The story of this year’s G20 was really the story of Donald Trump Unbound. Sure, it has always seemed as if Trump were free from any of the concerns that afflict ordinary mean—laws, morals, cholesterol—but clearly there was something to all that “Trump can’t really be himself while the Mueller investigation is hanging over his head” stuff. Because this year … Trump didn’t just engage in blatant evil, he reveled in it. He gave a giant middle finger to America’s allies, political propriety, and especially the whole concept of the free press.
Trump sat down with noted journalist-killer-in-bulk Vladimir Putin and talked about “getting rid of” pesky reporters. It was a joke all right … just not that kind of joke. The joke was the idea that Trump didn’t understand he was saying this side by side with a man who has had reporters poisoned, shot, drowned, and, with surprising frequency, defenestrated. The joke was how little he cared.
If that didn’t get the message across well enough, Trump then threw a special breakfast for his pal Mohammed bin Salman. At this little invite-only affair, Trump informed the media that “no one” blames the Saudi crown usurper for the dismemberment and murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. A statement that required Trump to deny the assessment of both the UN special commission and the CIA. After the murder, Jared Kushner’s advice to bin Salman was to stay low and the whole thing would blow over. But now Trump is saying f’-it. Who gives a damn about one murdered journalist, anyway?
Trump spent the days leading up to the event attacking and denigrating America’s allies. Then he sought out Putin for his first conversation of the get together. After that, Trump hustled over to stand next to bin Salman in the “family photo” of G20 members. Trump’s support was critical in seeing that the next G20 meeting will be held in Saudi Arabia — that should be a real thrill for the traveling press corps.
Hey, you know what Donald Trump calls one butchered Washington Post journalist? A good start. Relax. It’s just a joke. Let’s read columns … while there are still columns to read.
Jonathan Chait reminds us that Trump is still deeply, genuinely stupid.
New York Magazine
In an interview with the Financial Times before the G-20 summit, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin elucidated his oft-stated belief that Western-style liberalism has failed, leaving Putin-style authoritarianism as the only alternative. “The liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done. The migrants can kill, plunder, and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants must be protected,” Putin said. “The liberal idea has become obsolete.”
During a press conference at the G-20, a reporter asked President Trump about Putin’s comments that western-style liberalism is obsolete. Trump had absolutely no idea what the entire debate referred to:
Well, he may feel that way. He says what’s going on. I guess you look at what’s happening in Los Angeles, where it’s so sad to look, and what’s happening in San Francisco, and a couple other cities which are run by an extraordinary group of liberal people, I don’t know what they’re thinking but he does see things that are happening in the United States that would probably preclude him from saying how wonderful it is.
Yes, people. Donald Trump does think that “Western-style liberalism” means Democratic cities in California.
Putin was expressing a broadly fashionable argument that he has promoted for years, and that has recently taken hold among reactionaries in several Western countries, including the United States. Their critique is not of liberalism in the sense of the American center-left tradition identified with the Democratic party, but the longer historical tradition of liberalism that emerged from the theories of John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and other traditional philosophers whose beliefs created the foundation for democratic government.
Putin is saying that democracy is a dead idea. The less funny thing is that, if Trump had this explained to him, he would agree.
Hamid Dabashi gives an Iranian’s eye-view of the current scuffling in the Middle East.
Al jezeera
There is a famous fable by ancient Greek storyteller Aesop about a shepherd boy who habitually lied for fun. While looking after a flock of sheep near a village, every now and then he would cry "Wolf! Wolf!" to bring the villagers rushing, just to laugh at them and their naivety. One day the wolf did actually attack his flock, and the shepherd boy cried "Wolf!! Wolf!"- this time for real.
But by then, the villagers had wisened up and ignored his cries. With no one coming to help, the boy could do nothing to stop the wolf feasting on his flock. Aesop concludes: "There is no believing a liar, even when he speaks the truth."
Thinking of this fable today, one cannot help but wonder: Did Iran attack the Japanese tanker Kokuka Courageous with limpet mines - as the United States claims it did on June 13? Does the video the US army produced indeed prove the accusation?
Dabashi’s conclusion is that when Trump is telling, on average, 12 public lies every single day, how is is it possible to trust him when he gives a rationale for war? How can he be trusted, even if this time he is telling the truth?
Let us take them one at a time. The US launched a massive military attack against Iraq and wreaked havoc in the region, all based on a blatant lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction - a lie that the Bush administration staged and the New York Times consistently collaborated. Under the current administration that habitual tendency of states to lie has been exacerbated by a man who has a very casual relationship with the truth.
If the United States does end up in another Middle East conflict, is there any reason anyone in the Middle East should believe the stated reasons for that conflict? Is there any reason anyone in the United States should believe those reasons?
Paul Krugman says the S-word. Repeatedly.
New York TImes
What did you think of the bunch of socialists you just saw debating on stage?
Wait, you may protest, you didn’t see any socialists up there. And you’d be right. The Democratic Party has clearly moved left in recent years, but none of the presidential candidates are anything close to being actual socialists — no, not even Bernie Sanders, whose embrace of the label is really more about branding (“I’m anti-establishment!”) than substance.
Nobody in these debates wants government ownership of the means of production, which is what socialism used to mean. Most of the candidates are, instead, what Europeans would call “social democrats”: advocates of a private-sector-driven economy, but with a stronger social safety net, enhanced bargaining power for workers and tighter regulation of corporate malfeasance. They want America to be more like Denmark, not more like Venezuela.
To be fair, Venezuela is also not socialist. It’s just another garden variety dictatorship … like almost every other nation that has ever sold its populace on the idea that it was socialist.
Leading Republicans, however, routinely describe Democrats, even those on the right of their party, as socialists. Indeed, all indications are that denunciations of Democrats’ “socialist” agenda will be front and center in the general election campaign. And everyone in the news media accepts this as the normal state of affairs.
Which goes to show the extent to which Republican extremism has been accepted simply as a fact of life, barely worth mentioning.
To see what I mean, imagine the media firestorm, the screams about lost civility, we’d experience if any prominent Democrat described Republicans as a party of fascists, let alone if Democrats made that claim the centerpiece of their national campaign. And such an accusation would indeed be somewhat over the top — but it would be a lot closer to the truth than calling Democrats socialists.
I think this is my favorite Krugman column.
Art Cullen on the mismatch between how hard people work, and how well they are paid.
Storm Lake Times
The Iowa Department of Education released a chart showing the top school districts for free and reduced-price lunches. Six of the top 10 districts are meatpacking towns, Storm Lake coming in at No. 4 with 73.4% of its students eligible for meal assistance. The others: Postville (No. 1), Perry, Denison, Columbus Junction and Marshalltown. The 25 leading districts for this key indicator of poverty are rural (Laurens-Marathon, LuVerne and Gilmore City-Bradgates are prominent).
One conclusion to draw is that few people work harder than food processing employees but they have a harder time getting by. The Urbandale, Johnston and Dallas Center-Grimes school districts do not make the Top 25. It also is true that major manufacturing towns like Fort Dodge, Clinton and Davenport are on the list, as they have fallen into serious decline since the North American Free Trade Agreement watched all those jobs drain south of the border.
And, Des Moines is No. 2 on the list, where 76% of the students are eligible for food assistance.
Jobs not requiring skills do not pay well. Those are the jobs available in rural areas and inside Des Moines. Incomes are soaring in Dallas County through the knowledge economy but not in busted old river town Clinton, or in Denison. We subsidize lower-wage jobs with food assistance, housing tax credits to build low-income apartments, and various other means that never seem adequate to the need.
Those percentages are pretty staggering — and they should be pretty sobering for Iowans and for how they picture their own state.
I find it interesting that Cullen blames NAFTA for the lose of manufacturing jobs, rather than the manufacturers who made every decision about those jobs.
Renée Graham on how sexual assault doesn’t rate as a crime in the United States.
Boston Globe
The president of the United States is an accused sexual predator. Does anyone care?
In her upcoming memoir, “What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal,” writer E. Jean Carroll says that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in the dressing room of a New York department store in 1996. Yet on the Sunday morning news shows, no one could spare a minute to talk about the possible ramifications of Carroll’s claims. She is at least the 16th woman to accuse Trump of sexual misconduct ranging from groping to rape.
By Monday, The New York Times tried to explain its decision to downplay the story throughout the weekend. On the same day, editors relegated it to an “In Other News” roundup, wedged between teasers for the US women’s soccer team advancing to the World Cup quarterfinals and Italy’s selection as host of the 2026 Winter Olympics.
After all, it’s not like he used a personal email server.
As he has done in the past, Trump offered a denial, plus his usual steaming helping of general ickiness. “I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type,” he said in an interview Monday. “Number two, it never happened. It never happened, OK?” …
It’s telling how often Trump evokes a too-unattractive-to-rape trope as a defense against sexual assault allegations. In Trump’s mind, that closes the discussion. That’s unacceptable to anyone who cares about the safety of women, sexual assault survivors, and what message this sends about whether anyone should be above the law.
What’s the best word that combines sad and infuriating?
Joan Walsh on 2020 Democrats vs. Trump’s immigration nightmare.
The Nation
Anyone who had any doubt that the 2020 election was a contest for the soul of the United States had to lose that doubt watching Thursday night’s Democratic debate. The photo of the late Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter, Valeria, drowned in the Rio Grande thanks to Donald Trump’s policies, framed the night. It’s tough to overstate how much Democrats have changed the way they’ve approached these issues in the last decade. ...
On Thursday night, all 10 candidates raised their hands to say undocumented immigrants should be covered by government health insurance. And unlike when, just 24 hours earlier, Julián Castro berated fellow Texan Beto O’Rourke for being unwilling to make border crossing a civil, not criminal, offense (as it used to be), and the other candidates stood and watched, on Thursday night nine of 10 Democrats agreed with Castro.
That’s a massive movement to the good for Democrats, as the nation has taken an even more massive swing toward evil under Trump.
Let’s be clear: It’s not that all of these candidates are so progressive, though some are. A generation of immigrant-rights activists got us here. But it was stunning to see four of the five leading Democratic candidates, plus six who’d like to replace them, stand so strong on these issues—especially after the giant disappointment on the congressional border security vote the same day.
MIchael Tomasky on how Joe Biden ran smack into his worst opponent ... Joe Biden.
Daily Beast
Joe Biden: What was that?
That went about as badly for the frontrunner as it could have gone. He came out all right, mentioning Donald Trump in his first comment. Fifteen minutes in, Eric Swalwell went at him by throwing that quote in his face about it being time to pass the torch. Biden did not exactly handle that with the greatest of aplomb, but “I’m still holdin’ on to that torch” was… fine.
Over the course of the next 45 minutes, nothing terrible, nothing great. Looked a little old, seemed a little tired. But I remember seeing some people on Twitter ranking him, oh, third. Then came the moment. I’d been taking notes on my computer and then, at some point, without even quite knowing it, I stopped. A half an hour later, I looked back at those notes and saw that the last thing I wrote was:
“Anyway, my time’s up, I’m sorry.”
I stopped because after Biden said that, there seemed no point in keeping score anymore. We had a winner, Kamala Harris. And we had a loser.
Biden didn’t exactly do himself any favors after that moment. Or even after the debate. If he’s not exactly digging the hole deeper with a shovel, he’s at least diligently making use of a spoon.
And it got worse for Biden from there. The Iraq answer was a big whiff. Rachel Maddow gave him a chance to say he’d learned. She all but begged him to say he’d learned. Here’s her question: “You voted for the Iraq War. you said you regret that vote. Why should voters trust your judgment when it comes to making a decision on taking the country to war the next time?”
The answer to that question is obvious. I did, Rachel, and I was wrong. I couldn’t believe a president would deceive us about a casus belli. Whatever. Something like that. And then pivot to the grave lesson you’ve learned from that humbling error. Simple.
Yeah, it was obvious. No, it didn’t come.
Virginia Heffernan on why watching Democratic candidates spar was a good thing.
Los Angeles Times
On Wednesday, Julián Castro, former mayor of San Antonio, elegantly schooled former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) on immigration law. Castro made a case for getting rid of Section 1325 of the Immigration Nationality Act, which criminalizes border crossing and is used to justify family separation. (O’Rourke argues that the section is key to preventing human trafficking; Castro says other laws already have human trafficking covered.)
And then, on Thursday, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) delivered a virtuoso admonishment of former Vice President Joe Biden for his record on civil rights. In a devastating aria about her own experience of racism and being bused to school as part of desegregation — a practice Biden voted against — Harris described “a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools.”
“That little girl was me,” said Harris. “So I will tell you that on this subject, it cannot be an intellectual debate among Democrats.”
Her words threw into relief the lofty detachment of the party’s aged grandees, front-runners Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). These men like to position themselves as gung-ho for civil rights, but their records are mixed, and they have not lived the struggle as Harris has.
The best moments of both debates were those moments when candidates did not give slogans, mottoes, or catchphrases, and instead got down to things that were more visceral.
Hours after the second debate, why it was unsettling still eluded me. But then it came into focus: We’d been transported back through the looking glass. In prime time, our political conversation was rational, civil, normal, sane and enlightening.
I’ve urged this before, but go watch the debate between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Ford’s infamous “iron curtain” slip is an obvious misstep, but the night is a solid back and forth between men with different positions and opinions, disagreeing firmly, without making those disagreements into third grade insults. In years since, it’s achieved a kind of symbolic place in my heart at the last good debate. But maybe it won’t stay that way.
Charles Pierce on how Chuck Schumer really screwed the House on the border bill.
Esquire
While the Democratic Party's presidential candidates were teeing it up here, the Democratic Party in Congress was falling apart. This has caused, in no particular order, splits between the Senate Democrats and the House Democrats, between progressive Democrats and Blue Dog Democrats, between Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the progressive members of her caucus, and between Pelosi and members of her own leadership team. The immediate casus belli was a bill designed to deal with the humanitarian crisis at the southern border and its victims, some of whom are very young. The House passed a bill. The Senate passed its own bill. The differences in the bills respective priorities can be fairly summed up by the phrase, "Goddamn Mitch McConnell."
Yeah, I’d actually sum them up with “why did Chuck Schumer lead Senate Democrats to fold like a limp rag rather than trying to push the Senate toward positions contained in the House bill that had been authored by Democrats?” But that’s less catchy.
In point of fact, the Senate Democrats under Minority Leader Chuck Schumer cut the legs out from under their House colleagues and thereby made McConnell's revolting threat a reality for people voting in the lower House. And while it's true that the Blue Dogs, as well as the remarkably constituent-free members of the Problem Solvers caucus, threatened to tank the bill if it included the proposed cuts to ICE that were in the original House bill, the progressive rage at Pelosi is more properly aimed at Schumer, whose failure as a Senate Minority Leader is now complete. It's time for him to go.
There. That’s what I meant.
Anne Applebaum agrees that Russia tried to interfere before, it’s Trump’s reaction that was new.
Washington Post
Russian scorn for liberal democracy has a long history, and a certain kind of Russian disdain for the West is nothing new. As far back as 1920, Lenin declared that parliaments were “historically obsolete” and predicted that it was just a matter of time before they disappeared. In 1956, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev famously said that “history is on our side.” The Soviet Union was winning, he said, and the West was dying: “We will bury you.”
That’s the historical background for the interview that the Financial Times conducted with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on the eve of this weekend’s Group of 20 summit. The conversation ranged over many issues, with the curious exception of Ukraine, which the newspaper chose not to bring up. But in the course of the conversation, Putin returned more than once to a theme that Lenin and Khrushchev would have found familiar. The “so-called liberal idea,” he told his interlocutors, “has outlived its purpose.” A few minutes later he repeated himself: “The liberal idea has become obsolete.”
See above for Donald Trump’s contribution to this conversation.
But what is this “liberal idea” that has been consigned to the dustbin of history? In Putin’s telling, it is an alt-right, far-right caricature. To Putin, the “liberal idea” means that “migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity”; it also means that “children can play five or six gender roles.” The liberal idea, to Putin, has nothing to do with rights, or freedoms, or separation of powers; nothing to do with judicial independence, the rule of law, private property, or any of the other things that make liberal societies prosperous and free. The comments were telling: Putin’s understanding of the Western liberal world and of Western liberal values is not, it seems, any more sophisticated than that of the Internet trolls whose wages he pays. Nor is it much more sophisticated than Lenin’s or Khrushchev’s.
As is often true, Applebaum’s post is worth reading in full.
Will Bunch wonders how much needs to burn to make the point about fossil fuels.
Philadelphia Inquirer
It’s already way past time for Philadelphia and the rest of Pennsylvania to concede that the global fossil fuel revolution that started right here in the Keystone State (at the Drake well, in Titusville, in 1859) is also dead and gone, and that it’s time to start planning for a green 21st century.
That alarm clock finally went off at 4:22 a.m. on a Friday morning, as cameras covering a raging fire at the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery along the Schuylkill River captured a massive fireball near the Platt Bridge, so intense that weather satellites detected the heat from far above the earth. It took more than a day to extinguish the blaze that, for now, has shut down the largest oil refinery in the East Coast and caused an upward blip in gas prices.
If you haven’t seen the explosion, it was pretty spectacular.
Make no mistake, Philadelphia dodged a bullet — no, make that a dirty bomb — last week. It’s remarkable that only five refinery workers suffered non-life-threatening injuries and that officials have found no toxic chemicals from the fire and the blasts in the nearby community. Even more alarming … is how close the blasts may have come to a release of a gas called hydrogen fluoride that can result from an acid that’s used to convert crude oil into fuels. That’s a lethal substance that experts have compared to those that once caused hundreds of deaths in the notorious 1984 accident in Bhopal, India.
Aisha Sultan chronicles a heart-breaking trip to the border.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The children wore clothes soiled with mucus, urine and feces.
None of the children had access to soap or toothpaste, lawyers visiting the border detention facilities in Texas reported. Some had not showered in weeks.
It’s hard to think about the hundreds of children — scared, cold, sick, dirty, hungry — held by our government in these conditions, funded by our tax dollars.
Angie O’Gorman, a 71-year-old retired worker for Legal Services in St. Louis, could not look away. In February, she called Annunciation House, which operates shelters in El Paso, and said: “I’m available. I speak some Spanish. Let me know when you need a volunteer.”
G’Gorman headed for the border on her own, and unlike senators and representatives who have attempted to visit, she was able to spend two weeks on the inside —but only at the facility where those families who had been reunited went after they left detention. Of the detention facilities, she heard only horror stories.
“I know from experience the reasons why people are fleeing Central America,” she said. “I’ve been there.” She’s seen the damage that American policies have done in the countries overrun by drug and gang violence.
The latest news of deplorable conditions in an overcrowded facility in Clint, Texas, didn’t surprise her.
“This situation has been going on for months,” she said. “What I find more intolerable than the suffering is the attitude that allows it to go on.”
Leonard Pitts salutes the pride behind pride month.
Miami Herald
I am as straight as the crease in George Will’s slacks. It’s not something I’m particularly proud of.
To be clear, it’s also not something of which I am ashamed. Truth be told, it’s not something I’ve ever had to think much about, not something I’ve ever had to defend or deny. You might call that heterosexual privilege. It’s one of the things that makes the current festivities - June is LGBTQ Pride Month - necessary.
As Pride Months go, this one is particularly auspicious as it marks the 50th anniversary of the June 28, 1969 Stonewall Uprising, the Lexington and Concord of the gay rights movement. Sadly, this celebration also arrives in the shadow of a dramatic retrenchment of intolerance against LGBTQ Americans..
And, as is almost always true, it’s worth reading the rest of Pitts.
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