1. Washington Post Editorial: The shutdown was proof of Trump’s stark incapacity for leadership

TRUMP’S temper tantrum over Congress’s refusal to fund a border wall paralyzed much of the government for five weeks, sapped the morale and wallets of hundreds of thousands of federal workers and low-wage contractors, left millions of Americans disgusted and dismayed, and diminished the United States in the eyes of the world. The impasse was proof of the president’s stark incapacity for leadership, which he reconfirmed Friday by threatening to re-shutter the government in three weeks.

In announcing his non-deal with Congress — in fact, it is more cease-fire than solution — Mr. Trump rehashed his tired and truth-free arguments, asserting against logic and evidence that building a massive new border wall, to supplement hundreds of miles of barriers already in place along high-trafficked segments of the border, would cause crime to plummet and drug trafficking to dry up.

He has lost that argument with the American people, a majority of whom oppose building the wall and blame him and Republicans in Congress for the shutdown, according to the latest Post-ABC News poll. Mindful of that, of the cascading economic costs related to the government closure and of the latest shutdown-related calamity — Friday’s massive flight delays along the Eastern Seaboard owing to a shortage of air traffic controllers — the president agreed to reopen the government until Feb. 15, with no new funding for a border wall for now. Score one for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), though no one is going to celebrate a national debacle such as this. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-shutdown-was-proof-of-trumps-stark-incapacity-for-leadership/2019/01/25/deef71e0-20e2-11e9-8b59-0a28f2191131_story.html

2. Jonathan Chait: Trump Caves on Shutdown, Is Terrible at Politics

President Trump’s painful delusion that he could use a government shutdown to force Democrats to fund his campaign theme came to a predictable yet bizarre conclusion. Trump strode to the podium in front of the White House like a conquering hero. “My fellow Americans,” he announced, “I am very proud to announce today that we have reached a deal to end the shutdown and reopen the federal government!”

Trump declared this in the soaring tones of a conquering hero, as if he were announcing the safe return home of hostages from Iran, rather than the release of hostages he had taken himself. He thanked the federal workforce and absurdly insisted they “did not complain.”

Nobody has ever gained anything from a government shutdown. Trump nonetheless decided to try, egged on by a sycophantic right-wing media that pushed him into a tactic he could never win, and then denied the obvious. The shutdown “is highly unlikely to hurt either President Trump or the Republican Party,” argued Henry Olsen in December. “There’s no reason he shouldn’t dig in for the holiday season and wait for the Democrats to offer a compromise he can live with.” Amazingly, Olsen’s column did not contemplate what would happen if Democrats refused to offer up a concession and simply waited for the inevitable backlash to force Trump to relent.

Likewise, last week, Rush Limbaugh cheerfully insisted, “If he hangs on and continues down this road, at some point there’s gonna be a shift in public opinion and the vast majority of the American people are gonna end up with him on this.”

That, uh, did not happen. Instead, Trump’s approval rating sank below the 40% level in poll after poll, and he had to surrender before the economic chaos threw the economy into recession. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/trump-caves-on-shutdown-terrible-at-politics.html

3. Eric Levitz: AOC Thinks Concentrated Wealth Is Incompatible With Democracy. So Did Our Founders

In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville produced one of the earliest accounts of the American dream. In his famous study of the Jacksonian U.S., the Frenchman wrote that Americans possessed “the charm of anticipated success” — a ubiquitous optimism that he attributed to our country’s democratic character, and to the “general equality of condition” that prevailed among its “people.”

On Wednesday night, Sean Hannity took de Tocqueville to task. In the Fox News’ host’s telling, general economic equality is not a precondition for the American dream, but rather, an insurmountable obstacle to it — because the American dream is (apparently) to earn more than $10 million year without having to pay a top marginal tax rate higher than 37 percent.

Of course, Hannity did not actually frame his argument as a rebuke of de Tocqueville. His true target was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

After popularizing the idea of a 70 percent top marginal tax rate earlier this month, the freshman congresswoman recently suggested that the mere existence of billionaires was both immoral, and a threat to American democracy. “I do think that a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong,” Ocasio-Cortez told the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, during an interview on Martin Luther King Day. One day later, the congresswoman approvingly quoted an op-ed by the economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, which argued that the purpose of high taxes on the wealthy wasn’t merely to generate revenue, but rather, to safeguard “democracy against oligarchy.”

Hannity’s not buying it. The Fox News host informed his audience Wednesday that Ocasio-Cortez had “called the American dream immoral,” and that she wants to “empower the government to confiscate” said dream. “Better hide your nice things,” Hannity advised his audience (whom he ostensibly believes to be composed primarily of billionaires), “because here come the excess police.” http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/ocasio-cortez-aocs-billionaires-taxes-hannity-american-democracy.html

4. Matt Ford: Uh-Oh! Roger Stone's arrest brings the Mueller investigation one step closer to Trump himself.

Stone’s contentious relationship with Randy Credico, a New York radio host who appears to be the person described as “Person 2” in the indictment, also became public knowledge last year. Credico had previously interviewed Assange; Mueller’s indictment says that Stone described Credico as an “intermediary” between himself and the WikiLeaks founder. While Congress and federal investigators dug into the circumstances surrounding Russian election meddling in 2016, Stone allegedly began pressuring and threatening Credico to lie about what had transpired.

Stone, according to the indictment, told Credico before his House Intelligence Committee testimony that he should pull a “Frank Pentangeli,” referring to a fictional mafioso in the second Godfather film who commits perjury before a congressional committee to refute allegations that the Corleone family runs a nationwide crime syndicate. Last April, Stone’s efforts to pressure Credico took on a more violent overtone. “On or about April 9, 2018, Stone wrote in an email to [Credico], ‘You are a rat. A stoolie. You backstab your friends-run your mouth my lawyers are dying Rip you to shreds,’” the indictment states. “Stone also said he would ‘take that dog away from you,’ referring to [Credico]’s dog. On or about the same day, Stone wrote to [Credico], ‘I am so ready. Let’s get it on. Prepare to die [expletive].’”

The timing of Stone’s indictment could hardly be worse for Trump, who is already facing immense political turmoil over the partial government shutdown. The president’s refusal to budge on his demand for border wall funding has placed 800,000 federal workers and countless others in financial limbo, shuttered vital government functions, and impacted the nation’s economy. Trump proudly boasted last December that he would be willing to take the blame for the shutdown, and Americans have responded accordingly: His approval rating has sunk to new lows, even among his core supporters. https://newrepublic.com/article/152958/roger-stone-arrest-mueller-russia-collusion-investigation-closer-trump

5. Michael Kruse: Roger Stone’s Last Dirty Trick

“Perhaps an impolite question,” I asked Roger Stone in a text message last month, “but what if something you envisioned well before almost anybody else and worked toward for more than a generation”—a Donald Trump presidency—”is also in the end the source of your legal demise?”

“That isn’t going to happen,” he responded, punctuating his missive with a yellow, laughing, smiley-face emoji.

Friday morning, it happened.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of Stone, charging him with false statements, witness tampering and obstruction of proceeding, indeed landed with a strangely poetic, practically Shakespearean boom, marking a karmic kind of culmination of one of Trump’s longest and most important relationships—an ignominious end, maybe, the result of an idea that was first and foremost his, starting nearly 40 years back.

“I think,” Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio told me, “the universe seeks balance and order, and Stone’s life of disorder and corruption had to be confronted at some point.”

“He is,” longtime New York Democratic strategist George Arzt said, “the wicked seed who has poisoned the tree of democracy.” https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/01/25/roger-stone-last-dirty-trick-224217

6. Alex Wagner: Pelosi Won, Trump Lost

On Friday afternoon, President Donald Trump walked into the Rose Garden to announce, effectively, that he was throwing in the towel. After shutting down the government as part of a 35-day executive tantrum to secure funding for his proposed border wall with Mexico, Trump announced a plan to reopen the government for the next three weeks while House and Senate negotiators look at border-security funding measures. The government will reopen, and no wall is in sight.

It was the coda to what has been a national misery and a rolling disaster for the self-designated deal maker: By Friday afternoon, Trump’s disapproval rating had shot up five points since the start of the federal freeze, and one in five Americans polled said that the shutdown had personally inconvenienced them. This sure didn’t seem like big-shot master strategy.

The Rose Garden capitulation, besides providing the capstone to Trump’s public disgrace, was an undeniable victory for Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and a lesson about the new Washington power dynamic: The Donald has met his match.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/pelosi-beats-trump/581344/

7. David Roth: You Can't Get There From Here

If Trump appears to be confronting an emerging truth that makes him look bad with a flailing childish insistence that Actually The Opposite Is True, it’s because he is.

If it looks like he’s numbly ventriloquizing the rancid words of one of the aspiring genocidaires tasked with writing his more high-flown addresses, it’s because he is.

If it appears that he is taking some cruel promise made idly at some point in the past and then spinning stupid stories to justify seeing that promise through, it’s because that is just what he’s doing.

Trump repeats the same five or six phrases like a defective Teddy Ruxpin not because he’s trying to brainwash or brand but because he can only hold like 175 words in his head at one time and is just kind of mushing the button that seems most appropriate for the situation over and over again.

There will be no new work done until he’s out of this job, not just because the venal and idiotic criminality that has defined his life belatedly appears to be catching up with him but because it simply isn’t in him to do new work, and because his current job transparently doesn’t matter to him at all. He’ll believe that he’s getting away with it—that he’s winning and commanding and leading—until the cuffs close or the lights go out, and he will always act that way. He will spend the rest of his life trying to demonstrate that he was right about whatever it was that he said or did before. https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/you-cant-get-there-from-here-1831622949

8. John Podesta: It might now be Roger Stone’s time in the barrel

The details of Stone’s indictment are devastating and, characteristically of Stone, quite colorful. According to the filing, Stone emailed a confederate labeled “Person 2” (identified by the media as radio host Randy Credico) to dissuade him from testifying truthfully about WikiLeaks before the House Intelligence Committee: “You are a rat. A stoolie. You backstab your friends-run your mouth my lawyers are dying Rip you to shreds” and “I am so ready. Let’s get it on. Prepare to die [expletive].” Stone instructs Person 2 to do a “Frank Pentangeli” — a character from “The Godfather Part II” who famously lies to congressional investigators — and, my nostalgic favorite, Stone paraphrases a quote from President Richard M. Nixon during the Watergate coverup: “Stonewall it. Plead the Fifth. Anything to save the plan.”

To anyone keeping abreast of the unfolding events in the Mueller investigation, this level of sleaze is not at all surprising. The walls have been closing in for some time. As a key member of Trump’s inner circle, Stone and his course of conduct during the campaign and after have exemplified a culture of cronyism and corruption that ignored all ethical standards and rewarded fabrication over the hard truth of reality.

It was all obvious during the campaign and from President Trump’s first full day in office, when he sent out the hapless Sean Spicer to lie to the media about the size of his inauguration audience, that the president would establish an administration in which lying and intimidation were the default way of doing business. When it comes to lying, Trump is in a league of his own. The Post reported this week that he has made 8,158 false or misleading claims in his first two years in office. Sadly, his culture of deceit was embraced by (or forced upon) the people around him and his apologists on Capitol Hill. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/john-podesta-it-might-now-be-roger-stones-time-in-the-barrel/2019/01/25/78108cf6-20de-11e9-9145-3f74070bbdb9_story.html

9. Rosalind S. Helderman, Josh Dawsey and Matt Zapotosky: Trump advisers lied over and over again, Mueller says. The question is, why?

They lied to the public for months before Donald Trump was elected — and then repeatedly after he took office.

They lied to Congress as lawmakers sought to investigate Russia’s attack on American democracy in 2016.

And they lied to the FBI, even when they knew lying was a crime.

“In Trump world, everybody lies. Everybody doesn’t tell the truth. At the end of the day, they are all lying. I don’t know how Mueller can believe anybody,” said Louise Sunshine, a longtime executive with the Trump Organization.

Sam Nunberg, a former Trump aide, said he believed that people around Trump lied to investigators because they were trying to make sure their version of events lined up with lies the president was telling to the American people.

“They all conspired,” he said, “against themselves.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-advisers-lied-over-and-over-again-mueller-says-the-question-is-why/2019/01/26/e72454f6-20c5-11e9-8e21-59a09ff1e2a1_story.html

10. Eric Levitz: Howard Schultz Wants a President Who Will Tell Billionaires Their Favorite Lies

As many have already noted, a “realist” who believes that a third-party candidate can win the 2020 election is a contradiction in terms. Schultz is about as fluent in the realities of modern American politics as Donald Trump is with those of modern American grocery shopping. Meanwhile, Schultz’s ostensible belief that the U.S. government is analogous to an upscale coffee chain — and thus, that Uncle Sam has no more business running up a $21.5 trillion debt than Starbucks does — is no less a declaration of economic illiteracy than Trump’s insistence that trade deficits are tantamount to theft.

But what makes Schultz’s pretensions to realism truly hallucinatory is this: Even if one stipulates that he is right about the appeal of centrism, and the evil of deficits, his own promises about fiscal policy would still be much more extravagantly “unrealistic” than the median democratic socialist’s.

In sum: Schultz is promising to reduce inequality by keeping taxes on corporate shareholders lower than they were under Obama, to reduce the deficit by slashing taxes on the middle class, and to end poverty by cutting two of the most effective anti-poverty programs in American history. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/howard-schultz-2020-inequality-is-less-of-a-realist-than-ocasio-cortez.html

11.  Eric Levitz: Trump ‘Cucked’ Up the Government

Trump assembled his base by humiliating his enemies. Then, he won over his Republican skeptics by humiliating theirs. The mogul’s defeat of Hillary Clinton transformed all his defects into virtues: His dearth of tact and competence only served to amplify the indignity of blue America’s loss. John Kasich might have been able to beat “the libs,” but only Trump could truly “own” them.

Throughout his first two years in office, the president broke many promises and suffered plenty of defeats. But he never gave the GOP faithful serious cause for doubting his toughness on immigration, or capacity to bring liberals low.

Until he picked a high-profile, weeks-long fight over border security with a liberal, septuagenarian woman from San Francisco — and got “cucked” up beyond all recognition.

With the shutdown, Trump took the art of the lose-lose opportunity to new heights. Few propositions isolate the Trumpen proletariat from the rest of the electorate more comprehensively than “it is good for a president to deliberately sabotage the federal government, so as to coerce Democrats into funding a border wall.” And few spectacles could cause the Republican base more distress than the sight of Donald Trump bending the knee to Nancy Pelosi and insubordinate government workers. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/how-trump-cucked-up-the-government-shutdown-nancy-pelosi-border-wall.html

12. Greg Sargent: As Trump slides in new poll, he retreats deeper into Fox News fantasyland

Trump is stuck in Foxlandia

That Trump is consulting Dobbs for private advice about how to proceed — even as he craters in polls — perfectly captures the folly and delusion consuming this presidency at this particular moment. Trump watches Fox obsessively for validation, and he has very likely seen Dobbs tell him that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “whipped” him in the shutdown battle; that his only route forward is to declare a national emergency; and that recent leaks about the Russia probe were really about distracting the public from Democratic opposition to Trump’s wall, as if that’s somehow an unpopular position that Democrats fear holding.

In this mythology, the political threat to Trump does not come from the mounting legal travails he faces (all of that is a hoax and a witch hunt) or from Trump’s malicious and deeply destructive shutdown for the sake of his deeply unpopular wall. Rather, the real political danger to Trump always comes from his failure to fight hard enough, whether it’s failing to close down special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation, or failing to do whatever it takes — declare a national emergency, shut down the government until the end of time — to ensure that he gets the wall without giving up anything that might perturb his base in the slightest.

But if Trump did accept that Democrats now control the House, and thus must be offered genuine concessions in exchange for giving him what he wants, Trump probably could get more money for something that fits his latest description of the wall, which he has now downgraded to “steel barriers in high-priority locations.”

Alas, in Foxlandia, there is as much space for an acknowledgment of these new power realities in Washington as there is for an acknowledgment of the polls showing him cratering.

In Foxlandia, Trump always has all the hidden leverage, and if only he’d just exercise it, a glorious victory would follow — entirely on Trump’s own terms. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/28/trump-slides-new-poll-he-retreats-deeper-into-fox-news-fantasyland/

13. Matt Lewis: Trump: ‘The Greatest Salesman’ Who Can’t Sell Anything

For many conservatives (like Ann Coulter), Trump’s credibility rested not on his character, but on the fact that he said he would build a wall. They never stopped to think that the guy who conned others might be conning them, too. Today, Coulter is paying a high price for her misplaced trust—and she is discovering what so many of us sensed all along.

It also helps explain how—even on the rare occasion when Trump wheels out the teleprompter and tries to give a moving speech—nobody is moved. Part of a leader’s job is to persuade via rhetoric, yet outside of his credulous base Trump has consistently failed at this. His Oval Office speech was a dud, he was outmaneuvered by Nancy Pelosi (ironically over whether he could give a State of the Union speech during a shutdown!), and now he’s on the verge of losing Ann Coulter.

This situation smacks of irony: Donald Trump billed himself as the greatest salesman in the world, yet he can’t seem to sell the American public on anything.

Donald Trump’s rhetoric doesn’t work because he lacks credibility, and he lacks credibility because he has squandered it on lies and hate tweets. This is something many of us have long known. The Ann Coulters of the world are finally figuring this out…the hard way. https://www.thedailybeast.com/now-we-know-what-it-takes-for-some-people-like-ann-coulter-to-learn-that-trump-is-untrustworthy

 

14. Joel Mathis: The war over Trump's wall has only just begun

The longest government shutdown in American history is over. Thank goodness.

But the war over President Trump's border wall isn't finished, no matter how defeated he seems. That much should be clear from the president's defiant tweets over the weekend. Instead, it's likely that the biggest and most important battles — battles that could determine the future of the U.S. constitutional order — are yet to come.

Declaring an emergency and dumping the issue on the courts will feel better than a shutdown — no missed paychecks, no airport slowdowns — but it might be actually worse for the Constitution. If the courts should somehow rule in Trump's favor — the meager limits restraining his presidency, or any American presidency — will be greatly loosened.

Trump's fans are fine with that. They are short-sighted — and should consider if they're ready to let Democratic presidents have the same power they want Trump to assert. Is it so difficult to imagine, say, a President Elizabeth Warren declaring that Medicare-for-all is necessary to American national security? Or any president using the powers for far worse reasons and to far worse effect?

Trump's opponents spent much of the weekend exulting in the president's capitulation on the shutdown. You can't blame them. But there's a longer game being played here. The war over the wall has just begun. https://theweek.com/articles/820152/war-over-trumps-wall-only-just-begun

15. Bess Levin: Winning: U.S. Jumps Six Spots In Global Corruption Ranking

One of Donald Trump’s favorite pastimes, aside from screaming at the TV and tweeting, is claiming he’s the best at everything. “Nobody builds walls better than me,” he famously declared while announcing his candidacy for president. “I understand money better than anybody,” he insisted, several months later. “I know words, I have the best words,” are a collection of words that once tumbled from his mouth. Unfortunately—and this is true—the United States is not the best at everything. For instance, in an annual ranking released last year, America clocked in as the 16th least corrupt country in the world. (Somalia took the top prize). This year, however, thanks to Trump’s efforts, the U.S. jumped to number 22, our “most corrupt” level in seven years.

Of course, it‘s not super surprising that the U.S. would fall out of the top 20 least-corrupt nations under the tutelage of one Donald J. Trump, whose administration is, at least anecdotally, the most corrupt executive branch in modern U.S. history, and who gives Democracy the finger on a daily basis. Perhaps before his first term is up, we’ll leapfrog past North Korea (2018 ranking: 176)! https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/01/us-jumps-six-spots-in-global-corruption-ranking

16. Greg Sargent: As Trump slides in new poll, he retreats deeper into Fox News fantasyland

Trump is stuck in Foxlandia

That Trump is consulting Dobbs for private advice about how to proceed — even as he craters in polls — perfectly captures the folly and delusion consuming this presidency at this particular moment. Trump watches Fox obsessively for validation, and he has very likely seen Dobbs tell him that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “whipped” him in the shutdown battle; that his only route forward is to declare a national emergency; and that recent leaks about the Russia probe were really about distracting the public from Democratic opposition to Trump’s wall, as if that’s somehow an unpopular position that Democrats fear holding.

In this mythology, the political threat to Trump does not come from the mounting legal travails he faces (all of that is a hoax and a witch hunt) or from Trump’s malicious and deeply destructive shutdown for the sake of his deeply unpopular wall. Rather, the real political danger to Trump always comes from his failure to fight hard enough, whether it’s failing to close down special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation, or failing to do whatever it takes — declare a national emergency, shut down the government until the end of time — to ensure that he gets the wall without giving up anything that might perturb his base in the slightest.

But if Trump did accept that Democrats now control the House, and thus must be offered genuine concession sin exchange for giving him what he wants, Trump probably could get more money for something that fits his latest description of the wall, which he has now downgraded to “steel barriers in high-priority locations.”

Alas, in Foxlandia, there is as much space for an acknowledgment of these new power realities in Washington as there is for an acknowledgment of the polls showing him cratering.

In Foxlandia, Trump always has all the hidden leverage, and if only he’d just exercise it, a glorious victory would follow — entirely on Trump’s own terms. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/28/trump-slides-new-poll-he-retreats-deeper-into-fox-news-fantasyland/

17. Joel Mathis: The war over Trump's wall has only just begun

The longest government shutdown in American history is over. Thank goodness.

But the war over President Trump's border wall isn't finished, no matter how defeated he seems. That much should be clear from the president's defiant tweets over the weekend. Instead, it's likely that the biggest and most important battles — battles that could determine the future of the U.S. constitutional order — are yet to come.

Declaring an emergency and dumping the issue on the courts will feel better than a shutdown — no missed paychecks, no airport slowdowns — but it might be actually worse for the Constitution. If the courts should somehow rule in Trump's favor — the meager limits restraining his presidency, or any American presidency — will be greatly loosened.

Trump's fans are fine with that. They are short-sighted — and should consider if they're ready to let Democratic presidents have the same power they want Trump to assert. Is it so difficult to imagine, say, a President Elizabeth Warren declaring that Medicare-for-all is necessary to American national security? Or any president using the powers for far worse reasons and to far worse effect?

Trump's opponents spent much of the weekend exulting in the president's capitulation on the shutdown. You can't blame them. But there's a longer game being played here. The war over the wall has just begun. https://theweek.com/articles/820152/war-over-trumps-wall-only-just-begun