We begin today’s roundup with Michael Gordon and Eric Schmidtt at The New York Times:
North Korea’s threat on Thursday to test-fire ballistic missiles soon near the American territory of Guam deepened the challenge confronting the Trump administration: how to defang Pyongyang’s missile programs without risking all-out war. [...] “In the event of a first strike against Kim, even a non-nuclear option, it is highly likely that Kim would retaliate at least conventionally against South Korea,” said James Stavridis, a retired four-star admiral who is now dean of Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. “This almost certainly would create an upward spiral of violence which would be extremely difficult to manage or to mitigate.” [...]
To prevent nuclear attacks from elsewhere, namely Russia and China, the United States has relied on its potent nuclear arsenal. Some experts say the approach could also work with North Korea — a “least-bad option,” said Jeffrey A. Bader of the Brookings Institution.
But Mr. Trump has indicated that he does not want to rely on deterrence for a country he sees as bellicose and unpredictable.
Charles Bethea at The New Yorker has reaction from residents of Guam:
“Then we get vague assurances from the Secretary of State while he’s refuelling on Guam on his way back to the United States. I thought it was just a piece of bad P.R.: he lands here on Guam with no advance notice, issues a couple of press statements, and then jumps on his plane and takes off before anyone on Guam even knew he was here. And the first we find out he’s here is we start reading these press statements issued in other media? It really wasn’t the reassuring presence it could have been, you know. “
Eugene Robinson:
Trump once said he would be willing to meet with Kim. If the president can be kept from making further threats and the present crisis allowed to subside, perhaps we can eventually offer direct talks between Washington and Pyongyang — something Kim dearly wants — with the subject being a verifiable freeze on the North Korean nuclear program. After a freeze is in place for a while, it might be possible to negotiate reductions.
As I said, we need to be patient and realistic. Someone please distract the president with a shiny object for the next few years.
Robin Wright goes to the experts:
On Wednesday, I asked Michael Hayden, a former four-star general who has served as the director of both the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, how the crisis could be defused. There is no military option short of a potentially costly and deadly war that would result in many thousands of military and civilian casualties, he said. Covert action might slow North Korea’s nuclear program, and thus relieve some of the tensions, but it couldn’t halt the country’s program. Trying to shoot down missiles in flight would be more palatable—except for the danger that it might fail. U.S. technology is not there yet. In Hayden’s view, diplomacy is still the best way out. “Yet any deal will have to, in one way or another, concede North Korea’s nuclear status,” he said. “No other deal is possible.”
Turning to Trump’s attacks on the Senate Majority Leader, here is Josh Dawsey at POLITICO:
The rupture between President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell originated where so many of the president’s dramas do: with something he saw on TV.
Trump watched clips of McConnell criticizing him on the news and wasn’t happy. In a terse but loud conversation Wednesday, the president made clear he wasn’t to blame for the Obamacare failure and was displeased with the criticism he’s gotten for it. McConnell didn’t give any ground, said people briefed on the phone call, and there are no immediate plans to speak again.
Jennifer Rubin at The Washington Post:
In sum, in Trump’s mind, the categorization of someone as friend or foe depends almost entirely on whether they support and lavishly praise him. He cannot comprehend that legal or ethical rules (as Attorney General Jeff Sessions followed in recusing himself from the Russia affair), allegiance to democratic institutions, or personal principle (!) might have a greater hold on others. In Trump’s mind, there are no excuses for defying or criticizing him. Now, it would be one thing if Trump’s poll numbers were high and he was helping to enact a GOP agenda. He is doing neither. This latest tantrum should serve to remind Republicans: They’d be better off without him.
At CNN, Dan Merica and Kevin Liptak detail Trump’s obsession with Obama:
"This President has a very unusual obsession with his predecessor and constantly comparing himself to President Obama," Derek Chollet, former assistant defense secretary under Obama. "This is not a president who seems to be singularly focused on what is a genuinely a global security threat in North Korea."
"I think he has got to be shaking his head," Chollet said of the former president. "Clearly, he tried in raising this issue with President Trump by singling it out in their meeting in the Oval Office last year."
Here’s Jonathan Chait’s analysis of that poll suggesting Trump’s base would be open to postponing the 2020 election:
Many Republicans believe Trump when he claims to have legitimately won the national vote. The hypothetical remedy proposed by the pollsters, delaying the election until noncitizens can be removed from the voting rolls, follows logically from the fantastical beliefs the president has promulgated.
To be sure, skeptics might question whether Republican voters actually believe Trump’s conspiracy theories. Polls, usually liberal ones, have tested the more outlandish and bizarre convictions among the right-wing base — is Obama Muslim, is Obama an American citizen, and so on. For years, mainstream journalists have often treated these polls skeptically. Graham, in 2012, argued that many Republicans were merely affirming anti-Obama sentiment out of partisan solidarity, as opposed to actual conviction.
But the rise of Trump ought to have shown how serious these “crazy” views are.
Llyod Grove at The Daily Beast writes about CNN’s long-delayed dismissal of liar pundit Jeffrey Lord:
“I’m elated,” said a CNN insider at the news that the network’s president, Jeff Zucker, fired the 67-year-old Lord, a onetime associate political director in Ronald Reagan’s White House, mere hours after he tweeted “Sieg Heil!” during a fractious back and forth with Angelo Curasone, who heads the left-leaning press watchdog group, Media Matters for America. /react-text
Bob Dreyfuss at Rolling Stone has a must-read profile on Sebastian Gorka:
Early this year, his wife and partner, Katharine Cornell Gorka, took up a post at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, where she is now an adviser to the department's policy office. Almost as soon as they entered the Trump administration, the Gorkas absorbed withering incoming fire from national-security experts and in a series of exposés in LobeLog.com and The Forward, a progressive Jewish periodical. By late April, White House sources told The New York Times and The Washington Post that Gorka was on the way out. Yet so far – likely thanks to support from Bannon – both Gorkas have defiantly stayed in place. According to one insider, Gorka's dubious qualifications may have saved him. "The White House tried to find him a job at another agency," says the source. But no luck: "Nobody wanted him."
And, on a final note, if you read one thing today, read this Foreign Policy piece on the type of security analysis the president is receiving from inside the White House:
The memo at the heart of the latest blowup at the National Security Council paints a dark picture of media, academics, the “deep state,” and other enemies allegedly working to subvert U.S. President Donald Trump, according to a copy of the document obtained by Foreign Policy.
The seven-page document, which eventually landed on the president’s desk, precipitated a crisis that led to the departure of several high-level NSC officials tied to former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. The author of the memo, Rich Higgins, who was in the strategic planning office at the NSC, was among those recently pushed out. [...]
Trump is being attacked, the memo says, because he represents “an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative.” Those threatened by Trump include “‘deep state’ actors, globalists, bankers, Islamists, and establishment Republicans.”