1. Andrew Sullivan: America Takes the Next Step Toward Tyranny

This is the second phase of tyranny is when many constraints that had been in place to moderate the tyrant’s whims are set aside; no advice that counters his own gut impulses can be tolerated. And so, over the last couple of weeks, we have seen the president fire Rex Tillerson and Andrew McCabe, two individuals who simply couldn’t capitulate to the demand that they obey only Trump, rather than the country as well.

No one with these instincts for total domination over others is likely to moderate the longer he is in power. Au contraire. It always gets worse. And so Tillerson has been replaced by a fawning toady, Mike Pompeo, a man whose hatred of Islam is only matched by his sympathy for waterboarders. Pompeo has been replaced in turn by a war criminal, who authorized brutal torture and illegally destroyed the evidence, Gina Haspel. Whatever else we know about Haspel, we know she follows orders.

Gary Cohn has been replaced by Larry Kudlow — a sane person followed by a delusional maniac Trump sees on Fox, who instantly thought up ways for the president to cut taxes further without congressional approval. And the State Department, indeed the entire diplomatic apparatus, has, it seems, been replaced by Jared Kushner, a corrupt enthusiast for West Bank settlements who no longer has a security clearance. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/america-takes-the-next-step-toward-tyranny.html

2. Jonathan Chait: Nobody Is Left to Save the World From Trump Now

The combination of and Trump poses an especially potent danger. Trump once declared “I love war, in a certain way.” Both men think in terms of zero-sum conflict and harbor an obsession with dominating their adversaries. They are temperamental twins. In North Korea or elsewhere, Bolton could goad Trump into dangerous reaction. Some people fooled themselves into believing Trump would govern as a dove of some kind. But any dovish impulses he had were a product of his lack of control over the government. Trump might dismiss the use of power by people who aren’t Trump, but is not inclined to be shy about wielding power that he commands himself.

The great danger of a Trump presidency has never been the things that are the most likely to happen. It has been the tail risks — any number of low-probability, high-impact events that are far more likely to occur with an authoritarian buffoon in the White House than under a normal president. Trump has spent his presidency surrounded by people who were at least attempting to contain these risks — say, a constitutional crisis, or a meltdown of the international order. As awful and comically surreal as the first year and a quarter of his term has been, after Trump has taken full command of his administration, we may see it as a golden age. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/nobody-is-left-to-save-the-world-from-trump-now.html

2. Wendy R. Sherman: Trump and Bolton’s Plan to Isolate Allies and Encourage Enemies

John R. Bolton, President Trump’s new national security adviser, has never met a war he didn’t want.

Mr. Bolton defends the 2003 invasion of Iraq and he advocates attacking North Korea, too. He believes that the United States should have bombed Iran years ago, rather than negotiating an international agreement to prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Since going into force in 2016, that deal has blocked Tehran’s path to a nuclear weapon and prevented a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. By every account, Iran is complying with the agreement, has committed to never obtaining a nuclear weapon and has subjected itself to rigorous monitoring and verification. And yet, Mr. Trump appears committed to killing it. Mr. Bolton’s appointment has only cemented the expectation that the nuclear deal’s life expectancy is short. May 12 is the next deadline by which the president has to extend sanction waivers and certify Iran’s compliance to preserve the accord. If he doesn’t, the fallout will be profound.

Nothing about this decision will increase American security. It will be a leap into the unknown, with devastating consequences. Once lost, the hard-won trust and faith in America will not be easily regained. Mr. Bolton and Mr. Trump should not make this huge mistake. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/25/opinion/trump-bolton-allies-enemies.html

3. Jonathan Chait: Trump Hired Bolton to Make Foreign Policy Exciting Again

The news of John Bolton’s appointment as national security adviser frightened the foreign policy community, which has long shunned him as a true believer in his own belligerent credo. But the real danger it reveals is in Trump himself. The foreign policy apparatus really has been engaged in an unprecedented campaign of leaking, the only possible motivation for which is its white-knuckled terror of a president who clearly lacks the mental capacity to handle the awesome power he has gained.

Trump seems to find normal foreign policy boring, and craves the kind of narrative drama found in the manufactured cartoon moralism found on Fox News, where evil abounds, and the only question is whether it will be faced down by tough guys or by sniveling wimps. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/trump-hired-bolton-to-make-foreign-policy-exciting-again.html

4. Amy Walter: Deja Vu All Over Again. Health Care Takes Center Stage in 2018 Campaigns

While Republicans argue that Americans are going to vote with their pocketbooks this fall (thanks to a growing economy boosted by tax cuts and deregulation), Democrats seem to be betting that health care — costs and access — will be the more salient issue in 2018. In fact, as we saw in the special election in PA-18, Democrat Conor Lamb made the case that many of his constituents are going to have to use their tax cut refund to pay for escalating health care costs. It’s also true that Americans are more emotionally attached to health care than they are to almost any other issue. They may not love the health care system they have today, but they also dislike the idea of government messing with it.

In 2010, of course, voters punished Democrats for messing with the system. But, eight years later, Obamacare is more popular than ever. A February Kaiser Foundation poll found the long-maligned health care law garnering 54 percent approval, including 55 percent among independents. Republicans remain sour on the law, with 78 percent disapproving. In fact, since last summer, Obamacare has enjoyed support from a narrow majority of Americans (50-54 percent). Back in 2016, approval of Obamacare averaged in the low to mid-40 percent range. It’s not clear if this new level of support is due to increased happiness with the law, or if it’s become more popular as GOP attempts to dismantle have intensified. https://www.cookpolitical.com/analysis/national/national-politics/deja-vu-all-over-again-health-care-takes-center-stage-2018

5. Rick Wilson: Only Ryan and McConnell Can Pen in Tyrannosaurus Trump

Of course, he’s going to fire Mueller.

Of course, it’s going to trigger a constitutional crisis.

Of course, Republicans will do nothing.

Every single day, Tyrannosaurus Don tests the limits of his enclosure. Every day, he pushes against the walls, looking for weak spots and for places where the electric fence isn’t working. Outside, the zookeepers in this Jurassic political park toss a cow carcass over the wall, praise their big boy dino, and marvel how large his fingers look. They smile and congratulate themselves that they’ve appeased the monster for another day, managing its violent, ravenous urges.

The beast never rests, though. It’s never satisfied with boundaries, limits, laws, or traditions. Every day, Trump wants what he wants, even if it destroys everything around him. What he wants right now is to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, end the Russia investigation, and prevent his allies, friends, and family members from being sent to the Graybar Hotel and his legacy to the dustbin of history.

Republicans who believe firing Mueller will change the political dynamic and free Trump to do whatever the hell they think he’d do without the special counsel on the scene are dreaming. Trump is already permanently stained, a president with an asterisk next to his name, a joke, a con, and a political poison that’s devouring their campaigns and their legacies. Even the White House clown bus of mooks, slowcoaches, edge case cranks, and kissers of his double-wide backside seem to understand more than the GOP in Congress; he’s crazier than a rat in a septic tank, and only Congress has any power over his behavior.  https://www.thedailybeast.com/only-ryan-and-mcconnell-can-pen-in-tyrannosaurus-trump

6. Thomas Friedman: What Trump and Putin Have in Common

That steady erosion of norms is what Trump is doing to America and Putin is doing to the world. And if we let them get away with it, your kids won’t just grow up in a different America, they’ll grow up in a different world.

I don’t know what is sufficient to stop them, but I know what is necessary. American voters have to go to the polls and deal a resounding electoral defeat to this Republican Party, which Trump has taken over like an invasive species. America needs a healthy conservative party in our two-party system. But this G.O.P. is not a conservative party and it is not healthy.

It’s an intellectually and morally corrupt coalition that sells its soul to whoever will energize its base and get G.O.P. candidates elected — deficit hawks one year, deficit doves the next; free traders one year, protectionists the next — whoever pays the most in votes or money gets to choose. Only a resounding defeat might get this G.O.P. to look itself in the mirror and ask, How did we lose our soul?

As for Putin, the only way to brush him back is with economic sanctions that truly hurt him and his corrupt clique of oligarchs, and an offensive cyber campaign that exposes just how much money they have all stolen from the Russian people.

Bullies like Trump and Putin are relentless. They will keep driving through red lights, smirking all the way, as long as we let them. But American voters can stop Trump, and America and its allies can stop Putin — if they act together. Then you won’t see Putin or Trump smiling so much anymore. As the great philosopher Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.”  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/opinion/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-turkey.html

7. Gabriel Sherman: “now I’m F---ing Doing It My Way”: Jubilant And Self-liberated, The President Prepares For War With Mueller

In the days since Mueller subpoenaed the Trump Organization business records, Trump has been on the attack. Last Saturday, Trump encouraged Dowd to call for an end to the Russia probe, a source told me. On Sunday, Trump blasted Mueller as partisan, tweeting: “Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans?” And on Monday, he retained combative lawyer Joseph diGenova, who once declared on Fox News that the Justice Department was framing Trump with a “false crime.”

Trump’s new offensive is a sign that he’s unilaterally abandoning the go-along, get-along strategy advocated by Dowd and Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer overseeing the response to Mueller. Cobb’s standing with Trump has been falling for months, after Cobb made the now-infamous prediction that the Russia probe would be over by Thanksgiving 2017. Dowd assured Trump that he had a “great relationship with Mueller” and could manage him, according to sources. That obviously hasn’t happened. “Trump just wants something to change and nothing was changing,” the outside adviser said. The genial and mustachioed Cobb has always been somewhat of an odd fit for Trump, whose mental picture of a lawyer is Roy Cohn, his early mentor. Sources said Trump reluctantly conceded to allow Cobb to play good cop. “Trump is looking at this saying, I did it your way for months, now I’m fucking doing it my way,” a former West Wing official said. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)

In private, Trump friends and outside advisers have been stoking his desire to go on the offensive for months. Trump has heard that his lawyers are “idiots”; that Mueller’s probe is a “coup d’etat”; and that Trump’s only crime is having “won the election.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/03/the-president-trump-prepares-for-war-with-mueller

8. Walter Shapiro: John is a hawk itching for war – and few are there to stop him

it is possible to derive a glimmer of I-told-you-so satisfaction from the total collapse of the establishment theory that a race of bemedaled generals and oil-industry titans could contain Trump. In truth, we now confront the frightening image of Trump Unchained, like a fugitive from a low-rent 1960s movie about Hercules.

All signs from the White House suggest that Trump is going to war on multiple fronts. The Bolton bombshell came just hours after the president’s lead attorney, the often conciliatory John Dowd, resigned in frustration over Trump’s brass-knuckle attacks on special counsel Robert Mueller.

If Trump fires Mueller it would, of course, prompt the biggest constitutional crisis since Watergate. But, at least, on the Mueller front, no nuclear weapons would be launched, except as over-wrought metaphors.

Alas, Bolton as national security adviser would come equipped with a war-fighting capacity that goes far beyond mere words. Nothing is more chilling than the argument for attacking North Korea that Bolton sketched out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed just a few weeks ago: “The threat is imminent, and the case against pre-emption rests on the misinterpretation of a standard that derives from prenuclear, pre-ballistic-missile times.”

Bolton was the wild man in George W Bush’s tragically misguided, but sane, administration. Under Trump, though, he may end up as the sanest man in the Land of the Crazy. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/23/john-bolton-hawk-itching-war

9. Richard North Patterson: Exploiting America’s Tribal Warfare Is Donald Trump’s Survival Strategy

There is no good time for Donald Trump to be president of the United States. But 2018 is among the worst.

True, we are not at this moment engaged in all-consuming war. But what is so dangerous today is our civil war of the soul: By virtually every measure, Americans are more alienated from each other than ever before.

For someone who displays amoral, narcissist tendencies like Trump, our grave societal fissure is an irresistible opportunity ― and a tool of survival. In great measure, the president’s hope of thwarting the Russia investigation depends on igniting a cataclysmic civic rupture, turning his followers against the rule of law itself.

Here lies fertile ground. Instead of sharing a common vision, Americans are forming into opposing tribes based on culture and demographics. Under stress, their estrangement could tear us apart.

However malignant his motives, Trump is the ultimate accelerant of this potentially lethal chasm ― not its cause. Over time, we have sorted ourselves into communities separated by geography, ethnicity, education, economic status and sources of information. And so demography breeds demagoguery ― in this case, invoked by a president to govern outside the law. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-patterson-trump-tribalism_us_5ab40bcde4b008c9e5f56904

10. Maureen Dowd: Bolt the Oval Against Bolton

When Trump ran for president against Jeb Bush, he continued attacking W. and presenting himself as a noninterventionist, focus-on-America candidate.

But somehow, in his King George madness, Trump has circled back to elevate one of the chief Iraq war hawks to be his national security adviser.

That move sent a shiver through the capital, among both Democrats and Republicans, who whispered, “Anyone but Bolton!”

Bolton is a clever infighter. He learned from the best. He pushed to go to war in Iraq and still thinks it was a good idea, just as he has pushed to go to war in North Korea and get regime change in Iran and Syria. He is a fervent believer in pre-emptive war.

After all those years of criticizing W. on war, Trump is now letting himself be guided by W.’s most hawkish adviser. And the president, whose curiosity only extends to himself, seems determined to stay an empty vessel. That makes him, like W., a magnet for extremists who want to hijack the Oval. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/24/opinion/sunday/john-bolton-trump-dowd.html

12. Eric Levitz: John Bolton and the Anti-Muslim Bigotry of Mainstream Conservatism

Now, a white former U.N. ambassador — who is currently affiliated with anti-Muslim hate groups — is about to become the most powerful foreign-policy adviser in the American government. Since 2013, John Bolton has served as chairman of the Gatestone Institute, a far-right think tank that claims Muslims have established hundreds of  “microstates governed by Islamic Sharia law” (a.k.a. “no-go zones”) throughout France; that Muslim refugees have brought “a rape epidemic” and “exotic diseases” with them to Germany; and that the United Kingdom is on the cusp of becoming an “Islamist colony.”

And the incoming national security adviser boasts informal ties to even-more virulent anti-Muslim bigots. Pamela Geller is one of the most notorious Islamophobes in the United States. After gaining national attention for organizing the campaign against the opening of an Islamic cultural center in Manhattan’s Financial District (a.k.a. “The Ground Zero Mega-Mosque”), Geller proceeded to lead the “Stop Islamization of America” organization, author multiple books decrying the Islamization of the West, and organize a “Draw the Prophet” cartoon contest in Garland, Texas. She has argued that President Obama was “a Muhammadan” who “wants jihad to win”; that when Muslims “pray five times” they’re “cursing Christians and Jews five times a day”; that there is no such thing as “moderate Islam.”

John Bolton spoke at Geller’s rallies against the “Ground Zero Mosque,” made numerous appearances on her video blog, and wrote the foreword to a book she co-authored in 2010 entitled The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America. In that exposé, Geller claimed that Europe’s acceptance of Muslim immigrants constituted “slow cultural and demographic suicide” — and that “Barack Hussein Obama” was leading the United States toward “a soft sharia: the quiet and piecemeal implementation of Islamic laws that subjugate non-Muslims.” Not only has Bolton never disavowed his ties to Geller, he lent a laudatory blurb to a book she published in November of last year (Fatwa: Hunted in America). http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/john-bolton-and-the-islamophobia-of-mainstream-conservatism.html