Jonathan Chait on how the Republican Party became the party of Trump.
New York Magazine
In the summer of 2016, Mick Mulvaney promised an experiment of sorts to resolve just what had motivated the Republican Party’s fanatical opposition to Barack Obama. Mulvaney proposed that the answer was not partisanship or racism, but instead principled adherence to the Constitution. The test would come when the president — a man Mulvaney acknowledged to have dangerous instincts and contempt for governing norms — was a Republican.
“We’ve been fighting against an imperial presidency for five and a half years,” he said in June 2016, after Trump had captured the nomination. “Every time we go to the floor and push back against an overreaching president, we get accused of being partisan at best and racist at worst. When we do it against a Republican president, maybe people will see that it was a principled objection in the first place. So we actually welcome that opportunity. It might actually be fun, being a strict-constitutionalist congressman doing battle with a non-strict-constitutionalist Republican president.”
And then Mick Mulvaney totally pushed back against Donald Trump and led the fight to protect the government from a not-so-slow spiral toward autocracy and fascism.
In some other dimension.
The result of Mulvaney’s experiment could not be more clear. Under Trump, the entire party has abandoned its putative constitutional scruples. Indeed, Mulvaney himself has gone to work for the president whose authoritarian tendencies he once loathed and sat silently by as Trump has abused his power to lash out against his enemies and enrich himself and his family.
Mulvaney, like every other major Republican figure, has turned out to have foundations that would have to toughen up considerably to reach “clay.” Most of Chait’s piece deals with Tim Alberta’s new book, American Carnage, and how it shows Republicans eagerly discarding everything they were supposedly against.
Michael Tomasky sees the party as belonging to someone other than Trump.
Daily Beast
I certainly don’t have much good to say about David Koch, but I thought it would perhaps be more useful, on this occasion of his death, to explain precisely what he and brother Charles have done, because even with all that’s been written about them, it’s not as well understood as it ought to be.
It comes down to two things: One, they moved the Republican Party very hard to the right on economic questions; two, they did it at all levels of government.
But honestly, the Koch’s likely hate (or hated) Trump. Sure, he’s willing to sign anything they get to him, but he’s a miserable spokesman for their actual positions.
Also, I was at the Museum of Natural History last week and Koch’s name was everyone. So think of the dinosaurs … and also all those skeletons in the museum.
Paul Krugman on Trump casting around for someone to blame.
New York Times
Almost four decades ago then-candidate George H.W. Bush used the phrase “voodoo economic policy” to describe Ronald Reagan’s claim that cutting taxes for the rich would pay for itself. He was more prescient than he could have imagined.
For voodoo economics isn’t just a doctrine based on magical thinking. It’s the ultimate policy zombie, a belief that seemingly can’t be killed by evidence. It has failed every time its proponents have tried to put it into practice, but it just keeps shambling along. In fact, at this point it has eaten the brains of every significant figure in the Republican Party. Even Susan Collins, the least right-wing G.O.P. senator (although that isn’t saying much), insisted that the 2017 tax cut would actually reduce the deficit.
During the 2016 campaign Donald Trump pretended to be different, claiming that he would actually raise taxes on the rich. Once in office, however, he immediately went full voodoo. In fact, he has taken magical thinking to a new level.
True, whenever tax cuts fail to produce the predicted miracle, their defenders come up with bizarre explanations for their failure.
Republicans don’t have to believe voodoo economics, they just have to sell it long enough to get their tax cuts. Because once they have the money, keeping it is easy.
My favorite until now came from Art Laffer, the original voodoo economist and recent recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Why did George W. Bush’s tax-cutting presidency end not with a boom, but with the worst economic slump since the Great Depression? According to Laffer, blame rests with Barack Obama, even though the recession began more than a year before Obama took office. You see, according to Laffer, everyone lost confidence upon realizing that Obama might win the 2008 election.
This excuse will definitely get recycled for Trump. Heck, Trump’s poll numbers will absolutely fall along with the economy. All that needs to be done then is flip cause and effect.
Josh Barro lays out the death spiral of Trump’s remaining time in the White House.
New York Magazine
For the last couple of years, there had been a pattern: The president escalates, the markets hate it, then the president finds a way to back off, and stocks go back up. For a long time it looked like the president’s China policy was a negative factor for economy, but its effects were manageable, in significant part because Trump faced political incentives to limit the damage.
Now, as the economy shows signs of weakening (in part for reasons unrelated to the president’s actions) he seems panicked. He wants the Fed to clean up his mess but — despite public perception — his public jawboning of the Fed appears to be having little effect on monetary policy. The main way the president has been affecting monetary policy has been by taking concrete policy actions that hurt the economic outlook, which changes the parameters the Fed considers as it decides how to set interest rates. The bigger a mess Trump makes, the more rate cuts he can get, but not enough rate cuts to actually offset the mess. And this is making him angry.
However, as several people have pointed out, each of those rate cuts could put millions into Trump’s personal pocket. Which, when all is said and done, means more to him than any poll number.
With a China less willing to back down and a trade war maybe too far along to stop, the president is backed into a corner. He may feel he can’t save the economy by folding. And so he may follow his instinct — one of the few consistent policy views he has expressed for decades — that protectionism is good for the economy, and that despite what the markets and his advisers are telling him, trade wars are good and easy to win and more tariffs and more disruption will only mean more winning for the U.S.
For anyone else, the idea would be to fold the trade war and figure out some way to pretend that it never happened. Or that it was “won.” But with Trump … he may just quadruple down.
Art Cullen had a chance to talk with Bernie Sanders about the need for radical change.
Storm Lake Times
We were glad to sit down for a visit with Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday after his campaign stump at Better Day Café. Our previous impressions have been set by his speeches: fists waving, calling for a revolution, angry for a cause. On a personal level he is funny, candid, engaging, you could say charming as he gave Peach the News Hound a pat. And he scares the wits out of the health care industry, which sucked a $100 billion profit last year while poor sick people go wanting.
Well he should. The woman working at the convenience store wishes she hadn’t lost 30 pounds because she can’t keep food down. She is waiting to get on health insurance for the necessary surgery. Until then, she starves. A 63-year-old friend awaits eye surgery because he cannot afford the copay on his insurance. He is too young for Medicare and works like a dog to afford his health insurance premium. What’s it matter if his vision disappears because he is broke? We heard those two unprompted stories the same day we spoke with Sanders. They are two more reasons we need universal health care.
“The American people understand the current system is a disaster,” Sanders told us. “In poll after poll, the overwhelming majority support Medicare for All once you explain it to them. … But the corporate elite in this country don’t want Bernie Sanders to be President, because they love this system.”
Cullen always gives a very Iowa-centric view of the candidates and issues, and this week that’s what makes his column interesting.
Will Bunch looked at the revised, and revived, campaign of Beto O’Rourke.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Political campaigning has become a lame and predictable enterprise, dominated by empty talk and big money. Such was the motivation for Hollywood’s Warren Beatty way back in 1998 — or 21 long-yet-not-so-long years ago — in creating the political movie Bulworth, which he starred in and directed.
Beatty’s California Sen. Jay Bulworth is so disillusioned with the shallowness of his life in politics that he hires a hit man to get himself killed (and thus provide his daughter insurance money) — but then looming death sets him free. With a flask and an occasional joint serving as a kind of truth serum, Bulworth starts swearing in public, talks honestly about poverty and race in America, endorses the crazy notion of single-payer health care, and even raps for a suddenly adoring public at one point.
Seriously, Beto is coming …
But all the other Bulworth stuff is happening. The well-placed curse word — famously asking, “Members of the media, what the f***?” as he lost his patience with some reality-detached press questioning about President Donald Trump’s racism. The blunt talk about America’s “legacy of slavery and segregation” and the need for some type of reparations. The raw emotion — call it “emo” if you must — that’s never been far from the surface since a white-supremacist gunman slaughtered 22 people in his hometown of El Paso and he choked back tears while discussing it with reporters.
Honestly, that “well-placed curse word” did have impact, precisely because it felt real and honest. And that moment seems to have not just brought more cameras his way, it genuinely seems to have given Beto a chance to set his jaw and move forward with more confidence.
Nancy LeTourneau on why the New York TImes “1619 project” is scaring conservatives.
Washington Monthly
A common theme in the reaction of conservatives to this project is to assume that telling our story truthfully is somehow an attack on Donald Trump. For example, Dinesh D’Souza, the man who has spent the last few years blaming Democrats for the oppression of African Americans and claiming that it is the Republican Party that has always fought for freedom, said that the 1619 Project was a “political hit to discredit Trump and his base.” It is always interesting to watch Trump’s enablers assume that any honest conversation about racism in America reflects badly on the president, even when he’s not mentioned.
But there is another reaction to the 1619 Project that is even more revealing about the mindset that is at the heart of conservatism today. Newt Gingrich called the project propaganda worthy of Pravda, Cal Thomas referred to it as an “attempt to shape history to fit its own biases,” and Jeffrey Lord told Sean Hannity that “what the New York Times is engaged in is the Stalinizing of American history…The left wanted to do a total rewrite of American history and remake the story that we’re founded in racism. It’s all about race.”
This is a good one to read in full, especially as LeTourneau makes use of a lot of quotes.
Leonard Pitts has a 2019 to 2419 project.
Miami Herald
It is said that the ship came in out of a raging storm to land at Point Comfort in what is now Hampton, Virginia, just downriver from the English settlement at Jamestown. No one thought to record the date, except that it was in late August of 1619 — 400 years ago.
George Washington would not be born until 1732. The Mayflower would not bring the Pilgrims to North America until the following year.
The vessel that landed that day was an English ship called the White Lion and she carried cargo taken in an attack upon a Spanish ship in the Gulf of Mexico. Arriving in Virginia, the captain agreed to trade his stolen goods for “victuals.”
At this point, New Gingrich and Cal Thomas have their fingers in their ears.
It may have been the most portentous bargain ever struck.
Because the White Lion brought rhythm and blues to America. It brought B-Boy swagger, Jesus moans, stormy Monday and melancholy trumpet solos that seemed to stretch for Miles. It brought uh huh and uh uh and mmm hmm and okra and banjo and bongo and juke and jive and what is hip. It brought the color purple and the bluest eye, brought Porgy and Bess and Jesse B Semple, brought the invisible man and ain’t I a woman, too. It brought nightmares and an incandescent dream.
And Leonard Pitts. And some terrific writing.