1. George Conway: Trump’s ‘King Kong’ nickname has come into full fruition

Not for nothing did President Trump’s first White House counsel give him the nickname “King Kong.”

Former White House counsel Donald McGahn, who resisted Trump when he sought to violate the law and sometimes engaged in “epic” “shouting matches” with him, reportedly selected the sobriquet to connote Trump’s “volcanic anger” and “emotional decision-making.”

But as Trump’s behavior this week demonstrates, the moniker fits for another reason as well. It reflects Trump’s desire to escape constraints — in particular, legal constraints. That Kong-like urge was illustrated by two developments: the president’s latest executive clemency spree and his continued attacks against the federal judiciary.

Trump revels in issuing pardons, because that power is essentially absolute. The Constitution sets out no standards for granting pardons. They require no consent from Congress, and courts can’t second-guess them.

They also offer instant gratification to a president who desperately craves it. As one source close to Trump told Axios last year: “What he enjoys most about this job is finding things he has absolute power over,” which is why he gets “a kick out of pardons,” and the fact that “he could pardon anybody he wants and people would come to him to court him and beg him.”

Trump’s specific invocations of the pardon power, moreover, appear unwedded to any notion of mercy or public good; they are not guided by the ordinary process of careful review. Rather, they are impulsive expressions of Trumpian spite and self-interest. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-conway-trumps-pardons-are-impulsive-expressions-of-his-spite/2020/02/19/399485a0-5363-11ea-929a-64efa7482a77_story.html

2. Joel Stein: Trump honestly thinks Blagojevich did nothing wrong. That’s terrifying

People assume Donald Trump commuted Rod Blagojevich’s sentence and pardoned former San Francisco 49ers owner Edward DeBartolo, ex-NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik, junk bond king Michael Milken and lobbyist David Safavian because they granted him political favors. Or because they were his friends. Or because he loves white men. Or because he fears jail is unsafe for people with funny last names.

But Trump was simply doing what he thought was right.

Blagojevich is not even a member of Trump’s party. He’s a Democrat, and members of both parties hate him, so there’s not much political gain in freeing him. There was also no advantage for Trump to tweet on Feb. 8 that Pete Rose, who was thrown out of baseball for gambling, should be in the Hall of Fame. But Trump’s overriding belief is that cheating is irrelevant. What matters is winning. This is the ethos of New York real estate, multilevel marketing, reality television and all of his marriages.

Trump believes these men did what everyone else does. They just got caught. Sure, they broke the law, but everyone speeds. Everyone leaves the cash they were paid off their tax forms. Everyone tells a children’s hospital that funding will be cut off if their CEO doesn’t contribute $50,000 to his campaign, which is what Blagojevich did. Everyone would try to get some cash if they got to appoint a senator after Barack Obama left his seat to become president, which is what Blagojevich tried to do.

Selling political appointments, Trump is certain, happens all the time. He first floated the idea of commuting Blagojevich’s prison term in 2018, when he told reporters “plenty of other politicians have said a lot worse.” He was speaking of FBI recordings in which Blagojevich said Obama’s Senate seat was “a f— valuable thing. You just don’t give it away for nothing.”

Trump believes that the only reason people are prosecuted for corruption is that corrupt politicians on the opposing side are picking on them for their own gain. As Blagojevich wrote in a 2018 Wall Street Journal column, “I’m in prison for practicing politics. When they can’t prove a crime, they create one.” After Trump commuted his sentence, Fox News host Jeanine Pirro tweeted her approval, writing, “Political persecutions have no place in this country.”

But selling political offices for money is not something American officials do all the time, not even in Chicago.

The first step the next president should take in ending our culture of corruption is to ask for a constitutional amendment to get rid of the presidential pardon. Releasing people from prison for no reason is the flip side of putting people in prison for no reason. It’s an undemocratic power that came from kings. Plus it would mean ending that stupid animal rights charade we put up with every Thanksgiving. Those turkeys clearly knew somebody high up somewhere. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-02-19/trump-pardons-blagojevich-this-is-why

3. Garrett Graff: How Trump Hollowed Out U.S. National Security

While vacancies and acting officials have become commonplace in this administration, the moves by President Donald Trump this week represent a troubling and potentially profound new danger to the country. There will soon be no Senate-confirmed director of the National Counterterrorism Center, director of national intelligence, principal deputy director of national intelligence, homeland security secretary, deputy homeland security secretary, nor leaders of any of the three main border security and immigration agencies.

Across the government, nearly 100,000 federal law enforcement agents, officers, and personnel are working today without permanent agency leaders, from Customs and Border Protection and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

All the posts, and many more top security jobs, are unfilled or staffed with leaders who have not been confirmed by the Senate. Trump has done an end-around, installing loyalists without subjecting them to legally mandated vetting and approval by Congress. https://www.wired.com/story/trump-hollowed-out-us-national-security-vacancies-acting/ 

4. Brian Barrett: Russia Doesn't Want Bernie Sanders. It Wants Chaos

The point of Kremlin interference has always been to find democracy’s loose seams, and pull.

In 2016, Russian misinformation agents and hackers worked to boost Trump’s electoral chances, but also threw some of their support behind Sanders as he ran against Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of the Internet Research Agency troll farm detailed how IRA operatives were instructed to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump—we support them).” In the summer of 2016, pro-Sanders IRA Facebook accounts spread rumors that Clinton had stolen the Iowa caucus from Sanders and that her campaign had gotten illegal mail-in votes in Broward County, Florida.

Sanders did vote against the Magnitsky Act in 2012, a notorious Putin bugaboo, which could arguably make him a more palatable candidate to the Kremlin. But the distinction between Russia’s support for Trump and Sanders then, as now, is that Russia wanted only Trump to win. Promoting Sanders was simply another means to that end, driving a wedge between two already fraught factions of the Democratic Party.

“The IRA's left-leaning accounts focused their efforts on denigrating Clinton,” concluded the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s definitive look at Russian interference, “and supporting the candidacy of either fellow Democrat candidate Bernie Sanders or Green Party candidate Jill Stein, at the expense of Hillary Clinton.”

The 2020 playbook remains the same, say Clint Watts, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who studies Russian interference efforts: Elevate Trump, play up that Sanders got a raw deal, and tear down the leading institutional Democrat—then Clinton, now Biden and Bloomberg. Instead of Jill Stein, 2020 has Tulsi Gabbard, who has not left the race and whom Russian media, Watts says, regularly praises.

“The Kremlin’s strategy for a year has been very straightforward,” Watts says. “They would like to see Trump reelected.” https://www.wired.com/story/bernie-sanders-russia-chaos-2020-election/

5. Jonathan Blitzer: How Stephen Miller Manipulates Donald Trump To Further His Immigration Obsession

Inside the White House, Stephen Miller was known as a “walking encyclopedia” on immigration, and the President’s political advisers, who acknowledged that campaigning on the issue had been the key to Trump’s victory in 2016, deferred to him as an expert. Those with reservations—like Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, and H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser—had other responsibilities. Miller could outmaneuver them if he used the right interagency channels. He sent e-mail sparingly and avoided calling officials directly to issue orders, relaying his messages through intermediaries.

Since Trump could rarely comprehend the full substance of his own Administration’s agenda on immigration, it fell to Miller to define what victory looked like. One of the President’s favorite routines, according to someone close to both of them, is to play the good cop to Miller’s bad cop: “He’ll smile and say, ‘Well, that sounds O.K. to me but, Stephen, I know you’d never go for it.’ ”

Miller invoked the President constantly, especially when he encountered resistance from other officials. One of them told me, “Someone would say to him, ‘Stephen, what you’re trying to do is not possible.’ And his response would be ‘It is possible. I spoke to the President an hour ago, and he said it had to be done.’ ” (Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesperson, told me, “The policies Stephen works on are not his own but, instead, a faithful and vigilant implementation of the agenda Donald Trump brilliantly laid out.”)

Asylum seekers stuck in Mexico have given up on reaching the U.S. America’s legal and moral standing may not survive the Administration’s immigration policies, but Trump has succeeded in realizing one of his most infamous tweets: “Our country is full.”

With the border virtually sealed, Miller is turning his attention inward. D.H.S. has begun sending armed agents from Border Patrol swat teams to New York, Chicago, and other so-called sanctuary cities, where local law enforcement has limited its coöperation with ice. “There’s no one left at D.H.S. to say ‘No’ to Miller anymore,” a senior department official told me. Another official was present at a meeting in which Miller advocated allowing ice officers to pull children out of school.

This summer, months before the election, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on whether the Administration can cancel DACA. “Everything—everything!—hinges on that decision,” a former senior D.H.S. official told me. If the Supreme Court ends daca, then “Miller will be in ecstasy. He’ll finally have the leverage over the Democratic Congress that he’s been dying to have this entire time. He’ll say, ‘Well, you’re all worried we’re going to deport them. What will you agree to?’ ” The official continued, “It’ll be the summer of a huge campaign, and Miller will be in his glory.”  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/02/how-stephen-miller-manipulates-donald-trump-to-further-his-immigration-obsession

6. Andrew Sullivan: Trump’s Presidency Isn’t a Dark Comedy — It’s an Absurd Tragedy

After all the shocks and scandals, and all the violations of key norms and practices, the cult of Trump is as strong as ever. One chilling fact: In New Hampshire, in the Republican primary, basically uncontested, almost 130,000 people showed up to vote for their president. At a similar point in their reelection bids, Bush and Obama only mustered about half that number in the state.

This is a cult. It’s sustained by constant fanatical rallies, buoyed by a campaign of deliberate falsehoods, and thriving in an alternate reality created by a media company’s propaganda. This is more dangerous than a monarchy, because it is based on charismatic authority, not tradition. And Trump’s demagogic and Twitter skills remain underrated by too many who can’t see the menace behind the circus. The economy, meanwhile, is strong — thanks in part to adding a trillion more dollars each year to the debt — and people at the bottom of the ladder are actually seeing real wage gains for the first time in a long while. It is therefore more likely than not that this president will be reelected.

If that happens, every authoritarian precedent being set now will be given deeper democratic legitimacy. Yes, this is exactly how republics die. As in Rome, the forms remain, but the essence has shifted — away from democratic discourse, separation of powers, compromise and coalition and toward cultish, one-man strongman presidencies, buoyed by the tribal loyalties of half the country.

And that, of course, is not the worst option. Competing cult leaders is bad enough; but our current president is also threatening the integrity of our elections by his indifference toward foreign influence, his refusal to commit to obeying an election result in advance, his grotesque past claims of voter fraud, and his toying with a third or fourth term. Last year, Trump tweeted a GIF that showed him winning elections in 2024, 2028, and on and on. And it was one thing to swallow all this gamesmanship and trolling from a rogue candidate in 2016 — but from a sitting president heading into an election year? And then we have a genuine potential nightmare: If the election is close, can we be sure that the president will accept the result, and act in the interests of the country, rather than himself?

With Trump, for the first time in the history of the presidency, the answer is no. If you have followed this man’s business career, or witnessed the last three and a half years, you will notice that Trump never concedes anything. So why do we assume he would concede an election? And who would make him? And when you examine the nature of the party he has now remade in his image, and observe its evolution in recent decades, you see that the GOP’s core belief seems to have become that the other party is inherently illegitimate, and must be crushed by any means to hand. Which means to say that the GOP is a party now dedicated to the maintenance of its own power before any other principle. That was the core meaning of Trump’s nomination. It means that we have no idea if we’ll see a normal transfer of power this fall if the president loses.

I’m sorry not sorry to be a Cassandra about this — and I sure hope I’m wrong. But confronted with this reality, it is staggering to me that anyone can say we should chill. The nature of Trump’s instinctual tyranny is that it never stops by itself. And, like any psychological disorder, it never rests. It has an energy all its own. Each new beachhead of power is simply a means to acquire more of it in an ever-more ambitious and dynamic form. This is not a comedy; it’s a tragedy we want to believe is a comedy. Because the alternative is too nightmarish. A Kierkegaard quote, of all things, popped on Twitter this week that seemed to capture the dynamic beautifully: “A fire broke out behind stage at a theater. The clown walked out to warn the public and they thought it was a joke and they applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s exactly how the world will end: to generous applause from wits who think it’s a joke.”

Haha, as the kids say. Haha. Now that’s a black comedy. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/andrew-sullivan-trumps-presidency-as-absurd-tragedy.html

7. Admiral William McRaven: If good men like Joe Maguire can’t speak the truth, we should be deeply afraid

Edmund Burke, the Irish statesman and philosopher, once said: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Over the course of the past three years, I have watched good men and women, friends of mine, come and go in the Trump administration — all trying to do something — all trying to do their best. Jim Mattis, John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, Sue Gordon, Dan Coats and, now, Joe Maguire, who until this week was the acting director of national intelligence.

In 2018, Joe was asked to be the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, a job he knew well from his last assignment as a vice admiral. He accepted, but within months of his arrival came the announcement of Coats’s departure as director of national intelligence.

Maguire didn’t seek to fill the job as director of national intelligence, but like most of these good men and women, he came in with the intent to do his very best, to follow the rules, to follow the law and to follow what was morally right. Within a few weeks of taking the assignment, he found himself embroiled in the Ukraine whistleblower case. Joe told the White House that, if asked, he would testify, and he would tell the truth. He did. In short order, he earned the respect of the entire intelligence community. They knew a good man was at the helm. A man they could count on, a man who would back them, a man whose integrity was more important than his future employment.

But, of course, in this administration, good men and women don’t last long. Joe was dismissed for doing his job: overseeing the dissemination of intelligence to elected officials who needed that information to do their jobs.

As Americans, we should be frightened — deeply afraid for the future of the nation. When good men and women can’t speak the truth, when facts are inconvenient, when integrity and character no longer matter, when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security — then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/william-mcraven-if-good-men-like-joe-maguire-cant-speak-the-truth-we-should-be-deeply-afraid/2020/02/21/2068874c-5503-11ea-b119-4faabac6674f_story.html

8. Max Boot: Why the Russians still prefer Trump

Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, was ousted by President Trump after one of his aides told members of Congress that Russia is intervening in the U.S. elections again in an effort to reelect the president. This finding was met with skepticism from Republican House members who are credulous enough to believe Trump’s boasts that he has been “FAR tougher on Russia than Obama, Bush or Clinton. Maybe tougher than any other President.”

Trump’s claims of being tough on Russia are belied by the fact that he has a fit whenever any U.S. officials confirm that Russia attacked the 2016 election or try to safeguard future elections. It’s no coincidence that the previous director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, left office in August 2019, shortly after appointing a senior intelligence officer, Shelby Pierson, to take charge of election security. Now Coats’s successor has been fired because Pierson was doing her job. Maguire’s replacement by Trump propagandist Richard Grenell sends a loud and clear signal that Trump does not want to do anything to impede Russian attacks on the U.S. political system — which he sees as beneficial to his own campaign. In case there was any doubt, Trump on Friday dismissed the findings of the U.S. intelligence community about Russia’s desire to aid his reelection campaign as a “hoax” and “misinformation campaign.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/21/why-russians-still-prefer-trump/

9. Joe Lockhart: Bloomberg needs to take down Sanders -- immediately

As it stands, Sanders has a chance to run the table as the rest of the field fights each other for the honor of coming in second. Sanders has emerged as the Democratic front-runner, and his support stands at 25% among Democrats and independents who lean Democratic, according to the most recent Quinnipiac poll.

But that's not enough to win the general election. I don't believe the country is prepared to support a Democratic socialist, and I agree with the theory that Sanders would lose in a matchup against Trump. In a general election battle between two divisive figures who both preach the politics of grievance, I believe Trump will win the battle to the bottom and remain the last man standing.

Given that the primary calendar dictates that 60% of delegates will be determined by St. Patrick's Day, the primary race could be effectively over in less than a month. Of all the other Democratic candidates, Bloomberg may be the only one who can stop the Sanders freight train and still have a shot at winning the White House.

But let's not forget -- Bloomberg is already skipping the first four voting states in favor of concentrating on Super Tuesday. With his disastrous performance in the Las Vegas debate, it appears he won't be building any organic momentum in this race. He has to buy it.

If Bloomberg has any chance of winning the nomination, he has to redirect his resources during the primary and run ads against Sanders -- not Trump.

Continuing to focus only on Trump does nothing to stop the Sanders campaign, nor does it do anything to sort out the rest of the field until after Super Tuesday. By then, it'll be too late. If Bloomberg entered the race to become President and to stop Trump, he has no choice now but to try to stop Sanders.

Doing so without taking himself down is the strategic test for Mike Bloomberg. Either way, he has to face it now instead of waiting until Super Tuesday. Winning the White House ultimately means beating Donald Trump.

But to get to Trump, and to deny him a second term, Bloomberg will have to defeat Sanders first, even if that might mean ruining his own chances at the nomination. https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/22/opinions/bloomberg-needs-to-take-down-sanders-lockhart/

10. Jennifer Rubin: Here is Democrats’ last chance to get this right

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) racked up an impressive win in the Nevada caucuses, crushing his opponents and expanding his support to older voters and Hispanics. Unless Democrats manage to alter the race swiftly and dramatically, a 78-year-old socialist with a history of praising left-wing dictatorships will be the Democratic presidential nominee. While no one should exclude the possibility that Sanders might beat President Trump, his manifest weaknesses and extreme ideology make such a victory unlikely, thereby subjecting the country to the horror of another four years of an unhinged, authoritarian president. We should shudder at the prospect of what the country might look like after another Trump term — especially if, as is likely with Sanders at the top of the ticket, the Republicans retain their Senate majority.

Do not get me wrong: Many NeverTrump voters (including this one) will vote for anyone with a "D" to defeat Trump, who is a threat to constitutional government, mentally unfit and unabashed now in his use of the instruments of power to punish enemies and protect his cronies. However, expecting independent voters in places such as Wisconsin and Michigan to line up behind Sanders seems wholly unrealistic at this point. The candidate who wants to ban fracking, outlaw private health care and spend trillions of dollars is going to be a tough sell, to put it mildly. Suburban moderates who helped lift Democrats to victory in 2018 might choose to stay home. (In the seemingly unlikely event of a Sanders victory, one need not fear that President Sanders would actually enact measures that most of his party opposes, not to mention all Republicans. But for those who dread more conflict and gridlock, a Sanders presidency would be a painful period.)

The grown-ups in the party and the 2020 contenders who fail to act will be haunted by the possibility that they could have prevented a party crackup and a national disaster but chose not to act. That would be a terrible burden to shoulder and a black mark on their records of public service. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/23/here-is-democrats-last-chance-get-this-right/

11. Philip Bump: Who would win a Trump-Sanders election?

It's trite to say that the result of a Trump-Sanders election is nearly impossible to predict, but that doesn't make it incorrect.

We only need to look back four years to see how things can get wonky quickly. Clinton led Trump nearly every day of 2016 and had a wide lead in late October. At the very end of the contest, outside factors — the letter from then-FBI Director James B. Comey, for one — and other shifts — such as skeptical independents deciding on Trump — combined to give Trump an edge in places where he needed one. Trump’s election was not really predictable in February 2016, but it happened anyway.

One can’t unilaterally reject Sanders’s chances any more than you might reject those of Trump. It’s safe to say that the only views of the outcome of the November election that should be rejected are those that are offered with certainty. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/24/who-would-win-trump-sanders-election/

12. Eric Levitz: President Trump Has Never Been More Dangerous Than He Is Now

Taken together, Trump’s escalating authoritarianism and rising popularity make the present moment the most harrowing of his presidency thus far. With the anticlimactic end of the Mueller investigation, Trump learned that federal law enforcement cannot (or will not) hold him accountable for abuses of power. With his Senate acquittal, he secured confirmation that Congress won’t either. Now, the small but electorally decisive fragment of the American electorate that isn’t tightly wedded to either party is signaling to Trump that it won’t necessarily penalize his lawlessness either.

For much of the past five months, indisputable evidence of Trump’s illicit efforts to coerce a foreign power into aiding his reelection campaign have dominated the headlines. That Trump is willing to abuse the powers of his office to persecute his political rivals has been publicly affirmed by a wide variety of his own administration’s officials, and his own party’s members of Congress. And yet, his odds for reelection have steadily risen all the same. For America’s (largely) socially atomized and civically disengaged swing voters, Trump’s authoritarian power grabs and the criticism they inspire ostensibly register as little more than unusually heated partisan squabbles. Not entirely without reason, many have come to see cable news’ serial dramas as tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing terribly relevant to their own lives. They may have gathered that Trump is a bit of a crook, but then aren’t all politicians? And anyhow, why should they care more about sketchy schemes in Ukraine than all the “Help Wanted” signs out on Main Street — or Trump’s firing of Colonel Vindman more than the recent hiring of a friend or relative who’d been suffering from long-term unemployment?

Meanwhile, Trump’s post-impeachment polling bounce has cowed his congressional opposition into more accommodative posture. And, thanks to the onset of primary season, the president’s most engaged and ardent critics in civil society have been consumed with our own internal disagreements. These developments have further expanded Trump’s latitude for lawlessness. He has been taking full advantage. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/president-trump-dangerous-authoritarian-russia-intelligence.html

13. Peter Hamby: Get A Grip, Bernie Bed-Wetters: His Message And Media Machine Could Be Potent Against Trump

Socialist Schmocialist. Sanders has a set of political assets—celebrity, fundraising power, committed foot soldiers, media sophistication, relentless consistency—possessed by no one else in the race.

Everything about Sanders—his ideas, his stubborn dogma, his sometimes-kooky supporters, his contempt for greenroom culture and the party circuit—is completely foreign to the intellectual and cultural fabric of Washington. In that universe, the claim that Sanders is unelectable is more or less gospel. The same Democrats who were assured of Hillary Clinton’s victory are now starting to worry about a Goldwater or McGovern-style Electoral College wipeout with Sanders atop the ticket. If they were so inclined, the bed-wetters could easily Google a year of polls showing Sanders beating Trump in hypothetical head-to-head matchups. A Texas Lyceum poll just this week showed Sanders performing better against Trump in Texas than any Democrat, losing by just three points. That’s on top of a raft of polls showing Sanders beating Trump back those precious Upper Midwest states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. These polls aren’t totally hypothetical, either: Sanders boasts near universal Name ID. Most voters know who Sanders is and what he stands for—and they’re still choosing him, whether they actually like him or just because his name isn’t Donald Trump. The president and his advisers are starting to notice, according to recent stories in the New York Times and Daily Beast. Both outlets reported in recent weeks that some Trump advisers are worried about Sanders’s strengths—his populist appeal, perceived authenticity, and his durable popularity with the same white non-college voters who voted for Trump. “I think he’s tough in places where people are making $12 an hour,” Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale recently told CBS News, who said the media is underestimating his appeal. Trump himself has started asking his team about Sanders’s polling performance in key battleground states, specifically Pennsylvania, the Daily Beast reported. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/01/bernie-sanders-message-media-machine-could-be-potent-against-trump

14. Jonathan Chait: If Democrats Aren’t Terrified of Bernie, They’re Not Paying Attention

Watching the Brexit debacle from afar, it seemed impossible to understand how the Labour Party could know full well it needed to win a national election in order to prevent an irreversible setback, yet harness itself to Jeremy Corbyn, whose toxic leadership made victory nearly impossible. The rise of Bernie Sanders, at a moment when Donald Trump is accelerating his war on the rule of law, is retroactively illuminating. A liberal party drifting helplessly along as a small radical cabal steers it toward likely catastrophe? I didn’t think it could happen here.

The Democratic primary can be seen as a series of candidates goading each other to jump into the lion’s den. All the candidates have exposed themselves by taking at least a few unpopular positions, but none have gone quite as far as Sanders. What makes Bernie’s profile uniquely toxic is the way his liabilities all reinforce each other. He combines discrete, deeply unpopular policy positions with an unpopular socialist label, which in turn reinforce the fact that his campaign is premised on radically changing the economy, the one thing most voters believe Trump has done well. His historic statements praising various leftist dictators reinforce the impression of kookery.

One of the things Democrats have been telling each other is that it doesn’t matter what attacks Trump uses, because he’s going to make hyperbolic charges against them no matter what. And yes, Trump would call any Democrat an open-borders socialist who will throw everybody off their private insurance and drastically change the economy. But accusations work better when the target agrees with them. In 2016, Trump drew a lot of blood calling his opponent corrupt, but if Hillary Clinton had openly promised to use her office as a platform for lawbreaking and self-enrichment, it’s fair to say she would have done worse.

For Bernie’s most fanatical adherents, none of this matters. Sanders is a completely unique asset for the left — a proud socialist who holds national office — who will be too old to run again by the next election (if he isn’t too old already), and who has no short-term successor. They have every incentive to imagine away his many flaws and seize on the real but unlikely possibility he can defy the odds and win. What is shocking is observing how many other progressives have joined in this fantasy with them. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/bernie-sanders-nomination-electable-democrats-socialist-unpopular.html

15. Mike DeBonis and Michael Scherer: As Bernie Sanders’s momentum builds, down-ballot Democrats move to distance themselves

As Sanders builds what could eventually be an insurmountable delegate lead, many Democratic House and Senate candidates are approaching a dramatic shift in their campaigns, as they recalibrate to include praise of capitalism and distance themselves from the national party. Top campaign strategists from both parties view Sanders’s success as a potentially tectonic event, which could narrow the party’s already slim hopes of retaking the Senate majority and fuel GOP dreams of reclaiming the House, which it lost amid a Democratic romp in 2018.

“I can tell you that there are a lot of down-ballot jitters based on my conversations with my former colleagues,” said former Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), a longtime confidant of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who led congressional election efforts from 2011 to 2015.

“Donald Trump is going to offer the American people this choice: Do you want to continue building the economy or do you want to lurch toward socialism? And that is a real powerful argument in the Democratic districts that Trump won in 2016.”

With an emphatic victory in Saturday’s Nevada caucuses, Sanders has won two of the first three contests, and lost the third — the Iowa caucuses — in a squeaker. He also holds leads in polls in many of the Super Tuesday states that vote March 3 — a point by which nearly 4 in 10 delegates nationally will have been chosen.

Internal polling and analytics completed last week by former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg’s campaign projected that Sanders may be the only presidential candidate to win delegates in every state and district on March 3, delivering him a lead of 350 to 400 out of 1,357 delegates set to be awarded unless race dynamics change, according to a person familiar with the data who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-bernie-sanderss-momentum-builds-down-ballot-democrats-move-to-distance-themselves/2020/02/22/3364ddd8-5516-11ea-9e47-59804be1dcfb_story.html

16. Catherine Rampell: A socialist is likely to win the 2020 election. No, not Bernie Sanders.

It once seemed unimaginable, but a proven socialist looks quite likely to win the 2020 presidential election.

No, I’m not talking about that socialist. I’m referring to the one who already occupies the White House.

Conservatives complain that Sanders and his socialist allies wish to bloat budget deficits. Under Trump, of course, this has already happened. The deficit in fiscal 2019 was a whopping 48 percent higher than it was in fiscal 2017, thanks to GOP policies. And while “Crazy Bernie” does intend to jack up tax rates to (partly) offset his spending, Trump has raised some taxes on Americans, too — he’s just done it more regressively, through taxes on imports rather than income.

Trump’s version of socialism soaks the poor, not the rich.

If conservatives are genuinely frightened by Sanders’s proposed downward redistribution of wealth, they might consider the sort of redistribution practiced by Trump — in particular, the many ways Trump has used his office to redistribute taxpayer dollars into his own pocket. Just last week, during a tour of western states, Trump elected to fly his entourage back to his hotel in Las Vegas each night rather than stay in the other cities he was visiting. Whatever Sanders’s flaws, at least he doesn’t try to steal everything that’s not nailed down.

If you’re a Never Trumper worried that Sanders will take this country down the road to serfdom, beware: President Trump has already paved the path. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-socialist-is-likely-to-win-the-2020-election-no-not-bernie-sanders/2020/02/24/d5053fba-5747-11ea-ab68-101ecfec2532_story.html

17.  Jelani Cobb: How Did The Democrats End Up Here?

Last month, the Washington Post reported that eighty-three per cent of African-Americans believe that Trump is a racist, and sixty-five per cent think that this is “a bad time” to be black in America. His strategy, though, seems designed to persuade black voters not so much that he is better than they thought but that the Democratic nominee will be worse. (Given the latest news reports, we can expect this reasoning to feature in Russian social-media disinformation campaigns, as it did in 2016.) The no-difference argument will still be false, regardless of who the Democrats’ eventual nominee is, on every issue—criminal justice, health care, education, gun control, immigration, climate change—that disproportionately affects people of color. And no Democrat will ask Hollywood to bring back movies like the racist classic “Gone with the Wind,” as Trump did at a rally last week.

It is undeniable that Trump stokes the fury of voters who support him; less recognized is his clear hope to induce despair in those who do not. The imperative for Democrats is to defeat not only Trump but also the cynicism that abides him. One calculation for his reëlection isn’t how many African-Americans will vote for him. It’s how many will be dissuaded from voting at all. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/02/how-did-the-democrats-end-up-here