1. Carl Bildt: Trump’s decision to blow up the Iran deal is a massive attack on Europe

Few ideas are as holy in President Trump’s international liturgy as the concept of national sovereignty. His National Security Strategy speaks of a “beautiful vision—a world of strong, sovereign, and independent nations,” and the Trump himself is keen to repeat some form of “sovereignty” as often as he can. Sovereignty to Trump seems to mean that the United States can do whatever it wants without taking the interests of others into account. It’s the ultimate embodiment of “America first.” In reality, other actors have the right to their sovereignty, which is what the National Security Strategy proudly proclaims.

But Trump’s decision to try to blow up the nuclear deal with Iran is, in its execution, nothing less than a massive assault on the sovereignty of others — most notably that of Europe. The president has now directed maximum economic sanctions to be applied. But with few exceptions (Boeing is the one of significance), these sanctions don’t really affect American business or activities. They have already, in one way or the other, been blocked from business with Iran.

Instead, the brunt of the sanctions offensive directly affects business in Europe. For instance, in a tweet, the new U.S. ambassador to Germany was quick to give orders to German companies on how they should behave. This is nothing less than a massive assault on the sovereignty of European states and the European Union. They are deprived of their right to decide on their policies and actions by brutal dictates from a foreign — and allegedly friendly — country. This is utterly unacceptable from a European point of view, as well as a violation of the preaching of Trump himself. It relegates Europe to just abiding by and implementing policies with which it profoundly disagrees. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/05/12/trumps-decision-to-blow-up-the-iran-deal-is-a-massive-attack-on-europe/

2. Paul Waldman: Trump drinks from the swamp

The truth is that Trump has indeed changed the culture of corruption in Washington, in two main ways.

First, he has made it significantly worse. There have been no alterations to the usual paths for the wealthy and powerful to exercise influence; instead, Trump has greased the wheels. If you're in the administration and you aren't someone who used to represent the corporations you're now regulating (and you'll return to after your stint in "public" service), then at the very least you're ideologically devoted to the principle of enhancing corporate power.

To take one vivid example of these two types: You're no doubt familiar with how scandal-plagued EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has held on to his job because Trump is pleased with his aggressive action to remove any impediment to corporations polluting as much as they please. What you may not know is that if Trump does fire him, the person who would take over is his deputy Andrew Wheeler. Wheeler's job before he became second-in-command at the agency responsible for protecting the environment? He was a coal lobbyist.

The second way Trump has changed the culture of corruption has been to make sure that he and his are the ones wetting their beaks. I'm reminded of something Adam Serwer wrote after former Washington mayor Marion Barry died: While he was widely (and correctly) viewed as a deeply corrupt figure, "Barry didn't bring corruption to D.C. He changed who benefited from it." Likewise, Trump has enabled his people to benefit from the corruption that already existed. Some of the hottest influence-peddlers in town are now not those who understand Capitol Hill or the way agencies operate, but those who have a personal connection to Trump.

And that's where all these payments to Cohen seem to come in. It's clear that there's more to this story, but it seems obvious that one way or another, these companies — and that mysterious Russian oligarch — thought they could get what they wanted from the government by going through Cohen. And they had plenty of money to spend.

All that being said, while you might not believe it, in many ways Washington is less corrupt than ever. While there's an occasional bribery scandal, the old-fashioned kind of corruption — the briefcase full of cash exchanged for a key vote — is far less common now than it was in earlier days. Disclosure laws, a larger news media sniffing around, and electronic record-keeping have combined to make it more difficult to put a congressman in your pocket the way a railroad baron used to do.

But as the saying goes, the real scandal is what's legal. Or at least that was the real scandal, until Donald Trump came to town. http://theweek.com/articles/772336/trump-drinks-from-swamp

3. Maureen Dowd: From Ice Cube to Black Cube

We have crossed into a surreal dimension where we are limited only by our imaginations. The American identity and American values are fungible at the moment. The guardrails are off.

Our brains are so scrambled that it’s starting to make sense that none of it makes sense.

For example, it’s dissonant that cybercop Melania strides into the Rose Garden to introduce her “Be Best” plan to help at-risk children at the same time her cyberbully husband unleashes his cruel Be Worst plot to slash the popular children’s health benefits program.

But in the Trump era, sure, why not? Everything is plausible.

Consider how the president lavished praise on Gina Haspel, the evidence-destroying torture queen, tweeting, “There is nobody even close to run the CIA!” At the same time, White House aide Kelly Sadler shrugged off qualms about Haspel from torture survivor John McCain, blithely noting, “He’s dying anyway.”

White House most foul. Everything is plausible — even the jackbooted Dick Cheney rearing his poisonous head to call for the reboot of Torture Inc.

Everything is plausible — even Rudy Giuliani continuing his punch-drunk performance by referring to Avenatti as a “pimp.”

Finally, we learned from “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on Tuesday that Woody Harrelson and Mike Pence were pals in college.

Now, that’s implausible. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/12/opinion/sunday/donald-trump-presidency-maureen-dowd.html

4. Bess Levin: Is China Straight-up Bribing Donald Trump?

When Donald Trump announced on Sunday night that he was riding to the rescue of Chinese electronics maker ZTE, more than a few people, including those who work for him, were shocked. For one thing, Trump has long-claimed that China “is raping us” through unfair trade practices, and stealing American jobs. For another, the U.S. and Beijing are currently locked in tense negotiations to avoid a protracted trade war, thanks to the president’s decision to slap Chinese imports with a vast array of tariffs. For yet another, just a month prior, Trump’s own Commerce Department had banned shipments of American technology to ZTE for seven years, saying that the company violated American sanctions against countries including Iran and North Korea and lied about punishing employees for doing so. As a result, ZTE halted major operating activities—an outcome you’d have expected to please the president, considering he’d just imposed aluminum and steel tariffs on “national security” grounds, and ZTE was threatening national security. So it was a bit odd to see Trump pull a complete 180, suddenly insisting that the company and its 75,000 Chinese jobs must be saved, though to be fair, tweeting “Look, China just pumped $500 million into a Trump Organization project so I had to do them a solid” might not have gone over so well.

Oh, that’s right—according to multiple news outlets, the president’s total about-face on China came just 72 hours after the developer of a theme park outside Jakarta, known as MNC Lido City, with whom the Trump Organization has an agreement to license its name, signed a deal to receive $500 million in Chinese government loans, in addition to another $500 million from government banks. According to Agence France-Presse, the Trump Organization will rake in almost $3.7 million in licensing and consulting payments from Lido, along with another project in Bali. The company will also earn management fees, and be “eligible for additional unspecified incentives.” (Upon entering the White House, Trump turned over day-to-day management of the family business to his sons Donny Jr. and Eric, but chose not to divest himself financially from the company.)

Robert Weissman, president of the advocacy group Public Citizen, called the turn of events “stunning.” “They perpetually find new things to surprise me,” he said. “The idea of the president intervening in a law-enforcement matter to satisfy a foreign government is extraordinary. And it’s extraordinary because it doesn’t happen. Opening that door threatens the integrity of all corporate law enforcement. The Chinese government seems to have figured out a way to manipulate President Trump,” Weissman added. “It’s exactly why this anti-bribery clause of the Constitution is common sense.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/05/is-china-straight-up-bribing-donald-trump-zte

5. Rick Wilson: Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump: This Will End Badly. And Probably Soon.

Like a bloated, portly fake billionaire rolling off a hooker after a hot 45 seconds of passionate sex, Donald Trump’s ardor for Rudy Giuliani seems to have cooled.

If the White House leaks are any barometer, it sounds more and more as if Donald wants Rudy to get his money off the nightstand and the hell out of his room at the No-Tell-Motel. This is what happens when you work for Trump, and Rudy is old enough, crafty enough, and knows Trump well enough to have known better.

Trump’s hiring of my old boss is a triumph of today’s Trump-right media bubble, where nothing matters but the coverage on Fox & Friends, Hannity, Sinclair stations’ nightly Two Minutes of Hate, and on the nut-site constellation that comprises conservative “news” sites. Trump didn’t hire Rudy for his skills as a litigator, or as a warrior in the high-speed low-drag social-media world of today. He was hired to break shit and make loud noises, and he’s damn good at it. Unfortunately for Rudy, that probably won’t be enough to save him from the Trump curse.

Trump has been mostly unable to hire and retain top-flight litigators because he destroys everyone around him. His record of stacking former staffers like cordwood as they are either fired, humiliated, shamed, permanently scarred, forced to cut off a finger by the Yakuza, morally compromised, or moved into the Witness Protection Program will go down in presidential history. It’s no secret that he’s a spectacular liar at all times and on all subjects, leaving his legal team constantly wary they have a client who combines a stubborn streak and a self-destructive nature with an endless capacity to lie to them about his marital, financial, and political lies.

However, like so many others who should know better, Rudy staked his legacy on one last waltz with Trump, and may soon learn why no one else wanted the job.

Trump follows a clear pattern with his employees, hangers-on, camp followers, and six-degrees-of-separation edge cases who trail him like chunks of matter kicked off some fecal comet hurling across the political firmament. The pattern is abundantly evident at this point, and it’s one Rudy should realize applies to everyone in Trump’s sphere of crapulous influence. https://www.thedailybeast.com/rudy-giuliani-and-donald-trump-this-will-end-badly-and-probably-soon

6. Masha Gessen: Taking Children from Their Parents Is a Form of State Terror

Hostage-taking is an instrument of terror. Capturing family members, especially children, is a tried-and-true instrument of totalitarian terror. Memoirs of Stalinist terror are full of stories of strong men and women disintegrating when their loved ones are threatened: this is the moment when a person will confess to anything. The single most searing literary document of Stalinist terror is “Requiem,” a cycle of poems written by Anna Akhmatova while her son, Lev Gumilev, was in prison. But, in the official Soviet imagination, it was the Nazis who tortured adults by torturing children. In “Seventeen Moments of Spring,” a fantastically popular miniseries about a Soviet spy in Nazi Germany, a German officer carries a newborn out into the cold of winter in an effort to compel a confession out of his mother, who is forced to listen to her baby cry.

A few hours after Putin took his fourth oath of office, in Moscow, Attorney General Jeff Sessions addressed a law-enforcement conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. He pledged to separate families that are detained crossing the Mexico-U.S. border. “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you,” Sessions said. The Attorney General did not appear to be unveiling a new policy so much as amplifying a practice that has been adopted by the Trump Administration, which has been separating parents who are in immigration detention from their children.

The practice, and Sessions’s speech, are explicitly intended as messages to parents who may consider seeking asylum in the United States. The American government has unleashed terror on immigrants, and in doing so has naturally reached for the most effective tools. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/taking-children-from-their-parents-is-a-form-of-state-terror

7. George F. Will: Trump is no longer the worst person in government

The oleaginous Mike Pence, with his talent for toadyism and appetite for obsequiousness, could, Trump knew, become America’s most repulsive public figure. And Pence, who has reached this pinnacle by dethroning his benefactor, is augmenting the public stock of useful knowledge. Because his is the authentic voice of today’s lickspittle Republican Party, he clarifies this year’s elections: Vote Republican to ratify groveling as governing.

Last June, a Trump Cabinet meeting featured testimonials offered to Dear Leader by his forelock-tugging colleagues. His chief of staff, Reince Priebus, caught the spirit of the worship service by thanking Trump for the “blessing” of being allowed to serve him. The hosannas poured forth from around the table, unredeemed by even a scintilla of insincerity. Priebus was soon deprived of his blessing, as was Tom Price. Before Price’s ecstasy of public service was truncated because of his incontinent enthusiasm for charter flights, he was the secretary of health and human services who at the Cabinet meeting said, “I can’t thank you enough for the privileges you’ve given me.” The vice president chimed in but saved his best riff for a December Cabinet meeting when, as The Post’s Aaron Blake calculated, Pence praised Trump once every 12 seconds for three minutes: “I’m deeply humbled. . . . ” Judging by the number of times Pence announces himself “humbled,” he might seem proud of his humility, but that is impossible because he is conspicuously devout and pride is a sin.

There will be negligible legislating by the next Congress, so ballots cast this November will be most important as validations or repudiations of the harmonizing voices of Trump, Pence, Arpaio and the like. Trump is what he is, a floundering, inarticulate jumble of gnawing insecurities and not-at-all compensating vanities, which is pathetic. Pence is what he has chosen to be, which is horrifying. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-no-longer-the-worst-person-in-government/2018/05/09/10e59eba-52f1-11e8-a551-5b648abe29ef_story.html

8. NY Times Editorial: Trump’s Shadowy Money Trail

This week it has become clearer that questions about Mr. Trump’s finances, and those about whether his campaign cooperated with Russian hacking of the 2016 election, need to be asked in the same breath.

The golf writer James Dodson said last year that during a visit to a Trump golf course in 2013, Eric told him of his family company’s financing: “Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”

Around the time Donald Trump said goodbye to American banks, he said hello to Mr. Cohen, a lawyer whose résumé, one might have expected, would have screamed, “Stay away!” to a legitimate businessman.

From at least 1999, according to a recent Times report, Mr. Cohen had dealings with Russian mob figures and began finding business deals in, and with people from, Russia and the former Soviet Union. By 2007, Mr. Cohen was working for the Trump Organization as a fixer and deal maker.

Even during the 2016 campaign, Mr. Cohen pursued plans for a Trump Tower in Moscow, coordinating with Felix Sater, a felon with ties to Russian mobsters who had worked on other deals with Mr. Trump.

At the moment, Americans are lucky to have Robert Mueller, the special counsel, examining all of this. Mr. Mueller was appointed after Mr. Trump fired the F.B.I. director James Comey because of his frustrations with the Russia investigation. Mr. Mueller has been looking at Mr. Cohen’s affairs and records from the Trump Organization. And one question that Mr. Trump’s lawyers say Mr. Mueller wants to ask the president is what communication did he have with Michael D. Cohen, Felix Sater and others, including foreign nationals, about Russian real estate developments during the campaign.

Russians and cash — they’ve been a part of Mr. Trump’s life for years, and now they’re elements of the investigation into whether his campaign conspired with Moscow to corrupt American democracy. Mr. Trump’s affection toward the Russian president has led many to ask, “What does Putin have on Trump?” Maybe the ledgers will tell. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/opinion/trumps-shadowy-money-trail.html

9. Jonah Shepp: Trump’s Iran-Deal Exit Has Raised the Risk of War, Even Faster Than Expected

One quality Netanyahu has in common with Trump’s national-security adviser John Bolton is a fervent desire for war with Iran, with the explicit goal of overthrowing the Islamic Republic. Neither man believes that Iran can be trusted, reasoned with, or welcomed into the international community under any circumstances as long as it remains under clerical rule, and both openly thought the Obama administration was stupid to think otherwise. Netanyahu has been threatening war with Iran continually for nearly a decade; Bolton has been advocating war for at least as long. Both men have egged Trump on to cancel the deal.

Critics of the Trump administration’s approach to Iran like to complain that it offers no alternative to the deal. This is, strictly speaking, incorrect. High-ranking officials within this administration have been crystal clear for some time about the alternative they have in mind: namely, war and regime change. Now, the neoconservative Washington Free Beacon reports that the administration is working on plans to foment revolution in Iran after it reimposes crippling sanctions, suggesting that it is looking for ways to achieve regime change without violating Trump’s isolationist campaign promises by starting another foreign military adventure.

For armchair generals like Bolton who dream of Tehran in flames, an Israel-Iran war might have some appeal as another way to achieve their objective without the pesky need of selling the American people on yet another open-ended war. In that case, however, the question the administration must answer is this: What’s their plan for if and when Netanyahu gets in over his head and says he needs our help? http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/iran-deal-exit-raised-risk-of-war-even-faster-than-expected.html

10. Jonathan Chait: Trump Has Now Broken Every One of His Economic Populist Promises

Donald Trump ran for president as an economic populist. This fact has been largely forgotten, buried by the flurry of bizarre and outrageous actions, and activists on both sides have had little reason to bring it up. Conservatives have pushed the administration to forget its unorthodox gestures and follow Paul Ryan’s lead. Progressives have emphasized the racist and sexist nature of Trump’s appeal. But Trump’s ability to distance himself from his party’s economic brand formed a decisive element of his appeal. Voters actually saw Trump as more moderate than any Republican presidential candidate since 1972. And he has violated every one of his promises.

Trump repeatedly promised universal health care. Republicans as a whole had insisted since 2009 that they would replace Obamacare with something better, that did not deny anybody anything, but rather than fuzzing up this promise, like most of his party, Trump leaned heavily and explicitly into the benefits. “Everybody’s gotta be covered. This is an un-Republican thing for me to say … I am going to take care of everybody, I don’t care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody’s going to be taken care of, much better than they’re taken care of now … The government’s going to pay for it.” Instead, he never proposed an alternative to Obamacare, never compromised with Democrats on the issue, and instead sabotaged the existing program. After falling for several years, the uninsured rate is climbing again.

Trump promised to do a lot of un-Republican things to give resources and influence to blue-collar Americans, which would have threatened his party’s power brokers. Many of these promises were feasible if Trump actually wanted to follow through on them. Instead, the only promises he has kept are the ones that put money in the pockets of Trump and his cronies. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/trump-broken-every-populist-campaign-promise-prescription-drugs-infrastructure.html

11. Juan Williams: Trump's dangerous lies on Iran

Martin Luther King Jr. once said there is nothing in the world more dangerous than sincere ignorance.

Well, sincere ignorance had a banner day last week when President Trump unilaterally withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal.

A CNN/ORC poll taken shortly before Trump’s decision found that a majority of Americans — 63 percent — wanted the U.S. to stay in the deal. But get this: 62 percent of Americans believed Iran had violated its terms. 

To me, the second result is the more alarming.

That poll is proof of sincere ignorance of the deal on the part of nearly two-thirds of Americans. They are under the spell of Trump’s distortions.

The president’s partisan attacks on the Democrats who negotiated the deal — President Obama and former Secretary of State John Kerry — have left people with the sense that this is nothing more than one more political fight among many.

Trump has turned national security into just another political act in the Trump reality show. http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/387468-juan-williams-trumps-dangerous-lies-on-iran

12. DER SPIEGEL Editorial: Time for Europe to Join the Resistance

Trump's renown is rooted in American hero myths. Trump says that women like Carla Bruni lust after him, something that women like Carla Bruni vehemently deny. Trump says he is exorbitantly rich, yet Trump ran himself into the ground with his casinos to the point that he was 295 million dollars in debt in 1990. He was bailed out by the banks and by his father. The greatest myth, though, has to do with Trump's alleged negotiating expertise. This too is nonsense. Trump was never proficient in the art of the deal. As a businessman, he paid far too much for substandard properties and has shown no patience as a politician. He isn't curious. His preparation is nonexistent. Strategy and tactics are both foreign to him. Trump is only proficient in destruction. And that's what he does.

He backed out of the Paris climate agreement while promising a "better deal for America." But nothing came of the promise, neither a plan nor meaningful talks. In Trump's Washington, the only thing that matters is dismantling the legacy of his predecessor, Barack Obama. Trump also promised to improve Obama's health care plan, but the details are complex and bothersome. So Trump destroyed Obamacare and has done nothing to replace it.

Now, he is playing the same game on the world stage with the Iran nuclear deal. Trump refers to it as "the worst deal ever," which is why he has now pulled the U.S. out of it. The negotiations that resulted in the deal in 2015 were a masterpiece of international diplomacy, but there are no plans in place to launch new talks.

Trump wants to bring the Iran regime to its knees with sanctions, but domestic political considerations in Tehran make it unlikely that the country will buckle. Leaders who demonstrate weakness in Iran are discarded. It seems more likely that they will close ranks. Iran-supported groups like Hezbollah are likely to pour fuel on the fire of conflicts in Yemen or Lebanon - as close as possible to Israel's border. Iran presumably won't pursue the path of extreme escalation, since such a path wouldn't be beneficial, but it will likely cease allowing observers into the country, stop providing information on its uranium enrichment activities. It will seek to conceal what the West would like to know.

And what are the benefits of Washington's radical move? There are none. Just chaos where there was once order. Just American capriciousness after decades of stability.

Clever resistance is necessary, as sad and absurd as that may sound. Resistance against America. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/editorial-trump-deals-painful-blow-to-trans-atlantic-ties-a-1207260.html

13. Tom Eblen: 'Tricked by the devil.' They backed Trump. Now, his foreign labor cuts may ruin them.

Eddie Devine voted for President Donald Trump because he thought he would be good for American business. Now, he says, the Trump administration’s restrictions on seasonal foreign labor may put him out of business.

“I feel like I’ve been tricked by the devil,” said Devine, owner of Harrodsburg-based Devine Creations Landscaping. “I feel so stupid.”

Devine said he believed Trump’s America-first promises. But cutting off a good supply of seasonal foreign labor when Americans won’t take those jobs is only hurting American business owners and the U.S. workers they employ, he said.

These workers aren’t immigrants, and there is no path to U.S. citizenship. When their seasonal work is done, they return home. That’s why Devine thinks the Trump administration’s stifling of guest-worker programs has more to do with racism than economics. “I think there’s a war on brown people,” he said.

But what makes him most angry is that Trump’s properties in Florida and New York have used 144 H-2B workers since 2016. “I want to know why it’s OK for him to get his workers, but supporters like me don’t get theirs,” Devine said. http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/tom-eblen/article210676214.html

14. Simon Rosenberg: Trump's Iran deal withdrawal is an arrogant rejection of the post-war system America built

President Trump’s decision this week to walk away from the Iran Deal is significant for many reasons — but perhaps most importantly, it is yet another sign that America has lost faith in, and is no longer leading, the global system it imagined and built after World War II.

In a very short time Trump has turned the American presidency from the leader of the post-WWII order into its leading troll. His decision to walk from the Iran Deal this week, a deal negotiated over many years with our closest allies, on a critical post-WWII order achievement — nuclear non-proliferation — was another powerful sign of Trump’s arrogant disdain for well-intentioned efforts by the nations of the world to prevent a return of the savagery of previous eras.

What remains most remarkable about Trump’s reckless approach to the world is that it has generated almost no debate here at home. We are at the point now in the Trump presidency in which responsible leaders of both parties have a deep and clear obligation to foster a sustained debate about the path Trump has chosen. As durable and powerful and successful as the American-led post-WWII order has been, a sustained attack on it from its putative leader could eventually — and even rapidly — bring it down. And if our leaders cannot find it within themselves to debate that, then perhaps America no longer deserves the global leadership role it so richly earned for so long. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-s-iran-deal-withdrawal-arrogant-rejection-post-war-system-ncna872996