Jacqueline Alemany/WaPo:
Trump’s Homeland Security purge puts spotlight back on Stephen Miller
“I think it’s a result of the boy genius behind the policies,” Gil Kerlikowske, the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection under former president Barack Obama, told Power Up. “If you want to look at who should be fired, it should be him — Stephen Miller.”
Stephen Collinson/CNN:
The law or the President: The Trump appointees' dilemma
It was a case of the Trump revolution eating one of its own, since Nielsen, an immigration hardliner, was seen as insufficiently doctrinaire despite becoming the face of the zero-tolerance immigration policy that led to
child separations and caused outrage last year.
But CNN reporting makes clear that Nielsen also lost her job because she ultimately came to believe that Trump's wilder impulses on immigration -- an issue that he sees as critical to his reelection in 2020 -- threatened America's security and may have run contrary to the law.
Nielsen is not the first senior Cabinet official to lose their career after coming up against Trump's vision of his own authority -- or his instinct to elevate largely unaccountable appointees, such as domestic policy adviser Stephen Miller or his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
In their own ways, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former FBI Director James Comey and even former Attorney General Jeff Sessions -- the spiritual father of much of the administration's immigration policy -- suffered a similar fate.
Jonathan Bernstein/WaPo:
Trump’s Homeland Security Purge Is Destined to Fail
The president wants to run immigration policy from the White House. History suggests that’s a big mistake.
Now the really dangerous path is if Trump decides to simply ignore the department and use White House staff such as Miller to implement policy. That’s what Watergate and Iran-Contra had in common: presidents who couldn’t get federal agencies to carry out the policies they wanted and tried to just do it themselves. Both times it was a fiasco. Not only did it backfire and harm the president, but in both cases it failed to achieve the original policy goals. (Yes, Ronald Reagan survived Iran-Contra, but it crippled his presidency. His influence dwindled, his approval ratings collapsed and he was forced to accept a new chief of staff. Nixon, of course, fared even worse.)
James Hohmann/WaPo:
Trump keeps pushing legal boundaries — and 10 other takeaways from Kirstjen Nielsen’s ouster
“Two senior administration officials said that Nielsen had no intention of quitting when she went to the meeting Sunday with the president and that she was forced to step down,” Nick Miroff, Josh Dawsey, Seung Min Kim and Maria Sacchetti report. “Trump told aides last fall that he wanted to fire Nielsen … She appeared to regain her footing after U.S. Border Patrol agents used tear gas to repel a large crowd attempting to break through a border fence — the kind of ‘tough’ action Trump said he wanted … The president grew frustrated with Nielsen again early this year as the number of migrants rose and as she raised legal concerns about some of Trump’s more severe impulses, particularly when his demands clashed with U.S. immigration laws and federal court orders.”
This is a central theme in all the news accounts of why Trump turned on her.
Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:
Kirstjen Nielsen’s legacy of cruelty and incompetence is sealed
Several key points deserve emphasis.
First, no matter how she might have tried to temper the president or stay within shouting distance of the law, she will forever be known as the person who presided over the cruel, unconscionable family separation policy — and falsely denied there was such a policy. The notion, as the anonymous New York Times op-ed writer and other Trump apologists have insisted, that competent, law-abiding people must serve in the administration in order to prevent Trump from going entirely off the rails is nothing but self-delusion. If one works for Trump, one is inevitably required to compromise whatever values and standards one held. The only moral decision is to refuse to join the administration, or if already a member, to resign voluntarily (not get shoved out, as Nielsen seems to have been).
In other news:
Sean Trende/Real Clear Politics with a snapshot of where we are
Evaluating the 2020 Democratic field
As a final thought: If Sanders goes into a contested convention as the plurality delegate leader, the party will have a very difficult time denying him the nomination. It cannot withstand a progressive revolt in the general election, and many of his supporters are already convinced the 2016 nomination was stolen from him.
Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy/Upshot NY Times
The Democratic Electorate on Twitter Is Not the Democratic Electorate in Real Life
Today’s Democratic Party is increasingly perceived as dominated by its “woke” left wing. But the views of Democrats on social media often bear little resemblance to those of the wider Democratic electorate.
The outspoken group of Democratic-leaning voters on social media is outnumbered, roughly 2 to 1, by the more moderate, more diverse and less educated group of Democrats who typically don’t post political content online, according to data from the Hidden Tribes Project. This latter group has the numbers to decide the Democratic presidential nomination in favor of a relatively moderate establishment favorite, as it has often done in the past.
Real time example of the above from a new Wason Center poll on VA (my bold):
- In the wake of his “blackface” scandal, Governor Ralph Northam’s popularity among registered voters has plummeted 19 points since December. At 40%, Northam’s approval rating is lower than President Trump’s 44%.
- Asked if Northam should resign, a slight majority says he should stay in office (52%-42%). In his own party, 29% of Democrats say he should resign.
- With control of both Virginia Senate and House of Delegates on the line this November, Democrats hold a slight edge on the generic ballot test, 43% to 39%. Both parties will turn to their base, with Democrats still energized over Trump and Republicans fired up over abortion.
- Northam, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax and Attorney General Mark Herring have all been damaged by scandals, with their disapproval ratings rising. But 23% of voters appear unaware of even the highly publicized Northam scandal, so the “Top Three” scandals’ drag on Democratic candidates may be limited overall.
DC report:
What the FBI May Have on Trump
What FBI agents know, or might know, about Trump’s financial dealings during the years he worked with Sater would be of immense concern to Trump, especially if he laundered money for Russian-speaking individuals or their organizations.
The documents also help explain why Trump falsely testified under oath in a civil case that he barely knows Sater, even though the two men worked closely together for years. Trump gave the mobster an office in the Trump Organization suite in Trump Tower after he was sentenced, just a few doors down from his own office, said Michael Cohen, who was for years Trump’s lawyer and fixer.
“I mean, I’ve seen him a couple of times; I have met him,” Trump said in a video deposition in a court case involving Sater in 2013. “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.”
Sater’s use of his position in the Trump Organization as possible cover for those covert activities and monies generated for the Trump Organization by that relationship would explain Trump’s insistence that all matters related to “national security” be redacted from any public release of the Mueller report.
And now for something completely different