1. David Atkins: Does Trump Even Understand What He Did Wrong?

Even the briefest observation of Donald Trump is adequate to confirm that he is not a man of profound intellect. He certainly possesses his share of social intelligence, a knack for salesmanship and an obsessive drive to dominate and humiliate others stemming from a yawning maw of overlapping insecurities. But in terms of how we traditionally measure intelligence in the modern developed world–the acquisition of knowledge over time and the ability to process, digest and act cogently in response to complex information–Trump probably doesn’t even reach the 50th percentile of Americans. And that is being generous.

This basic fact is difficult to keep in mind when assessing his decisions because we have never had a president like this. Society tends to dramatically overestimate the talent and intelligence of those fortunate enough to be rich and powerful, but rarely are they as objectively ignorant and lacking in basic competency as Trump. Far too often we look for a schema or strategy behind Trump’s actions, only to discover that his decisions were precipitated by the dumbest of reasons: because he saw a Fox News segment that made him angry, or because he heard that Barack Obama had originated a policy, because some extraneous person mentioned some falsehood to him that he was credulous enough to believe, or because he was openly bribed. This principle has become known as “Trump’s Razor“: when seeking to understand the president’s behavior, look for the stupidest possible reason.

I mention all this because while I don’t fully believe it myself, we must at least consider the possibility that Trump’s bizarre behavior with respect to Russian collusion, the Mueller probe, and his obstruction of justice is that he literally does not understand when he committed crimes or what is wrong with what he did. His social intelligence and gut instinct for politics certainly leads him to understand that some aspects of the collusion and obstruction would be politically damaging to him if they fully came out. But it’s entirely possible that at a moral level and, crucially, at a legal one, he simply isn’t smart enough to grasp the enormity of the crimes he and his associates seem to have committed.

Trump may lack both the moral compass and the legal wherewithal to even comprehend the magnitude of his crimes and the precariousness of his situation. He certainly understands how politically inconvenient all of this is for him, yet it’s not entirely clear that he grasps why this isn’t a witch hunt, but perhaps the biggest scandal in all of American history.

Again, I’m not entirely convinced of this thesis. It’s still most likely that Trump is simply a knowing criminal scurrying like a rat caught in a trap. But that assumes a level of moral and intellectual capacity on Trump’s part that may not even be present. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/08/04/does-trump-even-understand-what-he-did-wrong/

2. Jennifer Rubin: Why Trump is so freaked out by the Manafort trial

Manafort is a mirror image of Trump. He is a man seduced by the oligarch wealth of the former Soviet Union,” says Max Bergmann of the Moscow Project. “Putting profit over principles he ends up becoming entangled, entrapped, and then a witting tool of Russian interests. The trial is a preview for much of what’s to come. ” He adds, “The trial is going to help us understand why the Trump campaign conspired with Russia. It is going to spell out Manafort’s motive. It will show that Manafort had deep ties to Russia (just like Trump) and was financially desperate prior to joining the Trump campaign.”

Frankly, confirming the presence on the campaign — at its highest level — of a guy as thick as thieves with the Russians will begin to chip away at Trump’s emphatic denial of any contacts or ties with Russia. Remember, in July 2016, Manafort was asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “Are there any ties between Mr. Trump, you or your campaign and Putin and his regime?” Manafort answered, “No, there are not. That’s absurd. And you know, there’s no basis to it.” Except that was patently false.

Trump also denied campaign contacts with Russians, as did Reince Priebus, the president’s one-time chief of staff. In February 2017, Priebus declared, “The New York Times put out an article with no direct sources that said that the Trump campaign had constant contacts with Russian spies, basically, you know, some treasonous type of accusations. We have now all kinds of people looking into this. I can assure you and I have been approved to say this — that the top levels of the intelligence community have assured me that that story is not only inaccurate, but it’s grossly overstated and it was wrong. And there’s nothing to it.” Except there were dozens and dozens of contacts, including by Manafort.

In short, establishing that Trump’s one-time campaign chief was heavily connected with Kremlin characters doesn’t prove conspiracy to acquire help during the election, but it sure does bolster the credibility of the investigators and underscores how preposterous were the dozens of denials that the campaign had any Russia contacts. A campaign chief down on his luck going to work for free for Trump certainly provides the back story for Manafort’s efforts to “monetize” those Russian connections. As Bergmann suggests, “This trial will also highlight, but not answer, many outstanding questions, such as: How did Manafort end up on the campaign?; Why did someone so cash-strapped work for free?; and, What did he do to conspire with Russia during the campaign? Mueller’s answers to those question will come later.” In other words, Paul Manafort’s trial will set the table for what follows. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2018/08/01/how-the-manafort-trial-may-hurt-trump/

3. Bonnie Kristian: Trump's unutterably stupid trade war

Trump is nowhere near the tradeless world of his factory speech fantasy, but the effects of his trade war are being felt, perhaps most painfully by American farmers, whose industry is already made economically and environmentally precarious by federal meddling. In response to Trump's tariffs on a basket of 800 Chinese goods, China has levied a 25 percent tax on 545 U.S. exports, including agricultural products like rice, beef, pork, and more. Soybean farmers expect a particularly hard hit, as China previously bought fully a third of their product. Maine lobster harvesters are suffering, too, as Chinese buyers turn to Canada, subject to a 7 percent lobster tariff, to avoid 35 to 40 percent taxes on American lobsters.

Rather than call a trade truce, the administration has responded with a $12 billion farm bailout. Beyond the gross hypocrisy of Republicans' supermajority support for the plan — they'd be howling objections had a Democratic president proffered this "fix" — this aid package only compounds the original error. It's like responding to a fever by cranking up the air conditioning and pretending nothing's wrong. The bailout might temporarily ease one symptom, but it will only prolong our pain.

American farmers have a better grasp of economics than does the president. "While $12 billion as a stand-alone number sounds like a lot of money, when you look at the economic impact this trade war has caused, it doesn't even scratch the surface," said a Minnesota soybean farmer named Mike Petefish. His crop has lost $250,000 in value thanks to the president's trade policies as soybean prices have dropped by $2 a bushel — about a fifth of their value — since May. "Imagine someone destroys your car and then says, 'I'll give you a ride to the next place you need to go,'" Petefish added. "Well gee, thanks."  http://theweek.com/articles/787837/trumps-unutterably-stupid-trade-war

4. David Faris: Why Trump firing Mueller would be pointless

President Trump on Wednesday got on his Twitter machine and suggested, in a rambling, seven-post tirade, that Attorney General Jeff Sessions "should stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now." Two years ago, it might have been shocking to see the president ordering his top law enforcement official to stop the government's inquiry into him and his campaign's possible collusion with a hostile foreign power — basically obstructing justice in plain sight. But in this case, it was just another miserable morning in occupied D.C.

What exactly precipitated this latest monarchical meltdown is not clear. ABC News reported that Special Counsel Robert Mueller wants to interview Trump about obstruction of justice, so that could be it. The outburst also coincided with the second day of the trial of international man of griftery and former Trump campaign manager ("for a very short time"!) Paul Manafort. The outburst brought with it fresh fears that Trump will conduct some kind of Morning Massacre, firing Sessions, Mueller, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in one fell swoop. But even if he did that, it wouldn't matter. We will, one way or another, finally know what Mueller knows, and no amount of presidential theatrics can change that.

During his Wednesday morning tweetstorm, Trump managed to muster more sympathy for Manafort than he ever has for innocent parents forcibly separated from their children. Indeed, the president got very worked up — one might even call his behavior fussy — that his old pal Manafort has been held in solitary confinement because every time he is allowed contact with the outside world, he relentlessly tries to undermine the case against him. "Who was treated worse, Alfonse Capone … or Paul Manafort?" he asked. http://theweek.com/articles/788089/why-trump-firing-mueller-pointless

5. Jonathan Chait: Trumpcare Means Leaving the Poor and Sick to Fend for Themselves

Yesterday, the Trump administration unveiled plans to allow insurers to skim healthy customers out of the insurance pool by offering skimpy plans that last for up to three years. The legally dubious maneuver is the crowning touch on the administration’s persistent efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act. Conservative intellectuals are justifiably ecstatic. “Wednesday’s rule came to be because dedicated people within the Trump administration worked hard to push federal policy in a libertarian direction,” exults Cato Institute scholar and onetime author of the “Anti-Universal Coverage Club Manifesto” Michael Cannon. Indeed, Trump’s attacks on Obamacare, taken together as a sum, provide a fair picture of the American right’s unique, social Darwinist philosophy of health-care policy.

Many people are either too poor or too sick to afford access to medical care. In every democracy in the world save the United States, a broad social consensus accepts the need to subsidize care for those people. This includes the conservative parties in those countries. Among right-of-center parties in the developed world, only the Republicans are so committed to anti-government dogma as to oppose measures to subsidize medical care for those who can’t afford it themselves.

But whenever Democrats have attempted to expand access to health care, Republican leaders have generally declined to present themselves as principled opponents of universal health care. Instead, they have promised they could accomplish the same goal in a better, cheaper fashion, without any of the painful trade-offs in the existing Democratic-authored proposals. No such plan ever emerged, in part because Obamacare was the most market-friendly way to accomplish the bare minimum objectives of any humanitarian health-care reform. The only space to Obamacare’s right involved punishing the poor and sick with medical and financial deprivation.

What is striking about the Trump-era Republican health agenda is the lack of policy ambition. Having spent years insisting they had an army of wonks who could design a better alternative to the Obamacare “train wreck,” the Republican plan of attack has dissolved into a rearguard sabotage campaign with no pretense of doing anything to help the poor and sick afford medical care. Health care remains a policy ground with which conservative-movement dogma cannot grapple. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/trumpcare-leaves-the-poor-and-sick-to-fend-for-themselves.html

6. Eric Levitz: The GOP’s New Midterm Message: Nancy Pelosi Wants to Cut Medicare

The Republican Party knows that it won’t win many elections by campaigning on its governing agenda. After winning unified control of the federal government in 2016, the GOP Congress prioritized two legislative goals: slashing federal health-care spending by roughly $1 trillion, and cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations by even more than that.

But one would hardly know that from the GOP’s paid messaging in 2018. In their campaign ads, Republican candidates are avoiding all mention of their party’s attempts to gut Medicaid and repeal the Affordable Care Act — while giving short shrift to Donald Trump’s signature tax cuts. As of May, only one-third of the ads arguing that Republicans should retain control of Congress mentioned the cut, the only major legislation that the current Republican Congress has passed. Instead, the GOP has opted to campaign against “open borders” (which no Democratic elected official supports), for loyalty to Donald Trump, and, above all, in opposition to Nancy Pelosi — and the godless urbanism, rootless cosmopolitanism, and crytpo-communist femi-nazism she (apparently) represents.

Troy Balderson, the Republican candidate in next week’s special congressional election in Ohio, abandoned talk of the tax cuts weeks ago. While his rival, Democrat Danny O’Connor, has savaged the GOP’s “corporate tax giveaway,” Balderson and his allies have tried to keep Buckeye voters focused on what really matters: how scary nonwhite immigrants are. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/oh-12-special-election-the-gops-new-midterm-message-pelosi-wants-to-cut-medicare.html

7. Bret Stephens: Trump Will Have Blood on His Hands

What can’t be ignored is presidential behavior that might best be described as incitement. Maybe Trump supposes that the worst he’s doing is inciting the people who come to his rallies to give reporters like CNN’s Jim Acosta the finger. And maybe he thinks that most journalists, with their relentless hostility to his personality and policies, richly deserve public scorn.

Yet for every 1,000 or so Trump supporters whose contempt for the press rises only as far as their middle fingers, a few will be people like my caller. Of that few, how many are ready to take the next fatal step? In the age of the active shooter, the number isn’t zero.

Should that happen — when that happens — and journalists are dead because some nut thinks he’s doing the president’s bidding against the fifth column that is the media, what will Trump’s supporters say? No, the president is not coyly urging his supporters to murder reporters, like Henry II trying to rid himself of a turbulent priest. But neither is he the child who played with a loaded gun and knew not what he did.

Donald Trump’s more sophisticated defenders have long since mastered the art of pretending that the only thing that matters with his presidency is what it does, not what he says. But not all of the president’s defenders are quite as sophisticated. Some of them didn’t get the memo about taking Trump seriously but not literally. A few hear the phrase “enemy of the people” and are prepared to take the words to their logical conclusion.

Is my caller one of them? I can’t say. But what should be clear is this: We are approaching a day when blood on the newsroom floor will be blood on the president’s hands. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/03/opinion/trump-fake-news-enemy.html

8. Joel Mathis: President Trump's inarticulate defense

College courses are devoted to presidential rhetoric. Generations of schoolchildren were once required to memorize the Gettysburg Address; the words of Lincoln's second inaugural are inscribed on his memorial. You don't have to be a historian — just a reasonably alert American — to recognize how powerful a president's words have been throughout history.

See, for example, how easy it is to match a president to his most famous quote:

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

"And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country."

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

"I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!"

Trump's most memorable quotes, meanwhile, involve shooting voters on Fifth Avenue and grabbing women by their private parts. It makes you miss the days when Republicans hailed Ronald Reagan as "The Great Communicator." http://theweek.com/articles/788211/president-trumps-inarticulate-defense

9. William Falk: The world on fire

This summer, forests are bursting into flame all over the world. More than 50 wildfires have scorched a shocked Sweden — some of them north of the Arctic Circle — as temperatures have soared into the 90s amid withering drought. In normally chilly Oslo, the mercury climbed past 86 degrees for 16 consecutive days. The Brits have been gobsmacked by 95-degree weather; it hit 98 in Montreal; and in Japan, 22,000 people were hospitalized when temperatures climbed to a record 106. In Arizona, Southern California, Pakistan, and India, summer's broiler has been turned up to unbearable levels, past 110 degrees, and people are dying. Heat, drought, and fires of this scale and scope are not normal — or perhaps they now are. Climate change, says Elena Manaenkova of the World Meteorological Organization, "is not a future scenario. It is happening now."

It is human nature to postpone change and sacrifice as long as possible. We don't act, especially collectively, until a crisis is upon us. This penchant for procrastination is why the national debt of $21.3 trillion is climbing at a rate of nearly $1 trillion a year, and why we're doing nothing to address the approaching funding shortfalls of Medicare and Social Security. Why deal with such unpleasantness now, when we can push decisions off into the future? So it goes for greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. The evidence clearly shows that the planet is warming, that the jet stream and other wind patterns have been disrupted, that ancient ice is melting and seas are rising, and that weather extremes such as droughts, heat waves, torrential rains, and flooding have all become more common and more prolonged. And the consequences have just begun. But what's most important is our comfort today, the next quarter's GDP, and the re-election of incumbent politicians. Climate change? The national debt? Social Security? Let our children and grandchildren deal with all that. We'll be dead by then, suckers. http://theweek.com/articles/788224/world-fire

10. Susan B. Glasser: It’s True: Trump Is Lying More, and He’s Doing It on Purpose

There have been comparisons between Nixon and Trump since Trump first entered office, but these, too, have escalated in recent months as the President has been shadowed by the threat of the ongoing special-counsel investigation into the electronic break-in of the Democratic National Committee (another eerie Watergate echo) and whether Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia. Trump’s obsession with the special counsel, Robert Mueller, also comes with metrics: he has called the Mueller probe a “witch hunt” on Twitter more than twenty-one times a month on average this spring and summer, compared with an average of just three times a month in the previous nine months.

Another commonality between Nixon and Trump is their obsession with the press as an enemy or, in Trump’s phrase “enemies of the people.” Nixon went so far as to order his White House staff to create an actual “enemies list,” a document with twenty names on it, which was released as part of the Watergate hearings. Reporters like CBS’s Daniel Schorr featured prominently on it. When Sanders announced at her press briefing last week that Trump was considering stripping the security clearances of six former senior U.S. officials who have emerged as scathing Trump critics, many made immediate comparisons to Nixon’s list. “An enemies list is ugly, undemocratic, and un-American,” Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, responded.

Only three members of Nixon’s enemies list are still alive. (Ron Dellums, a former member of Congress particularly loathed by Nixon for his anti-war protests and militant civil-rights activism, died on Monday.) I called one of them, Morton Halperin, to ask what he thought of the proliferating Trump-Nixon comparisons. Halperin, who oversaw the writing of the Pentagon Papers and then served on Nixon’s National Security Council staff before breaking with him over the invasion of Cambodia, sued when he found out that Nixon had secretly taped him and others in the White House. Over the years, he has been one of Nixon’s proudest and most persistent enemies. So I was surprised when Halperin insisted, strongly, that Nixon wasn’t nearly as damaging to the institution of the Presidency as Trump has been. “He’s far worse than Nixon,” Halperin told me, “certainly as a threat to the country.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/trumps-escalating-war-on-the-truth-is-on-purpose

11. Mindy Finn: Trump has built a pyramid scheme of public fraud. It's a taxpayer-backed cash grab.

Far from draining the swamp, Trump and his coterie of grifters, fraudsters and co-conspirators have filled it in entirely, dividing the land into personal fiefdoms to exploit.

In short, Trump has built a clearly organized machine for largesse and corruption. It’s a pyramid scheme of public fraud, and the president gleefully sits at its top, reaping the rewards and doling out the shares.

Still, the president and his defenders deny anything is wrong. Many throw up their hands and say “Washington has always been this way.” That’s certainly what Trump would have us believe. In truth, this level of corruption is rampant in dictatorships across the globe, but unprecedented here.

It’s disturbing to see the president ripping this page from the authoritarian textbook, though entirely in character. All around him he’s traded his blessing of corrupt dealings for a weakening of the agencies which might hold some check on him. Now, as key voters threaten to rebel over his policies, it’s only natural that he’d seek the same bargain with them.

But the American people aren’t so easily bought. We’ve already waged and won numerous battles against the president’s corruption, but our fight is far from over. We must reinvigorate the institutions of transparency and accountability in our government. We must hold our leaders to an even higher ethical standard. And, especially when it starts to feel fruitless, we must do so with Donald Trump. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/08/03/donald-trump-taxpayer-cash-grab-unprecedented-corruption-column/871902002/

12. Jonathan Chait: Liberals Are the Real Nazis, Says Donald Trump Jr. Actual Nazis Disagree.

Donald Trump Jr. emerged from an advance screening of the latest cinematic triumph by pardoned felon Dinesh D’Souza burbling with a previously dormant enthusiasm for historical inquiry. “When you have a bunch of kids in dreadlocks running around screaming about ‘fascism’ and all these things,” he explained, “it’s like, wait a second, have you actually taken a history class, do you actually know what these words mean that you’re running around and spewing. And I think they don’t.”

Anything that inspires Donald Trump Jr. to want to learn more would seem to be laudable. Sadly, Trump Jr. is not proposing that today’s youth should take more history classes. Indeed, he maintains that history classes are filled with lies promoted by liberal academic elites. Instead, he wishes the dreadlocked youth would pay more attention to the revisionist history promoted by D’Souza in his latest film, Death of a Nation. In it, D’Souza continues his long-standing contention that racists and fascists of the far right are actually the true allies of the liberal left. “You see the Nazi platform in the early 1930s … and you look at it compared to like, the DNC platform of today, you’re saying, man, those things are awfully similar,” said Trump Jr.

It is bizarre that conservatives are still attempting to surmise, through indirect inquiry, what Nazis would say about politics today when there are actual Nazis who are happy to pick up a tiki torch and tell us. There is no mystery here. The people who proudly lay claim to the legacy of the Confederacy and Nazism are openly enthusiastic about Trump. They are fine with his economic populism, and gaga for his nativism.

Calling modern liberals the Real Nazis and neo-Confederates was a fun troll for the right. You can’t troll your opponents as Nazis when there are proud Nazis out there marching for you. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/trump-jr-dinesh-dsouza-liberals-are-nazis-actual-nazis-love-trump.html

13. Colbert I. King: Follow the Russian money, and tighten your seatbelt

A Financial Times investigation found title deeds and bank records showing that a family from Kazakhstan accused of laundering hundreds of millions of dollars bought apartments in a Manhattan building part-owned by Trump. More recently, an analysis by McClatchy’s D.C. bureau  found that “buyers connected to Russia or former Soviet republics made 86 all-cash sales — totaling nearly $109 million — at 10 Trump-branded properties in South Florida and New York City. . . . Many of them made purchases using shell companies designed to obscure their identities.”

It’s important to stop and note that there’s nothing necessarily illegal about any of these real estate transactions. But Trump’s nonstop, manic attacks on Mueller’s investigation — and the media — look to me like the behavior of the guilty hearing footsteps and finding no place to hide.

Trump’s only alternative is to discredit and whip up a body of hate against those who would expose him for what he is: an amoral liar and self-centered, money-grubbing fraud, with a loyal following that would make any other cult leader jealous.

But Mueller, too, has no alternative but to follow the Russian connections and the money and see where they lead.

Folks, tighten your seat belts, there’s a bumpy road ahead. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/follow-the-russian-money-and-tighten-your-seatbelt/2018/08/03/a0397c40-967f-11e8-a679-b09212fb69c2_story.html

14. David Wallace-Wells: California’s Record-breaking Fire Isn’t the Week’s Worst Climate News

In an alarming report published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 16 scientists warned that — thanks to a series of dramatic positive-feedback loops they suggest might be significantly underestimated by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which effectively establishes the boundaries of acceptable discourse on global warming — the planet may already be heading down a far more harrowing warming path than most scientists, and certainly most nonscientists, understand.

In particular, the team of 16 scientists suggested that, while the Paris climate accords committed the world to the goal of stabilizing global warming below two degrees Celsius, in fact there may not be a natural planetary equilibrium there — and so even if we managed to hit the emissions targets consistent with only two degrees of warming, a series of accelerating climate-system feedback loops would be triggered anyway, bringing us quickly past three and even four degrees Celsius. They called this possibility the “Hothouse Earth” pathway, and they outlined an even darker, worst-case scenario in which feedback loops brought us up to six or even seven degrees.

How bad would this be? At four degrees of warming, according to some estimates, nearly all of Africa and Australia, most of the United States, South America north of Patagonia and Asia south of Siberia would be rendered uninhabitable by combinations of desertification and flooding. At six degrees, we would see relatively rapid sea-level rise of up to 200 feet. At seven degrees, much of the planet’s equatorial band would be so hot that humans could not move around outside without quickly dying. And, keep in mind: while the Paris accords articulated a goal of two degrees, the emissions commitments contained within it were far from sufficient to meet that goal; most previous estimates, which do not account for any dramatic feedback loops, suggest those commitments would only get us to 3.2 or 3.4 degrees. And no major industrialized nation is on track to meet even those commitments. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/theres-worse-climate-news-than-the-mendocino-complex-fire.html

15. Damon Linker: The coming Republican wipe-out

Despite the strong economy, Democrats have consistently led in congressional generic ballot polls for more than a year. RealClearPolitics' polling average puts the spread at about 7 points. At no point in the last year has RCP had Republicans getting any closer than 3.2 points.

It's true that Trump does remain extremely popular among the roughly 24 percent of Americans who are self-described Republicans. But this, too, could hurt Republicans in November. Trump's in-party popularity keeps the GOP's elected officials and candidates for office rallying around the president in multiple ways — mimicking his blatant racism and cruelty, his support for far-right policies (including trade wars and immigration restrictionism), his vicious partisanship, his hostility to the Mueller investigation, his attacks on "fake news" and the press as the "enemy of the people," and even his bizarre fondness for Russia and Vladimir Putin in the face of overwhelming evidence that Putin's government interfered in the 2016 election. These might be acceptable, and even necessary, positions for a Republican to take in 2018. But they're unlikely to endear Republican candidates to independent voters, and they may well be enough to motivate Democrats to show up to vote en masse against the president and his morally compromised party.

Three months out from the midterm elections of 2018, the state of play is exactly what one would expect to see in the early stages of the unfolding of precisely such a scenario. http://theweek.com/articles/788811/coming-republican-wipeout