Karen Tumulty: Trump is making Republican leaders look downright pathetic

The telltale characteristics of an abuser are well known: volatility, extreme jealousy, cruelty, controlling behavior.

So when are Republican leaders going to quit rationalizing and acknowledge the truth about their toxic relationship with Donald Trump?

They have managed to convince themselves that they need to appease the former president because he alone can stoke the conservative base enough to accomplish their return to power in 2022.

But the fragility of that premise becomes more apparent every day, as Trump increasingly turns his wrath on them, undermining their legitimacy and questioning their fitness to govern.

On Tuesday, Trump even went so far as to call for the ouster of Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) as Senate minority leader. “Should have never lost the Senate in the first place, thanks Mitch!” Trump wrote in an email blast. “New leadership is needed, and fast!”

At some point, you would think it would dawn on Republicans that where Trump is concerned, fealty earns nothing in return. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/30/trump-is-making-republican-leaders-look-downright-pathetic/

Dana Milbank: As prosecutors indict the Trump Organization, Trump indicts himself

As the world waited for the indictment of the Trump Organization to be unsealed Thursday afternoon, the disgraced former president released a statement  just minutes before the arraignment of his chief financial officer.

Statement by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America
Who shot Ashli Babbitt?

How terribly fitting. Just as his company and his top finance guy were about to be charged with 15 counts of fraud, grand larceny, conspiracy and falsifying records, Trump detonated one more weapon of mass distraction.

In doing so, he also abandoned all pretense about the events of Jan. 6. He was with the insurrectionists then, and he is with them now. Ashli Babbitt was the rioter who was shot dead by Capitol Police as she broke through the final barrier protecting huddled lawmakers from the violent mob attacking the House of Representatives. Now, Trump has joined those extremists who cast Babbitt as the victim and the Capitol Police as the villains of that day. Now we know the disgraced former president still stands, remorselessly and unapologetically, with those who attempted the violent overthrow of Congress and of a democratic election.

That’s why Trump’s attempt at distraction Thursday — “Who shot Ashli Babbitt?” — is more of an indictment than the indictment. He’s joining the likes of Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.), consort of white nationalists, who claimed Babbitt was “executed” by Capitol Police “lying in wait.” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), recalling that she helped Gosar open his gas mask “as the violent mob advanced on the House chamber,” called it “disgusting and despicable to see Gosar lie about that day and smear the men and women who defended us.”

Now Trump has embraced that disgusting and despicable lie, after his “big lie” about the election caused the insurrection in the first place. And congressional Republicans are busily protecting both lies from scrutiny. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, reportedly threatening to strip committee assignments from any Republican who cooperates with the select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, declared himself “shocked” on Thursday that Liz Cheney had accepted membership on the committee.

It’s not shocking that a lone Republican is taking a stand of conscience. What’s shocking is that, even on the day Trump’s business activities were revealed to be as fraudulent as the rest of his activities, the vast majority of Republicans lined up to help him perpetrate yet another . https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/01/prosecutors-indict-trump-organization-trump-indicts-himself/

 

Eugene Robinson: Climate scientists warned us. When will we listen?

Climate change is slow, gradual, almost imperceptible — until suddenly it’s not. One day, it seems like a normal summer. The next, the temperature soars to an unbearable 121 degrees. In Canada.

That record for the entire country was set last Tuesday in Lytton, British Columbia, as the Pacific Northwest suffered through its most punishing heat wave in recorded history. The same week, it was 108 in Seattle and 116 in Portland, Ore. — both all-time records.

In a region where many homes are not air-conditioned, it is not yet clear how many people died from the extreme heat; in British Columbia alone, officials said there were more than 700 “sudden and unexplained” deaths during the week, three times the normal average. At least 95 deaths in Oregon are suspected of being heat-related. Dozens of deaths are being investigated in Washington state as well.

The cause of all this was a massive, stubborn “heat dome” that parked itself on top of the region and refused to move. As you know, it is not possible to definitively attribute any specific weird, unprecedented weather event to climate change. But a pattern of increasingly frequent, weird, unprecedented weather events is precisely what climate scientists warned us about.

The climate change and weather instability we are experiencing will be with us for centuries. But it will all get much worse unless humanity reduces carbon emissions by shifting to clean, renewable energy. One simple question for climate-change skeptics: What is it about 121 degrees in Canada that you don’t understand? https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/05/climate-scientists-warned-us-when-will-we-listen/

Dana Milbank: Lauren Boebert, lost in a cacophony of crazy

The QAnon-admiring first-term Republican congresswoman from Colorado has tried everything to get noticed. Since she burst on the scene by tweeting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) whereabouts during the Jan. 6 insurrection, she has attempted one stunt after another.

To protest President Biden’s immigration policy, she noisily unfurled a foil blanket and covered herself in it during Biden’s address to Congress. She announced at a town hall that she had “very good information” that a secret scandal would oust Democrats from power before 2022, a popular QAnon claim. Two hours after the Boulder shooter killed 10 people in her home state, she sent a fundraising email asking donors to tell “radical liberals” Pelosi and Biden “‘HELL NO’ to taking our guns.”

But she has languished as a poor man’s Sarah Palin and a third-rate Josh Hawley, as others seize the spotlight with superior antics. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), another QAnon aficionado, inflamed the House with her antisemitic talk of Jewish “space lasers” and likening public health guidelines to the Holocaust. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) spoke at a confab of QAnon types where the violent overthrow of the U.S. government was contemplated. Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA) compared the Jan. 6 insurrection to a “normal tourist visit.”

Boebert had to raise her game. And on Wednesday, she gave it her best shot. She assembled 10 colleagues in the House TV studio to announce her new resolution to censure Biden — a reprimand that a chamber of Congress has delivered only once in U.S. history, to Andrew Jackson — over Biden’s border policy. “The Biden regime has punched our Border Patrol agents in the face!” she shouted, after calling Vice President Harris “Cackling Kamala.”

Not bad. But Boebert was immediately overshadowed by her colleagues, who put on a clinic in crazy talk.

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) called Biden “a reckless lawbreaker” who “spits on the laws,” “prioritizes napping” and wants “to lead America to ruin.”

Gohmert proposed that Biden “had no clue what was going on” with the border and “has some real mental issues that need to be evaluated.”

And then there was Greene, who endorsed the “censor” resolution.

With such a cacophony of conspiracy theories, it’s understandably hard for Boebert to break through.

In the past couple of weeks alone, she falsely claimed that liberals “legalized knowingly spreading HIV,” asserted that her election “is certainly a sign and a wonder, just like God promised,” attacked a trans woman weightlifter with the message “Welcome to the Woke Olympics” and declared that “Critical Race Theory is now mainstream.” The former proprietor of Shooter’s Grill in Rifle, Colo., also claimed she could carry her gun in the Capitol and refused to allow the U.S. Capitol Police to search her purse after setting off a metal detector. She even compared Biden’s German shepherds to violent illegal immigrants. But she has failed to rise above the din of crazy coming from her colleagues. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/23/lauren-boebert-lost-cacophony-crazy/

Sarah Jones: The Hell Donald Rumsfeld Built

Donald Rumsfeld didn’t lack belief, or conviction. In the words of the oft-quoted Yeats poem, the worst are full of passionate intensity. He believed in an exceptional America, he believed in the might and power of our armed forces, and he believed, too, that might and power are a kind of permission. A nation should do what it pleases if it can, as long as it’s right — and Rumsfeld’s America was always right. What kind of world did Rumsfeld’s belief help build? On the occasion of his death, this is a question worth asking.

Before the hagiographies commence, before the scolds complain that the left is being too harsh, examine the world as it stands today because of Rumsfeld. Iraq remains a war zone almost 20 years after the then-defense secretary shrugged off widespread looting in Iraq with a flippant “stuff happens.” The war on terror has endured for so long that it has embedded itself in our national functionality like a worm in a rotten piece of fruit. It is impossible to fathom what and where we would be without the wars that Rumsfeld orchestrated, and equally impossible to tell what we’ve gained. The answer, seemingly, is nothing but death. Destruction and war, decades of it. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/06/the-hell-donald-rumsfeld-built.html

Jonathan Chait: The Rule of Law Means Prosecuting Trump’s Crimes The criminal-in-chief has his own right-wing version of critical race theory.

If Trump has one actual ethical principle that guides him, it is that ratting is wrong and subordinates should not be allowed to strike deals with prosecutors by flipping on the boss. (He has called John Dean a “sleazebag” and a “rat” for betraying Nixon; “I know all about flipping — for 30, 40 years, I’ve been watching flippers,” he has raged.) It is a moral worldview he shares with the mobsters he worked with in New York. The law is a joke, the officials who carry it out are corrupt hypocrites, and loyalty is the one true value.

When he ran for office, Trump boasted of his ability to buy off politicians. Once there, he believed throughout his term that the government’s prosecutors worked for the president personally, and should defer to him on who to prosecute and who to allow to operate with impunity.

It is ironic that the Republican Party has become obsessed with critical race theory at a moment when its leader appears committed to vindicating its precepts. At its best, CRT can serve as a valuable critique of the inequality hidden beneath race-neutral institutions and principles; taken to extremes, it can devolve into a nihilistic battering ram, dismissing the very ideal of the rule of law as nothing but a contrivance to allow the strong to dominate the weak.

That cynical interpretation is one Trump has hewed to all along. The law is for the little people, the suckers. Society’s winners make their own rules. His belief in this ethos has taken him this far. We will see if, in the end, he was right. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/the-rule-of-law-means-prosecuting-trumps-crimes.html

Susan B. Glasser The Persistent Fantasy of a Trump Knockout Punch

The fantasy will not entirely die.

There is still the chance, no matter how slim, that this will all end with Trump in an orange jumpsuit being carted off to prison. The flickering dream of a final Trump purge from public life took slightly more tangible shape on Thursday, in a New York City courtroom, when Trump’s tightly controlled personal company, the Trump Organization, and his longtime financial chief, Allen Weisselberg, were indicted on criminal tax charges stemming from an alleged fifteen-year-long scheme, “orchestrated by the most senior executives” of the Trump Organization, as the prosecutor put it, to evade taxes. The theory of the case appears to be to pressure the seventy-three-year-old Weisselberg to turn on Trump, his boss of decades, by threatening him with the prospect of prison time. The multiple felonies with which Weisselberg is charged, including evading some nine hundred thousand dollars in taxes on $1.76 million in unreported, “off the books” income, carry the possibility of extensive incarceration. The broader criminal investigation into the company, a joint venture by New York State Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., is said to be ongoing.

Trump was not charged in the twenty-four-page indictment, but the case amounts to a direct assault on the company he built and ran as an extension of himself. The firm that bears his name mattered so much to Trump that he refused to surrender his family’s hold over it and place it in a blind trust even when he became President, snubbing ethics rules, Presidential tradition, and common sense—instead embracing the many conflicts of interest that came from being simultaneously the leader of the U.S. government and of a private business. Even if Weisselberg does not flip—and few seem to believe that he will—the case could result in years of litigation and millions of dollars in legal fees. Another bankruptcy or even shutting down the Trump Organization entirely is possible. (“Absolutely,” it will be shut down, Jennifer Weisselberg, the estranged former daughter-in-law of the charged financial chief, told CNN; she has emerged as an important witness in the case, handing over documents and information to prosecutors.) “They are on the precipice. They are on the brink of a much larger case against Trump and his businesses,” Norman Eisen, a former Obama White House counsel who issued an extensive Brookings Institution report this week on the New York State investigation, told me after reading the indictment. Whatever else it turns out to be, the case is already an example of hitting Trump where it hurts. Needless to say, no previous President of the United States, including the disgraced Richard Nixon, has seen his family business charged with criminal wrongdoing on such a scale. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/the-persistent-fantasy-of-a-trump-knockout-punch

Ruth Marcus: The Trump case may be unusual. But if true, it’s brazen tax fraud.

 Previous reporting about the Trump family’s tax returns portrays a multigenerational family enterprise devoted to tax avoidance, if not outright evasion. Thursday’s 15-count indictment lays out a separate, sprawling, 15-year conspiracy to funnel millions in unreported compensation — in the form of rent-free Manhattan apartments, leased Mercedes, private-school tuition payments, and the like — to senior Trump Organization executives, including CFO Allen Weisselberg, who allegedly received $1.76 million on which he paid no taxes. Both Weisselberg and lawyers for the Trump Organization pleaded not guilty.

Granted, it’s unusual to bring a criminal tax case involving the failure to pay taxes on fringe benefits. To take one relevant example, the Internal Revenue Service dunned Ronald and Nancy Reagan for back taxes plus interest for failing to report the value of $3 million free clothes, jewelry, furs and designer dresses she received; that was a civil penalty, not a criminal prosecution.

But it’s also unusual for prosecutors to amass the kind of damning evidence of intent laid out in the indictment. Nancy Reagan probably didn’t give a second thought to the tax consequences of her designer freebies; the Trump Organization and Weisselberg appear to have thought about nothing but tax consequences. Normal businesses don’t keep two sets of books, one for the tax authorities and the other for internal use. No self-respecting prosecutor would look at this kind of evidence and take a pass.

Two things stand out in the indictment: the seemingly boundless intensity of Weisselberg’s greed and, more legally significant, the degree to which the Trump Organization was aware of, and benefited from, the tax scheme.

The most astonishing — and damning — part is that the Trump Organization kept careful records of it all. It maintained two sets of books, one that showed Weisselberg’s compensation as reported to tax authorities, the second that recorded in detail how much he was actually receiving — as the indictment explains, “ensuring that he was not paid more than his pre-authorized, fixed amount of gross compensation.” Underreporting the compensation didn’t just help Weisselberg — it benefited the Trump Organization, which avoided having to ante up for payroll taxes on the unreported income.

Trump and his lawyers loudly proclaim that his company is being unfairly singled out. “In our view, this case was brought because the company’s name is Trump,” his lawyers said in a statement. Trump, typically, went higher-decibel, assailing the indictment as a continuation of “the political Witch Hunt by the Radical Left Democrats.”

And having uncovered the benefits scheme, were prosecutors supposed to look the other way, or simply refer the matter to civil tax authorities? Hardly. If true, this amounts to brazen, knowing tax fraud. That’s a crime, no matter who does it, or what their political connections. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/02/trump-case-may-be-unusual-if-true-its-brazen-tax-fraud/

Jelani Cobb: What Black History Should Already Have Taught Us About the Fragility of American Democracy

The parameters of American democracy correlate neatly with the parameters of the nation’s racial hypocrisy. This is not a secret; it helps explain why, for instance, a large part of Russian disinformation during the 2016 election sought to exacerbate racial divisions within the country. From the time of the abolitionists, the attempt to point out the fault lines in our democracy—for all our good—has been greeted with violent hostility. But our commitment to democracy was never as unblemished as our national vanity supposed, and our institutions were always more vulnerable to the kinds of corruption that Trump has enacted with astonishing speed. And America’s margins have often been the best vantage point from which to survey the weaknesses.

To be Black in the first week of November, 2020, is to yet again have the feeling of being called off the bench and being told that the whole game is riding on you. Trump is a dangerous man, but he is not nearly as dangerous as the history that animates him. He has retained the allegiance of more than sixty million voters, despite a shattered economy and the deaths of nearly a quarter million American victims of covid-19. He still has a chance to be reëlected, and Biden’s proposition about how much of him democracy can withstand might yet be put to the test. “Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States,” W. E. B. Du Bois said, in a speech to the Niagara Movement. The enduring value of the history that Black people have amassed is to facilitate the former proposition. But it is particularly hard, this week, to not look around and suspect that ignorance still has more than a puncher’s chance at the title. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/what-black-history-should-already-have-taught-us-about-the-fragility-of-american-democracy