1. Thomas L. Friedman: A President With No Shame and a Party With No Guts

If your puppy makes a mess on your carpet and you shout “Bad dog,” there is a good chance that that puppy’s ears will droop, his head will bow and he may even whimper. In other words, even a puppy acts ashamed when caught misbehaving. That is not true of Donald Trump. Day in and day out, he proves to us that he has no shame. We’ve never had a president with no shame — and it’s become a huge source of power for him and trouble for us.

And what makes Trump even more powerful and problematic is that this president with no shame is combined with a party with no spine and a major network with no integrity — save for a few real journalists at Fox News like the outstanding Chris Wallace.

When a president with no shame is backed by a party with no spine and a network with no integrity, you have two big problems. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/opinion/trump-putin-republicans.html

2. Michelle Goldberg: Trump Shows the World He’s Putin’s Lackey

While I was as shocked as everyone else, I shouldn’t have been. Trump’s behavior on Monday recalled his outburst at Trump Tower after the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, when he insisted there were “very fine people” among the racist demonstrators. Both times, everything Trump said was in keeping with things he’d said before. The shocking part was his frankness. Then, as now, it forced, if just for a moment, a collective apprehension of just what a repulsive abomination this presidency is.

It’s always been obvious that Trump does not hold Russia’s hacking of the 2016 election, which he publicly encouraged and gleefully benefited from, against Putin. None of us yet know the exact contours of Trump’s relationship with Russia, whether Putin is his handler, his co-conspirator or just his hero. But it’s clear that Trump is willing to sell out American democracy for personal gain. After all, on July 27, 2016, he publicly called for Russia to find Clinton’s emails, and, thanks to Friday’s indictments, we now know Russia started trying to hack the domain used by her personal office that very day. Trump’s collusion with Russia has always been out in the open, daring us to recognize what’s in front of our faces. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/16/opinion/trump-putin-summit-russia-collusion.html

3. Observer editorial: The Observer view on Donald Trump

It is almost one year since Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th US president. Will he last another 12 months? Day after tumultuous day since 20 January 2017, Trump has provided fresh evidence of his unfitness for America’s highest office.

It is not only that his politics and policies, from tax cuts and climate change to Palestine and nuclear weapons, are disastrously wrong-headed. It is not just that his idea of leadership is divisive, confrontational and irresponsible. Nor does the problem lie solely with his blatant racism, misogyny and chauvinism, though these are indeed massive problems.

His latest foul-mouthed outrage – describing developing countries as “shitholes” – is appalling even by his crude standards.

The fundamental failing underlying Trump’s presidency is his wilful ignorance. His frequently petulant, childish behaviour combines with a staggering lack of knowledge and contempt for facts to produce serial, chronic misjudgments. Trump, in power, cannot be trusted. He has been exposed as lacking in empathy, shamelessly mendacious, cynical and unversed or uninterested in the enduring human and constitutional values his office is sworn to uphold. Trump is the first and hopefully the last of his kind: an anti-American president. He is a disgrace and a danger to his country. The sooner he is sent packing, the better. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/14/observer-view-on-donald-trump

4. George F. Will: This sad, embarrassing wreck of a man

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and others might believe that they must stay in their positions lest there be no adult supervision of the Oval playpen. This is a serious worry, but so is this: Can those people do their jobs for someone who has neither respect nor loyalty for them?

Like the purloined letter in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story with that title, collusion with Russia is hiding in plain sight. We shall learn from Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation whether in 2016 there was collusion with Russia by members of the Trump campaign. The world, however, saw in Helsinki something more grave — ongoing collusion between Trump, now in power, and Russia. The collusion is in what Trump says (refusing to back the United States’ intelligence agencies) and in what evidently went unsaid (such as: You ought to stop disrupting Ukraine, downing civilian airliners, attempting to assassinate people abroad using poisons, and so on, and on).

Americans elected a president who — this is a safe surmise — knew that he had more to fear from making his tax returns public than from keeping them secret. The most innocent inference is that for decades he has depended on an American weakness, susceptibility to the tacky charisma of wealth, which would evaporate when his tax returns revealed that he has always lied about his wealth, too. A more ominous explanation might be that his redundantly demonstrated incompetence as a businessman tumbled him into unsavory financial dependencies on Russians. A still more sinister explanation might be that the Russians have something else, something worse, to keep him compliant.

The explanation is in doubt; what needs to be explained — his compliance — is not. Granted, Trump has a weak man’s banal fascination with strong men whose disdain for him is evidently unimaginable to him. And, yes, he only perfunctorily pretends to have priorities beyond personal aggrandizement. But just as astronomers inferred, from anomalies in the orbits of the planet Uranus, the existence of Neptune before actually seeing it, Mueller might infer, and then find, still-hidden sources of the behavior of this sad, embarrassing wreck of a man. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-sad-embarrassing-wreck-of-a-man/2018/07/17/d06de8ea-89e8-11e8-a345-a1bf7847b375_story.html

5. Jonathan Chait: At Summit With Russia, Trump Betrays His Country in Plain Sight

Standing next to Vladimir Putin, after a meeting Putin had requested, President Trump was asked by a reporter if he believed the findings of his own intelligence agencies that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. He began by floating unfounded accusations that the FBI had ignored his opponent’s misdeeds. Then he proceeded to express his doubts. “All I can do is ask the question,” said Trump. “My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me, they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia. I’ll say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

Trump told the world he trusts the denial of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin — the very man who did the deed! — over his own government’s intelligence. Trump can’t think of a reason why Putin would have interfered in the election. The fact that Russia has interfered in multiple elections, the fact its propaganda arm had broadcast its preference for Trump, the fact American intelligence concluded Russia intervened, that Robert Mueller has produced multiple indictments detailing evidence of this interference, all mean less to him than Putin’s say-so. Putin admitted at this press conference he wanted Trump to win.

My recent story argues that we have underestimated the possibility that the Russia scandal is much worse than it looks, that the depth and extent of the president’s covert ties to Russia might run deeper and longer than many people expect. Even for those of us harboring serious suspicions about this, Trump’s performance in Helsinki was stunning. I expected some artifice, some superficial gestures of Trumpian independence, perhaps some finger-wagging for show at Russia’s naughty behavior, and assurances it would not recur. What transpired instead was far worse, and far more blatant. Trump is engaged in an act of open betrayal against his own country. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/trump-betrays-his-country-for-russia-in-plain-sight.html

6. Dan Balz: The moment called for Trump to stand up for America. He chose to bow.

When the history of Donald Trump’s presidency is ultimately written, July 16, 2018, will have a special entry. On a day when the setting called for a show of strength and resolve from an American president, Trump instead offered deference, defensiveness, equivocation and weakness.

If anyone can recall a performance by a U.S. president that rivaled the one seen around the world Monday, let them come forward. In the meantime, Trump’s extraordinary joint news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin will stand on its own, for sheer shock value and for the reality of an opportunity lost.

Here was a president turning his back on the collective work of U.S. intelligence agencies, looking the other way at indictments returned last week by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III against 12 Russian military intelligence officers who sought to undermine American democracy during the 2016 election, and falling back as he so often has on attacks against Hillary Clinton, criticism of Democrats and boasts about the size of his electoral college victory. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/after-a-jaw-dropping-news-conference-what-does-america-first-really-mean/2018/07/16/2b728b12-892e-11e8-a345-a1bf7847b375_story.html

7. Brian Beutler: Trump And Putin Colluded In Public

President Trump hosted a bilateral press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday and colluded with him on a global stage.

In examining such a varied and unhinged performance, it’s important to filter out background noise, which tells us nothing new, and isolate new and specific signs of corruption that can’t arguably be characterized as twisted forms of statecraft.

Trump has left a key under the mat for Putin to meddle in future elections on behalf of Republicans, and continued to welcome more interference today, with Putin standing by his side, but this time he hinted that he’d be willing to reciprocate for such illegal assistance by allowing Putin to breach American intelligence.

The press conference went fully off the rails near the end, when rather than defend the U.S. election system against Russian meddling, Trump spouted anti-Democratic conspiracy theories, and cut the legs out from under his intelligence chiefs—particularly Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats—by accepting Putin’s election-sabotage denials over their conclusions.

Coats, et al, “said they think it’s Russia,” Trump noted. “I have President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

Because Trump humiliated his own cabinet, he has revived questions about whether his comments will prompt resignations, or whether his aides and allies will remain complicit in Russian cyberattacks on the American political system. But our predicament is actually bleaker than that, and the fact that Republicans in Congress will almost certainly do nothing about what just happened effectively guarantees that Trump and Putin will soon consummate a new corrupt bargain to further subvert American democracy. https://crooked.com/article/trump-and-putin-colluded-in-public/

8. ‘Disgraceful’ and ‘tragic’: John McCain’s excoriation of Trump on Russia.

“Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory. The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naivete, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. But it is clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake.

“President Trump proved not only unable, but unwilling to stand up to Putin. He and Putin seemed to be speaking from the same script as the president made a conscious choice to defend a tyrant against the fair questions of a free press, and to grant Putin an uncontested platform to spew propaganda and lies to the world.

“It is tempting to describe the press conference as a pathetic rout — as an illustration of the perils of under-preparation and inexperience. But these were not the errant tweets of a novice politician. These were the deliberate choices of a president who seems determined to realize his delusions of a warm relationship with Putin’s regime without any regard for the true nature of his rule, his violent disregard for the sovereignty of his neighbors, his complicity in the slaughter of the Syrian people, his violation of international treaties, and his assault on democratic institutions throughout the world.

“Coming close on the heels of President Trump’s bombastic and erratic conduct towards our closest friends and allies in Brussels and Britain, today’s press conference marks a recent low point in the history of the American presidency. That the president was attended in Helsinki by a team of competent and patriotic advisers makes his blunders and capitulations all the more painful and inexplicable.

“No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant. Not only did President Trump fail to speak the truth about an adversary; but speaking for America to the world, our president failed to defend all that makes us who we are — a republic of free people dedicated to the cause of liberty at home and abroad. American presidents must be the champions of that cause if it is to succeed. Americans are waiting and hoping for President Trump to embrace that sacred responsibility. One can only hope they are not waiting totally in vain.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/07/16/disgraceful-and-tragic-john-mccains-excoriation-of-trump-on-russia-annotated/

9. James Fallows: This Is the Moment of Truth for Republicans

There are exactly two possible explanations for the shameful performance the world witnessed on Monday, from a serving American president.

Either Donald Trump is flat-out an agent of Russian interests—maybe witting, maybe unwitting, from fear of blackmail, in hope of future deals, out of manly respect for Vladimir Putin, out of gratitude for Russia’s help during the election, out of pathetic inability to see beyond his 306 electoral votes. Whatever the exact mixture of motives might be, it doesn’t really matter.

Or he is so profoundly ignorant, insecure, and narcissistic that he did not  realize that, at every step, he was advancing the line that Putin hoped he would advance, and the line that the American intelligence, defense, and law-enforcement agencies most dreaded.

Conscious tool. Useful idiot. Those are the choices, though both are possibly true, so that the main question is the proportions. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/moment-of-decision/565289/

10. Andrew Sullivan: U.S. Democracy’s Hastening Demise

A small update on the dynamic nature of democratic collapse into tyranny, as we reel from Trump’s week abroad. It is never a straight or gradual line. And it is often an accelerating one. Tyrants respond to their early successes not by resting on their laurels but by constantly upping the ante more and more, purging the disloyal, and forcing the loyal to submit to more and more ludicrous positions. Tyrants’ claims to power get progressively more grandiose, their fantasies more delusional, their follies more transparent, as their self-confidence expands. They never moderate. And with Trump, all of this is self-evident, textbook, and getting worse every day. For those with eyes to see, we have the forms of democracy, but it is the strongman who now rules us. We are putty in his hands.

In the last few weeks, Trump’s outright lies seem to be more frequent and he repeats them ever more shamelessly. They are now pure expressions of power, open demonstrations that his followers will accept anything he says, obey anything he commands, abandon any belief that he opposes. This is not representative democracy; it’s submission to a king. It’s not just an attack on the bedrock American principle of self-government; it’s a determination to extinguish it. And it is more ascendant now than at any time since the inauguration.

The fantasies now dominate foreign policy as never before. Trump keeps insisting, for example, that there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea, that he has solved the problem, that Kim is embarking on total nuclear disarmament, and that he deserves a medal for this spectacular achievement, which somehow eluded every previous president. He says that 200 MIA bodies have been returned to the U.S. Yesterday, Trump tweeted out a letter from Kim lavishing praise on him, as evidence that his delusion is reality. But the letter was dated July 6, just as Pyongyang was humiliating Pompeo on his recent trip. And it was dated before the North Koreans were a no-show at the first scheduled talks on POW remains. No remains have been returned, even as the president says 200 have. This is now the insane world we live in. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/did-trump-just-help-stop-brexit.html

11. Jonathan Chait: Trump Still Pretending Fake North Korea Nuclear Deal Is Real

In the wake of his summit with Kim Jong-un, President Trump began issuing a series of pronouncements about how the problem of a nuclearized North Korea had been solved. By him, through the sheer force of his negotiating prowess. “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” he tweeted, adding that the public should “sleep well tonight!” He told reporters, “I have solved that problem … Now we’re getting it memorialized and all, but that problem is largely solved.”

When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled recently to Pyongyang to turn the gauzy assurances of a beautiful, denuclearized future into some specific steps, North Korea blew him off. An official statement called demands for steps forward “gangster-like.” The meeting went “as badly as it could have gone,” a source confessed. At a meeting today to discuss the return of the remains of American soldiers who died in the Korean War, North Korean officials did not even show up.

It is possible Trump will continue to insist in the face of all evidence that his deal is working right through the end of his presidency. At this point, that is probably the best-case scenario. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/trump-still-pretending-fake-north-korea-nuclear-deal-is-real.html

12. Tom Toles: Trump imagines a mandate to obliterate the record of America’s favorite recent president

One of the few threads of consistency in President Trump’s tangle of brain wiring is that if Barack Obama did it, he must undo it. This began on Day One, when Trump looked out and imagined an inaugural crowd of unmeasurable size chanting for him to demolish Obama’s legacy.

Trump had counted up imaginary ballots in his head and found he got way more votes than Obama, and also the biggest mandate in history. And that mandate was to repudiate everything Obama stood for. The only problem with this beautiful dream of his was how to convince everybody else. Obama, as it turns out, is America’s favorite recent president, by a lot.

But Trump has his own ideas. If Obama extended health-care coverage to millions of uninsured Americans, then that coverage must be taken away. If Obama signed anything to slow climate change, then Trump must burn those documents to produce more carbon pollution. Trump has no choice. The imaginary voices he hears in his head demand it. And those voices also are clamoring for him to increase the divisiveness in the United States. Don’t forget that Obama said “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America.” Well, that idea will have to go. And Trump hasn’t stopped at saying there is in fact a liberal America and a conservative America. He’s edited that to say there is only a conservative America. And further, that conservative America is whatever Trump tells it to be. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/07/12/trump-imagines-a-mandate-to-obliterate-the-record-of-americas-favorite-recent-president/

13. Paul Krugman: For Trump, Failure Is the Only Option

So Donald Trump went to a NATO summit, insulted our allies, then made the absurd demand not just that they increase defense spending — which they should — but that they raise it to 4 percent of G.D.P., much higher than the bloated military spending in his own budget. He then claimed, falsely, to have won major concessions, and graciously declared that it is “presently unnecessary” to consider quitting the alliance.

Was there anything our allies could have done that would have mollified him? The answer, surely, is no. For Trump, disrupting NATO doesn’t seem to be a means to an end; it’s an end in itself.

Does all of this sound familiar? It’s basically the same as the story of the escalating trade war. While Trump rants about other countries’ unfair trade practices — a complaint that has some validity for China, although virtually none for Canada or the European Union — he hasn’t made any coherent demands. That is, he has given no indication what any of the countries hit by his tariffs could do to satisfy him, leaving them with no option except retaliation.

So he isn’t acting like someone threatening a trade war to win concessions; he’s acting like someone who just wants a trade war. Sure enough, he’s reportedly threatening to pull out of the World Trade Organization, the same way he’s suggesting that the U.S. might pull out of NATO.

It’s all of a piece. Whatever claims Trump makes about other countries’ misbehavior, whatever demands he makes on a particular day, they’re all in evident bad faith. Mr. Art of the Deal doesn’t want any deals. He just wants to tear things down. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/opinion/trump-nato-failure.html

14. Jonathan Chait: Mueller’s New Indictment Points to Collusion With Russia

On July 27, 2016, Donald Trump denied Russia was the likely culprit in the email hacks, but also announced, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think that you’ll be rewarded mightily by our press.”

In what is possibly an astonishing coincidence, but probably not, that very night, according to the new indictments from the Department of Justice, Russian hackers “attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office. At or about the same time, they also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton campaign.” Trump asked Russia to hack his opponent, and Russia did “[f]or the first time,” as the indictment says.

The indictment charges that the conspirators “received a request for stolen materials from a candidate for the U.S. Congress,” and “sent the candidate stolen documents.” The Wall Street Journal reported a year ago that “Guccifer 2.0,” one of the Russian hackers, communicated with Florida-based Republican operative Aaron Nevins. Nevins is not named in this indictment, but the revelation that a candidate also communicated with Russian hackers indicates yet another point of contact in a conspiracy that went beyond Trump’s campaign. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/mueller-indictment-suggests-trump-colluding-with-russia.html

15. David Rothkopf: The Way Trump and the GOP Deal with Russian Attacks is ‘Textbook Treason’

We have been the target of the most successful cyber and information warfare operation in history and that operation is ongoing. We have great capabilities to defend ourselves as the indictments’ bravura act of naming names and specific military units revealed. But the Russians are gaining know-how daily, too.

At stake are the results in our 2018 and 2020 elections and the integrity of our political system. This enemy seeks not only to put puppets, or weak or deficient leaders in place, it seeks to gain leverage over them as they come to realize they are not the beneficiaries of the Russian attacks. (We now know clearly how that works.)

They seek to use them to advance their interests on a broad international front (consider their success in achieving this goal thus far in this administration … you need to look back no further than this week's NATO Summit.)

If they succeed, America will be profoundly weakened, our standing, our alliances and the international system we built may be irreversibly damaged.

What is more, at this point, given the success the Russians have had to date and the power of their defenders within our system, we simply do not know whether this ambitious campaign of theirs will continue to succeed. Their collaborators could kill the investigation that is revealing the scope and nature of their plans. Their colluders could win victory after victory. And so can the Russians. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-way-trump-and-the-gop-deal-with-russian-attacks-is-textbook-treason

16. Damon Linker: The enfeebling of America

Donald Trump ran for president promising to "Make American Great Again." But the result of his presidency is almost certain to be a massive, unprecedented decline in American economic strength and geopolitical status.

Can anyone doubt that his policies, combined with the president's insulting, mendacious, selectively obsequious words and behavior, will have the consequence of leaving the United States vastly weaker than it was before his election?

The U.S. has single-handedly started a global trade war that will sap our economic power — and we've done it with no clear aim beyond the amorphous goal of securing "better deals," with our clueless and feckless commander in chief in charge of the negotiations.

Trump has deliberately sabotaged the military alliance that has bound together the powers of the Western world for 70 years of unprecedented peace and prosperity and that has given the U.S. immeasurable leverage to further our national interests without having to resort to military force. His actions over the past 18 months are sure to set us on a path of vastly diminished influence around the world. 

Trump has publicly prostrated America before Vladimir Putin, turning the U.S. into a global laughingstock that gladly welcomes meddling in our political system by hostile and flagrantly anti-liberal foreign powers. http://theweek.com/articles/785374/enfeebling-america