been defeated — may be small. But he leads a minority coalition that cannot afford to shrink even a little.
Another criticism of Trump is that he lacks some of the basic skills that enable successful presidents to achieve their aims: setting priorities, thinking ahead, matching means to ends or preparing for contingencies. Instead he acts on his impulses. Sometimes these impulses are inspired, but often they are not, and they shift.
The shutdown has illustrated these deficiencies.