1. Jeffrey Toobin: Donald Trump and the Craven Firing of Andrew McCabe

If you wanted to tell the story of an entire Presidency in a single tweet, you could try the one that President Trump posted after Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the F.B.I., on Friday night.

Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI - A great day for Democracy. Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy. He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!

Every sentence is a lie. Every sentence violates norms established by Presidents of both parties. Every sentence displays the pettiness and the vindictiveness of a man unsuited to the job he holds.

Andrew McCabe, who turned fifty on Sunday, will be fine as he moves to the next stop in his career. The demeaning and unfair act that ended his law-enforcement career will be seen, properly, as a badge of honor. Still, this is far from a great day for the men and women of the F.B.I., who now know that they serve at the sufferance of unethical men who think that telling the truth amounts to “sanctimony.”  https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/donald-trump-and-the-craven-firing-of-andrew-mccabe

2. Chris Hayes: What ‘Law and Order’ Means to Trump

Donald Trump is not subtle. While normal political language functions through implication and indirection, Mr. Trump luxuriates in saying the quiet part loud. But in doing so, Mr. Trump exposes what drives the politics of the movement he commands. That is most evident in the way he talks about crime and punishment.

A political movement that rails against “immigrant crime” while defending alleged abusers and child molesters is one that has stopped pretending to have any universalist aspirations. The president’s moral framework springs from an American tradition of cultivating fear and contempt among its white citizens against immigrants, indigenous people and people of color, who are placed on the other side of “the law.” It’s a practice that has taken on new strength at a time when many white people fear they may be outnumbered, outvoted and out of time.

This is the opposite of what we like to tell ourselves is the traditional American civic creed: one symbolized by a blindfolded Lady Justice who applies the law without fear or favor to whoever may come before her. It is one of Mr. Trump’s most insidious victories that he has given his supporters permission to drop any pretense of insisting that their actions and views should conform to this principle.

If all that matters when it comes to “law and order” is who is a friend and who is an enemy, and if friends are white and enemies are black or Latino or in the wrong party, then the rhetoric around crime and punishment stops being about justice and is merely about power and corruption.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/opinion/sunday/chris-hayes-trump-law-order.html

3. Matt Bai: The Artifice of the Deal

Remember that time, way back about two weeks ago, when President Trump berated leaders of his own party, in front of a room full of cameras, for being afraid of the NRA, and he vowed to pass a bipartisan bill that would make it harder for kids to get assault rifles?

Yeah, well, in case you missed the latest — which wouldn’t have been hard, since the one-day story was instantly eclipsed by a Cabinet shakeup and a special election — that whole thing went away Monday with a mumbled “never mind” from the White House.

We’re still letting this president perform for the cameras as if he were actually planning to govern, without giving nearly as much attention to what happens on the issue once the cameras are gone. We’re still allowing ourselves to be carried along by one dramatic turn after another, because Trump knows instinctively that if he keeps us moving today, we won’t have time to dwell on whatever he promised yesterday.

Trump was dead right about our politics over the years — too much of it became a tired kind of stagecraft. But that kind of stagecraft was almost always designed to sell an agenda.

And that’s the distinction between a serious politician and a con artist. The latter only sells himself.  https://www.yahoo.com/news/the-artifice-of-the-deal-090054747.html

4. Rhonda Garelick: Stormy Daniels Is the Anti-Trump He’s finally met his match.

Behold: Out from the chaos, lies, secrets, and misdirection of the Trump administration has emerged a figure of bracing honesty, clarity of purpose, even purity: Stormy Daniels — perhaps the one adversary who could take down this presidency.

If Trump thought Daniels would just ride along prettily until he was done with her, and then retreat into silence, Trump misjudged the situation. Daniels, a champion equestrian, does not enjoy being a passive passenger. “I was fine with saying nothing. But I am not fine with being bullied into lying, or being bullied at all,” she told Rolling Stone. And so, Stormy defiantly refused to remain the silent commodity or secret indulgence of a rich man. In effect, she jumped out of that Cadillac golf cart. What’s more, Daniels would never have been one to be muzzled about a sexual encounter. Sex for her is not a shameful secret.

Stormy Daniels won’t allow herself to be turned into a secret, an object, a lying toady, or a golf joke. In Daniels, Trump has more than met his match. Like him, she wields the power of theater, but unlike him, she seems to have nothing to hide. In her salty talk (she told In Touch magazine she could easily describe Trump’s “junk”), her wit, her business sense, and most of all her refusal to be quiet and go away, there’s a brash feminism to Daniels. She resists even the high-minded distaste of the many mainstream journalists who insist that her story is secondary to matters of campaign finance law or legal agreements. (We’ll see what Anderson Cooper does with her soon.)

Daniels knows that she’s the story. That everyone is interested in her and all the dirty details, whether they admit it or not. She shares that kind of assured narcissism and feel for the carnivalesque with Trump. And this is why Daniels may be the only gladiator who has a chance right now in the ring with him.

Un-hushable, un-secret, and unashamed, Stormy Daniels — gloriously authentic for all her inauthenticity — may yet be the ray of sunlight we need, the one who exposes enough of Trump’s iniquity for the tide to turn. An antidote. The anti-Trump.  https://www.thecut.com/2018/03/stormy-daniels-is-the-antidonald-trump.html

5. Paul Waldman: 'You're looking handsome, Larry': How the reality TV president found the perfect idiot to be his chief economic adviser

In Larry Kudlow, Trump has really outdone himself. The man he's replacing, Gary Cohn, wasn't a trained economist, but at least Cohn didn't have such a comprehensive record of public idiocy. Do you think I exaggerate? Let's take a little tour around Kudlow's economic musings.

A fervent supply-sider, Kudlow never wavers from the conviction that not only is there no ill that cannot be fixed by a healthy tax cut for corporations and the wealthy, as long as you stick to that plan then nothing can go wrong. "There is no recession coming," he declared in December 2007. "The Bush boom is alive and well." We remember what happened right after, but by the next July, with the world plunging into what would come to be known as the Great Recession, Kudlow was convinced that people didn't understand just how great the economy was doing. "We are in a mental recession, not an actual recession," he insisted.

Everyone can be wrong now and then, but few people are wrong as often as Kudlow. "There is no question," he wrote in 1993, "that President Clinton's across-the-board tax increases ... will throw a wet blanket over the recovery and depress the economy's long-run potential to grow." When a genuine boom ensued, Kudlow knew exactly what had occurred. "I've always believed the 1990s were Ronald Reagan's third term," he wrote later.

Larry Kudlow certainly knows how to do that, and he'll make a perfect addition to the team. "I'm really at a point," Trump said not long before offering Kudlow the job, "where we're getting very close to having the Cabinet and other things that I want." You bet he is.  http://theweek.com/articles/760937/youre-looking-handsome-larry-how-reality-tv-president-found-perfect-idiot-chief-economic-adviser

6. David Faris: Pennsylvania's special election is an urgent warning sign for the GOP

The results of Tuesday's Pennsylvania special election should be an unbearably loud fire alarm for national Republicans about the state of public dissatisfaction with their party. If they aren't covering their ears and sprinting for the exits, they are making a fatal error.

Democrats should be elated. If Republicans aren't safe in PA-18, they aren't safe anywhere. Trump carried Pennsylvania's 18th district by 19.6 points, and last night's showing was a shocking 20-point swing away from the 2016 results. Republican turnout collapsed. If you take last night's results literally and seriously, they could put more than 120 Republican seats in play in November. While many of those districts will have strong, popular incumbents and other factors that will make them far out of reach for Democrats, Lamb's strong showing must be terrifying for Republican strategists. Even 10 or 20 additional winnable districts for the Democrats could have a transformative effect on their chances of taking over the House.

PA-18 isn't some strange Obama-Trump situation either, where a formerly competitive district is reverting to a pre-2016 status quo. Pennsylvania's 18th went deep red during the Bush administration and has been a layup for the national party ever since. While he wasn't a great candidate, Saccone was scandal-free, had aligned himself closely with the Trump administration's positions, boasted the full (if panicked) support of the national party, and was rewarded with his own personal rally headlined by the president himself over the weekend. If that's not enough to put an overwhelmingly red district away for the GOP, there is really no salvaging Paul Ryan's sordid majority. Sure, Saccone's fundraising was mediocre, but it might be time for the national GOP to wonder whether that was the candidate's fault or Trump's.  http://theweek.com/articles/760370/pennsylvanias-special-election-urgent-warning-sign-gop

7. Matthew Walther: President Trump's exuberant humiliation of Rex

Trump's administration is haunted by the ghost of Stephen Bannon. The spirit cannot be exorcised. What was conceived in chaos, dedicated to no principle save that of vindictiveness and intrigue for their own sakes, cannot be governed by any maxims of prudence or moderation. Cooler heads, assuming they can still be found, will never prevail. Bannon's departure last summer, as he seems himself to have recognized, was an irrelevance. The White House was his before the inauguration and will remain so until Trump's successor succeeds to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

This, rather than negligence or incompetence, explains why Tillerson learned of his firing from a tweet. It was not, as some have called it, an "unceremonious" dismissal. The president's tweet was a carefully staged, maximally evocative gesture of theatrical cruelty. It was meant to humiliate, and in this aim it seems very much to have succeeded. Meanwhile it will have no significant political consequences. It's a curious thing that on virtually every issue about which Tillerson is said to disagree with the president, with the possible exception of the decision to convene a summit with the leadership of North Korea, the latter enjoys the full support of the Republican establishment, including those who opposed his candidacy.

Trump's long campaign for the presidency was an unceasing exercise in self-indulgent viciousness. Why would we expect his presidency, conducted via Twitter from the seraglios of Mar-a-Lago in between bites of fast-food hamburgers, to be different?  http://theweek.com/articles/760651/president-trumps-exuberant-humiliation-rex-tillerson

8. Lili Loofbourow: Stormy Daniels is crushing President Trump at his own game

The entire Trump playbook — imply that an enemy's motives are shameful, dishonest, and not what they claim — falls apart when they have no interest in seeming better than they are. Daniels is open about the fact that her motive is money. Just as Trump has always been. He's every bit as flummoxed by her shamelessness as others are by his. Rumors that Trump's attorney Michael Cohen might try to quash Daniels' upcoming interview with 60 Minutes smack of desperation (one is reminded, in fact, of Trump's opponents flailing in the primaries).

If shamelessness is Trump's weapon of choice, it's also his Achilles heel. Stormy Daniels won't let this story drop, she's smart enough to hire great lawyers, and she's set up a legal conundrum that lands the president in a world of trouble no matter how he responds.

The trouble with Trump's antics is that they only work if his is the only game in town. It's easy to imagine Stormy Daniels rolling her eyes at the amateurishness of his act. When it comes to America's rogues' gallery, the porn star will always trump the reality star.

That might deliver poetic justice, or even, if this suit works, the real thing.  http://theweek.com/articles/760471/stormy-daniels-crushing-president-trump-game

9. Paul Krugman: Voters May Be Wising Up

There’s no mystery about the Republican agenda. For at least the past 40 years, the G.O.P.’s central policy goal has been upward redistribution of income: lower taxes for the wealthy, big cuts in programs that help the poor and the middle class. We’ve seen that agenda at work in the policies of every Republican president from Reagan to Trump, every budget proposal from party stars like Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House.

This policy agenda is, however, deeply unpopular. Only small minorities of voters favor tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations; even smaller minorities favor cuts in major social programs. So how does the G.O.P. stay politically competitive? The answer is that the party has mastered the tactics of bait and switch: pretending to stand for one thing, then doing something quite different in office.

But if special elections in the Trump era are any indication, voters are wising up. Rick Saccone, the Republican candidate in a deep-red Pennsylvania congressional district that Trump won by almost 20 points, tried not one, not two, but three different bait-and-switch strategies. And on Tuesday he still seems to have suffered a hair-thin defeat.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/opinion/pennsylvania-election-voters.html

10. Damon Linker: The last, dying gasp of Republican America

The partisan gerrymandering is impossible to justify as anything other than an attempt by Republicans to rig the system in their own favor. And that's how the GOP may well have set up the conditions of its own undoing.

If Republicans wanted to maximize the chance of getting away with their power grab, they would govern with humility and restraint, seeking compromise and conciliation whenever possible, realizing that the party's raw political strength lacks a firm foundation in public opinion. Instead, the president and his party have actively antagonized Democratic voters from day one, pushing a hard-right agenda, attempting to pass it without any votes from the other side of the aisle, issuing sweeping executive orders, and making an endless series of public statements that seem intended to keep liberals and progressives in a constant state of fury against the president and his party.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that in a country where the Republican presidential nominee has managed to prevail in the popular vote just oncesince 1988 and the sitting president appears permanently stuck below 42 percent approval, his party has decided to embrace flagrant cheating. But that doesn't mean that the voters are going to accept it indefinitely. A tidal wave is coming. When it arrives next November, Republicans may find they've lost the last advantage they had in their effort to forestall electoral reality.

The GOP has become a minority party. And sooner or later, minority parties lose.  http://theweek.com/articles/761221/last-dying-gasp-republican-america

11. Jacob Heilbrunn: No, Really, This Is Normal. Did You Forget Bush-Cheney?

Trump appears to be embarking upon a restoration of former Vice President Dick Cheney’s hard-line doctrines, which George W. Bush dutifully mouthed. It is no accident that everyone from William Kristol to the Wall Street Journal editorial page is making approving noises about Trump’s new picks: “Mr. Pompeo has the advantage,” the Journal noted on March 14, “of sharing Mr. Trump’s more hawkish instincts on Iran and North Korea in particular.” Far from representing an aberration, Trump represents the logical culmination of the longstanding Republican tradition of foreign policy unilateralism.

During the Bush administration, there was an alliance between the neocons, who espoused the promotion of democracy by regime change, and outright nationalists such as Cheney and Bolton, who had zero interest in democracy promotion and simply wanted to pulverize any upstart nations that might pose a threat to the supremacy of American might. Today, under Trump, it is this latter, dark vision that is emerging triumphant. Maybe the only thing worse than Trump the isolationist is Trump the interventionist.  https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/16/no-really-this-is-normal-did-you-forget-bush-cheney-217647

12. Maureen Dowd: Trump, Flush With Power

This was the week Donald Trump became president.

Or at least the week he became the president we were always expecting. He ceased bothering to pretend that he was ever going to do the job in any normal sense of the word. He decided to totally own the whole, entire joke that he is.

He started hiring people right off TV. He extended his tiny fingers into his giant flat screen, “Purple Rose of Cairo”-style, and dragged cable conservatives directly into the administration.

We’ve always known Trump makes stuff up. But now he has stopped bothering to pretend that he doesn’t. Truthful hyperbole is out. Outlandish fabrication is in. Trump began bragging to Republicans at a private fund-raiser in St. Louis Wednesday: Oh, get a load of this trade stuff I made up to outfox that fox, Justin Trudeau. I felt bad doing it to such a nice, good-looking guy. But it’s hilarious!

He is no longer bothering to pretend that governing involves a learning curve. Now he finds it’s clever to be a fabulist, concocting phony facts about the trade deficit when talking to the Canadian prime minister — one of our closest allies — or inventing a story for donors about how Japanese officials test American cars by dropping a bowling ball on their hoods from 20 feet up to see which ones dent.

The president thinks he’s navigating to his true north while the rest of the world thinks he’s headed due south.

President Trump is doing it his way now. But soon, he’ll be doing it Mueller’s way.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/opinion/sunday/trump-fox-news-dowd.html

13. Albert A. Hunt: There's a Blamer-in-Chief in the Oval Office

Trump never accepts responsibility for anything. Reflecting the lessons he learned decades ago from his fixer-lawyer-mentor Roy Cohn, his approach is always to stay on the offensive, as if any sign of contrition amounts to an unacceptable show of weakness. At some stage this tactic will threaten his already fragile presidency.

Trump's most dangerous evasion of presidential responsibility involves the investigation into possible connections between his campaign and Russian hackers who, according to a U.S. intelligence report, tried to help him win the 2016 election.

Trump started by blaming former President Barack Obama. Confronted with reports that a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer met secretly with his son and son-in-law, Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner, to dish dirt on Hillary Clinton, he first lied about the purpose of the meeting. Then he blamed it on Obama's attorney general, Loretta Lynch, on the grounds that the Justice Department had approved a visa for one of the Russian attendees. More recently he has attacked his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for failing to hold Obama responsible for Russian election meddling.

If Americans believe that a president won't admit a mistake, "the public fears he will go on to make the same error again," said the presidential scholar Michael Beschloss. Acknowledging mistakes, by contrast, shows that a president is "human and learns from his shortcomings, all qualities the public finds attractive in a leader," Beschloss added.  https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-18/trump-is-the-white-house-blamer-in-chief

14. Michelle Goldberg: Trump’s High-Tech Dirty Tricksters

Whether or not Cambridge Analytica’s methodology works, the fact that the Trump campaign had a crew of high-tech dirty tricksters on its payroll is significant. We already know that Cambridge Analytica reached out to Julian Assange about finding and disseminating Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails. We know that Robert Mueller, the special counsel, has asked the company to turn over documents related to the Trump campaign.

At a minimum, we’ve learned that the Trump campaign’s vaunted social media program was built on deception. Shortly after the 2016 election, Forbes ran an article crediting Jared Kushner for his father-in-law’s shocking triumph. Thanks to digital tools, it said, the traditional presidential campaign was dead, “and Kushner, more than anyone not named Donald Trump, killed it.”

Cambridge Analytica’s corruption helps provide the missing piece in this story. If the Trump campaign had a social media advantage, one reason is that it hired a company that mined vast amounts of illicitly obtained data.

There’s a lesson here for our understanding of the Trump presidency. Trump and his lackeys have been waging their own sort of psychological warfare on the American majority that abhors them. On the one hand, they act like idiots. On the other, they won, which makes it seem as if they must possess some sort of occult genius. With each day, however, it’s clearer that the secret of Trump’s success is cheating. He, and those around him, don’t have to be better than their opponents because they’re willing to be so much worse.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/opinion/trump-cambridge-analytica-.html

15. Dean Obeidallah: Democrats' 2018 midterm hopes strengthened by decline of 'purity tests'

The old political cliche “Democrats fall in love, while Republicans fall in line” is nevertheless alive and well when it comes to the Democratic base. Many Democrats, including myself, still do need to be in love to be inspired politically. But what’s changed is that we no longer need a particular candidate to set our hearts a flutter. Rather, Democrats have begun to fall head over heels in love with the goal of defeating Donald Trump and his agenda. And to achieve that, it seems more and more Democrats may be willing to check progressive purity at the door in favor of progressive pragmatism.

Come 2020, I’m sure there will be fierce, passionate battles about over the progressive credentials of the candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. And there should be. But for 2018, it’s looking more and more like Democrats think blocking Trump’s agenda in Congress is more important than finding the perfect person to run in every district. Republicans have experienced firsthand the successes of falling in line. The fact that Democrats may be co-opting this strategy should concern them most of all.  https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/democrats-2018-midterm-hopes-strengthened-decline-liberal-purity-tests-ncna857431

16. Cristian Farias: Mueller’s Interest in Obstruction Is Probably Just the Tip of the Iceberg

The word that’s been used and abused to describe this synergy between the Kremlin and the Trump camp is collusion, but Mueller has given us a better, more legally grounded term: conspiracy. Last month, Rick Gates, Trump’s deputy campaign manager and a longtime associate of Paul Manafort, became the first person in Mueller’s crosshairs to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States. This curious, catchall offense also appeared in the February indictment of 13 Russian trolls, all of whom were charged with “impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of the government through fraud and deceit for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.”

Unlike collusion, which makes for good sound bites but not real cases, conspiracy has deep roots in American law. As independent journalist Marcy Wheeler has laid out, even Jared Kushner may be on the hook for it. If the last ten months or so of the Mueller investigation have shown us anything, it is the tangled web of lies and cover-ups the Trump campaign weaved to hide its dealings with Russia. Don’t be surprised if Mueller untangles yet more of this mess and presents us with more indictments against conspirators in the U.S. or abroad.  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/muellers-obstruction-focus-is-likely-the-tip-of-the-iceberg.html

17. Damon Linker: Trump's maximal tribalism

Without fully grasping the consequences of his words and deeds, President Trump has done more than any previous president to advance a politics of sophistry and cynicism. It's a politics defined by the unrelenting effort to prove that every apparent act of virtue is in fact an example of something lower — of the very tribalism that motivates Trump's every public utterance and act.

If all politics is zero-sum tribalism, then the president's own zero-sum tribalism no longer seems quite so out of line. It can even seem normal. Which is no doubt one reason why he delights in tearing down the norms that call on us to put aside our self-interest, or to view our self-interest as reaching its ultimate fulfillment, in pursuit of the common good.

We dare not lose sight of the fact that this new normal is much lower than the one it replaces. Once we're no longer capable of recognizing that difference, the collapse in higher political ideals that Trump has helped to bring about will have passed beyond the point at which they can be easily repaired. And then all we'll be left with is gangland politics.  http://theweek.com/articles/761735/trumps-maximal-tribalism

18. Paul Krugman: Trump and Trade and Zombies

Almost four decades have passed since Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously declared, “Of a sudden, the G.O.P. has become a party of ideas.” And his statement still holds true, with one modification: These days, Republicans are a party of zombie ideas — ideas that should have died long ago, yet still keep shambling along, eating politicians’ brains.

The most important of these zombies is the “supply side” insistence that cutting taxes on the rich reliably produces economic miracles, and conversely that raising taxes on the rich is a recipe for disaster. Faith in this doctrine survived the boom that followed Bill Clinton’s tax hikes, the lackluster recovery and eventual catastrophe that followed George W. Bush’s tax cuts, the debacle in Kansas, and more.

And Donald Trump’s selection of Larry Kudlow to head the National Economic Council confirms that the tax-cut zombie is undead and well. For Kudlow is a fervent believer in the infinite virtues of tax cuts, despite a track record of predictions based on that belief that, as New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait once wrote, “has elevated flamboyant wrongness to a form of performance art.”  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/opinion/donald-trump-trade-.html