We begin today’s roundup with this analysis of the massive amount of money spent at Trump Properties by foreign governments, candidates, etc.:
Sixty-four trade groups, foreign governments, Republican candidates and others stayed at or held events at properties linked to U.S. President Donald Trump during Trump’s first year in office, a political watchdog group said in a report released on Tuesday.
The arrangements represented “unprecedented conflicts of interest” because Trump oversees the federal government and has not divested from properties he owns or that carry his name, Public Citizen, a nonpartisan group, said in the report.
Shortly before taking office last year, Trump said he would hand off control of his global business empire to his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, and move his assets into a trust to help ensure that he would not consciously take actions as president that would benefit him personally.
On the issue of a government shutdown, Margaret Hartmann has the details:
In recent years Congress has become accustomed to the constant threat of government shutdown, but no president had openly called for one until President Trump tweeted in May that perhaps “our country needs a good ‘shutdown.’”
Like so many things that appear on Trump’s Twitter feed, bringing the federal government to a grinding halt did not become official White House policy. Yet thanks in part to the president’s inability to refrain from complaining about the number of people who immigrate to the U.S. from “shithole” countries, we’re now closer to a shutdown than we have been at any point during this administration.
Robert Zaretsky at The Houston Chronicle provides some historical analogies on the president’s appeal to racists:
Just as the Nasjonal Samling sought to normalize racism in interwar Norway, our own "alt-right," which has thrown its support behind Donald Trump, is doing the same in our country. Tellingly, the neo-fascist Daily Stormer has published glowing pieces on both Quisling as well as Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian novelist who was both a Nobel Prize laureate and fanatical anti-Semite.
No less tellingly, along with the movement's leader, Richard Spencer, the editor of the Daily Stormer cheered Mr. Trump's description of Haiti and Africa. The remark, declared Andrew Anglin, "indicates that Trump is more or less on the same page as us."
Conservative Michael Gerson also writes about the president’s racism:
And still it is difficult for me to write the words: “The President of the United States is a racist.” The implications are horrible, but unavoidable. For starters, it means the president is blind to the contributions of African migrants to our country. It means that the president has undermined U.S. foreign policy across a strategic continent, and in the process, alienating people disproportionately prone to like the United States and respect its global role. It means that many Americans of color understandably view Trump as the president of white America, sharpening a legacy of distrust that will not quickly fade. Conversely, it means bigots also view Trump as the president of white America, providing energy and legitimacy to some of the worst people in the country.
Paul Waldman:
Some of Trump's defenders, thinking they're oh so clever, have been asking liberals, "So would you rather move to Haiti or Norway? Huh? Huh?" But that, of course is beside the point. The question isn't the relative merits of the bookstore/cafe scenes in Oslo and Port-au-Prince, it's about the people moving here. Trump has said he wants "skills-based" immigration, but in the heat of the moment he reveals himself, saying not that we should have more engineers but that we should have people from places like Norway.
Meanwhile, at The Daily Beast, Betsy Woodruff previews Steve Bannon’s testimony:
At 9:30 on Tuesday morning, Steve Bannon will sit down in an uncrowded room.
The former White House adviser may have been disavowed by his most generous donors, deposed as chairman of Breitbart News, and even semi-disowned by a candidate he endorsed.
But there are still people interested in him—namely, the staff and members of the House intelligence committee, who will question him Tuesday morning. Or at least, those congressmen and women who managed to get back to Washington after a holiday weekend.
On a final note, Garrett Epps dives into an important Supreme Court case:
If a citizen speaks at a public meeting and says something a politician doesn’t like, can the citizen be arrested, cuffed, and carted off to the hoosegow?
Suppose that, during this fraught encounter, the citizen violates some law—even by accident, even one no one has ever heard of, even one dug up after the fact—does that make her arrest constitutional?
Deyshia Hargrave, meet Fane Lozman. You need to follow his case. Hargrave is a language arts teacher in Kaplan, Louisana. She was arrested Monday after she questioned school-district policy during public comment at a school board meeting. [...]
Fane Lozman, whose case will be argued in front of the Supreme Court on February 27, faced the same fate at a meeting of the Riviera Beach, Florida, city council in November 2006. Lozman, remarkably enough, has made his way to the high court more or less without assistance twice in the past four years, arguing two different aspects of his acrimonious dispute with the Riviera Beach city government. The first case, which Lozman won, asked whether his motorless plywood “floating home” was actually a “vessel” subject to federal admiralty law. (Answer, via Justice Stephen Breyer: “Um, no.”) The second case is about police tactics at public meetings; its result could make a profound difference to citizens like Hargrave who want to talk back to local officials without a trip to jail.