1. Richard Wolffe: Trump's America will be saddled with debt – just like his bankrupted hotels

Mick Mulvaney counts the coins that are left in Trump’s budget office and he used to be worried about things like debt. But that was in the olden times, when he was trying to get confirmed for this current job, one year ago.

“Our gross national debt has increased to almost $20tn. That number is so large as to defy description,” he told senators. “I believe, as a matter of principle, that the debt is a problem that must be addressed sooner, rather than later.” 

Mulvaney is so old-fashioned he called Obama’s budget in 2011 “a joke” for adding to the national debt about the same amount as Trump’s tax cuts. “It’s hard to explain how detached from reality this is, to think that the country can spend another $1.6tn when it doesn’t have the means,” he told Politico. 

Nobody but Trump could have imagined that Republicans would vote for a trillion-dollar monster after so many years fighting a religious war against Obama for precisely the same thing. Nobody but Trump could have sold the idea of debt so well to the very people who said they hated it.

This was truly an undeveloped space in American politics, and it took a visionary like Trump to make it real. Let’s hope they all live happily ever after.  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/09/trump-saddle-america-debt-bankrupted-hotels

2. Jonathan Chait: Suddenly Deficits Don’t Matter Again

During the Obama era, Democrats frequently believed, but only rarely uttered aloud in official forums, that the Republican Party was engaged in economic sabotage. Not a coldly conscious plot, exactly. But it seemed just a little too convenient that the party had reversed its fiscal ideology at precisely the time when doing so would damage Democrats and thereby smooth the GOP’s return to power.

Now that Republicans have reversed their position once again, also in a way that happens to redound to their political benefit, the answer seems a little more clear. Republicans have used their control of government to virtually double the budget deficit, which had been hovering around half a trillion dollars per year, and will now likely run well over $1 trillion — during the peak of an economic expansion. There is no economic rationale for this behavior. Their policy is simply to support fiscal contraction under Democratic presidents and fiscal expansion under Republican ones. Cynicism is the only basis to explain their behavior.  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/obamas-gone-so-republicans-stopped-sabotaging-the-economy.html

3. Paul Krugman: Fraudulence of the Fiscal Hawks

There have been many “news analysis” pieces asking why Republicans have changed their views on deficit spending. But let’s be serious: Their views haven’t changed at all. They never really cared about debt and deficits; it was a fraud all along. All that has changed is the fact that a Republican now sits in the White House.

How do we know Republicans were never sincere about the deficit? It was obvious, even at the time, to anyone who looked at their fiscal proposals. These proposals always involved giant tax cuts for the wealthy — funny how that worked — offset by savage cuts in social benefits. Even so, assertions that deficits would go down depended entirely on assuming lots of revenue from closing unspecified loopholes and huge savings from cutting unspecified government programs. In other words, even at the peak of their deficit-hawk posturing, all Republicans really had to offer was redistribution from the poor to the rich.

However, pretending to care about the deficit served several useful political purposes. It was a way to push for cuts in social programs. It was also a way to hobble Obama’s presidency.

And I don’t think it’s unfair to suggest that there was an element of deliberate economic sabotage. After all, Republicans weren’t just vehemently opposed to fiscal stimulus; they were also vehemently opposed to monetary stimulus. Basically, they were against anything that might help the economy on President Obama’s watch.

Now Obama is gone, and suddenly deficits don’t matter.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/opinion/republicans-hawks-markets.html

4. NY Times Editorial: Trump’s Backward View of Immigration

Mr. Trump has said that the family reunification program — which he and other immigration opponents prefer to call “chain migration” — opens the floodgates to “virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives.” In fact, relatives other than spouses, parents and minor children are subject to annual caps and country quotas, so that, today, the backlog is almost four million applicants, most of them facing many years of waiting to get a visa. Mr. Trump would allow no new applicants other than immediate family members, and even these would no longer include parents. Imposing these restrictions and ending the diversity visa lottery would cut in half the number of legal immigrants.

It is hard to gauge how much of what Mr. Trump says is meant as a scare tactic and how much he really will demand. The one notion that runs through all he says or tweets about immigration is that it is a door for criminals and terrorists to enter the United States. Yet data studied by the Cato Institute indicates that diversity-visa holders and illegal immigrants, the groups most maligned by Mr. Trump, are far less prone to crime than native-born Americans.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/opinion/trump-backward-immigration.html

5. Masha Gessen: What Would Trump’s Military Parade Symbolize?

What would an American parade signify? Trump’s understanding seems clear on the surface: he thinks that parades go with the Presidency like gold-leaf furniture goes with wealth. Also, Trump wants it seen that he—and not the generals who are charged with taming him—is the Commander-in-Chief. Plus, his button is bigger than Kim Jong Un’s.

But, demagogue that he is, Trump is also tapping into something deeper: a sense of lost American greatness, and, even more, a sense of a lost American story. In this way, the United States isn’t different from the rest of the Western world, which has suddenly discovered that its post–Second World War story is no longer as convincing as it used to be, and can’t serve as an anchor for its identity. The rise of the right in Europe is a symptom of this phenomenon. Sweden, which in the wake of the war forged an identity as a humanitarian superpower, has seen that story punctured by the meteoric rise of an anti-immigrant right. Germany has seen the unthinkable: the rise of a far-right party that explicitly rejects the idea that Germany must continue to reckon with the ghost of Nazism. And the United States has a President who has no use for stories like “America is a nation of immigrants,” and who is trying to make America great again by ordering a military parade.  https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-would-trumps-military-parade-symbolize

6. Chuck Todd: ‘Like Living Inside a Parody’

It’s like we’re living inside a parody from three years ago – “What would happen if Donald Trump became president? Omarosa would probably work in the West Wing! And then she’d leave to go on Big Brother to dish about Administration secrets! Ha ha!” …Oh, wait. That actually happened on Big Brother Celebrity Edition, airing tonight…

Let’s leave aside the fact that Omarosa made those comments on a show named after George Orwell’s dystopian surveillance state. Folks, we’re not even surprised by this stuff anymore. Just think of all we’ve seen — or endured — in the last 13 months of this presidency. The twitter battles with a rival nuclear power, members of his own party, the Gold Star widow, the Justice Department, mayors, senators, governors, our allies, and many in between…

All of this is the legacy of our country’s first reality TV star president. It is all personal and it is all about the show… it is a hell of a show. One for the ages. But it is no laughing matter. And is it anyway to run a country?  https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/02/08/chuck_todd_trump_presidency
_like_living_inside_a_parody.html 

7. Nicholas Kristof: President Trump, How Is This Man a Danger?

Trump suggests that the aim of his crackdown on immigrants is to “defend Americans” from “savage,” “worst of the worst” intruders who kill Americans or at least are “dangerous criminals.”

What does Trump’s crackdown look like in real life? In Lawrence, Kan., the other day, immigration agents handcuffed a beloved chemistry professor as he was leaving his home to drive his daughter to school. Then they warned his crying wife and children, ages 7 to 14, that they could be arrested if they tried to hug him goodbye, and drove off with him — leaving a shattered family behind.

“I’m a normal 12-year-old with a dad like everybody else’s dad,” the daughter he was about to drive that morning, Naheen Jamal, told me. “I don’t understand why this is happening.”

Her dad, Syed A. Jamal, 55, had been in America for 30 years, having arrived legally from Bangladesh as a student, before overstaying his visa. He loved Kansas and settled in Lawrence, teaching at local colleges and volunteering at local schools — even running for the school board. He coached students in science and sports.

But President Trump, you say that these people are “criminals, drug dealers, rapists” and that we must be protected from them.

Jamal, who seems just about the least dangerous person in America, is now in jail pending deportation to Bangladesh. A court intervened with a temporary stay as the government was trying to rush him out of the country.

While this arrest has done nothing to make anyone safer, it is devastating for three American citizens in particular — his children. Their mom, Angela, also of Bangladeshi origin, donated a kidney last year, and Jamal is the only source of family income.

If Jamal is indeed deported, his family will be upended. Randy Capps of the Migration Policy Institute estimates that 25,000 people deported in 2016 have children who are American citizens.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/opinion/sunday/syed-jamal-ice-deportation.html

8. David Remnick: A Reckoning with Women Awaits Trump

Donald Trump is the least mysterious figure in the history of the American Presidency. His infantile character, duplicity, cold-heartedness, and self-dealing greed are evident not merely to the majority of the poll-answering electorate but, sooner or later, to those who make the decision to work at his side. This is manifest even in Trump’s favored medium, reality television. Recently, fans of “Celebrity Big Brother” witnessed Omarosa Manigault-Newman, the unforgettably forgettable former White House aide in charge of nothing at all, tearfully confessing her global despair. “It’s not going to be O.K.,” she said.

No kidding. Sooner or later, Trump’s satraps and lieutenants, present and former, come to betray a vivid sense of just how imperilled and imperilling this Presidency is. In their sotto-voce remarks to the White House press, these aides seem to compete in their synonyms for the President’s modesty of intelligence (“moron,” “idiot,” “fool”); his colossal narcissism; his lack of human empathy. They admit to reporters how little he studies the basics of domestic policy and national security; how partial he is to autocrats like himself; how indifferent he is to allies. They are shocked, they proclaim, absolutely shocked. In the past few days, it has been Trump’s misogyny, his heedless attitude toward women and issues of harassment and abuse, that has shocked them most. And those who know him best recognize the political consequences ahead.  https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/a-reckoning-with-women-awaits-trump

9. Mimi Kramer: Trump Sees Himself in Every Man Accused

What Trump can’t control — in his narcissism and his over-identification with the plight of the abuser — are his own ethics. Four or five times, it sounded as though Trump was going to say the right thing. “I found out about it recently,” he said, without specifying what “it” was, “and I was surprised by it …”— here, we expected the next statement to be something about how domestic abuse can’t be tolerated. But instead Trump repeated, “But we certainly wish him well.” He went on, “It’s a …” — he was using the emphatic (“ā”) pronunciation of the indefinite article, so we expected a strong utterance (It’s a terrible, terrible thing … or It’s a big, big problem …). But instead we got: “It’s obviously a tough time for him,” and “We hope he has a wonderful career.”

What we never got but kept expecting to hear were statements like “… but domestic abuse is never okay.” Or: “… but the White House takes allegations of violence against women seriously.” Trump couldn’t even manage to voice one of those routine, pro forma constructs. For a quarter of a century, Trump has been telling us that all the men he knows who abuse women are “good” people and/or “innocent,” by which he means not that he doesn’t believe that his friends and acquaintances abuse women. He means that he doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with it. Maybe it’s time we started believing him.  https://www.thecut.com/2018/02/trump-defends-rob-porter-domestic-abusers.html

10. Jonathan Chait: Republicans Look for Somebody to Blame for Their Deficit Mess. Guess Who They Found.

“President Trump is remaking the Republican economic playbook in his own image,” reports the Washington Post, “abandoning ideological consistency in favor of a debt-busting strategy that will upend how Washington taxes and spends trillions of dollars each year.” The story is an echo of the Republican Party’s own response to the evident failure of its fiscal program, which is doubling the budget deficit during peace and prosperity. The attempts to suggest Trump betrayed some previously healthy ideal of budgetary rectitude — remaking, abandoning — combined with the implication that it somehow grows out of his personality — his own image — represent the party’s utterly predictable efforts to explain away its already-collapsing promises.

Trump has not abandoned Republican economic policy. He has carried it out faithfully. The party’s attempts to pin its collapse on his personal shortcomings of willpower are a completely predictable part of how that policy takes shape.

Blaming the president’s idiosyncratic personality traits is a way for conservatives to avoid confronting the complete unworkability of their fiscal model. In reality, Trump did not remake the Republican economic playbook in his own image. Republicans remade the Trump economic playbook in theirs.  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/republicans-find-someone-to-blame-for-deficit-mess.html

11. Jim Tankersley: Republicans Have Forgotten They Hate Deficits

In a year of controlling power in Washington, President Trump and Republicans in Congress have run up federal spending, approved deficit-swelling tax cuts and presided over a marked increase in ‘policy uncertainty’ in the economy. They still talk about the importance of fiscal discipline, but they have yet to enforce it.

The $4.4 trillion budget Mr. Trump released on Monday spends as much over 10 years as any budget offered by President Obama, whose policies Republicans blamed for ballooning the size of the federal government and hobbling the economy. It does not attempt to achieve balance at the end of that time, despite optimistic economic growth projections that far exceed what most economists say is possible.

Instead, it projects that deficits will grow $7 trillion over the next decade as the United States continues borrowing huge sums of money — a number that could double if the administration turns out to be overestimating economic growth and if the $3 trillion in spending cuts the White House has floated do not materialize in Congress. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/us/politics/republicans-have-forgotten-they-hate-deficits.html

12. David Brooks: The End of the Two-Party System?

Back in the 1990s, there was an unconscious abundance mind-set. Democratic capitalism provides the bounty. Prejudice gradually fades away. Growth and dynamism are our friends. The abundance mind-set is confident in the future, welcoming toward others. It sees win-win situations everywhere.

Today, after the financial crisis, the shrinking of the middle class, the partisan warfare, a scarcity mind-set is dominant: Resources are limited. The world is dangerous. Group conflict is inevitable. It’s us versus them. If they win, we’re ruined, therefore, let’s stick with our tribe. The ends justify the means.

The underlying conditions of scarcity are only going to get worse. Moreover, the warrior mentality builds on itself. As the right pulverizes the left, the left feels the need to pulverize back, and on and on. This is a generational challenge. Trump will be succeeded by some other warrior.

Eventually, conservatives will realize: If we want to preserve conservatism, we can’t be in the same party as the clan warriors. Liberals will realize: If we want to preserve liberalism, we can’t be in the same party as the clan warriors.

Eventually, those who cherish the democratic way of life will realize they have to make a much more radical break than any they ever imagined. When this realization dawns the realignment begins. Even with all the structural barriers, we could end up with a European-style multiparty system.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/12/opinion/trump-republicans-scarcity.html