1. Philip Bump: Robert Mueller kneecaps President Trump’s no collusion, no obstruction mantra

“Director Mueller,” Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler asked, “the president has repeatedly claimed that your report found there was no obstruction and that it completely and totally exonerated him, but that is not what your report said, is it?”

“Correct,” Mueller replied. “That is not what the report said.”

Nadler quoted from a section of the report in which Mueller’s team wrote that it would have exonerated Trump on the question of obstruction if it could. But, the report says, it couldn’t.

“So the report did not conclude that he did not commit obstruction of justice, is that correct?” Nadler asked.

“That is correct,” Mueller replied.

“And what about total exoneration? Did you totally exonerate the president?” Nadler continued.

“No,” Mueller said.

“Does your report state there is sufficient factual and legal basis for further investigation of potential obstruction of justice by the president?” Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) later asked.

“Yes,” Mueller replied.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/07/24/robert-mueller-kneecaps-president-trumps-no-collusion-no-obstruction-mantra/

2. Walter Shapiro: Moderation in the Trump era? Democrats, it’s futile

We have all read versions of this column written by skittish liberals, nervous centrists and panicked never-Trump Republicans: “Don’t the Democrats understand that many voters like their employer-provided health care plans and will rebel over being forced into a rigid ‘Medicare for All’ system? Eliminating criminal penalties for crossing the border illegally would be an invitation for immigration chaos. And do Democrats really believe that Americans will sacrifice their lifestyles to comply with the extreme provisions of a Green New Deal?”

These Democrats-in-disarray columns invariably point out that only with sensible moderation can Donald Trump be defeated in 2020. As for Democratic congressional candidates, particularly first-term House members elected in the 2018 Democratic sweep, their political futures are jeopardized by the extreme antics of “the squad” and the unreasonable demands of these left-wing activists with safe seats.

These are fine arguments — and I would probably accept them in a normal political climate. I remember the wipeout years for the Democrats, like 1972 and 1984, when the party was crushed by veering too far from the center in an increasingly conservative political environment.

But Trump’s contempt for anything resembling truth has erased this traditional political equation.

What’s the point of the 2020 Democratic nominee offering a nuanced policy on immigration if Trump, regardless, will loudly bellow that his opponent not only supports open borders but also wants to invite the entire population of Honduras to move to Kansas?

Where are the political benefits of carefully talking about adding a public option to Obamacare when the Republicans will claim that all Democrats want to take away your doctor and make you wait long hours in a government clinic to see anyone?

Any Democrat talking about global warming and America rejoining the Paris accord will be accused of wanting to confiscate your car and turn off your air conditioning. In fact, the Republicans may even claim that there is a Democratic master plan for a gulag for those who have ever used plastic straws.

The NRCC press release helpfully explained, “The socialist Democrats’ deranged hatred of President Trump reached a new pathetic level today, with Abigail Spanberger voting to circumvent the rules of the House of Representatives to allow Nancy Pelosi to call Trump a racist.”

If that is all that it takes in politics today to be considered “deranged,” I am dying to know what conduct the NRCC deems worthy of being called “criminally insane.”

The larger point is that the traditional rewards for Democrats to move toward the center to appeal to swing voters have vanished in an era of Trumpian trampling on truth. If merely wanting to roll back part of the 2017 tax cuts is now attacked as socialism, then the careful issue proposals of prior Democratic nominees like Hillary Clinton no longer represent the route to political safety. https://www.rollcall.com/news/opinion/the-case-against-democratic-moderation-in-the-trump-era

3.  Paul Krugman: Deficit Man and the 2020 Election

A sort of test: Can a sufficiently terrible president lose an election despite a good economy? And that is, in fact, the test we’d be running if the election were tomorrow.

On one side, Donald Trump wastes no opportunity to remind us how awful he is. His latest foray into overt racism delights his base but repels everyone else. On the other side, he presides over an economy in which unemployment is very low and real G.D.P. grew 3.2 percent over the past year.

But the election won’t be tomorrow, it will be an exhausting 15 months from now. Trump’s character won’t change, except possibly for the worse. But the economy might look significantly different.

So let’s talk about the Trump economy.

The first thing you need to know is that the Trump tax cut caused a huge rise in the budget deficit, which the administration expects to hit $1 trillion this year, up from less than $600 billion in 2016. This tidal wave of red ink is even more extraordinary than it looks, because it has taken place despite falling unemployment, which usually leads to a falling deficit.

Strange to say, none of the Republicans who warned of a debt apocalypse under President Barack Obama have protested the Trump deficits. (Should we put Paul Ryan’s face on milk cartons?) For that matter, even the centrists who obsessed over federal debt during the Obama years have been pretty quiet. Clearly, deficits only matter when there’s a Democrat in the White House.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/opinion/2020-trump-economy.html

4. Adam Serwer: ‘What Americans Do Now Will Define Us Forever

White nationalism was a formal or informal governing doctrine of the United States until 1965, or for most of its existence as a country. Racist demagogues, from Andrew Johnson to Woodrow Wilson, have occupied the White House. Trump has predecessors, such as Calvin Coolidge, who imposed racist immigration restrictions designed to preserve a white demographic majority. Prior presidents, such as Richard Nixon, have exploited racial division for political gain. But we have never seen an American president make a U.S. representative, a refugee, an American citizen, a woman of color, and a religious minority an object of hate for the political masses, in a deliberate attempt to turn the country against his fellow Americans who share any of those traits. Trump is assailing the moral foundations of the multiracial democracy Americans have struggled to bring into existence since 1965, and unless Trumpism is defeated, that fragile project will fail.

Nevertheless, most of Trump’s predecessors had something he does not yet have: the support of a majority of the electorate. Ilhan Omar’s prominence as a Republican target comes not, as conservatives might argue, simply because her policy views are left-wing. Neither is it because, as some liberals have supposed, she is an unmatched political talent. She has emerged as an Emmanuel Goldstein for the Trumpist right because as a black woman, a Muslim, an immigrant, and a progressive member of Congress, she represents in vivid terms a threat to the nation Trumpists fear they are losing.

Omar must be defended, but not because of her views on Israel, gay rights, or progressive taxation. You needn’t agree with her on any of those things; in fact, you needn’t like her at all. But she must be defended, because the nature of the president’s attack on her is a threat to all Americans—black or white, Jew or Gentile—whose citizenship, whose belonging, might similarly be questioned. This is not about Omar anymore, or the other women of color who have been told by this president to “go back” to their supposed countries of origin. It is about defending the idea that America should be a country for all its people. If multiracial democracy cannot be defended in America, it will not be defended elsewhere. What Americans do now, in the face of this, will define us forever. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/send-her-back-battle-will-define-us-forever/594307/

5. Zak Cheney-Rice: Republicans Don’t Want Racist Chants to Define Them — Just Racist Policies

Few statements capture the yawning emptiness of Republican disapproval toward Trump’s racism better than Trump's tweet that Democratic Representatives Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested” countries they “originally came from.”’ Some GOP officials don’t want the president’s bigoted remarks reflecting on the party as a whole. (Though others are fine with it.) Rather, they prefer to be judged by Trump’s policies, as backed and implemented by rank-and-file Republicans. As it stands, these policies include an attempt to ban Muslim entry to the United States, disguised as a travel restriction targeting countries deemed a security threat. They’ve included a naked attempt to erode the political power of Hispanic voters in favor of non-Hispanic white people by adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, thus discouraging participation by Hispanic immigrants and leading to an undercount that would favor Republicans during redistricting. The administration has expended significant resources defending both efforts before the U.S. Supreme Court — the first successfully, the second unsuccessfully. Trump has supplemented these policies with dramatic restrictions on immigration, targeting Central American migrants attempting entry via the U.S.-Mexico border. These include narrowed options for legitimate asylum claims and compulsory separation of undocumented children from their guardians, creating a network of child jails near the border, some in degraded and lethal conditions. The animus driving these measures is not in dispute: Trump has described Central American migrants as murderers, rapists, and drug dealers hiding terrorists from the Middle East in their ranks, and derided their homelands as “shithole” countries — while submitting his preference for immigrants from European countries like Norway.

The clear takeaway from the party’s response to this agenda is that some Republicans may be put off by Trump’s racist remarks, but they’re fine with his racist policies. This is predictable, given that much of this agenda marks a continuation of mandates the party has pursued for years — indulging the electorate’s most extreme Islamophobic impulses, suppressing votes and gerrymandering districts to enshrine minority rule, and drumming up resentment toward immigrants from Latin America. It also explodes the notion that meaningful daylight exists between Trump and the Republican establishment, as suggested by the opposition to his campaign that dogged the 2016 primary. Even Senator Lindsey Graham, then one of the most vocal anti-Trump Republicans, is among his loudest defenders today. “Something I have learned,” the South Carolina Republican tweeted on Thursday. “If you are a Republican nominee for President — or President — you will be accused of being a racist. John Lewis compared John McCain’s campaign to being like that of George Wallace. It comes with the territory unfortunately.” Omar responded by tweeting Graham’s words from 2015: “Donald Trump is a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” Whatever discomfort GOP officials have with the president’s behavior is cosmetic. They object to the crudeness of the vessel. But its substance aligns firmly with their views. Some, like Walker, believe their shared policy vision so laudable as to be worth advertising and celebrating. The Trump presidency is not a new low. It is where the Republican Party — and America — has been headed for decades. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/republicans-define-us-by-racist-policies-not-racist-chants.html

6. Jonathan Chait: Welcome to the Post-Post-Corruption Era of the Republican Party

On Thursday, President Trump announced that he would nominate labor lawyer Eugene Scalia, son of the former Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, to replace Alexander Acosta as Labor secretary. Until Scalia can be confirmed, Acosta’s deputy, Patrick Pizzella, will serve on an acting basis, working to turn the functions of the agency over to the business lobby. Pizzella is a familiar kind of right-wing apparatchik, but he does have a unique biographical attribute that links him to a now-forgotten period of Republican politics.

Pizzella may not lead the agency for long, and by Trump-era standards, of course, his offenses barely register as scandals at all. The Trump administration is shot through with corruption, from petty grifts like Cabinet members abusing their expense accounts to legislation written by and for lobbyists. The president himself is taking payoffs from corporate lobbyists and foreign governments through his Washington hotel and other properties.

The party’s whole post-Bush backlash against corruption and deficit spending, and the notion that those values are antithetical to conservatism, has been forgotten. (“Nobody is a fiscal conservative anymore,” Rush Limbaugh casually declared. “All this talk about concern for the deficit and the budget has been bogus for as long as it’s been around.”) Having fulfilled its use by giving Republicans a reason to absolve their ideology of any role in Bush’s failure, they discarded it.

There was a time when conservatives spoke of little else besides corruption and the lessons they had learned from it. Now they never speak of it at all, while their grifter president and his family soak the government for every dollar they can wring from it. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/pat-pizella-labor-abramoff-corruption-republican-trump-marianas.html

7. Eric Levitz: GOP: Ilhan Omar Is Un-American Because She Supports the First Amendment

The Republican Party has spent the past several days accusing four Democratic congresswoman of “hating America” and rejecting its values. In that time, the GOP has produced approximately no evidence to substantiate its charges. No footage of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez burning a flag has been uncovered; no photo of Ayanna Pressley training with Maoist guerrillas in the Berkshires has been published.

But this week, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib did introduce a congressional resolution affirming that all Americans have a constitutional right to participate in boycotts. And this, apparently, qualifies as evidence of their dearth of patriotism and hostility to American values.

A pillar of the Republican indictment of Omar and Tlaib is that they are insufficiently deferential to the Israeli government on questions of Palestinian rights. And, since vehement opposition to the occupation of the West Bank is equivalent to anti-Semitism, and anti-Semitism is un-American, the congresswomen’s views on the Israel-Palestine conflict render them anti-American.

Therefore, many conservatives expressed incredulity when Omar and Tlaib — both of whom support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel — decided to introduce a resolution defending the legitimacy of boycotts this week, as though such a move did not confirm the worst things that had been said about them. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/omars-bds-resolution-free-speech-israel-gop-boycotts.html

8. Susan B. Glasser: “I’m Winning”: Donald Trump’s Calculated Racism

On Friday, Vice-President Mike Pence saw with his own eyes hundreds of men kept in inhuman and inhumane conditions in Texas, men forced to exist in such squalor that their armed guards wore masks to stave off the stench of so many unwashed bodies. It was terrible. And then Trump and Pence denied that it was any such thing at all. It couldn’t be a “concentration camp,” Trump even said at Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting, because it was very well run.

Republicans, meanwhile, are not only sticking with Trump as the country’s division and discord deepens, they approve of it. Many are even cheering him on. On Capitol Hill, just four Republican representatives joined with Democrats on a symbolic resolution condemning the tweets. Half of the country is appalled but not really sure how to combat him; the other half is cheering, or at least averting its gaze. This is what a political civil war looks like, with words, for now, as weapons. As if to underscore the point, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary account tweeted this during Trump’s rally: “Tonight’s top searches, in order: racism, socialism, fascism, concentration camp, xenophobia, bigot.” Whatever you call what is happening in America right now, Trump is convinced it is working for him, which is why we are in for many more such weeks, all the way through 2020. “I do think I’m winning the political fight. I think I’m winning it by a lot,” Trump told reporters before he boarded Marine One for the North Carolina rally, at which he would call the Squad “hate-filled extremists” intent on the “destruction of our country” all over again. “I’ll never change.”

Trump’s unwavering belief that race-baiting and immigrant-hating work to his electoral benefit is already the subject of raging debate in political circles. Many Democrats spent the five days and counting of this tweet controversy worrying that they were both required to call out Trump’s words and also doomed to see their condemnation of his racism play right into his hands. The Party is divided about how to counter Trump, and it shows: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has remained firmly against impeachment as the numbers inside her caucus favoring it grow.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/im-winning-donald-trumps-calculated-racism

9.  John Cassidy: There Is Nothing Strategic About Trump’s Racism

On Thursday, four days after posting his racist tweets, in which he said his targets should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came,” he finally took a step back, claiming he was “unhappy” about the chants of “Send her back” that echoed around his campaign rally in Greenville, North Carolina, on Wednesday evening. Even this reversal, according to the Times, took interventions from congressional G.O.P. leaders and Vice-President Mike Pence, who feared that “the rally had veered into territory that could hurt the party in 2020.” And on Friday Trump walked back his walk-back. “Those are incredible people. Those are incredible patriots,” he said, in reference to the crowd in North Carolina. Asked whether he was really unhappy about the chants directed at the Somali-born representative Ilhan Omar, he said, “You know what I’m unhappy with—the fact that a congresswoman can hate our country.”

To restate the obvious: the President is unpopular. Despite this, it is often argued that he knows what he is doing, and he’s concentrating on turning out his base of disaffected white voters, particularly those living in the Midwestern states that tipped the Electoral College his way in 2016. In an analysis posted on Friday, Nate Cohn, the Times’ election analyst, argued that, given Trump’s advantage in the Electoral College, he “could win while losing the national vote by as much as five percentage points.”

But, even for a candidate focussing on the Electoral College rather than the popular vote, Presidential contests aren’t merely about motivating the base. To win an election in which more than a hundred and thirty million people vote, a candidate has to make some inroads into the center ground. By adopting the language of barroom bigots everywhere, Trump is narrowing his potential voter pool and incentivizing some key groups whose participation could be key, such as suburbanites in Michigan, minorities in Milwaukee and Philadelphia, and millennials who voted for the Green Party in 2016. Could he still pull out a victory? After 2016, only a fool or an eternal optimist would say it’s inconceivable. He didn’t boost his chances this week, though. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/there-is-nothing-strategic-about-trumps-racism

10. Andrew Sullivan:Trump Is Betting That Indecency Can Win in America

In the deeply disturbing moments after Donald Trump invoked a three-minutes-of-hate session toward Congresswoman Ilhan Omar Wednesday night, and the crowd erupted with chants of “Send Her Back! Send Her Back!”, a protester yelled something inaudible, and caused a commotion. As security was called, the crowd chanted “USA! USA!” and eventually the young man was handcuffed and led out of the stadium, to the mob’s vocal derision and pleasure. In those moments, you can see Trump pause to allow the mob to vent against the dissenter. Frenzied participants gleefully whipped out their phones to take photos of the man, who was holding up pictures of Jeffrey Epstein and Trump together and wearing a “Native Trash” T-shirt — a defunct Charlotte band but also presumably a reference to all those who surrounded him.

Trump smiled that wide, satisfied, toothless grin of his, as the man was forcibly ejected, jutting his chin in the air, and strutting around the podium, inhaling the fumes of mob fervor like some two-bit Mussolini. He had formed an umbilical psychic bond with these people, a mastery of the mob few ever attain. He had tweeted only days before that Omar should “go back” to Somalia, and now his followers had created a chant to echo him. His claim yesterday that he tried to restrain the crowd, or was not happy with the chant, is belied by the tape, and by the thrilled tweet he issued afterward, actively touting the enthusiasm of his followers.

Yes, we have seen rallies not unlike this in the past, from George Wallace’s candidacy, for example. We have gone through periods in which minorities have been subliminally targeted in presidential rhetoric, along the Lee Atwater principle of using ever-more-coded racism to rally white support. We have had intense nativist phases during waves of mass immigration similar to the one we are now experiencing. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/andrew-sullivan-trump-betting-indecency-can-win-in-america.html

11. David Brooks: Donald Trump Hates America

In Trump’s version, “American” is defined by three propositions. First, to be American is to be xenophobic. The basic narrative he tells is that the good people of the heartland are under assault from aliens, elitists and outsiders. Second, to be American is to be nostalgic. America’s values were better during some golden past. Third, a true American is white. White Protestants created this country; everybody else is here on their sufferance.

When you look at Trump’s American idea you realize that it contradicts the traditional American idea in every particular. In fact, Trump’s national story is much closer to the Russian national story than it is toward our own. It’s an alien ideology he’s trying to plant on our soil.

Trump’s vision is radically anti-American.

The real American idea is not xenophobic, nostalgic or racist; it is pluralistic, future-oriented and universal. America is exceptional precisely because it is the only nation on earth that defines itself by its future, not its past. America is exceptional because from the first its citizens saw themselves in a project that would have implications for all humankind. America is exceptional because it was launched with a dream to take the diverse many and make them one — e pluribus unum. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/opinion/trump-america-election.html

12. Bess Levin: Fox Host Would “Love” To See Megan Rapinoe Fired For Disrespecting Trump

Donald Trump has never met a person, place, or inanimate object he didn’t deem ripe for maligning on Twitter. Since declaring his candidacy in 2015, an extremely short, wildly incomplete list of stuff he’s insulted via social media has included: Puerto Rican politicians; former Senator Harry Reid; new Senator Mitt Romney; the people calling the Kentucky Derby; the Federal Reserve Board; the ghost of John McCain; Guatemala; Honduras; the “dues sucking” firefighters’ union; Rep. Rashida Tlaib; his home state; “dumb as a rock” Rex Tillerson; the “very weak and untalented” late-night hosts; Paul Krugman; the United States census; “Mr. Kellyanne Conway,” a “stone cold loser and husband from hell”; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; Major League Baseball; UCLA basketball players; and the NFL. One target that had eluded him, however, was the U.S. Women’s soccer team, which he remedied on Wednesday morning with a multi-tweet outburst about co-captain Megan Rapinoe, who had the audacity to say she wouldn’t go to the White House if invited, after he complained about her respectful National Anthem protest. And while many people believe that the president, yet again, came off like a total lunatic who should be fitted for a padded cell, at least one guy thought his Chernobyl-esque meltdown was totally warranted: Stu Varney.

Bristling at the notion that anyone would have the temerity to turn down an invitation from an alleged serial sexual predator whose idea of a celebratory meal translates to a heaping spread of Burger King, Varney told his Fox Business audience, “She’s the co-captain of the team that represents the United States of America on foreign soil and what does she do? She insults, with an obscenity, our White House and our president. That is beneath contempt.” Then, he proffered an idea: “Why don’t we just fire her as the co-captain,” he asked. “Love to see that.”

If it were up to Coach Trump—and thankfully, it’s not—it’d probably already be a done deal. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/06/donald-trump-megan-rapinoe-stuart-varney

13. Charles Sykes: Dante, Trump and the moral cowardice of the G.O.P.

Someday, we can expect to read lachrymose mea culpas from members of the G.O.P. who will confess that they regretted siding with Mr. Trump or remaining silent, and they will unburden their freighted consciences in memoirs and op-ed pieces.

They will assure us that their silence did not reflect who they really are. But it did because this was the moment when they had to make a choice.

Unfortunately, this is where the G.O.P.’s Faustian bargain has led: Their moral compromises and silence have become a habit. The small surrenders become larger ones until there is nothing left.

Some of them are motivated by fear of the president’s wrath or by the political pragmatism of politicians who are obsessed with self-preservation. Others simply hope to ride out the news cycle, hoping the entire incident will be quickly forgotten.

But at some level, I suspect, they know that this was a defining moment. And it reminds us that while we celebrate political and moral courage, we forget that genuine political courage is vanishingly rare.  https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2019/07/21/dante-trump-and-moral-cowardice-gop

14. David Remnick: A Racist in the White House

Over decades in business, entertainment and now politics, Mr. Trump has approached America’s racial, ethnic and religious divisions opportunistically, not as the nation’s wounds to be healed but as openings to achieve his goals, whether they be ratings, fame, money or power, without regard for adverse consequences.

He was accused by government investigators in the 1970s of refusing to rent apartments to black tenants (he denied it but settled the case) and made a name for himself in the 1980s by championing the return of the death penalty when five black and Hispanic teenagers were charged with raping a jogger. They were later exonerated. He threatened to sell his Mar-a-Lago estate to the Unification Church in 1991 and unleash “thousands of Moonies” if city officials in Palm Beach, Fla., did not allow him to carve up his property.

Taking on competitors of his Atlantic City casinos, he questioned whether rival owners were really Native Americans entitled to federal recognition — then later teamed up with another tribe when there was money to be made. With his eye on the White House, he opened a yearslong drive to convince Americans that President Barack Obama was really born in Africa.

His own campaign in 2016 was marked by slurs against Mexicans, a proposed Muslim ban and other furors. To deflect criticism, two campaign officials said they regularly positioned a supporter nicknamed “Michael the Black Man” so cameras would show him behind Mr. Trump at his rallies.

In the White House, Mr. Trump equated “both sides” of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., referred to African nations as “shithole countries” and said Nigerian visitors to the United States would never “go back to their huts.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/us/politics/trump-race-record.html