1. Eugene Robinson: Why Trump is so frantic right now

President Trump’s incoherence grows to keep pace with his desperation. These days, he makes less sense than ever — a sign that this malignant presidency has entered a new, more dangerous phase.

I can’t be the only one who thinks he sounds less like an elected official than like the leader of some apocalyptic cult. Look at the way he rails against the news media at his revival-style campaign rallies. In Indiana on Thursday night, he seemed obsessed with news stories that had described empty seats and a subdued crowd at a West Virginia rally several days earlier. He claimed those reports were “fake news,” although they were demonstrably true.

Trump also said that “when I start screaming ‘fake news,’ you see those red lights go off for a little while,” referring to the television news cameras. The suggestion was that the news media do not want the public to know of his “fake news” attacks, which is insanely untrue — if anything, we give far too much coverage to that dangerous nonsense. And as all at the rally could see, the little red lights stayed on.

But although Trump’s rant was divorced from reality, it was also coldly calculated. He has waged a relentless campaign to persuade his staunch supporters to believe his words over the evidence of their own eyes and ears.

This is an astonishing thing to have to say about an American president, but Trump is taking a page from the playbook of totalitarian dictators: Believe only me. Reality is what I say it is. Anyone who claims otherwise is an Enemy of the People. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-trump-is-so-frantic-right-now/2018/09/01/26c7f816-ad52-11e8-b1da-ff7faa680710_story.html

2. Anonymous: I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.

Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.

Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.

There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first. But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html

3. Gabriel Sherman: “Everybody On The Inside Knows It’s True”: Woodward’s Reality Bomb Is Blowing Up The West Wing

The West Wing came to a virtual standstill yesterday after The Washington Postpublished the first excerpts of Bob Woodward’s upcoming book, Fear. The book by the veteran White House chronicler portrays Donald Trump as an unhinged and ill-informed commander in chief surrounded by aides who doubt his intelligence and question his fitness for office. “It’s pandemonium. He literally isn’t talking to anyone. He’s canceled meetings and is on the phone calling up his friends,” one source said. Current and former staffers, meanwhile, pointed fingers in all directions as they sought to deflect blame for the damaging leaks. “I’d rather be an unapologetic defender of Donald Trump than Judas,” one West Wing official told me.

Woodward’s book triggered Trump’s wrath on several levels. Two sources told me Trump is furious at the portions of the book that describe administration officials questioning his intelligence and emotional stability. Woodward reports that Chief of Staff John Kelly called Trump “an idiot” and the West Wing “Crazytown”; Defense Secretary Jim Mattis compared Trump to a “fifth- or sixth-grader”; and Trump’s former personal lawyer called Trump a “fucking liar” who would end up in “an orange jumpsuit” if he testified to special counsel Robert Mueller.

Trump is also outraged that the book portrays aides as believing they are the grown-ups protecting the country from his dangerous impulses. Two sources said Trump is particularly angry with former economic adviser Gary Cohn, who is revealed in the book to have snatched a letter off Trump’s desk to protect “national security.” “He hates that people are leaking. They think they can take things off the Resolute desk because of this idea they’re ‘saving’ the country,” one senior West Wing official said. “I mean, who does that?”

Even Trump’s family is concerned the president is in deep trouble. After attending John McCain’s funeral, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump told Trump he needs to get control of himself. A person briefed on the conversation recalled, “Jared told him if they’re going to last in Washington they can’t be this far off the mark with the establishment.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/09/bob-woodwards-reality-bomb-is-blowing-up-the-west-wing

4. Jonathan Chait: Trump Is a Snob Who Secretly Despises His Own Supporters

Deep in a Politico report about President Trump’s attempt to build support for firing Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whom Trump loathes for recusing himself from the investigation of a campaign he was part of, is a striking artifact of Trumpism. The president’s swelling complaints against Sessions include the fact that he “doesn’t have the Ivy League pedigree the president prefers” and that Trump “can’t stand his Southern accent.”

Conservatives have spent decades depicting liberals as coastal snobs. Entire campaigns were built from this theme, from Michael Dukakis’s “Harvard Yard boutique” to various Democrats failing to display the requisite enthusiasm for Nascar. Every image of Barack Obama in the right-wing media cast him gazing downward imperiously, a pose that conservatives seemed to think captured his contempt for the good people of the heartland.

Given the attention they have lavished on such picayune details as John Kerry’s failure to order cheesesteak properly, it’s not even possible to imagine what they would do with direct evidence of a president disdaining his attorney general’s University of Alabama law degree and regional accent. Imagine one of those scenes from a ’90s action movie where the bad guys are wearing night-vision goggles in the dark, and then suddenly faced with blinding light.

But as is so often the case, the accusation that was made falsely against Democrats turns out to be true of Trump. For all his vaunted populism, he is filled with contempt for average people in general and his own supporters in particular. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/coastal-snob-trump-mocks-sessions-alabama-accent-degree.html

5. Greg Sargent: The walls are closing in. And Trump’s lawyers know it.

What’s going on at @CNN is happening, to different degrees, at other networks - with @NBCNews being the worst. The good news is that Andy Lack(y) is about to be fired(?) for incompetence, and much worse. When Lester Holt got caught fudging my tape on Russia, they were hurt badly! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 30, 2018

That video is right here. This sounds like the sort of claim that Trump would make to aides — remember, he privately suggested that the “Access Hollywood” tape might have been faked — but in this case, suddenly blurted out publicly. Regardless, it raises a question: Why does Trump suddenly see a need to distance himself from that interview now, more than a year after it happened?

Trump’s own lawyers believe that Mueller thinks he has already got enough for a strong obstruction case. While there won’t be any indictment, they believe Mueller will issue a damning report to Congress, and given their own fears about obstruction, that (in their view) will likely be what makes the report potentially so damaging — helping to supply grounds for impeachment.

Trump may sense the rising likelihood of this as well, which might be why he’s suddenly distancing himself from the Holt interview. But even if so, while Trump has talked about impeachment with his advisers, they don’t believe he is sufficiently mindful of the danger all of this poses.

How does this end? All of it perhaps makes it more likely that Trump will fire Sessions. If Mueller already has enough for an obstruction case, and putting in a new attorney general could perhaps limit what Mueller investigates further or what he puts into his report, then why not? Even if so, it’s hard to see how that would derail the case for impeachment — it might add to it.

Provided, that is, that Democrats take back the House. But what if that does not happen? Then what? https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/08/30/the-walls-are-closing-in-and-trumps-lawyers-know-it/

6. NY Times Editorial Board: After Trump, the Deluge?

At a private meeting on Monday, President Trump urged evangelical Christian leaders to break federal law and openly support him from the pulpit. Does it matter that he seemed to believe that he had overturned the provision of the tax code that prevents churches from endorsing or opposing political candidates? Truth, fantasy and deceit slosh together with Mr. Trump.

What mattered more was the thought that Mr. Trump planted — that a deluge of violence and anarchy would be loosed upon the world if they failed to rally the nation’s Christian soldiers to his side.

If the Democrats win the midterm elections, the president warned, “they will overturn everything that we’ve done and they’ll do it quickly and violently, and violently.”

“The level of hatred, the level of anger is unbelievable,” he said.

Of course, the only political leader who has been inciting and condoning violence has been Mr. Trump. At campaign rallies he fantasized about punching a foe in the face and urged his crowds to “knock the crap out of”protesters, offering to pay their legal bills if they did. Reporters at his rallies have feared for their safety as they faced the “enemy of the people” fury Mr. Trump has sought to foment among his most passionate supporters. When torch-bearing neo-Nazis marched in Virginia last year, and one even ran his car into a crowd of counter-demonstrators, killing a woman, Mr. Trump said there was “blame on both sides.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/opinion/trump-evangelicals-violence.html

7. Max Boot: The McCain funeral offered a promise of deliverance at a dark moment in American history

When dictators took over countries such as Germany, Italy, Russia, Argentina and Venezuela, the body politic had usually already been weakened by war, depression or chronic misrule – and often all three. Today, the United States faces a threat from a would-be despot of its own: a president who incessantly undermines his own Justice Department, calls for his political opponents to be investigated and locked up, denounces the press as the “enemy of the people,” and lies incessantly while telling his followers that they must trust whatever he now says over what the media report or even over what he himself was previously recorded as saying on video.

President Trump has tried with all his might to undermine what he calls a “Rigged Witch Hunt,” but to judge by the evidence of the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, he is failing: Only 36 percent of those surveyed approve of the president, while 49 percent support his impeachment and 63 percent back the Mueller investigation. Assuming the poll is not simply an outlier, it suggests that the body politic is rejecting the Trumpist infection. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/09/02/the-mccain-funeral-offered-a-promise-of-deliverance-at-a-dark-moment-in-american-history/

8. Bonnie Kristian: Trump's medieval sense of order

For Trump, society has a definite hierarchy that must be preserved. As president and a wealthy, white businessman, his own rank is the highest. Trump is our world's analogue to the king, and he has plenty of slithering court evangelicals feeding him assurances that his position is God-ordained. His children are, in his phrase, "high quality" too. The exact details of the rest of the hierarchy are debatable, but being female, poor, non-white, disabled, a Democrat, an immigrant, physically unattractive, a member of the media, or a Trump critic of any variety clearly lowers your marks.

So, to illustrate, Trump is very angry about NFL players protesting police brutality during the national anthem. He associates the anthem with himself as head of state and believes the players (in his mind, low honor people) have offended his high honor. He is also very angry about the murder of white Americans (high honor) by non-white immigrants (low honor). Trump believes his own enemies, like Clinton, deserve very large punishments; their honor is clearly at peasant levels. Anyone associated with or flattering of Trump, however, shares in his honor and therefore could not possibly deserve much punishment because any offenses they committed were against victims of lower status. http://theweek.com/articles/792593/trumps-medieval-sense-order

9. Bret Stephens: Straining to Keep Faith With America

On his last visit to the Munich Security Conference in 2017, shortly before his cancer diagnosis,John McCain  he spoke of his own mounting sense of alarm. Alarm, he said, at “the hardening of resentment we see toward immigrants” and “the growing inability, and even unwillingness, to separate truth from lies.” Alarm that “more of our fellow citizens seem to be flirting with authoritarianism and romanticizing it as our moral equivalent.” Alarm, above all, “that many of our peoples, including in my own country, are giving up on the West.”

It was no mystery to anyone in his audience that day where the real source of his alarm lay: An American president who, in matters of both character and conviction, was low and vapid and mean-spirited and bottomlessly dishonorable — McCain’s opposite in every respect.

But everyone in that audience would also have known that McCain had enough sense of history, and enough confidence in the future, not to mistake evidence of decay for proof of decline. In the scale of American blunders — from the Dred Scott decision to the Neutrality Acts of the 1930s to the tragedy of Vietnam — is the Trump presidency really unique? And in the long, upward arc of American history, will its consequences be so dire or decisive? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/opinion/mccain-america.html

10. NY Times Editorial: A Bogus Deal on NAFTA

The North American Free Trade Agreement is a nearly 25-year-old agreement that needs to be modernized to address new technologies, update intellectual property rights and protect American industry and workers from unfair competition. Instead, President Trump has proposed replacing Nafta with something worse, a vague agreement that could hurt American workers and raise prices for American consumers while antagonizing America’s neighbors.

In the Trumpian worldview, Canada isn’t a friendly neighbor but a frosty enemy bent on ruining our steel, auto and dairy industries while cutting down forests in British Columbia and trucking the lumber across the border. Fiends! Likewise, as he sees it, Mexico ships tequila, produce and people north, and imports our higher-paying manufacturing jobs. Desperados! Yet his solutions would simply add complications with few benefits.

We will certainly not be better off. Nor is Congress planning to cede its authority in treaty making. The president can and should expect a bipartisan pushback against an unnecessary and abusive bad “deal.”

“Canada has oil, electricity, water, all the things that the United States desperately needs,” notes Jerry Dias, national president of Unifor Canada, a leading trade union. “So for him to pick a fight with us makes no sense, either philosophically or economically.”

Correct, Mr. Dias. Welcome to our world. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/02/opinion/trump-nafta-deal.html1.

11. Juan Williams: Trump's 'majority' is fake

The lives of over 300 million Americans are being affected by policies foisted on them by a Senate “majority” that represents less than one-fifth of them and a president who was elected with three million fewer votes than his opponent.

Meanwhile, even as daily controversy, including federal convictions of his associates, surrounds Trump, the 18 percent represented by the GOP majority in the Senate protects the president from impeachment.

What is wrong with this picture?

Liberal comedian Bill Maher has long said that the Constitution is in need of a “page one rewrite.”

That’s funny, but the joke has a bite to it.

Trump has normalized many horrible things in our politics: racism, lying, scapegoating and corruption.

Future historians may look back and conclude one of the most corrosive things he normalized was minority-posing-as-majority tyranny that cheats the majority of the American people out of their democracy. http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/404720-juan-williams-trumps-majority-is-fake

12. Jeffrey Toobin: How Giuliani Turned Into Trump’s Clown

Since joining Trump’s team, Giuliani has greeted every new development as a vindication, even when he’s had to bend and warp the evidence in front of him. Like Trump, he characterizes the Mueller probe as a ‘witch hunt’ and the prosecutors as ‘thugs.’ He has, in effect, become the legal auxiliary to Trump’s Twitter feed, peddling the same chaotic mixture of non sequiturs, exaggerations, half-truths, and falsehoods. Giuliani, like the President, is not seeking converts but comforting the converted.

This has come at considerable cost to his reputation. As a prosecutor, Giuliani was the sheriff of Wall Street and the bane of organized crime. As mayor, he was the law-and-order leader who kicked ‘squeegee men’ off the streets of New York. Now he’s a talking head spouting nonsense on cable news. But this version of Giuliani isn’t new; Trump has merely tapped into tendencies that have been evident all along.

Trump learned about law and politics from his mentor Roy Cohn, the notorious sidekick to Joseph McCarthy who, as a lawyer in New York, became a legendary brawler and used the media to bash adversaries. In the early months of his Presidency, as Mueller’s investigation was getting under way, Trump is said to have raged, ‘Where’s my Roy Cohn?’ In Giuliani, the President has found him. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/10/how-rudy-giuliani-turned-into-trumps-clown