1. Paul Krugman: When the President Is Un-American

Remember back in 2008, when Sarah Palin used to talk about the “real America”? She meant rural and small-town residents — white residents, it went without saying — who supposedly embodied the nation’s true essence.

She was harshly condemned for those remarks, and rightly so — and not just because the real, real America is a multiracial, multicultural land of great metropolitan areas as well as small towns. More fundamentally, what makes America America is that it is built around an idea: the idea that all men are created equal, and are entitled to basic human rights. Take away that idea and we’re just a giant version of a two-bit autocracy.

And maybe that is what we have, in fact, become. For Donald Trump’s refusal to condemn the murderous white supremacists in Charlottesville finally confirms what has become increasingly obvious: The current president of the United States isn’t a real American.

Real Americans understand that our nation is built around values, not the “blood and soil” of the marchers’ chants; what makes you an American is your attempt to live up to those values, not the place or race your ancestors came from. And when we fall short in our effort to live up to our ideals, as we all too often do, at least we realize and acknowledge our failure.

But the man who began his political ascent by falsely questioning Barack Obama’s place of birth — a blood-and-soil argument if ever there was one — clearly cares nothing about the openness and inclusiveness that have always been essential parts of who we are as a nation. 8/14/17 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/opinion/when-the-president-is-un-american.html

2. NY Times Editorial Board: The Hate He Dares Not Speak Of

Let’s discard the fiction that President Trump wasn’t placating white supremacists by responding so weakly to the neo-Nazi violence that killed Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old counterdemonstrator in Charlottesville, Va., on Saturday. The neo-Nazis heard his message loud and clear.

“He didn’t attack us,” crowed The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist website, about Mr. Trump’s statement after the two days of racist demonstrations. “Refused to answer a question about White Nationalists supporting him. No condemnation at all. When asked to condemn, he just walked out of the room. Really, really good. God bless him.”

The police said a 20-year-old man, who participated in the long-planned protest against the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, plowed his car into peaceful counterdemonstrators on Saturday, killing Ms. Heyer and injuring 19 others. He was charged with second-degree murder. Two Virginia state troopers responding to the protests died in a helicopter crash.

After the attack, and before he spoke, Mr. Trump reportedly consulted advisers. They told him to condemn the white nationalists who fomented the violence.

He did not. Instead, he spoke of an “egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence that’s on many sides.”

Mr. Trump is alone in modern presidential history in his willingness to summon demons of bigotry and intolerance in service to himself. He began his political career on a lie about President Barack Obama’s citizenship and has failed to firmly condemn the words and deeds of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan leaders and other bigots who rallied behind him. A number of these people, including David Duke, the former Klan imperial wizard, and Richard Spencer, self-styled theorist of the alt-right, were part of the amen chorus of bigots in Charlottesville. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/13/opinion/trump-charlottesville-hate-stormer.html

3. The Guardian Editorial: Donald Trump and racism: a moral failure that shames America

It would be difficult to imagine any US president of this more recent period, of whatever party, who would not have responded to the neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville with anything except explicit condemnation and disgust. Any president, that is, until this one.

There is absolutely no moral equivalence between the fanatical white supremacists who rallied in the Virginia city on Saturday and the equality defenders who demonstrated peacefully against them, one of whom was rammed and killed by a speeding car allegedly driven by a man who had attended the neo-Nazi rally. The supremacists hate black people and Jews, and regard white people as superior. They talk portentously about blood, soil and the right to bear arms. They admire Hitler and give Nazi salutes. They fly the flags of the pro-slavery Confederacy – the ostensible cause of their rallies this summer is Charlottesville’s decision, more than 150 years after the south’s surrender, to remove a statue of Robert E Lee from a park. And one of them committed the sort of act that was rightly called terrorism when it occurred in Nice, Berlin and London.

Yet, in his first response on Saturday, Mr Trump utterly failed in his primary duty to uphold equality and speak the truth about the racist violence that had taken place. Instead of placing the blame where it belonged, on the supremacists and Klansmen who triggered these events, and rather than stand up for the indivisibility of equality and tolerance before the law, Mr Trump’s words were by turns slippery, banal and morally compromised. It was not true that the violence in Charlottesville came from “many sides”, as Mr Trump evasively said, before repeating his evasion. It is the head of state’s duty to stand up, explicitly and unequivocally, against racists and those who promote racial violence. Mr Trump was found wanting. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2017/aug/13/the-guardian-view-on-donald-trump-and-racism-a-moral-failure-that-shames-america

4. Scott Lemieux: Don't praise the GOP for calling out Trump's appalling Charlottesville comments

The mobilization of white supremacy is not incidental to Trump's rise, but central to it. Remember, he became a major figure in the Republican Party by aggressively promoting the racist falsehood that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and continued to engage in egregious race-baiting throughout the 2016 campaign. There's a reason former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke declared after the Charlottesville rally that "[t]hat's why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he's going to take our country back." The "our" in that sentence is represented by the white nationalist and anti-Semitic groups that staged the hate rally this weekend. Trump's lackluster response to such a rally was just another reminder of the very real particular dangers his naked appeals to white supremacy and xenophobia pose.

Trump's pathetic speech was a bridge too far for some of the Republicans who made a devil's bargain with Trump and have been ignoring his overt racism and corruption in the hope that he could serve as a vehicle to advance their unpopular policy agenda. Multiple prominent Republican senators, including Orrin Hatch (Utah), Cory Gardner (Colo.), Marco Rubio (Fla.), and Ted Cruz (Texas) did what Trump should have done but didn't: They specifically called out the white supremacist hate groups and condemned their destructive ideology.

Calling out Trump's white supremacy is necessary, and it's good that some Republicans are finally doing it. But actions speak louder than words, and until Republicans start showing the American people, particularly those who aren't white, that they care about their rights and well-being, too, the GOP's condemnations of white supremacy will ring hollow. 8/18/17 http://theweek.com/articles/718176/dont-praise-gop-calling-trumps-appalling-charlottesville-comments

5. William Falk: When winning isn't possible

President Trump lives in a binary universe. All interactions are transactional, and you either win or lose. You either dominate and humiliate your opponent, as in the case of "Low-Energy Jeb," "Little Marco," or "Crooked Hillary," or you suffer humiliation yourself. It's zero-sum all the way. I'm not psychoanalyzing here — Trump has openly espoused this worldview for decades. "My whole life is about winning," he said early in the campaign. "I almost never lose." That core belief now shapes his presidency. He's furious that we're not still winning the 16-year-old Afghanistan war, so he's threatening to fire the commander and pull U.S. troops out. The Republican failure to repeal and replace ObamaCare so galls him that he's threatening to stop critical payments to insurers, so the whole system collapses. This week he warned he would rain "fire and fury" on North if Kim Jong Un kept making nuclear threats. Exchanging trash talk about incinerating millions of people may seem a bit risky, but for Trump, being laughed at by a third-rate tyrant is just, well, intolerable. You think you have nukes, twerp?

In running for president, a relentless drive to win can be useful. But now that Trump is president, he faces a mounting list of complex problems that do not fit neatly into his binary box. The looming debt ceiling, the budget, health care, tax reform, North Korea, Afghanistan ... all will require negotiation and compromise, and at best, settling for Ronald Reagan's "half a loaf." Frustration is inevitable. Meanwhile, Trump must stomach galling reminders that special counsel Robert Mueller and his 16 crack prosecutors are digging through his tax returns and financial transactions, and summoning family members and campaign aides to a grand jury. What happens when a man who needs to crush and humiliate his enemies cannot? As the president is fond of saying, "We'll see." http://theweek.com/articles/717568/when-winning-isnt-possible

6. Michael Gerson: Trump babbles in the face of tragedy

One of the difficult but primary duties of the modern presidency is to speak for the nation in times of tragedy. A space shuttle explodes. An elementary school is attacked. The twin towers come down in a heap of ash and twisted steel. It falls to the president to express something of the nation’s soul — grief for the lost, sympathy for the suffering, moral clarity in the midst of confusion, confidence in the unknowable purposes of God.
Not every president does this equally well. But none have been incapable. Until Donald Trump.

Trump’s reaction to events in Charlottesville was alternately trite (“come together as one”), infantile (“very, very sad”) and meaningless (“we want to study it”). “There are so many great things happening in our country,” he said, on a day when racial violence took a life.

Ultimately this was not merely the failure of rhetoric or context, but of moral judgment. The president could not bring himself initially to directly acknowledge the victims or distinguish between the instigators and the dead. He could not focus on the provocations of the side marching under a Nazi flag. Is this because he did not want to repudiate some of his strongest supporters? This would indicate that Trump views loyalty to himself as mitigation for nearly any crime or prejudice. Or is the president truly convinced of the moral equivalence of the sides in Charlottesville? This is to diagnose an ethical sickness for which there is no cure.

If great words can heal and inspire, base words can corrupt. Trump has been delivering the poison of prejudice in small but increasing doses. In Charlottesville, the effect became fully evident. And the president had no intention of decisively repudiating his work.

What do we do with a president who is incapable or unwilling to perform his basic duties? What do we do when he is incapable of outrage at outrageous things? What do we do with a president who provides barely veiled cover for the darkest instincts of the human heart? These questions lead to the dead end of political realism — a hopeless recognition of limited options. But the questions intensify. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-babbles-in-the-face-of-tragedy/2017/08/12/a27211ba-7fbb-11e7-9d08-b79f191668ed_story.html

7. Andrew Sullivan: Trump’s Reckless Nuclear Bluffing

And then, in an instant, he ended America’s nuclear deterrence.

Isn’t that what happened this week? The president of the United States laid down an ultimatum that if the North Korean dictator issued any more threats to the U.S., there would be a response more ferocious than any military action in human history — i.e., presumably worse than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Within hours, Kim Jong-un issued a threat to Guam. And nothing has happened … or, we are told, will happen. (Friday morning, Trump came back with more bluster, this time warning that “military solutions are in place” should North Korea act “unwisely.”)

This was a nuclear threat that was exposed as a bluff on the same day it was made. Imagine what Reagan would say about that. Or Truman. Or Eisenhower. Or Nixon. Or Kennedy. For when a superpower makes such a threat and doesn’t follow through, its nuclear credibility — the cornerstone of our deterrence — is damaged well below the waterline. That credibility — sustained by successive presidents of both parties, for decades — is integral to our national security and to global stability and peace.

Trump’s reckless nuclear bluff — more terrifying still — was not run by any aides beforehand. It was not coordinated with the Pentagon or State Department. The language was improvised. He was venting. He was winging it. And so this week confirmed what we already knew: There is no one able to control this rogue president, no one who is capable of preventing him, if he so wishes, from consigning hundreds of thousands of people to a nuclear holocaust. If this does not make for an emergency, what would?

For the Republican Party, this is a particularly dark and surreal moment. A party once defined by its edge in national security is now actively, recklessly, impulsively endangering it with a president manifestly unfit for the office he holds and the power he wields. At what point will they say enough? Will it take a nuclear incident to force their hand? Or are they really prepared to pretend none of this is happening? http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/08/trumps-reckless-nuclear-bluffing.html

8. Emily Jane Fox: Donald Trump, Swamp King, Is Officially Swimming In Washington Money

In what many believed was an improbable coup for a New York billionaire, Donald Trump managed to win the presidency in part by promising to “drain the swamp” in Washington. He would excel in this purgation of corruption, he argued, because he had so much experience benefiting from it. The phrase was repeated at rallies, in debates and television interviews, at town halls and in tweets until it became a sort of mantra. Under his administration, gone would be the days of greedy politicians lining their pockets and looking out for their own interests instead of worrying about the American people, he promised.

Nine months after the election, however, it seems the opposite is true. A distinctly Trumpian swamp has displaced the old as a new breed of G.O.P. and foreign lobbyists have ascended alongside the young administration. At the center of this new Washington power structure is Trump’s D.C. hotel, which has quickly become the best place to see Trump’s swamp creatures at work—mixing and mingling over sabered bottles of champagne while pouring money into the president’s pockets. According to The Washington Post, the Trump Organization has turned a close to a $2 million profit in the last four months at its Trump International Hotel. The historic, gilded building, carved into the Old Post Office Building, sits just five blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House and has drawn the president for dinner several times—becoming a de facto parlor room for members of his Cabinet, his innermost circle, and his most fervent supporters hoping catch a glimpse of it all.

Governing, it turns out, is hard to do, and unbelievably, being president of the United States is not a walk down easy street. Being president and someone who owns a hotel within spitting distance of the White House, however, is much simpler. Certainly, it is more lucrative, and Trump doesn’t need McConnell or Mueller’s help to cash those checks. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/08/donald-trump-hotel-profits

9. Joy-Ann Reid: Remove Trump From Office Before He Removes Us from Earth

Did Donald Trump really just walk us to the brink of war with North Korea on a whim this week, or has this all been a figment of our lurid imagination? It seems crazy to contemplate that the world now stands on the edge of disaster because the American president simply lacks self-control. And yet that’s exactly the discussion on the table.

Trump’s bizarre statements about “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” coupled with the follow-up press conference in which he declared a “whole new ballgame” and doubled down on his apparently extemporaneous threats against the North Korean regime should chill the bones of every military family and every American with a child of draft age.

Trump talks in many ways exactly as Kim Jong Un does—in disjointed statements full of bellicose hyperbole. He blusters in a clear effort to shore up his flagging ego; to make himself seem strong when in fact he is weak; an isolated, morose figure lumbering from self-named golf course to self-named golf course and imprisoned by the office whose grandeur he cannot measure up to. He screams into the ether to try and push back the void, when the void is deep inside him.

He is a bitter, angry, frightened man, cornered by prosecutors, rejected by a majority of Americans, declaring his leaking aides are merely fighting to prove who loves him the mostand yet unsure which of his former lieutenants—or maybe even family members—will sell him out to save themselves. His dream of finally commanding global respect by becoming president of the United States and of besting his obsession, Barack Obama, has collapsed before his first year in office is even complete.

If Donald Trump begins to blunder this country into war, with the whip of the prosecutor and the shriek of impeachment at his heels, I think it’s incumbent on the American people to decide that the time has long since come. 8/12/17 http://www.thedailybeast.com/remove-trump-from-office-before-he-removes-us-from-earth

10. David Faris: National Lampoon's presidential vacation

After 48 hours of pressure from GOP elites terrified that America will finally understand that the modern Republican Party is the institutional vehicle of fascism, racism, and white terror, the president glumly appeared before the cameras with a long-overdue and half-hearted denunciation of the KKK and the various cosplaying cowards who overran Charlottesville. No one who had been paying attention to the timeline could possibly have believed a word of it. What he proved, instead, was that he needs to open Waze just to navigate himself to the corner of Right Thing Street and Bare Minimum Road. This is a man whose administration reportedly mulled eliminating white nationalist groups from its Countering Violent Extremism program and froze grants designed to combat racist hate groups, who set up a hotline to report crimes committed by undocumented immigrants but who clearly gives zero tweets about the milieu of impunity he has created for hate groups and white nationalist terrorists. This is a man whose allies prioritized helping mediocre white kids get into college over the galloping menace of neo-Nazis. His entire presidency has been a long, unbearable, white nationalist infomercial.

Wake me up when impeachment proceedings begin. Wake me up when they promise to sit on all legislation until Stephen Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Sebastian Gorka are out of the White House. Wake me up when they denounce the president's immigrant crimes hotline. Wake me up when they stop abetting white nationalist initiatives like Kris Kobach's voter fraud farce. Wake me up when they fund programs to combat white nationalist extremism with the same gusto they support countering radical Islam. Wake me up when a single elected Republican leader recognizes the party's Jim Crow voter suppression laws for what they are. Until then it's just more empty posturing from a party that will be remembered for generations as the worst set of cowards to stain American democracy since Reconstruction.

As for America's doddering Clark Griswold and his New Jersey vacation from hell: You can have all of our credit card miles if you promise to go much, much farther away and never come back. August 15, 2017 http://theweek.com/articles/718299/national-lampoons-presidential-vacation

11. Scott Lemieux: Don't praise the GOP for calling out Trump's appalling Charlottesville comments

The mobilization of white supremacy is not incidental to Trump's rise, but central to it. Remember, he became a major figure in the Republican Party by aggressively promoting the racist falsehood that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and continued to engage in egregious race-baiting throughout the 2016 campaign. There's a reason former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke declared after the Charlottesville rally that "[t]hat's why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he's going to take our country back." The "our" in that sentence is represented by the white nationalist and anti-Semitic groups that staged the hate rally this weekend. Trump's lackluster response to such a rally was just another reminder of the very real particular dangers his naked appeals to white supremacy and xenophobia pose.

Trump's pathetic speech was a bridge too far for some of the Republicans who made a devil's bargain with Trump and have been ignoring his overt racism and corruption in the hope that he could serve as a vehicle to advance their unpopular policy agenda. Multiple prominent Republican senators, including Orrin Hatch (Utah), Cory Gardner (Colo.), Marco Rubio (Fla.), and Ted Cruz (Texas) did what Trump should have done but didn't: They specifically called out the white supremacist hate groups and condemned their destructive ideology.

This is laudable as far as it goes, but it doesn't let them, or the Republican Party, off the hook. The GOP has nurtured and harbored Trump's explicitly racist appeals. And still quieter, less obvious forms of racism run through the party. After all, it was not Trump who wrote the 2013 opiniongutting the Voting Rights Act, therefore paving the way for various voter identification laws and dubious redistricting. That distinction goes to Chief Justice John Roberts, a man who has long been opposed to expanding voting rights.

And Roberts has a lot of company. As Eric Levitz of New York puts it, "[t]here are plenty of Republican lawmakers who campaign with utmost civility, and then push legislation that objectively advances racial inequity." Congressional Republicans have not acted to repair the Voting Rights Act or to guarantee access to the ballot. Instead, Republicans in state after state have enacted vote-suppression measures targeted at minority voters. As the Republican Party moves increasingly further to the right of the typical voter, the measures have only become more desperate. Trump's fondness for voter suppression doesn't make him an outlier — it makes him a typical Republican in 2017, and that is perhaps the scariest thing of all.

Calling out Trump's white supremacy is necessary, and it's good that some Republicans are finally doing it. But actions speak louder than words, and until Republicans start showing the American people, particularly those who aren't white, that they care about their rights and well-being, too, the GOP's condemnations of white supremacy will ring hollow. http://theweek.com/articles/718176/dont-praise-gop-calling-trumps-appalling-charlottesville-comments