1. Dana Milbank: The Trump albatross

President Trump is getting his wish: It’s all about him.

The election, that is.

New evidence indicates that the midterm elections in seven weeks will be the clearest referendum on a president in at least 80 years.

But while it may delight the narcissistic president that the 2018 midterms are entirely about him, this is precisely what his fellow Republicans were hoping to avoid. With Trump’s support at historic lows — 60 percent overall disapprove of his performance, including 59 percent of independents — Republicans scrambling to hold the House and Senate have been struggling in vain to make the election about other issues: tax cuts, Democrats’ personal foibles — anything to avoid the election being about Trump.

This has failed, bigly. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-are-tripping-on-trumps-coattails--bigly/2018/09/14/d05dee32-b83b-11e8-94eb-3bd52dfe917b_story.html

2. Gabriel Sherman: “Trump Believes There’s A Coup”: Freaked By The Times Op-Ed, The President Is Seeing Enemies Everywhere

Trump’s anger over Woodward’s book is dwarfed by his continuing fixation on the anonymous New York Times op-ed. Sources told me Trump is “obsessed,” “lathered,” and “freaked out” that the leaker is still in his midst. His son Don Jr. has told people he’s worried Trump isn’t sleeping because of it, a source said. Meetings have been derailed by Trump’s suspicion. “If you look at him the wrong way, he’ll spend the next hour thinking you wrote it,” a Republican close to the White House said. Much of what’s fueling Trump’s paranoia is that he has no clear way to identify the author. One adviser said Trump has instructed aides to call the anonymous author a “coward” in public to shame him or her. “He’s going to continue to shame this person,” a person close to Trump said. “The author will break under pressure or will eventually say, ‘fuck it, it’s me.’” Plans to administer polygraph tests to staff have seemingly died. “Nobody knows who it is,” a former official said.

The West Wing is bracing for the climate to worsen. The increasing likelihood that Democrats will make big gains in the midterms is frustrating the White House’s efforts to get nominations confirmed in the Senate. According to a source, Johnny DeStefano, who’s in charge of personnel, has complained that Mitch McConnell’s staff will only focus on confirming judges before the midterms, leaving many important appointments, such as ones in the Export-Import Bank, unfilled. Ivanka and Jared Kushner, meanwhile, continue to agitate for Trump to replace Chief of Staff John Kelly with a more pliable manager. Ivanka recently asked a friend about Republican political adviser and former lobbyist Wayne Berman, a source briefed on the conversation said. Another name Ivanka has discussed is former federal prosecutor Matt Whitaker, who’s serving as Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s chief of staff (Axios reported Whitaker is also a candidate to replace White House counsel Don McGahn). https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/09/trump-ny-times-op-ed-bob-woodward-fear

3. Tina Nguyen: Facing A Midterm Wipeout, Trump’s Alternate Reality Comes Crashing Down

“Your vote in 2018 is every bit as important as your vote in 2016,” Donald Trump said at an event hosted by the Susan B. Anthony List back in May, reading dutifully from a teleprompter. Then, he went off script: “Although I’m not sure I really believe that . . . I don’t know who the hell wrote that line,” he said with a grin, as the audience laughed. Trump has maintained this same level of swagger for most of the summer, defiantly smacking down talk of Democrats winning the House in the midterms as more mainstream-media nonsense. (“RED WAVE!” he tweeted at one point.) In doing so, of course, he may have pacified the same voters Republican operatives are eager to rev up. “They’re like, ‘Oh, to hell with this crap, we were told Trump wasn’t going to win [in 2016]. It’s bullshit,’” a worried G.O.P. strategist fretted to Axios.

It’s a problematic dynamic for a president who is allergic to facts that don’t go his way. In reality, all signs point to a crushing wave election, with not even a roaring economy enough to boost Trump’s dismal approval rating. “At this stage of the game, losing the House is the most likely proposition,” a G.O.P. strategist with clients on the ballot recently told David M. Drucker for the Hive. “It’s just a matter of how bad it gets.”

In public, Trump maintains his reality distortion field. But behind the scenes, a grim fatalism seems to be sinking in. “What he’s figured out is that his name is on the ballot in 2018,” a source who’s discussed the midterms with Trump told Axios. “His name is on the ballot as it relates to 2020, but more important he realizes his name is on the ballot as it relates to what life is going to be like for the next two years.” Democrats are preparing to make life a living hell for Trump, if they take back one or both houses of Congress. Republicans have already begun circulating a list of possible Democratic investigations into the administration, which features such bullet points as “President Trump’s tax returns,” “The travel ban,” and “Jared Kushner’s ethics law compliance.” The list, Jonathan Swan reported last month, “has churned Republican stomachs.” “If Republicans lose the House, the president will pivot and say it’s not a big deal, and make the case that he won regardless, because he lost fewer seats than past presidents,” a knowledgeable Republican told Drucker. “He will not fully understand the incredible headache it will be, in terms of House oversight, but he’ll quickly realize why it’s idiotic not to care.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/09/facing-2018-midterm-wipeout-trump-alternate-reality-comes-crashing-down

4. Ryan Cooper: Republicans' hurricane hubris

South Carolina isn't quite so obviously self-harming as its neighbor, but that's about all that can be said for it. Its Republican state government and congressional delegation is filled with science deniers and people who automatically vote against any climate diplomacy or regulation. Meanwhile, Georgia's Gov. Nathan Deal (R) used to be a full-fledged climate denier in Congress (like the rest of the delegation), but has clammed up on the issue since becoming governor in 2011.

This sort of retreat from denial seems more and more common in conservative politics (perhaps driven by these clockwork extreme weather disasters), replaced mainly by a lot of evasion and double talk. But that is far from good enough. Just like Florida, the Carolinas and Georgia very badly need two things: a massive federal investment program to ruggedize their built environment and an all-out diplomatic push to secure an international agreement on climate policy. Local politicians won't even be able to properly help their own cities alone, much less conduct international diplomacy. The biggest greenhouse gas emitter by far these days is China, so any successful attack on climate change must be international, and hence must be led by the federal government.

Mainly this would mean mounting our own crash decarbonization program, and using that progress to challenge, help, and stimulate other such efforts. Ultimately China is just as doomed as Florida if climate change is not checked, which is why they are making heroic efforts to cut their emissions and build out their renewable sector.

The U.S. has a lot of power and wealth. We could be pulling our weight here, and helping our own citizenry in the process. But instead we're the worst laggard in the world. And when Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accords, virtually the entire Republican Party either cheered or kept quiet. The citizens of Georgia and the Carolinas — many of whom tried their hardest to get their representatives to pay attention to reality, it's important to note — are about to pay the price. http://theweek.com/articles/795475/republicans-hurricane-hubris

5. Allan Ripp: Trump's Groundhog Day presidency

We are 606 days into Donald Trump's presidency — and I can't stop thinking about Groundhog Day.

In that 1993 film directed by Harold Ramis, Bill Murray plays a cynical, self-absorbed weatherman sent by his Pittsburgh TV station to dreary Punxsutawney to cover festivities around the local groundhog's mid-winter forecast. Meteorologist Phil Connors (Murray) is disdainful of everyone around him, communicates via caustic one-liners, and treats his production crew with scorn. He even disparages the groundhog, calling it a rat.

Sound like someone you know?

Desperate to get out of town the moment his blah-blah story is filed, Phil encounters a driving snowstorm on the highway, forcing him back to Punxsutawney, where he enters a Twilight Zone wrinkle in time, reliving the same day over and over — from waking to the same grating Sonny & Cher tune on the clock radio in his stuffy B&B to getting repeatedly sloshed with icy puddle water by a glad-handing insurance salesman he went to high school with, plus countless other indignities.

As Phil moans of his no-exit dilemma: "What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing you did mattered?"

This is our life under President Trump.

Every day, we awaken to the same mean tweets from the president, the same outraged memes on social media, and the same screeching reports about lies, fake news, impeachment, the 25th Amendment, the wall, idiots and morons, and even treason. Instead of Sonny & Cher hitting us with the romantic "I Got You Babe," we're jolted awake every day at 6 a.m. by the equivalent of Barry McGuire's classic lament "Eve of Destruction."http://theweek.com/articles/795927/trumps-groundhog-day-presidency

6. Jonathan Chait: It Takes More Than ‘Adults in the Room’ to Control a Petulant Leader Like Trump

One of the most blandly unsettling passages in Bob Woodward’s Fear recounts the near resignation of Gary Cohn, one of the book’s likely sources and (therefore) heroes. In August 2017, Cohn, nauseated at President Trump’s equivocation over neo-Nazis demonstrating in Charlottesville, Virginia, attempted to quit. Trump berated Cohn for his weakness and, characteristically equating political loyalty to himself with loyalty to the country, accused Cohn of “treason.” “It was chilling,” Woodward reports.

Then Trump tried another approach. “If you leave now, taxes are over,” he warned. By this he meant the massive corporate tax cuts Cohn had helped to craft and from which he also stood to personally benefit. Cohn’s moral outrage began to drain, and he instead decided to stay on, prioritizing the taxes, or, as Woodward has him selflessly declaring, “helping the country.”

There is no better symbol for the Republican Party elite in the Trump era than Gary Cohn weighing the morality of opposing Nazism against corporate-tax-rate cuts and choosing the latter. But it is also a reminder that Nazism, which several generations of Americans have grown accustomed to thinking of as an exotic symbol of pure, abstract evil, in reality represents a political faction. Trump is not a Nazi. Nor, even, is Steve Bannon. They are, however, Nazi-adjacent, and actual neo-Nazis are excited about Trump, who has emboldened and empowered white nationalists in a way nobody could have fathomed until recently. They are just another part of the party coalition now. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/09/it-takes-more-than-adults-in-the-room-to-control-trump.html

7.  George Packer: With “Fear” and Trump, Bob Woodward Has a Bookend to the Nixon Story

Bob Woodward’s “Fear” belongs on a shelf with the literature of mad kings, next to Robert Graves’s “I, Claudius,” featuring the Roman emperor Caligula, and Ryszard Kapuściński’s “The Emperor,” about the last days in the court of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie. Those books are masterpieces of fictionalized history, while “Fear” is a remarkable feat of reporting conveyed in prose that couldn’t be called literary. But they resemble one another in their atmosphere of antic dread—the claustrophobic, gut-tightening sense that power has come utterly unmoored from reality, and no one in the palace is safe from the wild impulses of the ruler. There’s nothing comparable in American journalism, except maybe Woodward’s “The Final Days,” co-written with Carl Bernstein, about the downfall of Richard Nixon. Yet even Nixon—drunk late at night and talking to paintings in the White House residence—seems relatively sane and pitiable compared with Donald Trump. You half expect to find Woodward’s Trump ordering the execution of the entire National Security Council, declaring himself a god on Twitter, then anointing his daughter as heir to the throne.

The title of the book comes from Trump’s definition of “real power,” whether in terms of political clout or the ability to bully a woman he has victimized. But the fear around his Presidency has nothing to do with his skillful use of intimidation, and everything to do with the dangerous consequences of his erratic behavior. At Trump’s core lies a need always to look strong, which, of course, makes him look weak. In several scenes, one adviser or another struggles to find the right, flattering words that will keep the President from starting a nuclear war.

No one has any respect for Trump. In the course of the book, his chief of staff calls him “an idiot”; his Secretary of State ups it to “a fucking moron”; his Secretary of Defense compares him to an eleven-year-old; his top economic adviser and his personal lawyer consider him, respectively, “a professional liar” and “a fucking liar.” (Various denials have been issued.) Gary Cohn, the economic adviser, tells the President to his face that he’s “a fucking asshole,” while Trump calls Cohn “a fucking globalist.” When Cohn first tries to resign, Trump mocks him for being under his wife’s thumb, not to mention treasonous. There’s no end to the Cabinet members and generals whom Trump is eager to insult in front of their colleagues, or to fire by tweet. A coarse and feckless viciousness is the operating procedure of his White House, and the poison spreads to everyone. Only snakes and sycophants survive.

Woodward has written a kind of bookend to the Nixon story, and the ghost of the scandal that launched his career haunts the Trump White House. “All the President’s Men,” Woodward’s first collaboration with Bernstein, was at its heart a detective story, and the trail of evidence led the reporters into the Oval Office. We don’t yet know the outcome of Robert Mueller’s investigation into and obstruction of justice, but in a sense it doesn’t matter. The real crime is already in plain sight.  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/24/with-fear-and-trump-bob-woodward-has-a-bookend-to-the-nixon-story

8. Tina Nguyen: Facing A Midterm Wipeout, Trump’s Alternate Reality Comes Crashing Down

“Your vote in 2018 is every bit as important as your vote in 2016,” Donald Trump saidat an event hosted by the Susan B. Anthony List back in May, reading dutifully from a teleprompter. Then, he went off script: “Although I’m not sure I really believe that . . . I don’t know who the hell wrote that line,” he said with a grin, as the audience laughed. Trump has maintained this same level of swagger for most of the summer, defiantly smacking down talk of Democrats winning the House in the midterms as more mainstream-media nonsense. (“RED WAVE!” he tweeted at one point.) In doing so, of course, he may have pacified the same voters Republican operatives are eager to rev up. “They’re like, ‘Oh, to hell with this crap, we were told Trump wasn’t going to win [in 2016]. It’s bullshit,’” a worried G.O.P. strategist fretted to Axios.

It’s a problematic dynamic for a president who is allergic to facts that don’t go his way. In reality, all signs point to a crushing wave election, with not even a roaring economy enough to boost Trump’s dismal approval rating. “At this stage of the game, losing the House is the most likely proposition,” a G.O.P. strategist with clients on the ballot recently told David M. Drucker for the Hive. “It’s just a matter of how bad it gets.”

In public, Trump maintains his reality distortion field. But behind the scenes, a grim fatalism seems to be sinking in. “What he’s figured out is that his name is on the ballot in 2018,” a source who’s discussed the midterms with Trump told Axios. “His name is on the ballot as it relates to 2020, but more important he realizes his name is on the ballot as it relates to what life is going to be like for the next two years.” Democrats are preparing to make life a living hell for Trump, if they take back one or both houses of Congress. Republicans have already begun circulating a list of possible Democratic investigations into the administration, which features such bullet points as “President Trump’s tax returns,” “The travel ban,” and “Jared Kushner’s ethics law compliance.” The list, Jonathan Swan reported last month, “has churned Republican stomachs.” “If Republicans lose the House, the president will pivot and say it’s not a big deal, and make the case that he won regardless, because he lost fewer seats than past presidents,” a knowledgeable Republican told Drucker. “He will not fully understand the incredible headache it will be, in terms of House oversight, but he’ll quickly realize why it’s idiotic not to care.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/09/facing-2018-midterm-wipeout-trump-alternate-reality-comes-crashing-down

9. Conor Lynch: How Americans came to their senses about climate change

For a long time climate change felt far off to many Americans. Though people saw the pictures of melting ice caps and heard the warnings from Al Gore and 97 percent of climate scientists, they never truly felt this long-term environmental trend would threaten their own lives. Maybe it would affect future generations or people in the global south, where climate change will have especially deleterious effects, but not their own communities, not them.

So not only did countless Americans treat global warming like some minor threat that wouldn't hurt them in any major way, but many simply denied that it was even happening. This attitude was promoted by fossil fuel companies and special interests that funded propaganda questioning the scientific consensus, as well as the politicians who supported their views. Thus over the past few decades, the Republican Party — the party that once founded the Environmental Protection Agency — became the party of climate change denialism.

In recent years, however, this refusal to face reality has become increasingly hard to sustain, especially as extreme weather events become more and more common and menace more and more Americans. The latest instance of extreme weather, Tropical Storm Florence, is wreaking havoc on the Carolinas, and as many have already pointed out, there is strong evidence to suggest that climate change made it worse, increasing rainfall by up to 50 percent and slowing down the storm's movement. Florence arrives a little over a year after Hurricane Harvey, which devastated the Houston area, and Hurricane Maria, which went down as the worst natural disasterin Puerto Rico's recorded history.

There is little doubt in the scientific community about the effect that global warming is already having on the weather, and it is clearly making natural disasters more catastrophic than they were previously. Of course, it's not just hurricanes that are growing more deadly. The recent global heat wave that scorched America and left dozens of people dead was also connected to climate change, as were the wildfires that consumed the West Coast this summer.

Climate change is no longer some remote threat that can be dealt with by our great-grandchildren. It is here. Thankfully, more people seem to be waking up to reality. http://theweek.com/articles/795810/how-americans-came-senses-about-climate-change

10. Hillary Rodham Clinton: American Democracy Is in Crisis

It’s been nearly two years since Donald Trump won enough Electoral College votes to become president of the United States. On the day after, in my concession speech, I said, “We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.” I hoped that my fears for our future were overblown.

They were not.

In the roughly 21 months since he took the oath of office, Trump has sunk far below the already-low bar he set for himself in his ugly campaign. Exhibit A is the unspeakable cruelty that his administration has inflicted on undocumented families arriving at the border, including separating children, some as young as eight months, from their parents. According to The New York Times, the administration continues to detain 12,800 children right now, despite all the outcry and court orders. Then there’s the president’s monstrous neglect of Puerto Rico: After Hurricane Maria ravaged the island, his administration barely responded. Some 3,000 Americans died. Now Trump flatly denies those deaths were caused by the storm. And, of course, despite the recent indictments of several Russian military intelligence officers for hacking the Democratic National Committee in 2016, he continues to dismiss a serious attack on our country by a foreign power as a “hoax.”

Trump and his cronies do so many despicable things that it can be hard to keep track. I think that may be the point—to confound us, so it’s harder to keep our eye on the ball. The ball, of course, is protecting American democracy. As citizens, that’s our most important charge. And right now, our democracy is in crisis.

I don’t use the word crisis lightly. There are no tanks in the streets. The administration’s malevolence may be constrained on some fronts—for now—by its incompetence. But our democratic institutions and traditions are under siege. We need to do everything we can to fight back. There’s not a moment to lose.

In 1787, after the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was asked by a woman on the street outside Independence Hall, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.” That response has been on my mind a lot lately. The contingency of it. How fragile our experiment in self-government is. And, when viewed against the sweep of human history, how fleeting. Democracy may be our birthright as Americans, but it’s not something we can ever take for granted. Every generation has to fight for it, has to push us closer to that more perfect union. That time has come again. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/american-democracy-is-in-crisis/570394/

11. Richard Cohen: The GOP is about to hurl itself into the sea

The Republican Party is in bad shape. The prognosis for the midterm elections is not good for it. The economy is booming, unemployment is about as low as it can get and inflation remains oddly meek. Yet, none of this seems to be enough. For one thing, the tweetaholic in the White House seems intent on diverting attention to himself and his moral and ethical squalor. He cannot stay on message unless the message is himself. For the GOP, this is not good. Trump is the Harvey Weinstein of American politics.

I choose the disgraced Hollywood mogul, ground zero of the #MeToo movement, for a reason. Women are abandoning the Republican Party for its adoration of the piggish Trump, its insistence that a woman’s body is not her own and its tolerance of intolerant cultural figures. Blacks, who have a dissenting view of “very fine” Klansmen, and Hispanics, who might feel that not all Mexicans are rapists, are feeling no different. Among women, Trump has an approval rate of only 29 percent in the latest CNN poll; among nonwhites, it’s 19 percent.

Those dismal polling numbers apply to Trump, not to the Republican Party in general. But Trump has become the party. He’s replaced Thomas Nast’s elephant as its symbol. The president’s ugly tics are mirrored by his party. They are now one on immigration, trade, tax benefits for the rich, hostility to minority groups, a grope-friendly approach to women’s issues and a weakness for conspiracy theories — the foreign birth of Barack Obama, the treason of Benghazi or anything to do with the Clintons, clearly the most felonious couple since Bonnie and Clyde.

The leaders of the party know better. But out of fear of repercussions from ideological droolers, they mostly fail to distinguish themselves from Trump. They have allowed Republican principles — free trade, abhorrence of debt, etc. — to atrophy, possibly thinking they will revive them when Trump is gone.

The Democratic Party once had an analogous dilemma: a Southern wing so recalcitrant on race that it even refused to make lynching a federal crime. But it did have Northern liberals and Midwestern progressives, and so one could remain a Democrat and still retain some pride. The GOP, in contrast, is presenting just one face to the voters — Trump’s. The party is unified — like lemmings about to hurl themselves into the sea.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gop-has-become-trump--and-is-about-to-hurl-itself-into-the-sea/2018/09/17/4147a592-baa9-11e8-a8aa-860695e7f3fc_story.html