1. Ben Smithjan: I’m Proud We Published the Trump-Russia Dossier

Exactly one year ago BuzzFeed published what’s now known simply as “the dossier”: a set of reports put together by a former British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele during the 2016 presidential campaign. The 35-page dossier suggested that the Russian government had both compromised and colluded with President-elect Donald Trump.

Our choice to publish the dossier was greeted by outrage from two sources. Journalistic traditionalists didn’t like the idea of sharing an unfiltered, unverified document with the public, whatever the caveats and context. NBC’s Chuck Todd told me on air, “You just published fake news.” Mr. Trump agreed. He described CNN’s reporting on the dossier as “fake news” and called BuzzFeed a “failing pile of garbage.”

But a year of government inquiries and blockbuster journalism has made clear that the dossier is unquestionably real news. That’s a fact that has been tacitly acknowledged even by those who opposed our decision to publish. It has helped journalists explain to their audience the investigation into Russian influence on the 2016 election. And Mr. Trump and his allies have seized on the dossier in their efforts to discredit the special counsel leading the investigation, Robert Mueller.

Without the dossier, Americans would have found it difficult to understand the actions of their elected representatives and government officials. Their posture toward Mr. Trump was, we now know even more comprehensively than we did in January 2017, shaped by Mr. Steele’s report. The Russia investigation, meanwhile, didn’t turn out to be some minor side story but instead the central challenge to Mr. Trump’s presidency.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/opinion/im-proud-we-published-the-trump-russia-dossier.html

2. Scott Lemieux: Why Republican leaders will stand by Trump no matter what

Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff's gossipy tell-all about the inner workings of the Trump administration, has created a media firestorm. Predictably, President Trump's reaction to the book and the attention it received has demonstrated its apparent central theme: that Trump is temperamentally and intellectually unfit for the immensely powerful office he holds. But the book can also help to explain the paradox at the heart of contemporary politics: The more evidence of Trump's unfitness accumulates, the more powerful Republicans are circling the wagons in his defense.

Trump's reaction to Fire and Fury provides a perfect illustration of his character, showing his authoritarian instincts, impulsiveness, disloyalty, and narcissism. He threatened to sue to stop publication of the book, the most dangerous (and flagrantly unconstitutional) form of government censorship. He asserted that when former top strategist Stephen Bannon "was fired, he lost his mind." In an instantly legendary and self-refuting series of tweets, he claimed that "my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart" and that he was "a very stable genius." And at an odd Saturday press conference, he reiterated his wish that the United States had libel laws that prevented books critical of him from being published, repeated his ridiculous argument that Mexico would pay for a wall along the American border, and dismissed claims that his campaign colluded with Russia by quipping: "I do things proper."

Given that Trump's self-evident unfitness for office also comes with an unprecedented level of corruption, you might think that Congress would be using its oversight powers to check him. But the opposite is happening. Not only are Republican legislators refusing to investigate or meaningfully constrain Trump, they're turning the legal apparatus of the state against perceived enemies like Christopher Steele (author of the infamous intelligence dossier about Trump) and, of course, Hillary Clinton.  http://theweek.com/articles/747256/why-republican-leaders-stand-by-trump-no-matter-what

3. Charles M. Blow: ‘Like, Really Smart’

This is the problem we face: We have a person occupying the presidency who is impetuous, fragile, hostile, irrational, intentionally uninformed, information-averse and semiliterate.

The question we have to put to the elected officials protecting this president, and indeed to all those being paid a taxpayer-funded salary and then concealing, distorting or denying the truth to make this man look competent, is: Don’t you have an obligation, either moral, ethical, patriotic or otherwise, to level with America that you, too, are concerned by Trump’s erratic behavior?

At the very least, don’t the members of the House and Senate, who swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution, have an obligation to rebuke this president for his attacks on the press and free speech, both protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution?

These elected officials in particular are not only obsequiously placating a man nursing a god complex, they are displaying a staggering lack of national fealty.

You can’t say that you love America and not take a stand to defend it from harm.

These politicians are taking the politically expedient track for political gain or political survival. They would rather defend a compromised Republican president than have to live in the wake of a deposed one. They would like to try to manage the damage Trump may do, rather than prevent that damage from occurring.

And in so doing, they are moving dangerously close to the day when being a loyal Trump Republican could be seen as being an unpatriotic American.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/07/opinion/trump-stable-genius-smart.html

4. Andrew Sullivan: Trump’s First Year Has Been a Disaster. Here’s Why I Have Hope.

Michael Wolff’s new book confirms what we already knew: that the White House is a smoldering crater of chaos and dysfunction. Wolff claims that every single White House source he talked to believes Trump is “incapable of functioning in his job.” We have heard these claims about presidents before — but usually from the opposition, not from the White House itself, let alone unanimously. But Wolff’s piece in The Hollywood Reporter yesterday also confirmed what is obvious about Trump’s fast-eroding mental health: “Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he’d repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes.” And: “At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends.” This addled, lazy, and belligerent man-child is nonetheless engaged in a war of insults and threats against a nuclear-armed dictatorship, with the capacity to kill millions. No head of any nuclear-armed country has ever said in public what Trump has now repeatedly broadcast to the world.

Should this tempt us toward optimism? I’d say not. Just because a drunk driver hasn’t crashed for a quarter of his journey home carries no assurance that catastrophe isn’t still eminently possible. But it seems possible, after a year of this insanity, to entertain some measure of hope that it will some day be over, and the country and the world not irrevocably damaged in the process. There may even be hope that the confirmation of everyone’s darkest fears about this president’s functionality may at some point break through, and perhaps after a drubbing in the fall elections, the GOP might even begin to reassess its reckless gamble. No, I’m not optimistic about this, but hope flickers in the distance. Reality at some point could finally intrude upon the reality show.  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/trumps-first-year-was-a-disaster-heres-why-i-have-hope.html

5. Jonathan Chait: Trump Has Created Dangers We Haven’t Even Imagined Yet

During Trump’s year in office, a great many terrifying things have happened. But the most terrifying are the things that have not happened, yet. Most of them probably never will. But one nuclear war can ruin your whole day, and the same holds true of a wide array of low-probability disasters that have all grown less improbable under Trump.

Throughout Trump’s presidency, Michael Wolff observes, he has been “singularly focused on his own needs for instant gratification, be that a hamburger, a segment on Fox & Friends or an Oval Office photo opp.” This is not only a matter of cognitive ability. A monomaniacal obsession with the short term has characterized Trump’s entire career. He does not think strategically. He lives for the moment. Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal that he prefers to keep his workday unstructured, because “you can’t be imaginative or entrepreneurial if you’ve got too much structure. I prefer to work each day and just see what develops.” He makes decisions impulsively, has leveraged his assets precariously — “I’m the king of debt,” he bragged — and went into bankruptcy six times. He specialized in unethical maneuvers that enabled him to take short-term profits while burning his partners — like tunneling money out of his failing casinos, defrauding customers, or refusing to pay contractors the agreed-upon price.

Why, besides ethics, haven’t more business owners tried Trump’s patented method of ripping people off? Because over the long run it poisons your ability to find willing partners. Indeed, mainstream banks eventually refused to deal with Trump, which is what led to his unusual dependence on Russia and other shady foreign sources for capital. In many ways, his presidency has followed the arc of his business career — short-term leverage plays that benefit Trump and his inner circle before his counter-parties wise up.  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/trump-has-created-dangers-we-havent-even-imagined-yet.html

6. James Witcover: GOP tax bill is a Trojan horse

The Republicans jammed their little-explained and little-understood bill through Congress with not a semblance of bipartisanship in its authorship or public sausage-making. Republican advocates confessed to not having read all or even much of the voluminous product that will critically touch the lives of all Americans.

As Mr. Trump leads his party with bravado, with his transparent need for public adulation distorting reality, American politics lurches from one uncertainty to another. After the crushing Republican defeat in the special Senate race in Alabama, in which Mr. Trump invested much in the loser, he now turns to claims of broad benefits and tax cuts for working stiffs, although they are microscopic compared the tax breaks headed to already wealthy individual and corporate businessmen like himself.

As the end of Mr. Trump's first year in office approaches, he promises that the major tax rate reduction for the highest corporate interests will lead to great job growth — the old Republican establishment trickle-down litany.

The impact on voters of his huge tax cuts is yet to be determined. And the jury is still out on that broader question of presidential qualification, which drives the Justice Department and congressional investigations threatening and challenging Donald Trump's incumbency.  http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-op-0102-witcover-tax-bill-20171228-story.html

7. Paul Waldman: Trump's war on Justice

The provenance of the FBI investigation explodes the claim some on the right — including Trump himself — had been making before now, that the entire investigation is illegitimate because it supposedly originated with the opposition research "dossier" assembled by a former British intelligence agent. "FBI TAINTED," Trump recently tweeted after getting riled up by a segment about the dossier on Fox & Friends. "And they used this Crooked Hillary pile of garbage as the basis for going after the Trump Campaign!"

Well no, they didn't — not to mention the fact that they weren't "going after the Trump Campaign," they were investigating whether a hostile foreign power was meddling in an American presidential election. But I suppose that if you think that any investigation into that question is proof of anti-Trump bias, you'd be willing to countenance all manner of attacks on federal law enforcement.

I'm sure there are more than a few elected Republicans who are deeply uneasy with the fact that so many of their ideological compatriots are vilifying the FBI and the Justice Department. If you're one of them, and you don't want to be one of those screaming for a "purge" of those in government who are insufficiently loyal to Trump (and yes, one congressman actually used that word), up until now it hasn't been too hard to dodge questions on the scandal. You could just say that we should let the investigation run its course and then address the findings, whatever they turn out to be.

But you can only say that for so long. With each new revelation that implicates the campaign and perhaps Trump himself, there will be an intense reaction from Trump's defenders to vilify the investigators. Every Republican will have to decide how far they're willing to go to stand by an increasingly desperate president. As they make that decision, they'll reveal a great deal about themselves.  http://theweek.com/articles/746157/trumps-war-justice

8.  Evan Osnos: Donald Trump and North Korea: Big Button, Small President

Responding to Kim Jong Un’s speech from a day earlier—when the North Korean leader said the U.S. is “within the range of our nuclear strike and a nuclear button is always on the desk of my office”—Trump tweeted, “Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

For seventy years, North Korea has baited America with threats of mayhem, and, for seventy years, American Presidents, with rare exceptions, understood that squabbling with a pariah state whose economy is smaller than that of Rhode Island would diminish their own stature and America’s standing. Trump, by contrast, summoned the world’s attention and then sawed himself off at the knees.

After a year of the President’s casual threats of mayhem, of his belittling of American alliances, of claims so bizarre that a man shouting them on a public bus would get a wide berth, the response from Americans generally ranges from disbelief to despair to numbness. They are moments that defy the usual analysis, other than psychoanalysis.

For the moment, Trump’s and Kim’s bloviations about nuclear buttons on their desks remain in the realm of schoolyard fantasy. (Neither arsenal actually functions via desk button, though this is thin reassurance.) But the occasion is an awful reminder that, between them, they share less than eight years of experience in public office—and seven of them are on Kim’s side.  https://www.newyorker.com/sections/news/donald-trump-and-north-korea-big-button-small-president

9. Neal F. Lane and Michael Riordanjan: Trump’s Disdain for Science

Sound science advice was conspicuously absent from the president’s revised budget for the fiscal year 2018, which features draconian cuts at the E.P.A., the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies — especially those sponsoring climate-change research. Congress has largely refused to go along with the drastic cuts, but significant reductions will almost inevitably occur this year.

The assaults by Mr. Trump and his administration on American science and technology might have been avoided, or at least tempered, had the president already named, and the Senate confirmed, a distinguished scientist as his science adviser — especially if that individual had direct presidential access.

Nowhere is this need for advice more crucial than in the arena of nuclear weaponry. In fact, most presidential science advisers have been physicists, who can knowledgeably address the technologically sophisticated questions that always arise in this arena. For instance, in the case of the 2015 international nuclear agreement with Iran, President Obama benefited from the trusted advice of Dr. Holdren and his energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, an M.I.T. nuclear physicist, both experts on the science, technology and policy of nonproliferation. It’s unclear whose advice Mr. Trump relied on when he refused last year to certify Iran’s compliance with that deal. This is an exceedingly dangerous situation, particularly in view of the looming threat of a nuclear confrontation with North Korea.

No president in recent history has needed a capable science adviser more while apparently wanting one less. But given Mr. Trump’s obvious disdain for science — and for evidence in general — it will be difficult at this point, if not impossible, to find an accomplished, reputable scientist who would agree to work with him.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/opinion/trump-disdain-science.html

10. Jonathan Chait: Republicans Turn on Bannon for Telling the Truth About Trump

In his short career as a power within the Republican Party, Steve Bannon committed a litany of crimes and mistakes. He brought white supremacists and Nazis into mainstream party politics; he whipped up discontent against loyal Trump allies in Congress on behalf of insurgents who couldn’t win (and who also happened to be theocratic child-molesters). But Bannon has finally done something truly unforgivable: He told the truth about Donald Trump.

Bannon’s cooperation with Michael Wolff’s dishy account, which paints the president as a man-child and his son as treasonous, has prompted his swift excommunication. Bannon’s funders have pulled the plug on his rogue pseudo-populist operation and even his lavish security detail. Trump has given him a derisive nickname. Mitch McConnell, Bannon’s bête noire, is openly celebrating the demise of his adversary. Trump had long since abandoned his “nationalist” agenda and given himself over to standard Republican policy.

Bannon’s content-free insurgency on Trump’s behalf was the last vestige of conflict between the party and the president. Having removed the most pronounced irritant in their relationship, the president and the party apparatus have drawn more tightly together than ever before. And so the publication of a book detailing that nearly everybody who works for Trump considers him utterly unfit for office has had the perverse outcome of solidifying party support for that very president.  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/republicans-turn-on-bannon-for-telling-the-truth-about-trump.html

11. Matthew Gertz: I’ve Studied the Trump-Fox Feedback Loop for Months. It’s Crazier Than You Think.

It’s no secret, of course, that the president likes to tweet about what he sees on TV. Thanks to diligent reporting from the White House beat, we know Trump often watches several hours of cable news each day via the “Super TiVo” he had installed at the White House. And journalists at CNN, the Washington Post, New York magazine, among others, have compiled lists of Trump tweets they believe were inspired by Fox.

But here’s what is shocking: After comparing the president’s tweets with Fox's coverage every day since October, I can tell you that the Fox-Trump feedback loop is happening far more often than you think. There is no strategy to Trump’s Twitter feed; he is not trying to distract the media. Heis being distracted. He darts with quark-like speed from topic to topic in his tweets because that’s how cable news works.

Here’s what’s also shocking: A man with unparalleled access to the world’s most powerful information-gathering machine, with an intelligence budget estimated at $73 billion last year, prefers to rely on conservative cable news hosts to understand current events.  https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/05/trump-media-feedback-loop-216248

12. The Increasing Unfitness of Donald Trump

A new book by Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, amplifies, in lurid anecdote and quotation, what we have been learning elsewhere every day for the past year: Trump believed that he would lose the election, but would multiply his fame, his fortune, and his standing in American life. To near-universal shock, however, he won. And the consequences followed. Trump has no comprehension of policy and cares about it less. He surrounds himself with aides who are either wildly incompetent or utterly defeated in their attempts to domesticate the mulish and bizarre object of their attention. There are no lingering illusions about the President’s capacities: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump ‘a fucking moron’ and spared us a denial. Wolff’s book, which leans heavily on interviews with Steve Bannon, makes it plain that pretty much everyone in the President’s circle agrees that he is, in terms of character and intellect, fantastically limited. There is no loyalty or deliberation in the White House, only a savage ‘Lord of the Flies’ sort of chaos. Each day is at once preposterous, poisonous, and dangerous.”

“In the meantime, there is little doubt about who Donald Trump is, the harm he has done already, and the greater harm he threatens. He is unfit to hold any public office, much less the highest in the land. This is not merely an orthodoxy of the opposition; his panicked courtiers have been leaking word of it from his first weeks in office. The President of the United States has become a leading security threat to the United States.  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/15/the-increasing-unfitness-of-donald-trump

13. David Frum: Donald Trump Goes Full Fredo

In 2016, there were voters who genuinely, in good faith, believed that Donald Trump was a capable business leader, moderate on social issues, who cared about the troubles of working class white America—and would do something to help. There may well still be some people who believe this—but nowhere near enough to sustain a presidency.

What sustains Trump now is the support of people who know what he is, but back him anyway. Republican political elites who know him for what he is, but who back him because they believe they can control and use him; conservative media elites who sense what he is, but who delight in the cultural wars he provokes; rank-and-file conservatives who care more about their grievances and hatreds than the governance of the country.

Michael Wolff has done a crucial service, showing more intimately than any reporter yet the true nature of the man at the center of the American system. But without the complicity of other power-holders, Trump would drop from his central position like a tooth from a rotten gum. What we need to do now is widen the camera angle beyond Fredo Trump to the hard-faced men and women over his shoulders. Those are the people who put Trump where he is, and keep him there, corrupting the institutions of American democracy and troubling the peace and security of the world.  https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/donald-trump-goes-full-fredo/549875/