Trump can’t keep the lies straight. The meeting was about adoption, remember?
Well, now he’s admitted what we all knew (President Admits Trump Tower Meeting Was Meant to Get Dirt on Clinton from the NY Times). And here is what we also know:
NY Times:
White Nationalists Love Corey Stewart. He Keeps Them Close.
’Shaun Kenney, former state party executive director, lamented that “the alt-right has taken over the Virginia Republican Party.” After Mr. Stewart secured the nomination in June, John C. Whitbeck, Jr., the party chairman who once accused Mr. Stewart of “racist” language, resigned.
But many Republican leaders haven’t publicly disavowed Mr. Stewart, mindful that Mr. Trump is supporting him, and that the president has strong influence with the party base — many of whom supported Mr. Stewart in the primary.
Gary Abernathy (Trump supporter)/WaPo explains the attraction:
When I was growing up, my uncle, Bill Kibler, was a figure who both intimidated and fascinated me. A big, loud Navy veteran, farmer, outdoorsman and county Republican Party chairman, Uncle Bill was never shy with an opinion, often stated in the most politically incorrect manner. His verbal daggers frequently targeted his own party.
“They don’t have any guts,” he would say every time Republicans either folded, in his opinion, or acquiesced to the Democrats or the media on one issue or another. “The Democrats never back down or apologize. They play hardball. We’re sissies,” he would say, except sissies was not the word he used.
Uncle Bill passed away in 2008 at age 84, and it is a cosmic injustice that he did not live to see Donald Trump become president. He would be gratified that, finally, there has arrived a Republican who won’t apologize, come hell or high water, for wanting to enforce immigration laws, for demanding that our allies pony up more for our common defense and — most impressively, as far as the base is concerned — for giving as good as he gets from the media…
Likewise, however badly Trump behaves, and regardless of the criticism he faces, grass-roots Republicans are standing by him and going through it with him, defiantly and without apology. They finally have the president they’ve been waiting for, and they’re not letting him go.
When they fall, the fall will be a very hard landing.
Now that will make you smile.
Will Bunch/Philly.com:
If Team Trump can't reunite border families, someone needs to go to jail
Contempt.
Contempt for international refugee law — and, more importantly, basic human decency — when Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in response to President Trump’s dismay over unauthorized border crossings, declared a “zero tolerance” explicitly designed to use separation of young children from their parents as a tool to deter future migration.
Contempt for human rights when the “zero tolerance” policy allows a defense contractor with $248 million in government contracts to hold detained migrant children in windowless office buildings in Phoenix without kitchens or showers, where kids in U.S. government custody have been observed bathing themselves in sinks.
Contempt for the decency of children, not to mention the law, when these migrant kids are dispatched to a network of largely unaccountable shelters where the investigative reporters of ProPublica have now documented hundreds of allegations of sexual offenses, fights and missing children in a system that one expert called “a gold mine” for predators.
NBC:
Study shows Democratic voter enthusiasm surging
To be clear, primary votes are often very different animals than general elections. Primaries are sometimes driven by intra-party competition. But the numbers at least provide a rudimentary measure of how engaged voters are.
And the House primary numbers not only show a bigger Democratic bump, they show that more people have voted in Democratic House primaries than Republican House primaries in 2018 — flipping the script from 2014. (The same 31 states will have voted in both years.)
The Pew analysis also found the Democratic primary vote surging in Senate and gubernatorial races, but the House vote numbers were especially noteworthy. In part, they are the result of the Democrats challenging in more districts around the country, fielding candidates and energizing voters.
But the national numbers don’t tell the whole story, particularly in midterm elections where specific candidates and unique district dynamics can play a big role. And in individual states and districts, the numbers can look very different. Consider three states: California, Ohio and Iowa. All states with important battleground House districts in 2018.
Virginia Heffernan/LA Times on the #KremlinAnnex protests:
Does accusing Trump of treason go too far?
Organized mostly by Adam Parkhomenko, the boisterous Ukrainian American advisor to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the #KremlinAnnex protest translates a controversial and mouthy strain of online resistance into living color..
Now, technically, according to UC Davis legal scholar Carlton F.W. Larson, treason entails adhering to a declared Enemy — a power with which we are officially at war.
But, rhetorically, the T-word nicely suits Trump’s bowing-and-scraping routine with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, on July 16, which set off the #KremlinAnnex protest.
And the protesters are not the only ones who read the Helsinki event that way. John Brennan, the former CIA director, called Trump’s performance in Helsinki “nothing short of treasonous.”
Moreover, as citizens — rather than prosecutors — the protesters are well within their rights to reason that because Russia and the U.S. are fighting a proxy war in Syria, Russia should count as an Enemy to which Trump has given ample succor.
Mike DeBonis/WaPo:
Trump’s worst political nightmare? Democrats with subpoena power.
Some nonpartisan political forecasters now favor Democrats to flip the 23 seats necessary to win a House majority, citing fundraising, special-election results and national polling. There is a much narrower chance Democrats capture the Senate, due to an electoral map that heavily favors the GOP.
The risks of Democratic oversight for Trump and his administration stand apart from the more loaded question of impeachment — a possibility that both Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) have sought to down play despite broad support for it among Democratic voters.
Some outside Trump advisers have mused in recent days that losing the House would be a political disaster but saw a silver lining in the possibility that Democrats would veer left next year and be a foil for Trump, according to two Republicans familiar with those discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Those who served in the last GOP administration that dealt with a Democratic congressional majority said Trump and his allies would be making a mistake to minimize the consequences.
