Month: July 2018

Vlad knows a useful idiot when he sees one


by digby

I wrote about the latest Russia craziness for Salon this morning:

It is a testament to how far we’ve fallen down the rabbit hole that on the afternoon of July 3, the Republican-led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a report in which its members unanimously agreed that the evidence shows that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Donald Trump — and on July 4, a group of eight Republican senators were in Moscow, publicly glad-handing Russian officials. It was an odd juxtaposition to say the least.

The SSCI has been releasing reports on its investigation into Russian interference piecemeal, with the latest being the second of what’s expected to be at least three. The first report addressed the attempted hacking and infiltration of the election systems in the 2016 election by Russian entities. This second report confirmed the intelligence community’s findings that the Russian government had interfered in the election to hurt Hillary Clinton and then went all in to help Donald Trump. That wasn’t news, of course, but it is significant that the Republicans on the committee all signed off on those findings, contradicting the House Intelligence Committee’s Republican majority, refused to admit that their president had been a targeted beneficiary of the Russian campaign.

But the unclassified report did make some news — or at least it would have, had it been released at any other time but at 3 p.m. on the afternoon before a national holiday. The senators also found that the Russian campaign of interference continued past January of 2017, when the intelligence agencies’ assessment was released. They also found a “far more extensive Russian effort” to use social media to influence the American electorate than was known at that time.

In what is surely a disappointment to right-wing conspiracy theorists, they also confirmed that the infamous “Steele dossier” had no influence on the original intelligence report. It was handled separately, and there was no political bias involved in the analysis. In other words, Russian interference happened, which has been obvious for well over a year. Nonetheless, the president tweeted out this puerile whine just last week:

Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election! Where is the DNC Server, and why didn’t Shady James Comey and the now disgraced FBI agents take and closely examine it? Why isn’t Hillary/Russia being looked at? So many questions, so much corruption!
4:25 AM – Jun 28, 201895.1K63.8K people are talking about thisTwitter Ads info and privacy

The report didn’t address the big question as to whether or not the Trump campaign was aware of election interference on its behalf or collaborated with Russians in any fashion. That report is suspected to be more controversial and may possibly break down on party lines. We also may not see it for many months, particularly if the committee decide to hold it back for fear of interfering with special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation.

Nonetheless this current report is significant, both because of its bipartisan consensus and the aforementioned bizarre contrast of its release as a group of Republican senators were in Moscow assuring the Russian government that they weren’t there to cause any unpleasantness. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., led the group and essentially disavowed their previous promise to “be tough” on the Russian government over this issue. He said, “I’m not here today to accuse Russia of this or that or so forth. I’m saying that we should all strive for a better relationship.” It was, by all accounts, something of a love fest.

It’s not that the two countries shouldn’t strive for a better relationship. But rewarding this assault on the integrity of American elections only raises serious concerns that these Republicans are happy to see it continue. The fact that they didn’t (or couldn’t) make it a bipartisan mission makes the whole spectacle more suspicious. An earlier planned trip was scrapped last winter after the Russian government denied a visa to Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., because of her critical comments. This time they just brought along Republican sycophants and everyone was happy.

Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., returned from the trip early so that he could join President Trump for a rally in his home state on Thursday. He went on Fox News and said that the Republican delegation had told the Russian officials in no uncertain terms that they mustn’t interfere in elections, they’d better leave Ukraine alone, work toward peace in Syria and abide by their nuclear treaties. The Washington Post reported the obviously contemptuous Russian reaction:

“We heard things we’d heard before, and I think our guests heard rather clearly and distinctly an answer that they already knew — we don’t interfere in American elections,” said Sergey Kislyak, the former Russian ambassador to the United States and now a member of Russia’s upper house of parliament. 

On Russian state television, presenters and guests mocked the U.S. congressional delegation for appearing to put a weak foot forward, noting how the message of tough talk they promised in Washington “changed a bit” by the time they got to Moscow.

Meanwhile, Trump was still badmouthing all the NATO allies at his Montana rally on Thursday evening, which must tickle his Russian friends to no end. After his usual tiresome gripe about their alleged refusal to pay up, he made a particularly sharp remark, referring to something he allegedly said to German Chancellor Angela Merkel:

And I said, “You know Angela, I can’t guarantee it, but we’re protecting you, and it means a lot more to you. … I don’t know how much protection we get from protecting you.”

This thinly veiled threat came on the same day NATO ambassador Kay Bailey Hutchinson told the press that the relationship between the U.S. and its European allies was just swell and she announced that “the overall theme of this summit is going to be NATO’s strength and unity.” It was a week of mixed Republican messages all around.

Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin will be meeting privately after the NATO summit, and apparently will not even have an American translator with them. Trump is confident that he knows what he’s doing. At his Montana rally he dismissively noted that people are always saying “you know President Putin is KGB and this and that.” And then he added:

You know, Putin is fine. He’s fine. We’re all people. Will I be prepared? I’ve been preparing for this stuff all my life.

That’s absurd. He’s a rich kid from New York who bankrupted casinos, sold some cheap junk, had a TV show and fooled a whole lot of gullible Americans. But Vladimir Putin actually has been preparing for this stuff his whole life. And he definitely knows a useful idiot when he sees one.
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Praying to the leader

by digby

 Scott Pruitt’s resignation letter:

It has been an honor to serve you in the Cabinet as Administrator of the EPA. Truly, your confidence in me has blessed me personally and enabled me to advance your agenda beyond what anyone anticipated at the beginning of your Administration. Your courage, steadfastness and resolute commitment to get results for the American people, both with regard to improved environmental outcomes as well as historical regulatory reform, is in fact occurring at an unprecedented pace and I thank you for the opportunity to serve you and the American people in helping achieve those ends.

That is why it is hard for me to advise you I am stepping down as Administrator of the EPA effective as of July 6. It is extremely difficult for me to cease serving you in this role first because I count it a blessing to be serving you in any capacity, but also, because of the transformative work that is occurring. However, the unrelenting attacks on me personally, my family, are unprecedented and have taken a sizable toll on all of us.

My desire in service to you has always been to bless you as you make important decisions for the American people. I believe you are serving as President today because of God’s providence. I believe that same providence brought me into your service. I pray as I have served you that I have blessed you and enabled you to effectively lead the American people. Thank you again Mr. President for the honor of serving you and I wish you Godspeed in all that you put your hand to.

Now we know why Trump loved him so much:

Former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt survived months of reports on his unethical behavior by lavishing praise on President Donald Trump and making himself a visible figure in the West Wing, The Washington Post reported Thursday evening.

Pruitt mechanically praised the President, calling him “brilliant” and a “political revolutionary,” in the Post’s words. The two men bonded over their shared paranoia, regularly grousing about the “deep state” and former aides who they thought collaborated to upend their agenda, according to White House officials familiar with the meetings who spoke to the Post.

Trump reportedly enjoyed Pruitt’s presence too, and tried to ignore the constant barrage of news reports on his EPA chief’s scandals, which ranged from excessive spending on flights to scrubbing his official calendar to hide controversial meetings.

But despite the consistent praise, Trump finally decided by Thursday morning that Pruitt’s behavior was too much of a political burden for him to bear. He directed his staff to ask for Pruitt’s resignation without speaking to him and tweeted about the ouster after he received the letter.

By then, Pruitt had few fans left in the White House, according to officials who spoke to the Post.

Almost as if they’re not welcome
by Tom Sullivan

Photo: U.S. State Department

Associated Press reported yesterday that the Army is quietly discharging immigrant-enlistees:

The AP was unable to quantify how many men and women who enlisted through the special recruitment program have been booted from the Army, but immigration attorneys say they know of more than 40 who have been discharged or whose status has become questionable, jeopardizing their futures.

“It was my dream to serve in the military,” said reservist Lucas Calixto, a Brazilian immigrant who filed a lawsuit against the Army last week. “Since this country has been so good to me, I thought it was the least I could do to give back to my adopted country and serve in the United States military.”

Some enlistees, AP reports, received no explanation for their abrupt discharge. Others heard the Army considered them security risks. They had enlisted under a George W. Bush-era initiative offering “expedited naturalization” to immigrant soldiers. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the Pentagon needed recruits with foreign language or advanced medical skills it lacked. The language deficit allowed thousands of pages of intercepts in Arabic to go untranslated before the attacks.

In 2009, the effort became the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest program, known as MAVNI. A 2016 Department of Justice brief alleged some MAVNI recruits in their applications cited fake university degrees, barred new enlistments, and added increased security checks. The Trump administration began examining cancelling the program last summer.

AP adds:

It came under fire from conservatives when President Barack Obama added DACA recipients — young immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally — to the list of eligible enlistees. In response, the military layered on additional security clearances for recruits to pass before heading to boot camp.

The Trump Administration added even more hurdles, creating a backlog within the Defense Department. Last fall, hundreds of recruits still in the enlistment process had their contracts canceled. A few months later, the military suspended MAVNI.

Col. Margaret Stock, the now-retired officer who suggested the program, spoke with National Public Radio after the Trump administration suspended the program in October:

BLOCK: What was your reaction when you learned that the Pentagon was shutting off this fast track towards citizenship in the military?

STOCK: I was appalled by this because it’s obvious the military is going to lose a valuable source of recruits. The foreign-born right now are 13.5 percent of the population. And the percentage of the population that’s foreign-born is growing. So if you’re going to say that the military can’t recruit 13.5 percent of the population, you’re restricting military recruiting only to citizens. You’re going to end up with much less quality in terms of language – foreign language skills, cultural skills.

Stock told AP, “Immigrants have been serving in the Army since 1775. We wouldn’t have won the revolution without immigrants. And we’re not going to win the global war on terrorism today without immigrants.” She told NPR last July, “If you were a bad guy who wanted to infiltrate the Army, you wouldn’t risk the many levels of vetting required in this program.”

The Military Times reported last October that since 2009, 10,000 troops had entered the ranks through MAVNI. One year ago, the Independent reported at least 1,000 trainee-soldiers with expired visas might risk deportation from cancelling MAVNI. Reporting from AP yesterday leaves that an open question.

In a statement, the Department of Defense states, “All service members (i.e. contracted recruits, active duty, Guard and Reserve) and those with an honorable discharge are protected from deportation.” The catch, immigration attorneys told AP, is these discharges are “uncharacterized,” neither honorable nor dishonorable.

In its xenophobic zeal, the Trump administration is making us safer by excluding from the army (and citizenship) immigrant recruits with foreign-language skills the Pentagon only realized it needed after September 11.

The sitting president is “like a smart person” only because he’s a person.

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

Civility for dummies

by digby

Everything about this is disgusting:

While speaking at a rally in Montana on Thursday evening, President Trump said should he ever find himself debating Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), he’ll “gently” throw an ancestry test kit at her and offer $1 million to her favorite charity if she takes it.

Trump has long called Warren “Pocahontas” in reference to her Native American heritage, and used the name throughout his speech. He promised that “in the middle of the debate, when she proclaims that she is of Indian heritage because her mother said she has high cheekbones — that’s her only evidence, that her mother said she had high cheekbones — we will take that little kit…we will slowly toss it, hoping it doesn’t hit her and injure her arm, even though it only weighs probably two ounces.”

The reason why he’d lightly throw the kit? “We have to do it gently, because we’re in the #MeToo generation — so we have to be very gentle,” Trump said. He told the crowd that he’d offer Warren $1 million “if you take the test and it shows you’re an Indian. And we’ll see what she does. I have a feeling she will say no, but we will hold it for the debates.”

Trump has been criticized for calling Warren Pocahontas, and in a message to the deceased historical figure, he said, “Pocahontas, I apologize to you. To the fake Pocahontas, I won’t.”

He said this in Montana where I thought they had some respect for Native Americans. I guess not.

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Modern blackshirts don’t wear black shirts


by digby

From Pro Publica:

There likely isn’t such a thing as a “typical” violent white extremist in America in 2018. Still, Michael Miselis — a University of California, Los Angeles doctoral student with a U.S. government security clearance to work on sensitive research for a prominent defense contractor — makes for a pretty unusual case.

For months, ProPublica and Frontline have been working to identify the white supremacists at the center of violent demonstrations across the country, including the infamous Unite the Right rally last August in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Rise Above Movement, a Southern California group that expresses contempt for Muslims, Jews, and immigrants, became a focus of that effort. ProPublica and Frontline were able to quickly identify a number of the group’s leaders, and find evidence that put them in the middle of violence in Charlottesville and Berkeley, California, among other places.

But one seeming member of RAM was harder to nail down. In video shot in Charlottesville, a bearded, husky man is seen in a red Make America Great Again hat with his hands wrapped in tape that came in handy for the brawling that occurred that day. During one encounter, the unidentified man in the red hat pushed an African-American protester to the ground and began pounding on him, video of the episode shows; moments later, a known RAM member choked and bloodied a pair of female counterprotesters. The possible RAM member also had turned up in video shot during hours of combat at a Trump rally in Berkeley, as well. Wearing protective goggles to ward off pepper spray, the man fought alongside RAM members, wrestling one protester to the ground and punching others.

Ultimately, ProPublica and Frontline determined the man in the violent footage was Miselis, a 29-year-old pursuing a Ph.D. in UCLA’s aerospace engineering program. Miselis was identified using video footage and social media posts, and reporters confirmed his identity in an encounter with him outside his home. In interviews, a number of California law enforcement officials said Miselis was a member of RAM.

In addition to his scholarly pursuits, Miselis works as a systems engineer for Northrop Grumman, the giant defense contractor with a plant in Redondo Beach, California.

He claims they “have the wrong guy.”

This radical white supremacist is working on national security. And evidently his radicalism either wasn’t uncovered in the background checks he underwent or — they just didn’t think it mattered. The reporters spoke with co-workers who knew he was part of this RAM group in Charlottesville.

Here’s a little something about that group:

As ProPublica has previously reported, RAM first surfaced publicly last spring and has quickly established itself as one of the violent groups in the resurgent white supremacist scene; members, who regularly train in boxing and martial arts, have been documented engaging in a string of melees. Founded in early 2017 by Robert Rundo, a Queens, New York, native who served an 18-month prison sentence for stabbing a rival gang member six times during a 2009 street fight, the group’s core membership is small — 15 to 20 young men — but capable of real menace, ProPublica’s reporting has shown.

Rundo has recruited followers from the Orange County and San Diego chapters of the Hammerskin Nation, the country’s largest Nazi skinhead gang, and one the authorities say has been behind at least nine murders. One of the Hammerskins who joined up with RAM, Matthew Branstetter, went to prison in California in 2011 on hate crime charges for robbing and assaulting a Jewish man in an Orange County park. The attack left the victim with “a concussion, broken jaw, eye socket fracture, broken nose, cracked ribs, severe facial bruising, and cuts and bruises to his body and face,” according to a news release issued by county prosecutors at the time. Other RAM members have spent time in prison and Los Angeles County Jail on charges for robbery, firearms possession and other offenses.

In case you were wondering they don’t actually wear either black or brown shirts. They’re a little bit more modern:

That’s Micelis with his arms up

The movement to preserve a white majority

by digby

Jamelle Bouie has written an important piece about the GOP’s white nationalist strategy for survival. It’s bracing:

Under the Trump administration, even naturalized citizens are now a target. The government agency that oversees immigration applications is hiring lawyers and immigration officers to review cases of immigrants suspected of obtaining citizenship through fake identities or other false information on their applications. Cases would be referred to the Department of Justice, where offenders could lose their citizenship or legal status.

“We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place,” L. Francis Cissna, director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said in an interview with the Associated Press last month. “What we’re looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.”

The small scale of this effort belies its significance. As a country, the United States makes few distinctions between naturalized citizens and their native-born counterparts. The naturalization process, which includes long-term residents with deep ties to the U.S., is assumed to be permanent. This new task force on denaturalization throws that permanence into question, bringing suspicion on anyone who received their citizenship through means other than birth.

There’s no guarantee this effort will stay confined to cases of cheating and fraud. The Trump administration has shown, in its drive to criminalize asylum-seekers, that the existing processes for seeking legal status can effectively be criminalized at any time. The president’s willingness to demonize all immigrants as intruders on American soil offers little comfort.

The move to denaturalize some citizens is just the latest in a larger drive by Republicans—led by key figures in the Trump White House—to preserve a white majority in American politics. At the state level, Republican lawmakers take steps to protect GOP districts, dampen voter turnout, and otherwise hinder participation, which raises the chances of Republican victories for Congress and the White House. In turn, Republicans in Washington nominate and confirm judges who give voter suppression the cover of law, giving incentive to new efforts at restriction and disenfranchisement. What Donald Trump brings is an explicit effort to write nonwhite immigrants out of the body politic, removing as many as possible and presenting the rest as a suspect class.

Even if you blocked all immigration to the United States and removed millions of naturalized citizens, existing trends make demographic change inevitable. At some point in the not-distant future, a majority of Americans will be of black, Hispanic, and Asian origin. But there’s a difference between a nation’s population and its electorate—its share of people who can exercise the full rights and privileges of citizenship. Republicans realize this, and are trying—at every level of government—to reverse-engineer a white electorate large enough to secure their own power, and along with it, the existing hierarchy of class and race.

The move to denaturalize some citizens is just the latest in a larger drive by Republicans to preserve a white majority in American politics.
Donald Trump is a major part of this story. But as with all things Trump, it would be wrong to treat this project as unique to him and his administration. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House adviser Stephen Miller, as well as former advisers Stephen Bannon and Michael Anton, are unusually driven in their commitment to a racial vision of the American state: Sessions once praised the nativist 1924 Immigration Act, and Anton, writing under a pseudonym, once warned that the “ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners” would mean a “less traditionally American” electorate. But they are also largely in line with a broader Republican politics that’s become reliant on the revanchist anger of a white minority. Supercharged in reaction to Barack Obama, that motivated minority of the electorate delivered a House majority in 2010, a Senate majority in 2014, and brought unified GOP control to state governments across the country.

What came out of those victories was just as important as what produced them: an immediate effort to shrink the electorate by disadvantaging black and brown voters. In 2011, Republicans in Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin introduced and signed strict voter identification laws. Republicans in Ohio ended same-day voter registration, while those in Florida and Texas took steps to restrict voter registration drives. Georgia (along with Florida and Ohio) reduced early voting, and Iowa (along with Florida) made it harder for former felons to vote. After winning a “trifecta” in 2012, capturing the governor’s mansion and both legislative chambers, North Carolina Republicans made dramatic changes to public policy—slashing taxes and making deep cuts to state government—and then took dramatic steps to keep Democrats and Democratic constituencies from pushing back with an unprecedented sweep of voter restrictions. Striking down that law, a federal appeals court called it “the most restrictive voting law North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim Crow” and said it targeted black voters “with almost surgical precision.”

In 2013, a conservative majority on the U.S Supreme Court—each member nominated by a Republican president—struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, all but freeing conservative lawmakers to go even further in pursuit of voter restrictions. In the aftermath of that ruling, Shelby County v. Holder, GOP-controlled states like Wisconsin pushed forward with changes and restrictions that had a measurable effect on the electorate. In Milwaukee, for example, 41,000 fewer votes were cast in 2016 than in 2012, a change that can’t be explained by a shrinking voting-age population. Donald Trump won the state by fewer than 23,000 votes.

To compound their advantage, Republican lawmakers used their majorities for aggressive gerrymanders, packing Democratic voters into districts meant to dilute their electoral influence. In some states, this also means racial gerrymandering, to neutralize the influence of black and Latino voters.

These tactics amplify Republicans’ existing advantages. The party benefits from a structural bias toward rural counties and exurbs—where white Americans who support the GOP disproportionately live—and against urban centers and dense metropolitan areas. Where they’ve been successful, Republicans have effectively lowered the threshold they need to attain necessary majorities. Because of malapportionment, gerrymandering, and voter suppression, Republicans could lose the national popular vote in November by several percentage points and still retain a majority in the House of Representatives. That rural bias is even stronger in the Senate, where Republicans can win a majority of seats with a distinct minority of voters, thanks to equal representation and the large number of predominantly rural states.

In all of this, Donald Trump is less an instigator and more an accelerator. With strategic appeals to white racial prejudice, Trump took this well-distributed plurality of white voters and made it large enough to secure an Electoral College victory, taking the “minority rule” that already defines the federal legislature and extending it to the White House itself. The Republican Party, in turn, has followed the path of its state counterparts, using narrow but absolute majorities to pursue its ideological goals—upper-income tax cuts and attacks on the social safety net—while taking steps to engineer continued minority rule. Indeed, if Trump did anything unique, it was take the subtext of that engineering—we need to keep nonwhites from voting or otherwise limit their full participation—and made it explicit.

There’s more. It’s good. And he’s right.

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QOTD: a civil Republican

by digby

Just don’t call him deplorable. It offends Real Americans like Erickson.

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Just how many Nazis are running for office as Republicans anyway?

by digby

It’s considered very rude and beyond the pale to call Republicans Nazis so I won’t do that. But considering how many actual Nazis are running for office as Republicans I’ll just call them Nazi-curious. Here’s another one, via Media Matters:

John Fitzgerald, an anti-Semite who is running as a Republican for California’s 11th Congressional District seat, has been appearing on neo-Nazi podcasts and falsely claiming that the Holocaust is a “lie.”

Fitzgerald came in second with 23 percent of the total vote in the June 5 top-two primary and will face off against incumbent Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (D-CA) in the November election.

Fitzgerald writes on his campaign site that the “911 attacks were used as the catalyst by Jewish elements within our Government and Israel’s, to implement the PNAC Doctrine (1999) which called for a ‘catastrophic and catalyzing event– like a new Pearl Harbor’ to both galvanize support from the American people and to make regime changes” (italics in original) throughout the world. He also writes: “I hope all of you ask yourselves why JEWS are primarily behind the push of multiculturalism, diversity and inclusiveness throughout the United States, Europe and other once predominantly white nations of the world and WHY many of our politicians allowing them to do so has led to rape and crime epidemics in its aftermath.”

The California Republican Party and the Republican Jewish Coalition released a statement in May condemning Fitzgerald and rejecting any support for him.

Since advancing to the general election as a Republican, Fitzgerald has courted anti-Semitic media.

He appeared on the June 23 edition of The Realist Report with host John Friend. Friend is a neo-Nazi who has said that the “Jews Did 9/11,” Adolf Hitler was “the greatest thing that’s happened to Western civilization,” and the “alleged ‘Holocaust’ of 6 million Jews at the hands of Adolf Hitler and National Socialist Germany during WWII is one of the most egregious and outrageous falsehoods ever perpetrated.”

During the interview, Fitzgerald complained about purported “Jewish control and supremacy” and praised Friend for claiming that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks. He also said he’s dedicated to “exposing the truth about the Holocaust and how it’s an absolute fabricated lie.”

Fitzgerald ran for Congress as a Democrat in the 2010 and 2012 primaries but got little traction, gaining just 15 percent and 7 percent of the vote, respectively. He said on Friend’s program that though he ran as a Democrat in those elections, “I wasn’t really a Democrat. But I was just trying to get in the system, and so I did so.”

Fitzgerald also appeared on the June 28 edition of The Andrew Carrington Hitchcock Show. Hitchcock haslionized Hitler and written numerous anti-Semitic screeds.

During that program, Fitzgerald said, “I’ve really gone on an extreme journey from the standard material that everybody believed to what is considered a very taboo subject, taking on the entire Holocaust narrative and realizing that everything we’ve been told about the Holocaust is a lie. So my entire campaign, for the most part, is about exposing this lie.”

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Some GOP senators clutch their pearls

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

When it comes to the Republican Party, Donald Trump can do no wrong. Sure, he’s ignorant and undisciplined and has taken a wrecking ball to our democracy at home and our alliances abroad. His administration is the most openly corrupt in history, and he is personally under investigation for possible conspiracy with a foreign power. But nobody’s perfect! His followers love him, the economy is working well for rich people again, they’re going to get their solid Supreme Court majority and he signed their massive tax cut bill. Who are they to rock the boat over rampant corruption and betrayal of national security?

As I have written many times, going all the way back to the presidential campaign, the Trump phenomenon exposed something important about the conservative movement which has spent decades building up an edifice of ideology that went beyond simply “Fool the rubes into voting to give rich people their money.” (Others have made this point in depth.) It is now obvious that they were wasting their breath with all that folderol about “small government” and “freedom” and “individualism.” Trump showed that underneath it all, the dogwhistles were the conservative movement.

No, conservatives simply don’t care that Russia attacked the U.S. in the last election, because it benefited them. They certainly don’t care about the toxic swamp of corruption that threatens to drown the entire government. But for all of their sycophantic enabling, there is one area that has the GOP contemplating a small revolt because it will actually hurt their voters directly in the pocketbook and affect their donors’ bottom lines. Those are things for which they do have some respect. I’m talking about the trade war.

I should say at the outset that there are some good arguments for targeted tariffs and a reevaluation of trade deals and global financial institutions. Progressives have complained for decades about the international trade structure in which the benefits all float up to oligarchs and multinationals while workers are squeezed from all sides. There is a legitimate debate to be had here. But Donald Trump is not the man to lead it.

It’s often been observed that Trump formed his trade philosophy, if you want to call it that, in the ’80s. He used to rant about the Japanese in exactly the same terms as he once ranted about the Chinese and is now ranting about Mexico, Canada and the European Union. Catherine Rampell of The Washington Post archly pointed out that Trump’s views are entirely defensible — at least, by the standards of the 1680s, when mercantilism reigned. She explains:

What is mercantilism, exactly? As you may remember from some long-ago high school class, it’s an economic philosophy that was prevalent in the 17th and 18th centuries. In a nutshell, mercantilists believed a country should try to maximize exports and minimize imports. The logic was this: Military power comes from wealth; wealth comes from accumulating gold and silver; and the way you accumulate gold and silver is through trade surpluses. Your merchant ships should go out loaded with attractive goods and came back overflowing with shiny specie.

 

There basically was no such thing as modern-day trade diplomacy; tariffs were high, and no one would have trusted anyone to stick to trade agreements anyway, since everyone was trying to maintain trade surpluses at once. Which is fundamentally impossible. It was a zero-sum view of the world. Nothing was win-win, everything was win-lose, and everyone was suspicious of everyone else. 

As you also may remember from high school history, then a dude named Adam Smith waltzed onto the scene. He (and subsequently other classical economists, such as David Ricardo) turned much of this thinking on its head. Smith showed that real national wealth doesn’t come from amassing piles of gold, which are transitory. Wealth comes from increasing productivity — that is, by figuring out how to make stuff more efficiently, which permanently increases living standards. 

How do you increase productivity? By specializing in what you do well and honing your skills in that area. Then you trade with other people who do other stuff well. Through these transactions, over time, everyone gets richer. In other words: Trade is not zero-sum; it’s positive-sum.

Trump wouldn’t know mercantilism from militarism, and his instincts in this matter are simplistic because he sees everything in life as a zero-sum game: He wins, you lose.

He tweeted this back in March:

When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore-we win big. It’s easy!

Even a grade-school kid can see the holes in that argument. He seems under the illusion that other countries can’t fight back or can’t survive if they do. That’s just not true. They can and they will.

That fact is making even the supine GOP Congress get restive as Trump’s willy-nilly tariffs on China, Canada and the EU are starting to bite their own constituents and as those partners retaliate.

According to Politico, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who previously suggested that Trump would be one of the greatest presidents who ever lived, has now turned angrily against the tariffs, saying he’d “like to kill ’em.” Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, another Republican who is getting an earful from his voters, says “Individual senators have met with the president, including me. The [Agriculture] Committee met with him, the Finance Committee met with him. And there’s nobody for this.”

Trump simply doesn’t understand what he’s doing, and until Congress steps in and does its job, he will continue to do whatever he wants. He is unrestrained by reality because he’s in so far over his head that he can’t see it.

There is some movement by Sens. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa., to put a stop to Trump’s use of “national security” as a rationale for imposing tariffs. He ludicrously used that excuse to hit Canada. But that seems months away, if ever. Meanwhile, Trump’s’s talking about tearing up more trade agreements and withdrawing from the World Trade Organization. He apparently believes he can personally negotiate take-it-or-leave-it bilateral trade deals with every country in the world, based on some boilerplate that demands that all other nations allow the U.S. to make money at their own expense. Republicans know this is daft but seem to be convinced that they cannot defy him even on behalf of their own voters.

At this point you have to wonder if Republicans don’t simply hope that Democrats win a congressional majority in November and do their dirty work for them. If it weren’t that much of the world’s prosperity rested on this issue, it would be understandable if the Democrats told them it was their mess and they had to clean it up. Unfortunately, like so many aspects of the Trump presidency, this Republican mess is toxic for all of us.

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Relearning the Declaration
by Tom Sullivan

The humanitarian crisis the Department of Justice created on the southern border demonstrates with immediacy and urgency just how much America has lost its way. While Democrats and Republicans and progressive and conservative activists point fingers and argue over which faction of political actors have more deeply betrayed America, however defined, it is a mud fight which leaves all of them caked and bloodied.

Conor Friedersdorf’s July 4th appreciation in The Atlantic of Abraham Lincoln’s thoughts on the essential principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence is not only clarifying, but invigorating. We think of Lincoln as America’s greatest president for preserving the union and abolishing slavery. Amidst another period of national peril, the words of the man who guided us through our worst one provide a guidestar.

Ahead of joining the U.S. Senate, Lincoln gave a speech in Lewistown, Illinois on August 17, 1858 in which he referenced the Declaration of Independence as the guiding inspiration behind the American experiment. He issued a warning:

Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines conflicting with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence; if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur, and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions; if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated by our chart of liberty, let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the Revolution. Think nothing of me – take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever – but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence. You may do anything with me you choose, if you will but heed these sacred principles.

This, Lincoln told his audience, “was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures.”

Lincoln continued:

Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows.

They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. The erected a beacon to guide their children and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began — so that truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built.

Friedersdorf adds his own warning to Lincoln’s prescient one:

And the United States is now led by a man––bereft of Christian virtues, his own Twitter account a testament to his dearth of self-mastery or prudence––who extols the supposed strength of the Communists who suppressed lovers of liberty at Tiananmen Square, the authoritarian tyrant who leads Russia, and the thug who leads the Philippines. His political ideals would be a cancer to any body politic. It festers within ours and spreads daily.

The man who now holds the office Lincoln did once embodies and represents the rich, white men of that farthest posterity. His actions demonstrate daily his disdain for all but the ceremonial trappings of democracy and equality before law. He pursues a perverse, anti-American ordering of humanity. The rich above the rest. Men above women. Caucasians above non-whites. Christians above any other faiths. And power above truth and “all the humane and Christian virtues.” Especially mercy.

In seeking to reorder America’s international trade and strategic alliances, the 45th president of the United States is systematically undermining the United States’ leadership in the world and working, for his own ends and perhaps others’, to unmake the American century.

Friedersdorf adds:

While debating Senator Stephen Douglas, Lincoln said he hated slavery and the prospect of its spread not only because of its monstrous injustice, but because “it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites— causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty—criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.”

The flag-hugger residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is perhaps the greatest patron saint of self-interest since Ayn Rand, but without even her pretension of morality.

What perhaps Lincoln did not foresee was the potential that a rich few might again in a distant future so beguile so many into following them, in pursuit of self-interest, in trodding underfoot and imbruting others “stamped with the Divine image.” Ending that in the present, of course, was the political question of Lincoln’s day. After imparting that lesson once, it would stay learned. Only it did not.

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