1. Charles M. Blow: Trump’s Obama Obsession

Donald Trump has a thing about Barack Obama. Trump is obsessed with Obama. Obama haunts Trump’s dreams. One of Trump’s primary motivators is the absolute erasure of Obama — were it possible — not only from the political landscape but also from the history books.

Trump is president because of Obama, or more precisely, because of his hostility to Obama. Trump came onto the political scene by attacking Obama.

Trump has questioned not only Obama’s birthplace but also his academicand literary pedigree. He was head cheerleader of the racial “birther” lie and also cast doubt on whether Obama attended the schools he attended or even whether he wrote his acclaimed books.

Trump wants to be Obama — held in high esteem. But, alas, Trump is Trump, and that is now and has always been trashy. Trump accrued financial wealth, but he never accrued cultural capital, at least not among the people from whom he most wanted it.

For Trump, the mark of being a successful president is the degree to which he can expunge Obama’s presidency.  6/29/17 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/opinion/trumps-obama-obsession.html?ref=opinion

2. Ronald Brownstein: Why the GOP's Plan for Health Care Hit a Wall

Not surprisingly the House and Senate health care proposals benefit high earners the most. The Senate bill would cut taxes by $180 annually for a family in the bottom fifth of the income distribution and by $280 for one in the middle fifth, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center determined this week. By contrast, households in the top 1 percent would save $45,000. In all, the center calculated, the top 10 percent of earners would receive over 60 percent of the Senate bill’s tax savings. That’s far more than the roughly one-third of savings directed to households in the bottom four-fifths of the income distribution combined, even though that group is over 12 times bigger than the top 10 percent. All of these numbers are similar for the House plan.

On the other side, the cuts’ corresponding benefit reductions would hit lower-income and older workers hardest, particularly in the last years before retirement. Those are cornerstone Republican voters: Nationwide, over two-thirds of all adults ages 45 to 64 are white and Trump dominated among them.

The losers in the GOP bills are beginning to notice. The latest Kaiser poll shows that while most non-college-educated whites and whites age 50 or older remain negative on the ACA, only about one-third of each group supports the Republican alternatives. And majorities of each group oppose cutting Medicaid funding. Perhaps most older and blue-collar whites feel such a strong cultural and racial affinity for the GOP that no offense against their economic interests can shatter that bond. But the grudging reset facing McConnell’s health-care bill suggests that, at least for now, too many Senate Republicans are not willing to test that proposition. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/senate-republican-health-care/531993/

3. Jonathan Chait: The Republican Health-Care Lie Is Collapsing

Republicans have justified their health-care rollback as a “rescue mission” to save America from a “failing” law. Their insistence that the Affordable Care Act is collapsing on its own is demonstrably false. But even if it were correct, the case is a non sequitur, because the most significant changes in the law have nothing to do with the alleged failure of Obamacare. Throughout the health-care debate, Republicans have managed to submerge this disconnected, obfuscatory rhetoric. But now the lie is finally coming to the surface, and the willingness of Republicans to indulge it is dissolving.

When McConnell warns his party that the alternative to failure is bipartisanship, it sounds comical to outside ears. But he is deadly serious about it. He is telling conservatives that they are on the verge of forfeiting a historic opportunity to use the pretext of Obamacare repeal and replace to fulfill longstanding goals. The least committed conservatives in his party seem unwilling to risk their own popularity for these audacious goals. “If for some reason it fails … the floodgates would probably open to reach a bipartisan compromise,” West Virginia senator Shelley Moore Capito said on CNN. The term “floodgates” is telling. It indicates built-up pressure to abandon ideological maximalism and instead try to actually improve Obamacare.

McConnell is trying to use the urgency of a deadline to force through a law enabling his grandest ideological dreams. Instead, the pressure of timing may have opened up a schism within his party he cannot mend. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/06/the-republican-health-care-lie-is-collapsing.html

4. John Cassidy: Why Mitch McConnell and the Republicans Can’t Fix Health Care

Even if McConnell somehow manages to revive the bill in the coming weeks and put together the fifty votes that he needs to get it through the Senate, that broader failure will remain a problem for him and his party. If they end up passing this bill or something like it, they will be betting their future on a reform that cannot deliver what Donald Trump promised during the election campaign and what Paul Ryan and his colleagues promised last December: reasonably priced access to health care for every American. Over time, political pressure would mount for the restoration of Obamacare, or even for a public option available to everyone.

Conservative supporters of the Senate bill disagree, of course. Writing in the Washington Post over the weekend, Avik Roy, a former health-care adviser to Mitt Romney, said that passing this legislation would “represent the greatest policy achievement by a Republican Congress in generations.” It would create “a thriving, consumer-driven individual insurance market, with as many as 30 million participants, available to the healthy and the sick and the young and the old, whose successes will lay the groundwork for future efforts at entitlement reform.”

The Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the Senate bill, which was released on Monday, offered a very different picture. If the bill were signed into law, the C.B.O. said, tens of millions of Americans would eventually be added to the ranks of the uninsured. Many others would face higher premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket limits. Older and poorer people, in particular, would find it harder to pay for health care.

In reality, of course, the only party here that is really exercising choice is the Republican Party, which is refusing to accept the principle of genuine universal access to health care—a principle that virtually every other developed nation in the world recognizes. Until the Republicans and their conservative backers surmount their objections to this principle, they will be obliged to try and foist upon the country policies that can only do harm to many of their own supporters. After the July 4th break, they will doubtless hurry back to this task. 6/28/17 http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/why-mitch-mcconnell-and-the-republicans-cant-fix-health-care

5. Paul Waldman: How Trump’s disgusting behavior will make Republican disunity more likely

Let’s be clear about something: Republicans are not a profile in courage on the question of Donald Trump’s boorishness. They supported him in 2016 — when he was accused by multiple women of harassment, when he made racist attacks on a judge, when he picked a fight with a Gold Star family, when he was caught on tape bragging about his ability to commit sexual assault with impunity — and they still support him as long as he’s doing what they want. There are precious few of them who stood up and said that they could not in good conscience stand behind such a despicable human being, and history will judge them harshly for their complicity in this disaster of a presidency.

But what I’m talking about here are the moments when they aren’t all in agreement, and Trump would have to exercise leadership to pull them together. If you’re a member of Congress, making the decision to overcome your doubts and do what the president asks isn’t easy. A lot of factors play into it — your fear that he might punish you, the personal relationship you’ve built with him, your constituents’ feelings about him, your worries about reelection, your belief in your own independence and so on. Trump has been president for barely five months, and we’re already seeing that members of Congress don’t really fear him, they’re continually amazed by his ignorance about policy, and they think his White House is a bunch of amateurs.

There are always going to be times when a member of Congress says, “Mr. President, I respect and admire you, but I have to say no this time.” That happens to every president. But if you convince them that you’re not worthy of their respect and admiration, saying “No” becomes a lot easier. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/06/29/how-trumps-disgusting-behavior-will-make-republican-disunity-more-likely/?tid=pm_opinions_pop

6. Ruth Marcus: Authoritarianism creeps up on you. This is how.

“Some of the Fake News Media likes to say that I am not totally engaged in healthcare,” President Trump tweeted on Wednesday. “Wrong, I know the subject well & want victory for U.S.”

Fine, Mr. President, there’s an easy way to prove your asserted knowledge: Have a news conference. Answer questions that aren’t softballs tossed by your friends at Fox News.

Remember back when Trump and his campaign were busy blasting Hillary Clinton for failing to hold a news conference?

As for other ways in which Trump has made himself accessible, or not? Well, he went 41 days between interviews — from May 13 with Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro(“Your agenda is not getting out, because people are caught up on the [James B.] Comey issue, and ridiculous stuff”) to June 23 with Fox News’s Ainsley Earhardt(on Trump’s bogus suggestion there might be tapes of Comey, she said, “That was a smart way to make sure he stayed honest in those hearings”).

Is this what our democracy has been reduced to? We in the media can’t make Trump take our questions. But supinely accepting his silence threatens to normalize the distinctly abnormal. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-creeping-authoritarianism-of-trumps-attacks-on-the-free-press/2017/06/29/81e92ca6-5cea-11e7-9fc6-c7ef4bc58d13_story.html

7. Ryan Cooper: The GOP's cartwheeling troupe of sycophants and hacks are lying their heads off about health care

Senate Republicans are struggling mightily to pass their version of TrumpCare. They had originally scheduled a vote for this week, but have pushed it back to after the July recess to give the leadership more time to shore up the party's wobbling right and left flanks.

Here's what TrumpCare does, in all its various manifestations: cut taxes on roughly the top 2 percent of families, and pay for it by slashing ObamaCare subsidies and Medicaid, throwing tens of millions off their health insurance. The motivation for such a bill can only be some combination of two things: the belief that wealthy people's incomes are too low, and the belief that government health insurance programs are too generous (or should not exist at all).

That argument is too brutal and unpopular for most people to face, so the Republican Party and its cartwheeling troupe of media sycophants and hacks have chosen lying, dissembling, and prevaricating to sell their monstrous legislation. http://theweek.com/articles/708786/gops-cartwheeling-troupe-sycophants-hacks-are-lying-heads-about-health-care

8. Jonathan Chait: Now We Have a Roadmap to the Trump Campaign’s Collusion with Russia

Most of the commentary surrounding the Russia scandal has treated the possibility that Donald Trump’s campaign deliberately colluded with Moscow as remote, unfounded speculation. The new reporting that has broken this weekend suggests instead that this collusion likely did take place. It provides a roadmap to the, or perhaps a, likely avenue through which this occurred.

The figure carrying out the operation in question was Peter W. Smith, who died at the age of 81 earlier this year. Smith is hardly a lone kook. He’s an established Republican donor with a demonstrated history in financing ethically murky investigations, such as paying Arkansas state troopers for stories of Bill Clinton’s sexual dalliances.

Smith surfaced earlier in the week in an explosive Wall Street Journalreport by Shane Harris, which Harris followed-up Friday night. What really underscores the significance of Harris’s reporting, though, is a detailed account, also published Friday night, by Matt Tait, a British cybersecurity expert who dealt extensively with Smith. Tait’s report makes it clear that Smith had access to Michael Flynn, at the very least, and was working not only to obtain stolen Clinton emails but also to hide the Trump campaign’s involvement.

Smith is deceased (at an old age; there is no grounds for suspicion about the cause of his death.) But Michael Flynn, a figure he reportedly worked for, is very much with us, and facing significant legal jeopardy. Flynn’s lawyer has said he has “a story to tell.” This might be part of the story. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/now-we-have-a-roadmap-to-trump-campaigns-russia-collusion.html?utm_source=tw&utm_medium=s3&utm_campaign=sharebutton-b

9. Kia Makarechi: Did Trump Just Begin Laying The Groundwork For “mass Voter Purging”?

In a letter issued Wednesday, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, a creation of one of Donald Trump’s executive orders, has asked every state in the country to hand over its publicly available voter data, including full names, addresses, dates of birth, political parties, last-four digits of Social Security numbers, voting history from 2006 on, and more. The official document is signed by Vice-Chair Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and conservative activist who has become infamous for his efforts to enact stricter voter-ID laws and purge voter rolls of duplicate or allegedly fraudulent voter registrations. Kobach and chairman Vice President Mike Pence give the states a deadline of July 14 to comply, and asks states to submit the information over e-mail or through a government file-transfer system.

Critics of the White House’s voter fraud crackdown were appalled. “That they would be able to build out this nationwide database [on such a timeline] with any level of accuracy defies the imagination,” Vanita Gupta, who ran the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration, said in an interview. The letter “lays the groundwork for mass voter purging,” she added. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/06/trump-kobach-voter-fraud

10. Peter Beinart: Trump's Grudges Are His Agenda

The least convincing Republican defense of Donald Trump’s attack on Mika Brzezinski surely belongs to White House principal deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who declared that Americans “knew what they were getting” when they elected him. The implication is that because Americans understood that Trump was a vulgar misogynist during the campaign, there’s nothing wrong with his vulgar misogyny today.

Put aside the fact that a majority of Americans voted against Trump. Put aside the fact that even those Americans who did vote for him largely did so in spite of, rather than because of, his crude, sexist outbursts: Exit polls showed that among Americans who prioritized “good judgment,” Clinton beat Trump by 40 points.

On policy, Trump is inattentive and inconsistent. Where he’s attentive and consistent is in his personal attacks on his adversaries. Trump’s presidency will have vast and frightening policy implications, most which he doesn’t understand. But Trump’s primary goal as president does not appear to be enacting a set of policies; his behavior suggests that his real goal is feeding his ego and vanquishing his enemies. He’s only truly interested in his presidency’s impact on himself. Calling Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky a diversion made sense because Clinton was genuinely committed to certain policy goals, which he undermined by his personal recklessness. With Trump, personal recklessness is all there is.

That’s why Trump will launch attacks like the one he launched against Mika Brzezinski for as long as he’s president, and likely after that. Saying he attacks people viciously because he lacks impulse control is like saying a professional boxer lacks impulse control because he punches people in the ring. For Trump, this is the true purpose of politics, if not life itself. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/trumps-grudges-are-his-agenda/532395/

11. Maureen Dowd: Cruella de Trump

 So, with this latest toad jumping from our president’s mouth, is Donald Trump acting like a sexist pig or simply a pig?

I proffer, a pig.

I have no doubt that he would attack a man’s appearance in the same breathtakingly below-the-belt way if he felt humiliated by that man and had the ammunition.

In his vile tweet about Mika Brzezinski, he called her crazy. He often tweets that women journalists — including me — are crazy. Yet in that same tweet about Mika, he called Joe Scarborough “psycho.” And he told the Russians in May that James Comey was “a nut job.”

It’s cruelty on a Grand Guignol scale, both in Trump’s heartless tweets and in his mindless salesmanship of the Republicans’ heartless budget. When Trump called the House health care bill mean, he knows whereof he speaks. He’s the King of Mean. Pathetically, Trump mistakes cruelty for strength. 7/01/17 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/opinion/sunday/donald-trump-cruelty-dowd.html

12. Sarah Holder: How the Psychology of Cyberbullying Explains Trump’s Tweets

That’s one big reason Trump is unlike any other cyberbully on the internet: Because he’s arguably the most important person in the world, more people listen to him, and his words can have far broader consequences than hurt feelings.

“Now it’s a huge set of headlines. … It's a huge distraction and kerfuffle,” Bazelon says. “It’s important both to recognize that Trump in some ways is a classic bully, and also that when you’re a bully and you’re the president, it’s very different.”

Another way in which Trump’s online behavior differs from typical cyberbullying? For most adults who practice cyberbullying, online anonymity gives them the liberty to be less mature, says Aboujaoude. “So cyberbullying isn’t just an expression of the aggression trait—it’s also an expression of the regression trait.” But Trump doesn’t, and can’t, usually go incognito—and it’s not clear he would want to, given his history of lobbing insults in speeches, interviews and other in-person appearances.

So, how can a cyberbully be stopped? In this case, can he? The answer isn’t just “take away his phone.” A bully’s power has everything to do with social status. If a community—a school, a Congress, a country—accepts and tolerates a bully’s actions, those actions usually continue. It’s only through social rejection that they are incentivized to stop.

“It’s not up to the victim of bullying to stop it or fight back,” explains Bazelon, drawing on her research about adolescent bullies and their victims. “It’s up to the community to make it clear to the bully that bullying is unacceptable. It’s on all of us.” http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/03/how-the-psychology-of-cyberbullying-explains-trumps-tweets-215333

13. Beyond Economics: Fears of Cultural Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump

Perhaps the most contested question from the 2016 presidential election is what factors motivated white working-class voters to support Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by a margin of roughly two to one. New analysis by PRRI and The Atlantic, based on surveys conducted before and after the 2016 election, developed a model to test a variety of potential factors influencing support for Trump among white working-class voters. The model identifies five significant independent predictors of support for Trump among white working-class voters. No other factors were significant at conventional levels.

Overall, the model demonstrates that besides partisanship, fears about immigrants and cultural displacement were more powerful factors than economic concerns in predicting support for Trump among white working-class voters. Moreover, the effects of economic concerns were complex—with economic fatalism predicting support for Trump, but economic hardship predicting support for Clinton.

Identification with the Republican Party. Identifying as Republican, not surprisingly, was strongly predictive of Trump support. White working-class voters who identified as Republican were 11 times more likely to support Trump than those who did not identify as Republican. No other demographic attribute was significant.

Fears about cultural displacement. White working-class voters who say they often feel like a stranger in their own land and who believe the U.S. needs protecting against foreign influence were 3.5 times more likely to favor Trump than those who did not share these concerns.

Support for deporting immigrants living in the country illegally. White working-class voters who favored deporting immigrants living in the country illegally were 3.3 times more likely to express a preference for Trump than those who did not.

Economic fatalism. White working-class voters who said that college education is a gamble were almost twice as likely to express a preference for Trump as those who said it was an important investment in the future.

Economic hardship. Notably, while only marginally significant at conventional levels (P<0.1), being in fair or poor financial shape actually predicted support for Hillary Clinton among white working-class Americans, rather than support for Donald Trump. Those who reported being in fair or poor financial shape were 1.7 times more likely to support Clinton, compared to those who were in better financial shape. https://www.prri.org/research/white-working-class-attitudes-economy-trade-immigration-election-donald-trump/

14. Charles Blow: The Hijacked American Presidency

Every now and then we are going to have to do this: Step back from the daily onslaughts of insanity emanating from Donald Trump’s parasitic presidency and remind ourselves of the obscenity of it all, registering its magnitude in its full, devastating truth.

There is something insidious and corrosive about trying to evaluate the severity of every offense, trying to give each an individual grade on the scale of absurdity. Trump himself is the offense. Everything that springs from him, every person who supports him, every staffer who shields him, every legislator who defends him, is an offense. Every partisan who uses him — against all he or she has ever claimed to champion — to advance a political agenda and, in so doing, places party over country, is an offense.

We must remind ourselves that Trump’s very presence in the White House defiles it and the institution of the presidency. Rather than rising to the honor of the office, Trump has lowered the office with his whiny, fragile, vindictive pettiness.

The presidency has been hijacked. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/03/opinion/trump-hijacked-american-presidency.html?ref=opinion

15. Max Boot: The System Works

With President Trump spending the days leading up to the Fourth of July tweeting an increasingly outlandish and offensive series of insults against members of the Fourth Estate (specifically, Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, and CNN), I was left to reflect on the wisdom of the Founders. More than two centuries ago, they came up with a system of government that contains, at least to a large extent, even the damage that a personality as protean and disordered as Donald Trump’s can do.

The president may rage against the media—bizarrely, he accuses the mainstream press of being “fake” even as he posts a doctored video from a professional wrestling match, the most artificial entertainment imaginable—but his ability to do anything more than vent on social media is decidedly limited. Thanks, James Madison, for drafting the Bill of Rights and, in particular, the First Amendment that protects our most precious liberties. Trump has talked in the past about changing the libel laws, but that’s not something he can do by executive fiat. It will take an act of Congress, and the odds of such legislation passing are scant even in a Republican-dominated legislature. 7/04/17 

16. Laura Rosenberger : How President Trump could tweet his way into nuclear war with North Korea

President Trump’s reaction to North Korea’s intercontinental missile test was to immediately reach for his phone and sound off with chest-thumping statements on Twitter.  This is a very reckless reaction, and one that risks miscalculation by adversary and ally alike.

North Korea has just launched another missile. Does this guy have anything better to do with his life? Hard to believe that South Korea..... Donald J. Trump ✔@realDonaldTrump

North Korea will parse every word of Trump’s Twitter statement looking for clear signals of intention in Trump’s tweets. The problem is, it’s not clear that Trump has any idea what his intentions are. He is sending signals that foreign officials will attach meanings to — meanings he may not have intended and might not even realize he’s sending.

Bluster and chest-thumping may feel good — but it will not make us safer. The threat posed by North Korea is serious, urgent and reaching a critical point. It requires a real, coordinated strategy in which the president works in concert with his national security team to protect the country. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/07/05/how-president-trump-could-tweet-his-way-into-nuclear-war-with-north-korea/