1. Eric Lutz: The Flynn “Unmasking” Non-Scandal Gets Even More Non-Scandalous

Donald Trump’s allies are escalating their probes into the origins of the Russia investigation, announcing their intention to issue subpoenas for information about the “unmasking” of Michael Flynn—the president’s former national security adviser, who was forced out of the administration after less than a month over his shady contacts with then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The retired general lied to Vice President Mike Pence, and later to federal investigators, about the interactions, and admitted as much when he pleaded guilty to Robert Mueller in 2017. But he has since become a cause for the president and other Republicans, who say he was set up by deep state actors working in concert with Barack Obama’s administration, which—as the conspiracy theory goes—was improperly spying on Flynn and others in Trump’s circle. “I’m trying to explain to the American people what happened in Crossfire Hurricane,” Lindsey Graham told reporters this week.

But there appears to be a problem with the “unmasking” theory: Flynn was not, in fact, unmasked in the report on his Kislyak call. The Washington Post on Wednesday reported that, in the FBI’s report about communications between Flynn and Kislyak, Flynn’s name appeared unredacted, making the hunt to find out who in the Obama administration sought to reveal his name in intelligence materials—well, kind of unnecessary. “They included Flynn’s name from the beginning,” a former United States official told the Post. “There were therefore no requests for the unmasking of that information.”

Of course, Trumpworld investigations aren’t meant to make sense. The idea here is not so much to uncover wrongdoing as it is to have the words “Obama” and “Biden” and “investigation” appear in the same sentence as much as possible between now and November, and to occasionally turn up nefarious-sounding but ultimately benign materials, like Susan Rice’s recently declassified email to herself in which she noted—gasp!—that Barack Obama made clear he wanted investigations into Russia’s election hacking to be done “by the book.” “The Obama Administration is turning out to be one of the most corrupt and incompetent in U.S. history,” Trump tweeted last week. “Obamagate” is looking more and more like this cycle’s Hillary Clinton email scandal—a web of implication and insinuation that doesn’t add up to anything, but is just confusing enough to muddy the waters and distract from the corruption and incompetence that has been unfolding in plain sight this whole time. It seems particularly tired this time around, but that doesn’t mean it can’t work. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/mike-flynn-unmasking-non-scandal-gets-even-more-non-scandalous

2. Garrett Graff: The Hypocrisy of Mike Pompeo

MANY OF THOSE around Donald Trump have evinced a certain moral or political flexibility, but few have eclipsed the purely distilled, cynical hypocrisy of Mike Pompeo. As a Tea Party, Koch-backed member of Congress, he built his political reputation almost solely on two issues: lambasting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the Benghazi attack and her email server, and more broadly, attacking the Obama administration’s Iran deal at every turn.

Now, Pompeo—who in April passed his two-year mark as the nation’s top diplomat—has spent much of the last year mired in a widening series of questions about his own leadership at the State Department and alleged use of taxpayer resources for personal errands and to bolster his own political ambitions.

For a politician who spent years in Congress railing about the misuse of government funds and improper conduct, it’s an extraordinary turnabout. Amid the controversaries, time and again, Secretary Mike Pompeo has conveniently taken stances that Congressman Mike Pompeo never would have tolerated.

During his years on the House Republicans’ select committee on Benghazi, Pompeo railed against the State Department’s lack of cooperation with Congress and Hillary Clinton’s lack of support for her employees as secretary. “We were stonewalled by the State Department and by former Secretary Clinton,” Pompeo told NPR in 2015. “It was the case that the State Department came out after the event and told the American people a tale that just turned out not to have been true.” https://www.wired.com/story/mike-pompeo-hypocrisy/

3. Susan B. Glasser: Trump Is a Superspreader—of Distraction

Trump lovers may find the return to the Ukraine impeachment story endlessly satisfying revenge drama played nightly on Fox. Still, riling up his base over impeachment, or retaliating for it, or whatever it is that the President is doing, is only part of Operation Obfuscation. Trump right now is mass-proliferating diversions, from last week’s spurious “Obamagate” to this week’s threat to withhold federal funds from Democratic-led states that make it easier for voters to cast ballots by mail this fall. If it seems as though Trump is generating more controversies than usual these days, that’s because he is. He is a superspreader of distraction. It’s an excellent way to make one forget, at least for a while, about the death and economic destruction currently rampaging across the country.

If a return to normal isn’t really around the corner, Trump can at least offer distraction and denial. Diversion was and is the point. As if the coronavirus did not exist. As if more than a thousand Americans weren’t dying every day of this terrible virus without a cure. It was only a few weeks ago that the President was saying the United States might lose only fifty or sixty thousand Americans, or perhaps a hundred thousand total, to the disease. On April 10th, he predicted that covid-19 deaths in the United States would be “substantially below the one hundred thousand” figure, perhaps even as low as half of that. But now it is the start of the Memorial Day weekend, a time when the country traditionally pays tribute to its wartime fallen, and Trump’s “invisible enemy” is about to pass that awful milestone of a hundred thousand American deaths. The grim symbolism of this year’s holiday is not likely to be soon forgotten, no matter how hard the President tries. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/trump-is-a-superspreader-of-distraction

4.  Jonathan Chait: Ukraine’s President Finally Delivers Favor Trump Was Impeached Over

A very, very long time ago, the House of Representatives impeached President Trump for abusing his power by pressuring Ukraine to announce an investigation of his opponent, Joe Biden. Then every Senate Republican except Mitt Romney decided either that this was fine, or that it wasn’t abusive enough to justify removal, or that — as senators including Susan Collins, Rob Portman, Shelly Moore Capito optimistically put it — he had learned his lesson.

Meanwhile, here’s a funny footnote to this long-forgotten episode in our distant past. Yesterday, Ukraine’s president announced the investigation.

It might seem surreal that Trump would simply pick up his low-rent scheme right where he left off, given that it got him impeached and the payoff is modest. But one of the oddities of this episode is that its effect is radically contingent on the attention of the media and public officials.

In May of 2019, Giuliani was visiting Ukraine, and openly boasting about his plans to use Trump’s diplomatic leverage to shake loose dirt on Biden. He wasn’t hiding it. He wasn’t even denying it was improper. (“There’s nothing illegal about it. Somebody could say it’s improper.”) Nobody cared.

The whole scheme was sitting there in plain sight until a whistle-blower filed a formal complaint, which the Trump administration tried to cover up. Then Congress decided to investigate and initiate impeachment. Republicans toggled between denying it happened and insisting it was not a big deal if it had, then let Trump go.

Now he’s back at it, but because of both the coronavirus and having successfully established the precedent that he can get away with this, nobody is treating it as a first-tier scandal. It’s back to being what it started as: grist for generating headlines that imply some kind of wrongdoing by Joe Biden. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/ukraine-favor-trump-impeachment-biden.html

5. Virginia Heffernan: Grab your sanitizer and face masks — it’s Republican dirty trick season

Malarkeygate.

The pile Trump dips into for his smear jobs keeps getting bigger and more rank. But his recent claims about his enemies are kinda ... weird. Recently he suggested that cable news everyman (and Never Trumper Republican) Joe Scarborough murdered a woman who died of natural causes 20 years ago. Scarborough didn’t.

In the last few days, Fox News has been trying hard to squeeze a scandal out of a snoozer email memo by Susan Rice, former national security advisor to President Obama, memorializing that her boss told James B. Comey, then the FBI director, to do things “by the book” in running down Trump appointee Michael Flynn’s Russia contacts.

Still awake? Not exactly crack pipes or Chappaquiddick, is it? But the dirty tricksters want you to believe it is sure and certain proof of a cover-up of deep state crimes against Trumpworld.

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank) condemned this kind of ruthless politicking by Republicans in a speech during an Intelligence Committee hearing last year: “You might think” all the ways the Trump campaign made common cause with Russians “is OK,” he said. “I don’t.”

Schiff was right: The entire Republican Party, including warhorse Karl Rove, who as of Thursday is advising the Trump campaign, evidently sees collaboration with Russia and the whole deck of dirty tricks as “just what you have to do to win.” https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-05-22/republicans-dirty-tricks-campaign-donald-trump

6. Jonathan Chait: Trump Is Failing at Governing But Winning at Authoritarianism

Donald Trump has been battering away at American democracy for about four years now, first as a populist candidate warning of rigged elections and inciting his supporters to violence, and then as a president. Scholars who study democratic erosion — the process through which populist leaders hollow out previously healthy republics — have shown steady, if not increasing, concern.

Ross Douthat has been one of the most effective and articulate critics of those warnings. Douthat’s Trump is little more than a clown, who may dream of the jackboot but who has been reduced instead to ineffectually stamping his loafers. Douthat’s latest column, “Donald Trump Doesn’t Want Authority,” oversimplifies his thesis only slightly. While acknowledging that Trump’s misgoverning has had tragic effects, he reiterates his portrayal of a president too hapless to do any real damage to the democratic system.

Douthat has one point. Even a reasonably effective leader of Trump’s authoritarian bent could have exploited this crisis more effectively. The pandemic produced a worldwide upsurge in trust for leaders — in almost every state, governors have enjoyed soaring approval ratings, as have leaders across the globe, some of them inept. Only Trump’s ineptitude was so obvious, playing out in buffoonish daily briefings, that he was denied the upsurge that almost every other leader enjoyed. Even a barely competent version of Trump would now be sitting on a commanding lead.

But effective public management and effective attacks on democratic norms are different skills. Douthat undersells the very real success Trump has had in the latter area. Trump has not “suddenly discovered how to use his authority for dictatorial or democracy-defying purpose,” he asserts.

Well no, perhaps not “suddenly.” He has instead worked his way there through trial and error. But Trump’s progress after three years is undeniable.

Trump’s first success came immediately: He disabled the norms walling off presidents from private interests. Restraints that were once so strong that Jimmy Carter had to sell off his peanut farm lest any pro-peanut bias infect his decision-making have essentially disappeared altogether. The entire Republican congressional party, and much of its judicial wing, have lined up behind Trump’s claim that he doesn’t need to even disclose his financial interests, let alone cut them loose. Conservatives literally use “Emoluments Clause” as a punchline — after all, it was never enforced before, since nobody until Trump bothered violating it. Just about the only small price Trump pays anymore is regular stories by David Fahrenholdt detailing the government overpaying at his properties. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/trump-authoritarian-democracy-barr-justice.html

7. Max Boot: Conspiracy theories are more dangerous than ever

Plagues have been a particularly rich breeding ground for conspiracy theories. In 14th century Europe, Jews were massacred after being accused of spreading the bubonic plague by poisoning wells.

So it is no surprise that there is now an epidemic of coronavirus conspiracy theories. The virus was said to have been started by a Chinese biological warfare laboratory, the U.S. Army, Bill Gates or a “globalist conspiracy to establish sweeping population control” — and it is said to be spread by 5G towers. A movie called “Plandemic” alleges that masks make you sick, that bleach can heal you and that a vaccine may kill you; it has been viewed at least 8 million times online. Naturally, the novel coronavirus has been subsumed into the all-encompassing QAnon conspiracy theory that has become a quasi-religion among some Trump supporters. They think that the virus was created by the “deep state” to bring down their hero.

What’s different about this particular moment in conspiracy history?

We now have an unhinged conspiracy-monger in the White House. When he is not ranting about a vast, nebulous plot perpetrated by the prior administration (“ gate”) or about how Joe Scarborough supposedly murdered an aide, Trump is opining that the virus started in a Chinese lab, that hydroxychloroquine is an effective prophylactic, and that injections of bleach can treat the disease. His son, Eric, recently said that the coronavirus has been hyped by Democrats eager to stop his dad from holding rallies, and that “after Nov. 3, coronavirus, will magically all of a sudden go away.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/23/three-reasons-conspiracy-theories-are-more-dangerous-than-ever/

8. Nicholas Kristof: Crumbs for the Hungry but Windfalls for the Rich: Billions are going to zillionaires under the guise of pandemic relief

While President Trump and his allies in Congress seek to tighten access to food stamps, they are showing compassion for one group: zillionaires. Their economic rescue package quietly allocated $135 billion — yes, that’s “billion” with a “b” — for the likes of wealthy real estate developers.

My Times colleague Jesse Drucker notes that Trump himself, along with his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, may benefit financially from this provision. The fine print was mysteriously slipped into the March economic relief package, even though it has nothing to do with the coronavirus and offers retroactive tax breaks for periods long before Covid-19 arrived.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas, both Democrats, have asked the Trump administration for any communications that illuminate how this provision sneaked into the 880-page bill. (Officially, the provision is called “Modification of Limitation on Losses for Taxpayers Other Than Corporations,” but that’s camouflage; I prefer to call it the “Zillionaire Giveaway.”)

About 82 percent of the Zillionaire Giveaway goes to those earning more than $1 million a year, according to Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation. Of those beneficiaries earning more than $1 million annually, the average benefit is $1.6 million.

In other words, a single mom juggling two jobs gets a maximum $1,200 stimulus check — and then pays taxes so that a real estate mogul can receive $1.6 million. This is dog-eat-dog capitalism for struggling workers, and socialism for the rich. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-economic-response.html

9. Nicholas Goldberg: The Trump attack machine reaches new levels of hysteria. Is there anything to be done about it?

It’s all part of the by now familiar Trump playbook: Inflame the base with outrageous charges, muddy the minds of the undecided with false equivalencies, fashion whole conspiracies out of the thinnest of facts, retweet the libels of others. Then add some incendiary language and superlatives — the worst ever, the most incompetent, the biggest crime, the most awful scandal — and poof, you’ve got a strategy.

It’s shocking how effectively these tactics were deployed in 2016. Remember the Hillary Clinton email server? Trump actually assailed Clinton for corruption “on a scale we have never seen before” while the credulous crowds shouted “lock her up, lock her up.”

And what did the press do? We lost our perspective and the email story repeatedly landed on Page One and on the cable news repeat cycle, as if it were a truly significant story that deserved extensive coverage. A study by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard later found that Clinton’s controversies received more attention in the media during the campaign than Trump’s — much of it focused on the email story that Trump’s own State Department eventually concluded amounted to nothing, finding there had been “no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information” by Clinton.

Now the media have a second chance to get it right. But will it matter? Will it change anything?

We’re a divided country, an angry country that can’t agree on a common narrative, a common history or a common set of values, much less a single coherent picture of President Trump.

Reporters must soldier on, doing their best to present the facts, fully, honestly and in their proper context, so that readers can draw informed conclusions and make their best possible decisions on election day. But getting the truth out in the current political climate is an uphill battle. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-05-23/trump-press-attack-coverage

10. David Atkins: We Need to Speak Honestly About the GOP’s Evolution Into a Conspiracy Cult

Being a Republican now requires believing in a jaw-dropping series of claims that, if true, would almost necessitate anti-democratic revanchism. One has to believe that a cabal of evil scientists is making up climate science in exchange for grant money; that there is rampant, widescale voter impersonation fraud carried out by thousands of elections officials nationwide; that the “Deep State” concocted a scheme to frame Trump for Russian collusion but chose not to use it before the 2016 election; that shadowy forces are driving migrant caravans and diseases across American borders in the service of destroying white Republican America; that the entire news media is engaged in a conspiracy against the Republican Party; that grieving victims of gun violence and their families all across America want to take away guns as a pretext for stomping the boot of “liberal fascism” on conservative faces; and so on. That and much more is just the vanilla Republican belief system at this point (not even touching less explosive academic fictions like “tax cuts pay for themselves” or “the poor will work harder to better themselves if you cut the safety net.”)

It doesn’t stop there. Almost half of Fox News viewers–the core of the GOP–believe that Bill Gates is using the COVID-19 pandemic to microchip them.  And Donald Trump has been promoting a series of conspiracy theories on twitter each more outlandish than the last, from old debunked accusations against cable news hosts he dislikes to concocted accusations against former president Barack Obama. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/05/23/we-need-to-speak-honestly-about-the-gops-evolution-into-a-conspiracy-cult/

11.  Chris Cillizza: Why Donald Trump's wild weekend can't be normalized

"I have struggled with Biden's recent remarks," tweeted former Trump administration ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley on Saturday afternoon. "They were gut wrenchingly condescending. Regardless of color, gender, or class, to label any individual with what he or she is expected to think, believe, and vote is demeaning and disrespectful. Not to mention arrogant and entitled."

Which, fine. Biden was wrong. He shouldn't have said it.

But, the outrage summoned by Haley and her ilk seems to miss one big reality: Trump says and does things on an almost-daily basis that far exceed the inappropriateness of Biden's comment. And yet, there is silence from the same people so willing to leap to condemn Biden.

Just to prove my point, let's go through just some of what Trump has tweeted and retweeted between Friday morning -- when Biden made his "ain't black" remark and Sunday morning.

* Retweeted a post calling 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton a "skank."

* Retweeted a post suggesting -- contrary to science -- that hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment for coronavirus, adding these words: "Many physicians agree with you. Also, some very good studies!"

* Retweeted a photo of former 2018 Georgia gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams that included these words: "She fought a tough race, kissed a lot of babies and visited every buffet restaurant in the State."

* Retweeted two doctored photos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- one with a Trump 2020 face mask on and one with duct tape over her mouth. The tweet said: "To protect PolyGrip during this pandemic, we have developed 2 options. With the DJT option, she will be able to tongue and adjust her dentures more easily. With duct tape, she won't be able to drink booze on the job as much."

* Tweeted, with no evidence or proof, that mail-in ballots will produce "the greatest Rigged Election in history."

* Retweeted an article about the death of an intern in then-Florida Rep. Joe Scarborough's office, adding: "So a young marathon runner just happened to faint in his office, hit her head on his desk, & die? I would think there is a lot more to this story than that?"

* Tweeted this unfounded speculation about the 1990s death of the intern in Scarborough's office: "A blow to her head? Body found under his desk? Left Congress suddenly? Big topic of discussion in Florida...and, he's a Nut Job (with bad ratings). Keep digging, use forensic geniuses!"

* Tweeted that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions should drop out of the Alabama Senate race -- accusing him of having "no courage, & ruined many lives.”

That's all in the last 48 hours. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/24/politics/donald-trump-tweets-joe-biden-comments/index.html

12. Jonathan Chait: Trump Is Smearing Joe Scarborough Because Republicans Reward His Bullying

The United States is in the midst of its worst economic catastrophe in 90 years, and its deepest public-health crisis in more than 100, and the president is laser-focused on the co-host of a morning cable-news talk show whose audience, about 1.1 million daily viewers, equals less than one third of one percent of the population.

Indeed, to put the matter more precisely, the president is focused on investigating a 20-year-old death that Trump wishes to falsely pin on Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough. Trump has tweeted about the case four times since the beginning of Memorial Day weekend. It is, to say the least, a strange issue to focus on given the circumstances. Even if his claims were true, there are far more important issues before him.

This is not a shrewd messaging gambit. It does, however, follow a certain logic.

Obviously a wise and strategic president would not be doing this. The sane strategy for maximizing Trump’s reelection odds would be to manage the public-health response to the pandemic while taking advantage of a Democratic Congress willing to spend almost unlimited sums to pump stimulus into the economy.

But “sane” left the building a long time ago, and Trump is left in a world of second- and third-best strategies. In place of effective governance, he is counting on partisanship to polarize the race, keeping it close enough that he can eke out another win by demonizing his opponent. A crucial element of Trump’s polarization method is to suppress all internal dissent.

Trump is not a political genius, but he does grasp the power of audacious lies. His most devoted cultists believe everything he says, even the things that contradict other things he says. Perhaps more vital to his success is the political allies who go along with the lies even if they see through them. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/trump-scarborough-morning-joe-murder-lie.html

13. Gabrial Sherman: “This Is So Unfair to Me”: Trump Whines About His COVID-19 Victimhood as Campaign Flails

As he headed into Memorial Day weekend, Donald Trump complained that he was COVID-19’s biggest victim. “He was just in a fucking rage,” said a person who spoke with Trump late last week. “He was saying, ‘This is so unfair to me! Everything was going great. We were cruising to reelection!” Even as the death toll neared 100,000 and unemployment ranks swelled to over 38 million, Trump couldn’t see the pandemic as anything other than something that had happened to him. “The problem is he has no empathy,” the adviser said. Trump complained that he should have been warned about the virus sooner. “The intelligence community let me down!” he said.

Trump’s outburst reflected his growing frustration that, at this stage of the race, he is losing to Joe Biden. According to a Republican briefed on the campaign’s internal polls, Trump is trailing Biden by double digits among women over 50 in six swing states. “Trump knows the numbers are bad. It’s why he’s thrashing about,” the Republican said.

Even those closest to Trump have been privately worried the election is slipping away. According to a source, Melania Trump warned the president during their trip to India in February to take the virus response seriously. “He totally blew her off,” the source said. Melania later told people that Trump “only hears what he wants to hear and surrounds himself with yes-people and family,” the source added.

And when he’s not feeling helpless or aggrieved, Trump continues to cling to magical thinking. “He lives in his own fucking world,” the outside adviser said. Trump recently told a friend that the Moderna vaccine is going to be ready in months.

At this point many Republicans I spoke to said the only hope for Trump is that Biden implodes. As one prominent Republican put it: “Right now the only person who can change the dynamic is Joe Biden.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/trump-whines-about-his-covid-19-victimhood-as-campaign-flails