1. Jonathan Chait: Lobbyists and Tax Lawyers Can’t Believe What a Gift Republicans Have Given Them

Rather than removing political interference from the tax code, the Republicans instead set out to create more of it. The bill was designed by corporate lobbyists and Republican partisans, rewarding pro-Republican business interests and punitively targeting politically hostile ones. “It’s death to Democrats,” gloats Trump adviser Stephen Moore, with more than a touch of hyperbole. “They go after state and local taxes, which weakens public employee unions. They go after university endowments, and universities have become playpens of the left.”

Meanwhile, the bill lavishes rewards on industries friendly to the Republican majority. Oil and gas receive favorable treatment at the expense of renewable energy. Real estate — perhaps not coincidentally, the Trump family business — makes out like a bandit.

The haste with which the bills have been written and passed, combined with the unchecked influence of lobbyists, has resulted in a complex blizzard rife with loopholes. “Suddenly, there are a dozen different tax rates that apply to different businesses, in different industries, and to different investments,” Adam Looney, a former Treasury Department official, tells the New York Times. “The speed with which they’re doing this creates a level of ambiguity that will keep tax lawyers and tax professionals busy for 20 years,” adds tax lawyer Scott D. Michel. The proliferation of rates creates unlimited opportunities for gamesmanship.

Sheer haste and technical incompetence will mean that some of the financial benefits to the rich and well-lawyered will be offset by the costs of figuring out how the law even works. These quotes to Politico from Republican sources are jaw-dropping. “The more you read, the more you go, ‘Holy crap, what’s this?’” says Greg Jenner, a former top tax official in George W. Bush’s Treasury Department. “We will be dealing with unintended consequences for months to come because the bill is moving too fast.” Another Republican lobbyist says, “It’s crazy. I don’t think anyone could explain it, let alone comply with it” by the time it takes effect.

This is not a description of a compromised or watered-down effort to reform the tax code. It is a description of a bill performing the opposite function of tax reform. The bill may not be the death of democracy or mortal peril to the economic expansion. But it is, at best, a messy helicopter drop of cash on corporate America. The cleanup will take years.  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/12/lobbyists-and-tax-lawyers-giddy-over-republican-tax-giveaway.html

2. Greg Sargent: Two new reports suggest Trump has come unhinged. The truth is worse.

To date, Trump has made over 1,600 false or misleading claims as president. Routinely, the lies are demonstrably false, often laughably so. But this actually serves his ends. It is impossible to disentangle this from his constant effort to undermine the news media, seen again in today’s NBC tweet. In many cases the attacks on the media are outlandishly ridiculous, dating back to the tone-setting assertion that the media deliberately diminished his inaugural crowd sizes, even though the evidence was decisive to the contrary. Here again, the absurdity is the whole point: In both the volume and outsize defiance of his lies, Trump is asserting the power to declare the irrelevance of verifiable, contradictory facts, and with them, the legitimate institutional role of the free press, which at its best brings us within striking distance of the truth.

I don’t claim to know whether this is merely instinctual on  Trump’s part, or part of a strategy. As Trump biographer Tim O’Brien puts it, Trump constantly “tells fables to himself” and “about himself,” and has long self-consciously regarded this as “one of his great skills.” Trump has been doing it for so long that the separation between instinct and conscious technique has probably disappeared. But one thing is clear: Terms like “lying” or “delusional” don’t do justice to what we’re seeing here, and we have not yet seriously reckoned with its true nature and what it really means.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/11/29/two-new-reports-suggest-trump-has-come-unhinged-the-truth-is-worse/

3. E.J. Dionne: Who Will Challenge Trump's Enablers?

We are so inured to the chaos and the lying that characterize Trump's presidency that we see each outrage as little more than another passing episode on an ongoing cable news drama.

But events of just the last few days should remind us that the longer this president is in power, the weaker our country will become.

On Wednesday morning, the nation learned that it has a president who traffics in fascist propaganda -- and I am not using the "f" word lightly. Trump retweeted three inflammatory anti-Muslim videos of unknown accuracy put out by an ultra-right British group called Britain First.

Britain's Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May was horrified and did not mince words in a statement criticizing Trump for distributing "hateful narratives." She added that "British people overwhelmingly reject the prejudiced rhetoric of the far right, which is the antithesis of the values that this country represents: decency, tolerance and respect."

We'd like to think that the United States is also a nation of decency, tolerance and respect. We can't make this claim while Trump is president.  https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2017/11/30/who_will_challenge_trumps_enablers_135648.html

4. Jill Filipovic: The Men Who Cost Clinton the Election

Many of the male journalists who stand accused of sexual harassment were on the forefront of covering the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Matt Lauer interviewed Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump in an official “commander-in-chief forum” for NBC. He notoriously peppered and interrupted Mrs. Clinton with cold, aggressive, condescending questions hyper-focused on her emails, only to pitch softballs at Mr. Trump and treat him with gentle collegiality a half-hour later. Mark Halperin and Charlie Rose set much of the televised political discourse on the race, interviewing other pundits, opining themselves and obsessing over the electoral play-by-play. Mr. Rose, after the election, took a tone similar to Mr. Lauer’s with Mrs. Clinton — talking down to her, interrupting her, portraying her as untrustworthy. Mr. Halperin was a harsh critic of Mrs. Clinton, painting her as ruthless and corrupt, while going surprisingly easy on Mr. Trump. The reporter Glenn Thrush, currently on leave from The New York Times because of sexual harassment allegations, covered Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign when he was at Newsday and continued to write about her over the next eight years for Politico.

A pervasive theme of all of these men’s coverage of Mrs. Clinton was that she was dishonest and unlikable. These recent harassment allegations suggest that perhaps the problem wasn’t that Mrs. Clinton was untruthful or inherently hard to connect with, but that these particular men hold deep biases against women who seek power instead of sticking to acquiescent sex-object status.

The “Crooked Hillary” narratives pushed by Mr. Lauer, Mr. Halperin, and a long list of other prominent journalists and pundits indelibly shaped the election, and were themselves gendered: Hillary Clinton as a cackling witch, Hillary Clinton a woman it was easy to distrust because she was also a woman seeking power, and what kind of woman does that? Mr. Trump emphasized this caricature as part of his more broadly sexist campaign, but he didn’t invent it. Nor was he the only famous man going on television to perpetuate it — while revealing a deep disdain for women when the cameras weren’t rolling.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/opinion/matt-lauer-hillary-clinton.html

5. Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker: Trump veers past guardrails, feeling impervious to the uproar he causes

Again and again, Trump veered far past the guardrails of presidential behavior. But despite the now-routine condemnations, the president is acting emboldened, as if he were impervious to the uproar he causes.

If there are consequences for his actions, Trump does not seem to feel their burden personally. The Republican tax bill appears on track for passage, putting the president on the cusp of his first major legislative achievement. Trump himself remains the highest-profile man accused of sexual improprieties to keep his job with no repercussions.

Trump has internalized the belief that he can largely operate with impunity, people close to him said. His political base cheers him on. Fellow Republican leaders largely stand by him. His staff scrambles to explain away his misbehavior — or even to laugh it off. And the White House disciplinarian, chief of staff John F. Kelly, has said it is not his job to control the president.

For years, Trump has fired off incendiary tweets and created self-sabotaging controversies. The pattern captures the musings of a man who traffics in conspiracy theories and alternate realities and who can’t resist inserting himself into any story line at any moment.

“In an intensely polarized world, you can’t burn down the same house twice,” said Alex Castellanos, a GOP campaign consultant. “What has Donald Trump got to lose at this point?”

Castellanos added that for many voters, and especially Trump’s base, there’s an “upside” to his bellicosity. “A strong daddy bear is what a lot of voters want,” he said. “Right or wrong, at least he’s fighting for us.”  https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-veers-past-guard-rails-feeling-impervious-to-the-uproar-he-causes/2017/11/29/f96244d2-d523-11e7-b62d-d9345ced896d_story.html

6. Antony J. Blinken: How Rex Tillerson Did So Much Damage in So Little Time

It’s hard to overstate the lasting harm Mr. Tillerson’s tenure will do to America’s diplomacy. Last month, Barbara Stephenson, the head of the American Foreign Service Association, reported that “our leadership ranks are being depleted at a dizzying speed.” Since January, the department has lost 60 percent of its career ambassadors — the equivalent of four-star generals — more than 40 percent of its three-star-equivalent career ministers and about 14 percent of its two-star-equivalent minister counselors. “Were the U.S. military to face such a decapitation of its leadership ranks,” Ms. Stephenson noted in a message to her members, “I would expect a public outcry.” And the number of people applying to take the Foreign Service entrance exam has dropped by more than 50 percent.

The world does not organize itself. In the absence of an engaged, diplomatically energized America, others will set the agenda, shape the rules and dominate international institutions — and probably not in ways that advance our interests or values. America’s ability to mobilize others in the pursuit of common objectives will atrophy. And a whole host of challenges that require coordinated, collective responses — epidemics that defy frontiers, hackers who breach firewalls, terrorists who form global networks, aggressors who ignore borders, rogue actors who amass intercontinental arsenals, and an ocean that rises and a planet that warms — will go unmet.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/opinion/tillerson-damage-trump-replacement.html

7. Timothy Egan: In the End, Reality Will Win

Whoo, boy. The truth just keeps getting whacked by this gangster White House. The how-low-can-he-go bar keeps falling. Is there no bottom? Not for some time, friends, so hold on.

We learned this week that President Trump does not believe his own words on videotape — words that he had earlier acknowledged, in explaining how a star can get away with the type of predatory behavior that has caused everyone but him to get fired.

We learned that he endorsed a website that says the pope uses magic to mastermind world events. This, after he gave a thumbs up to a media outlet that claims NASA runs a child labor colony on Mars.

We learned that he still believes three million fraudulent voters caused him to lose the popular vote, that no president has accomplished so much in 10 months as he, that Barack Obama is not a citizen of the United States.

We may soon learn that Trump won a gold medal in synchronized swimming. This is likely to come from a public servant being paid tax dollars to defend a dog’s breakfast of fantasy. That would be Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House spokeswoman, who crossed a big Rubicon this week.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/opinion/in-the-end-reality-will-win.html

8. Andrew Sullivan: America Is Trapped in Trump’s Delusional World

This past week was, in some ways, the most potent distillation of the Trump era we have yet encountered. This is not because any single incident is worse than any previous one over the past year. It’s because the last few days have brought all of them together in a new, concentrated way — a super-storm, as it were, of liberal democratic destruction.”

We have deranged tweeting; truly surreal lies; mindless GOP tribalism; evangelicals making excuses for the molestation of minors; further assaults on the free press; an unprecedented attack on the most reliable Atlantic ally; the demonization of personal enemies; stupendous tribal hypocrisy with respect to sexual abuse; the White House’s endorsement of a foreign neo-fascist hate group; the vengeful hanging out to dry of a Cabinet member; and the attempt to pass a catastrophic omnibus piece of legislation in one mad, blind rush in order to get a ‘win.’ And all in a few days!”

Give such a man the power and trappings of the most powerful office on earth, give him a few months, and such delusions will get worse. Sane men and women are corrupted by the wielding of power; a psychologically disturbed figure from the get-go will degenerate into deeper and deeper forms of madness.  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/12/andrew-sullivan-america-is-trapped-in-trumps-delusions.html

9. Jonah Shepp: Trump’s Twitter Feed Is a Foreign-Policy-Crisis Machine

It can’t be good for anyone’s nerves to work at the State Department right now. From one day to the next, you can’t be sure whether your boss is about to get fired, whether your job still exists, or whether (as was the case on Wednesday) you’ll come into work to learn that the president wrote something on Twitter that would make people in other countries very angry at the United States.

The retweet heard round the world was of highly dubious videos circulated by the leader of the U.K.’s virulently Islamophobic Britain First party, purporting to show Muslims committing acts of violence. President Donald Trump’s decision to share a sloppy, racist propaganda message with his 44 million Twitter followers (and not for the first time) led to condemnationsfrom British politicians and pundits of all stripes, with some calling for Trump to be banned from the U.K. — or, even more helpfully, from Twitter.

As a matter of basic decency and online etiquette, to say nothing of presidential leadership, it is generally unwise to endorse and distribute the recruiting material of foreign neo-Nazis, especially when Europe’s new, young, anti-immigrant right wing is making disconcerting gains. As a matter of U.S. foreign policy, it’s outright malpractice.

Someone ought to tell that to the president. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/12/trumps-twitter-feed-is-a-foreign-policy-crisis-machine.html