1. Peter Canellos: What FDR Understood About Socialism That Today’s Democrats Don’t

For Sen. Bernie Sanders, socialism was a way of distinguishing his left-wing views from those of the dominant moderate wing of the Democratic Party in Vermont. He has proudly, even courageously, worn the socialist moniker since the days of the Cold War, when fears of Soviet-style socialism were rampant. On the presidential campaign trail, however, he does more than just claim the title of “democratic socialist” for himself. By embracing policies shared by many other Democratic candidates, such as Elizabeth Warren and Bill de Blasio, he puts the socialist imprimatur on their platforms, as well. Some younger Democrats, eager to advertise their distance from the party’s tired status quo, have also embraced the term. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has won plaudits for her unambiguous endorsement of the pro-worker socialist tradition.

The Republicans show every sign of putting the “Socialism” at the very center of their efforts in 2020, with President Donald Trump sounding the charge in his State of the Union speech last winter. “Socialist” has already become a chyron for numerous Democratic initiatives on Fox News. And, indeed, polls suggest that initiatives such as “Medicare for All” attract solid support when described in generic terms, but rather less when the word “socialist” is affixed to them.

Would Franklin Roosevelt applaud these later generations of Democrats, who claim a piece of his legacy, attempting to demystify the term that was used to slight his record? The evidence strongly suggests he would not. Roosevelt the canny salesman might well say that attaching an ideological label to a pragmatic proposal such as Medicare for All—which is intended to eliminate waste and cut costs, after all—is foolish and misleading.

The architect of the New Deal would surely rise up in fist-shaking fury when Donald Trump blasts away at all Democrats as socialists. But when the charge is leveled at Bernie Sanders, he might be tempted to think: He brought this on himself. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/16/democrats-socialism-fdr-roosevelt-227622

2. Joe Walsh: Trump Needs a Primary Challenge

The fact is, Mr. Trump is a racial arsonist who encourages bigotry and xenophobia to rouse his base and advance his electoral prospects. In this, he inspires imitators.

Republicans should view Mr. Trump as the liability that he is: No matter his flag-hugging, or his military parades, he’s no patriot. In front of the world, he sides with Vladimir Putin over our own intelligence community. That’s dangerous. He encouraged Russian interference in the 2016 election, and he refuses to take foreign threats seriously as we enter the 2020 election. That’s reckless. For three years, he has been at war with our federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, as he embraces tyrants abroad and embarrasses our allies. That’s un-American.

And despite what his enablers claim, Mr. Trump isn’t a conservative. He’s reckless on fiscal issues; he’s incompetent on the border; he’s clueless on trade; he misunderstands executive power; and he subverts the rule of law. It’s his poor record that makes him most worthy of a primary challenge.

Mr. Trump has taken the legitimate differences that Americans have on policy and turned them into personal division. He’s caused me to change my tone and to reflect upon where I went over the line and to focus on policy differences moving forward.

We now have a president who retweets conspiracy theories implicating his political opponents in Jeffrey Epstein’s death. We now have a president who does his level best to avoid condemning white supremacy and white nationalism.

Yes, William Weld, the former Massachusetts governor, is challenging Mr. Trump from the center. But the president is more vulnerable to a challenge from the right. I’m on the right, and I’m hugely disappointed that challenge hasn’t yet materialized.

Mr. Trump’s most vulnerable against a challenger who’d make the case for strong borders — instead of warning of “invaders,” dragging us down, turning neighbor against neighbor. A majority of Americans want fixes to our most basic problems.

We need someone who could stand up, look the president in the eye and say: “Enough, sir. We’ve had enough of your indecency. We’ve had enough of your lies, your bullying, your cruelty, enough of your insults, your daily drama, your incitement, enough of the danger you place this country in every single day. We don’t want any of this anymore, and the country certainly can’t stand four more years of it.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/opinion/joe-walsh-trump-primary.html

3. Eugene Robinson: Sea level rise could claim Mar-a-Lago — and Trump’s empire

Someday, in the not-so-distant future, sea-level rise could claim Mar-a-Lago. Perhaps President Trump — by then no doubt disgraced, shunned and all but forgotten — would still be around to see his beloved Florida resort wiped out by a “Chinese hoax.”

Of all the wrongheaded policies Trump and his Republican Party insist on pursuing, their stubborn denial of climate change is the most baffling — and the most obviously self-destructive. Everything is personal with Trump. Can’t anybody get it through his head that his own coastal properties are urgently threatened? And that he is going out of his way to hasten their demise?

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Thursday that July 2019 was the hottest month on planet Earth since record-keeping began in the 1880s. Wherever you live, think back to all the punishing heat waves you’ve experienced. Globally, July was worse.

The month saw unprecedented triple-digit temperatures in parts of Europe where summers are usually mild at best. On July 25, thermometers in Cambridge, England, soared to 101.7 degrees Fahrenheit — a record for the United Kingdom. That same day, Paris saw a high of 108.7 degrees, which broke the previous record by a full four degrees. Meanwhile, much of the United States baked in an unrelenting heat wave, with day after day in the 90s. And earlier in July, Alaska saw its highest temperatures since record-keeping began, with residents of Anchorage enduring a Floridian 90-degree afternoon.

July also saw the area covered by polar sea ice shrink to record lows in both the Arctic and Antarctic regions, according to NOAA. In the Arctic, there was almost 20 percent less ice than normal, or what used to be normal.

Much of the damage this administration is doing can, and I believe will, be repaired after Trump is gone. But we will never get back the precious time he is squandering on climate change. If he retires to Mar-a-Lago, he’d better be able to swim. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/if-trump-retires-to-mar-a-lago-he-better-know-how-to-swim/2019/08/15/569d196e-bf8e-11e9-a5c6-1e74f7ec4a93_story.html

4. Paul Waldman: Donald Trump is terrified, and he wants you to be, too

President Trump is gripped by fear.

That is the message coming through from his public statements, his recent policy decisions, and reporting from inside the White House that paints a picture of a president increasingly rattled and irrational, striking out wildly as he searches for an argument that will frighten Americans enough to reelect him.

Let’s take a tour around the news today:

Trump told his fervid supporters at a rally Thursday that if he is not reelected, the economy will crash. “You have no choice but to vote for me because your 401(k)’s down the tubes. Everything is going to be down the tubes. So whether you love me or hate me, you’ve got to vote for me.”

Amid growing signs of a coming economic downturn, he is reportedly experiencing a combination of denial and rage. “Trump has a somewhat conspiratorial view, telling some confidants that he distrusts statistics he sees reported in the news media and that he suspects many economists and other forecasters are presenting biased data to thwart his reelection,” The Post reports. But he has also “told aides and allies that [Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell] would be a scapegoat if the economy goes south.”

In the most bizarre bit of news, Trump reportedly has expressed interest in buying Greenland, a suggestion that should make us wonder whether he has gone completely off the deep end. His own staff seems to be wondering too: “The presidential request has bewildered aides, some of whom continue to believe it isn’t serious, but Trump has mentioned it for weeks.” Perhaps if they stall him for a while, he won’t order them to blow up the moon and build him a time machine.

In all this, it’s the economic news that really has Trump sweating. As any sensible observer understands, presidents get more credit than they deserve when the economy does well and more blame than they deserve when it does poorly, because most of what happens in a country with about 330 million people and more than $20 trillion of economic activity is out of their control. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/16/donald-trump-is-terrified-he-wants-you-be-too/

5.  Alexandra Petri: The Emperor’s New Island, a tale of Trump buying Greenland

“We should buy Greenland," the Emperor said. “Harry Truman wanted it, and there are very few things Harry Truman wanted that I do not also want.”

“Are you sure you are not thinking of Andrew Jackson?" one of the advisers asked.

“I am always thinking of Andrew Jackson," the Emperor replied.
The advisers glanced from one to the other. They were not exceptionally skilled or wise, and their one task was to keep the Emperor from becoming upset. “If you want it,” one said, “I am sure that it can be arranged.”

“That is good,” said the Emperor. “It is right there. I am certain it must be strategically significant! And it says in the name that it is green. It contains golf courses already and might be induced to contain more. I wish to possess all the finest lands. I will spare no expense until I have Greenland, too."

“All told,” the advisers agreed, “it is an excellent plan, although there is one small matter. Denmark owns it."

“That is no great concern,” the Emperor said. “I will offer Denmark a great sum of money, and it will part with it. I am sure Denmark cannot want it very much ”

“But — why Greenland?” the advisers asked. "All we know about Greenland is that once a man went there and lied that it was green, and then it became Greenland, even though it was not.”

“Precisely,” the Emperor said. “I wish to live in such a place, where you can say such a thing and it can be so. Now it is only so when I gaze into my mirror, but if I had the island, I could give it whatever name I wished, and it would be so all the time. If I could only say that a thing was so and it could then be so, then I might know rest. Then I might truly be content."

“But it is a lie!” cried a little boy who was passing by.

The Emperor shrugged. “It has never stopped me before.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/16/emperors-new-island-tale-trump-buying-greenland/

6. Michelle Goldberg: With Trump as President, the World Is Spiraling Into Chaos

In a world spiraling towards chaos, we can begin to see the fruits of Donald Trump’s erratic, amoral and incompetent foreign policy, his systematic undermining of alliances and hollowing out of America’s diplomatic and national security architecture. Over the last two and a half years, Trump has been playing Jenga with the world order, pulling out once piece after another. For a while, things more or less held up. But now the whole structure is teetering.

To be sure, most of these crises have causes other than Trump. Even competent American administrations can’t dictate policy to other countries, particularly powerful ones like India and China. But in one flashpoint after another, the Trump administration has either failed to act appropriately, or acted in ways that have made things worse. “Almost everything they do is the wrong move,” said Susan Thornton, who until last year was the acting assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, America’s top diplomat for Asia.

Consider Trump’s role in the Kashmir crisis. In July, during a White House visit by Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, Trump offered to mediate India and Pakistan’s long-running conflict over Kashmir, even suggesting that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had asked him to do so. Modi’s government quickly denied this, and Trump’s words reportedly alarmed India, which has long resisted outside involvement in Kashmir. Two weeks later, India sent troops to lock Kashmir down, then stripped it of its autonomy.

Americans have grown used to ignoring Trump’s casual lies and verbal incontinence, but people in other countries have not. Thornton thinks the president’s comments were a “precipitating factor” in Modi’s decision to annex Kashmir. By blundering into the conflict, she suggested, Trump put the Indian prime minister on the defensive before his Hindu nationalist constituency. “He might not have had to do that,” she said of Modi’s Kashmir takeover, “but he would have had to do something. And this was the thing he was looking to do anyway.”

At the same time, Modi can be confident that Trump, unlike previous American presidents, won’t even pretend to care about democratic backsliding or human rights abuses, particularly against Muslims. “There’s a cost-benefit analysis that any political leader makes,” said Ben Rhodes, a former top Obama national security aide. “If the leader of India felt like he was going to face public criticism, potential scrutiny at the United Nations,” or damage to the bilateral relationship with the United States, “that might affect his cost-benefit analysis.” Trump’s instinctive sympathy for authoritarian leaders empowers them diplomatically.. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/16/opinion/hong-kong-kashmir-trump.html

7. Michael Luo: America’s Exclusionary Past and Present and the Judgment of History

This week, the Trump Administration announced new regulations that deny permanent legal status, or green cards, to immigrants who are likely to need government services, such as Medicaid, public housing, and food stamps. The policy, which is set to take effect in October, is expected to disproportionately penalize immigrants from Mexico, Central America, Africa, and the Caribbean; immigrants from Europe and Canada are less likely to be affected. During an interview for National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition,” Rachel Martin, one of the show’s hosts, pressed Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, to defend the policy in light of the ideals expressed in the Emma Lazarus poem “The New Colossus,” which appears on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Cuccinelli suggested a twist to the cherished sonnet. “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge,” he said. He later added that, in his opinion, the poem referred to “people coming from Europe.”

The new regulation is part of a comprehensive effort by the Trump Administration to restrict immigration, which includes steps to reduce refugee admissions, bar entry from certain Muslim-majority countries, deter asylum seekers, and apply greater scrutiny to all immigrant visa applications. Trump’s diatribes have offered an unmistakably racist backdrop to these measures. He has railed against immigrants from “shithole countries,” characterized the influx of Latinos into the United States as an “invasion,” and suggested that four congresswomen of color should “go back” to the countries “from which they came.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/americas-exclusionary-past-and-present-and-the-judgment-of-history

8. Lee Drutman: The Cork Board President

Richard Nixon may have had his enemies list, but no president has ever publicly embraced conspiracy theories quite like Donald Trump. From claiming that Barack Obama was not born in the United States to insisting that millions of people voted illegally in 2016, Trump’s rise and presidency have been filled with vague, false accusations targeting his enemies. When one drops, another follows. Trump only gave up on birtherism during the presidential campaign by preposterously declaring that it was his political opponent, Hillary Clinton, who had first raised doubts about Obama’s origins.

Trump’s taste for the conspiratorial might be a source of idle curiosity were he not the president of the United States. But he also might not be the president of the United States if his style of rambling insinuation and intimidation didn’t resonate with many voters. More than two-thirds of Republicans have consistently expressed doubts about Obama’s citizenship, making Trump’s birtherism an early campaign asset. Trump leaped to the top of primary polls on the strength of an announcement speech filled with baseless assertions, including the claim that Mexicans were sending “rapists” across the border. And now that he is president, his style is spreading, taking on a self-reinforcing logic. https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/july-august-2019/the-cork-board-president/

9. Timothy Egan: The Great Western Public Land Robbery

Imagine if the head of Philip Morris were put in charge of the American Cancer Society. Imagine he had spent his career trying to fight cancer cures, while promoting one of the world’s leading carcinogens. For good measure, he mocked the mission of his new employer and insulted the prayers of those looking for hope.

No, I’m not talking about Ken Cuccinelli, the acting chief of federal immigration services, who wants to rewrite the poem on the Statue of Liberty to say something like: Keep out, wretched masses. Only
well-off whites are welcome here.

The gallery of awful human beings, monumental incompetents, wife-beaters, frauds and outright criminals appointed to high positions in the Trump administration is large and varied. As wanted posters, they would fill an entire post office wall.

But you have to go pretty deep into the ranks of the Worst People to find someone equal to the man Donald Trump has now put in charge of your public lands — William Perry Pendley. This is another Onion headline that writes itself: Trump’s pick for public lands doesn’t believe in public lands. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/16/opinion/trump-public-lands.html

10. David Masciotra: Donald Trump and the Republican Party hate America: It's time to say it

America has collapsed into a prone position, however, where the scoundrels are so brazen in their inhumanity, so bold in their indifference to suffering, and so barbaric in their refusal to compromise for the sake of their own country that only their own language can aptly describe them.

Trump provides an example of love for country by ridiculing Atlanta as “horrible” and “crime-infested,” claiming that “no human being” would like to live in Baltimore, and maintaining that black residents of Chicago are “living in hell.”

The enlistees of the Trump cult at his bizarre gatherings applaud, cheer and laugh when their high priest derides American cities, and disparages the millions of their compatriots who reside within them.

It does not require the discerning eye of Sherlock Holmes to notice that the geographic objects of Trump’s hatred are always metropolitan areas with high percentages of black inhabitants. If the far right were sincere in their concerns about urban decay, they would use their political power to provide assistance, in the form of targeted public policy, to poor neighborhoods. Needless to say, every Trump budget proposal has recommended the reduction of funding for social welfare programs, from after-school activities for children to public transit subsidies for the elderly.

With Trump’s every incoherent utterance, racism is the elephant dung in the room. One might have noticed that he never disparages the poorest counties in Appalachian West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.

It would appear that Trump and his sycophantic fascists-in-training simply don’t like black Americans, and do not consider predominantly black cities as part of the “real America.” Shocking news, no doubt, for anyone who has spent the majority of their days in a coma, but it makes lectures on patriotism from people who so clearly hate so much of their own country particularly vomitous. https://www.salon.com/2019/08/18/donald-trump-and-the-republican-party-hate-america-its-time-to-say-it/

11. Matt Taibbi: Trump 2020: Be Very Afraid

Two and a half years into his presidency, Trump has already staked a claim to a role in history usually reserved for hereditary monarchs at the end of a line of inbreeding. Historians will list him somewhere between Vlad the Impaler and France’s Charles VI, who thought his buttocks were made of glass.

Much of America loves its Mad King, whose works are regularly on display. Russians under Ivan the Terrible used to watch dogs being hurled over the Kremlin walls when the tsar’s mood was bad. Americans have grown used to late-night insults tweeted at nuclear powers from the White House bedroom.

Royal lunacy is traditionally a secret, but in Twitter-age America it’s a shared national experience. We are all somersaulting down and out the sanity chute. The astonishing thing about Trump is that he wasn’t foisted on us by a council of Bourbons, or by succession law. We elected the man, and are poised to do it again.

History will judge us harshly for this, and will look with particular venom at Trump’s political opponents in both parties, who over the years were unable to win popularity contests against a man most people would not leave alone with a decent wristwatch, let alone their children.

Trump’s original destiny was the destruction of the Republicans as a viable entity in modern American politics. Then he ran a general election like he was trying to lose, and won. Now his legacy is the spectacular end of America’s fragile racial consensus. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/taibbi-trump-2020-be-very-afraid-872299/

12. Susan B. Glasser: Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of Trump

In the winter of 2016, Donald Trump was roaring through the primaries, and Mike Pompeo was determined to stop him. Pompeo, a little-known congressman from Wichita, helped persuade Marco Rubio to make a late stand in Kansas. Like many Republicans in Congress, Pompeo believed that Rubio had the national-security knowledge and the judgment to be President, and Trump did not. Urged on by Pompeo, Rubio’s team pulled money out of other states to gamble on winning the Kansas caucus. It was one of the few remaining contests in which Rubio still hoped to beat Trump, who, he said, was a “con artist” about to “take over the Republican Party.”

On March 5th, Trump and Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, arrived in Wichita for the caucus. Rubio left his closing argument to Pompeo, who told the crowd at the Century II arena, “I’m going to speak to you from the heart about what I believe is the best path forward for America.” An Army veteran who finished first in his class at West Point, Pompeo cited Trump’s boast that if he ordered a soldier to commit a war crime the soldier would “go do it.” As the audience booed, Pompeo warned that Trump—like Barack Obama—would be “an authoritarian President who ignored our Constitution.” American soldiers “don’t swear an allegiance to President Trump or any other President,” Pompeo declared. “They take an oath to defend our Constitution, as Kansans, as conservatives, as Republicans, as Americans. Marco Rubio will never demean our soldiers by saying that he will order them to do things that are inconsistent with our Constitution.” Listening backstage, Trump demanded to know the identity of the congressman trashing him. A few minutes later, Pompeo concluded, “It’s time to turn down the lights on the circus.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/mike-pompeo-the-secretary-of-trump

13. Eugene Robinson: Trump is melting down. Again.

Uh-oh. President Trump is in such a state of panic about his dimming reelection prospects that he’s getting his lies mixed up and occasionally blurting out the truth.

“It’s tough for Apple to pay tariffs if it’s competing with a very good company [Samsung] that’s not,” the president told reporters Sunday — flatly contradicting the ridiculous and utterly false narrative that he has spent months trying to sell. Trump apparently forgot his standard lie that China is somehow paying “billions of dollars” in tariffs, acknowledging instead that they are taxes paid by U.S. companies and, ultimately, the American consumer.

This reflects more than just the difficulty of juggling multiple lies. Evidence suggests that Trump is melting down. Again.

And for good reason.

Fears of a global recession, greatly exacerbated by Trump’s erratic and self-destructive trade policies, have sent financial markets tumbling. A sharp downturn would close off one of the principal lines of attack the president was hoping to use against his Democratic opponent. He tried it out at a rally in New Hampshire last week: “You have no choice but to vote for me,” he told the crowd, “because your 401(k)’s down the tubes, everything’s gonna be down the tubes” if he loses. “So whether you love me or hate me, you gotta vote for me.”

Fact check: No.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-melting-down-again/2019/08/19/814b65e4-c2b3-11e9-b5e4-54aa56d5b7ce_story.html

14. James Hohmann: Trump’s erratic style becomes more problematic as the economy slows

Trump’s erratic, contradictory pronouncements induce whiplash. They’re also de rigueur in this administration. This is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpism. During his first 928 days in office, Trump made more than 12,000 demonstrably false or misleading claims. Our Fact Checker has documented them in a database. (Glenn Kessler has a new piece this morning on the president’s economic claims.) There are dozens of separate examples of the president’s spokespeople – predating Gidley and Grisham – saying something adamantly, only to have the president cut their legs out from under them later in the day. Why would you take anything they or the president say at face value?

This behavior is riskier in challenging economic times. When the business cycle turns, the wherewithal of our system depends on people having as much confidence and certainty as possible. Trump and his White House flacks inspire neither feelings of confidence nor certainty. Trump’s penchant for contradicting himself and his aides, as well as changing his mind hastily, which together fuel the credibility gap, would be problematic in a financial crisis. Investors want a steady hand on the ship of state’s tiller. That’s how you prevent runs on the banks, freefalls in the stock market and freezes in business investment. The same way that prematurely lowering interest rates takes away flexibility from policymakers down the road when times get tougher, Trump depleting his reservoir of trustworthiness may come back to haunt him. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2019/08/21/daily-202-trump-s-erratic-style-becomes-more-problematic-as-the-economy-slows/5d5cc71c88e0fa7bb93a8619/

15. Chuck Todd, Mark Murray and Carrie Dann: Whiplash in the West Wing

It’s Year 3 of Donald Trump’s presidency, and his behavior in office isn’t getting better.

Instead, it’s getting worse.

On Tuesday night, the president said he was cancelling a trip to Denmark — a U.S. ally — because it wouldn’t sell Greenland to the United States. (Who else thought the Greenland story was a joke when they first saw it?)

“Denmark is a very special country with incredible people, but based on Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s comments, that she would have no interest in discussing the purchase of Greenland, I will be postponing our meeting scheduled in two weeks for another time,” Trump tweeted.

And just hours earlier, in discussing Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib being denied entry into Israel, Trump said this about American Jews: “I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”

This is no way to run a country. Or to talk about its citizens. Or to treat an American ally.

Everyone who works in Washington knows this. Staff members at the White House know this. Top officials inside the Republican Party know this.

Yet here we are. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/whiplash-west-wing-n1044741