1. T.A. Frank: A Eulogy For Trump’s Wall Fantasy: The Costly, Unloved Monstrosity That Wasn’t

Reports that Donald Trump has surrendered in the latest showdown with Congress over funding for a border wall will shock no one. Like Yosemite Sam in the face of Bugs Bunny, Trump has fired in all directions and thrown tantrums and gotten outplayed. It’s the usual. This time, it was also inevitable. Government shutdowns can be great as brinkmanship, but your cause must be on the side of prevailing voter opinion. Chuck Schumer folded swiftly last January, when Democrats found that shutting down the government over Republicans’ refusal to grant citizenship to DACA recipients polled poorly with the public. The math here was equally plain. When only about 35 percent of Americans are in favor of constructing a wall on the border, you’re already in the hole and going deeper by throwing down ultimatums.

The Danish historian Palle Lauring liked to observe that those best at leading a rebellion, however justified it might be, are rarely those best suited to govern. Donald Trump will continue to perform at rallies across the country, because that is what takes him back to height of rebel glory, and his biggest fans will attend, enjoying the memory. But they know the show is over, just as Democrats know—barring some calamity, such as an act of war—that the worst is behind them. Trump Lite, hemmed in by a Democratic Congress, is the future. Stagnancy awaits us, along with an inevitable economic correction, which will hurt Trump further. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/12/a-eulogy-for-trumps-wall-fantasy-the-costly-unloved-monstrosity-that-wasnt

2. Philip Bump: Evaluating Trump’s latest legal defense on the 2016 hush-money payments

Let us dispatch quickly with a lot of truly remarkable context for President Trump’s Thursday morning tweets denying culpability for alleged campaign-finance law violations. So we’ll note only hastily how noteworthy it is that a sitting president has been implicated by his own Justice Department in the commission of multiple felonies. Quickly note how significant it is that those felonies relate to allegations from a Playboy model and an adult-film actress that the president engaged in extramarital affairs. Mention in passing that a person who served as the president’s personal attorney for nearly a decade, Michael Cohen, has been sentenced to three years in prison in part for violating campaign finance laws to keep those relationships from being discussed publicly before the election.

And, of course, dedicate only one line to the president’s striking demand that Americans ignore his demonstrably false claims about the payments — that he wasn’t aware of them, that he wasn’t involved — and instead accept this latest, complicated iteration as God’s-honest-truth.

There is now and has always been a simple explanation to all of this: Trump and Cohen worked together on the payments to McDougal and Daniels to keep them quiet before the campaign. If that’s what happened, it’s clear why it isn’t the story that Trump’s presenting publicly. Instead we’re left with increasingly convoluted explanations that, time after time, are shown to be false. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/13/evaluating-trumps-latest-legal-defense-hush-money-payments/

3. Héctor Tobar: Trump’s Ongoing Disinformation Campaign Against Latino Immigrants

Generations of Latino immigrants have gone to work with an abiding faith that, if they labor hard enough, they will earn their place here. They lift up the beams of new houses and office buildings, care for the children of strangers, keep restaurant kitchens spick-and-span, and harvest crops in sun and in rain. But, in the first decades of this century, they face a new reality: the prospect that no amount of brawn or sacrifice will grant them the prize that they most desire. Their labor has become a Sisyphean spectacle unfolding in the very homes and communities they have built and kept prosperous.

Latinos began to make up a majority of the babies born in California at about the turn of the millennium. In 2018, many of those children became eligible to vote for the first time. Among them was Alba Piedra, an eighteen-year-old freshman at Santa Ana College. A week before the election, in a column for the Orange County Register, she wrote, “As a child of undocumented parents, I live every day with the fear that my parents might be deported, no matter how hard they work or how much they do for our local community.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trumps-ongoing-disinformation-campaign-against-latino-immigrants

4. William Falk: When facts no longer matter

If there's a word that defines the year 2018, says Dictionary .com, it's "misinformation." An unintended consequence of the Information Age, misinformation — and its cousin, deliberate disinformation — is a rising flood tide of lies, delusions, and blind, adamant belief that imperils our ability to govern ourselves. The pollution pours in from Facebook and other social media, Russian troll farms, and a White House that denies that objective truth exists. Did Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman order the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi? "Maybe he did and maybe he didn't," President Trump said, shrugging off the CIA's evidence-based conclusion that he did. When asked why his client wouldn't testify in the Russia investigation, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani explained, "Truth isn't truth." There's no way to determine who's lying and who's not, Giuliani and his client insist. Truth is inherently partisan. It's whatever you prefer to believe. https://theweek.com/articles/812513/when-facts-no-longer-matter

5. George Packer: The Corruption of the Republican Party

The corruption I mean has less to do with individual perfidy than institutional depravity. It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them. It isn’t about dirty money so much as the pursuit and abuse of power—power as an end in itself, justifying almost any means. Political corruption usually trails financial scandals in its wake—the foam is scummy with self-dealing—but it’s far more dangerous than graft. There are legal remedies for Duncan Hunter, a representative from California, who will stand trial next year for using campaign funds to pay for family luxuries.* But there’s no obvious remedy for what the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan, following the example of North Carolina in 2016, are now doing.

Republican majorities are rushing to pass laws that strip away the legitimate powers of newly elected Democratic governors while defeated or outgoing Republican incumbents are still around to sign the bills. Even if the courts overturn some of these power grabs, as they have in North Carolina, Republicans will remain securely entrenched in the legislative majority through their own hyper-gerrymandering—in Wisconsin last month, 54 percent of the total votes cast for major-party candidates gave Democrats just 36 of 99 assembly seats—so they will go on passing laws to thwart election results. Nothing can stop these abuses short of an electoral landslide. In Wisconsin, a purple state, that means close to 60 percent of the total vote.

The fact that no plausible election outcome can check the abuse of power is what makes political corruption so dangerous. It strikes at the heart of democracy. It destroys the compact between the people and the government. In rendering voters voiceless, it pushes everyone closer to the use of undemocratic means.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/how-did-republican-party-get-so-corrupt/578095/

6. Susan Glasser: “This Is Not a Normal Time”: Trump and the Rapidly Expanding “Witch Hunt”

Shortly after 11 a.m. on Thursday, Senator Jeff Flake, of Arizona, took to the Senate floor for his farewell speech. One of President Trump’s few remaining public critics in the Republican Party on Capitol Hill, Flake used the chance for one more lament about the perilous state of American democracy in the Trump era. “We all know well that this is not a normal time and that the threats to our democracy from within and without are real,” Flake said. “None of us can say with confidence how the situation that we now find ourselves in will turn out.” As Flake was still speaking, Trump tweeted out the two-word slogan that more than any other captures the current political agenda in the capital of the most powerful nation in the world. “witch hunt!” the President wrote. No explanation offered, none needed.

In other words, the criminality of key figures in the President’s inner circle is now established, by their own admissions, as they start to implicate the President himself. And this is even before Mueller issues findings or criminal charges related to the central subject of his inquiry into whether Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russians in 2016. Additional damning evidence against Trump is increasingly likely to emerge from outside of the Mueller investigation, as in the case of Cohen, or as a consequence of aggressive investigations and oversight by the new Democratic House. For example, on Thursday, the de-facto incoming Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said that the Ways and Means Committee will use its subpoena powers to demand Trump’s tax returns, which, given the extensive reporting in the Times about his family’s decades-long tax dodges, could produce an untold wealth of damaging information. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/this-is-not-a-normal-time-trump-and-the-rapidly-expanding-witch-hunt

7. Jeffrey Toobin: Adam Schiff’s Plans to Obliterate Trump’s Red Line

President Trump said some time ago that he believes his personal finances should be off limits to investigators. In an interview with the Times in July, 2017, he asserted that if Robert Mueller, the special counsel, sought to investigate the Trump family’s business dealings he would be crossing a ‘red line.’ When, later that year, several news reports suggested that Mueller had subpoenaed Deutsche Bank for records relating to Trump’s businesses, the President reportedly told members of his staff that he wanted to fire Mueller in response.

It was never confirmed whether Mueller had actually subpoenaed Deutsche Bank, but the President’s aversion to the scrutiny of his business interests caught the attention of Representative Adam Schiff, who will become the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence next year. On a recent weekend, at a busy restaurant in downtown Burbank, in the heart of his congressional district, Schiff talked about his plans for conducting an investigation that will be parallel to Mueller’s, probing Trump’s connections to Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other places around the world.

As Schiff described his approach, it became clear that he wasn’t just planning to cross Trump’s red line—he intended to obliterate it. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/24/adam-schiffs-plans-to-obliterate-trumps-red-line

8.  Dana Milbank: The GOP majority’s last words: But her emails!

Republicans, in the waning hours of their eight-year reign in the House, are using this precious time to do what they love best: investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails.

The House Oversight Committee had one last item on this year’s calendar — a hearing Thursday on the Clinton Foundation. But it didn’t stop there! Republicans and their witnesses used the hearing to reprise their greatest hits: her email server, Benghazi, George Soros, Sidney Blumenthal, Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, James B. Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, IRS targeting the tea party, Uranium One and a QAnon conspiracy about the Justice Department swooping into Little Rock to seize Clinton documents.

Even the lock-her-up Trump administration had tired of these proceedings. The Justice Department — under the command of Trump loyalist and former hot-tub promoter Matthew G. Whitaker — refused to testify (leading one witness to suggest the administration had joined the cover up), and the IRS also sent regrets.

Instead, Republicans summoned conspiracy theorists, including “investigators” poised to make money as tipsters if the IRS brings a Clinton Foundation case. But even these witnesses refused to provide documents supporting their dubious claims. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gop-majoritys-last-words-but-her-emails/2018/12/14/25076412-ffcd-11e8-83c0-b06139e540e5_story.html

9. Jonathan Chait: Trump Had Nothing to Do With His Own Inauguration, White House Says

Last night, the Wall Street Journal reported that federal investigators are probing the Trump inauguration for influence-trading and misappropriation of funds. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters that the Trump inauguration has nothing to do with Donald Trump.

“That doesn’t have anything to do with the president or the First Lady,” explained Sanders. “The biggest thing the president did, his engagement in the inauguration, was to come here and raise his hand and take the oath of office. The president was focused on the transition at that time and not on any of the planning for the inauguration.”

Apparently Trump just showed up, gave a speech, and left, never asking how the money being raised in his name was being spent or who was handing it over. And so the massive, nationally televised festival of Trump joins the list of Trump-related people or activities for which Donald Trump claims no responsibility. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/trump-inauguration-michael-cohen-paul-manafort-didnt-know.html

10. Timothy L. O'Brien: How Donald Trump Got Caught in a Legal Vise

As Donald Trump and his lawyers turn toward the new year, they’ll have to contend with a legal narrative that’s taken fuller shape through a flurry of court filings and news reports that began landing about three weeks ago and extended through Friday afternoon: Members of Trump’s presidential campaign — and possibly “Individual 1” himself — may have orchestrated a number of criminal conspiracies that took root before and during the 2016 presidential campaign, continued after Trump won the election, and have tainted the White House’s policies and torn at its operations ever since.

The breadth of investigations is so sweeping — as many on social media and reporters with the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and Bloomberg News have already noted — that few of the worlds Trump inhabits have escaped prosecutors’ attention. The Trump Organization, the Trump Foundation, the Trump family, the Trump campaign, the Trump transition, the Trump inauguration, and the Trump White House are all being probed for wrongdoing.

The Trump team’s possible collusion with Russia to sabotage and tilt the 2016 election, a probe spearheaded by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, pulls many strands of the investigations together. Trumplandia’s intersection with Russia may have started with business propositions more than a decade ago (such as the Trump SoHo hotel and condominium), and included more recent undertakings like a project in Moscow, before evolving into a political partnership during the 2016 campaign after Trump’s presidential prospects brightened. 

But there are many other threads, some related to Russia and some not, that investigators are pulling on. The Trump inauguration raised $107 million, and $40 million of that amount remains unaccounted for; Ivanka Trump, according to a joint report from ProPublica and WNYC, refereed payments to Trump’s Washington hotel during the inauguration. The Wall Street Journal said last week that federal investigators are examining whether inauguration donors gave money in exchange for policy favors.

If that’s the course the various investigations follow, then Trump may emerge as a brazen grifter who, by aspiring to the White House like a wizened, soiled version of Icarus, flew beyond the boundaries of his own luck and abilities and delivered his business, children and well-being into the hands of prosecutors. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-17/donald-trump-s-legal-vise-how-the-probes-have-proliferated