1. Max Boot: Trump’s Fourth of July salute to himself will only hurt him

It’s no surprise that President Trump has hijacked the Fourth of July ceremony on the Mall. He wants to turn a celebration of America’s founding into a celebration of himself. Obscene, yes, but entirely in character. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodore Roosevelt’s eldest child, said: “My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.” That is Trump to a T — minus any of Roosevelt’s redeeming qualities.

A desire to be the center of attention has been — along with a desire for money and a desire to grab women by their private parts — Trump’s defining passion in life. It is why he has plastered his name on so many buildings and products. Why he fed the New York tabloids so many stories about himself. And ultimately why he ran for president. He didn’t think he’d win — it was just a way to get the attention he’s always craving.

Remarkably enough, Trump hasn’t become any less needy and greedy for publicity since he entered the White House. Having drunk so deeply at the well of ego gratification, he keeps coming back for ever-bigger gulps.

By the standards of normal politicians who want to get things done and win reelection, Trump’s presidency has been a fiasco. But by the standards of a reality TV show performer, he is accomplishing far more than he could have ever imagined. Getting attention as a real estate developer took a lot of work. For a president, it’s effortless. He finally has a narcissist’s dream job, and he will try to keep it as long as he can. The irony is that the more he struggles to stay in the limelight, the likelier he is to lose it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-fourth-of-july-salute-to-himself-will-only-hurt-him/2019/07/03/38da2564-9da8-11e9-b27f-ed2942f73d70_story.htm

2. Michelle Goldberg: The Welcome Humiliation of John Bolton

Say this for Donald Trump. He may be transforming American politics into a kleptocratic fascist reality show and turning our once-great country into a global laughingstock, but at least he’s humiliating John Bolton in the process.

Many people who get involved with this president end up diminished, embarrassed or, in quite a few cases, indicted. Rex Tillerson, once known as a corporate titan, will now be remembered for his brief, ineffectual record as secretary of state. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, and Paul Manafort, his former campaign manager, are in prison.

Bolton’s comeuppance is of a different kind. By taking to Fox News to kiss up to Trump, he became national security adviser, a job that no other president would have ever given to a discredited warmonger. His reward is that, after devoting his life to the expansion of American power globally, he’s a hapless party to its contraction. For a person to sell out his putative ideals for such a hollow victory would be like a Greek drama, if the Greeks had written dramas about such small men. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/opinion/john-bolton-trump.html

3.  Narges Bajoghli: Trump’s Iran Strategy Will Fail. Here’s Why.

While the Revolutionary Guards remains a repressive organization, intolerant of dissent, for the moment it has managed to shift public opinion in its favor. The regime has long smeared its domestic critics as tools of Western imperialism, but the generations born after the revolution were skeptical of that message. In large numbers, young people kept voting for leaders who called for domestic reform, and promised dialogue with the West.

The Trump administration’s aggression has changed that. Hard-line factions in the guards and the political establishment have claimed for years that the United States cannot be trusted, despite calls by moderates and reformers for Tehran to take conciliatory measures toward the United States. With Mr. Trump unilaterally pulling out of the international nuclear accord, despite Iran’s compliance, conservatives in the Islamic Republic feel vindicated in their distrust of the United States.

Despite the frustrations that many Iranians have with their political leaders, modern Iranian history teaches that one of the core themes in the country’s political culture is the struggle for independence from foreign powers. The revolution was the most significant milestone in that struggle, but it was also just one part of this larger story. As long as the Trump administration believes it can use sanctions and hostile rhetoric to drive a wedge between the Iranian public and its leaders, the Revolutionary Guards will use that same pressure to enforce solidarity behind it and the regime — and defeat any attempt by the West to bring change to Iran. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/30/opinion/trump-iran-revolutionary-guards.html

4. Greg Weiner: The Trump Fallacy

President Trump lies so reflexively on trivial matters that world leaders do not know whether to believe him on important ones. This conduct has become so routine it barely merits notice. He denounces the press as “the enemy of the people,” derides his critics as treasonous and openly fawns over an autocrat whose modern-day gulags practice extermination, torture and sexual violence. The president’s most strenuous apologists have long swept all this away with the breezy assurance that he should be taken “seriously, not literally.” Instead of his bombast, they say, look to policies of which conservatives approve.

This image of Mr. Trump as a political Robin Hood whose illicit behavior is justified because it serves a greater good is doubly flawed. First, the lying and vulgarity are unrelated to the policies Mr. Trump’s base wants implemented. Second, his supporters purport to seek a restoration of American founding principles. This increasingly strains credulity. But if they profess constitutionalism, they should at least understand that it is more about process than policy. Constitutions depend on habits and traditions, not the momentary outcomes they produce. Mr. Trump’s upending of these customs, not his transient policies, will form the legacy that endures.

The first flaw arises from what might be called the “post Trump, ergo propter Trump” fallacy. It is a form of the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” error in logic: “after, therefore because of.” The classic illustration is the supposition that the rooster’s crow causes the sunrise because the second event follows the first.

In the version of the fallacy his defenders espouse, Mr. Trump violates customary standards of presidential behavior and then delivers desired policies, so the assumption is that the violations produced the policies. No one believes this more vehemently than Mr. Trump himself, a man who crows before the stock market rises and believes he caused it to occur. The challenge in his case is that the boorishness that supposedly yields conservative outcomes is so unrelenting it is impossible to correlate with anything and plausible to associate with everything. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/30/opinion/trump-fallacy.html

5. Greg Sargent: The new GOP attacks on Mueller will backfire on Trump — bigly

Given that Robert S. Mueller III’s findings supposedly amounted to “total exoneration” for President Trump, you might be puzzled to learn that Trump’s top allies are spending enormous amounts of time scheming about how to undermine the former special counsel’s credibility and cast doubt on those findings.

With Mueller set to testify to Congress on July 17, Politico reports that Trump’s leading Republicans defenders in the House are putting together a new battle plan that will finally expose the Mueller investigation once and for all as the fraud it has always been.

If Mueller’s investigation exonerated Trump, you would think the best strategy for Trump’s allies would be to simply sit back while Mueller describes his findings in as detailed and unvarnished way as possible. Oddly enough, that’s not what they’re planning on doing.

The monumental absurdity at the core of this disconnect is the reason this strategy is likely to backfire on Trump. Yet, at the same time, the very existence of this strategy, despite its obvious ridiculousness, opens a window on how the Trump propaganda network wields disinformation, and how in certain respects, it does serve his ends. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/01/new-gop-attacks-mueller-will-backfire-trump-bigly/

6. Paul Krugman: The Moochers of Middle America

I’ve been reading a recent Rockefeller Institute report on states federal ‘balance of payments’ — the difference for each state between what the federal government spends in that state and what it gets back in revenue.

The pattern is familiar: Richer states subsidize poorer states. And the reasons are clear: Rich states pay much more per person in federal taxes, while actually getting a bit less in federal spending, because Medicaid and other ‘means-tested’ programs go disproportionately to those with low incomes. But the magnitudes are startling.

Take the case of Kentucky. In 2017, the state received $40 billion more from the federal government than it paid in taxes. That’s about one-fifth of the state’s G.D.P.; if Kentucky were a country, we’d say that it was receiving foreign aid on an almost inconceivable scale. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/opinion/2020-democrats-taxes.html

7. Jennifer Rubin: Sometimes, even in post-debate polling, conventional wisdom gets it right

The CNN poll has some red flags for Democrats. By a 57 percent to 37 percent margin, voters say a new health-care system shouldn’t completely replace private insurance. And among Democrats, only 31 percent think it is a good idea and 50 percent do not. On the broader question of whether the government should cover everyone even if it requires higher taxes, 56 percent (including 87 percent of Democrats) say yes, 40 percent say no. In short, for the life of me, I cannot see any upside in promising to abolish private health care. Nevertheless, a batch of these candidates including Warren and Sanders are promising to do just that.

Likewise, by a difference of 59 percent to 38 percent, Americans say they don’t want to give government health-care coverage to illegal immigrants. However, 66 percent of Democrats approve of the idea. That’s a quintessential issue on which a popular position in the primaries is a loser in the general election.

Democrats and those who lean Democratic are now confident (61 percent to 30 percent) that their candidate can beat President Trump. But it stands to reason that who they nominate will matter a great deal.

A final, critical aspect of this poll is Biden’s commanding lead (31 percent) among conservative and moderate Democrats. No other candidate gets more than 11 percent. If Biden implodes — and we are a long way from that — determining who else could capture the moderate/conservative Democratic electorate will be a vital concern. If there is a two- or three-person race among candidates who all appeal more to liberal Democrats, there could be room for a moderate, or someone moderate-friendly, to win the nomination.

That might leave a slice of daylight for someone such as Klobuchar, or it might mean that Harris, if she doesn’t follow Sanders and Warren all the way out on the party’s left branch, might become the consensus candidate.

If she simply mimics the two super-progressives, she might have a hard time. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/02/two-lines-counterattack-harris-will-either-work/

8. Brian Klaas: Will Boris Johnson bring Trumpism to Britain?

He’s a narcissistic serial philanderer with larger-than-life hair who was born in New York. He lies routinely and has encouraged political violence. He makes racist statements, basks in the media attention from his outlandish statements and unapologetically follows self-interest rather than principle. Now he’s about to become one of the most powerful men in the world.

No, this isn’t America in November 2016. I speak of Britain in July 2019.

Boris Johnson is the odds-on favorite to become Britain’s next prime minister on July 24, when a new leader is slated to take over from Prime Minister Theresa May. Johnson is currently in a two-man battle (against British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt) for the leadership of the Conservative Party.

There are, of course, plenty of differences between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. But their biggest hidden similarity — the one nobody is talking about — is how their paths to power were paved by a conservative political party that decided to become a vehicle for xenophobic nationalism, co-opting bigots and lunatics rather than denouncing them.

In the United States, the tea party movement emerged a month after Barack Obama became president in January 2009. Ostensibly, the movement was about taxes and government spending. And while that may have been true for some of the intellectual architects of the movement, the rank and file were far more motivated by xenophobic nationalism and social conservatism. If you wanted to see signs or hear speeches that falsely claimed Obama was a secret Muslim from Kenya, the best bet was to attend a tea party rally. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/02/will-boris-johnson-bring-trumpism-britain/

9. Jennifer Rubin: Trump’s celebration of himself is the perfect reminder of why he must leave

Trump has crushed political norms and constitutional barriers, whether by his incessant, brazen lying or his defiance of Congress in executive power grabs or impeding the Mueller investigation or smearing our intelligence community or taking monies from foreign governments in violation of the emoluments clause (according to two district court judges). But now, he has really done it.

Absconding with the most American of holidays, Independence Day, he plans to run a Soviet-style military display on the Mall; and just like the Soviets of old, he’ll have rich apparatchiks ... er, donors, in preferred seats, because nothing says Fourth of July like preferential treatment for rich toadies.

The event embodies so much of what is wrong with Trump that a Hollywood screenwriter surely would have been told to do a page-one rewrite of “Trump’s Grotesque Celebration of Himself.” It has nearly every Trumpian element.

There is the cringe-worthy ignorance. (“Abrams tanks — which Trump referred to as ‘Abram’ tanks in his remarks — weigh more than 60 tons and are usually transported over long distances by heavy rail,” The Post reports. “Trump also said ‘we have the brand-new Sherman tanks,’ which have not been in use by the U.S. military since the 1950s.”)

There is the misuse of the military as props for his own partisan ends and personal glorification (especially demanding that service commanders to stand at his side during the flyovers, as any tinpot dictator would insist upon). His incessant desire to ingratiate himself (he imagines) with the military while lacking any sense of its code of honor and values (e.g. considering pardons for war criminals, extolling police brutality) is a pathetic attempt to “make up” for draft avoidance.

There is the raiding of the Treasury for his personal aggrandizement. “The F-35 costs about $30,000 per hour to fly, according to Pentagon estimates. Each Blue Angel jet costs at least $10,000 per hour to operate, and the cost of flying an Air Force One jet is more than $140,000 per hour,” The Post reports. Moreover, “Two major fireworks firms have donated a pyrotechnic show valued at $750,000, for example, but the Park Service will have to pay employees overtime to clean up the remnants of that display.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/02/trumps-celebration-himself-is-perfect-reminder-why-he-must-go/

10. Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin-- Liberal Democrats Ruled the Debates. Will Moderates Regain Their Voices?

The Democratic debates this past week provided the clearest evidence yet that many of the leading presidential candidates are breaking with the incremental politics of the Clinton and Obama eras, and are embracing sweeping liberal policy changes on some of the most charged public issues in American life, even at the risk of political backlash.

Vowing to eliminate private health insurance, decriminalize illegal immigration and provide government health care benefits to undocumented migrants, high-profile contenders like Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris are wagering that they can energize voters eager to dismantle President Trump’s hard-line policies.

But with moderate Democrats repeatedly drowned out or on the defensive in the debates, the sprint to the left has deeply unnerved establishment Democrats, who have largely picked the party nominees in recent decades. They fear that advocating a government-run health care system could alienate suburban and upper-income voters who are otherwise eager to eject Mr. Trump from office, while the most progressive immigration policies might turn off the working-class white voters who backed Mr. Trump after twice supporting former President Barack Obama.

Liberals point to polls showing that policies like universal health care and tuition-free college are growing in popularity, and argue that victory in 2020 depends in part on inspiring turnout from young voters and progressives. Yet other Democrats came away from the debates fearful that the party was squandering the chance to make the election a referendum on an unpopular president, and staking its fortunes on untested policy promises instead. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/29/us/politics/2020-democrats.html

11. Chas Danner: Trump’s Big Tariff Threat Against China Is Officially a Flop

President Trump has backed down on his threat to impose new tariffs in his trade war with China, and will once again allow U.S. companies to sell to Huawei. He announced the big about-face after a long meeting with President Xi Jinping at the G20 on Saturday in which the two leaders agreed to restart trade-deal negotiations.

The president said that existing U.S. tariffs on goods from China, which currently target $250 billion worth of exports, would remain in place, but he would hold off (for the “time being”) on imposing new ones.

Ahead of the last round of trade talks, the president had vowed to impose tariffs on an additional $300 billion worth of goods if China didn’t agree to a deal. He didn’t impose them, but kept up with the threat anyway. The tariffs, if implemented, would have meant targeting almost everything China exports to the U.S. Paired with China’s retaliatory tariffs, they could have had a significant negative impact on the global economy, on U.S. businesses and consumers, and on President Trump’s reelection chances.

Now, six weeks of stalemate later, Trump seems to have been forced to realize that his big threat was met with a big “meh.” http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/trumps-big-tariff-threat-against-china-is-officially-a-flop.html

12. Maureen Dowd: Kamala Shotguns Joe Sixpack

Kamala Harris, who had been trying to appease the progressives on Twitter who berate her for her law enforcement record, suddenly found her inner cop.

Rather than asking Biden to pass the torch, she took a blowtorch to him.

“I do not believe you are a racist,” she allowed about the man who was the partner of the first black president, had a good civil rights record and claimed (unconvincingly) that he was inspired to run by his disgust at Charlottesville.

Harris snapped the cuffs on: “It was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on segregation of race in this country. And it was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing. And you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”

Harris was grinding her stiletto on a vulnerable part of Biden’s record. The reason Hill was eviscerated and a lying Clarence Thomas ascended to the Supreme Court is that Biden, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was bending over backward to appease uncompromising Republicans on the panel — the same men who were falsely accusing Hill of perversity, erotomania and perjury.

After his poor debate showing, Biden tried to recover Friday in Chicago but stepped in it again, saying during a labor luncheon, “We’ve got to recognize that kid wearing a hoodie may very well be the next poet laureate and not a gangbanger.”

Biden on Friday, during a labor luncheon in Chicago, argued that “the discussion in this race today shouldn’t be about the past.” But the problem at the moment is that Biden has too much past and not enough presence. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/29/opinion/sunday/kamala-harris-joe-biden-debate.html

13. Ben Taub: The Law That Makes It Easy to Go to War with Iran

Thirteen months ago, the United States pulled out of its own nuclear deal with Iran, not because the Iranians had violated it—there is no evidence to suggest that they had—but seemingly because it had been negotiated by President Trump’s predecessor.

Now the Iranians have abandoned the nuclear deal, following a year of compliance with the remaining five partners; the Revolutionary Guard is gaining power and recklessly lashing out, giving the United States more reasons to respond with a deadly strike. On June 25th, in response to Iran’s President, Hassan Rouhani, saying that the White House was “afflicted by mental retardation,” Trump threatened the “obliteration” of Iran. After which, who knows?

The cultural norms of the Presidency are currently determined by a man who, on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, was asked on live television whether a building he owned on Wall Street had suffered any damage during the attack. “Well, it was an amazing phone call,” he said, as footage of the falling towers played onscreen. “Forty Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan.” (It wasn’t.) “And now it’s the tallest.” He went on to suggest that a Boeing 767 couldn't “possibly go through the steel” beams without secondary explosions—a line of questioning at the core of the 9/11-truther movement. Then he became the President of the United States. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-law-that-makes-it-easy-to-go-to-war-with-iran

14. Ezra Klein: Kamala Harris was the Democrat you could imagine taking on Trump

Sen. Kamala Harris is the closest Democrats have to a potential consensus candidate. She doesn’t suffer from the enmity that Hillary Clinton voters have for Sen. Bernie Sanders, or that leftists hold for former Vice President Joe Biden, or that the Obama administration has for Elizabeth Warren. She’s not another white guy running to represent a diverse party. She’s got enough political experience to be a credible candidate, but not so much that she’s been on the wrong side of dozens of controversial issues.

But Harris wouldn’t be the first politician to look good on paper only to falter in the campaign. And so the question that has quietly suffused Democratic politics for the past few years has been: Can she do it? Can she perform under the lights?

Thursday night, she proved she can.

Harris won a debate over Bernie Sanders’s ideas despite Sanders standing right next to her. She looked like the heir to the Obama coalition despite the presence of Barack Obama’s vice president on the stage.

She tore into Biden’s comments about segregationists and his record on busing in a way that left him sputtering onstage, and that carried the meta-message that she’d be able to confront Trump with the same cool precision. She carefully criticized the Obama administration’s record on immigration in a way that showed she wouldn’t be hemmed in by the Democrats’ past. It was a command performance. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/28/18953583/kamala-harris-democratic-debate-2019-miami-biden-trump-winner

15. Jonathan Chait: Sanders Claims 2016 Primary Was Rigged, Won’t Commit to Supporting Winner

NBC’s Kasie Hunt asked Bernie Sanders if he would commit to supporting the Democratic nominee before the convention if it’s clear it won’t be him. Sanders would not make any such commitment. Instead, he said, “some people say that maybe if the system was not rigged against me, I would have won the nomination.”

While Sanders is coyly hiding behind the ‘some people say’ formulation, he is threatening to repeat the tactics he used in 2016, when he called the process ‘rigged’ and withheld his support long after the outcome was decided. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/bernie-sanders-2016-rigged-wont-pledge-support-winner.html

16. Jonathan Chait: Democratic Presidential Candidates Need to Stop Taking Unpopular Stances

The Democratic presidential primary has worked to the party’s disadvantage by maneuvering its candidates into unpopular positions. This is not quite a crisis, but it is a serious danger that, if not redressed, could blow up in the party’s face.

Democrats have lots of room to run to attack President Trump from the left on economic and social policy while placing themselves on the right side of public opinion. And while the party as a whole has done so, the presidential contenders have been jostling to stand out by adopting a series of highly unpopular stances. To date, the following positions have been taken by some or all the candidates: replace all employer-provided private insurance with a government plan; decriminalize the border while also providing subsidized health insurance to undocumented immigrants; and provide reparations for the descendants of American slaves.”

All these positions would likely be serious liabilities in a general election. What’s more, none of them would appear to stand any plausible chance of enactment in the next administration. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/democratic-candidates-taking-unpopular-stances-progressive-trump-private-insurance-decriminalize-border.html

17. Bess Levin: “I Made Him”: Trump Loses His Mind In Batshit Fox Interview

But speaking of Jerome Powell, aka Trump’s archnemesis du jour, here’s what the president of the United States had to say about his hand-selected central bank chief:

"Here's a guy -- nobody ever heard of him before. And now, I made him, and he wants to show how tough he is, okay. Let him show how tough he is. He's a-- he's a-- he's not doing a good job."

Trump, who apparently thinks he’s some kind of talent agent who “discovered” Powell bagging groceries and made a star, went on to claim that he has “the right” to demote or fire the Fed chair, which, it may or may not surprise you to hear, he actually doesn’t. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/06/donald-trump-maria-bartiromo-interview

18. Greg Sargent: The new GOP attacks on Mueller will backfire on Trump — bigly

Given that Robert S. Mueller III’s findings supposedly amounted to “total exoneration” for President Trump, you might be puzzled to learn that Trump’s top allies are spending enormous amounts of time scheming about how to undermine the former special counsel’s credibility and cast doubt on those findings.

With Mueller set to testify to Congress on July 17, Politico reports that Trump’s leading Republicans defenders in the House are putting together a new battle plan that will finally expose the Mueller investigation once and for all as the fraud it has always been.

If Mueller’s investigation exonerated Trump, you would think the best strategy for Trump’s allies would be to simply sit back while Mueller describes his findings in as detailed and unvarnished way as possible. Oddly enough, that’s not what they’re planning on doing.

The monumental absurdity at the core of this disconnect is the reason this strategy is likely to backfire on Trump. Yet, at the same time, the very existence of this strategy, despite its obvious ridiculousness, opens a window on how the Trump propaganda network wields disinformation, and how in certain respects, it does serve his ends. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/01/new-gop-attacks-mueller-will-backfire-trump-bigly/

19. Max Boot: Trump just proved he doesn’t even know the meaning of America

Oh, the cruel irony. President Trump is planning to turn the Fourth of July celebrations into his own “Salute to America.” And yet, while attending the Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan, Trump made clear that he has no idea what America is all about.

Just before coming to Osaka, Vladimir Putin attacked liberal democracy in an interview with the Financial Times. The Russian despot claimed that “the liberal idea” — which he maliciously defined as allowing “migrants” to “kill, plunder and rape with impunity” — had become “obsolete.” Any normal democratic leader should have reacted as Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, did. He said, “What I find really obsolete is authoritarianism, personality cults, and the rule of oligarchs.”

But when Trump was asked by Peter Baker of the New York Times about Putin’s attack on “Western-style liberalism,” he responded by criticizing San Francisco and Los Angeles, which he said are “sad to look at” because they are “run by liberal people.” So Trump doesn’t know the difference between West Coast liberalism and Western liberalism — between supporting the Green New Deal and supporting the immortal words of the Declaration of Independence that all people are endowed “with certain unalienable Rights,” including “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is the issuance of the Declaration of Independence that we celebrate on July 4. But Trump is clueless. For him it’s just another chance to stage a garish spectacle with himself at the center. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/29/trump-just-proved-he-doesnt-even-know-meaning-america/

20. Donald Ayer: Why Bill Barr Is So Dangerous

Buried behind our president’s endless stream of lies and malicious self-serving remarks are actions that far transcend any reasonable understanding of his legal authority. Donald Trump disdains, more than anything else, the limitations of checks and balances on his power. Witness his assertion of a right to flout all congressional subpoenas; his continuing refusal to disclose his tax returns, notwithstanding Congress’s statutory right to secure them; his specific actions to bar congressional testimony by government officials; and his personal attacks on judges who dare to subject the acts of his administration to judicial review. More blatant yet are his recent assertion of a right to accept dirt on political opponents from foreign governments, and his declaration of a national emergency, when he himself said he “did not need to do this,” he just preferred to “do it much faster.”

Attorney General William Barr has not had the lead public role in advancing the president’s claims to these unprecedented powers, which have come to us, like most everything about this president, as spontaneous assertions of Trump’s own will. To the contrary, in securing his confirmation as attorney general, Barr successfully used his prior service as attorney general in the by-the-book, norm-following administration of George H. W. Bush to present himself as a mature adult dedicated to the rule of law who could be expected to hold the Trump administration to established legal rules. Having known Barr for four decades, including preceding him as deputy attorney general in the Bush administration, I knew him to be a fierce advocate of unchecked presidential power, so my own hopes were outweighed by skepticism that this would come true. But the first few months of his current tenure, and in particular his handling of the Mueller report, suggest something very different—that he is using the office he holds to advance his extraordinary lifetime project of assigning unchecked power to the president. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/bill-barrs-dangerous-pursuit-executive-power/592951/

21. Michael Tomasky: Do Republicans Even Believe in Democracy Anymore?

A number of observers, myself included, have written pieces in recent years arguing that the Republican Party is no longer simply trying to compete with and defeat the Democratic Party on a level playing field. Today, rather than simply playing the game, the Republicans are simultaneously trying to rig the game’s rules so that they never lose.

The aggressive gerrymandering, which the Supreme Court just declared to be a matter beyond its purview; the voter suppression schemes; the dubious proposals that haven’t gone anywhere — yet — like trying to award presidential electoral votes by congressional district rather than by state, a scheme that Republicans in five states considered after the 2012 election and that is still discussed: These are not ideas aimed at invigorating democracy. They are hatched and executed for the express purpose of essentially fixing elections.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/opinion/republicans-trump-democracy.html

22. Alexander Heffner: Trump Is Counting on the Media to Help Re-Elect Him—Will They Oblige?

In scrutinizing the Democratic candidates for president, the debate moderators largely restrained themselves from Trumpian fictional frames and themes, whether they are “walls,” “caravans,” “spying,” or even his fantasy about challenging the constitutional law of impeachment. The result was Drudge’s first post-debate headline: THEY IGNORE TRUMP! 

Instead, the candidates expounded on reality—American economic immobility, the continued health care crisis, and the climate emergency. If journalists ask questions based on the truth, it will also expose the president’s exploitation of bigotry instead of helping to spread his lies.   

This doesn’t come naturally to the media. Instead, they renormalize a habitually deceitful president in return for the perception of access. We saw this again Sunday, as some gloated about a groundbreaking presidential North Korea landing without appropriate context. A historic betrayal of American values and acquiescence to authoritarianism would be more accurate.

On last Sunday’s Meet the Press interview of President Trump, the first of his presidency, Chuck Todd replicated the approach of ABC’s 30 Hours special, enabling Trump to volley back and forth disinformation, like “votes cast that I don’t believe,” and personal grievances—without any merit or real public policy discussion. “EXCLUSIVE: President Donald Trump tells @chucktodd that impeachment is ‘a very unfair thing,'” retweeted MSNBC. Erm... that’s not an exclusive. https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-is-counting-on-the-media-to-help-reelect-him-will-they-oblige