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Month: June 2018

Tax cuts aren’t a political panacea after all

Published by digby on June 28, 2018

Tax cuts aren’t a political panacea after all

by digby

They make the GOP donors happy to be sure, which is the main purpose. But they were also supposed to thrill the public into voting for Republicans and the Godhead Donald Trump. That’s not working out:

Public support for the recent tax overhaul plunged in the past two months, as more voters became ambivalent about it, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll.

Just 37 percent of registered voters said they supported the tax-cut laden law, down from 44 percent in an April poll. The number of voters who were undecided or offered no opinion leapt to 24 percent from 17 percent.

The 39 percent of respondents who said they opposed the law was unchanged from April.

Even among Republicans, support for the law dropped to 70 percent, from 80 percent in April. The number who moved into the undecided column jumped to 19 percent from 10 percent.

The poll surveyed 1,989 registered voters from June 22-24. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

Only 25 percent of voters said they had noticed an increase in their paychecks as a result of the law, while 52 percent said they hadn’t. In the April poll, 22 percent said they had seen an increase and 55 percent said they hadn’t.

Republican lawmakers have been counting on the tax cuts, which they moved through Congress last year without Democratic support, to fatten Americans’ wallets and buoy GOP candidates in the November midterm elections.

Last week, Republican lawmakers and tax-cut advocates celebrated the six months since the legislation was passed, pointing to job growth and business investments that they attribute to the cuts. Democrats did counter-programming, claiming the cuts overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy.

House Republicans are planning more tax votes in the fall, including making permanent the individual income tax cuts that are set to expire in the law.

The POLITICO/Morning Consult poll tracked with other recent surveys. A recent Monmouth University poll also showed slipping public support for the tax law and a surge in the undecided: 24 percent in June, up from 16 percent in April.

A RealClearPolitics average of polls from April to June had opposition to the tax law at 43 percent and approval at 36 percent.

When they start to scream about the exploding deficit, which is the second part of this nefarious strategy, as a way to cut the safety net to the bone and literally throw children, elderly and disabled into the street, this picture must be waved in their faces and they must be told to go to hell:

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Trump could blow his Supreme Court chance — if Dems play their cards right

Published by digby on June 28, 2018

Trump could blow his Supreme Court chance — if Dems play their cards right

by digby

My Salon column this morning is about the Supreme Court. *Sigh*

One of the first major official acts of the Trump administration, when everyone was still shell-shocked and not quite sure how bad it was really going to be, was the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to fill the seat on the Supreme Court that was open following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia the previous year. In an unprecedented act of cynical partisanship, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell essentially stole the seat for the Republicans by brazenly denying a vote for President Obama’s nominee for eight months. And he was rewarded for his underhanded exercise of raw political power with a hard right conservative justice who would be dedicated to protecting and advancing the conservative agenda for as far as the eye could see. It was the triumph of his career.

But it almost didn’t happen. The Washington Post reported several months later that Trump had nearly withdrawn the Gorsuch nomination before it even came to a vote:

Trump, according to several people with knowledge of the discussions, was upset that Gorsuch had pointedly distanced himself from the president in a private February meeting with Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), telling the senator he found Trump’s repeated attacks on the federal judiciary “disheartening” and “demoralizing.”

The president worried that Gorsuch would not be “loyal,” one of the people said, and told aides that he was tempted to pull Gorsuch’s nomination — and that he knew plenty of other judges who would want the job…

When Senator Lindsey Graham asked  whether the president might be subject to prosecution, Gorsuch answered, “no man is above the law, no man.” At some point in all this, the Post reported that Trump got livid:

“He’s probably going to end up being a liberal like the rest of them,” Trump told Republican leaders, according to a person with knowledge of the comments. “You never know with these guys.”

The president wasn’t just venting. It was serious enough that McConnell had to do some significant hand holding and cajoling to prevent the president from pulling Gorsuch from consideration. Several people confirmed to the Post that Trump was also angry that Gorsuch wasn’t sufficiently grateful for the nomination prompting the staff to scramble to find a note the nominee had sent to the president which said, in part:

Your address to Congress was magnificent. And you were so kind to recognize Mrs. Scalia, remember the justice, and mention me. My teenage daughters were cheering the TV!”…The team you have assembled to assist me in the Senate is remarkable and inspiring. I see daily their love of country and our Constitution, and know it is a tribute to you and your leadership for policy is always about personnel. Congratulations again on such a great start.

The note apparently eased the president’s mind and he dropped his threats to rescind the nomination. I’ve seen no reporting that Trump asked Gorsuch personally for a loyalty pledge as he did others but it wouldn’t be surprising. In any case, that obsequious thank you note indicates that he got it.

It was not clear at the time that the president himself would be implicated in a massive counterintelligence investigation that would span continents or that inappropriate questions of “loyalty” would lie at the heart of a criminal investigation into whether or not he obstructed justice. But it does fit the pattern.

It may be that in the early days, people around Trump chalked up his behavior to a basic lack of knowledge about how government functions. But from the beginning he has had a weird propensity for demanding personal fealty from powerful cops, prosecutors and judges. He may not be schooled in political science, but he knows how the Mob works.

Today we know that Trump may very well have been thinking more personally when he demanded loyalty from some of these people. He is facing very serious legal trouble, some of which may very well end up before the Supreme Court. The court could be asked to decide whether a sitting president can be indicted and whether he must comply with a grand jury subpoena. They might even have to rule on whether a president can pardon himself. There are cases about the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause working their way through the courts. Will there be cases pertaining to Trump’s taxes or to various forms of fraud uncovered in the Cohen investigation? Will he have to sit for a deposition in the Stormy Daniels case? The man is a walking legal nightmare.

And yet, with the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, he will get to choose yet another of the justices who may well decide his fate. Will Trump privately demand his or her loyalty too? Will he get it?

So far, Democrats seem to be pinning their hopes on the argument that it would be hypocritical for McConnell not to delay the vote until after the midterm election in November, since he did that to Obama. That’s very unlikely to work. McConnell will smirk and say, “What is this hypocrisy you speak of?”

There is some talk about getting retiring Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., to stand by his pledge not to allow any judges to be confirmed until Trump lifts his tariffs. But if history is any guide, Flake will not be the guy who stands in the way of a right-wing Supreme Court justice. The most serious strategy is to pressure pro-choice Sens. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Susan Collins, R-Maine, to vote against any Trump nominee, on the reasonable assumption that Trump’s pledge only to choose anti-abortion judges means that with one more conservative on the Supreme Court there will now be the votes to overturn Roe v. Wade.

That probably has the best chance of blocking the nomination, but it too is a long shot. The nominees will be well coached to say they have a completely open mind and will always respect precedent. Both of those senators’ commitments to principle and common sense will be tested as never before.

Considering his mercurial nature, it’s also possible Trump himself could destroy the nomination with some ill-timed tweet or a temper tantrum. He no longer listens to anyone, so it’s doubtful that McConnell would be able to talk him down a second time. So perhaps another strategy for Democrats would be to press the nominee as aggressively as possible in public hearings about all the potential Trump crimes in detail and dare him to be “disloyal” while the president is watching.

Since it’s absolutely true that no man should be able to choose his own judge, they could ask if the nominee plans to recuse himself from any of these potential Trump cases. We know how Trump feels about his minions’ recusing themselves. He’s said many times that if Jeff Sessions had told him he was going to do that, he would have withdrawn Sessions’ nomination as attorney general. Maybe the president would well and truly sabotage himself this time.

Crashing the Gate 2018 by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 28, 2018

Crashing the Gate 2018
by Tom Sullivan

“Five years ago, the Republicans took over the government through nondemocratic means,” wrote bloggers Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong in the preface to their 2006 book on progressive organizing, “Crashing the Gate“:

Establishment Democrats, for the most part, stood back and watched as a partisan judicial body halted the counting of presidential votes. While conservative activists led the charge on behalf of their party, there was nothing happening on our side.

A decade later, establishment Democrats sat back again as Senate Republicans stonewalled President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court seat eventually given by President Donald Trump to Justice Neil Gorsuch. Two years beyond that, Trump is pondering dismantling NATO even as he builds internment camps on the southern border for Central American refugees, and Democrats are even more powerless to stop him from appointing another conservative ideologue to the high court. We’re going to need some better Democrats.

Now comes the stunning primary win on Tuesday by newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York’s 14th Congressional District. The 28-year-old Latina and Democratic Socialist defeated 10-term incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley by 15 points in a race where he outspent her by over 15 to 1. Crowley, the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, has not faced a primary challenge in 14 years.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) downplayed the loss to her leadership team, telling reporters, “They made a choice in one district. So let’s not get yourself carried away as an expert on demographics and the rest of that.” She added, “It is not to be viewed as something that stands for everything else.” Uh-huh.

Indeed, Josh Marshall cautioned that New York is an immigrant city and NY-14 is a minority district with a disproportionate number of young adults, thus not representative of the country as a whole. Martin Longman concurred, adding:

If there is any part of this victory that concerns me, it’s that Crowley’s race was used rather explicitly as a reason why he shouldn’t continue to represent the district. If someone were to use that logic to, for example, explain why former NAACP director Ben Jealous shouldn’t be elected as governor of Maryland, I think it would be rightfully condemned. More than that, though, it sends a message to the broader country that I think is more powerful and alienating than Ocasio-Cortez’s ideological leanings.

They’re coming for you, Longman didn’t say.

But MSNBC’s Steve Kornacke (clip below) pointed indirectly to the same establishment dynamic Moulitsas and Armstrong pointed to in 2006. Crowley got to Congress via New York’s Democratic machine politics. He toiled in the trenches to “climb the Democratic ranks in D.C.” only to be blocked by Pelosi (a member of the House since 1987). Only in the last few years has Crowley made his way into leadership, with the potential to be the next Democratic Speaker of the House.

The Democratic Party in many ways has all the institutional vigor of a men’s fraternal organization. It is wedded to a culture of incumbency that rewards those — with or without talent — willing to toil in the trenches until it is finally their turn to take the reins. It elevates chummy political careerists, perhaps idealists to start, but ambitious enough to linger long enough to become institutionalized and thus everything voters hate, especially younger voters and non-voters.

That career track caught up with Joe Crowley on Tuesday.

Which brings us back to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I’ve watched the “Morning Joe” video below a couple of times and remain impressed with the clearness of Ocasio-Cortez’s message. A first-time candidate (and likely congresswoman in January), she defeated Crowley with a message more authentic than a career politician’s. She has not been in the game long enough to absorb the careerist culture of the party establishment or the pugilistic politics of the Beltway. Ocasio-Cortez focused on her message for working-class Americans, not on the president, at least not directly.

A critic on Twitter described her proposal for funding universal Medicare, free post-HS education, and student loan forgiveness as “confident, articulate incoherence.” As if that hasn’t been the GOP’s approach for decades, fueled with institutionalized guile, subterfuge, xenophobia, and corruption. But “speaking your truth” boldly without hesitation earns respect. What’s frightening is how many Americans on the right will buy the packaging without examining the contents.

The cautiousness of the Democratic Party establishment has strangled its “edge.” What’s needed is a willingness to nurture new talent. Ocasio-Cortez might not be the candidate for Kansas, but being plainspoken and direct as she is a skill Democrats need to relearn. It won’t come from those already institutionalized.

* * * * * * * *

For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Published by digby on June 27, 2018

Hey, remember when the Republicans had a fit over Kathy Griffin’s ill-thought out joke because poor Barron saw it and was upset? Well, I guess he’s over it because they’re using it in campaign ads now:


That ad reminds me of a post I wrote many moons ago.

 The Art Of The Hissy Fit

By digby

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

I first noticed the right’s successful use of  ostentatious handwringing, sanctimony and faux outrage back in the 90’s when well-known conservative players like Gingrich and Livingston pretended to be offended at the president’s extramarital affair and were repeatedly and tiresomely “upset” about fund-raising practices they all practiced themselves. The idea of these powerful and corrupt adulterers being personally upset by White House coffees and naughty sexual behavior was laughable.

But they did it, oh how they did it, and it often succeeded in changing the dialogue and titillating the media into a frenzy of breathless tabloid coverage.

In fact, they became so good at the tactic that they now rely on it as their first choice to control the political dialogue when it becomes uncomfortable and put the Democrats on the defensive whenever they are winning the day. Perhaps the best example during the Bush years would be the completely cynical and over-the-top reaction to Senator Paul Wellstone’s memorial rally in 2002 in the last couple of weeks leading up to the election.

With the exception of the bizarre Jesse Ventura, those in attendance, including the Republicans, were non-plussed by the nature of the event at the time. It was not, as the chatterers insisted, a funeral, but rather more like an Irish wake for Wellstone supporters — a celebration of Wellstone’s life, which included, naturally, politics. (He died campaigning, after all.) But Vin Weber, one of the Republican party’s most sophisticated operatives, immediately saw the opportunity for a faux outrage fest that was more successful than even he could have ever dreamed.

By the time they were through, the Democrats were prostrating themselves at the feet of anyone who would listen, begging for forgiveness for something they didn’t do, just to stop the shrieking. The Republicans could barely keep the smirks off their faces as they sternly lectured the Democrats on how to properly honor the dead — the same Republicans who had relentlessly tortured poor Vince Foster’s family for years.

It’s an excellent technique and one they continue to employ with great success, most recently with the entirely fake Move-On and Pete Stark “controversies.” (The Democrats try their own versions but rarely achieve the kind of full blown hissy fit the Republicans can conjure with a mere blast fax to Drudge and their talk radio minions.)

But it’s about more than simple political distraction or savvy public relations. It’s actually a very well developed form of social control called Ritual Defamation (or Ritual Humiliation) as this well trafficked internet article defines it:

Defamation is the destruction or attempted destruction of the reputation, status, character or standing in the community of a person or group of persons by unfair, wrongful, or malicious speech or publication. For the purposes of this essay, the central element is defamation in retaliation for the real or imagined attitudes, opinions or beliefs of the victim, with the intention of silencing or neutralizing his or her influence, and/or making an example of them so as to discourage similar independence and “insensitivity” or non-observance of taboos. It is different in nature and degree from simple criticism or disagreement in that it is aggressive, organized and skillfully applied, often by an organization or representative of a special interest group, and in that it consists of several characteristic elements.

The article goes on to lay out several defining characteristics of ritual defamation such as “the method of attack in a ritual defamation is to assail the character of the victim, and never to offer more than a perfunctory challenge to the particular attitudes, opinions or beliefs expressed or implied. Character assassination is its primary tool.” Perhaps its most intriguing insight is this:

The power of ritual defamation lies entirely in its capacity to intimidate and terrorize. It embraces some elements of primitive superstitious belief, as in a “curse” or “hex.” It plays into the subconscious fear most people have of being abandoned or rejected by the tribe or by society and being cut off from social and psychological support systems.

In a political context this translates to a fear by liberal politicians that they will be rejected by the American people — and a subconscious dulling of passion and inspiration in the mistaken belief that they can spare themselves further humiliation if only they control their rhetoric. The social order these fearsome conservative rituals pretend to “protect,” however, are not those of the nation at large, but rather the conservative political establishment which is perhaps best exemplified by this famous article about how Washington perceived the Lewinsky scandal. The “scandal” is moved into the national conversation through the political media which has its own uses for such entertaining spectacles and expends a great deal of energy promoting these shaming exercises for commercial purposes.

The political cost to progressives and liberals for their inability to properly deal with this tactic is greater than they realize. Just as Newt Gingrich was not truly offended by Bill Clinton’s behavior (which mirrored his own) neither were conservative congressmen and Rush Limbaugh truly upset by the Move On ad — and everyone knew it, which was the point. It is a potent demonstration of pure power to force others to insincerely condemn or apologize for something, particularly when the person who is forcing it is also insincerely outraged. For a political party that suffers from a reputation for weakness, it is extremely damaging to be so publicly cowed over and over again. It separates them from their most ardent supporters and makes them appear guilty and unprincipled to the public at large.

Ritual defamation and humiliation are designed to make the group feel contempt for the victim and over time it’s extremely hard to resist feeling it when the victims fail to stand up for themselves.

There is the possibility that the Republicans will overplay this particular gambit. Their exposure over the past few years for incompetence, immorality and corruption, both personal and institutional, makes them extremely imperfect messengers for sanctimony, faux or otherwise. But they are still effectively wielding the flag, (or at least the Democratic congress is allowing them to) and until liberals and progressives find a way to thwart this successful tactic, it will continue. At this point the conservatives have little else.

What do you suppose today’s enforcers of proper decorum would say to this?

Americans too often teach their children to despise those who hold unpopular opinions. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place – the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else’s keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan. — Mark Twain

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It’s a little bit disappointing to see this phony handwringing returning

QOTD: Michelle Goldberg

Published by digby on June 27, 2018

QOTD: Michelle Goldberg

by digby

On Chris Hayes last night, I think she spoke for a lot of us:

I think a lot of people feel sort of harassed because this false equivalency that has dominated so much of the coverage of the Trump administration — that basically equates an actor saying a bad word with white nationalists marching around with semi-automatic weapons on their backs and saying ‘oh look, both sides are participating in the death of civility’ — is maddening to people. And it also maddening to people to constantly be told to worry about not just their own actions and the results of their own actions buy how will their actions influence some imaginary Trump voter who they’re trying to win over in the mid-terms.

I think people can’t live like that. They can’t live in the way we’re constantly overly solicitous of the feelings of these alienated white people and contemptuous of the feelings of the majority of the people who find this administration intolerable.

It is intolerable. And it’s getting more intolerable by the day.

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The ICEing on the cake: of course Kennedy is retiring

Published by digby on June 27, 2018

The ICEing on the cake: of course Kennedy is retiring

by digby

Going all the way back to Bush vs Gore it was clear to me that for all of being the unpredictable “swing vote” he would always do the most harm at the worst moment. So of course he’s retiring at a time when the minority of deplorables are seizing power illegitimately under the illegitimately elected Donald Trump. Of course he is.

He’s been voting down the line with the wingnuts throughout this session so perhaps there won’t be much of a change. But there are some areas he’s mapped out that will likely be overturned by a more explicitly right wing zealot. This piece by Dylan Matthews at Vox spells out exactly what we’re looking at. It’s long and complicated but this has to be the most obvious. Donald Trump is the most blatantly misogynist president in American history so of course, this will happen under his rule:

Abortion in America after Kennedy

Nothing is guaranteed, but if Anthony Kennedy retires under Trump, his replacement will be much likelier to join a decision overturning Roe v. Wade and giving states the ability to ban abortions as early as the first trimester.

This may take years after the replacement’s confirmation; a state would need to pass a law clearly incompatible with the Court’s existing approach to abortion rights and wait for the challenge to reach the Supreme Court before the new justice would have a chance to join a ruling. The anti-abortion movement might choose a more cautious strategy, instead chipping away at Roe with measures that fall short of outright bans. But with Kennedy gone, the votes for an outright reversal of Roe would probably be there.

If Kennedy (or one of the liberals) leaves the court, UC Berkeley law dean and constitutional law expert Erwin Chemerinsky writes, “There almost certainly will be a majority to overrule Roe v. Wade and allow states to prohibit abortions.”

It’s certainly possible that Chief Justice Roberts will decline to join an anti-Roe majority due to precedent and a desire to avoid a massive public backlash, but there are reasons to think it unlikely. Roberts has on two occasions joined decisions overturning past Supreme Court precedent: one was a case on the right to counsel and how it can and cannot be waived, and the other was Citizens United, which sparked massive national outrage.

Roberts voted to overturn precedent anyway, knowing a backlash was inevitable. Indeed, in his concurrence to Citizens United, Roberts suggested that “hotly contested” issues might provide for exceptions from the principle of stare decisis and respect for precedent. Also possible is that instead of decapitating Roe in one blow, Roberts will instead “vote to kill it with 1,000 cuts rather than overturn it outright,” as UC Irvine Law’s Richard Hasen puts it.

Perhaps we’ll see another case like Whole Women’s Health (a 2016 decision where Kennedy joined the Court’s liberals in striking down Texas regulations meant to disrupt abortion provision), but this time the court sides with the state’s restrictions. Perhaps another state takes its 20-week ban to the Supreme Court, which then relaxes Roe and rules that you can bar abortions that early in a pregnancy. Bit by bit, the Court enables states to get more creative and bold in their restrictions, until one day it finally gives up the ghost and announces Roe is dead.

In the aftermath of a reversal, the current gap in abortion services between red and blue states will become even more severe. The pro-abortion rights Guttmacher Institute classifies 29 states as “hostile or extremely hostile” to abortion rights, of which all but two voted for Trump in 2016 (the exceptions are Rhode Island and Virginia). It rated only 12 as supportive, with Montana the only supportive red state.

There are already substantial gaps between states in access to abortion. A study by Guttmacher researchers found that while the average American woman aged 15 to 44 lives fewer than 11 miles from the nearest clinic, that number varies dramatically from state to state and county to county. In Mississippi, the average woman lives 68.8 miles from the nearest clinic. In North Dakota, the number is 151.6. A lot of the variation is just a function of how rural the state is, but the political environment appears to be a significant factor as well.

RU-486 will become more prevalent — until the wingnuts find a way to outlaw that as well.

Meanwhile, these “pro-lifers” will be getting their death penalty celebration outfits cleaned and pressed.

This is a bad day.

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With the Supreme Court endorsing Trump’s dictatorial power grab, what happens now?

Published by digby on June 27, 2018

With the Supreme Court endorsing Trump’s dictatorial power grab, what happens now?

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

The biggest question of the Trump era so far has been whether the institutions would hold under this president’s ongoing assault on the rule of law. He does not understand how government is supposed to work on the most basic level, has no respect for or knowledge of the U.S. Constitution and is an instinctive authoritarian demagogue with no sense of his own limits. His own people cannot restrain him.

By this time it’s clear that the Republican Congress is failing to perform its duty. It is a willing accomplice in the president’s continuous violation of every established rule and norm. In fact, congressional leaders are now helping President Trump evade the legal consequences of his campaign’s complicity in an attack on the electoral system.

They have likewise shown no appetite to challenge Trump on policy, allowing him free rein to enact a draconian anti-immigrant program, start a global trade war, tear up treaties and international agreements, denigrate our long-term alliances and use executive agencies to take a wrecking ball to the regulatory apparatus that keeps the citizens safe from disasters both natural and man-made. Republicans in Congress have also turned a blind eye to the rampant corruption permeating every corner of the executive branch, including the Oval Office.

The Congress, as currently configured, is beyond useless as a check on a rogue president. It is functioning as his co-conspirator.

That leaves the third branch of government, the courts. Up until now, they have been the only functioning bulwark against the worst of Trump’s impulses. As of yesterday, however, it became clear that the Supreme Court, the only co-equal branch of government that could have checked the president’s power, is also abdicating its duty. In its ruling on Trump’s “travel ban,” it pretty much gave the president a blank check when it comes to dealing with foreigners. He has a free hand now and will no doubt waste little time in implementing his most oppressive anti-immigrant policies. He may well be inspired by the high court’s deference to his power to push the envelope in any other way he chooses.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke for many Americans with her scathing, angry dissent in the travel-ban case, which concluded:

Our Constitution demands, and our country deserves, a Judiciary willing to hold the coordinate branches to account when they defy our most sacred legal commitments. Because the Court’s decision today has failed in that respect, with profound regret, I dissent.

Nobody is holding Donald Trump to account for anything.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., even took a bow on social media, proud to have been the one who made it happen:

Foreign allies are closely watching this unfold. They see now that they are dealing with a U.S. government that is incoherent, hostile and aggressive toward them. Adversaries obviously see a country that is unbalanced and vulnerable. The world’s autocracies are beginning to see a country run by kindred spirits.

The disastrous G7 meeting in Quebec left all of America’s closest allies gobsmacked by Trump’s heavy-handed behavior. He has been dismissive and rude since he came into office, but this was a dramatic escalation. Now they have belatedly recognized that Trump is serious about instigating a trade war, despite the fact that he fails to understand the issue on even the most elementary level. They are left with little choice but to retaliate, which Trump sees as “unfair.”

The New York Times’ Paul Krugman described the problem:

Trump famously declared that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” Never mind the goodness issue: It’s already becoming apparent that the “easy to win” part is delusional. Other countries won’t quickly give in to U.S. demands, in part because those demands are incoherent — Trump is demanding that Europe end the “horrific” tariffs it doesn’t actually impose, while the Chinese can’t even figure out what the Trump administration wants, with officials calling America “capricious.”

If the rest of the world expected that the Republican Congress, having spent decades ranting about free markets and railing against trade barriers, would at least exert some resistance on this issue, they have once again been disappointed. The GOP has been passive and accepting. There will be no check on him from that quarter on this issue either.

As was evident by Trump’s lobbying on behalf of Vladimir Putin at the G7 summit, Trump is clearly champing at the bit to get together with the Russian president. He has dispatched National Security Adviser John Bolton to set up a meeting between the two of them around the time of the NATO summit in July.

All of this has reportedly led to some serious qualms among America’s allies, who are worried that if Trump meets with Putin ahead of the NATO meeting, Trump may be even more inclined to do something destructive to the trans-Atlantic alliance.

According to The Washington Post, this meeting with Putin has them spooked either way:

But worries are so high that one senior European diplomat, in a recent conversation, halted mid-sentence to muse about whether it was worse for the two to meet before the NATO summit — when many alliance leaders fear the U.S. president might make big concessions to Putin without input from them — or after, when they would be unable to mop up a mess.

Their worries are understandable since we now know that on Putin’s advice, Trump blithely gave up the joint U.S. military exercises with South Korea without consulting anyone — and got nothing in return for it. His vaunted negotiating style could end up green-lighting something far worse than a trade war.

Now that it’s clear that no one in the current U.S. government will lift a finger to stop Trump from acting like a maniac, the rest of the world has recognized that it must try to recalculate how to keep him from doing his worst. Good luck with that.

There are a couple of institutions that haven’t weighed in just yet, so there is still hope that America can pull back from the brink. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into serious crimes that may implicate the president is still hard at work. And in just over four months, the American people will have a chance to weigh in by either validating or repudiating the president’s enabling party in the midterm elections.

If those backstops don’t work, our democracy may not make it. And much of the rest of the world will have no choice but to see this behemoth economic and military power as an existential threat.

How low can he go? by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 27, 2018

How low can he go?
by Tom Sullivan


Photo by Endlisnis via
CC BY 2.0

Tuesday night, a federal judge in San Diego granted a preliminary injunction requested by the American Civil Liberties Union. Judge Dana M. Sabraw ordered that all families separated at the border by the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy be reunited within 30 days, 14 days for children under 5. Parents must be allowed to speak to their children by phone within 10 days.

Somewhere in the White House, a man busy with his hairspray will be wondering what kind of a name Sabraw is before dialing Attorney General Jeff Sessions and demanding an immediate appeal. Trump won a significant victory in yesterday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing his latest travel band to stand and he likely won’t stand for the District Court for the Southern District of California rolling back his zero tolerance policy on the southern border:

Critics expressed fears that the court’s ruling would embolden Trump to further test the limits of his statutory authority to enforce border-control laws without explicit approval from lawmakers. Aides have promised new measures ahead of the midterm elections in November, and Trump ruminated this week about the power to turn away unauthorized immigrants without offering them due-process rights.

[…]

In recent months, frustrated by a lack of progress on his proposed border wall, Trump has called immigrants “vermin” that are overrunning the country, although arrests of unauthorized border-crossers remain historically low. He has also accused Democrats of supporting “open borders” and of facilitating the brutality of MS-13, a transnational gang with many members born in the United States.

As the nation swirls in the bowl, what is stunning to behold is how profoundly un-conservative what is left of the Republican Party has become. In part, because it is no longer the Republican Party but the Party of Donald Trump.

Sane conservatives would not stand for what the imbecile in the Oval Office has done to them. But Trumpists are so deep into their Fox News and talk-radio nurtured addiction to a daily fix of scapegoating, conspiracy theories and xenophobia there are too few sane conservatives left to organize an intervention. Not even businesses are immune from attack.

Trump launched a Twitter tirade yesterday against Harley-Davidson after the company announced it would move some production offshore. Why, they’re ruining his beautiful trade war!

Where’s Inigo Montoya when you need him? Because someone needs to explain to Trump trade wars involve punishing other country’s companies. Of course, if he’s that angry Trump could try nationalizing Harley for failure to make proper obeisance. He’s just that far gone that he might.

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