1. David Frum: Trump Goes to War Against the Democracies

“He’s like Heath Ledger’s Joker—but without the operational excellence.” That was the grim after-action assessment of one senior G7 official with whom I spoke in the shocked aftermath of President Donald Trump’s savage post-summit tweets.

To the very last minute, the Charlevoix summit seemed business-no-worse-than-usual. Trump had arrived at the summit in a credible semblance of a jolly mood. He joked about where he would site the condos if he redeveloped the hosting hotel. He assured the other heads of governments not to mind the false reports in the media. We’re all still friends, he said. We’re going to make a deal.

Then, something happened. From Air Force One, the president emitted a vituperative series of tweets aimed at his Canadian counterpart. What had triggered him? Had he belatedly seen that photograph of Angela Merkel looming over him? As many have said: Trump thinks in images, not ideas. Who could ever know? Trump probably does not know himself.

Ominously too: Once Trump started tweeting out abuse, the snakepit of hissing, warring aides around the president suddenly competed to amplify and deepen the quarrel. At 6:56 pm, National-Security Adviser John Bolton tweetedout his own version of the offending image of Merkel topping Trump—only with a caption reinterpreting the scene as proof of Trump’s strength and defiance. “Just another #G7 where other countries expect America will always be their bank. The President made it clear today. No more.” On pro-Trump Twitter—and then on pro-Trump TV and radio—that would almost instantly consolidate the new message line. The allies had tried to muscle the strong-willed president. But he had held firm.

Of course, all this blatantly contradicts yesterday’s message line. Remember, Trump holds authority to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum because—and only because—of a Kennedy-era special exemption to normal trade law for national-security purposes. Trump has signed documents attesting that he imposed tariffs to protect vital defense interests of the United States. Now he has changed his story. The tariffs on steel and aluminum from Germany, the U.K., Mexico, and all the others were not a national-security measure, but a retaliation for Canada’s restrictions on dairy imports. Whatever you think of Canada’s milk protectionism (and few Canadians who don’t directly profit from it will defend it), it is not a threat to U.S. national security.

Trump is locked into a cycle in his top-level diplomacy: bully-cringe-bully-cringe. He bullies traditional friends and allies; he cringes to adversaries, dictators, and potential funding sources for Trump enterprises. Bullying the G7 was the weekend’s story; cringing to North Korea—and behind it, China—will be the story of the week ahead. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/06/trump-g7/562487/

2. David E. Sanger. Vague on Details, Trump Is Betting on ‘Special Bond’ With Kim to Deliver Deal

On paper, there is nothing President Trump extracted from North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, in their summit meeting that Mr. Kim’s father and grandfather had not already given to past American presidents.

In fact, he got less, at least for now. But as Mr. Trump made clear in a lengthy but vaguely worded reconstruction of their five hours of talks, none of that really matters to him.

Instead, he is betting everything on the “terrific relationship” and “very special bond” that he said he developed with the 34-year-old dictator, and Mr. Trump’s seeming certainty that they now view the future elimination of North Korea’s arsenal of atomic weapons the same way. 

“The upcoming negotiations will be arms control to constrain the North Korean program, not disarmament to eliminate it,” Mr. Litwak said.

The supreme irony, as Mr. Litwak and others noted on Tuesday, is that an effort to constrain the North’s capabilities, rather than eliminate them, has shades of the Iran deal that Mr. Trump just rejected.

So now comes the hard part.

If Mr. Trump allows this negotiation to become about limiting the North’s capabilities, rather than eliminating them, he will repeat the moves that he castigated Mr. Obama for making in Iran. If he insists on getting it all — “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization,” he risks coming up empty-handed.

Whatever he gets, it will be judged by one standard: whether he has “solved” the North Korea problem, as he vowed he would, rather than passing it on to his successor. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/world/asia/trump-kim-policy.html

3. Jennifer Haberkorn and Adam Cancryn: Trump’s latest health care move squeezes Republicans

Republicans who have tried to repeal Obamacare for nearly a decade believe the Trump administration is reviving a politically risky battle with a court filing that could eliminate one of the most popular parts of the law: protections for people with pre-existing conditions.

The administration wants a federal court to strike the protections, providing fresh fodder to Democrats who argue that the GOP cannot be trusted to protect Americans’ health insurance months ahead of a midterm election in which health care was already a top issue. It also threatens to shift attention away from the GOP's message on tax cuts, refocusing it on an Obamacare fight most Republicans wanted to put behind them.

The administration late Thursday asked a U.S. District Court in Texas to do something congressional Republicans weren’t willing to take on themselves during last year’s repeal effort: Strike the most popular part of Obamacare.

Few congressional Republicans rushed to defend the administration's move, instead emphasizing their support for preserving pre-existing condition protections.

“I’m not going to have to defend anything I don’t agree with — regardless of who says it,” said Rep. Phil Roe of Tennessee when asked if he would defend the administration’s request on the campaign trail this fall. He added that rising premiums for Obamacare coverage will force lawmakers to address health care policy next year.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine — one of three GOP senators who blocked the Obamacare repeal effort last year — warned the administration's new bid could undermine key patient protections. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/08/trumps-obamacare-court-case-health-care-republicans-611072

4. Michael Kruse: The ‘What, Me Worry?’ President

The administration late Thursday asked a U.S. District Court in Texas to do something congressional Republicans weren’t willing to take on themselves during last year’s repeal effort: Strike the most popular part of Obamacare.

Few congressional Republicans rushed to defend the administration's move Friday, instead emphasizing their support for preserving pre-existing condition protections.

“I’m not going to have to defend anything I don’t agree with — regardless of who says it,” said Rep. Phil Roe of Tennessee when asked if he would defend the administration’s request on the campaign trail this fall. He added that rising premiums for Obamacare coverage will force lawmakers to address health care policy next year.

Within hours of the news, Democrats pounced on the Senate Republicans up for reelection this fall. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee blasted releases questioning whether those Republicans — such as North Dakota hopeful Rep. Kevin Cramer — back the Trump administration’s decision. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/06/08/donald-trump-beliefs-what-matters-fatalism-218663

5. Christopher Dickey: The Madness of King Trump on Full Display at the G7

As Trump checked out of the G7 early, ostensibly so he could head off to Singapore for his “hot date with Kim Jong Un” (in the words of World Politics Review’s Judah Grunstein), the impression lingered that he was much more at ease with the tyrants who are America’s adversaries than with the leaders of the countries that have been its closest allies for the last 70 years.

In a parting shot that was just as implausible as the suggestion Russia be brought in from the cold, Trump said the G7 should do away with all tariffs. As the Financial Times reported, that left the other leaders “flummoxed.” This especially at a time when Trump has been promising to tax all German cars off the streets of the United States, even though most are assembled there in plants that employ tens of thousands of people in South Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama….

Here’s the thing, nobody expects Trump to be rational anymore. And few people really believe this madness will end any time soon. Crazy as it sounds, the world is just getting used to him, and while Trump’s counterparts scramble for answers, the rest of us are left searching for a way to be, in the classic line from Pink Floyd, “comfortably numb.” https://www.thedailybeast.com/porn-stars-are-furious-with-rudy-giuliani-a-storms-a-coming

6. NY Times Editorial Board: If Democrats want a blue wave, they need to try voting

Voter registration hit historic levels in California this year, with more people registered to vote than at any other time in history. But the numbers were bad for the state’s Republican Party, which marked a new low in May after decades of steady decline. For the first time, more voters were registered as “No Party Preference” than Republican. This erosion no doubt warmed the hearts of Democratic Party operatives hoping for a “blue wave” in the state’s primaries that would roll over the state’s Republican delegation and prepare the political landscape for some serious House flipping in November.

That didn’t happen. Instead, this ever-shrinking political minority scored an outsize success on Tuesday. With just a quarter of the state’s registered voters, Republicans won a spot in the gubernatorial runoff against Gavin Newsom in November and recalled a Democratic state senator, effectively crushing Democrats’ hope of regaining a supermajority in that house — all while their candidates easily finished first in the seven Republican-held congressional districts that Democrats had targeted for flipping. Democrats were lucky they weren’t shut out of the November election in any of those races. It was a real possibility.

How did Republicans pull off such a feat? It’s simple: They voted. Registered Republicans (along with those who may be Republican in spirit, if not party affiliation) simply cast ballots in greater numbers than Democrats and their liberal allies. Turning out voters in greater numbers is the same strategy that Bay Area candidates regularly employ to win more state offices than Southern Californians. Republicans also tended to face fewer challengers from their own party than Democrats, an advantage in the primaries that will not extend to November. http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-primary-turnout-20180607-story.html

7. Julie Miller: Is Reality TV Really to Blame for President Donald Trump?

Last year, Real Housewives executive producer Andy Cohen noticed Donald Trump using so many pot-stirring tactics from the Bravo franchise that he began cataloguing them on Twitter. When the president used social media to cancel a White House invitation that N.B.A. champion Stephen Curry had not yet officially rejected, Cohen tweeted, “HOUSEWIVES PLAYBOOK: rescind invitations liberally! (See: Bethenny re LuAnn, Mexico; Bethenny & Ramona, Mexico).” Trump’s post-election digs about Hillary? “Keep bringing up fights from last season.” Trump’s excuse for not immediately calling Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto following an earthquake? “Blame cell-phone reception.” Trump’s suggestion that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign colluded with the Russians? Tossing out bogus statements in desperate pleas “to stay on the show,” Cohen wrote.

It isn’t surprising that in the first year-plus of his presidency, Trump has returned to the reality-TV toolbox he used so effectively during his 14 seasons on NBC’s The Apprentice—where he rebranded himself from 90s tabloid buffoon into something resembling a successful C.E.O. Yet it’s still scary that Trump—essentially an amusing reality-TV character who wound up in the White House through an arguably Twilight Zone-worthy sequence of events—is running the country with the same kind of schemes Ramona Singer deploys during white-wine-fueled Hamptons getaways on The Real Housewives of New York City. Only, to Cohen, Trump’s flagrant headline grabs are so artless that the president would be kicked off a Bravo series that traffics in backseat limo brawls. (Or maybe “impeached” would be the verb.) https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/06/is-reality-tv-really-to-blame-for-president-donald-trump

8. Marc Ambinder: The power of Mueller's facts

A weird syllogism attends to the Russia investigation today, one that is now being ardently pushed by President Trump's defenders. It holds that because the crimes that Trump may have committed are insuperable from the decisions a president may legally make — akin to decisions that a CEO makes about personnel choices inside her company — if there is at least a plausible reason beyond criminality that the president might have made a choice, he must be given the benefit of the doubt. A crime is not committed unless, this weird theory goes, the House impeaches and the Senate convicts based on a bill of charges that they themselves write. That is, the crime becomes a crime only after the accused has been charged with a crime. Before — and in the absence of a congressional trial — the president can do whatever he wants.

This theory is as unsettling as it is dubious, but a weak, compliantCongress, and the lack of a full accounting from Special Counsel Robert Mueller, might mean that, by the time this chapter in history closes, the president will have established the right to immunize himself and future presidents from scrutiny.

But short of Trump firing Mueller, we will get a full accounting from the special counsel. And it will be full. http://theweek.com/articles/777090/power-muellers-facts

9. Charles M. Blow: ‘I Want to Hate …’

On an April night nearly 30 years ago, a young investment banker was beaten and raped when she went for a jog in Central Park. The attack left her in a coma. She happened to be white. Five teenagers arrested for the crime — four black and one of Hispanic descent — went to trial. As this newspaper reported at the time, they were “in what the police said was part of a marauding spree by as many as 30 youths in the northern end of the park” that night.

A few days after the attack, long before the teenagers would go on trial, Donald Trump bought full-page ads in New York newspapers — you may think of this as a precursor to his present-day tweets to a mass audience — under a giant, all-caps headline that read: “Bring Back the Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!”

After serving up to 13 years in prison, the boys were proven right: Another man confessed to the crime and his DNA matched that at the scene of the crime.

The boys, then men, had their convictions overturned, were freed, and eventually reached a multimillion-dollar settlement with the city over their wrongful convictions.

How did Trump respond after having called for them to be put to death? In true Trump fashion, he refused to apologize or show any contrition whatsoever.

In a 2014 opinion essay in The Daily News, Trump wrote that the settlement was a “disgrace” and that “settling doesn’t mean innocence.” He continued his assertion that the men were guilty, urging his readers: “Speak to the detectives on the case and try listening to the facts. These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels.”

Some people will never admit that they are wrong, even when they are as wrong as sin.

But it is the language in the body of Trump’s 1989 death penalty ad that sticks with me. Trump wrote:

“Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/06/opinion/trump-central-park-five.html

10. Lilliana Mason: Trump’s ‘Winning’ Is America’s Losing

In a commencement address at the Naval Academy last month, President Trump revisited a familiar theme. He remarked to the graduates: “Winning is such a great feeling, isn’t it? Winning is such a great feeling. Nothing like winning — you got to win.” He later repeated the idea: “Victory, winning, beautiful words, but that is what it is all about.”

This focus on victory is not new for Mr. Trump. During his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump promised that under his leadership the audience would “get bored with winning.” He predicted that his fans would grow “so sick and tired of winning, you’re going to come to me and go, ‘Please, please, we can’t win anymore,’” and “I’m going to say, ‘I’m sorry but we’re going to keep winning, winning, winning.’”

The focus on winning is not incidental. It caters to a very primal need among humans to feel that we’re part of a group whose status is high and protected. This winning “we” is often a divisive concept, turning Americans against their fellow citizens. The story of how American politics has grown ever more focused on partisan victory instead of the greater good of the nation has two major components. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/06/opinion/trump-winning-america-.html

11. Andrew Sullivan: Another Glimpse of State Terror in Trump’s America

Keep a list, they tell you. Notice the little landmarks that tell you that authoritarianism is making headway.

It’s worth making a note, then, when a president goes out of his way to declare he has an “absolute right” to pardon himself, and anyone else, if he so wants, for any reason, including protecting himself and others from possible charges of conspiracy against the United States. Yes, there are legal details here that make this remarkable constitutional claim a little more more complicated than it sounds, as in: Can the Executive branch obstruct itself? Yes, we’re also told that the president has no intention, you understand, of pardoning himself right now, he’s just musing, as he so often does, on various unrelated constitutional conundrums; and yes, he’s pardoning friends and allies, as other friends and allies face a special prosecutor. But just take a note. You’ll be amazed how swiftly this recedes as the latest provocation occupies your soul.

And it’s also worth taking a note when a near-universal norm of human decency is thrown out of the window, with a sudden change in procedure. I’m talking about the idea of a government that reserves the right to separate children from their parents forcibly — and not for interests of rescuing the child from abuse. I’m talking about the 658 children taken from their parents at the border in the two weeks since a new policy was introduced, with the aim of prosecuting everyone who enters the U.S. illegally immediately.

There are some core humane lines no civilized country should cross, some red lines, such as torture, or mistreatment of prisoners, or the wrenching of children from loving parents by agents of the state. This isn’t a completely isolated instance either. The ICE arrests that are happening every day just as mothers and fathers drop their kids off at school are particularly horrifying. They violate official policy, which is supposed to restrict arrests at “sensitive locations,” but the loopholes in this provision are legion. Children see their mom or dad suddenly subjected to force, shoved out of cars, handcuffed and then simply spirited away. No child should ever be subjected to this, period. The sheer trauma it will generate can last a lifetime. Yes, these are noncitizens. Yes, many have broken the law. But they are also children. Every day we numb ourselves to these core violations of decency, America dies a little.

When challenged on this, of course, Trump simply lied and insisted that the Democrats came up with this “horrible law.” He has nothing to do with what his own ICE is doing, he tells us. Nothing.

The thing about this despicable man is that he doesn’t even have the courage of his own cruelty. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/traumatizing-children-is-the-new-weapon-in-trump-arsenal.html

12. Ron Reagan: Trump’s Character Is Our Destiny. We Must Recognize That Horror.

Much has been made of Trump’s reflex to see every interaction as a zero-sum game — he wins if you lose. This is not a matter of toughness as he and his toadies would have you believe. It is the result of a narcissistic fragility wherein even the mildest rebuke constitutes an existential threat. Journalists who report accurately are inventing sources — “fake news!’. Football players who don’t kowtow are “sons-of-bitches” who don’t belong in the country. Politicians insufficiently deferential are saddled with demeaning nicknames. Can you remember another president going after his own Attorney General the way Trump attacks Jeff Sessions?

Merely being held accountable for his behavior is, for Trump, the equivalent of a death sentence. Imagine his fevered desperation in the face of the Mueller probe!

In another era, this man would already be heading toward impeachment, Not in today’s political climate. Even if the Dems take back the House and begin impeachment proceedings, it is highly unlikely they could ever wrangle enough Republican colleagues to reach the 66 vote threshold for conviction in the Senate.

In any case, Trump will make this fight as nasty and destructive as he needs to in order to cling to power and salvage his ego. Undermining the reputation of the FBI, Justice Department and intelligence community while whipping up enraged Trumpskyites is only the beginning. https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-character-is-our-destiny-we-must-recognize-that-horror

13. John Cassidy: Trump Unleashed Is a Danger to the World

If Trump’s worldview has any consistency, it is as the ideology of a certain type of parochial, embittered, outer-borough New Yorker, an upscale Archie Bunker. The first great misfortune that befell the U.S. and its allies came in November of 2016, when this small-minded parvenu was elected President. The second came earlier this year, when Trump belatedly realized that he didn’t have to surround himself with wiser and more knowledgeable people who could restrain his impulses. He replaced H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser, and Gary Cohn, the head of the National Economic Council, with John Bolton and Larry Kudlow, two wizened conservative talking heads who both know their role, which is to parrot whatever nonsense Trump comes up with on any given day.

On Saturday, Trump once again made a stunning display of his ignorance. Before departing early from the G-7 summit in La Malbaie, Quebec, to fly to Singapore, he issued a preposterous threat to cut off all U.S.-Canadian trade if the Canadians responded to his imposition of tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum goods entering the United States by levying similar duties on some American goods entering Canada. At a press conference that Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister, held to close the summit, he was inevitably asked whether his government would go ahead with the retaliatory tariffs despite Trump’s barking. “I have made it very clear to the President that it is not something we relish doing, but it is something that we absolutely will do,” Trudeau said. “Because Canadians, we’re polite, we’re reasonable, but we also will not be pushed around.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/trump-unleashed-is-a-danger-to-the-world

14. Jonathan Chait : Trump Now Sounds Like a Fan of North Korean Repression

“No regime has oppressed its own citizens more totally or brutally than the cruel dictatorship in North Korea,” declared Donald Trump, accurately, at his State of the Union address. Trump movingly recounted the grim plight of North Korea’s oppressed population, telling the story of Ji Seong-ho, a defector who was tortured for trying to escape.

In Singapore, his view of the situation has changed radically. He now sees Kim Jong-un as a bright young man full of promise and talent, whose only crime is perhaps failing to develop some of his country’s prime beachfront real estate.

“Anybody that takes over a situation like he did at 26 years of age and is able to run it and run it tough,” Trump said. “I don’t say he was nice or say anything about it. He ran it, few people at that age — you could take one out of 10,000 could not do it.”

The language Trump uses here is telling. He is calling Kim’s regime “tough,” which is language he reserves for praise. “Rough” and “tough” is Trumpspeak for the kinds of brutality he considers necessary. Trump urges police to be rougher. (“We’re getting them [criminals] out anyway, but we’d like to get them out a lot faster, and when you see these towns and when you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in — rough, I said, please don’t be too nice.”) And he wants protesters to be treated rough. (“In the good old days this doesn’t happen because they used to treat them very, very rough. And when they protested once, they would not do it again so easily.”) http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/trump-now-sounds-like-a-fan-of-north-korean-repression.html

15. Trump Was Outfoxed in Singapore

It sure looks as if President Trump was hoodwinked in Singapore.

Trump made a huge concession — the suspension of military exercises with South Korea. That’s on top of the broader concession of the summit meeting itself, security guarantees he gave North Korea and the legitimacy that the summit provides his counterpart, Kim Jong-un.

Within North Korea, the “very special bond” that Trump claimed to have formed with Kim will be portrayed this way: Kim forced the American president, through his nuclear and missile tests, to accept North Korea as a nuclear equal, to provide security guarantees to North Korea, and to cancel war games with South Korea that the North has protested for decades.

In exchange for these concessions, Trump seems to have won astonishingly little. In a joint statement, Kim merely “reaffirmed” the same commitment to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula that North Korea has repeatedly made since 1992.

They were willing to de-nuke,” Trump crowed at his news conference after his meetings with Kim. Trump seemed to believe he had achieved some remarkable agreement, but the concessions were all his own.

The most remarkable aspect of the joint statement was what it didn’t contain. There was nothing about North Korea freezing plutonium and uranium programs, nothing about destroying intercontinental ballistic missiles, nothing about allowing inspectors to return to nuclear sites, nothing about North Korea making a full declaration of its nuclear program, nothing about a timetable, nothing about verification, not even any clear pledge to permanently halt testing of nuclear weapons or long-range missiles. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/opinion/trump-kim-summit-north-korea.html

16. Jonathan Blitzer: The Trump Administration Is Completely Unravelling the U.S. Asylum System

The Trump Administration also appears to be putting more asylum seekers behind bars. In March, the A.C.L.U. filed a complaint in federal court alleging that the Administration was detaining asylum seekers indefinitely, in some cases even after they passed the standard screening, known as the credible-fear interview, at the border. Five Immigration and Customs Enforcement field offices, the lawyers wrote in their brief, “have detained these asylum seekers based not on individualized determinations that they pose a flight risk or a danger to the community, but rather to deter other migrants from seeking refuge here.” The lead plaintiff in the case is a teacher from Haiti, who has remained in detention for close to two years, despite having won his asylum case, twice, in immigration court. The government is refusing to release him while it appeals the decisions.

On Thursday, ice, the federal agency most directly associated with immigration enforcement, directed five medium-security federal prisons in California to take some sixteen hundred people into custody while they wait for a final determination in their civil immigration cases. An agency spokesperson cited a surge in illegal immigration as a reason for the demand for more space, but border crossings are actually at relatively low levels. In fact, much of the crowding at immigration detention centers is a consequence of the new zero-tolerance policy, which calls for the arrest and detention of people who, in the past, would have been released pending the outcome of their cases. “The government is manufacturing a border crisis as a way of saying, ‘This is why we need to change our asylum laws,’ ” Brané, of the Women’s Refugee Commission, said. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-trump-administration-is-completely-unraveling-the-us-asylum-system