1. Jonathan Chait: Macron Uses Toddler Reverse Psychology Trick to Fool Trump Into Supporting NATO

What seems to have worked to get Trump to support NATO is Emmanuel Macron’s ploy. The French president gave an interview last month decrying the “brain death” of NATO, which he said had failed to account for America’s shrinking commitment under Trump.

Trump himself has called NATO “obsolete,” openly questioned whether the U.S. would come to the defense of allies under attack (the very foundation of the alliance), and privately told aides on several occasions last year he wants to withdraw from the alliance. But the notion that somebody else would question NATO, and blame its demise on Trump, has enraged him.

And now Trump is lashing out at Macron. “NATO serves a great purpose,” he declared today. “And I hear that President Macron said NATO is ‘brain dead.’ I think that’s very insulting to a lot of different forces … When you make a statement like that, that is a very, very nasty statement to 28 — including them — 28 countries.”

Manipulating children into doing what you want by pretending to demand they do the opposite thing is a trick most parents learn to use. It usually stops working around the age of 5. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/macrons-toddler-psychology-trick-makes-trump-endorse-nato.html

2. Jonathan Chait: Rudy’s Scheme to Line His Pockets in Ukraine Keeps Getting Shadier

Rudy Giuliani is in an enormous amount of trouble. His two partners, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, have already been arrested, and Giuliani himself is under investigation. We learned last week that the investigation concerns his own potential profit. Over the last two days, a flood of leaks has detailed the potential crimes he may have committed. And today, the New York Times and Washington Post both have new stories about Giuliani pursuing business deals with Ukrainian government officials at the same time he was lobbying them on Trump’s behalf. All this misconduct is on top of the basic political shakedown Trump is getting impeached over.

Some of the draft agreements Giuliani was trying to strike included deals for Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova, two Republican lawyers close to Trump. There does not appear to be much room for Giuliani to deny any of these reports. His “discussions with Ukrainian officials proceeded far enough along that he prepared at least one retainer agreement, on his company letterhead, that he signed,” reports the Times.

The first and most important thing to understand about these deals is that there is no possible set of mitigating circumstances that might make the negotiations remotely ethical. Ukraine was and is desperate for the support of the American government, because it has been fending off a low-grade Russian invasion for years and fighting to maintain its territorial integrity against Vladimir Putin’s barely disguised ambition to swallow it back into the Russian empire. Trump has repeatedly urged Ukrainian officials — both through his intermediaries, and in a phone call with its president — to deal with Giuliani. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/rudy-giuliani-ukraine-business-deals-impeachment-trump-profit.html

3. Philip Bump: President Trump loves conspiracy theories. Has he ever been right?

For President Trump, conspiracy theories are often more about utility than considered belief.

A good example of that came after the White House released the rough transcript of a call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. That document showed that Trump pressed Zelensky to launch an investigation into a server purportedly obtained by Ukraine, a request that was itself a muddling of an unfounded conspiracy theory.

We identified 19 conspiracy theories — some constrained, some sprawling — that Trump has elevated since becoming a vocal participant in U.S. politics before the 2012 presidential election. Seventeen of them are obviously false or lack substantive evidence in their defense. One involves a claim Trump makes about a past belief that is hard to evaluate. And one — one lonely, lucky theory — appears to have been validated to some extent.

Core theories are those that have become central to Trump’s political identity;.

Core theory: Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States
Core theory: Global warming is a hoax
Core theory: Immigrants bring higher crime to the United States
Core theory: Voter fraud is rampant in American politics
Core theory: The Russia inquiry was a hoax
Core theory: Joe Biden behaved improperly or illegally in Ukraine
Core theory: Polling is biased and skewed against Trump

Corollary theories: The FBI targeted Trump with a coup, Russia didn’t interfere in the 2016 election.

Theory: Trump Tower was wiretapped during the 2016 election
Theory: Ukraine was somehow involved in 2016 hacks targeting Trump’s opponents
Theory: The death toll from Hurricane Maria has been overestimated
Theory: Wind turbines cause cancer
Theory: Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself — it was Clinton’s fault.
Theory: Trump saw a television broadcast of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating on Sept. 11
Theory: Muslims seek to bring sharia law to the United States
Theory: Foul play might have been involved in the death of Justice Antonin Scalia
Theory: Ted Cruz’s father was linked to the Kennedy assassination
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/26/president-trump-loves-conspiracy-theories-has-he-ever-been-right/

4. Jonathan Bernstein: Trump's Approval Rating Should Worry Republicans

It’s still early to project how next year’s congressional elections will go. But the folks at Inside Elections have updated their predictions for 12 House contests in the Democrats’ favor, with only one shifting toward Republicans. It’s a good reminder that unpopular presidents typically drag their parties down.

And, yes, President Donald Trump is unpopular. In fact, through 1,048 days, his average approval rating is back to being the very worst of the polling-era presidents. According to FiveThirtyEight, he’s at 41.6%; the next worst at this point was Barack Obama at 44%. Disapproval ratings tell an even worse story: At 53.5%, Trump is the only president through 1,048 days topping 50% (with Obama again the next-worst at 49.7% and no one else above 42%).

This is dangerous territory for Republicans. Even if Trump rallies between now and November, it may be too late to help his party much. Candidate-recruitment season is already well underway, and those updates at Inside Elections mostly reflect how certain seats are becoming easier for Democrats to defend or harder for Republicans to hold based on decisions by politicians who are anticipating a tough contest for the president’s party. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/donald-trump-s-approval-rating-should-worry-republicans

5. Tom Boggioni: Trump has surrounded himself with ‘failsons’ starting with ’dimwitted’ Don Trump Jr. and Kushner

In a biting piece for the Daily Beast, acerbic columnist Molly Jong-Fast accuses Donald Trump of stocking his administrations with “failsons” — which she described as “a son of wealth and privilege who is equal parts incompetence, stupidity, and arrogance” — because in many ways they are a reflection of his own career.

Using reports of conservative groups making bulk purchase of Don Trump’s Jr’s book “Triggered” to boost it on the best sellers list, Jong-Fast pounced on the president’s namesake to make her case.

“One is not born a failson. Nor does one simply inherit the status of failson. No—failson status is earned through a display of equal parts incompetence, stupidity, and arrogance. And until his book, no person in America—or maybe even the world, so bursting at the seams with louche heirs and dissolute royals with no throne to sit their pampered arses on—illustrated all the facets of a failson better than Junior,” she wrote.

The New York Times denotes such bulk sales with an asterisk to let readers know that the sales were not organic. Junior, never one to be deterred by facts, immediately declared that this was part of a larger Times conspiracy against him. ‘I guess that’s their way of exerting a little bit of revenge by putting an asterisk without getting into the details,’ he sniffed,” she wrote before adding a sarcastic,” Yes Junior, The New York Times bulk purchasing policy is actually a conspiracy against you, the president’s large adult failson.”

Don Jr was not the only one to get the “failson” treatment with Jong-Fast casting a jaundiced eye at Jared Kushner, a “failson” who married into the family.

Jared Kushner is the failson in chief, arguably worse than Junior. After crushing a newspaper and overpaying for the aptly named 666 Fifth Avenue, the failson-in-law decided to take a crack at governmenting. He was tasked with peace in the Middle East and also renegotiating NAFTA, handling the opioid crisis, modernizing the Veterans Administration, spearheading criminal justice reform, and WhatsApp messaging with Saudi Arabian failson Mohammed bin Salman,” she explained. “But when those things proved too complicated for the young polymath, his father-in-law decided to refocus him on the important things, like why Matt Drudge was mad at him, tasking Ivanka’s husband to “look into it” and find out why Drudge has forsaken him. More recently, Jared was asked by his father-in-law to take another crack at building the wall.

Not to be forgotten, Jong-Fast also focused on Eric Trump.

“Not as notorious as his dimwitted siblings, Eric is the one of the Trump litter who seems the most interested in running the family’s mediocre hotel business. Though Eric always enjoys doing a segment on Fox News, where he dishes out really hot takes like his assessment that “Democrats weren’t even people.” Eric is also extremely bad at Twitter. On Thanksgiving Day, he tweeted a picture of a red hat emblazoned with the acronym LOPA for “Leave Our President Alone,” which caused the internet to erupt in mockery of the young Hapsburg,” she wrote.

As to why Trump doesn’t surround himself with competent aides and defenders, Jong-Fast points out that Trump himself is a “failson.” https://www.rawstory.com/2019/11/trump-has-surrounded-himself-with-failsons-starting-with-dimwitted-don-trump-jr-and-kushner-columnist/

6. Will Bunch: In America, the law is the law* (*if you’re poor, undocumented or nonwhite)

You raise your child to grow up to be a man like Delmer Joel Ramirez Palma. The Honduran native -- married, raising a 10-year-old son in New Orleans -- supported his family by working construction. It’s a tough job under the best of circumstances, but Ramirez Palma didn’t have the best of circumstances. After complaining repeatedly to his bosses at the site of a future Hard Rock Hotel about workplace safety, he watched three coworkers die and narrowly escaped serious injury himself when the unfinished building collapsed in October.

As an undocumented immigrant, Ramirez Palma had every reason to retreat into the shadows after cheating death. Instead, he wanted people to know everything. He talked to the media, joined a workplace-safety lawsuit, and offered to tell investigators what he knew about the deadly collapse -- but the U.S. government wasn’t having it. In a simpler time, Ramirez Palma had staved off deportation so he could raise his son -- a U.S. citizen -- but the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested him and sent him back to Honduras where he’d be inaccessible to investigators, let alone his family.

The details here are unique, even shocking -- but the almost mindless cruelty of it all is something we see again and again in America as the 2010s mercifully come to a close. Not just in heavily Latin neighborhoods where families are now afraid to go to the ice cream shop -- let alone testify in a court case or talk with police -- but on big-city subway platforms where cops respond to fare jumpers with SWAT teams when they’re not busting women selling treats at the entrance upstairs. Did I mention school lunch debt or overdue library books?

This zero-tolerance policing sends a message not just to citizens and to migrants but around the world: America is a nation where the law is the law.

Except when it’s not.

This is why I fear so greatly for the United States after Trump is acquitted in January. Our secret that’s been hiding in plain sight for decades now -- that America isn’t really ruled by the power of law, just the powerful -- will be out there for the world to see, with no more pretending that we are some kind of exceptional nation. In post-impeachment, post-factual, post-rule-of-law America, we’ll discover whether that truth entraps us or sets us free. https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/hard-rock-whistleblower-deported-gallagher-war-crimes-trump-epstein-20191201.html

7. Jonathan Chait: Report: Trump’s Business More Fraudulent Than Previously Known

Donald Trump has famously refused to disclose his returns, and waged a series of implausible but dogged legal challenges to prevent those returns from being obtained by Congress and the New York attorney general, in spite of clear legal mandate to do so. In the absence of seeing the tax returns, journalists have pieced together elements of Trump’s financial practices by obtaining whatever documents he has had to submit in the course of his business dealings.

The portrait those efforts have painted is consistent. Trump engages in systematic financial fraud — not just aggressive use of tax sheltering, but straight up criminal fraud — and counts on lax-to-nonexistent enforcement to make his crimes pay.

This isn’t being clever, finding a complicated tax shelter, or taking full advantage of what the law allows. It’s just, by all indications, straight up fraud. What these figures can’t settle is whether Trump is defrauding his lenders, cheating on his taxes, or both. Both of those forms of fraud are crimes. None of the experts contacted by ProPublica could formulate an innocent explanation. And as Congress decides whether it should deem Trump’s abuses of power to be high crimes, surprisingly little attention has been given to the fact that Trump’s entire career leading up to the presidency has consisted of habitual criminality. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/report-trump-business-fraud-propublica-taxes-crimes.html

8. Molly Jong-Fast: Lisa Page Speaks: ‘There’s No Fathomable Way I Have Committed Any Crime at All’

Lisa Page, of course, is the former FBI lawyer whose text-message exchanges with agent Peter Strzok that belittled Donald Trump and expressed fear at his possible victory became international news. They were hijacked by Trump to fuel his “deep state” conspiracy.

For the nearly two years since her name first made the papers, she’s been publicly silent (she did have a closed-door interview with House members in July 2018). I asked her why she was willing to talk now. “Honestly, his demeaning fake orgasm was really the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she says. The president called out her name as he acted out an orgasm in front of thousands of people at a Minneapolis rally on Oct. 11.

That was the moment Page decided she had to speak up. “I had stayed quiet for years hoping it would fade away, but instead it got worse,” she says. “It had been so hard not to defend myself, to let people who hate me control the narrative. I decided to take my power back.” 

The era of Trump populism always had an ugly edge, particularly toward women. Trump revels in bringing misery to his opponents and will always seek out and exploit any weakness. Page “wasn’t nice to him,” and so in his eyes she can be endlessly targeted and assaulted. 

It’s tempting to describe this as just part of Trump’s deep, baked-in misogyny and sociopathy, but in Page’s case it’s worse; it’s a sign of how deeply he’s corrupted the government to serve his will and his whims. His apologists have become part of Trump’s own squad of witch-hunters, hunting fantasies like “Ukrainian interference” while attacking the people who tried to protect us from Russian attacks.

It’s not just that Lisa Page may never be safe as long as Trump is president. 

It’s that we won’t be safe, either.  https://www.thedailybeast.com/lisa-page-speaks-theres-no-fathomable-way-i-have-committed-any-crime-at-all

9. Matthew Yglesias: What Trump has actually done in his first 3 years

The scandals, the leaks, the outrages, and the bizarre tweets of the last three years can distract from an important fact about President Donald Trump: He has changed policy in ways that affect the lives of millions of Americans.

Tax changes were Trump’s biggest legislative accomplishment, creating a huge windfall for wealthy shareholders and small gains for the middle class — with revenue losses much larger than initially forecast. He’s also undertaken significant but little-noticed alternations in supervision of Wall Street that increase the riskiness of the banking system, plus drastic changes to immigration policy that go far beyond wall construction.

The immigration changes align with Trump’s main campaign themes, even if they don’t line up in detail with what he promised. But much of this amounts to delivering for big business and the wealthy in a much more dramatic way than his “populist” positioning would indicate. Promises to voters to protect clean air, provide better health care, crack down on banks, and tax the rich have fallen entirely by the wayside.

As 2020 approaches, Trump’s achievements are a reminder that Trump and his team are doing real things that have real impacts on real lives. His successes explain why the conservative movement is solidly behind him, despite its considerable doubts from four years ago. Regardless of what Trump tweets or says or does during the election, it’s worth remembering there’s more to him than the Trump Show. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/2/20970521/trump-administration-achievements

10. Bob Bauer: Trump Is the Founders’ Worst Nightmare

One of Sherlock Holmes’ most famous cases was solved when a normally noisy dog was silent the night of the crime, leading the famous detective to the deduction that it must have been an inside job — the dog knew the intruder.

Those not barking today are the numerous Trump administration officials who are strangely silent when a few short statements (under oath) could go a long way toward exonerating the president from the charge of using the powers of his office for personal gain.

Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, former national security adviser John Bolton and probably at least a dozen White House and National Security Council staffers — all could clear up, one way or another, the essential question of whether the president was interested in corruption generally in Ukraine last summer, or whether the withholding of military aid and the dangling of a White House meeting was motivated by his personal and political interest in publicized investigations of the 2016 election and the activities of one of his principal rivals. And this would be direct evidence, which no one can call hearsay.

Because it would be so easy for these people to clear the president, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that their silence is less about vague assertions of executive privilege (which isn’t available to cover-up wrongdoing, in any case) and more about not wanting to testify under oath as to what actually happened. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/12/02/ukraine-scandal-mick-mulvaney-john-bolton-mike-pompeo-trump-column/4347042002/

11. Jonathan Chait: Trump Is Making the Al Capone Tax-Evasion Defense Against Impeachment

Trump ran as an authoritarian demagogue whose entire conception of the office he stood poised to occupy was at odds with the republican form of government. That Democrats did not immediately undertake impeachment proceedings against him shows they gave him the benefit of the doubt.

But rather than growing into the office, Trump has fulfilled the darkest fears about his character and his conduct. Trump has run through the authoritarian threats he made as if it were a to-do list. Retribution against owners of independent media? Check. Promoting the use of war crimes? Check. Collecting money from interested parties at home and abroad? Check. Inciting violence to intimidate critics? Check.

The fact that some of Trump’s critics were contemplating impeachment for years before they settled on this charge hardly absolves him. The feds were looking to nail Al Capone for a long time before they finally prosecuted him for tax evasion. Capone, like Trump, had a knack for intimidating law enforcement, bribing witnesses, and withholding evidence. His crimes were something everybody knew but were difficult to prove. His punishment was both procedurally fair — Capone was as clearly guilty of tax evasion as Trump is of pressuring Ukraine to investigate his domestic rivals — yet frustratingly too narrow to capture the full breadth of his culpability. That discrepancy will challenge historians who study Trump’s criminal presidency. But it is truly odd to see it used as a case against impeaching him at all. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/trump-impeachment-democrats-ukraine-crimes-al-capone.html

12. Matt Stieb: Attorney General Bill Barr Still Trusts Trump Over DOJ on Russia Investigation

Since it’s been a few months — and at least one presidency-defining international scandal — since President Trump’s last presidency-defining international scandal, let’s review the behavior of Attorney General William Barr regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Foremost, Barr’s creative interpretation of the Mueller report shielded Trump from clear examples of obstruction of justice, leading to the president’s false claim of “complete and total exoneration.” Aside from that bail-out, he also called the Mueller investigation into potential obstruction a “political operation to overthrow the president;” claimed that the FBI was “spying” on Trump; had multiple conversations with White House lawyers prior to the report’s release benefitting the president’s cause; and compared the Russia investigation to the racist birther movement, although it was forwarded primarily by Trump.

In light of the attorney general’s past actions safeguarding the president from accountability for his campaign’s conduct, it’s no surprise that Barr continues to trust Trump’s word over findings from a Department of Justice investigation. According to the Washington Post, Barr privately disagrees with the DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s determination that the FBI had enough information to open an inquiry into the Trump campaign in July 2016. The IG report on the origin of the investigation, which will be released next week, is expected to find that the FBI was justified in its investigation, which was opened after Trump aide George Papadopoulos spilled that Moscow had hacked Clinton emails prior to the announcement that DNC servers were compromised by Russian assets. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/ag-bill-barr-still-favors-trump-over-doj-on-russia-inquiry.html

13. Eric Levitz: Democrats Should Make 2020 a Referendum on ‘More Socialism for Old People’

The Republican Party lives off the largess of the welfare state’s worst enemies — and the votes of its primary beneficiaries. In 2016, Hillary Clinton trounced Donald Trump by more than 20 points with voters under 45. Absent the resilient Republicanism and superlative turnout rate of America’s seniors, the mogul would have lost the Electoral College in a landslide.

Thus the GOP appears poised to grow increasingly reliant on the support of older voters, even as those voters grow evermore dependent on on social-welfare programs: In the coming decades, millions of younger boomers will age into eligibility for Medicare and Social Security, while millions of older ones will develop a need for long-term care. Whether the GOP can keep these graying boomers satisfied — while meeting its obligations to the anarcho-capitalist billionaires who are the party’s top shareholders (and the movement conservative ideologues who are its top functionaries) — may determine its electoral viability in 2020 and beyond.

The Democrats’ leftward lurch on socialism for seniors is right on the merits: Owing in part to gains in life expectancy among the elderly, an American turning 65 today has somewhere between a 50 and 70 percent chance of eventually requiring long-term support by the end of his or her life. And yet, the U.S. is nearly alone among wealthy nations in lacking a universal long-term-care benefit. What’s more, as James Medlock and Colin McAuliffe of Data for Progress note, the U.S. spends far less on long-term care (as a percentage of its GDP) than the vast majority of OECD countries.

If the federal government does not step in and provide more funding for home health-care workers and quality live-in facilities, then millions of older Americans will be at risk of spending their “golden years” in conditions of harrowing deprivation, while millions of younger Americans will see their own ambitions compromised by the burdens of caring for their elders. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/dems-should-campaign-on-socialism-for-seniors-in-2020.html

14. Greg Sargent: Laughable new GOP report: Yes, Trump did it. But his motives were pure!

House Republicans have now formalized their defense of Trump with the release of a new report as the impeachment process shifts into its next phase, and at the center of it is an effort to make that corrupt motive disappear entirely.

The report’s new argument is that, yes, Trump might have made requests of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce “investigations” that would validate Trump’s (invented) theory of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election and his (fabricated) narrative of corruption on the part of Joe Biden and his son in Ukraine.

But, Republicans say, Trump was right to do this, because his concerns about these things were legitimate and were subsumed into a much broader — and, again, legitimate — set of concerns about corruption.

The argument is a joke. But it also illustrates in a backhand way just how unconvincing any effort to sanitize away Trump’s corrupt motives must inevitably be.

The GOP argument requires ignoring voluminous evidence of those corrupt motives. It also requires accepting the spectacularly absurd idea that the investigations Trump actually did ask for were not just motivated by a general desire to fight corruption but also benefited Trump politically out of pure coincidence. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/03/laughable-new-gop-report-yes-trump-did-it-his-motives-were-pure/

15. William D. Cohan: Dear President Trump: The Ultimate Impeachment Deal Is To Abdicate Right Now

If Donald Trump were even half the “stable genius” he’d like us to think he is, he’d do something really smart: He’d abdicate his office before the House of Representatives votes to impeach him. What’s more, if he were to abdicate, not only could he cut one helluva deal on his way out of Washington, but he could also make sure that Trumpism survives him—and his brand would be preserved to adorn hotels and golf courses far into the future.

Bear with me here, especially because Trump is about as contrarian and stubborn as they come. To say nothing of the fact that he is highly unlikely to take advice from a contemptuous libtard like me. But the idea of Trump abdicating still makes a lot of completely objective sense. He will most certainly be impeached by the House whenever that vote comes. And for good reason: His behavior as president has been largely and repeatedly unconscionable. The fact that the Republicans in the Senate will allow him to get away with his impeachable offenses is not a good reason for why he should continue to stick around the Oval Office. Impeachment is forever. It’s for the history books. He can’t erase it from his tombstone, regardless of whether the Senate lets him slide on the removal from office part of the equation. It’s a permanent status humiliation—his own particular, inescapable circle of hell. He’ll be a world-historic loser. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/12/ultimate-impeachment-deal-donald-trump-abdicate

16. Paul Waldman: The world is laughing at Donald Trump

“We need a President who isn’t a laughing stock to the entire World,” Donald Trump tweeted in 2014. “We need a truly great leader, a genius at strategy and winning. Respect!”

Indeed, having such a leader would provide many benefits to the United States. Instead, we get this: President Trump, who has long demeaned his rivals for being laughed at around the world, found himself the scorned child on the global playground Wednesday as widely circulated video showed some of his foreign counterparts gossiping about and mocking him.

The video captured Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appearing to laugh Tuesday evening with French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and others about Trump’s performance during an earlier bilateral meeting and painted White House aides as agog at the president’s behavior.

And so it was Wednesday morning that Trump presented a sulking, brooding president as he engaged on the sidelines of the NATO summit at a secluded estate here outside London. Trump abruptly cancelled a planned news conference at the summit’s conclusion, arguing that he had already answered so many questions from reporters in other settings during his visit to England.

Trump says he’ll be leaving the summit early, and it won’t be the first time he has stalked angrily away from a meeting of U.S. allies before he was scheduled to depart. A year and a half ago, he fled a meeting of the Group of Seven in Quebec, apparently miffed that the allied leaders expressed their differences with him on tariffs and climate change.

It’s almost as though at these gatherings of world leaders Trump becomes his most petulant, insecure and childish.

Trump’s preoccupation with the idea of being laughed at borders on the pathological. It was his primary theme as a candidate whenever he discussed foreign affairs or international trade: China is laughing at us, Europe is laughing at us, the Taliban is laughing at us, OPEC is laughing at us, the world is laughing at us. But once he became president, he promised, the laughter would stop. And so he has asserted many times since taking office. “We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore, and they won’t be,” he said. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/04/world-is-laughing-donald-trump/

17. Max Boot: NATO is on life support — and Trump’s the one who put it there

President Trump’s meetings with anti-American despots such as Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin are inevitably lovefests. His meetings with democratic allies are inevitably tense and acrimonious. This week’s NATO summit in London held true to disastrous form.

The first lowlight was Trump’s tense meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday. The two leaders fought over the handling of Islamic State detainees (“Would you like some nice ISIS fighters? I could give them to you,” Trump demanded sarcastically. Macron snapped: “Let’s be serious”). They also fought over Turkey (“How is it possible to be a member of the alliance … and to buy the S-400s from the Russians?” Macron asked) and Russia (“I think we get along with Russia,” Trump said, while Macron cautioned against “naivete” in “a strategic dialogue with Russia”). They even fought over NATO’s own future.

In an interview with the Economist last month, Macron made headlines by saying that NATO is experiencing “brain death” because of the unilateralism of Turkey and the United States. “We find ourselves for the first time with an American president who doesn’t share our idea of the European project, and American policy is diverging from this project,” Macron said. “You have no coordination whatsoever of strategic decision-making between the United States and its NATO allies. None.”

You would think that an American president who has called NATO “obsolete” and opined that “European nations were set up in order to take advantage of the United States” would have no problem with Macron’s withering assessment. But no. Trump called Macron’s comments “very, very nasty” and “very disrespectful,” although not to Macron’s face. Trump — a lion on Twitter but a pussycat in person — saved his harshest words about the French president for his meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/04/nato-is-life-support-trumps-one-who-put-it-there/

18. John Cassidy: The House Republicans’ Shameless Report

At this late stage in the transformation of the Party of Lincoln into an emotional- and political-support group for Donald Trump, we have grown accustomed to its elected representatives debasing themselves to protect the President. Even by current G.O.P. standards, though, the impeachment report that the House Republicans put out on Monday is an extraordinarily cynical and tendentious document.

It begins by dismissing the entire impeachment process as an effort to “undo the will of the American people” as expressed in the 2016 election result, and “an orchestrated campaign to upend our political system” that began “because some unelected bureaucrats chafed at an elected President’s ‘outside the beltway’ approach to diplomacy.” Ignoring the potential contradiction in these two descriptions, the report goes on to concede that there are some actual allegations here. “The sum and substance of the Democrats’ case for impeachment is that President Trump abused his authority to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, President Trump’s potential political rival, for President Trump’s benefit in the 2020 election,” it says.

“Democrats say this pressure campaign encompassed leveraging a White House meeting and the release of U.S. security assistance to force the Ukrainian president”—Volodymyr Zelensky—“to succumb to President Trump’s political wishes. Democrats say that Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the President’s personal attorney, and a ‘shadow’ group of U.S. officials conspired to benefit the President politically.”

The Republican report runs to more than a hundred pages, most of which are spent trying to explain away what is obvious. It makes much of the fact that many of the witnesses didn’t have direct access to Trump, but it plays down the fact that the White House ordered many witnesses who did have access to him not to testify, claiming, “President Trump’s assertion of longstanding claims of executive privilege is a legitimate response to an unfair, abusive, and partisan process, and does not constitute obstruction of a legitimate impeachment inquiry.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-house-republicans-shameless-impeachment-report