1. John Stoehr: Donald Trump's 'Gothic' Speech

After watching last night two hours of Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech, the word “gothic” keep ringing in my ears. It wouldn’t stop. His address was a perversion of morality, an inversion of common sense and a glorification of pettiness and barbarism.

For the benefit of racist white people, Trump said he was good for black people. He took credit for Barack Obama’s successes while blaming Obama for his failures. He said he was fighting for inclusion, democracy and justice even as he undoes them. He said children should be free even as he allows them to be caged. He warned white voters not to trust Democrats. They will take your Social Security and Medicare before giving it to “criminal aliens” bent on murdering you and destroying the United States.

On and on it went. It was a nationally televised gaslighting session aiming to dislodge our trust in reality, in ourselves and in democracy. It was punctuated only by cynical and cheap sugar highs (“made for TV moments”) in the form of a scholarship for a young boy, a medal for Rush Limbaugh and a surprise appearance for a military wife missing her husband. https://stoehr.substack.com/p/donald-trumps-gothic-speech

2. Jonathan Chait: Trump Cites Sole Triumph: Rebranding Obama’s Economy As His Own

Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address was organized around one main lie: “If we hadn’t reversed failed economic policies of the previous administration, the world would not be witnessing this great economic success.” Almost everything the president said flowed from that premise. And yet it is obviously, almost indisputably false.

He shrewdly reversed his rhetorical posture, having previously disparaged it as a wasteland of hopelessness, and immediately boasted of the prosperity his election had ushered in. Public confidence in the current state of the economy surged within days of the election, driven entirely by Republicans, who now had permission to admit Barack Obama’s socialist debt spree had not, in fact, turned the United States into a basket case. The rapidity of the turnaround shows how little relationship it had to any policy accomplishment.

The truth is Trump’s economy is about as good overall as the one Obama left him. The main difference is that he has borrowed a lot more money, and he and his wealthy friends are skimming a lot more off the top. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/trump-cites-sole-triumph-rebranding-obamas-economy-as-his.html

3. Gabriel Sherman: “It’s Payback Time”: With Acquittal Certain, Trump Plots Revenge On, Impeachment Enemies

With Senate Republicans on track to acquit Donald Trump on Wednesday, Washington is bracing for what an unshackled Trump does next. Republicans briefed on Trump’s thinking believe that the president is out for revenge against his adversaries. “It’s payback time,” a prominent Republican told me last week.

“He has an enemies list that is growing by the day,” another source said. Names that came up in my conversations with Republicans included Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, Mitt Romney, and John Bolton. “Trump’s playbook is simple: go after people who crossed him during impeachment.”

Several sources said Bolton is at the top of the list. Trump’s relationship with Bolton was badly damaged by the time Bolton left the White House in September. Trump has since blamed his former national security adviser for leaking details of his forthcoming memoir that nearly derailed the impeachment trial by pressuring Republicans to call witnesses. In the book Bolton reportedly alleges Trump told him directly that Ukraine aid was tied to Ukraine announcing investigations into the Bidens. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/02/trump-plots-revenge-on-bolton-impeachment-enemies

4. Susan B. Glasser: Alan Dershowitz For The Defense: L’état, C’est Trump

An hour into the Senate trial of Donald John Trump on Wednesday, the emeritus Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz came to the floor to answer a question from a former Harvard law student, Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas. In theory, it was a question that went to the heart of the impeachment case against Trump, about the President’s imposition of a quid pro quo on military aid to Ukraine and whether his motivations mattered. Dershowitz had something larger and more profound to say, however: Donald Trump has the power to do just about anything he wants to do, and there’s nothing that the U.S. Senate can or should do about it.

For more than a week, House managers prosecuting the impeachment case against Trump have argued that the Senate’s failure to convict him would make Trump an unaccountable leader; in effect, a dictator or a king. When Dershowitz spoke, it was as if he completely agreed with them. Two days earlier, Dershowitz had told senators that Presidential “abuse of power” should not be considered an impeachable offense under the Constitution. On Wednesday, he took that further—much further. “If a President does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment,” he argued. Dershowitz was offering Trump—and all future Presidents—a free pass. His argument seemed unbelievable: as long as the President thinks his reëlection will benefit the country, he can do anything in pursuit of it without fear of impeachment. Really?

Trump has already said that he considers himself empowered by Article II of the Constitution “to do whatever I want.” Video of this extraordinary moment has been played, repeatedly, by House managers in the trial. They clearly saw it as a damning statement made by a power-grabbing President—and then the President’s counsel, in effect, endorsed Trump’s power grab on the floor of the Senate. So long as Trump believes himself to be acting in the national interest, Dershowitz said, he can do whatever he wants. If the past three years have taught us anything, it is that Trump is a President who is comfortable conflating his own interest with the national interest. L’état, c’est Trump. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/alan-dershowitz-for-the-defense-letat-cest-trump

5. Robin Wright: Trump Unveils The “Giveaway Of The Century” On Middle East Peace

Three years after he said that peace in the Middle East was “not as difficult as people have thought,”  Donald Trump unveiled a lopsided plan that gives Israel much of what it has long sought and imposes daunting requirements that the Palestinians must meet before negotiations can even begin. The President described his plan, orchestrated by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as “the last opportunity” for a Palestinian state. Yet it fails to address many of the problems that led to the collapse of earlier peace initiatives. The plan calls for a two-state solution, but largely in name only. It grants Israel’s long-standing demands on settlements and borders, security, Jerusalem, and refugees. Israel will have the right to annex parts of the West Bank that it now occupies, significantly reducing and further dividing Palestinian territory. It gets control of Jerusalem as its “undivided” capital. And it will assume security control over the entire West Bank, the Jordan River Valley, and Jerusalem. The Palestinians will be left with a proto-state that is physically divided, economically challenged, and possibly not viable as a modern country. Trump’s plan also lacks diplomatic energy—with no formal mechanism to get the two sides together—or any sense of urgency, since it offers a vague four-year window for the Palestinians to complete a long list of preconditions just to talk with Israel.

The conflict between Israel and the Arabs—now in its seventy-second year—is one of the world’s longest. The Trump plan will probably let it rumble on for another four years, with ominous implications for all countries in the volatile Middle East—and, quite possibly, to the benefit of no one. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/trump-unveils-the-giveaway-of-the-century-on-middle-east-peace

6. Maureen Dowd: Trump, Unrepentant and Unleashed

The Republican Party has now lost whatever control they could exert over this president, any oversight they could have. It’s gone. The state of the union is there is no union. How can there be, when one side is petrified of their Godzilla?”

Senator Chris Murphy, the Connecticut Democrat, dismissed Republicans as “a cult of personality” around Trump.

“This trial in so many ways crystallized the completely diametrically opposed threats that Democrats and Republicans see to the country,” Murphy told The Times’s Nicholas Fandos. “We perceive Donald Trump and his corruption to be an existential threat to the country. They perceive the deep state and the liberal media to be an existential threat to the country.

“That dichotomy, that contrast, has been growing over the last three years, but this trial really crystallized that difference. We were just speaking different languages, fundamentally different languages when it came to what this trial was about. They thought it was about the deep state and the media conspiracy. We thought it was about the president’s crimes.”

As with so many other pivotal moments in modern history, Republicans wanted to win, not look for the truth. And history, God help us, is written by the winners. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/01/opinion/sunday/trump-impeachment-trial-witnesses.html

7. Jonathan Chait: The Republican Cover-up Will Backfire. The House Can Keep Investigating Trump.

Toward the end, the impeachment trial’s strategic purpose narrowed into an obsessive quest to produce evidence. Democrats have defined victory not as removal, but as winning a procedural vote to allow more testimony, especially by John Bolton. The House managers have designed their arguments not to reinforce Trump’s guilt but to underscore the need for more testimony. They seem to have given little attention to the question of whether such a victory would actually serve their larger strategic purposes at all. Republicans may have succeeded in blocking all new evidence and driving toward the rapid conclusion they seek, bu the tactical victory may well become a strategic defeat.

If the several days that have passed since the Bolton revelation have proved anything, it is just how uninterested Republicans are in holding Trump to account for his misconduct. Initially, even Trump’s staunchest supporters conceded that pressuring Ukraine to investigate Trump’s rivals would be, if true, unacceptable. (Lindsey Graham: “very disturbing”; Steve Doocy: “off-the-rails-wrong.”) As evidence of guilt accumulated, their denial that this unacceptable conduct took place narrowed to a tiny, highly specific claim: No witness testified that Trump personally ordered them to carry out a quid pro quo. Bolton is the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle.

It is probably for this reason that Republicans have fallen back to a quasi-legal argument offered by Alan Dershowitz: Even if true, abuse of power is not an impeachable offense. While Dershowitz’s reasoning is ahistorical, legally absurd, and opens the door to aspiring strongmen, it signals the party’s determination to acquit Trump regardless of the facts. Democrats hoped to persuade four Republicans to allow new evidence, and thus to extend the trial for perhaps a few weeks, prove Trump’s culpability even more thoroughly than they have. But this would only proceed to a partisan vote to acquit. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/senate-impeachment-trial-evidence-bolton-cover-up-trump-ukraine.html

8. John Cassidy: New Reports Show That Trump’s Economic Promises Were Empty

The core of Donald Trump’s platform is that his policies have produced what he touts as “The Greatest Economy in American History!” The truth is very different. By enacting a huge tax cut, in late 2017, that was heavily slanted toward corporations and the rich, Trump and the Republicans gave the economy a temporary boost—in 2018, it grew at an annual rate of 2.9 per cent—that has now faded.

In the fourth quarter of last year, G.D.P.—the broadest measure of activity in the economy—expanded at an annual rate of 2.1 per cent, the new report from the Commerce Department showed. Taking 2019 as a whole, G.D.P. grew at 2.3 per cent. These growth rates are nowhere near the four-per-cent growth that Trump promised in 2016. Instead, they are in line with the average growth rate since 2000, which is 2.2 per cent. And this ho-hum outcome has only been achieved at a tremendous cost. The federal government is now running an enormous budget deficit and accumulating vast amounts of new debt, which will burden taxpayers for decades to come. After three years of Trump’s Presidency, in fact, the United States is starting to look like one of his highly indebted business ventures.

This year, the new report from the C.B.O. says, the deficit will be about a trillion dollars. Ten years from now, it will be roughly $1.3 trillion. Numbers like these are so big that they are hard to take in. The way economists make sense of them is by comparing the dollar amount to the level of G.D.P., much like a family might compare its mortgage to its income. If you do this, you can see just how out of whack with history the Trump Presidency really is.

Just last week, I pointed out that the Democratic nominee, whoever it is, will need to debunk Trump’s claims about the economy. These latest economic reports provide plenty of material to work with. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/new-reports-show-that-trumps-economic-promises-were-empty

9. Chris Coons: Trump’s expanded travel ban is a grave foreign policy mistake

President Trump and his administration often justify their national security policies by posing a false choice to the American people: that we can either keep America safe or preserve our fundamental values.

That was Trump’s core message in January 2017 when he banned travel to the United States by people from seven Muslim-majority countries, and it’s the message we heard today — three years later — when the president announced that he’s expanding the ban to immigrants from six more countries: Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania.

The truth, though, is that this policy does not make us safer; in fact, it does the opposite. It does not help us fight terrorism, combat extremism or secure democracy around the world. It has senselessly separated thousands of U.S. citizens from their families. It reinforces Trump’s message that we should fear refugees and our immigrant neighbors, and it fuels already growing division and intolerance here at home.

The United States is strongest when we are a welcoming country capable of attracting talented people from all over the world. We’re safer when we do, too. That’s why dozens of national security experts oppose the current ban and why I have strongly opposed it since Trump proposed it during the 2016 campaign.

The United States has been a beacon of hope and freedom to the world for generations because we’ve built our foreign policy and immigration policies on our values, not on fear. Now is not the time to change that. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/31/trump-travel-ban-chris-coons-oped/

10. Megan McArdle: Four things Democrats need to understand about beating Trump

 Everyone has Trump on the brain. Candidates explain, at great length, why they are the one whom Trump fears most in the general election. At question time, the audience offers likely Trump attacks and demands a detailed plan to counter them.

Despite having listened to those questions, they might not understand the biggest problems they face:

The economy isn’t as bad as Democrats think. When the 2019 gross domestic product growth figures came out, the media treatment was generally glum, and rank-and-file Democrats seemed almost cheery. Why, growth was only 2.3 percent for the year! Darn those trade wars! Surely now voters will realize what a disaster Trump is. Reality check: In 2011, GDP grew only 1.6 percent; it grew at 2.2 percent in 2012. Yet President Barack Obama still got reelected — with an unemployment rate of 7.7 percent, instead of the 3.5 percent we now enjoy.

Trump is a good public speaker. Trump, by contrast, sounds like … well, actually, he sounds a lot closer to how most people talk than a “good” public speaker. He speaks in short sentences and uses a small vocabulary. He makes up names for stuff to aid listener memory. He repeats himself. He digresses at random.

Voters aren’t paying much attention to impeachment. It obviously isn’t even a top issue for the attendees at Democratic campaign events — which means it’s definitely not going to move independents or Republicans. Maybe it should. But “should” doesn’t win elections.

The Democratic field is extraordinarily weak. Consider that FiveThirtyEight currently considers Joe Biden the most likely nominee — even though he dropped out of previous primaries before Michael Dukakis and Hillary Clinton, two of the least charismatic candidates in living memory. Both ultimately lost general elections.

Don’t get me wrong: I think that any of them would be a better president than Trump. But for all the reasons I’ve listed above, I’m less than sure that any of them will get the chance to prove me right. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/31/what-democrats-need-understand-beat-trump/

11. Bess Levin: Mike Bloomberg Loving What This Iowa Caucus Debacle Has Done For His Candidacy

“This is the best-case scenario.”

Since jumping into the Democratic primary last November, Mike Bloomberg has spent more than $300 million of his own money in what many have viewed as a vain attempt to win the nomination. Among those people thinking the three-time mayor has little-to-no shot? Up until recently, apparently Bloomberg himself! According to the Washington Post, in the wake of Monday night’s Iowa disaster, the billionaire “authorized his advisers Tuesday morning to double television spending for his own presidential campaign, as his advisers have become more bullish on his odds of success.” In other words, the more than a quarter of a billion dollars spent up to this point was primarily for the purposes of making Donald Trump’s life hell and proverbial shits and giggles. But now that Daddy Warbucks actually thinks he has a chance, he’s cranking the money spigot to full-blast. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/02/mike-bloomberg-iowa-caucus-disaster

12. Paul Waldman: The time has come to kill the Iowa caucuses

The best thing about the 2020 Iowa caucuses is that it may be the end of the Iowa caucuses.

In fact, if we take the long view, we should be celebrating the debacle that occurred Monday night. As a longtime venomous critic of the Iowa caucuses, I couldn’t be happier.

To catch you up: Someone thought it was a good idea to have workers at each caucus report in their results on a brand-new app that hadn’t been tested, with the predictable result that the whole thing melted down. Then they couldn’t get through on the phone either, and now we still don’t know who won.

Even the idea of winning was made more complex this year, as the state party decided to report three sets of results: the initial vote totals, the final vote totals (after supporters of candidates who failed to reach 15 percent in each caucus were reallocated) and the winners of delegates to the state convention, which is the “real” result.

About that 15 percent rule: If you tuned in to cable news and watched correspondents running around middle school gyms explaining that one candidate’s supporters didn’t reach the threshold of viability and so had to find another candidate, you probably asked, “What’s the point of that?”

It’s a good question. Why on earth should a candidate who gets 14 percent of the vote in a given precinct get zero votes when the results are tabulated? How is that supposed to be democratic? https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/04/time-has-come-kill-iowa-caucus/

13. Bess Levin: Report: Trump Is Melting Down Over Bloomberg Ads About His Weight

As you may have heard, former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg recently got into the Democratic primary with one goal: to troll the shit out of Donald Trump. Oh sure, he’d like to be the nominee, but more than that, Bloomberg has been spending hundreds of millions of his own money to drive the president insane. And thus far, it appears to be working! Last month, the New York Times reported that despite Bloomberg’s relatively low polling, he’s managed to get under Trump’s skin much more than, say, Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, and Trump is apparently “pricked” by Bloomberg’s massive ad buys and anti-DJT messaging, including spots targeting his treatment of military leaders. And if the events of the last 24 hours are any indication, it’s been $200 million (and counting!) well spent.

Fueled by an alleged, though totally believable, anger over Bloomberg ads targeting his “girth,” Trump spent Sunday attacking “Mini Mike” on Twitter, declaring the three-time mayor “fake news,” a loser, out to get Sanders, and, most damningly, short:

Not content to let the president spin his wheels, Bloomberg’s campaign shot back via his national press secretary, Julie Wood, who said in a statement: “The president is lying. He is a pathological liar who lies about everything: his fake hair, his obesity, and his spray-on tan.” Later that day, Bloomberg himself responded: “I will stand on my accomplishments of what I’ve done to bring this country together and get things done. I’ve been doing it for a long time. I stand twice as tall as he does on the stage, on the stage that matters.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/02/donald-trump-mike-bloomberg-feud

14. Sarah Ellison: From the Archive: The Enablers

Blame for the ongoing destruction wrought by the Trump administration will always attach to Donald Trump. But Trump cannot help himself. He is a pathogen, doing what pathogens do, and as surprised as anyone to have found himself replicating in the nation’s bloodstream. Equal blame will attach to a small group of experienced and seemingly rational politicians who knew exactly what Trump was like; who had cause to loathe and distrust him; who understood firsthand that he knew nothing about government and did not care to know anything; who could see clearly that he was dangerous, brutal, and corrupt; and who nonetheless decided, after occasional protests, to help him achieve and hold power. These are people who have been repeatedly belittled and mocked by Trump, who have sometimes been forced to voice their disgust at his words and actions, and who—for reasons that range from ambition and fear to denial and moral blindness—not only have declined to stand in his way but continue to prop him up. One or more of them may ultimately decide to defy him, but nothing will absolve them of the damage already done.

The Trump administration may last for months or it may last for years. There will be crises and catastrophes. A corrosion of values and spirit has already set in. The outside world pulls away. John Boehner, the Republican former Speaker of the House, now retired and fortified with tobacco and Merlot, has called Trump “a disaster.” Donald Trump will suffer his own grim fate in the eyes of historians, but it will come with an asterisk: he is a profoundly damaged human being with no true understanding of his capacities, his emotions, his ignorance, his job, or the fundamentals of human decency.

His enablers will get no asterisk. They will be treated with the special contempt reserved for those who acted knowingly and cravenly, with eyes wide open. https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2017/8/the-enablers