Julian Zelizer/CNN:
Under Trump, the deficit has ballooned, exploding a GOP myth
Republicans often complain that Democrats in Congress refuse to go along with the spending cuts that would be needed to make the tax reductions financially plausible. Still, the GOP moves ahead understanding that most Americans won't tolerate cuts to their federal benefits as they themselves drive for higher defense spending.
Nor is it true that Democratic presidents don't care about balancing the budget. While there is a legitimate debate about how
deep the commitment runs, there is a long record of Democratic presidents who have grappled with reducing the deficit….
Democrats have a greater incentive than Republicans to balance the budget -- doing so allows them to introduce new social programs. Republicans have been comfortable creating massive deficits so to "starve the beast" of government, as Ronald Reagan's Budget Director David Stockman once said.
The right understands that the more politicians talk about the importance of curbing deficits, the more Democrats are pressured into cutting back on existing policies, and the harder it becomes to build support for new programs
Yeah, he said that.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Trump is set to blow up the G-7. In so doing, he’ll reveal the worst.
Yet behind the scenes, such bravado is a lot harder to find. The Post brings us this striking report:
Top White House advisers notified President Trump earlier this month that some internal forecasts showed that the economy could slow markedly over the next year, stopping short of a recession but complicating his path to reelection in 2020.
The private forecast, one of several delivered to Trump and described by three people familiar with the briefing, contrasts sharply with the triumphant rhetoric the president and his surrogates have repeatedly used to describe the economy.
This juxtaposition, between Trump’s planned public display at the G-7 and his advisers’ private economic terrors, is striking. It shows that Trump’s appearance will in reality demonstrate that the very nationalist agenda he will be touting is, thus far, a record of deep fraudulence and failure, covered up with lies…
And if our economy continues to slow, what’s Trump’s plan? Trump has resorted to all manner of lies and conspiracy theories to mask the slowdown. And as The Post reports, this is what Trump is truly counting on:
He has told aides that he thinks he can convince Americans that the economy is vibrant and unrattled through a public messaging campaign.
You can bet Trump’s routine at the G-7 will be key to this “public messaging campaign.” Trump will distract his supporters from all this failure by publicly putting on a show of “disruption” that, once again, has nothing but lies, empty boasts and megalomania at its core.
Morning Consult:
Roughly Half of Trump Voters Would at Least Partially Blame Him for a Recession
40 percent of people who voted for the president in 2016 would not hold him responsible for downturn
President Donald Trump has promised a booming economy as a key part of his 2020 pitch. Voters — including his own supporters — might hold him to that.
Trump got a taste of the damage an economic downturn could deal to his 2020 reelection campaign last week when the Dow plummeted and the yield curve inverted for the first time since the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis. Since then, Trump has continued to publicly insist that the United States is keeping up its decade-long expansion, while, paradoxically, the White House has begun to discuss measures that would offset a recession.
Trump might have good reason to feel anxious. Voters would overwhelmingly pin an economic recession on Trump, according to a Morning Consult/Politico poll.
This is a great project from Economist:
Who is ahead in the Democratic primary race?
Here you will find our average of each candidate’s performance in all high-quality, national public opinion polls conducted so far as well as the probability of victory inferred from political betting. You will also find data from YouGov, our pollster, breaking down support for each candidate by demographic group. Under “Candidates” you will find further demographic data for each contender.
Rick Wilson/Daily News:
The great crackup: Trump is coming even more undone
“Our great American companies are hereby ordered...”
The subtle meter in Americans’ brains that tracks the degree to which the universe seems off its axis has been in a state of constant flux since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, but this week the needle slammed hard into the peg on the right side of the gauge. Red warning lights are flashing across Washington as even the now-typical levels of uncertainty and political chaos reach epic proportions.
It’s almost as if we need a recalibration of the insanity of the Trump era, a new set of definitions about what comprises normal presidential behavior.
Because what’s happening now left normal five towns back, stopped for smokes and brown liquor, and tossed the GPS out the window. This week wasn’t normal, and no amount of whistling past the graveyard will make it any different…
Here’s a pointer I can tell you from 30 years now in politics: When an elected official declares himself to be “The Chosen One” or agrees that he’s the “King of Israel” and “the second coming of God," it’s not time for a re-election campaign; it’s time for an extended, quiet stay with the nice men in white coats.
Reminder:
G Elliott Morris/Crosstabs:
"Electability" is a function of your opponent, too. That's bad news for Trump.
Voters are bearish that any Democrat can beat Trump yet still prefer most others to him
The Takeaway: Even as I proof-read this text, I can tell that I sound like a broken record. But here goes: General election polls released this early are likely not predictive of the final 2020 vote share—but perhaps we can still learn something from them. Here’s what I see in the numbers: Donald Trump is deeply unpopular, faces a tough re-election battle, and performs roughly the same against different opponents…
And here’s another point: it doesn’t actually matter which 2020 Democratic candidates we think are electable if their opponent is polling under 40% against all of them. The facts are the facts; the data are the data. The probability of victory for a Democrat polling 12 points ahead of Trump is only marginally higher than their probability of victory if they are 6 points ahead. If their opponent is polling below 40%, almost anyone could beat them.
So if our question is “who can beat Trump?” instead of “who has the highest probability of beating Trump?”—and usually I would caution against such binary thinking, but I think it’s apt here—perhaps the conversation about electability should not be about how Biden or Warren can fare in the general election, but about how Donald Trump will.
NY Times:
A Gyrating Economy, and Trump’s Volatile Approach to It, Raise Alarms
“Uncertainty is generally bad for the economy, as firms put off making fixed investments until the uncertainty is resolved,” said N. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard professor and former chief White House economist for President George W. Bush. “Of course, uncertainty is an inevitable fact of life. But uncertainty caused by erratic policymakers is gratuitous.”
The president’s volatile approach to the economic situation played out on Twitter over the course of only a few hours on Friday. He started the day boasting that “the Economy is strong and good, whereas the rest of the world is not doing so well.”
Hours later, he lashed out at the Federal Reserve Board for not taking the sort of action usually reserved only for an economy that is weak and bad.
Even for a president who has made a habit of personal attacks on his own Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell, Mr. Trump then took it further than any president has in modern times by comparing him to President Xi Jinping of China. “My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi,” Mr. Trump tweeted.
Mankiw is a GOP economist, who — unlike politicians — are speaking out publicly. and why include the NY Times? Because multiple outlets carrying the same message matters (here is the twitter version).
Jonathan Tilove/Austin -American Statesman with a look at Texas 2020:
2020 forecast for GOP: Cloudy with a chance of free fall
I interviewed [Rachel] Bitecofer on Monday and realized that it’s not so much that her analysis flies in the face of conventional wisdom about Texas politics, as it flies above it.
Her model is based on what was at first an intuition Trump was going to drive college-educated voters, often with a lax history of voting participation, to turn out against him in unprecedented and realigning ways — and she said, that is what is happening, and she predicts will continue to happen through 2020.
David Folkenflik/NPR:
A Dead Cat, A Lawyer's Call And A 5-Figure Donation: How Media Fell Short On Epstein
A coterie of intimidating lawyers. A deployment of charm. An aura of invincibility. A five-figure donation to a New York Times reporter's favored nonprofit. A bullet delivering a message. Even, it is alleged, a cat's severed head in the front yard of the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair.
Such were the tools the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein is said to have used to try to soften news coverage and at times stave off journalistic scrutiny altogether..
Epstein killed himself, authorities say, in federal prison as he faced criminal charges alleging sex trafficking of underage girls, some as young as 14, in his mansions in New York and Florida. And yet with a few notable exceptions, the national media infrequently covered Epstein's behavior and rarely looked at the associates who helped him evade accountability for his actions — at least, not until the Miami Herald's Julie K. Brown's investigative series late last year.
Economist with a reminder that politics is about trade-offs:
Rural Minnesota’s Democratic voters are shifting allegiances
Republicans see an opening with voters in regions like the Iron Range
How might Democrats respond? Heidi Heitkamp, a senator in North Dakota until this year, is leading a national effort called “One Country” to persuade rural voters that Democrats have their interests at heart. She cites the Iron Range as typical of where the party must pay more attention. “Democrats failed to show up and listen to legitimate concerns” in such places, she says. The party should offer a message of infrastructure investment and of tapping rural labour for white-collar jobs, she says, even if it won’t commit to reviving mining.
Ms Heitkamp also wants Democrats to change their tone when addressing voters in towns like Eveleth. “I think miners want to hear the truth. Right now rural America depends on trade aid, but there is a real high bullshit factor,” she says, meaning politicians have not been straight when explaining that a changing economy requires government help in retraining for new jobs. Mr Trump may make simple vows to restore old mining work, but Democrats could explain how tourism, technology, engineering, health care and other industries can bring economic revival.
Such messages won’t win over all rural voters, she admits, but they are better than silence. “Rural America is movable,” she argues, pointing to the appeal of Laura Kelly, the Democratic governor of Kansas, in suburbs, small towns and cities. Similar successes may only be replicated if candidates show up in places like Eveleth. “It is a game of inches, not yards,” says Ms Heitkamp. If Democrats fail to play, Republicans will make the running on the Range