1. Jonathan Chait: Corruption, Not Russia, Is Trump’s Greatest Political Liability

Trump’s vision of an economy run by tight circles of politically connected oligarchs has reshaped America’s standing in the world. The same effect that applies at the personal level with Trump has appeared at the level of the nation-state. Small-d democratic leaders have recoiled from the Trump administration, while autocrats have embraced him. Similarly, the president and his inner circle feel most comfortable in the company of the wealthy and corrupt. They have built closer ties to Russia, the Gulf States, and China, all of which are ruled by oligarchs who recognize in Trump a like-minded soul. They share the belief that — to revise a favorite Trump saying — if you don’t steal, you don’t have a country.

An easy fatalism about all this corruption has gained wide circulation. It was known about Trump all along and his voters signed up for it anyway, so nothing matters, right? In fact, Trump’s behavior runs directly contrary to his most important promises. “Draining the swamp” was not supposed to mean simply kicking out Democrats and competent public officials. He made speeches promising good-government reforms: a ban on lobbying by former members of Congress and stricter rules on what lobbying meant; campaign-finance reform to prevent foreign companies from raising money for American candidates; a ban on lobbying by former senior government officials on behalf of foreign governments.

Not only has Trump made no effort to raise ethical standards but he and his administration have flamboyantly violated the existing guidelines. Lobbyists are seeded in every agency, “regulating” their former employers and designing rules that favor bosses over employees and business owners over consumers. The problem of former government officials’ being paid by foreign governments has been superseded by the far larger problem of current government officials’ being paid by foreign governments. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/corruption-is-trumps-greatest-political-liability.html

2. Abigail Tracy: Tump Is Just A Moron”: How The President Played Himself On North Korea

In his rush to reach a disarmament agreement with North Korea, Donald Trump appears to have badly misjudged his adversary, Kim Jong Un. As multiple State Department sources have told me, U.S. demands that North Korea give up its nuclear weapons were always going to be a nonstarter for Kim. Nevertheless, Trump appeared to misinterpret Kim’s overtures, relayed via South Korean President Moon Jae-in, that he would unilaterally disarm, and was reportedly “surprised” and “angered” last week when North Korea’s chief nuclear negotiator released a statement to that effect. According to The New York Times, Trump now believes he may have made a mistake in agreeing to meet with Kim, and worries that the summit could become a political embarrassment. “It doesn’t look like they want to denuclearize at all,” one U.S. official told The Washington Post, after Trump made a frantic call to Moon. “The North’s attitude is a pretty long distance away from what it appeared to be as Moon portrayed.”

Diplomats and North Korea experts, however, say this was entirely predictable. “Kim Jong Un has not offered to give up his nuclear weapons. He has not done that. He has never said anything remotely close to that,” Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at Middlebury College, told me recently. “What he has said is that he is willing to endorse the kind of vague principle of the elimination of nuclear weapons.” But Trump, in his excitement over the prospect of a Nobel Peace Prize, inflated his expectations for the June 12 summit. As Korea expert Victor Cha noted, Kim had “not even reaffirmed the more definitive statements about denuclearization that were used by the North Koreans in the past,” during previous negotiations with Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “It all sounds good if you are not aware of what North Korea’s strategy is. North Korea in the end, they do want a peace treaty, and they do want normalization, but they want those things as a nuclear-weapon state. . . . They’re willing to part with some of their capability, but they’re certainly not willing to part with all of it.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/05/donald-trump-kim-jong-un-north-korea

3. David Faris: This is the laziest Congress in history

Has anyone seen Congress lately? If anyone has any information about the whereabouts of the congressional GOP agenda, please contact the authorities immediately. Because with Speaker Paul Ryan headed for the bliss of early retirement and President Trump doing whatever it is he does all day instead of presidenting, the odds of meaningful legislation coming out of this Congress are plummeting by the hour.

Republicans are conducting a genuinely audacious experiment in non-governance. Since the passage of their unpopular tax cut in December, the GOP hasn't accomplished a single thing of note, and seems to be operating on the premise that anything they or their donors actually want to do will be received so poorly by voters that it might further endanger their already-vulnerable majorities in both chambers. The plan seems to be to take a knee (irony alert!), wind down the clock, and hope that the economy delivers them another two years of power.

One would think that the rolling crisis the president has been yapping about nonstop might be amenable to solutions bolder than a lone giveaway to rich people and corporations and some half-hearted, thus far unsuccessful efforts to renegotiate America's terms of trade and alliance policies. Stay with me for a second, but it's almost as if neither President Trump nor his allies ever actually believed their own apocalyptic rhetoric about the condition of the country. It was all part of the grift. http://theweek.com/articles/773757/laziest-congress-history

4. Adam Serwer: There Is Only One Trump Scandal

The myriad Trump scandals can obscure the fact that they’re all elements of one massive tale of corruption.

The sheer volume of Trump scandals can seem difficult to keep track of.

There’s the ongoing special-counsel investigation into whether the Trump campaign aided a Russian campaign to aid Trump’s candidacy and defeat his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton; there’s the associated inquiry into whether the president obstructed justice when he fired former FBI Director James Comey, whom he had asked not to investigate his former national-security adviser; there are the president’s hush-money payments to women with whom he allegedly had extramarital affairs, made through his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, and facilitated by corporate cash paid to influence the White House; there is his ongoing effort to interfere with the Russia inquiry and politicize federal law enforcement; there are the foreign governments that seem to be utilizing the president’s properties as vehicles for influencing administration policy; there’s the emerging evidence that Trump campaign officials sought aid not only from Russia, but from other foreign countries, which may have affected Trump’s foreign policy; there are the ongoing revelations of the president’s Cabinet officials’ misusing taxpayer funds; there is the accumulating evidence that administration decisions are made at the behest of private industry, in particular those in which Republican donors have significant interests.

The preceding wall of text may appear to some as an abridged list of the Trump administration’s scandals, but this is an illusion created by the perception that these are all separate affairs. Viewed as such, the various Trump scandals can seem multifarious and overpowering, and difficult to fathom.

There are not many Trump scandals. There is one Trump scandal. Singular: the corruption of the American government by the president and his associates, who are using their official power for personal and financial gain rather than for the welfare of the American people, and their attempts to shield that corruption from political consequences, public scrutiny, or legal accountability. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/05/there-is-only-one-trump-scandal/560825/

5. Barbara Slavin: Pompeo’s Mission Impossible on Iran

Since President Donald Trump rejected State Department appeals for more time to reach a supplemental understanding with the Europeans on Iran, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has tried to make a virtue out of failure.

Pompeo listed 12 demands that range from Iran ending all uranium enrichment and providing anywhere, anytime access to “all sites” within the country to stopping support for Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran’s other historic partners in the Middle East. He also demanded that Iran withdraw “all forces under Iranian command” from Syria, where Iranians and Shia militias have been fighting at the request of the Damascus government.

The demands would require that the Iranian leopard not just change its spots but transform itself into a lamb, subordinated to the wishes of the U.S. and Iran's regional rivals — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Israel.

By withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, the Trump administration has likely paved the way toward two major nuclear crises — in the Middle East and Northeast Asia — with no realistic strategy to resolve either. https://www.axios.com/pompeos-mission-impossible-on-iran-1526910087-881b0756-a68e-4c87-9fff-76df8dbd7237.html

6. Dahlia Lithwick: How to Survive Trump’s Presidency Without Losing Your Mind

This past week, journalists in America were struggling to comprehend two major stories: The first was that Donald Trump announced (via tweet) on Wednesday that any news that paints him in a negative light is, by definition, “fake news.” He went on to threaten the press credentials of any journalist who doesn’t portray him in a flattering light. This is, of course, the natural culmination of two years of attacks on the media, threats to reporters, promises to change the First Amendment press protections, and an unprecedented claim that the media itself is an “enemy of the people.” Perhaps relatedly, CBS reported Friday that every television at the Food and Drug Administration is tuned to Fox News and cannot be changed. This stuff is jarring because just two years ago, we believed such threats to the First Amendment died with Richard Nixon.

At the same time, we are all attempting to unravel a narrative in which Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s nonlawyer, created a shell corporation to pay hush money to a porn star with whom Donald Trump claims not to have had sex. That company became a funnel for ungodly sums of money from Fortune 500 companies and Russian oligarchs to perform services that it could have in no way performed.

We are trapped in a kind of national collective madness, where lies are truth, truth is derided as fake news, corruption is cleansing, and cruelty is good governance. Suddenly the adults are children and the Parkland, Florida, kids are adults, and every time you think it can’t get madder, it just does. It’s a world in which the mere act of declaiming, “This isn’t normal,” or “They’re not telling the truth” is dismissed as hysteria and overreaction. Jokes can hurt feelings, but ripping children from their parents leaves no lasting moral footprint. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/05/how-to-survive-trumps-presidency-without-losing-your-mind.html

7. Jonathan Chait: In Year Two, Mueller Is Wading Into a Bottomless Pit of Trump Sleaze

Mueller has swept up a wide array of crimes that may be secondarily related to collusion with Russia, but are not direct acts of abetting Russian election interference. He has charged Paul Manafort with money laundering, and several other figures with making false statements to the FBI. When federal agents raided the home and office of Trump fixer Michael Cohen, it signaled a new phase in the investigation, homing in on a rapidly spreading web of alleged financial misdeeds by Donald Trump and his associates.

Trump’s supporters have portrayed this aspect of the investigation as a gross overreach. The raid on Michael Cohen’s office “is a major red line in [constitutional] Law,” cried Hugh Hewitt; “If this were Hillary Clinton [having her lawyer’s office raided], the ACLU would be on every TV station in America jumping up and down …” complained Alan Dershowitz. Both Hewitt and Dershowitz are lawyers who were aware, or able to learn, about Justice Department rules laying out just when and where its agents can raid a lawyer’s office, and nobody has made a credible or remotely specific case that the raid on Cohen, a fixer with a lifetime of criminal associations who only barely qualifies as a lawyer, violated attorney-client privilege either by the letter of he law or by the intent.

Meanwhile the Congress has made it perfectly clear it has no intent to investigate any of these curiosities. The House has used its investigative apparatus to hurl a continuous series of calumnies at Mueller and the FBI. The Senate has conducted an earnest but tightly constrained investigation into the foreign policy security aspect of the Russian intervention, and even that investigation has run into repeated brick walls.

Trump’s strategy of brazening out every call for disclosure, avoiding media scrutiny and answering the few shouted questions he gets with lies, has largely worked. The unstated assumption of the case that Mueller should stay away from this topic is that Trump managed to evade scrutiny of his business record during the campaign, and the campaign was the public’s one and only shot at accountability. Now the special counsel is the only force putting real pressure on the unethical and quite possibly criminal culture that Trump has nourished. What possible justification is there for Mueller to ignore this bottomless pit of sleaze? http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/robert-mueller-probing-trump-money-laundering-collusion-russia.html

8. Ryan Cooper: The mind-boggling corruption of Trump Inc.

Another week in the Donald Trump presidency, another handful of days so stuffed full of sordid and highly complicated stories that even journalists have trouble keeping track of what's going on.

But the thread tying all the latest news together — from Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's sundry exploits, to Trump's ongoing presidential profiteering, to the Russia investigation — is corruption. The Trump administration will surely go down as one of the most — if not the most — rotten in American history.

That brings me to Trump's bizarre about-face on the Chinese phone manufacturer ZTE, in which he promised to help restore the company's jobs after being hit with U.S. fines and sanctions. Are we really to believe that this has nothing to do with China loaning $500 million to a huge Trump-branded development in Indonesia days beforehand? It simply beggars belief — indeed, there is practically no other comprehensible explanation.

One important reason why Trump was able to become president is because his business career was not derailed at any of the several points in which he allegedly committed crimes. He could have been finished on one of the dozen-plus occasions he was credibly accused of sexual harassment or assault, or when he illegally discriminated against black tenants in his properties, or for the Trump University scam, or for an illegal loan to one of his casinos, or about 10 other things. But instead, he was actually coddled and lifted up by the New York establishment.

And he was far from alone. It turns out that when you stop enforcing the law against rich people, a seething plasma of corruption tends to engulf the national political system. Perhaps in the future we can start applying laws to everyone, even the wealthy and powerful. http://theweek.com/articles/773708/mindboggling-corruption-trump

9. Jamelle Bouie: Trump’s Animals

At a roundtable discussion with California sheriffs on Wednesday, Trump blasted some immigrants as “animals” after one sheriff expressed frustration with “sanctuary” laws that preclude cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities. “They can’t do all kinds of things that other law enforcement agencies can do. And it’s really put us in a very bad position,” said the sheriff, adding—as a hypothetical—that she wouldn’t know if a gang member was in her jail. “There could be an MS-13 member I know about—if they don’t reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about it.”

Trump responded with his usual riff:

We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and we’re stopping a lot of them — but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before. And because of the weak laws, they come in fast, we get them, we release them, we get them again, we bring them out. It’s crazy.

Even if Trump were plainly referring to MS-13, it’s still a step too far for the president of the United States to refer to anyone in the language of “animals.” Not only does it demonize, casting entire groups as subhuman, it opens a door to something worse than just rhetoric, and sends a signal to the agencies and officers tasked with enforcing the laws of the United States.

This particular signal is straightforward: They do not deserve respect or fair treatment. Who is “they?” It may be the gang members themselves, or it may be people accused of being gang members, regardless of the truth. It may be people who want to escape gang life but find themselves stigmatized. It may be entire communities, targeted as one of the president’s vectors for crime and disorder. Indeed, Trump has already obliterated the distinction between the law-abiding and the criminal in immigration enforcement, freeing ICE agents to detain and deport anyone they suspect of being “illegal.” The result is a surge in the arrests of immigrants without criminal records.

If there’s no difference in the president’s policies between criminal and law-abiding immigrants, why should we assume there’s a difference in his rhetoric?  https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/05/donald-trumps-animal-comments-are-just-his-latest-attempt-to-connect-immigrants-and-crime.html

10. Abigail Tracy: As Mueller Closes In, Trump’s Allies Urge Him To Go Nuclear On The F.B.I.

Egged on by his most ardent followers, Donald Trump’s public-influence campaign against the F.B.I. has dogged each new stop of Robert Mueller’s investigation. From casting doubton key players in the bureau to waging a proxy war to discredit Mueller himself, Trump and his allies have sought to weaponize public opinion, even as doing so may further ensnare them in Mueller’s obstruction-of-justice case. This week, the president and his allies have seized on a new talking point to justify their animosity toward the bureau: “Wow, word seems to be coming out that the Obama F.B.I. ‘SPIED ON THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN WITH AN EMBEDDED INFORMANT,’” Trump tweeted on Thursday morning. “If so, this is bigger than Watergate!”

Of course, for Trump it’s not necessarily the truth that matters, but public opinion. If Trump and his allies can poison the well to the point that an attack on the F.B.I. is seen as warranted, then they have successfully manufactured their own escape hatch, even as the possibility of a damning presidential interview with Mueller becomes more likely than ever. “We finally got a brief response that gives us some hope that maybe we can do something,” Giuliani told Politico, hinting at renewed openness to a Trump-Mueller tête-à-tête. “I guess I got to wait and see what they ask.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/05/donald-trump-rudy-giuliani-mueller-investigation-fbi

11. Emma Stefansky: Trump Goes Nuclear After Report His Son Entertained Illegal Campaign Aid

Donald Trump flew into a frenzy online Sunday morning after The New York Times published what appears to be a bombshell: the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., didn’t just meet with Russians promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. In a separate, previously unreported meeting, Trump Jr. also met with an Israeli social media specialist, an emissary for two Arab princes, and a private military contractor offering potentially illegal data services to the Trump campaign

It is not clear whether anything came of the meeting. But according to the Times, “Donald Trump Jr. responded approvingly ... and after those initial offers of help, Mr. Nader was quickly embraced as a close ally by Trump campaign advisers—meeting frequently with Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, and Michael T. Flynn, who became the president’s first national security adviser.” Later, Nader allegedly paid Zamel as much as $2 million.

The president did not refute the story, instead launching into a prolonged Twitter rant directed at the Times, the Democrats, and the Clinton campaign. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/05/trump-rant-nytimes-tweets

12. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. My family believed in the ideals of American democracy. Donald Trump's policies discredit them.

America today is, as it always has been, an enduring struggle between two visions of what our country should be. One vision is that we should be an idealistic nation that serves as an example to the rest of the world of the success of this American experiment with self-government, equality, justice and democracy. The other sees us as another refuge for the rich, where people with money can dominate and subjugate large populations and commoditize the public commons.

There's an outrage in this country today among people who believe in the first, idealistic vision of America and who then look at President Trump and believe that he has brought disrepute to the United States and discredited the entire American experiment in self-governance. President Trump's policies have been not to actively encourage democracy abroad, but to reach out to some of the most tyrannical governments in the world and to give them sustenance and encouragement. That's a discredit to democracy.

And for other nations of the world that are considering democracy, Trump isn't helping the cause. Think about China, for example: Their system rewards intelligence and so, when you meet with Chinese political leaders — which I've done — you are, generally speaking, meeting with some of the smartest people in a given province. So if you're Chinese and looking at what's happening in the United States today, why in the world would you ever choose a political system that could produce a national leader who is utterly incurious, superficial and ultimately a buffoon? And I'm sure other nations are having the same second thoughts. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/my-family-believed-ideals-american-democracy-donald-trump-s-policies-ncna875406

13. Jonathan Chait: Trump Is Doing Same Thing He Demanded Clinton Be Locked Up For

Politico reports that President Trump uses at least two mobile phones that lack the necessary security features to conceal his communications. The president “has rebuffed staff efforts to strengthen security around his phone use,” the article explains, and while President Obama swapped out his phone every month for security staffers to see whether it had been hacked, Trump has refused to do the same because it would be “too inconvenient.” In other words, the offense is identical to Clinton’s, except that the president is a far more inviting target for foreign hackers than the secretary of State, and Trump in particular is especially vulnerable to espionage and blackmail due to his concealed business interests and habitual adultery.

That is to say, nobody wants to live in a world where Donald Trump is held to the same standard as Hillary Clinton. Nor can anybody imagine what such a world would look like. It already feels like we are numb from the sensory overload of endless sirens directing us to the latest unprecedented outrage. No human could generate the mental space to process Trump’s firehose stream of offenses calibrated at Clinton levels. The political system couldn’t function at such a standard. He would have been impeached his first week in office.

Maintaining one’s intellectual and moral standards is difficult in a political system in which one party operates without either. America elected a president in large part on a platform of demanding adherence to Executive branch information security so rigorous that a violator ought to be locked up. What do we do when we obtain retroactive proof that that entire claim, endorsed without reservation even by Republicans who blanched at other aspects of his platform, was a lie? Just walk away? http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/trump-thanks-secure-phone-too-inconvenient-lock-him-up.html

14. Tom Coleman: It’s Not a Liberal Fantasy to Ask if Trump Committed Treason

Under the Constitution an individual commits treason if the nation is at war and the person provides aid and comfort to the enemy.  This is an impeachable offense, committed by word or deed. It's one that individuals need to start grappling with seriously because it is not some far-fetched liberal fantasy to conclude that Donald Trump may have committed treason.

In fact, the case is fairly simple to make.

The U.S. intelligence community’s assessment of Russian activities in the 2016 presidential election concluded that Russia tried to influence the outcome through the dissemination and weaponization of information stolen from the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The thirteen Russian operatives indicted by the Special Counsel for waging a disinformation campaign through our social media platforms and other internet media, described their activity as “information warfare against the United States of America.”  

Russia’s cyber attack was an act of war. They significantly disrupted and damaged our Constitutional infrastructure in an attempt to undermine the foundation of U.S. democracy. They were of sufficient scope, duration and intensity to deem them armed attacks. Clearly, they meet the international criteria of an armed attack and an act of war against the United States.

Trump’s comments and actions during this time are damning. He continually called for release of Russian cyber hacked documents that were intended to influence the outcome of the election. Based upon the preponderance of these known facts, it would be stunningly feasible to answer “yes” to the following: Did Trump assist Russia in its conduct of cyber war against the United States?  Did the cumulative effect of the Trump campaign and Trump’s personal actions result in aiding and abetting a hostile nation?  Did Trump’s actions rise to the level of giving aid and comfort to an enemy? https://www.thedailybeast.com/its-not-a-liberal-fantasy-to-ask-if-trump-committed-treason