1. Charles M. Blow: Trumpism Extols Its Folk Hero

I think it is a mistake to believe that Trump’s supporters don’t see his lying or corruption. They do. But, to them, it is all part of the show and the lore. They have personal relationships and work relationships like the rest of us, and those relationships depend on honesty and virtue. They, like my mother did, are allowing in him something that they would not allow in themselves.

And, when you survey the constellation of folk heroes, you see that many have been criminals. Bonnie and Clyde. John Dillinger. The Sundance Kid.

I would also argue that some other recent troubled, corrupt or corrosive politicians came close to the definition without receiving the designation. The former Washington, D.C., mayor, Marion Barry. The former Toronto mayor, Rob Ford. The former Maine governor, Paul LePage.

And this elastic morality around the folk hero appears to be a global human inclination. El Chapo, who, as CNN pointed out, “Claimed in 2014 that he has killed 2,000-3,000 people,” was a folk hero in Mexico.

Like Bonnie and Clyde and El Chapo, Trump’s Br’er Rabbit-like ability to avert the best attempt by authorities to hold him accountable, at least for a while, only increases the chorus of applause.

Anti-Trump forces must stop operating as if they are doing battle with a liar; they are doing battle with what his supporters have fashioned into a legend. How does one fight a fiction, a fantasy? That’s the question. Its answer is the path to America’s salvation .https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/07/opinion/donald-trump-trumpism.html

2. Paul Waldman: Trump’s tax return scam has taken yet another turn

While the best con is one in which the victim never even realizes they got scammed, that can seldom be guaranteed. So the con artist needs a final argument to make to their mark if they get confronted, and the one they often use goes as follows: Sure, I conned you. But this is your fault. You were dumb enough to believe me. Now get lost, sucker.

That is what President Trump is now saying to the American public on the subject of his tax returns. He spent years saying that he would be releasing his returns as soon as a routine IRS audit of them was complete, so the American public could understand exactly where he gets his money and where he might have conflicts of interest as president.

This was and remains a pressing question, because Trump’s greed is so encompassing that we can never be sure that if faced with a choice between doing what is in the best interests of the country and making money for himself, he won’t choose the latter. After all, this is a man who while running for president was pursuing a hotel deal in Moscow, sucking up to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and claiming falsely that he had no business interests in Russia.

Indeed, there has never in American history been a president for whom it was more important that the public learn the full details of their finances. But now that Democrats in Congress have made a formal demand to the IRS for six years of Trump's returns as allowed by a law passed in 1924, Trump and his allies are saying to the public: You were dumb enough to believe me when I said I'd show you the returns? That's your own fault. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/08/trumps-tax-return-scam-has-taken-yet-another-turn/

3. Jonathan Chait: William Barr Seems to Be Covering Up Something Bad for Trump

The Times reports that Mueller’s famously leak-free team was moved to break its silence by Barr’s slanted summary of its work. The news from the Times, as well as the follow-up report from the Washington Post, conveys very little information about the substance of the report. There’s no reason to doubt Barr’s conclusion that Mueller was unable to establish a criminal conspiracy between Donald Trump and the Russian government. Whether the unflattering information in the report contains evidence of noncriminal misconduct with Russia — remember, collusion is not a crime — or centers entirely around obstruction of justice remains to be seen.

It does seem clear, though, that Barr has not been dealing from the top of the deck. More evidence of his bad faith can be found in his putative reason for abridging Mueller’s conclusions. The special counsel’s report provided summaries of its work. The Times, apparently relying on Justice Department sources, reports that Mueller’s summaries could not be published, because they “contain sensitive information, like classified material, secret grand-jury testimony and information related to current federal investigations that must remain confidential, according to two government officials.”

But the special counsel flatly contradicts this in its leak to the Post. The summaries, says a special counsel source, were deliberately written “so that the front matter from each section could have been released immediately — or very quickly … It was done in a way that minimum redactions, if any, would have been necessary, and the work would have spoken for itself.” http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/william-barr-cover-up-mueller-report-trump-obstruction-russia.html

4. Eric Lutz: Mueller’s Team Breaks Its Silence To Dispute The Barr Summary

Members of Robert Mueller’s team are reportedly disputing the way William Barr has characterized their conclusions, telling close associates in recent days that the four-page summary the attorney general released last month “failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry,” and suggesting that the special counsel’s full report is potentially damaging to President Donald Trump. On Wednesday, The New York Times was first to report on the frustrations among investigators, who remained notoriously tight-lipped about their work for the duration of the nearly two-year probe. Shortly after, The Washington Post published a similar account, reporting that some members of the Mueller team say evidence that Trump obstructed justice is “alarming and significant.”

In addition, people familiar with the matter told the Post that some people on Mueller’s team were “disappointed” that Barr chose not to release summaries by their office. “There was immediate displeasure from the team when they saw how the attorney general had characterized their work instead,” one official told the Post. (Two government officials told the Times that, in declining to publish the summaries, Barr was attempting to guard against the release of sensitive information.)

Both reports seem to contest Trump’s giddy proclamations that Mueller’s investigation resulted in his “Complete and Total EXONERATION,” and have stoked demands by Democrats for Mueller’s findings to be released in full. “The AG should release the FULL #MuellerReport now,” Representative Eric Swalwell, a prominent critic of the president in the Russia investigation, tweeted Wednesday evening. “His credibility is at stake.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/mueller-team-breaks-its-silence-to-dispute-barr-summary

5.  Catherine Rampell: Trump’s next possible Fed nominee can’t understand basic policy issues

Nein, nein, nein.

That should be the Senate’s response if President Trump actually nominates his friend Herman Cain, the former pizza magnate turned failed Republican presidential candidate, to the Federal Reserve Board, as Trump said he plans to do.

Cain would be Trump’s second proposed addition to the Fed in as many weeks, the other being longtime partisan operative Stephen Moore. Even before this month, though, Trump had ample opportunity to reshape the Fed in his anti-institutional, anti-intellectual image. Thankfully — surprisingly, in fact — he had refrained.

Like Moore, Cain has some baggage. Way worse baggage, in fact: Cain dropped out of the 2012 Republican presidential primary after at least four women accused him of sexual misconduct.

One alleged that he put his hand up her skirt at a convention and tried to pull her head toward his crotch. When she protested, he allegedly said, “You want a job, right?”  Cain denied the allegations.

If true, such actions alone would be disqualifying for any major government position. And they may yet derail his nomination. But they’re also hardly the only reasons to object to placing Cain in one of the most important economic jobs in the world.

To put it bluntly: When it comes to understanding pretty basic policy issues, Cain isn’t able. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/herman-cain-has-baggage-and-some-quack-tastic-views/2019/04/04/f31a8e6e-5717-11e9-814f-e2f46684196e_story.html

 

 

6. Paul Krugman: Donald Trump Is Trying to Kill You

Trust the pork producers; fear the wind turbines.

There’s a lot we don’t know about the legacy Donald Trump will leave behind. And it is, of course, hugely important what happens in the 2020 election. But one thing seems sure: Even if he’s a one-term president, Trump will have caused, directly or indirectly, the premature deaths of a large number of Americans.

Some of those deaths will come at the hands of right-wing, white nationalist extremists, who are a rapidly growing threat, partly because they feel empowered by a president who calls them “very fine people.”

Some will come from failures of governance, like the inadequate response to Hurricane Maria, which surely contributed to the high death toll in Puerto Rico. (Reminder: Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.)
Some will come from the administration’s continuing efforts to sabotage Obamacare, which have failed to kill health reform but have stalled the decline in the number of uninsured, meaning that many people still aren’t getting the health care they need. Of course, if Trump gets his way and eliminates Obamacare altogether, things on this front will get much, much worse.

But the biggest death toll is likely to come from Trump’s agenda of deregulation — or maybe we should call it “deregulation,” because his administration is curiously selective about which industries it wants to leave alone.

Consider two recent events that help capture the deadly strangeness of what’s going on.

One is the administration’s plan for hog plants to take over much of the federal responsibility for food safety inspections. And why not? It’s not as if we’ve seen safety problems arise from self-regulation in, say, the aircraft industry, have we? Or as if we ever experience major outbreaks of food-borne illness? Or as if there was a reason the U.S. government stepped in to regulate meatpacking in the first place?

But when it comes to renewable energy, Trump and company are suddenly very worried about supposed negative side effects, which generally exist only in their imagination. Last year the administration floated a proposal that would have forced the operators of electricity grids to subsidize coal and nuclear energy. The supposed rationale was that new sources were threatening to destabilize those grids — but the grid operators themselves denied that this was the case.

Whatever the drivers of Trump policy, the fact, as I said, is that it will kill people. Wind turbines don’t cause cancer, but coal-burning power plants do — along with many other ailments. The Trump administration’s own estimates indicate that its relaxation of coal pollution rules will kill more than 1,000 Americans every year. If the administration gets to implement its full agenda — not just deregulation of many industries, but discrimination against industries it doesn’t like, such as renewable energy — the toll will be much higher.

So if you eat meat — or, for that matter, drink water or breathe air — there’s a real sense in which Donald Trump is trying to kill you. And even if he’s turned out of office next year, for many Americans it will be too late. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/opinion/trump-deadly-deregulation.html

7. Ed Kilgore: Without a Plausible ‘Theory of Change,’ Progressive Ideas Are Just Fantasies

Political writers have understandably tried to make sense of the large 2020 Democratic field of presidential candidates by sorting them out ideologically (“left” or “center”) or by indicators of policy audacity (“bold” progressives versus “cautious” or “incremantalist” moderates). And part of the reason for the general belief that the party is “moving to the left” is the clustering of presidential candidates around policy positions (e.g., single-payer health care or a Green New Deal) that were considered “radical” not that long ago.

But as Ezra Klein observes after interviewing Pete Buttigieg, the most important differences may have less to do with what the candidates want to do and more with how they plan to do it — their theory of change:

The central lesson of Obama’s presidency, Buttigieg argues, is that “any decisions that are based on an assumption of good faith by Republicans in the Senate will be defeated.” The hope that you can pass laws through bipartisan compromise is dead. And that means governance is consistently, reliably failing to solve people’s problems, which is in turn radicalizing them against government itself.

Which is, of course, precisely the way obstructionist Republicans led by Mitch McConnell planned it.

Donald Trump should be the last U.S. president to take office with no clue about how to implement his campaign promises. Perhaps he never intended to in any event. But anyone seeking to eject him from office in order to pursue a real vision of a better America ought to promise something more than rhetorical enchantment. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/the-2020-primaries-are-about-progressivess-theory-of-change.html

8. Robert Reich: Mitch McConnell is destroying the Senate – and American government

No person has done more in living memory to undermine the functioning of the US government than the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell.

The difference between winning at politics by playing according to the norms and rules of our democracy, and winning by subverting them, could not be greater. Political victories that undermine the integrity of our system are net losses for society.

Great athletes play by the rules because the rules make the game. Unprincipled athletes cheat or change the rules in order to win. Their victories ultimately destroy the game.

In terms of shaping the federal courts, McConnell has played “the long game”, which, incidentally, is the title of his 2016 memoir. Decades from now, McConnell will still be shaping the nation through judges he rammed through the Senate.

But McConnell’s long game is destroying what was once known as the world’s greatest deliberative body.

He is longest-serving leader of Senate Republicans in history but Mitch McConnell is no leader. He is the epitome of unprincipled power. History will not treat him kindly. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/06/mitch-mcconnell-senate-republicans-donald-trump-judges

9. Paul Waldman: William Barr just previewed Trump’s spin over the Mueller report

While “coverup” might be too strong a word to describe what the administration is planning, what is clear is that they will be carefully managing the information the public gets to see in order to make sure that the narrative of President Trump’s supposed innocence prevails.

It’s important to keep in mind that the only reason Barr is attorney general right now is that last year he wrote an unsolicited 19-page memo to the Justice Department arguing that “Mueller’s obstruction theory is fatally misconceived.” Trump could not have been more clear that he pushed out his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, because Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation and couldn’t shut it down or otherwise use his authority to protect Trump, and he wasn’t going to make that mistake again.

There’s been nothing yet to suggest that he did, or that when the redacted Mueller report comes out Barr will be anything less than a full partner in the Republican effort to convince the public that the Russia investigation was much ado about nothing and Trump is an exemplar of ethical and patriotic behavior. I’m willing to be proven wrong on that score, but I doubt I will be. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/09/william-barr-just-previewed-trumps-spin-over-mueller-report/

10. Ashley Parker and Toluse Olorunnipa: Trump seeks to campaign on problems he promised to fix

President Trump is ratcheting up his attacks on immigration — making and then rescinding a threat to close the nation’s southern border in response to a problem that has worsened on his watch. He’s reviving his assault on the Affordable Care Act — frustrated by a Democratic law that has only grown more popular since his inauguration. And he is escalating his complaints about unfair trade practices — even while presiding over a ballooning trade deficit he promised to eliminate.

These key themes from Trump’s 2016 victory are emerging again as the pillars of his 2020 campaign, centered on a foreboding, populist message about the perils of lax immigration policies, socialist health-care plans and foreign economic threats. He has returned to similar subjects repeatedly throughout his presidency, helping him hold onto a strong base of Republican support.

But Trump’s dark warnings pose a central conundrum for his reelection effort: Can he win the White House a second time by railing against the very problems he promised to fix?

Trump allies are betting the strategy will work again by bolstering enthusiasm among his most avid supporters, particularly older white voters in the upper Midwest who clinched his victory the last time. But the approach also risks alienating moderate suburban voters, including those who took a chance on Trump’s candidacy in hopes that his dealmaker persona would overcome Washington gridlock.

“The bet that they’re making is still the same one — that this is going to be a base election, not an election on persuasion, and so he’s hitting his key issues,” said Doug Heye, a former spokesman for the Republican House leadership and the Republican National Committee. “The challenge they face is it was, and will be, a very fine needle to thread. There’s not much margin for error.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-seeks-to-campaign-on-problems-he-promised-to-fix/2019/04/06/b873f4ce-5633-11e9-9136-f8e636f1f6df_story.html

11. John Cassidy: The High-Stakes Battle Between Donald Trump and the Federal Reserve

On Friday, the editorial page of the Financial Times said that the nominations of Moore and Cain “surely qualify as sabotage.” Many people who follow the Fed’s deliberations agree. “It is as serious of a threat to the Fed as I have seen in my lifetime,” Justin Wolfers, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan, told me. “It raises the prospect of a dysfunctional Fed, and a dysfunctional Fed would lead to a dysfunctional economy.”

The consensus among economists is that the U.S. economy, despite a recent slowdown, remains on pace for modest growth this year, and that a cut in interest rates isn’t necessary. On Friday, the Labor Department reported that employers created a hundred and ninety-six thousand jobs last month. For the first quarter of 2019, the monthly average was a healthy hundred and eighty thousand. “The March report should put to rest the notion that the economy is doomed to falter in 2019,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican economist and a former head of the Congressional Budget Office, wrote in a blog post.

What is going on is perfectly clear. There is another Presidential election on the horizon, the Trump-G.O.P. stimulus is running down, and economic growth is slowing. With the Democrats controlling the House of Representatives, Trump knows that he can’t rely on Congress to juice the economy again going into 2020. So he is trying to bully the Fed into doing the job, regardless of the longer-term consequences. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-high-stakes-battle-between-donald-trump-and-the-fed

12. Jennifer Rubin: Run government like a business? Not like Trump Inc.

In testimony last year before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Max Stier, president and chief executive of Partnership for Public Service, explained, “Vacancies in key presidential appointments, including Senate-confirmed positions, often leave agencies in a holding pattern where officials serving in an ‘acting’ capacity are not empowered to make key decisions and new agency heads are left without a politically appointed leadership team to work with career executives and employees.” This in turn slows hiring of lower-level staff and effective execution of the department or agencies mission.

Think of the substitute teacher syndrome: Are students going to behave as they would when their “real” teacher is there? Now think of a school with an impulsive principal who has a slew of substitute teachers and staff vacancies. You’d expect that school to be dysfunctional. So it is with this administration.

In sum, the president becomes more unhinged by the day, throwing out one harebrained scheme (close the border) only to reverse course (give Mexico a year!) and then reverse again (close the border!). He has no idea how government should operate and no capacity for attracting competent people — or listening to their advice.

The result is a constant churn in personnel and a government in disarray. He is still left with the same record of non-accomplishment he feared will impair his reelection prospects. If Democrats don’t run in part on competency and the promise of a return to normalcy, they’ll be missing a strong reason to send him and his three-ring circus on their way. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/09/run-government-like-business-not-like-trump-inc/

13. Adam Serwer: The Cruelty Is the Point

Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/

14. By Eric Levitz: If You Are Defending Stephen Miller, You Are an Ally of Anti-Semitism

Stephen Miller is personally responsible for the most xenophobic policies of the most xenophobic presidency in modern American history. The senior White House adviser authored the travel ban that denied a wide variety of American Muslims the right to be visited by their overseas relatives. He implored the president to adopt a policy of family separation at the southern border, arguing that Central American families would be less likely to seek asylum in the United States if the U.S. government gained a reputation for subjecting their children to psychological torment. The public hated this policy, and the judiciary struck it down. Meanwhile, the Trump administration proved itself incapable of competently administering the program: the U.S. government ended up losing track of thousands of migrant children and allowing others to be legally adopted by U.S. citizens without their birth parents’ consent.

And yet Stephen Miller believes that the family separation policy was a success. In his view, having the U.S. government permanently break up a few hundred Central American families is an acceptable price to pay for discouraging such people from exercising their legal right to seek asylum in the United States. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/ilhan-omar-is-right-stephen-miller-is-a-white-nationalist.html

15. T.A. Frank: Trump’s Incompetence Is Creating A Stephen Miller Hail Mary

Leaving the Trump White House on happy terms is like dying a peaceful death in the wild—possible but exceptional. Lingering torment is the norm. Erstwhile Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who has been dismissed, was already out of favor a year ago, and Donald Trump had for months been signaling his intention to replace her. He was angry Nielsen didn’t seem to be coming up with inventive work-arounds for the law (like breaking it), and last October he spent about half an hour berating her during a Cabinet meeting.

It’s all very Trumpy. If a job on the farm calls for a border collie, you don’t buy a dachshund. If the church needs a priest, you don’t hire an atheist. But Trump does. He hires people who don’t share his agenda and then gets furious at them for being what they are.

Trump likes to blame others for his incompetence. One can read claims that he was angry to discover that an omnibus spending bill he had signed included minimal wall funding, as if Trump didn’t know that when he signed it. When Trump proposed impossible or impractical policies for addressing a wave of asylum-seeking migrants, like shutting down the border altogether, Nielsen had the unhappy job of explaining the law to him. To be sure, a more dynamic and hard-line leader than Nielsen might have thought of creative alternative ways to stem the flow, but it took someone as bumbling as Trump to pass the buck to D.H.S., like a team that provides no defense and then yells at the goalie when the other side scores. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/trumps-incompetence-is-creating-a-stephen-miller-presidency