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Month: March 2018

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the handsomest man in the history of the world?

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the handsomest man in the history of the world?

by digby

Trump’s not going to be happy about this:

In light of Democrat candidate Conor Lamb declaring victory in Tuesday night’s special congressional election, some pundits have used it to suggest a liberal anti-Donald Trump wave is under way, but the hosts of Fox & Friends chalked the results up to the “cuteness” vote.

While results are still too close to technically call in the Pittsburgh-area PA18 district, Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt said Democrats should start looking at this race as a template for future elections in pro-Trump areas. “Democrats are definitely looking at that and saying what is it about this candidate that people like because we gotta’ continue this,” Earhardt said.

Steve Doocy believed the answer to Lamb’s it-factor was his devastating good looks, saying, “Brit Hume said he was cute a couple a nights ago.”

Co-host Earhardt chimed-in with agreement and laughter: “He is very handsome. He’s young, he’s a Marine.”

Kilmeade closed the segment of the president’s favorite morning show by suggesting network veteran Brit Hume is Fox News’ resident cuteness expert.

“I go to Brit Hume to find out what policies matter and sometimes cuteness counts,” concluded Kilmeade.

Recall what Trump said at his rally last Saturday:

I hear he’s nice-looking. I think I’m better-looking than him. I do. I do. I do. And he’s slightly younger than me. Slightly. No, I heard that, then I saw, he’s OK. He’s all right.

If Lamb won because he’s “cute” that means he’s cuter than Trump. And that cannot be true. Trump seriously believes he is the best looking man in the world. He is very competitive this way:

Recall:

Donald Trump said that he not only had higher poll numbers than fellow GOP presidential contender Marco Rubio — he was also better looking than his rival.

Trump made the comments on Bloomberg Television’s “With All Due Respect,” referencing the media fawning over Rubio, who had a successful performance at last week’s Republican debate.

“I watched someone on [MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’] this morning…He’s fawning over him. He says how handsome he is,” Trump said.

“I don’t know, I think I’m better looking than he is.”


And this:

“When I’m attacked, I fight back. When I was attacked viciously by those women, of course, it’s very hard for them to attack me on looks, because I’m so good looking,” Trump said on Sunday morning.


Aaaand here:

A woman fainted shortly after Donald Trump got on stage in Lexington, S.C., after waiting hours to see the billionaire GOP frontrunner.Trump pointed the woman out, and motioned the crowd to help her, and said that she probably waited eight hours to sit in one of the front rows.

“Maybe she fainted at how good looking I am,” Trump quipped.

He said this all the way back in 1999:

“To be blunt, people would vote for me, they just would,” Mr Trump said. “Why? Maybe because I’m so good looking.”

Fox and Friends had better watch their step. Saying Conor Lamb won because of his youthful good looks is likely to be taken as a personal insult of their Dear Leader. He took his magnificent gorgeousness to to Pennsylvania. That had to be enough.

Obviously, it wasn’t looks. The election was rigged.

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Trump unleashed. What could go wrong?

Trump unleashed. What could go wrong?

by digby

I wrote about Trump feeling his oats for Salon today:

President Trump had quite a day on Tuesday. He fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in crude and cowardly fashion, announced that he is moving the unqualified CIA director, Mike Pompeo, over to the ghostly halls of the nearly empty State Department to do a job for which he also has no experience. Then he nominated Gina Haspel, one of the most notorious CIA officers in American history, a woman best known for enthusiastically torturing terrorist suspects and then destroying all the evidence of doing so, to run the agency.

That was just the morning’s work. By noon it was reported that his closest personal assistant, the “body man” John McEntee, had been fired and escorted off the White House grounds for what were later described as serious financial misdeeds discovered by the Department of Homeland Security. Then the president took off for the California-Mexico border, where he uttered some gibberish about “the wall” needing to be transparent, after which he addressed some service members and announced his latest great idea:

Oh, and the president also hedged on whether the Russian government was responsible for the nerve gas assassination attempt in Britain, despite Prime Minister Theresa May’s speech in which she made clear that all the evidence pointed in that direction. His wishy-washy statement, coming as it did on the heels of firing Tillerson, who had denounced the Russian government for this heinous act just the day before, sent a clear message to the perpetrators that the Trump administration would take this no more seriously than it is taking the 2016 hacking and propaganda campaign. (Later, May’s spokesman said Trump had told the prime minister the United States was “with the U.K. all the way” in their phone call.)

Meanwhile, the Republican majority on the House Intelligence Committee has folded its tent, saying there was nothing to see and no issue worth pursuing. The president clearly believes that means he’s on his way to total exoneration in the Russia probe. So he is aroused, upbeat and manic, as you can see from the flurry of activity.

As I and others have observed over the past couple of weeks, something has changed in Trump. I ascribed what I see as a new frenetic assuredness to his realization that the president has a tremendous amount of power and that there’s little anyone can do to stop him from exercising it, particularly in certain areas. More importantly, he has seen that the Republicans in Congress are unwilling to take any steps to thwart him, while the courts move at a glacial pace. To a significant degree, he can do what he wants.


The Washington Post’s Robert Costa frames it this way:

Considering the checkered history of the Trump Organization, that is anything but reassuring.

Maggie Haberman at The New York Times described the change in a tweet yesterday by saying that the narrative about “Trump unglued is not totally wrong but misses the reason why — he was terrified of the job the first six months, and now feels like he has a command of it. So now he is basically saying ‘I’ve got this, I can make the changes I want.’ This is not to say his perception of self-confidence is in line with others’ perceptions of him. But it is part of why he is less able to be swayed.” She also reported, as did a number of others, that Tillerson will not be the last to be fired in this burst of manic energy.

As we know, the president’s power is concentrated in foreign policy and national security, so we can probably expect most of his frenetic activity to be in that area. There have been many reports that he’s ready to fire his national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, with whom he has had a rocky relationship. He may bring in former UN ambassador and certified kook John Bolton to replace him. If so, Trump’s comments yesterday in which he claimed that part of the reason he was firing Tillerson was their differences over the Iran deal probably mean he’s going to tear it up. Nobody is more hostile to that agreement than Bolton, who wrote a memo to Trump last August showing how he should abrogate it. The national security adviser requires no Senate confirmation, so if Trump wants him, he’s in.

The appointments of Pompeo and Haspel could theoretically take some of the wind out of the president’s sails, however, if Senate Republicans decide to do their jobs. According to national security journalist Marcy Wheeler, Pompeo is facing a more hostile committee for the State Department job than he had to deal with for his current post. Retiring Sens. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., are on the panel, and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., voted against Pompeo for CIA director. If they withhold their votes and the Democrats all hang tough, his appointment might not even make it to the floor. That’s unlikely, but possible.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., reportedly held up an earlier Haspel promotion over the Bush torture regime, a subject about which Feinstein has been uncharacteristically uncompromising. Haspel had been an up-and-comer whose career was derailed by her involvement in the torture of Abu Zubaydah, an al-Qaida detainee who was waterboarded 83 times at CIA “black site” prisons and treated with horrific violence and cruelty. He lost an eye at some point during his years in CIA custody, and all video of his “enhanced interrogation” has reportedly been destroyed, likely on Haspel’s orders. Naturally, Trump loves Haspel. He said many times on the campaign trail that he “loves” waterboarding and wants to do “worse than that.” Of course he would promote a member of the clandestine service who participated in torture to head the CIA.

Feinstein said yesterday that she planned to wait until the confirmation hearings to decide whether to vote for Haspel as CIA director and one hopes that’s just typical senatorial courtesy. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a man who knows something about the subject of torture, issued a statement on Tuesday saying that “the torture of detainees in U.S. custody during the last decade was one of the darkest chapters in American history. Ms. Haspel needs to explain the nature and extent of her involvement in the CIA’s interrogation program during the confirmation process.”

That promises to be a stomach-churning event, particularly when one imagines the effect a candid discussion of torture will have on our already overstimulated president. As bad as George W. Bush’s people were on this subject, they didn’t publicly revel in the gore the way Trump did during the presidential campaign. I shudder to think what ideas this might give him in his current unrestrained state. Trump is ticking off items on his wish list, from trade wars to space wars, and torture is definitely rising to the top.

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Conor Lamb gets positraction by @BloggersRUs

Conor Lamb gets positraction
by Tom Sullivan

With 100 percent of precincts reporting in yesterday’s congressional special election south and west of Pittsburgh, Democrat Conor Lamb holds a 579 vote edge over Republican state representative Rick Saccone. As of this writing, no comment from the president’s Twitter account. Donald Trump won the district by 20 points just 16 months ago.

Absentee and provisional votes have yet to be counted in PA-18. The number of absentee ballots remaining late last night in Allegheny County in the Pittsburgh suburbs were expected to favor Lamb, where the Democrat held an advantage. An unknown number of provisional ballots could take a week to count.

But Lamb declared victory just after midnight, Introduced to his supporters “Congressman-elect Conor Lamb,” Lamb declared, “It took a little longer than we thought, but we did it.” The results are not official.

If anyone knows every vote matters besides Lamb and Saccone, it is Daily Kos writer Adam Bonin of Philadelphia. Bonin spun out a “super-nerdy” series of tweets last night noting that with much of the vote done via touch screen machines, a recount won’t change much. Absentee and provisional ballots could.

In a very tough district for Democrats, one considered “Trump country,” Democrats erased a 20-point Republican advantage and may win this race, even if by a hair. Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the PA-18 is that, as Alex Seitz-Wald observed, there are many more out there that, in theory, could be an easier lift for Democrats in November.

Democrats need 24 seats to reclaim the House.

As for Saccone, if declared the loser by the Board of Elections (if not by the president), Bonin writes:

The motivation, momentum, and “positraction” are with the Democrats’.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

What’s the matter with rural America?

What’s the matter with rural America?

by digby

As we await the results of the special election in Pennsylvania tonight, this interview with Robert Wuthnow, a sociologist at Princeton University and author of the new book The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America who spent eight years interviewing Americans in small towns across the country is worth reading if you want to understand the dynamics at work in rural America.

An excerpt:

Sean Illing:
In the book, you argue that the anger we’re seeing in rural America is less about economic concerns and more about the perception that Washington is threatening the way of life in small towns. How, specifically, is Washington doing this?

Robert Wuthnow:
I’m not sure that Washington is doing anything to harm these communities. To be honest, a lot of it is just scapegoating. And that’s why you see more xenophobia and racism in these communities. There’s a sense that things are going badly, and the impulse is to blame “others.”

They believe that Washington really does have power over their lives. They recognize that the federal government controls vast resources, and they feel threatened if they perceive Washington’s interest being directed more toward urban areas than rural areas, or toward immigrants more than non-immigrants, or toward minority populations instead of the traditional white Anglo population.

Sean Illing:
But that’s just racism and cultural resentment, and calling it a manifestation of some deeper anxiety doesn’t alter that fact.

Robert Wuthnow:
I don’t disagree with that. I’m just explaining what I heard from people on the ground in these communities. This is what they believe, what they say, not what I believe.

Sean Illing:
Fair enough. The title of your book, The Left Behind, rubbed me the wrong way. It seems to me that many of these people haven’t been left behind; they’ve chosen not to keep up. But the sense of victimization appears to overwhelm everything else.

Robert Wuthnow:
I make it very clear in the book that this is largely a choice. It’s not as though these people are desperate to leave but can’t. They value their local community. They understand its problems, but they like knowing their neighbors and they like the slow pace of life and they like living in a community that feels small and closed. Maybe they’re making the best of a bad situation, but they choose to stay.

They recognize themselves as being left behind because, in fact, they are the ones in their family and in their social networks who did stay where they were. Most of the people I spoke to grew up in the small town they currently live in, or some other small town nearby. Often their children have already left, either to college or in search of a better job somewhere else.

In that sense, they believe, quite correctly, that they’re the ones who stayed in these small towns while young people — and really the country as a whole — moved on.

Sean Illing:
What I hear from many of the people in your book is nostalgia for a bygone world or a world that probably never really existed in the first place.

Robert Wuthnow:
It’s resentment that ultimately gets directed toward the politicians they don’t like, or toward people who look different from them. That’s certainly part of what’s going on here.

Sean Illing:
I’m still struggling to understand what exactly these people mean when they complain about the “moral decline” of America. At one point, you interview a woman who complains about the country’s “moral decline” and then cites, as evidence, the fact that she can’t spank her children without “the government” intervening. Am I supposed to take this seriously?

Robert Wuthnow:
It’s an interesting question. What does it mean for us to take that seriously? I guess my point is that she takes it seriously, even if we don’t or shouldn’t. Does she still spank her children? Probably. Is she just using that as an example of how the country is changing and how Washington is driving that change? Probably.

Now, I doubt she made this us up herself. She likely heard it at church or from her neighbors or from Fox News or talk radio. Again, what I kept hearing from people is a general fear that traditional moral rules were being wiped out by a government and a culture that doesn’t understand the people who still believe in these things.

Sean Illing:
I guess I just don’t know how to respond to these sorts of complaints. Yes, the world has changed; it’s always changing. And I understand the sense of loss some people feel because of that, but at some point, we have to acknowledge that culture evolves and stop trying to unwind the historical clock.

Robert Wuthnow:
I grew up in rural America; I still have a great deal of affection for rural America. But I find a lot of this quite depressing. Part of me wants to take some of these people, shake them up, and tell them to “move on.” This is the 21st century, after all. Quit listening to Rush Limbaugh and try to think as clearly as you can about what’s going on.

But another part of me says it’s important to understand where they’re coming from and not simply dismiss them as disconnected or out of touch with reality. If they feel threatened by racial diversity or homosexuality or abortion or whatever it might be, I want to understand why they feel that way. As a scholar, that’s the only way I’m going to learn anything.

Sean Illing:
The suffering in rural America is real, and I worry about social fragmentation and drug addiction and wage stagnation and all the rest of it. But do you think the xenophobia and the hatred of Washington in these places is diverting attention from the source of these problems and therefore making it less likely that things get better?

Robert Wuthnow:
We found town managers and elected officials who were frustrated over the generalized anger toward Washington because it inhibited practical solutions from being pursued. These officials knew they had to secure grants from the federal government, for instance, but found it difficult to do that when local elections were won by far-right candidates.

I think the concerns about moral decline often miss the mark. I think a lot of white Americans in these small towns are simply reacting against a country that is becoming more diverse — racially, religiously, and culturally. They just don’t how to deal with it. And that’s why you’re seeing this spike in white nationalism.

Sean Illing:
Which is why I’d argue that the divide between rural and urban America is becoming unbridgeable. We can talk all we like about the sanctity of these small communities and the traditional values that hold them together, but, as you say, many of the people who live in these places hold racist views and support racist candidates and we can’t accommodate that.
:
Robert Wuthnow
Yes, this is one of the most difficult aspects of the discussion we’re now having about morality in America. What counts as moral varies so much from place to place. In the South, for example, you have clergy who are vehement about abortion or homosexuality, and they preach this in the pulpits every Sunday. But then they turn a blind eye to policies that hurt the poor or discriminate against minorities.

Sean Illing:
I know a lot of people who don’t live in rural America are tired of being told they need to understand all these resentments. But I’ll set that aside and just ask: What’s the most useful takeaway from all this research? What do you propose we do to move forward?

Robert Wuthnow:
Point one is that rural America is quite diverse. People live in farm towns or coastal towns or mining communities, or they live in the North or the South or in Republican states or Democratic states. So we have to be careful about lumping people together under one category.

Point two is that rural America does have real problems — population decline, a brain drain, opioid addiction, etc. We can make of that what we want. But that’s not the whole picture. Not every small town is full of people who are suffering and bitter and angry at Washington.

Point three is that there are significant differences between small towns and large cities, but there are also commonalities. Since we’re living in a polarized time, it’s worth remembering that not all divisions run along the rural-urban divide. The conservative-liberal divide or the Republican-Democrat is just as pronounced in many cases. So we’ve got a lot of work to do in this country, and it goes beyond this one fault line.

Is this new? I don’t think so. I’ve been watching the exodus to the cities my whole life. And I think it’s been going on for … well, forever. Rural life isn’t for everyone. Young people often want to go out and seek a new identity in a different place. That’s as old as time. I think what’s fueling the intensity today is communications, religious opportunism and political propaganda which has been cynically employed for partisan purposes. Not that this is unprecedented of course. But in the modern world it’s possible to create the illusion that this group is more monolithic and powerful than it really is.

Tonight should be an interesting test of just how insular rural Americans really are. If they sense that things have gone off the rails then maybe it’s not a insular as we think.

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Priorities

Priorities

by digby

Axios:

When Saudi Arabia opened the bid for construction of its first nuclear power plant, the U.S.–based manufacturer Westinghouse was eager to beat out Russia’s Rosatom and China’s National Nuclear Corporation for the deal. Last week Energy Secretary Rick Perry traveled to London to discuss the potential for a nuclear cooperation agreement with senior Saudi officials.

In order to secure the deal, the Trump administration may relax the U.S.’s “gold standard” nonproliferation guidelines — conditions that would prohibit Saudi Arabia from enriching uranium or reprocessing spent fuel. In that case, neither outcome of the bidding process would come without downsides.

Enriching and reprocessing capabilities make it easy to exploit peaceful nuclear activities to develop a clandestine weapons program. Waiving the nonproliferation standard would open a pathway for Saudi Arabia to develop nuclear weapons as tensions with its regional rival, Iran, continue to escalate.

Yet if the U.S. insists on the gold standard as a condition for this deal, Saudi Arabia could turn to Russia or China, costing the U.S. an important economic and diplomatic foothold in the region.
The bottom line: Whichever course the administration pursues, the Saudi nuclear deal will carry a steep political cost, either compromising the United States’ strong record on nonproliferation or allowing its leadership in the international nuclear industry to slip even further.

Yeah, Saudi Arabia has no other source of energy so they need nuclear power …

If the US had any real leadership it would be leading on non-proliferation. In the Trump era, we’re now just competing for the big nuclear winter contract.

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Trump has his adoring cult but nobody likes Paul Ryan

Trump has his adoring cult but nobody likes Paul Ryan

by digby

I’m not a fan of the DCCC but I think this is a good ad that should be run in the red Trump districts with GOP incumbents. Even the GOP rank and file hates Paul Ryan:

Going after health care is not popular at this point. The only thing I would say is that they should hit the House GOP harder on their plan to gut Medicare and Medicaid.

Update: Oh never mind. They suck as usual…

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Follow the trail of dead Russians

Follow the trail of dead Russians

by digby

Yesterday, the UK Prime Minister said this in a public speech regarding the attempted assassination with nerve gas against a man and his daughter in Salisbury England:

“Either this was a direct action by the Russian state against our country, or the Russian government lost control of its potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others.”

The attack happened last week. The US intelligence community knows all the details as well.

Until today the President of the United States couldn’t be bothered to even spew out a tepid tweet on the matter. Today he said in passing that he was going to speak with May today and:

“As soon as we get the facts straight, if we agree with them, we will condemn Russia or whoever it may be.” 

Again, he is reluctant to condemn his friend Vladimir Putin. He knows all the facts. He simply cannot do it.

There is no more evidence of collusion necessary than his ongoing refusal to acknowledge what Russia is doing. It is right out there in the open. The Russian government is killing people in the streets of America’s most important ally. Trump refuses to condemn it.

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Will the GOP stick with Trump if Pennsylvania deserts him?

Will the GOP stick with Trump if Pennsylvania deserts him?

by digby
I wrote about the Pennsylvania election for Salon this morning:
It’s pretty clear by now that Donald Trump’s not all that excited about the boring governing part of being the president. But he still delights in his Twitter feed and absolutely loves his rock star campaign rallies. A month ago, Jonathan Swan of Axios reported that Trump has set his strategy for the midterms and it’s all about him. He’s not the kind of man to deny himself his pleasures:

A source close to the White House tells me that with an eye to getting Republicans excited about voting for Republicans in midterms, the president this year will be looking for “unexpected cultural flashpoints” — like the NFL and kneeling — that he can latch onto in person and on Twitter.

The source said Trump “is going to be looking for opportunities to stir up the base, more than focusing on any particular legislation or issue.”

Swan also quotes Matt Bennett of the centrist Democratic group Third Way drawing the same conclusion: “But what he’s really interested in is storylines revolving around him — driving the conversation with whatever crosses his mind at that moment, and then comes out of his mouth or his fingers.”

On Monday, the White House delivered its gun safety proposals, which come pretty close to doing nothing at all, as Salon’s Matthew Sheffield observed. They read as if they were dictated by Wayne LaPierre himself on the back of a cocktail napkin at that “meeting” where the NRA reminded Trump who his friends are. Immigration and repeal of the Affordable Care Act also fit that general description, leaving the Holy Tax Cuts as Trump’s one substantive legislative accomplishment. They don’t seem to be moving the needle for congressional candidates, so we’re back to the culture war — not that it ever ended.

We were treated to a preview of the Trump midterm strategy last Saturday, when the president traveled to Pennsylvania to stump for Republican candidate Rick Saccone, who is hoping to replace the very devout pro-life GOP congressman Tim Murphy, who was caught demanding that his pregnant mistress have an abortion. That special election takes place today, and most observers see it as an important bellwether for November. Both Trump and Mitt Romney won that district in southwestern Pennsylvania by double digits, but on the eve of Election Day, polls show a dead heat between Saccone and Democrat Conor Lamb, a 33-year-old former Marine.

Trump was obviously very excited to be up on the podium talking about his favorite subject, himself. Basically, he believes that the best way to sell a candidate is the same way he sold steaks and ties: Slap a Trump label on them and tell everyone they’re great because he’s great.

If the Pennsylvania rally was any example, he’s also going to do a full, interminable set of his greatest hits. It remains to be seen whether that will wear as well among anyone but his most diehard followers. Novelty acts tend to get stale, especially when they perform the same bit over and over again. The fans did seem to love it, although they were a bit confused about some of the call-and-response on the newer material. They booed when Trump mentioned Kim Jong-un, naturally enough, and he quickly shushed them, telling them to save their jeers for true evil in this world, such as “sleeping son of a bitch” Chuck Todd, the moderator of “Meet the Press.” They happily obliged, roaring with approval as he ran through his standard litany of insults against the fake news media.


Trump tried out his new push to expand the death penalty and talked up his trade war. But mostly he just talked about his great 2016 victory and his magnificent TV ratings and patted himself on the back repeatedly, saying things like, “So we are doing a great, great job.” It’s mystifying that his fans still love his relentless, boring self-congratulation, but apparently they do.

Trump finally found time to talk for a short minute about the candidate he was supposedly campaigning for. Rick Saccone is a hardcore Tea Party-type state representative who is running as a Trump clone. Not that Trump seems to like him much, which likely has to do with the fact that Saccone hasn’t been doing well in the polls. Trump trotted out a few lame words of praise, but naturally spent more time going after his opponent, Conor Lamb:

And Conor Lamb: Lamb the Sham, Lamb the Sham — he’s trying to act like a Republican so he gets . . . he won’t give me one vote. Look, I don’t know him. Looks like a nice guy. 

I hear he’s nice-looking. I think I’m better-looking than him. I do. I do. I do. And he’s slightly younger than me. Slightly. No, I heard that, then I saw, he’s OK. He’s all right. Personally, I like Rick. I think he’s handsome.

This guy is so self-centered, he had to compare himself with a former Marine and prosecutor who is half his age, giving away the fact that he thinks his own candidate is too homely to win. That’s just sad

But it’s also clear that Trump knows Lamb has a very good chance to win and that has to have him feeling a little bit panicked. This is a perfect Trump district filled with exactly the kind of white, working-class voters who gave him his victory just 16 months ago. If a Democrat can win there, it suggests that whatever coattails Trump once had have completely unraveled. He may not yet grasp what that means for him, but it’s a big problem.


Setting aside the obvious disaster of losing the House in November, this also signals that Republicans not only don’t need to fear Trump anymore but must begin to distance themselves from him if they want to survive. That won’t necessarily affect the “Trump agenda,” because there really isn’t one. He actually said at the Pennsylvania rally, “If we coast for two and a half years, we did a hell of a job,” so he may believe he’s already done everything he needs to do to get re-elected. The bigger problem for him is that if Republicans no longer fear him they may no longer want to protect him either. So far they’ve been complicit in covering up his misdeeds, but once he proves to be an electoral liability they will have no more incentive to do so.

If Lamb wins Tuesday night, that big splash you hear won’t be the sound of the big blue wave cresting. It’s still got a way to go. It will be the sound of Republican rats hitting the water as they desert the sinking ship.

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Trump takes control

Trump takes control

by digby

Trump has discovered his power and he’s conducting a purge of his enemies. Finally firing Tillerson is consistent with his recent manic, agitated behavior and reports that he’s decided to “go with his gut.” As I wrote in this piece last week presidential power is mostly concentrated in foreign policy and national security and (other than expanding the death penalty) that is where Trump has been focused for 30 years. He’s going to “make them stop laughing at us.”

Today Trump believes that he has single-handed brought North Korea to its knees and that he’s about to kick Europe and China’s in the teeth. He thinks he has put Canada and Mexico in their places. He is going to withdraw from the Iran deal and then take matters into his own hands in the Middle East.

So get ready. We know McMaster is probably next and the word is that John Bolton is likely to replace him.

We are entering a crucial period. He’s the president. Nobody will stop him.

Update:

I previewed this last week.

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