We knew who Trump was from the beginning. We knew who Rudy was, as well. What surprised us is who the Republicans are. But they can’t hide between these two schmegeggies too much longer.
Gregory Koger/Mischiefs of Faction:
Why Trump Wants A House Vote on Impeachment
If the House held a roll call vote today to authorize an impeachment inquiry, most House Republicans would probably still back the President. For them, it is the safe position when it is unclear how this contest will play out and with primary elections ahead. It would take coordinated risk-taking to defect, and the House GOP is not there yet.
But many individual Republicans would probably prefer not to vote. The longer they wait without taking a public position, the more they learn about the case against the POTUS. And if the evidence mounts, and ratings drop, and the 2020 election continue to look bleak, the odds of a coordinated break continue. This is not outlandish—we have actually seen Republicans break with the President several times on Russian sanctions, his Charlottesville comments, and funding for "the wall."
This is why the Trump White House and House minority leader Kevin McCarthy want a vote ASAP. Sure, the lack of a floor vote to grant formal House approval for the impeachment inquiry is a handy process-based talking point when the facts look bad, but a quick vote would also have two immense benefits.
Peter Wehner/Atlantic:
Trump Betrayed the Kurds. He Couldn’t Help Himself
Humiliating his own Cabinet secretaries was bad. Putting faithful American allies in harm’s way is far worse
According to Jennifer Griffin and Melissa Leon of Fox News, Trump was supposed to tell Erdoğan to stay north of the border, but instead “went off script.” By Wednesday, the Turkish offensive began, with Erdoğan’s aim to push back the Syrian Kurds from the border region. The results have been swift and brutal: the displacement of more than 100,000 people, executions and war crimes, the escape of hundreds of Islamic State prisoners. (If Islamic State fighters escape, they’ll “be escaping to Europe,” Trump said last week—as if Europe’s problems don’t affect the United States.) For the Kurds, the consequences of America’s policy change will only get worse. “I don’t know how many people will die. A lot of people will die,” a senior military source told Fox News. Yesterday the Trump administration tried frantically to make Turkey stand down, but enormous damage has already been done.
Margaret Sullivan/WaPo:
If Trump doesn’t condone violence against journalists, he should stop inspiring it
I’ll never forget the moment, while covering the Republican National Convention in 2016, that I saw the T-shirt:
“Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some Assembly Required,” it read in bold letters. Stacks of them were for sale on the streets outside the Cleveland arena where Donald Trump would soon get his party’s nomination.
I felt slightly sick, watching people laugh at the words about lynching reporters — and, in some cases, buy the shirt as a souvenir.
What I didn’t realize then was that this ugliness would get much, much worse.
The latest is the playing of a horrific doctored video — depicting a fake President Trump violently killing journalists and his political opponents — at a pro-Trump conference last week at the president’s Miami-area resort.
Politico:
Ronan Farrow: National Enquirer shredded secret Trump documents
A new book by the New Yorker writer alleges a coverup at the pro-Trump tabloid.
American Media Inc. and the National Enquirer shredded sensitive Donald Trump-related documents that had been held in a top-secret safe right before Trump was elected in 2016, according to fresh allegations made in a new book by journalist Ronan Farrow.
During the first week of November 2016, the book alleges, Dylan Howard, who was editor in chief of the National Enquirer at the time, ordered a staff member to “get everything out of the safe” and said, “We need to get a shredder down there.”
Walter Shapiro/Bloomberg:
The Democrats Don’t Have a Frontrunner
With less than four months before the Iowa caucuses, none of the leading contenders have been able to overcome the obstacles in their paths.
I have long believed that Warren’s appeal is rooted more in her life story as a professor transformed into an unlikely politician than in her left-wing proposals to restructure the economy. The idea that she has a detailed agenda (“Warren Has a Plan for That”) seems more popular than the policy ideas themselves.
In fact, the arena where Warren has been uncharacteristically vague is in failing to provide full details of her “I’m with Bernie” support for his Medicare for All. Her stance on the issue could be risky (particularly as she must win over upscale voters who might not want their private health insurance to be abolished). But, worse still, if Warren were to retreat now, it would seem like a patently political move rather than a principled one—which would undermine what makes her campaign so unique.
In the history of Democratic presidential primaries dating back to the 1970s, no outsider candidate like Warren has ever defied gravity all the way to the convention. Even Jimmy Carter in 1976 (the patron saint of all candidates with asterisks in the polls) lost a string of later primaries to a California governor named Jerry Brown (yeah, that guy) and others.
If not Biden or Warren, then who?
Jonathan V. Last/Bulwark:
About That Trump Video
If you watch all the way through the shooting and killing in the video, at the 2:50 mark the fake Trump turns to the camera and smiles and the creator of the video drops in different music—here he’s replacing the original Kingsmen score. The music is DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win.”
Which goes something like this:
“All I do is win, win, win no matter what.”
Then Trump freezes with his Pepe smile and a pair of 8-bit sunglasses floats down onto his face.
The video is the answer to my question: This—the video—is what Trump voters signed up for.
They don’t care about Syria, or tariffs, or the Russians, or the Wall, or anything else that we traditionally think of as policy goals. They don’t even care about judges or abortion or free trade.
They care about hurting their domestic enemies.
Not all of them, to be sure. Maybe not even a majority of them. But for a percentage of them that is greater than zero, a video about Trump killing politicians and celebrities and journalists they don’t like isn’t a regrettable side-effect of Trump’s presidency.
It’s the entire point of Trump’s presidency.
Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:
Trump’s Approval Rating Is Holding Up. But Why?
It’s possible that the president’s numbers are simply locked in. But there are more likely explanations.
To the extent that the media has framed all this as “one side says X, the other side says Y,” they’re getting a big part of the story wrong — and it may be partly responsible for Trump’s stable approval numbers.
A second possibility involves something I speculated about months ago. There’s a “priming” effect in public opinion in which the answer to a question can change depending on the context in which it’s asked. A classic example was during George H.W. Bush’s presidency. To oversimplify a bit, most people thought Bush was good at foreign policy and bad at domestic policy. So when foreign policy was in the news, people interpreted the question “Do you approve of how Bush is handling the presidency?” as a question about foreign policy, and said yes; when domestic stories were in the news, the opposite happened. People weren’t changing their minds about Bush. They were just evaluating him on different criteria.
A similar thing could be happening here. Once impeachment is the story, Republicans may think of the approval question as equivalent to whether they support removing Trump from office, and therefore say they approve of him; if the story centered more on the scandal, they might be more likely to disapprove of Trump’s overall performance. If that’s what’s happening, it’s possible that the Syria story, taking place outside of the impeachment context, might damage Trump where the Ukraine scandal hasn’t.
There’s also the possibility that Trump’s numbers are simply locked in no matter what. I remain very skeptical of that one.