1. Bess Levin: Trump: Unpaid Shutdown Workers Are Mostly Dems, So Screw ’Em

Last week, from the presidential mind that brought you telling kids Santa isn’t real on Christmas Eve and tweeting “I am all alone (poor me)” the same day an eight-year-old migrant boy died in U.S. custody, Donald Trump decided the best thing he could do for the country was shut down the federal government over his useless border wall. The news roiled an already freaked-out market, and investors weren’t the only ones unhappy about the turn of events. Trump, too, was clearly cranky about the fact that the shutdown was eating into his previously planned 16-day vacation at Mar-a-Lago, rage tweeting about everything from the wall to the Federal Reserve to Jim Mattis in between exposing the location and identities of Navy SEAL Team 5 and demanding Democrats end the shutdown he once said—just about two weeks ago—that he wouldn’t blame them for. On Thursday, though, he seemed to have found a silver lining to keeping the federal government partially closed:

Don’t adjust your TVs folks, that is the president of the United States seemingly suggesting that the issue of federal workers not getting paid during the shutdown he engineered doesn’t matter because they’re playing for the other team. (Incidentally, two days prior, Trump insisted that “many” federal employees “want the wall” and have said to him or otherwise communicated that he should hold out until he gets the funding.)

As the shutdown hit its fifth day on Wednesday, federal workers have been sharing worries about not receiving a paycheck on Twitter using the hashtag #ShutdownStories. Julie Burr, an administrative assistant at the Department of Transportation, wrote that she is “a single mom in panic mode” and is “picking up extra shifts at [her] 2nd job but it won't pay the rent.” Incredibly, the government has reportedly created sample letters for employees to send to creditors explaining their situation. “I am a federal employee who has recently been furloughed due to a lack of funding of my agency,” one meant to be sent to landlords reads. “Because of this, my income has been severely cut, and I am unable to pay the entire cost of my rent, along with my other expenses.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/12/trump-shutdown-mostly-democrats

2. Eugene Robinson: Who’s afraid of the MAGA mob? Only Trump.

Anyone who thinks Trump is a master politician is wrong. He’s a master illusionist, which isn’t the same thing. Politicians can’t keep pulling rabbits out of empty hats forever. At some point, they face a reckoning, and Trump’s is well underway.

Trump is talented at making it appear that he has more than he really does — more money, more respect, more support. All those campaign rallies before the midterm elections were not just an attempt to save the Republican majorities in Congress or feed Trump’s insatiable ego. They were also demonstrations of the fervor of his core supporters — and implied warnings to Republicans who might cross him.

Trump tries to project an image of immense strength. But it turns out that the man who made “You’re fired!” a television catchphrase can’t summon the nerve to actually dismiss anyone in person. Trump’s bluster camouflages great weakness. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/whos-afraid-of-the-maga-mob-only-trump/2018/12/27/0faa2f1e-0a0e-11e9-a3f0-71c95106d96a_story.html

3. Patrick Radden Keefe: How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump as an Icon of American Success

“The Apprentice” was built around a weekly series of business challenges. At the end of each episode, Trump determined which competitor should be “fired.” But, as Braun explained, Trump was frequently unprepared for these sessions, with little grasp of who had performed well. Sometimes a candidate distinguished herself during the contest only to get fired, on a whim, by Trump. When this happened, Braun said, the editors were often obliged to “reverse engineer” the episode, scouring hundreds of hours of footage to emphasize the few moments when the exemplary candidate might have slipped up, in an attempt to assemble an artificial version of history in which Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip decision made sense. During the making of “The Apprentice,” Burnett conceded that the stories were constructed in this way, saying, “We know each week who has been fired, and, therefore, you’re editing in reverse.” Braun noted that President Trump’s staff seems to have been similarly forced to learn the art of retroactive narrative construction, adding, “I find it strangely validating to hear that they’re doing the same thing in the White House.”

Such sleight of hand is the industry standard in reality television. But the entire premise of “The Apprentice” was also something of a con. When Trump and Burnett told the story of their partnership, both suggested that Trump was initially wary of committing to a TV show, because he was so busy running his flourishing real-estate empire. During a 2004 panel at the Museum of Television and Radio, in Los Angeles, Trump claimed that “every network” had tried to get him to do a reality show, but he wasn’t interested: “I don’t want to have cameras all over my office, dealing with contractors, politicians, mobsters, and everyone else I have to deal with in my business. You know, mobsters don’t like, as they’re talking to me, having cameras all over the room. It would play well on television, but it doesn’t play well with them.”

“The Apprentice” portrayed Trump not as a sleezy hustler who huddles with local mobsters but as a plutocrat with impeccable business instincts and unparalleled wealth—a titan who always seemed to be climbing out of helicopters or into limousines. “Most of us knew he was a fake,” Braun told me. “He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.” Bill Pruitt, another producer, recalled, “We walked through the offices and saw chipped furniture. We saw a crumbling empire at every turn. Our job was to make it seem otherwise.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/how-mark-burnett-resurrected-donald-trump-as-an-icon-of-american-success

4. David Rothkopf: Trump’s lies and corruption disgrace presidential legacies of Lincoln and Washington

• A corrupt and fraudulent family foundation.
• Hush money to mistresses to help swing an election — felony violations of campaign finance laws.
• Seeking and embracing the help of an enemy to win an election.
• Repeatedly obstructing justice to cover up crimes.
• Selling out American interests to patrons overseas.
• Profiting from the presidency.
• Helping foreign murderers cover up the murder of an American permanent resident.
• Attacking our allies.
• Destroying the international architecture that has been the foundation of our strength.
• Lying to or misleading the American people on average 10 times a day.
• Celebrating Nazis as very fine people.
• Building detention camps for children on our borders.
• Racist policies that turn away good people from our shores.
• Serial misogyny.
• Upwards of 20 allegations of sexual harassment.
• At least one accusation of rape from an underage minor.
• A massive, decades-long record of income tax fraud. 
• Seventeen investigations into his activities.
• Virtually every major organization he has run for two decades under investigation.
• An international record of celebrating despots and autocrats and kleptocrats and brutal totalitarians and enemies.
• Unprecedented isolation from America's friends and a repeated record of insults of them and international rejection of him as a trusted leader.
• Attacking America's law enforcement institutions.
• Attacking America's intelligence institutions.
• Collaborating with fellow travelers in Congress to circumvent the laws and to undermine decades and decades of regulation.
• Irreversible damage done to the environment.
• A campaign to take health care away from the neediest Americans.
• A systematic effort to deport productive contributors to our society who have lived and worked here for decades.
• Hypocrisy. Vulgarity. Deceit. Mounting evidence of criminal behavior. Serial violation of his oath of office. 
• Serial betrayal of his country.

This is our president. This is the heir to Washington and Lincoln. He stole the office with the aid of our enemies, and he has done grievous damage to this country ever since. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/12/27/trump-corruption-disgraces-presidential-legacy-washington-lincoln-column/2376588002/

5. NY Times Editorial: Trump Imperils the Planet

It’s hard to believe but it was only three years ago this month — just after 7 p.m., Paris time, Dec. 12, to be precise — that delegates from more than 190 nations, clapping and cheering, whooping and weeping, rose to celebrate the Paris Agreement — the first genuinely collective response to the mounting threat of global warming. It was a largely aspirational document, without strong legal teeth and achieved only after contentious and exhausting negotiations. But for the first time in climate talks stretching back to 1992, it set forth specific, numerical pledges from each country to reduce emissions so that together they could keep atmospheric temperatures from barreling past a point of no return.

Two weeks ago, delegates met at a follow-up conference in Katowice, Poland, to address procedural questions left unsettled in Paris, including common accounting mechanisms and greater transparency in how countries report their emissions. In this the delegates largely succeeded, giving rise to the hope, as Brad Plumer put it in The Times, that “new rules would help build a virtuous cycle of trust and cooperation among countries, at a time when global politics seems increasingly fractured.”

But otherwise it was a hugely dispiriting event and a fitting coda to one of the most discouraging years in recent memory for anyone who cares about the health of the planet — a year marked by President Trump’s destructive, retrograde policies, by backsliding among big nations, by fresh data showing that carbon dioxide emissions are still going up, by ever more ominous signs (devastating wildfires and floods, frightening scientific reports) of what a future of unchecked greenhouse gas emissions is likely to bring.

The bottom line, according to the Global Carbon Project, is that after three years in which emissions remained largely flat, global levels of carbon dioxide increased by 1.6 percent in 2017 and are on pace to jump by 2.7 percent this year. Some scientists have likened the increase in emissions to a “speeding freight train.” That has a lot to do with economic growth. It also has a lot to do with not moving much faster to less carbon-intensive ways of powering that growth. Or in Mr. Trump’s case, moving in the opposite direction. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/opinion/editorials/climate-change-environment-trump.html

6. Jonathan Lemire: Trump’s presidency has changed Washington, defied convention

Mr. Trump went to Washington. And he changed it.

In his first two years in office, President Donald Trump has rewritten the rules of the presidency and the norms of the nation’s capital, casting aside codes of conduct and traditions that have held for generations.

In Trump’s Washington, facts are less relevant. Insults and highly personal attacks are increasingly employed by members of both parties. The White House press briefing is all but gone, international summits are optional, the arts are an afterthought and everything — including inherently nonpartisan institutions and investigations — is suddenly political.

Taking a wrecking ball to decorum and institutions, Trump has changed, in ways both subtle and profound, how Washington works and how it is viewed by the rest of the nation and world.

“He’s dynamited the institution of the presidency,” said Douglas Brinkley, presidential historian at Rice University. “He doesn’t see himself as being part of a long litany of presidents who will hand a baton to a successor. Instead, he uses the presidency as an extension of his own personality.”

Is this a one-president aberration? Or has the White House forever changed? Whether the trends will outlast Trump’s presidency is a question that won’t be answered until there is a new occupant in the Oval Office, but Brinkley predicts “no future president will model themselves on him.”

There was a time, many accelerated news cycles ago, when there was speculation, stoked by the candidate himself, that Trump would abandon the bluster of his campaign and become “more presidential” once he took office.

No one says that anymore.

Trump himself believes his unpredictability is what holds Americans’ attention and fuels his success. https://apnews.com/d7239932bb0a42ee91c71bead38c6baa

7. Elizabeth Drew: The Inevitability of Impeachment

An impeachment process against President Trump now seems inescapable. Unless the president resigns, the pressure by the public on the Democratic leaders to begin an impeachment process next year will only increase. Too many people think in terms of stasis: How things are is how they will remain. They don’t take into account that opinion moves with events.

Whether or not there’s already enough evidence to impeach Mr. Trump — I think there is — we will learn what the special counsel, Robert Mueller, has found, even if his investigation is cut short. A significant number of Republican candidates didn’t want to run with Mr. Trump in the midterms, and the results of those elections didn’t exactly strengthen his standing within his party. His political status, weak for some time, is now hurtling downhill.

The midterms were followed by new revelations in criminal investigations of once-close advisers as well as new scandals involving Mr. Trump himself. The odor of personal corruption on the president’s part — perhaps affecting his foreign policy — grew stronger. Then the events of the past several days — the president’s precipitous decision to pull American troops out of Syria, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’s abrupt resignation, the swoon in the stock market, the pointless shutdown of parts of the government — instilled a new sense of alarm among many Republicans. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/opinion/trump-impeachment-resign-drew.html

8.  Eric Levitz: Trump: Give Me a Wall or I’ll Engineer a Recession

Donald Trump declared himself qualified for the world’s highest office in 2016, on the grounds that his exceptional deal-making acumen and economic expertise more than compensated for his lack of conventional credentials.

On Friday morning, the president tweeted that if Democrats refuse to fund his wall, he will engineer a massive recession (that would all-but ensure Democratic victory in 2020) – because he is under the impression that the United States would “profit” by closing its southern border to all commerce, since the U.S. runs trade deficit with Mexico:

Trump’s threat to “close the border” appears to be a desperate attempt to secure some kind of leverage over negotiating partners who show no signs of caving. And it is (arguably) true that the president could at least temporarily shutter the U.S.-Mexico border by invoking his national security powers, and that this would inflict some economic pain on Democratic constituencies. It is also true that Trump has unilateral authority to initiate a thermonuclear armageddon, and that Nancy Pelosi would probably prefer to fund a border wall than perish in an atomic holocaust.

But our president is the kind of demented nihilist who threatens to use his national security powers to inflict suffering on the American people, for the sake of narrow legislative gains — not the kind who would actually do so! Or, probably not, anyway!

And that is apparently enough to persuade congressional Republicans that they have no responsibility to remove a demented nihilist from the Oval Office.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/trump-threatens-close-southern-border-wall-government-shutdown-recession.html

9. Bess Levin: Government Tells Furloughed Workers To Unclog Toilets For Rent As Trump Rants And Raves Over Border

One of the most distressing aspects of the ongoing government shutdown, besides the national embarrassment of having a dysfunctional political system, is that for as long as Donald Trump keeps up his tantrum over the wall, some 800,000 federal workers will go unpaid. For many who live paycheck to paycheck, the prospect of not being able to put food on the table or pay their mortgage or rent is a very real concern, with furloughed employees sharing their fears on Twitter using the hashtag #ShutdownStories. While the president is apparently unconcerned about hundreds of thousands of Americans going without a paycheck—many of them are Democrats!—the Office of Personnel Management has tried to help, sharing a series of sample letters it suggests using as “a guide when working with your creditors during this furlough.” Here’s an excerpt from one of them:

I am a Federal employee who has recently been furloughed due to a lack of funding of my agency. Because of this, my income has been severely cut and I am unable to pay the entire cost of my rent, along with my other expenses...I will keep in touch with you to keep you informed about my income status and I would like to discuss with you the possibility of trading my services to perform maintenance (e.g. painting, carpentry work) in exchange for partial rent payments.

Here the federal government actually telling workers to beg their landlord to let them unclog some toilets or perform other janitorial work to avoid being evicted. (When tweeting the sample letters, the O.P.M. also told people to consult their “personal attorney” over legal matters—advice we’re sure the average government employee currently working without pay much appreciated.)

Presumably even less comforting, though, was the wall rant Trump went on, sandwiched between defending signing MAGA merch while visiting the troops in Iraq and thanking Pravda competitor Fox & Friends for some great press:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1078625779670503426

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1078632205210058752

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1078634025412116480

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1078638249562775552

If your reaction to reading that is “WTF” or simply slack-jawed astonishment, you’re not alone. Here, the president is somehow conflating the alleged need for an (ineffective!) wall to keep out illegal immigrants with NAFTA—a trade agreement he crowed about renegotiating not long ago. Unsurprisingly, the former beauty pageant owner, for whom everything is transactional, can’t set aside his obsession with supposedly being screwed (“The United States looses [sic] soooo much money on Trade”) and focus on one thing for one minute. Now, somehow, the battle over wall funding also has to do with jobs being sent to Mexico, plus “Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador . . . doing nothing for the United States but taking our money,” and the solution for it all is some tasteful steel slats. Or, barring that, completely shutting down the southern border. For the furloughed workers currently being advised to barter with their landlords to make rent, it can’t be much comfort to know their fate is tied to the whims and logic of a confused child. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/12/government-tells-furloughed-workers-to-unclog-toilets-for-rent

10. Ryan Cooper: The comical incompetence of President Trump

President Trump is spending the last few days of 2018 in signature fashion, with a series of unforced errors and comical pratfalls around the world, any one of which would have been a multi-week scandal for any previous president. The government is shut down over total nonsense, and Trump's attempt to visit the troops for a quick propaganda coup instantly became a head-shaking discussion about his awful operation security and pointless lies.

It's worth remembering every now and then that Trump is horrible at being president. The basic tasks are as far beyond him as it would be for a parakeet attempting to operate the Large Hadron Collider.

Let's review. The United States is on the seventh day of a government shutdown sparked by Trump demanding $5 billion for The Wall. As many, many experts have argued at tedious length, any border wall is all but pointless for achieving its stated objective. Walls are easy to get around, and actually building one would ruin the lives and properties of many law-abiding citizens, in addition to presenting huge logistical and legal barriers. Anyway, since 2007 most people who immigrate illegally overstay their visas instead of crossing the border.

The Wall has always been a shiny bouncing ball, something to whip up the Fox News rubes and get cable news talking about Trump's favorite subject: himself. The reality of the thing is entirely beside the point. Indeed, Congress already allocated $1.7 billion for border barriers in 2017 and 2018, and the administration only spent 6 percent of it. https://theweek.com/articles/814599/comical-incompetence-president-trump

11. George Packer: No Peace for Them and No Honor for Us

Nothing in the presidency of Donald Trump combines tragedy and farce so perfectly as his decision to withdraw the 2,000 American troops in Syria.

“We have defeated isis in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” he tweeted on the morning of December 19. The claim was false on its face. The Islamic State has lost most of its territory, but it retains thousands of fighters in the desert where the Euphrates River crosses from Syria to Iraq. Those fighters could be more dangerous as insurgents and terrorists than as the territorial army of a self-proclaimed caliphate.

Trump’s announcement was so ill-considered and rushed that it blindsided his most important advisers, prompting the resignations of Defense Secretary James Mattis and Brett McGurk, special envoy to the anti-isis coalition. Diplomats and aid workers involved in rebuilding liberated Syrian towns were given 24 hours to evacuate the country. U.S. Special Forces now have to abandon the training of the American-allied, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, a job that General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, recently said was only 20 percent finished. For American troops dedicated to the ethic of leaving no friend behind on the battlefield, Trump’s order has to be particularly bitter. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/us-betraying-its-allies-syria/579133/

12. Ryan Cooper: Trump is losing his Republican security blanket in 2019

Because the Republican Party is morally bankrupt, they categorically abandoned their constitutional obligations from 2017 to 2018 and protected Trump at every turn. Congressional Republicans did not hold a single hearing or open a single investigation into any of Trump's egregious scams or flagrant violations of the constitutional language banning profiteering off the presidency.

That is highly likely to change in 2019. Partly because Republicans have stuck so closely to Trump, Democrats will control the House committees and their subpoena powers. And as Robert Mueller has showed time and time again, the crimes of Trump and his associates are typically extremely easy to figure out. https://theweek.com/articles/814890/trump-losing-republican-security-blanket-2019

13. Dan Balz: For Democrats, the race to 2020 will be unlike any seen in modern times

Anyone who has paid close attention to past Democratic presidential nominating campaigns should strike what they know from their memory bank. Old rules and previous assumptions aren’t likely to be worth much. What’s ahead for the Democrats will be unlike any nomination battle in recent years.

This time it is likely there will be two African American candidates — Sens. Kamala D. Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey — looking to consolidate support from the party’s most loyal constituency. But many other candidates will be seeking a piece of the black vote as well. Biden has ties to black voters dating to the days of the civil rights movement. Warren’s opening video is explicit, highlighting the wealth gap between white and black families and the history of discrimination against African Americans. Sanders struggled in 2016 with African Americans and could face similar challenges this time.

There won’t be just one woman running this time, there could be many. They include Harris, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. The success of female candidates running for Congress during the midterm elections, the organizing activity led by women across the country and the #MeToo movement have illustrated the rising power of women in politics, especially in the Democratic Party.

The Democratic race will quickly become a kind of Noah’s Ark of candidates, with at least two of almost everything. There will be multiple senators running, along with multiple governors or ex-governors, along with multiple mayors or ex-mayor (a rarity in presidential politics), along with the possibility of multiple candidates with business backgrounds and even a couple of billionaires. One other clear dividing line will be familiar versus fresh faces — a Biden or a Sanders versus the likes of outgoing-Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas or Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana.

The permutations are endless, given the mix-and-match appeals of the field. The challenge will be finding a way to break out of the pack, whether through celebrity appeal, money or preferably a messenger with a distinctive message that can capture the imaginations of party activists and also prove viable with the electorate in a general election. Having a clear sense of strategy and the discipline to follow it will separate long-distance runners from the others. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/for-democrats-the-race-to-2020-will-be-unlike-any-seen-in-modern-times/2018/12/31/c01a8d8a-0d15-11e9-8938-5898adc28fa2_story.html

14. David Brooks: 2019: The Year of the Wolves

It will be a year of divided government and unprecedented partisan conflict. It will be a year in which Donald Trump is isolated and unrestrained as never before. And it will be in this atmosphere that indictments will fall, provoking not just a political crisis but a constitutional one.

There are now over a dozen investigations into Trump’s various scandals. If we lived in a healthy society, the ensuing indictments would be handled in a serious way — somber congressional hearings, dispassionate court proceedings. Everybody would step back and be sobered by the fact that our very system of law is at stake.

But we don’t live in a healthy society and we don’t have a healthy president.

Trump doesn’t recognize, understand or respect institutional authority. He only understands personal power. He sees every conflict as a personal conflict in which he destroys or gets destroyed.

When the indictments come down, Trump won’t play by the rules. He’ll seek to delegitimize those rules. He’ll seek to delegitimize our legal institutions. He’ll personalize every indictment, slander every prosecutor. He’ll seek to destroy the edifice of law in order to save himself. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/opinion/trump-indictment-2019.html

15. Mitt Romney: The president shapes the public character of the nation. Trump’s character falls short.

The Trump presidency made a deep descent in December. The departures of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, the appointment of senior persons of lesser experience, the abandonment of allies who fight beside us, and the president’s thoughtless claim that America has long been a “sucker” in world affairs all defined his presidency down.

It is well known that Donald Trump was not my choice for the Republican presidential nomination. After he became the nominee, I hoped his campaign would refrain from resentment and name-calling. It did not. When he won the election, I hoped he would rise to the occasion. His early appointments of Rex Tillerson, Jeff Sessions, Nikki Haley, Gary Cohn, H.R. McMaster, Kelly and Mattis were encouraging. But, on balance, his conduct over the past two years, particularly his actions this month, is evidence that the president has not risen to the mantle of the office.

To a great degree, a presidency shapes the public character of the nation. A president should unite us and inspire us to follow “our better angels.” A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect. As a nation, we have been blessed with presidents who have called on the greatness of the American spirit. With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable. And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mitt-romney-the-president-shapes-the-public-character-of-the-nation-trumps-character-falls-short/