Interesting how blatant the writing about male potency is getting when it comes to Trump’s presidency and the people around him. For the best example, last week’s Peggy Noonan piece. And in a similar vein, here are some great follow-up posts to the Trump, “Mooch,” and the Rise of the New York Douchebag piece from Jeet Heer:
Olivia Nuzzi/New York Magazine:
“This isn’t a normal presidency,” the source said. “Trump always likes shiny new toys. Anthony will be the golden boy for the next couple of months.”
“Trump is taking a gamble on Scaramucci,” the source added. “But if he makes Trump look bad on this, he’s going to fall out of favor very soon — and if he thinks Reince was mistreated by the president? Wait until he sees how the president will treat him.”
Kevin D. Williamson/NRO, a must read:
Death of a F***ing Salesman
Glengarry Glen Ross is the Macbeth of real estate, full of great, blistering lines and soliloquies so liberally peppered with profanity that the original cast had nicknamed the show “Death of a F***ing Salesman.” But a few of those attending the New York revival left disappointed. For a certain type of young man, the star of Glengarry Glen Ross is a character called Blake, played in the film by Alec Baldwin. We know that his name is “Blake” only from the credits; asked his name by one of the other salesmen, he answers: “What’s my name? F*** you. That’s my name.” In the film, Blake sets things in motion by delivering a motivational speech and announcing a sales competition: “First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize? A set of steak knives. Third prize is, you’re fired. Get the picture?” He berates the salesmen in terms both financial — “My watch cost more than your car!” — and sexual. Their problem, in Blake’s telling, isn’t that they’ve had a run of bad luck or bad sales leads — or that the real estate they’re trying to sell is crap — it is that they aren’t real men.
As far as Gen. Kelly as CoS, ignore the puff pieces and watch who the Mooch reports to. If it’s not Kelly, he’s already failed. If it is, failure has been postponed.
WSJ:
President Donald Trump’s tumultuous past week has widened rifts in his party, between those who vocally support the president’s combative style and others who bridle at it, according to interviews with GOP officials and supporters across the country.
Mr. Trump has long been a polarizing force among members of his party, but for the first several months of his tenure, the GOP was largely united by a shared desire to make the most of his election and the party’s total control of the government for the first time in a decade.
After a week that included the president attacking his attorney general, the collapse of a GOP health bill, a surprise effort to bar transgender people in the military and a White House staff shakeup, divisions that were largely set aside at the start of 2017 have emerged anew.
“Particularly among some of my former colleagues in the House, there is a frustration and lament about opportunities squandered in what should be a prime time for a GOP legislative agenda,” said former Republican Rep. David Jolly of Florida. In 2015, Mr. Jolly urged Mr. Trump to drop out of the presidential race and, as a result, lost the support of some GOP voters during his unsuccessful re-election bid.
Mr. Jolly added that Mr. Trump remains popular among many of his voters.
Molly Ball/Atlantic, another must read:
The Final Humiliation of Reince Priebus
With Priebus out, the only traditional conservative remaining in the administration’s upper ranks is the vice president, Mike Pence, leading many on the right to fear that Trump will now openly turn on the GOP and begin pursuing an agenda antithetical to his party’s traditional principles.
Like Priebus, the Republican Party made a Faustian bargain when it capitulated to Trump’s takeover—it would sell its soul in order to win. But as chaos continues to swirl, Priebus is surely not the only Republican asking himself: What was that victory good for?
So a slew of stories about the chickens coming home to roost. Journos sympathetic to Rience and Sean Spicer (God knows why, they both lied with every breath) come in handy sometimes.
Jack Goldsmith/Lawfare:
The Trump Presidency is a strange combination of menacing and impotent. It is also fractured internally like no presidency in American history.
The menacing element is plain. Trump sets everyone on edge with incessant verbal attacks and relentlessly indecorous behavior. The maelstrom that is his presidency seems like it could at any moment push the country off the rails—massive pardons to kill the Russia investigation, a Justice Department meltdown as a result of firings and resignations, a North Korean miscalculation, or who-knows-what-other-crazy-thing. Many people worry how the impulsive Trump will handle his first crisis.
As for impotence, Trump has accomplished nothing beyond conservative judicial appointments. His administration is otherwise a comedy of errors in the exercise of executive power. What is most remarkable is the extent to which his senior officials act as if Trump were not the chief executive. Never has a president been so regularly ignored or contradicted by his own officials. I’m not talking about so-called “deep state” bureaucrats. I’m talking about senior officials in the Justice Department and the military and intelligence and foreign affairs agencies. And they are not just ignoring or contradicting him in private. They are doing so in public for all the world to see.
Stan Collender/Forbes:
This Was Last Week's Only Moment Of Bipartisan Sanity In Washington
No...I'm not talking about the 51-49 vote that defeated Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R-KY) "skinny" repeal and replacement health care legislation last Thursday.
That was indeed bipartisan -- 3 Republicans joined with 48 Democrats and Independents against McConnell -- but it was hardly rational. Senate Republicans were asked to vote in favor of legislation they absolutely didn't want the House to adopt at the same time the House leadership wouldn't provide Senate Republicans with an ironclad guarantee that it wouldn't be adopted. Far from being rational, that actually was quite insane.
The one golden nugget of true bipartisanship and rationality amidst all of last week's extreme and maybe even unprecedented craziness in Washington occurred when the House decisively defeated 116 to 309 a proposal by Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-VA) that would have gutted the Congressional Budget Office.
The vote absolutely was bipartisan: less than half (116) of the 240 House Republicans voted for the proposal. Several of the biggest GOP names in federal budgeting, including House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-TX) and Budget Committee Chairwoman Diane Black (R-TN), voted against the Griffith plan.
There are 116 inmates in the House asylum. They usually run the place but not this time.
Axios:
What's next: Now that the left has defeated the Republicans on repeal-and-replace, the progressive resistance is channeling its energies into protesting any Trump administration actions to "sabotage" the ACA.
- Progressive activist Jesse Ferguson, a Hillary alum, emails me: "It's expected that the side who loses a legislative fight is the one who mobilizes in response. What's remarkable is that the reverse is happening. In the 48 hours since progressives won the repeal vote, there were more than 170 rallies and events all over the country to fight back against repeal and sabotage."
- Watch for a five week long, 18-state bus tour — funded by groups like Planned Parenthood and AFSCME — to hammer vulnerable Republicans who voted to repeal-and-replace the ACA.
Josh Kraushaar/National Journal (free):
The Emerging Democratic Minority?
If Democrats can’t take advantage of Trump’s troubles in next year’s midterms, they could be out of power in Congress for a long time.
Yeah it’s about white non-college voters. But it also is a good reminder that cultural anxiety > economic anxiety, and that anti-Trumpness alone won’t do it (yet). Still, Trump and the Rs are not as solid with this group as in the past.
Read this:
Drew Altman and Larry Levitt/WaPo:
It’s not Obamacare anymore. It’s our national health-care system
But most of all, they failed because they built their various plans on the false claim — busted by the Congressional Budget Office — that they could maintain the same coverage levels as the ACA and lower premiums and deductibles, while at the same time slashing about a trillion dollars from Medicaid and ACA subsidies and softening the ACA’s consumer protection regulations. Had they succeeded, they would have won a big short-term victory with their base, which strongly supports repeal, but suffered the consequences in subsequent elections as the same voters lost coverage or were hit with higher premiums and deductibles.
The challenge now is to stabilize the ACA’s insurance marketplaces. They are not in free fall or imploding, as President Trump suggests, and in most markets insurer profits have been improving. But these are fragile markets, especially in rural areas, and there are 38 “bare counties” where no insurer currently intends to participate in 2018. About 20 percent of marketplace enrollees have access to only one insurer, with the biggest problems in rural areas.
NY Times:
How to Repair the Health Law (It’s Tricky but Not Impossible)
Stabilizing the market, lowering drug prices and expanding access to
coverage would go a long way to easing millions of Americans’ concern
The politics are exceedingly tricky in a divided and dysfunctional Washington, but economists, insurers, doctors and health policy experts across the political spectrum agree that immediately addressing three or four basic shortcomings in the existing system would go a long way toward making the law more effective and financially stable.
See, they didn’t vote on AHCA, so that’s still on the calendar (literally, since McConnell put it there) and it will be back if there are 50 votes.
Still doesn’t have close to the number of votes it will need.
This has aged well:
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