#^d 2017-07-02 #^h Week Links
Last week I contemplated suspending Weekend Roundup. Partly I was having grave computer problems that made surfing the web ever more painful, and partly I was just disgusted with all the insane things Trump and the Republicans are doing. Since then I tried Google's Chromium browser and it's working better (although not perfectly, and without NoScript I'm seeing a lot of annoying JavaScript I never had to deal with before).
So I figured I'd compromise by just jotting down a few links without comments, although sometimes I couldn't help myself. Also because shit's happening so fast, I figured I should jot down a date for each linked page (when I remembered to do so). Then I wrote an introduction.
Meanwhile, I slogged through Noam Chomsky's essay collection, Who Rules the World? I didn't learn a lot I didn't already know, but I started out in a bad mood about America's many wars, so I didn't mind Chomsky being even harsher than I would be. Still, I wanted something lighter next, and settled for Bernie Sanders' post-campaign book. Only about 100 pages into it -- still pre-Iowa, when he was a very longshot, yet still no more improbable than the mess we wound up with. I talked to a friend last week who was still complaining about "Bernie or bust" -- people who held out for something more while most of us were willing to settle for much less (damn near nothing).
Five months in, I think we can draw some clear conclusions about Donald Trump as President. One is that he's a lot more ignorant about everything a national political leader does (or should do) than pretty much anyone imagined -- including those of us who have long feared what we thought would be the worst. One manifestation of this is that he has no clue how to get anything done, and his ideas about what to do rarely rise above his sociopathic prejudices.
The second, which was easier to predict from his campaign, is that his shameless disregard for truth is orders of magnitude beyond anything Washington -- a notorious haven for dissemblers -- has ever encountered. The media literally have no idea where to begin, because there are no fixed points to navigate by.
The third is that Trump has belied every intimation he made on the campaign trail that he might break with Republican Party orthodoxy and forge a new direction: nationalist, for sure, but giving government a more humane role at home and a less aggressive one at home. This not only didn't happen; as many of us suspected, it never had a chance. Trump's trifecta of ignorance, incompetence, and dishonesty (for lack of a better word -- mendacious implies he's somewhat clever, and even bullshit suggests a hidden agenda) has left his administration in the malevolent hands of Republican apparatchiks and their billionaire masters.
His only authentic (in the sense of things he personally decided) moves so far have been hiring relatives and touring his personal properties -- things he's been doing for decades. And when he's not indulging his oversized ego, he's doing what he's always tried to do: make money. He's not responsible for creating Washington's ubiquitous culture of graft, but he exemplifies it, especially by making sure he's getting his cut.
Still, since Mitch McConnell unveiled his hitherto secret health care bill (the BRCA, like the breast cancer gene -- it seems immune to adding a "Care" suffix because it clearly doesn't), Trump's own personal garishness has taken a back seat (despite eruptions like the Mika Brzezinski flap) to his adopted party's crusade not just to coddle and elevate the rich but also to demean and hurt the poor (and anyone else they can organize their disdain against). This should have been clear years ago, but centrist Democrats and the bought-and-aid-for media have perpetuated the myth that they can work with moderate counterparts among the Republicans. But while Clinton and Obama never pointed to the obvious, Trump inadvertently made the point when he complained of not having a chance to get a single Democratic vote for his "repeal-and-replace Obamacare" bill. At least this answers the thought experiment: how bad does a bill have to be to not get a single sell-out Democrat?
Still, Republicans are using their thin Congressional margins, the conservative-leaning Supreme Court, and anything that can be done through executive orders (or not done by turning a blind eye to enforcement on matters like civil rights, environment, and antitrust), to push its anti-popular (and frequently downright unpopular) agenda through. Just this last week, Trump's travel ban order got a reprieve from the Supreme Court, and the House passed two anti-immigrant bills (certain to fall short of the 60 votes the Senate used to require, but McConnell may still get creative there).
It's hard to say whether Trump's chaos (for lack of a better word, although I was tempted by "insanity") is making their efforts easier or harder. Matthew Yglesias sums this up in Why Donald Trump can't make deals in Washington:
It seems paradoxical that you could combine the party discipline needed to push controversial and unpopular legislation through on a party line vote with total disengagement on the part of the party's top leader. But the Trump administration seems to feature just the right mix of chaos and conventionality to make it work. Both Vice President Mike Pence and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus are very conventional Republicans with deep ties to the congressional party. That seems to be good enough to ensure that Trump will take his cues from Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell regardless of his personal instincts. Trump triumphed over the GOP's leadership during the 2016 primary, but he has largely surrendered to them on policy questions.
The result is that deals get done -- or not -- by the party's congressional leadership. The ability to legislate hinges on Ryan and McConnell being able to agree among themselves. Trump serves as an ineffectual figurehead, talking tough but not really being able to engage with the policy details enough to properly negotiate an unprecedented rollback of the welfare state.
Here's another writer who understands that no matter how personally noxious Donald Trump may be, his administration is doing pretty exactly what any Republican administration would be doing given the same powers: Alex Pareene: This Is Normal:
What most of the worst people in Donald Trump's administration have in common is that they are Republicans. This simple fact is obscured sometimes by the many ways in which Trump is genuinely an aberration from the political norm -- like his practice of naked nepotism rather than laundering the perpetuation of class advantage through a "meritocratic" process -- and by the fact that many of the most vocal online spokespeople for "the resistance" ignore the recent history of the Republican Party in favor of a Trump-centric theory of How Fucked Up Everything Is.
But it is necessary for liberals, leftists, and Democrats to actually be clear on the fact that the Republican Party is responsible for Trump. The Democrats' longterm failure to make a compelling and all-encompassing case against conservatism and the GOP as institutions, rather than making specific cases against specific Republican politicians, is one of the reasons the party is currently in the political wilderness. . . .
Next time you boggle at the sight of the president's unqualified son-in-law flying to Iraq to get briefed by generals on the facts on the ground, remember that George W. Bush sent a business school chum to privatize Iraq's economy and a 24-year-old with no relevant experience to reopen the Iraqi stock market.
The worst members of Trump's cabinet -- Jeff Sessions, Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos -- are Republicans. Their analogues in any possible alternate Republican presidency would've been basically identical in how they carried out their work. Jeb Bush would've signed the AHCA. Marco Rubio would've sold arms to Saudi Arabia. John Kasich would've abided the theft of a Supreme Court seat and selected a justice just as conservative as Neil Gorsuch, if not Gorsuch himself.
None of those men would've lobbed crude personal insults at cable show hosts. They wouldn't have been as cartoonishly, personally corrupt in their business dealings (though scores of their appointees would have been). But even the most consequential way in which Trump differs from a hypothetical alternate Republican president, his blatant obstruction of the investigation into whether or not he is somehow compromised by or in league with the Russian government, has almost no real-world consequences, compared to his (bog-standard Republican) international and domestic policy agendas. When Mitch McConnell's underhanded legislative maneuvering is included in a list of ways in which Trump is normalizing authoritarianism, you give the president far too much credit and the Republican Party far too little.
Meanwhile, here are links (mostly without comments) to some stories I noticed:
Zeeshan Aleem: Trump just made a humiliating economic error in front of South Korea's president [06-30]: Confusing trade deficits with national debt. The bigger problem -- assuming confirmation of Trump's duncehood is no surprise -- is that US has historically bought South Korean alliance by supporting its export-driven economic growth, a strategy undercut by Trump's "America First" demagoguery -- oddly at a time when Trump's blundering has triggered another confrontation with North Korea. Also see: Jason Ditz: Trump: North Korea Should Be Dealt With Rapidly: but how? "South Korea and China had both been said in recent weeks to have presented the Trump administration a diplomatic resolution, but to have been dismissed out of hand, with the administration ruling out any deal that reduces the 'military pressure' on North Korea."
Zack Beauchamp: This chilling NRA ad calls on its members to save America by fighting liberals
Ari Berman: The Trump Administration Is Planning an Unprecedented Attack on Voting Rights
Esme Cribb: No Staff Members Left in Science Division of White House Office [07-01]
Chas Danner: Christie Shuts Down New Jersey Government, State Beaches and Parks Closed [07-01]
David A Farenthold: A Time magazine with Trump on its cover hangs in his golf clubs. It's fake. [06-27]
Michelle Goldberg: Trump No Longer Seems Able to Hide His Raw Misogyny.
Richard Goldstein: Jupiter Rising: On Macron and France.
Glenn Greenwald: CNN Journalists Resign: Lastest Example of Media Recklessness on the Russia Threat
William Greider: Worried About Those Global Cyber Attacks? They Were Started by Washington
Alex Isenstadt/Josh Dawsey: Senate GOP seethes at Trump impulsiveness [06-27]: Sour grapes about Trump's inadvertent mucking with 2018 Senate prospects; e.g., his PAC attacks against Dean Heller (R-NV), who must be one of the most endangered Republican incumbents (otherwise why would he break with Trump over gutting of ACA?).
Annie Karni/Nahal Toosi: Tight circle of security officials crafted Trump's Syria warning [06-27]: Curious that Trump's claim that "new intelligence" indicated that Syria was planning on launching a chemical weapons attack appeared almost immediately after Seymour Hersh reported that US intelligence agencies didn't believe reports of a previous attack that Trump used as pretext for his cruise missile volley against a Syrian Air Force base (see: Trump's Red Line). Also note that Trump and company claimed their warning had worked a mere two days after it was issued (see: Michael D Shear: White House Warning Halted Syria Chemical Attack, Officials Say [06-28].
Jeremy Kryt: Inside Trump's Disastrous 'Secret' Drug War Plans for Central America [07-01]
Martin Longman: And Now the Trump Presidency Begins to Fail for Real [06-29]: Well, Trump has settled on a strategy of trying to pass everything with straight party votes, further angering Democrats by using executive power to reverse virtually everything associated with Obama -- in effect, he's not only set out to erase the last eight years, he's more explicit about that than any president ever. (Too bad Obama did just the opposite, even though GW Bush left him a lot that should have been rolled back.) Health care is merely the most obvious example, because Republicans made it one eight years ago, leaving Democrats with no option other than to pass the ACA on a straight party vote. But this dynamic applies to lots of things, and there's no reason to think taxes, infrastructure, or immigration will turn out any different. And note that a big part of Trump's problem with pressing his partisan majority is that he can't win without support of the tea party faction (or whatever they call themselves these days) and those guys have learned to leverage their numbers, basically to block anything that isn't extreme enough. Thus, the House AHCA initially failed, only to pass after the leadership made it more hurtful and even less popular. Needless to say, that just encourages the extreme right to become even more aggressive. On the other hand, Trump closed off the option (if it ever existed) of moving toward the center when he staffed his administration and started his Obama purge. So, yeah, getting things done is going to be difficult for Trump. On the other hand, his capacity to wreck our world is still quite extraordinary, so I wouldn't start celebrating yet.
German Lopez: Trump's "election integrity" commission wants every voter's name, party ID, and address [06-30]: This is Kris Kobach, a reach which far exceeds anything Russia has been accused of trying to hack. Such a database would be very useful for political operators. Article has much background info on Republican voter suppression efforts, which is what "voter fraud" is really all about. Aside from the politics, another obvious problem is noted here: Eric Geller/Cory Bennett: Trump voter-fraud panel's data request a gold mine for hackers, experts warn. Meanwhile, instead of backing away from such an obviously bad idea, Trump is doubling down: Esme Cribb: Trump Rails Against States Rejecting His Shady Election Commission's Requests.
Hugh Miles: Al-Jazeera, insurgent TV station that divides the Arab world, faces closure: Shutting down the closest thing the Arab world has to a free press is one of Saudi Arabia's key demands before they will consider calling off their blockade of Qatar, and the one that's most clearly offensive to anyone in any country that has a relatively free press.
Mark Perry: Tillerson and Mattis Cleaning Up Kushner's Middle East Mess [06-26]
Brad Palmer/Nadja Popovich: As Climate Changes, Southern States Will Suffer More Than Others: Florida, of course, but Texas and Arizona are conspicuously red on this map. Authors argue that the poorest counties will suffer most, but it seems obvious to me that relatively rich individuals will be hardest hit -- e.g., it's not poor people who own all that beachfront property soon to be submerged. Another article notes Carbon in Atmosphere Is Rising, Even as Emissions Stabilize.
Alex Pareene: Donald Trump Is Getting Played Like a Sucker by His Own Budget Guy [05-26]: "Democrats dream of running against budgets like the one drawn up by Mulvaney. It neuters Trump's single greatest political advantage, which is that a sizable number of whites in the Rust Belt convinced themselves that Trump was something other than a Mitt Romney-style plutocratic Republican." I had lost track of Pareene, but looks like he's been at Fusion for some time. Some older posts that caught my eye: Maybe We Need That Hillary Clinton Dark Money Group Now [06-21]; Alex Pareene: Stop Enabling the Nihilist Republican Shrug [06-01]; Actually, Why Not Cancel the White House Press Briefing? [05-12] ("A room full of people who know the man answering their questions cannot possibly truthfully answer their questions makes for great TV, but it does not make for meaningful coverage of the White House"); Airlines Can Treat You Like Garbage Because They Are an Oligopoly [04-11]; I Don't Want to Hear Another Fucking Word About John McCain Unless He Dies or Actually Does Something Useful for Once [02-17]. Perhaps best is The Long, Lucrative Right-wing Grift Is Blowing Up in the World's Face [04-05]; e.g.:
Trump was always venal, dishonest, genuinely deluded about his financial acumen and business success, and, you know, a wildly misogynistic accused rapist and sexual harasser. But for most of his public life, he also clearly knew the right sorts of things to say to sound like a reasonable person, albeit a mostly ridiculous one. Donald Trump the deranged believer of bizarre untruths about the world at large is actually a fairly recent development. . . . Trump learned what to think about the world at large from the media, and for most of his life, he was a consumer of the mainstream media.
Donald Trump today is a cruel dolt turned into a raving madman by cable news and Breitbart.com. You could see the descent happen during the Obama era, in concert with the broader maddening of the GOP. The major difference between Trump and the other old white men who've been radicalized by the conservative press is that his was a strangely self-directed conversion, based on his desire to make himself known as a plausible Republican presidential candidate. . . .
Now, and for the foreseeable future, the grifter-in-chief sits alone in the White House residence every night, watching cable news tell him comforting lies -- that he's a hugely popular president, that responsibility for his myriad setbacks and failures lies with the many powerful enemies aligned against him a grand conspiracy -- in between the ads for reverse mortgages and "all-natural male enhancement." There's an image of America in the age of the complete triumph of bullshit. You spend a few years selling lousy steaks to suckers, then one morning you wake up and you're the sucker -- and the steak.
Frank Rich: Nixon, Trump, and How a Presidency Ends: More on Nixon than on Trump, but the relevance is clear. One note I wasn't aware of is that the House impeachment committee considered charging Nixon with violating the "emoluments clause," which Trump has flagrantly violated since taking office. Another is a Gary Wills quote about Nixon's help: "a world of little men using large powers incompetently from a combination of suspicion and panic." As I recall, Nixon and his "little men" were less worried about what was being investigated than what else the investigators might find, and that's surely true of Trump too.
Corey Robin: If Republicans lose the healthcare fight, it's the beginning of the end: One note here is that in 1977, 1983 and 1993 "the federal government launched a major retrenchment of Social Security" -- all three were bipartisan efforts, two signed by Democratic presidents, but this time Democrats aren't going to give Republicans cover for their cuts and the misery they cause. This makes me think Republicans should worry more about passing their bill, but they're pretty locked into their delusions. Still, note this:
One reason the Republicans are having such a hard time of it is that the public is overwhelmingly against the Senate bill. As Politico recently reported, Senate phones have been ringing off the hook -- almost entirely from citizens opposed to what the Republicans are doing.
A staffer for Mississippi senator Thad Cochran claims his office received 226 constituent calls over a four-day period: two in favor of the Republican bill, 224 against. And, yes, you read that correctly. Not Massachusetts. Mississippi.
Jordan Rudner: Donald Trump's Supreme Court Justice Did a Lot of Horrible Things Today [06-26]: Subheds: He opposed a ruling that gave same-sex parents equal rights; He made it clear how he'll side on Trump's travel ban; He helped vote to send a man to death in Texas; He tried to take on a case that could further weaken gun control laws; He voted to strike down a barrier between church and state
Christopher Sellers: Trump and Pruitt are the biggest threat to the EPA in its 47 years of existence [07-01]
Matt Taibbi: With CNN Flap, Media's Trump-Era Identity Crisis Continues [06-28]: "Donald Trump's great talent as a politician -- some might call it an anti-talent -- is his ability to bring everyone down to his level." Also Megyn Kelly Vivisects Bloated Conspiracy Hog Alex Jones [06-20].
Jeffrey Toobin: The National Enquirer's Fervor for Trump: "Throughout the 2016 Presidential race, the Enquirer embraced Trump with sycophantic fervor. The magazine made its first political endorsement ever, of Trump, last spring." Related: Gabriel Sherman: What Really Happened Between Donald Trump, the Hosts of Morning Joe, and the National Enquirer [06-30].
Matthew Yglesias: The most important stories of the week, explained [06-30]: CBO released its analysis of Senate GOP health bill; Trump's travel ban finally went into effect; the EU slapped Google with a $2.7 billion fine; Elizabeth Warren endorsed single-payer health care; Donald Trump held his first Trump fundraiser at the Trump hotel. Google was found in violation of EU antitrust laws for perverting its search results in favor of its advertisers. That should be illegal here, too. The fundraiser may have struck people as odd given that he famously self-financed his 2016 campaign. Yglesias writes:
While some politicians would go the extra mile to avoid even the appearance of personally profiting from the presidency, this was the clearest sign yet that Trump revels in it -- donors know they are putting money directly in Trump's pocket via the hotel fees, Trump knows it too, and the donors know that he knows it.
Yglesias also wrote: Republicans' health bill saves its most severe Medicaid cuts for outside the CBO's scoring window; The 3 leading conservative cases for the Senate health bill, explained. Needless to say, those "cases" range from bad to fraud. From the second article:
One key thing to understand is that even though the bill would set Medicaid on a course that makes cuts to coverage and services inevitable, it defers all the actual decision-making to governors and state legislatures. The effect is that the political pain for making the cuts will probably fall on state-level actors rather than congressional ones, letting the members of Congress whose actions made the cuts inevitable evade accountability.
Note: It was impossible for me to follow various links that loooked interesting due to aggressive gatekeeping. This included Business Insider, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal. Also annoying: The Guardian, The Nation. I subscribe to The Nation, so should be able to work around that, but the new browser doesn't have the right account info.