1. John Cassidy: Trump’s Awful Middle East Policies Are Coming Back to Haunt Him

By needlessly reneging on the U.S.-Iranian nuclear deal and launching a sanctions campaign that amounts to economic warfare against Tehran, he has strengthened the Iranian hard-liners and further destabilized a region that was already in turmoil. By enabling Saudi Arabia in bombing Yemen and carrying out horrendous war crimes, he has contributed to a terrible humanitarian crisis: according to the United Nations, about 3.3 million of the Yemenis who have fled remain displaced, and another fourteen million desperately need food, medicine, and other assistance.

So far in his Presidency, Trump has largely escaped personal responsibility or political consequences for his bad and foolhardy policies. Now some of the repercussions are hitting home. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/trumps-awful-middle-east-policies-are-coming-back-to-haunt-him

2. Max Boot: The Saudi oil attacks are signs of Trump’s Mideast fiasco

Saturday’s attacks on two major Saudi oil facilities appear to represent a sharp escalation in the struggle for regional primacy between Saudi Arabia and Iran. A drone strike was said to have knocked out half of the Saudis’ daily oil production. The Houthi rebel group in Yemen assumed responsibility, but Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pinned the blame on Iran.

Every step of the way, Trump either cheered the Saudis on or looked the other way from their appalling misconduct. “I have great confidence in King Salman and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, they know exactly what they are doing,” Trump tweeted after MBS locked up dozens of wealthy Saudis without trial. Turns out the 34-year-old MBS has no more idea what he is doing than America’s 38-year-old crown prince, Jared Kushner, who has become his champion within the U.S. government.

Yet Trump keeps covering for the Saudis: He refuses to name MBS as the culprit behind Khashoggi’s murder and he has vetoed two bills to end U.S. support for the bloody war in Yemen. Most significant of all, Trump exited the Iran nuclear deal in spite of Iran’s compliance — just as his friends in Riyadh and Jerusalem urged him to.

So here we are with the Middle East tinderbox on the verge of igniting. Iran is signaling that it will break out of the fuel enrichment limits of the nuclear deal and that it will not scale back its destabilizing activities. Israel has responded by stepping up airstrikes against Iranian proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. A costly war with Iran that could drag in Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United States looms ever closer.

In recent months, Trump seemed to be having second thoughts about his misguided approach to Iran. Hence his decision to get rid of national security adviser John Bolton, an anti-Iran uber-hawk, and has signaled his openness to talks with Iran — even to easing Iran sanctions. The attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure will make it harder for Trump to compromise; if the Iranian regime was responsible, it may have just shot itself in the foot.

A sponsor of terrorism and a heinous human rights abuser, Iran deserves an outsize share of the blame for destabilizing the Middle East. But Trump has only aggravated the crisis by blindly backing his friends in Israel and Saudi Arabia. The attack on Saudi oil production is only the latest blowback — and far from the last. https://beta.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/15/mideast-is-tinderbox-trump-has-aggravated-crisis/

3. Jonathan Bernstein: Why Are Democrats in Disarray Over Impeachment?

The basic problem is that House Democrats can’t seem to agree on where their impeachment effort stands. Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler says that ‘formal impeachment proceedings’ are underway. Others, including in the House leadership, have expressed much more ambiguous views of what’s happening.

A few things are contributing to this muddle. One is a push from many party actors who basically judge everything short of impeaching President Trump as a total flop – a position that I still think doesn’t make much sense. Another is that some House Democrats in tough districts are overly cautious about taking on the president. But perhaps the biggest factor is that the Democrats have had a majority in the House for more than nine months now and have at best managed to produce a handful of memorable moments in oversight hearings on Trump’s many scandals and general lawlessness. At best. Maybe. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-12/why-are-democrats-in-disarray-over-impeaching-donald-trump

4. Susan Glasser: Trump Finally Fired John Bolton, but Does It Really Matter?

The spectacle of the Trump Presidency often overwhelms our ability to process the stakes of any individual episode. But the firing of John Bolton was not just another Washington farce in what the President himself has now started calling, as he did the other day, on Twitter, ‘the Age of Trump.’ Bolton’s exit serves as a reminder that the intensive national-security decision-making process of previous Presidents, Republican and Democrat alike, has been abandoned by Trump, subverted to the Presidential ego, and will not return for the duration of his tenure.

It’s worth remembering that, as all this played out inside the White House, the Taliban almost showed up at Camp David, in time to mark the eighteenth anniversary of 9/11. Bolton, who evidently made his vocal opposition to the idea known to the media in a way that likely hastened his firing, didn’t stop Trump from hosting them. Nor, for that matter, did Pompeo, whose State Department team has been overseeing the talks. In the end, it was only the Taliban’s decision to continue killing American soldiers while simultaneously negotiating with the United States that provided the pretext for Trump to put a stop to his own hastily conceived idea. Trump will now become the only President ever to have had four national-security advisers in three years, but he might as well consider not having one at all.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/trump-finally-fired-john-bolton-but-does-it-really-matter

5. Mark Sanford, Joe Walsh and Bill Weld: We are Trump’s Republican challengers. Canceling GOP primaries is a critical mistake.

A president always defines his or her party, and today the Republican Party has taken a wrong turn, led by a serial self-promoter who has abandoned the bedrock principles of the GOP. In the Trump era, personal responsibility, fiscal sanity and rule of law have been overtaken by a preference for alienating our allies while embracing terrorists and dictators, attacking the free press and pitting everyday Americans against one another.

No surprise, then, that the latest disgrace, courtesy of Team Trump, is an effort to eliminate any threats to the president’s political power in 2020. Republicans have long held primaries and caucuses to bring out the best our party has to offer. Our political system assumes an incumbent president will make his case in front of voters to prove that he or she deserves to be nominated for a second term. But now, the Republican parties of four states — Arizona, Kansas, Nevada and South Carolina — have canceled their nominating contests. By this design, the incumbent will be crowned winner of these states’ primary delegates. There is little confusion about who has been pushing for this outcome.

What does this say about the Republican Party? If a party stands for nothing but reelection, it indeed stands for nothing. Our next nominee must compete in the marketplace of ideas, values and leadership. Each of us believes we can best lead the party. So does the incumbent. Let us each take our case to the public. The saying “may the best man win” is a quintessential value that the Republican Party must honor if we are to command the respect of the American people. Cowards run from fights. Warriors stand and fight for what they believe. The United States respects warriors. Only the weak fear competition.

In the United States, citizens choose their leaders. The primary nomination process is the only opportunity for Republicans to have a voice in deciding who will represent our party. Let those voices be heard. https://beta.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-are-trumps-republican-challengers-canceling-gop-primaries-is-a-critical-mistake/2019/09/13/7a951c84-d665-11e9-86ac-0f250cc91758_story.html

6. How Trump may bulldoze 'America's Amazon'

In the hottest Alaskan summer on record, amid countless signs of a climate in crisis, a camera phone captured a Republican fundraiser on Kenai Peninsula.

Judging from the laughs and smiles, you'd never know that they are a few dozen miles from the Swan Lake Fire, now burning for over three months. But the mood is giddy because a surprise caller is on speaker -- President Trump.

Holding up the phone in one hand and swatting at late-season hornets with the other, Sen. Dan Sullivan nods and grins as Trump promises to fulfill a Republican wish list that environmentalists have been fighting for generations.

He mentions drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge way up north and building a road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge in the south. "King Cove Road! Yessir!" says Sullivan as Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker nods with vigor.

Spread across the islands and fjords of the Alaskan panhandle, Tongass is roughly the size of West Virginia, full of towering old growth spruce, cedar and hemlock, some trees twice as old as America itself. It traps and hold so much carbon, it's known as "America's Amazon."

The pristine wilderness holds a bounty of salmon, bears, wolves, eagles and whales living alongside around 70,000 people.

And in the little town of Tenakee Springs, the reaction is "one of shock and dismay."

"After all the work that we put in to keep this area roadless and keep this as pristine as we possibly can," fishing captain Tuck Harry says as he shakes his head.

"And would you characterize yourself as sort of a tree-hugging liberal?" I ask him.

He laughs. "No, not at all. Not a tree-hugging liberal at all," he says, looking across a mirror-flat Tenakee Inlet at hillsides once scarred by clear-cuts.

"When I go down and talk to some of my oldest friends of 35 years, they can see what's happened. They can see the degradation of the streams down there. That's not what we want to have happen here," fishing guide Tuck Harry says.

"So to the governor and the president, this is what I'm saying: Do not do this to us.” https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/13/politics/alaska-trump-tongass-forest-weir-wxc/index.html

7. Robert Reich: Trump is seriously, frighteningly unstable – the world is in danger

In retrospect, what’s most disturbing about “Sharpiegate” isn’t Trump’s clumsy effort to doctor a National Weather Service map or even his brazen move to get the same agency to lie on his behalf.

It’s how utterly petty his motive was. We’ve had presidents trying to cover up a sexual liaison with an intern and a botched burglary, but never have we had one who went to such lengths to cover up an inaccurate weather forecast. Alabama being hit by a hurricane? Friends, this is not rational behavior.

Trump also cancelled a meeting with the Taliban at Camp David. The meeting was to have been secret. It was scheduled for the week of the anniversary of 9/11. He cancelled it by tweet.

Does any of this strike you as even remotely rational?

Before that, Trump cancelled a state visit to Denmark because Denmark wouldn’t sell Greenland to the US. Hello? Greenland wasn’t for sale. The US no longer buys populated countries. The state visit had been planned for months.

He has repeatedly told senior officials to explore using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes hitting the US. He believes video games cause mass shootings. He thinks climate change is no big deal.

No president has ever been sent packing. Nixon resigned because he saw it coming. Trump would sooner start a civil war

He says trade wars are “good and easy to win”. He insists it’s Chinese rather than US consumers who pay his tariffs. He “orders” American firms to stop doing business in China.

He calls the chairman of the Federal Reserve an “enemy.” He retweets a comedian’s sick suggestion that the Clintons were responsible for the suicide of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

I think we have to face the truth that no one seems to want to admit. This is no longer a case of excessive narcissism or grandiosity. We’re not simply dealing with an unusually large ego.

The president of the United States is seriously, frighteningly, dangerously unstable. And he’s getting worse by the day. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/15/donald-trump-nuts-impeachment-25th-amendment-2020-election

8. Greg Sargent: Get ready for a spectacular display of Trump’s corruption

At a rally in New Mexico on Monday night, President Trump ridiculed the idea that Democrats might impeach him based on the special counsel’s findings. He claimed the investigation was run by “18 Trump haters,” but that “after two years, they found nothing.”

In so doing, Trump suggested that the investigation was deeply corrupt while simultaneously claiming it totally exonerated him — two big lies in one.

Yet even as Trump lied to his rallygoers’ faces, we learned that the White House counsel has ordered two top Trump advisers to defy subpoenas for testimony to the Judiciary Committee, which is considering articles of impeachment against Trump, while sharply limiting a third former adviser’s testimony to the panel.

Which raises a question: If the case against Trump’s corruption were so weak, then why would Trump and the White House have to go to such extraordinary lengths to stonewall Congress’ ability to exercise its most basic and fundamental oversight authority? https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/17/get-ready-spectacular-display-trumps-corruption/

9. Katrina vanden Heuvel: Democrats, don’t be afraid to go big in 2020

Democrats can no longer take their “blue wall” in the upper Midwest for granted; that much is clear. But winning back the states that Trump turned red should not come at the expense of the party’s efforts to expand the electoral map, compete for new voters and build a more diverse coalition nationally. If it does, Democrats are likely to regret it even if they pull off a victory in the presidential race.

Narrowing the playing field to a few swing states could severely undermine Democrats’ efforts to win back the Senate. The potential success of the next president’s domestic agenda depends on control of the upper chamber, where Republicans currently hold 53 seats. With legitimate pickup opportunities in Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia (where two seats are up for grabs), Democrats need to energize voters in places that are widely considered less winnable and therefore less important to the outcome of the presidential race than the Rust Belt. Fiercely competing for those states’ electoral votes could help generate the enthusiasm Democrats need to swing the Senate and advance progressive goals.

The consequences could be similarly massive further down the ballot. That includes not only House elections, in which Democrats have a chance to expand the majority they won in 2018 but also state and local races that, despite their importance, analysis of the electoral map tends to ignore.

Nobody, of course, is suggesting that Democrats should not fight hard to win back the states they lost in 2016. But “going big,” as Abrams puts it, actually improves Democrats’ chances of defeating Trump by creating more possible paths to victory. It also reflects a fundamental understanding that the party’s future depends on its ability to reach new voters and build progressive power in places where it does not currently exist. To win in the long run, Democrats need to compete everywhere today. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/17/democrats-dont-be-afraid-go-big/

10. James Hohman: Ignore the circus. Look at what Trump is doing to the environment, immigrants and health care.

It’s so easy to get distracted by political theatrics, but it’s so important not to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Tectonic changes in public policy under the Trump administration will have a vastly greater impact on the lives of everyday Americans than anything he tweets or any stunt his former campaign manager pulls on Capitol Hill. A flurry of mostly under-the-radar stories over the past 24 hours put in stark relief why it’s more important to pay attention to what the president and his appointees do than what they say.

A few examples of Trump's latest moves:
... plans to formally revoke California's long-standing right to set stricter air pollution standards for cars and light trucks
... bulldozers and excavators rush to install Trump's border barrier could damage or destroy up to 22 archaeological sites within Arizona's Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument
... set up tent courts for virtual asylum hearings.
... increase fees nine-fold for immigrants appealing deportations
... fired the general counsel for DHS

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2019/09/18/daily-202-ignore-the-circus-look-at-what-trump-is-doing-to-the-environment-immigrants-and-health-care/5d81aa3688e0fa7bb93a8bfb/