1. Orlando Sentinel Editorial: Our endorsement for president in 2020: Not Donald Trump 

Some readers will wonder how we could possibly eliminate a candidate so far before an election, and before knowing the identity of his opponent.

Because there’s no point pretending we would ever recommend that readers vote for Trump.

After 2½ years we’ve seen enough.

Enough of the chaos, the division, the schoolyard insults, the self-aggrandizement, the corruption, and especially the lies.

So many lies — from white lies to whoppers — told out of ignorance, laziness, recklessness, expediency or opportunity.

Trump’s capacity for lying isn’t the surprise here, though the frequency is.

It’s the tolerance so many Americans have for it.

There was a time when even a single lie — a phony college degree, a bogus work history — would doom a politician’s career.

Not so for Trump, who claimed in 2017 that he lost the popular vote because millions of people voted illegally (they didn’t). In 2018 he said North Korea was no longer a nuclear threat (it is). And in 2019 he said windmills cause cancer (they don’t). Just last week he claimed the media fabricated unfavorable results from his campaign’s internal polling (it didn’t).

Trump has diminished our standing in the world. He reneges on deals, attacks allies and embraces enemies.

The nation must endure another 1½ years of Trump. But it needn’t suffer another four beyond that.

We can do better. We have to do better. https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/editorials/os-op-sentinel-not-endorsing-donald-trump-2020-20190618-63ya7cyb5ngf3irllodwxnznui-story.html

2. Jonathan Chait: Trump Goes on TV to Solicit 2020 Foreign Collusion

President Trump today claimed, falsely, that the Mueller report found not only no collusion with Russia but that his campaign “rebuffed” offers of help from Moscow. But apparently Trump regrets his imaginary decision to refuse help from Russia, since he tells George Stephanopoulos in a new interview that, yes, if another foreign power offers him dirt on his next opponent, he’ll gladly take it:

Of course, in the last election, Russia stole emails from Trump’s opponent, and Trump not only exploited that crime but also made repeated attempts to get more stolen emails.

Perhaps more revealingly, Trump reiterated his view that he would not go to the FBI. Trump hates flippers, he’s a stand-up guy, not a rat, and he respects the omertà.

Trump continues to show every sign of hoping and expecting to benefit from foreign collusion in 2020. In May, he intended to send Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine to pressure the government to supply dirt on Joe Biden. He and his ally, Mitch McConnell, are blocking measures (including ones with bipartisan support) to help safeguard elections against foreign attacks and social-media propaganda. His message to Russia, or any other government that wants a close relationship with him, is obvious: Do anything you can to help me win. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/trump-goes-on-tv-to-solicit-2020-foreign-collusion.html

3. Ben Bradlee, Jr.: How Collusion Confusion Helps Trump

More than any American President, Donald Trump strains credulity. Of the ten-thousand-plus false or misleading statements he has made during his Presidency that fact-checkers have documented so far, one of the baldest claims came on March 24th. That was when the Attorney General, William Barr, stepped into the vacuum left by the special counsel Robert Mueller’s report and announced that he had cleared Trump of any obstruction-of-justice charges.

Trump then crowed on Twitter, writing, “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION. . . .” That statement was false on all three counts. Mueller’s report explicitly did not exonerate Trump, and it cited at least ten possible instances of Trump’s obstruction of justice, while noting that Justice Department policy prevented the filing of criminal charges against a sitting President. Mueller made no judgment on collusion, meanwhile, because that isn’t a crime.

The New York Times documented at least a hundred and forty contacts by Trump and eighteen of his associates with Russian nationals and WikiLeaks, or their intermediaries, during the 2016 campaign. But that story, which appeared in April, after the release of Mueller’s report, failed to get traction, as did the four-hundred-and-forty-eight-page report itself, which only a tiny fraction of the country seems to have read, thereby helping the White House, and Barr, to frame it as a vindication of Trump.

But the report—from its sweeping confirmation of the depth of Russian interference in the election (a conclusion that Trump still refuses to fully accept), to its ten examples of possible obstruction of justice, to its documentation of the extensive contacts between Russians and the Trump campaign—actually amounts to a searing indictment of the President. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-collusion-confusion-helps-trump

4. Tina Nguyen: Elizabeth Warren Is Surging—And The Trump Campaign Is Taking Notice

The Warren boomlet appears to have legs. Recent polling suggests the Massachusetts senator has pulled ahead of Bernie Sanders in Nevada, California, Minnesota, and South Carolina, potentially cementing her position in second place behind Joe Biden in the Democratic primary race. Quinnipiac finds that Warren would beat Donald Trump nationally by seven points; Fox News finds that she would beat the president by two.

It’s a notable reversal of fortune, after a slow start for Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, and one that has surprised some Democratic rivals. “You’re seeing a candidate who actually came into the race with theory of how she wanted to run, and she’s executed,” a top Democratic strategist who supports Sanders recently told my colleague Chris Smith. “She looked dead in the water at the start of the year. Now she’s in position to seize the nomination.” Sanders, meanwhile, has stalled in national polls, and has ceded political ground to his left. “His candidacy this time around has ended up being a greatest-hits act. What new energy or idea is he bringing to the table? Warren has outmaneuvered him on policy.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/06/elizabeth-warren-donald-trump-polling

5.  Ed Kilgore: McConnell Thinks Obama Was Reparations Enough

But then you have the people of not-so-good will who don’t even want to engage in a discussion of America’s residual and still-developing debts to those who have been denied rights in the past and the present. Mitch McConnell is one of their spokesmen, as he made clear today in remarks quoted by The Hill:
“I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none us currently living are responsible is a good idea,” McConnell said. “We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil-rights legislation. We elected an African-American president.” 

I don’t know what’s worse: the belief that once slavery ended, the outrages associated with this particular “original” form of white supremacy ended, too, or the idea that civil-rights legislation (simply to give a distinct category of Americans what we all expect) and one president out of 45 are “reparations” in themselves and ought to be enough. It is credible that McConnell thinks the minute Obama took office any obligation to treat him with respect ended, since the Republican leader and his party spent the entire eight years of the Obama presidency seeking to deny him any positive legacy. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/mcconnell-thinks-obamas-election-was-reparations-enough.html

6. Jamelle Bouie: Mitch McConnell, Too, Welcomes Russian Interference

McConnell’s career makes clear that he has few, if any, political and ideological convictions. As Alec MacGillis, a reporter for ProPublica, observes in “The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell,” McConnell was reliably pro-choice until it became inconvenient and pro-union when it would get him votes. But his most revealing turnaround was on campaign finance.

As chairman of his county Republican Party in the 1970s, he backed aggressive campaign finance reform. He wanted “drastically” lower contribution limits, full donor disclosure, a ceiling on overall spending and public financing of elections. “Many qualified and ethical persons are either totally priced out of the election marketplace or will not submit themselves to questionable, or downright illicit, practices that may accompany the current electoral process,” he wrote in a 1973 op-ed for The Courier-Journal in Kentucky.

In 1990, as the junior senator from Kentucky, he introduced legislation to abolish political action committees. In 1993, he backed a ban on funds collected outside the contribution limits for individual candidates — what had come to be known as “soft money.” “Soft money should be banned,” McConnell wrote at the time. “All campaign spending should be on the top of the table where voters can see it.” By the end of the decade, however, McConnell would be a reliable foe of virtually every limit on the ability to raise and spend money in politics.

The reasons for his reversal were straightforward. At heart, McConnell is a partisan. When he thought campaign finance reform would harm Democrats or help him win higher office, he backed campaign finance reform. When he thought Democrats relied on soft money, he tried to ban soft money. But when those funds began to fill his campaign war chest, he changed his tune. By 1997, he had nothing but good things to say about soft money. “Soft money is just a euphemism for free speech,” he said. For McConnell, winning was the only thing that mattered, and anything it took to win was fair game. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/opinion/mitch-mcconnell-russian-interference.html

7. Peter Hamby: “What can you say in 60 seconds?": As the first debate looms, Democrats prepare to face reality

The first chapter of the Democratic race for president has been defined by its steadiness. A handful of scandals once billed as potentially devastating—shoulder touching! Tupac! Standing on tables!—revealed themselves as little more than Twitter ephemera. The two most famous candidates, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, unsurprisingly remain atop most of the polls. The two candidates who have managed to climb up the ladder, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg, have done so by defining a clear rationale for running and pounding their message daily, with a relentless media and travel schedule. The race, though, has remained mostly static, helmed by a pair of durable white-haired front-runners, a platoon of credible second-tier candidates, and a roster of one-percenters who look like they wandered off the set of Frasier.

What campaign obsessives are not discussing is another entirely possible outcome: that the first debates won’t change very much at all. It might be true that tens of millions of Americans will excitedly tune in to watch a bunch of random politicians for two hours on back-to-back nights during summertime. It’s possible too that some Democrats will murder-suicide each other in heated attempts to grab attention, shaking up the race. But because of the limited speaking time, and the need for each candidate to make a positive first impression, viewers could be in for two nights of kid gloves and hokey stories that deliver nothing but fodder for a Saturday Night Live cold open. “With 10 people on a stage, there is not a lot of time really to say anything,” said the senior Democratic campaign official. “It’s going to incentivize one-liners, or a certain kind of communication that some are going to be good at delivering and some aren’t. But what can you say in 60 seconds on any issue? A thesis statement and a couple sentences, then you’re going to get cut off.” Speaking time for some candidates will also shrink as others ramble over their time, or as Democrats try to interject and pick their own fights, drowning out screen time for the ones who don’t speak up. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/06/first-democratic-debate-rules-2020-campaign

8. Susan B. Glasser: Forget “No Collusion.” Trump Is Now Pro-Collusion

The worry about a president receiving assistance from a foreign country, let alone inviting it, was one of the central concerns of the Founders when they came up with the mechanism of impeachment. It need not be a conspiracy or a crime. It was about violating the integrity of the American political system — to the advantage of another country. They were thinking of Britain and France, their equivalent of Russia and China. And they were understandably paranoid about it. “He might betray his trust to foreign powers,” Madison worried about waiting for the next election to call a president to account. Combine the blithe ease with which Trump considers this impeachable offense with his now-demonstrated attempts to obstruct justice, and now add a legal claim that the Congress cannot oversee what might be presidential criminality … well, you have a situation that impeachment was specifically designed for.

It is worth adding to this, for good measure, that, all the while, the president has been attempting to buttress Republican — and essentially white — power, by rigging the census to deny Democrats future seats, and thereby resources. We now have incontrovertible proof that this was the intention behind adding a citizenship question to the Census — thanks to a leaked hard drive. Put all this together and you begin to get a sense of how contested the result of the next election could be. Trump is deliberately undermining public confidence in its integrity. He did this rhetorically as a candidate. Doing it as an incumbent president is an even graver assault on our liberal democracy. Imagine Bush v. Gore, but with an incumbent president who controls the executive branch and has the Supreme Court in his pocket, and you begin to see the risk we are taking by leaving him in place.

He will do anything, we have to understand, to protect his psychic attachment to his own self-interest. Anything. I’ll repeat what I believe: He will not leave his office if he narrowly loses in 2020. He’ll fight — and rally his supporters to fight with him. He’s not Nixon. He’s Erdoğan. When, since becoming president, has Trump conceded anything?

A tyrant’s path to power is not a straight line, it’s dynamic. Each concession is instantly banked, past vices are turned into virtues, and then the ante is upped once again. The threat rises exponentially with time. If we can’t see this in front of our own eyes, and impeach this man now, even if he will not be convicted, we are flirting with the very stability of our political system. It is not impregnable. Why is Putin the only person who seems to grasp this? http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/andrew-sullivan-donald-trump-and-the-art-of-the-lie.html

9. Jonathan Chait: Trump: Witness to My Crime Can’t Testify, But Trust Me He’s Lying

Some of the most damning crimes in the Mueller report come via former White House counsel Don McGahn, who was directed to obstruct justice by President Trump (but declined to carry out his illegal orders). McGahn testified about these orders to Mueller, thereby surrendering any claim the White House would have to keep the conversations private as part of executive privilege. The White House is nonetheless blocking McGahn from testifying to Congress.

ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos asked Trump about McGahn’s testimony in an interview this week. Trump called his former counsel a liar. “The story on that very simply, No. 1, I was never going to fire Mueller. I never suggested firing Mueller,” he said. When asked why McGahn would lie, Trump said, “Because he wanted to make himself look like a good lawyer.” Pressed again, Trump denied ever having told McGahn to fire Mueller.

So the White House maintains the following:

1. The Mueller report exonerates Trump, and any attempt to follow up on its findings is a “do-over,” and thus unfair.

2. One of the most damning charges in the Mueller report, detailing Trump’s efforts to obstruct justice, is a lie.

3. The witness who testified under oath to that charge cannot be allowed to testify to Congress.

The Mueller report shows no obstruction of justice, and the obstruction it shows is fake, and Congress can’t hear from a person who testified about obstruction. We just have to take Trump’s word on this, even though his words contradict other words of his. Just what you’d expect an innocent person to say, basically. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/trump-mcgahn-cant-testify-but-trust-me-hes-lying.html

10.  Peter Baker: As Trump Accuses Iran, He Has One Problem: His Own Credibility

To President Trump, the question of culpability in the explosions that crippled two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman is no question at all. “It’s probably got essentially Iran written all over it,” he declared on Friday.

The question is whether the writing is clear to everyone else. For any president, accusing another country of an act of war presents an enormous challenge to overcome skepticism at home and abroad. But for a president known for falsehoods and crisis-churning bombast, the test of credibility appears far more daunting.
For two and a half years in office, Mr. Trump has spun out so many misleading or untrue statements about himself, his enemies, his policies, his politics, his family, his personal story, his finances and his interactions with staff that even his own former communications director once said “he’s a liar” and many Americans long ago concluded that he cannot be trusted.

Fact-checking Mr. Trump is a full-time occupation in Washington, and in no other circumstance is faith in a president’s word as vital as in matters of war and peace. The public grew cynical about presidents and intelligence after George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq based on false accusations of weapons of mass destruction, and the doubt spilled over to Barack Obama when he accused Syria of gassing its own people. As Mr. Trump confronts Iran, he carries the burden of their history and his own. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/us/politics/trump-iran-credibility.html

11. John Cassidy: The Stephanopoulos Interview Is Another Fine Mess for Trump

Some weeks the Trump Presidency is a horror show; some weeks it is slapstick. This week it was both. In the Middle East, tensions with Iran rose alarmingly, while, on the domestic front, Donald Trump got himself into yet another political mess. As of Saturday, it has been three days since Trump told George Stephanopoulos, of ABC News, that he would accept damaging information on political opponents from foreign governments, and the White House is still trying to repair the political damage. It isn’t working. Instead, things are only getting worse for the President.

Trump had not only stated that he would willingly break the law. He had also reminded everyone of the contents of Volume I of the Mueller report, which detailed the extensive contacts in 2016 and thereafter between people connected to the Trump campaign and people connected to Vladimir Putin. The report concluded that the Russian government, with its hacking and Internet disinformation efforts, purposefully assisted the Trump campaign, and that some people connected to the campaign were eager to make the most of this assistance. But the report also said “there was insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy”—a statement that Trump and his allies seized upon as vindication of the President’s refrain that there was “No collusion,” even though the report said explicitly, “we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of ‘collusion.’ ” Now here was Trump saying, in effect, that he would gladly collude.

Even the late-night comics, who have been feeding on Trump’s gaffes for years, were stunned, a Vanity Fair article noted. Seth Myers: “The guy who has spent two years scream-tweeting ‘no collusion!’ is now saying, ‘If anyone’s down to collude, I’m your guy.’ . . . If Trump had been President during Watergate, he would have left a business card at the break-in.” Stephen Colbert: “You’ve got to imagine Robert Mueller is just getting home with all of his boxes after clearing out his office, turns on the TV, and he’s like, ‘Damn it, honey, I’m going back to work. I’ll see you in another two years.’ ” https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-stephanopoulos-interview-is-another-fine-mess-for-trump
 

12. Susanna Rustin: We must transform our lives and values to save this burning planet

The case for action to tackle the climate emergency, on a scale far beyond anything that has yet been attempted, is increasingly widely understood. Almost three decades after the first UN climate treaty was agreed in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and despite the commitments thrashed out among nation states at every summit since, global carbon emissions last year rose to a record 37.1bn tons.

In October, UN scientists warned that within 12 years a target of 1.5C of global heating would be out of reach. Above this level, temperature increases are predicted to cause colossal disruption: 10 million more people displaced as a consequence of higher sea levels; greatly increased risk of fires, drought and extreme weather of all kinds; shrinkage of plant and insect habitats with massive effects on agriculture as well as nature; the extinction of coral.

For decades, our attitude to the climate crisis has combined complacency and denial, while the number of people (and politicians) firmly committed to action on anything like the required level has struggled to climb above a tiny minority. With attention focused by recent, alarming temperature rises and emissions increases, as well as by the prospect of a series of crunch meetings at the UN, serious attempts are at last being made to frame a policy response.

The Green New Deal embraced by leftwing US Democrats and elsewhere is the best chance we have. Economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote recently that we should think of the response to climate change as a “third world war.” It is helpful to have a historical analogy on which to draw, when thinking about the transformation that is needed if we are to avoid a descent into chaos and dystopia. To be paralyzed by panic would be a disaster. But there are also big differences between the situation human civilization faces now, and any we have ever faced before.

The climate crisis differs from a war because it does not have an end – or not in the same way. And while there is an enemy, in the hugely powerful fossil fuel industry and the politicians who are its backers, this is a much harder foe to identify than a foreign power. As for the Green New Deal, there is a risk that it can be made to sound too much like a leftwing utopia.

It is extremely difficult to see a safe way through the next few decades that does not involve a drastic reorientation of global priorities, towards wildlife and away from consumption. Meeting the UK’s 2050 net-zero target, for example, will require planting almost 3bn trees. We can expect air quality to improve as we shift to electric cars. Some people are already discovering a new relationship with food. If the world is to come together as we need it to, human values will have to assert themselves over the forces of capital. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/15/transform-lives-burning-planet-agriculture-consumption

13. Margaret Sullivan: Joe Biden and the ‘electability’ delusion — and why the media keep making the same mistake

As Iowa journalist Robert Leonard talks to voters around his state, he finds himself baffled at the national portrayal of Joe Biden’s dominance in the presidential campaign.

The local Democrats he encounters respect the former vice president, he told me, but many of them also feel his time has passed.

They’re far more excited about other candidates, five in particular: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.); Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind.; Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.); former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke and Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.).

So he shakes his head at the extensive coverage and commentary that depicts Biden as almost a shoo-in for a nomination that’s more than a year away.

One example: CNN’s morning briefing newsletter recently called Biden “the most formidable threat” to President Trump’s reelection chances.

CNN is far from alone. It’s common across the national media to see Biden pegged as the safest candidate for Democrats to put up to unseat Trump. He’s got that secret sauce: electability.

“Sure, Democrats think he’s electable, but they believe a half-dozen other candidates are, too,” Leonard, the news director of two Iowa radio stations, told me. “No one I have spoken with sees Biden as more formidable than other top candidates.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-electability-delusion--and-why-the-media-keep-making-the-same-mistake/2019/06/14/495c3b12-8de9-11e9-b08e-cfd89bd36d4e_story.html

14. Eric Levitz: The One Percent Have Gotten $21 Trillion Richer Since 1989. The Bottom 50% Have Gotten Poorer.

Some Democratic presidential candidates say that America’s economic system is badly broken and in need of sweeping, structural change. Others say that the existing order is fundamentally sound, even if it could use a few modest renovations. The former are widely portrayed as ideologues or extremists, the latter as moderates.

And it’s certainly true that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are ideologically “extreme,” if our baseline is the median member of Congress or the median policy agenda pursued by recent American presidents. But it’s not clear why these would be the appropriate metrics.

After all, we do not equate calls for sweeping change (whether from recent precedent or from current consensus) with extremism in all circumstances. When young people in an Islamist autocracy take to the streets demanding basic civil rights, we do not regard them as radicals, or the regime’s apologists as moderates. Our assessment of the dissenters’ ideological character does not hinge on how far their values depart from those of the status quo order — but rather on how far that status quo departs from our consensus values.

Thus, whether it is truly extreme or moderate to demand sweeping changes to American capitalism depends on the degree to which the existing system aligns with common-sense views of what a just or rational economic system should look like. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/the-fed-just-released-a-damning-indictment-of-capitalism.html

15. Frank Sharry: Democrats can turn immigration into a total loser for Donald Trump in 2020 — if they dare

In the world according to Trump, his 2016 campaign rode racism and xenophobia to victory. In the 2018 midterms, he doubled down, invoking caravans filled with criminals and terrorists and producing an ad so racist even Fox News wouldn’t air it. Republicans suffered the largest midterm popular-vote defeat in American history. 

A wiser president would get it: His obsession with immigration fires up his core supporters but backfires badly with everyone else. Encouraged by White House whisperer Stephen Miller, Trump refuses to let up. Since the midterms, he has demanded billions for his border wall, shuttered the government for 35 days, declared a national emergency of dubious constitutionality, sent troops to the border, decapitated the Department of Homeland Security's leadership, and threatened economic warfare to get Mexico to (pretend to?) bend the knee.

Nevertheless, the numbers of families arriving at the border are sky high. His border strategy is as ineffective as it is cruel.

Meanwhile, at Trump rallies, he tells his followers that he is “finishing the wall” (he’s not) and calls Democrats the party of “open borders and crime” (they’re not). Yes, in 2020 he’s going to run, and run hard, on xenophobia. 

What should Democrats do?

First, Democrats should recognize that the public is with them, not Trump. A majority of voters believe that immigration is good for America, object to Trump’s race-baiting divisiveness, reject the practice of ripping toddlers from parents and putting kids in cages, oppose his border wall, and want Congress to create a line for undocumented immigrants to get into — with "Dreamers" and Temporary Protected Status holders in front.  https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/06/18/trump-immigration-policies-democrats-ticket-white-house-column/1472246001/

16.  Peter Wehner: Trump Is Betting That Anger Can Still Be Power

Donald Trump has been the most persistently unpopular first-term president in the postwar era. Much of the nation is exhausted and embarrassed by his presidency, pining for normalcy, eager to change the channel. The president’s own internal polls show Mr. Trump trailing the former vice president, Joe Biden, not only in many battleground states Mr. Trump won in 2016, but in traditional Republican strongholds like Georgia.

But as we saw Tuesday night, during a huge, raucous rally in Orlando, Fla., Trump is viewed by his supporters almost as a demigod. One excited Trump supporter who was there told me he was overwhelmed by the unwavering support for Mr. Trump, driven by a sense that Mr. Trump has been deeply wronged — by the Mueller investigation, by the media and by what he described as “anti-Trump forces.” He also told me, based on conversations he had with others at the rally, that Mr. Trump’s supporters believe his era is “spiritually driven.” What he meant by that is that person after person reported that when it comes to Mr. Trump and the presidency, “God has chosen him and is protecting him.” It is the Children of Light against the Children of Darkness.

That certainly aligns with my sense of how Trump supporters see things. It’s not just that Mr. Trump is exceedingly popular among Republicans, with his approval rating this year hovering in the high 80s and low 90s. It is that he has won their undying loyalty and affection. As a Republican friend of mine put it to me recently, Mr. Trump is the general leading the army into battle against an enemy that needs to be vanquished for the good of the nation. When facing an existential threat, there is no room for public dissent. In Mr. Trump’s Republican Party, you are expected to treat him with reverence, submission and obeisance, or you will be treated as a traitor to king and cause. Just ask Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Mark Sanford and Justin Amash. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/opinion/trump-2020-announcement.html

17. Jonathan Chait: Trump Awards Kook Art Laffer for Inventing Fake Curve

Last year, famed Republican economist Art Laffer co-authored a hagiographic tribute to President Trump and his agenda. Trump habitually bestows his most slavish supporters with pardons or — in the event they have not been convicted of any federal crimes — awards. Laffer accordingly will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom today.

In the real world, Laffer’s contributions have built a streak of unbroken wrongness over a time and scale few policy entrepreneurs in history can match. Laffer predicted Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts would pay for themselves. When they instead produced historic deficits, Laffer continued to claim he was right. He predicted Bill Clinton’s attempt to reduce the deficit by raising taxes on the rich would backfire (“I think the plan will fail. It entails price controls, which have never worked. It calls for tax increases, and that’s exactly the wrong way to go. It makes no sense to raise taxes on people who work and pay more to those who don’t work. This is the Reagan revolution in reverse”). Instead, revenue growth exceeded projections.

He likewise predicted President Obama’s plan would “destroy the economy” (it did not) and that President Trump’s tax cut would “pay for itself many times over” (it did not pay for itself at all), among many other failed predictions. Not content to botch his analysis of the federal budget, he has parachuted into several state governments and prodded Republicans into adopting his utterly false worldview. In Kansas and Louisiana, Republican governors listened to Laffer and produced fiscal catastrophe so comprehensive and undeniable Republicans in their state revolted.

Economists do not take Laffer’s claims seriously. This has not reduced his influence whatsoever. Laffer has elevated his curve to metaphysical status within the party, which treats the skepticism of economists as more evidence of their own correctness. “Economists still ridicule the Laffer Curve,” boasted Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Robert Bartley, “but policymakers pay it careful heed.” http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/art-laffer-curve-trump-medal-freedom-tax-cuts.html