1.  Chris Cillizza: Donald Trump is acting like a fifth-grade bully

There was also some sense -- among his supporters and even those who didn't vote for him and couldn't even imagine him becoming president -- that once the gravity of the office hit him, he might change. There was some thinking -- occasionally stoked by Trump himself -- that he was only acting like this because it was how he had to win the campaign. Once he was elected president, everything would change.

"I will be so presidential, you will be so bored," Trump promised in April 2016. "You'll say, 'Can't he have a little more energy?'"

Trump didn't change. If anything, he has become more of a name-calling bully than he was in the campaign. (Side bar: How many 71-year-old men fundamentally change their personality? If you answered "none," you got it right!)

Including his ongoing fight with Corker, Trump has insulted or personally impugned well more than a dozen Republican senators. That's stunning given that Republicans only have a two-seat majority in the Senate and, as the health care fight showed, have almost no margin for error on anything but the most benign pieces of legislation.

That's a very bad thing -- whether you are a Democrat, a Republican or don't care about politics at all.  http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/10/politics/trump-corker-liddle/index.html

2. Michael Gerson: Republicans, it’s time to panic

GOP denial about Trump has generally taken Ryan’s form. The president may be eccentric and divisive, but Republicans need to keep their heads down and think of tax reform. This assumes that the main challenge is to avoid distraction from essential tasks.”

But the real problem has always been Trump’s fundamental unfitness for high office. It is not Trump’s indiscipline and lack of leadership, which make carrying a legislative agenda forward nearly impossible. It is not his vulgarity and smallness, which have been the equivalent of spray-painting graffiti on the Washington Monument. It is not his nearly complete ignorance of policy and history, which condemns him to live in the eternal present of his own immediate desires.”

No, Corker has given public permission to raise the most serious questions: Is Trump psychologically and morally equipped to be president? And could his unfitness cause permanent damage to the country?  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-its-time-to-panic/2017/10/12/5775d558-af76-11e7-be94-fabb0f1e9ffb_story.html

3. Amy Davidson Sorkin: Donald Trump’s Terrible Executive Order on Health Care

The most Trumpian aspect of Trump's executive order designed to push people into what are known, accurately, as “junk” insurance plans is that it makes life easier for con men. It does so by allowing the sale of insurance plans that do not meet basic standards through “associations,” which might be made up of employers, interest groups, or just entrepreneurial opportunists—the exact rules still have to be written. Obamacare plans offer certain defined essential services, such as preventive and obstetric care and hospitalization, that an insurance plan has to cover, and cover substantially, to call itself an insurance plan. In other words, the A.C.A. made it harder for employers or insurers to claim that they were covering people if, when it counted, they really weren’t. (Such a bait and switch was common in the pre-Obamacare days; many people who went bankrupt after a medical emergency actually had insurance plans.) The executive order would create a sham market alongside the real one. One concern is that young, healthy people will be drawn to association plans because they don’t “need” comprehensive coverage, and are making what they believe is a rational calculation, albeit one that will drive up premiums in the Obamacare market, by making that pool of people, on average, sicker and older. (Paul Ryan, who has complained that it is unfair that healthy people help pay for sick people—the premise of insurance—is an association-plan enthusiast.)

In presenting the plan at the executive-order signing, Trump did his best impression of a flim-flam man—that is to say, he was entirely in character. The guests included members of his Administration, some small-business representatives, and Senator Rand Paul, who believed that the Senate’s last attempt to break Obamacare was not radical enough. Trump didn’t have many details other than the promise that a “nightmare” was over, that millions of people would be “very happy,” and that the whole thing would produce better plans at no expense whatsoever to the government. “That’s not too bad, right?” he said. https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson-sorkin/donald-trumps-terrible-executive-order-on-health-care

4.  Sarah Kliff: Trump’s acting like Obamacare is just politics. It’s people’s lives.

The White House announced late Thursday morning it would cut off a key Obamacare subsidy that makes copayments and deductibles more affordable for low-income Americans. Trump pulled the trigger on the plan late Thursday night.

There is no question that this new policy is lose-lose-lose for key stakeholders with no upside:

It will raise Obamacare premiums by an estimated 20 percent in 2018, as health plans have to charge more to make up the lost funds. By 2020, premiums would increase 25 percent due to this change.

Pulling the plug actually increases the national deficit. As those insurance plans make double-digit rate increases, the government will have to spend billions more on the other subsidies that 10 million Americans receive to purchase that coverage.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this move will ultimately cost the government $194 billion over the next decade.

The number of uninsured Americans would rise by one million people in 2018, in the CBO’s estimate.

Insurance companies lose out, too, particularly those that assumed Trump would pay these subsidies and set their premiums accordingly. They now stand to face significant financial loses on the Obamacare marketplaces.

To recap: Trump is enacting a policy where the government spends billions more to insure fewer people.

Trump has long predicted the implosion of the Affordable Care Act. It’s now become clear he plans to use the White House to tear down his predecessor rather than to help the people who voted him into office.  https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/13/16467910/trump-obamacare-politics-aca

5. Michael Kruse: The Power of Trump’s Positive Thinking

Donald Trump is a self-help apostle. He always has tried to create his own reality by saying what he wants to be true. Where many see failure, Trump sees only success, and expresses it out loud, again and again.

“We have the votes” to pass a new health care bill, he said last month even though he and Republicans didn’t then and still don’t.

“We get an A-plus,” he said last week of his and his administration’s response to the devastating recent hurricanes as others doled out withering reviews.

“I’ve had just about the most legislation passed of any president, in a nine-month period, that’s ever served,” he said this week in an interview with Forbes, contradicting objective metrics and repeating his frequent and dubious assertion of unprecedented success throughout the first year of his first term as president.

The reality is that Trump is in a rut. His legislative agenda is floundering. His approval ratings are historically low. He’s raging privately while engaging in noisy, internecine squabbles. He’s increasingly isolated. And yet his fact-flouting declarations of positivity continue unabated. For Trump, though, these statements are not issues of right or wrong or true or false. They are something much more elemental. They are a direct result of the closest thing the stubborn, ideologically malleable celebrity businessman turned most powerful person on the planet has ever had to a devout religious faith. This is not his mother’s flinty Scottish Presbyterianism but Norman Vincent Peale’s “power of positive thinking,” the utterly American belief in self above all else and the conviction that thoughts can be causative, that basic assertion can lead to actual achievement.  http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/13/donald-trump-positive-thinking-215704

6. Dan Balz: Trump governs by disruption — and overloads all the circuits

Nine months into his first term, President Trump is perfecting a style of leadership commensurate with his campaign promise to disrupt business as usual in Washington. Call it governing by cattle prod.

It is a tactic born of frustration and dissatisfaction. Its impact has been to overload the circuits of government — from Capitol Hill to the White House to the Pentagon to the State Department and beyond. In the face of his own unhappiness, the president is trying to raise the pain level wherever he can.

The permanent campaign has long been a staple of politics in this country, the idea that running for office never stops and that decisions are shaped by what will help one candidate or another, one party or another, win the next election.

President Trump has raised this to a high and at times destructive art. He cares about ratings, praise and success. Absent demonstrable achievements, he reverts to what worked during the campaign, which is to depend on his own instincts and to touch the hot buttons that roused his voters in 2016. As president, he has never tried seriously to reach beyond that base.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-governs-by-disruption--and-overloads-all-the-circuits/2017/10/14/d28df604-b100-11e7-be94-fabb0f1e9ffb_story.html

7. Scott D. Sagan: The Korean Missile Crisis

It is time for the U.S. government to admit that it has failed to prevent North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach the United States. North Korea no longer poses a nonproliferation problem; it poses a nuclear deterrence problem. The gravest danger now is that North Korea, South Korea, and the United States will stumble into a catastrophic war that none of them wants.

The world has traveled down this perilous path before. In 1950, the Truman administration contemplated a preventive strike to keep the Soviet Union from acquiring nuclear weapons but decided that the resulting conflict would resemble World War II in scope and that containment and deterrence were better options. In the 1960s, the Kennedy administration feared that Chinese leader Mao Zedong was mentally unstable and proposed a joint strike against the nascent Chinese nuclear program to the Soviets. (Moscow rejected the idea.) Ultimately, the United States learned to live with a nuclear Russia and a nuclear China. It can now learn to live with a nuclear North Korea.

Doing so will not be risk free, however. Accidents, misperceptions, and volatile leaders could all too easily cause disaster. The Cold War offers important lessons in how to reduce these risks by practicing containment and deterrence wisely. But officials in the Pentagon and the White House face a new and unprecedented challenge: they must deter North Korean leader Kim Jong Un while also preventing U.S. President Donald Trump from bumbling into war. U.S. military leaders should make plain to their political superiors and the American public that any U.S. first strike on North Korea would result in a devastating loss of American and South Korean lives. And civilian leaders must convince Kim that the United States will not attempt to overthrow his regime unless he begins a war. If the U.S. civilian and military leaderships perform these tasks well, the same approach that prevented nuclear catastrophe during the Cold War can deter Pyongyang until the day that communist North Korea, like the Soviet Union before it, collapses under its own weight.  https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/north-korea/2017-09-10/korean-missile-crisis

8. Barbara Radnofsky: The Founding Fathers designed impeachment for someone exactly like Donald Trump

Their writings and debates surrounding the creation of the Constitution make clear that the framers feared a certain kind of character coming to power and usurping the republican ideal of their new nation. Having just defeated a tyrant — “Mad” King George III of England — they carefully crafted rules to remove such a character: impeachment. In the process, they revealed precisely the kind of corrupt, venal, inattentive and impulsive character they were worried about.

The very embodiment of what the Founding Fathers feared is now residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Again and again, they anticipated attributes and behaviors that President Trump exhibits on an all-too-regular basis. By describing “High Crimes and Misdemeanors,” the grounds for impeachment, as any act that poses a significant threat to society — either through incompetence or other misdeeds — the framers made it clear that an official does not have to commit a crime to be subject to impeachment. Instead, they made impeachment a political process, understanding that the true threat to the republic was not criminality but unfitness, that a president who violated the country’s norms and values was as much a threat as one who broke its laws.

But prescient as they were, what the framers may not have anticipated was someone who epitomized so many of their fears at once — someone like Donald Trump — being elected to the presidency in the first place. They hoped that the electoral college system would prevent that from happening. But in the event that didn’t happen, they added an additional fail-safe: impeachment. It’s now up to Congress to fulfill the framers’ vision.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/10/15/the-founding-fathers-designed-impeachment-for-someone-exactly-like-donald-trump/

9. Charles M. Blow: Trump, Chieftain of Spite

It must be cold and miserable standing in the shadow of someone greater and smarter, more loved and more admired. It must be infuriating to have risen on the wings of your derision of that person’s every decision, and even his very existence, and yet not be able to measure up — in either stratagem or efficacy — when you sit where that person once sat.

This is the existence of Donald Trump in the wake of President Barack Obama. Trump can’t hold a candle to Obama, so he’s taking a tiki torch to Obama’s legacy. Trump can’t get his bad ideas through Congress, but he can use the power of the presidency to sabotage or even sink Obama’s signature deeds.

In fact, if there is a defining feature of Trump as “president,” it is that he is in all ways the anti-Obama — not only on policy but also on matters of propriety and polish. While Obama was erudite, Trump is ignorant. Obama was civil, Trump is churlish. Obama was tactful, Trump is tacky.

There is a thing present in Obama and absent from Trump that no amount of money or power can alter: a sense of elegant intellectualism and taste.

Trump isn’t governing with a vision, he’s governing out of spite. Obama’s effectiveness highlights Trump’s ineptitude, and this incenses Trump.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/15/opinion/columnists/trump-spite-obama-legacy.html

10. Evan Osnos: Trump’s Irrational Hatred of the Iran Deal

Long before Donald Trump was mocking “Little Rocket Man” in North Korea, or taunting “fools” in the Republican foreign-policy establishment, he expressed special contempt for one international agreement: the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which blocked Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. After the Obama Administration signed the agreement, in 2015, then candidate Trump called it “the worst deal ever,” and vowed to “renegotiate” it once he was in office. In fact, the landmark agreement capitalized on a rare consensus. After years of hesitating, China and Russia joined the other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, along with Germany and the European Union, in supporting American pressure on Iran to change course. At a negotiating session in Vienna, the coalition was so large that, for appearance’s sake, Iran stocked its side of the table with additional staffers. Jake Sullivan, one of the U.S. negotiators, recalled, “It was the whole world versus Iran.”

The deal did not change all of Iran’s bad behavior: Tehran continued to test conventional ballistic missiles, to foment violence in Iraq and Syria, and to unjustly detain Americans. But the effect on its nuclear program was unquestionable. In return for the removal of sanctions imposed by the United States and other nations, which had crippled its economy, Iran agreed to shut down facilities and to give broad access to inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. Even fierce critics of Tehran, including U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis and Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime Minister, have held the agreement to be vital to international security. Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, and Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s foreign-affairs chief, were widely mentioned as contenders for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Decertifying the Iran agreement would fracture the United States’ credibility among its original partners in the deal. It would open a rift with China just as it is weighing whether to join the United States again, this time in negotiating with North Korea. Global Times, a state-backed Chinese newspaper, has asked, “If America would overturn a pact it made to the rest of the world, solely because of a transition in government, how can it retain the reputation of a great power?”  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/23/trumps-irrational-hatred-of-the-iran-deal

11. Michael Scherer: For each scene of his presidency, Trump casts a villain (or two, or three …)

Most days bring another round, often at dawn, like plot points in a 24-7 miniseries. In just the past few weeks, Trump has started, without any clear provocation, fights with football players who kneel during the national anthem, department stores that declare “happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” and late-night television hosts for their “unfunny and repetitive material.”

Then there are the individual targets: Clinton, of course, but also “Liddle” Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, North Korea’s “Little Rocket Man” Kim Jong Un, ESPN anchor Jemele Hill, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), and a shifting array of reporters, newspapers and networks he labels as the “fake news.”

Although the targets often appear tangential, if not contradictory, to his governing priorities, both the president and his senior aides see them as central to his political strategy. In each instance, the combat allows Trump to underline for his core supporters the populist promise of his election: to challenge the power of political elites and those who have unfairly benefited from their “politically correct” vision.

It’s a tactic he has employed for years — defining himself against a negative space, as a tough truth teller who opposes others. In 1990, he condemned his New York real estate rival, Leona Helmsley, as a “truly evil human being,” and decades later he spent years nursing a viciously personal feud with Rosie O’Donnell, a daytime television host, largely through social media. His rise to politics was built upon sometimes shocking denunciations and insults.

Without a fresh foe to rail against in real time, his political aides have observed, Trump can struggle, uncertain of his next move and unable to frame the political debate.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/for-each-scene-of-his-presidency-trump-casts-a-villain-or-two-or-three-/2017/10/16/d29d2330-b287-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html

12. Michelle Goldberg: Save the Phony Weinstein Outrage, Republicans

Say this for Donald Trump: When it comes to sex, he’s less of a hypocrite than Harvey Weinstein. Until Weinstein’s abrupt downfall amid proliferating accusations of sexual assault and harassment, he posed as a backer of women’s rights. He made films with substantive female leads (82-year-old Judi Dench joked that she’d tattooed his name on her butt in gratitude), donated money to politicians supporting feminist policies and contributed to endow a chair at Rutgers University honoring Gloria Steinem. He even attended the Women’s March at Sundance. Yet privately, he appears to have been a sexist ogre, using his power to exploit and humiliate women. After the truth about his conduct was widely revealed, he was cast out of his professional community and rendered a pariah.

Trump is more consistent. He is a pig in public as well as behind closed doors. In 1992, New York Magazine reported that he said the best way to deal with women is to treat them like excrement, though he used a more vulgar term. He has followed his own advice. His first wife, Ivana Trump, accused him of raping her in a fit of rage. (She later denied that the events she’d recounted were rape “in a literal or criminal sense,” but stuck to the underlying story.) Trump reportedly pressured his second wife, Marla Maples, to pose for Playboy. He owned beauty pageants and, by his own admission, would barge into changing rooms to ogle the naked contestants. The makeup artist Jill Harth said that he tried to rape her. Multiple women have accused him of groping and sexual harassment. Those charges appear credible in light of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump boasted of grabbing women by their genitals. After the truth about his conduct was widely revealed, he was elected president of the United States.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/opinion/columnists/weinstein-sexual-harassment-republicans.html

13. Paul Krugman: The G.O.P. Is No Party for Honest Men

So the question about this plan isn’t whether it favors the wealthy — it does, to an outrageous extent. The questions we should be asking instead are why Republicans are pushing this so hard, and how they can hope to get away with it.

The Republicans have been lying to the middle-class since the days of Regan. They know of no other way to govern. Now we have the real lair...

Bear in mind that there is essentially no popular constituency demanding tax cuts for the rich. By a large margin, the general public wants to see taxes on corporations and the wealthy go up, not down; even Republicans are divided, with only a modest margin in favor of cuts.

Yet tax cuts for the rich are the overriding objective of the modern G.O.P. They were the principal motivation for the attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, since that would also mean repealing the high-income taxes that pay for it; from Republicans’ point of view, depriving millions of health care was just a minor side benefit. And now tax cuts for the wealthy are pretty much the only thing left on the G.O.P.’s legislative agenda.

In fact, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the hope for tax cuts is the main thing keeping congressional Republicans in line behind Donald Trump. They know he’s unfit for office, and many worry about his mental stability. But they’ll back him as long as they think he might get those tax cuts through.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/opinion/columnists/republicans-taxes-honesty.html

14. Jack Shafer: Trump’s Fake Jihad Against the Fake News

Ever since Democrats started complaining about the rise of genuinely fake fake news after the election, Trump hasn’t stopped throwing around the term. In December, he began accusing all the top media news outlets—except Fox News Channel, that is—of promulgating fake news. In this revised formulation, fake news was anything Trump didn’t like, anything that made him look bad, anything that threatened him personally or politically, or anything that contradicted him. Unflattering leaks from the intelligence community got the fake news stamp, as did reports connecting him or his campaign to Russia. Critical stories about Ivanka and Donald Jr. fell into the category, too. Anonymously sourced tales about White House chaos? FAKE! Campaign aides taking credit for his electoral victory? Puerto Rico rescue efforts a shambles? Fake, fake. Whenever he failed to find a specific news story to misdiagnose, he can always be relied upon to issue his rat-a-tat condemnation of CNN as fake, fake, fake.

The trouble with Trump’s blanket condemnation of fake news is that it has a few holes in it. It’s not fake news if he likes it or if it delivers findings that damage somebody else. When he needs to make a point, he thinks nothing of favorably citing pieces from news outlets he has repeatedly nailed as “fake.” For instance, when asked earlier this month about the Harvey Weinstein sex harassment scandal—a subject area in which Trump has more than a little exposure—he came close to endorsing the New York Times investigation. “I’ve known Harvey Weinstein for a long time. I’m not at all surprised to see it,” he said to reporters while leaving the White House for a fundraiser. How about similar groping charges against him? Trump backpedaled with his “That’s locker room, that’s locker room” excuse. Donald Jr. was in lockstep with his dad, validating the Times story in a series of tweets.

Like demagogues before him, Trump relies on the ignorance of the crowd, which makes exciting their passions and short-circuiting their powers of reason a simple task. Like a comedian’s catch phrase, the charge of “fake news” brings down the house every time Trump utters it, making irrelevant the fact that his views on fake news are fake—very fake.  http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/17/trumps-jihad-fake-news-215722