1. Paul Krugman: Trump’s Deadly Narcissism

According to a new Quinnipiac poll, a majority of Americans believe that Donald Trump is unfit to be president. That’s pretty remarkable. But you have to wonder how much higher the number would be if people really knew what’s going on.

For the trouble with Trump isn’t just what he’s doing, but what he isn’t. In his mind, it’s all about him — and while he’s stroking his fragile ego, basic functions of government are being neglected or worse.

Let’s talk about two stories that might seem separate: the deadly neglect of Puerto Rico, and the ongoing sabotage of American health care. What these stories have in common is that millions of Americans are going to suffer, and hundreds if not thousands die, because Trump and his officials are too self-centered to do their jobs.

Start with the disaster in Puerto Rico and the neighboring U.S. Virgin Islands.

When Hurricane Maria struck, more than a week ago, it knocked out power to the whole of Puerto Rico, and it will be months before the electricity comes back. Lack of power can be deadly in itself, but what’s even worse is that, thanks largely to the blackout, much of the population still lacks access to drinkable water. How many will die because hospitals can’t function, or because of diseases spread by unsafe water? Nobody knows.

But Trump spent days after Maria’s strike tweeting about football players. When he finally got around to saying something about Puerto Rico, it was to blame the territory for its own problems.

The impression one gets is of a massively self-centered individual who can’t bring himself to focus on other people’s needs, even when that’s the core of his job.

In short, Trump truly is unfit for this or any high office. And the damage caused by his unfitness will just keep growing.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/opinion/trumps-deadly-narcissism.html

2. NY Times Editorial: A Boondoggle Masquerading as Tax Reform

After months of secret negotiations, the Trump administration and congressional leaders have come up with a tax plan — sort of. What they have really come up with is a wish list of tax cuts for the wealthy, with lots of “we’ll get back to you on that” promises where the details are supposed to be.

This much is clear: The tax “framework” published by Republican leaders on Wednesday would greatly increase the federal deficit, would not turbocharge economic growth and could leave many middle-class families worse off by ending deductions they rely on. It would do little or nothing to improve the lot of the working class, a group President Trump says he is fighting for. It would instead provide a windfall to hedge fund managers, corporate executives, real estate developers and other members of the 1 percent. And can it be just a happy coincidence that Mr. Trump and his family would benefit “bigly” from this plan?

It’s hard to predict the economic impact of these skeletal proposals. But most experts agree that they could raise the federal budget deficit by trillions of dollars. As they have so many times in the past, Republicans will surely argue that the cuts would spur growth, and, in some measure, pay for themselves. This is the old supply-side hooey. In fact, over time the increased borrowing for unproductive tax cuts could depress growth by driving up interest rates.

There are important public purposes that could justify increasing the deficit — repairing the country’s dilapidated infrastructure, for instance, or paying for hurricane recovery efforts. Making the rich richer is not one of them.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/opinion/a-boondoggle-masquerading-as-tax-reform.html

3. Bill Scher: The Culture War President

Trump has all but given up on governing. He’s a full-time cultural warrior now.

In the wake of 9/11 and with the Iraq war not yet a year old, President George W. Bush bluntly described himself as a “war president” who makes “decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind.”

President Donald Trump is a war president of a different sort: a culture war president. As the New York Times reported this week, “In private, the president and his top aides freely admit that he is engaged in a culture war on behalf of his white, working-class base … against ‘politically correct’ coastal elites … He believes the war was foisted upon him by former President Barack Obama and other Democrats — and he is determined to win.”

Who is winning this culture war presidency? Trump feeds a base that lives to thwart further liberal advancements, but starves everyone else. Democrats ponder endlessly how to win back the hundreds of seats they’ve lost across the country and regain the support of white working class voters, but are constantly drawn into cultural battles that fire up their base but can alienate those very voters. It’s a stalemate—we’re all losing this war.

When viewed from a crude, narrow, electoral perspective, the culture war makes no political sense for anyone. It dominates cable news, electrifies Twitter, revs up partisans on both sides and drives fundraising. But neither party’s presidential candidate cracked 50 percent last year, so neither can feel sanguine about the potency of their base. Our endless and escalating fights over race, abortion, guns, sexuality and now football make it hard for either party to assemble a governing coalition.

Trump may be the aggressor, but the bases of both parties are effectively demanding this culture war be fought, regardless of the political consequences. That leaves Democratic leaders trying to win back white noncollege voters while remaining true to their multicultural principles. And it leaves Republicans, many of whom did not ask to be led by Trump and are privately embarrassed by their own voters, resigned to leading a party of white grievance in an increasingly diverse nation.

Tell me how this ends.  http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/27/trump-culture-war-215653

4. Jonathan Chait: Trump, Roy Moore, and the Craven Surrender of the GOP Establishment

The long triumph of the far right in the Republican Party is a process of asymmetric warfare. The insurgents are willing to destroy the party in order to prevail, while the Establishment’s primary goal is to hold the party together. A war between a faction determined to win and a faction determined to patch things up can only have one outcome.

The nomination of Roy Moore is another marker in this ongoing struggle. Moore prevailed in his primary by attacking Mitch McConnell, whom the insurgents blame for undermining the Trump presidency. Moore has openly defied legal authority in service of his belief that his theology overrides the authority of the United States government. This ought to disqualify Moore for service in public office, the most minimal qualification for which is a profession of respect for the rule of law. And yet, rather than declaring Moore unfit to serve, Republicans have endorsed his candidacy. Their stated qualms are limited to the concern that he might fail to vote for their tax-cut plan.

The insurgents don’t have to make public displays of support for McConnell or Ryan or the party agenda. They advertise their opposition at every turn. The Establishment, on the other hand, is terrified of any schism, and willing to prostrate itself in the service of unity. A decade ago, Paul Ryan himself was the right-wing alternative to the party Establishment. The long rightward march has no end in sight.  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/09/trump-moore-and-the-craven-surrender-of-the-establishment.html

5. NY Times Editorial: Private Emails, Private Jets and Mr. Trump’s Idea of Public Service

Electing him, Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail, would “make every dream you ever dreamed for your country come true.” Among those reveries, he suggested, would be a government free of self-dealing and one devoted to public service. “If we want to make America great again,” he wrote in an op-ed for USA Today days before the election, “we must clean up this corruption.”

This ambition has all but vanished from Mr. Trump’s field of vision, assuming he ever meant it. Not least because of his own self-dealing — the hotel down the block, the failure to fully divorce himself from the Trump Organization, all the rest — the White House became ground zero for grasping lobbyists and ethically challenged, self-promoting staffers. So great was the back stabbing and chaos that, in July, Mr. Trump turned to an upright military figure, Retired Gen. John Kelly, to set things straight as chief of staff.

It has proved an impossible task. The tighter ship Mr. Kelly vowed to run seems to be springing ethical leaks almost daily, as more and more accounts surface of this or that official using public resources for private gain or crossing a line demarcating personal from government business.

On Monday, it emerged that at least six current and former top White House officials, including Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner; his daughter Ivanka Trump; and his chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, have been using private email accounts at least sporadically for government business. This is both dumb and richly paradoxical when one considers that Mr. Trump has continued to attack Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account and server as secretary of state, and has prodded his Justice Department to restart an inquiry that cleared her of criminal wrongdoing.

While the president whips up chants of “Lock her up” in red states, his daughter — one of the less credible “moderating” forces in White House history — has been tapping away on her personal email despite being an administration official. Personal emails are not illegal per se, as long as those about government business are forwarded to government accounts. Failure to do that is a potential violation of the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act, which preserve public access to government documents..

In August, Mr. Kelly embarked on what he said would be a thorough housecleaning. Time now for him to round up top members of the administration for an all-hands lecture on the difference between public service and self-enrichment, and the importance of sunlight as a disinfectant. Sadly, though, they seem to have already absorbed a more persuasive lesson from the chief executive — get it while you can and to hell with the rules.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/opinion/editorials/tom-price-plane-trump-cabinet.html

6. Paul Waldman: Trump says he won't benefit from his tax plan. That's nonsense.

President Trump wants you to know that his push for tax cuts isn't about him. As he said during his big unveiling on Wednesday, the new tax proposal is only to help "low-income and middle-income households, not the wealthy and well-connected. They can call me all they want. It's not going to help. I'm doing the right thing, and it's not good for me. Believe me."

If you've been paying close attention for the last couple of years, you know that when Trump says the words "believe me," it is a clear signal that he's lying. This is no exception.

Trump has been adamant that he won't profit from his tax plan. Asked by a reporter whether he'd benefit from the plan, the president responded, "No, I don't benefit. I don't benefit. In fact, very, very strongly, as you see, there's no — I think there's very little benefit for people of wealth."

There is one way that might possibly be true: if Trump pays no taxes at all, in which case his taxes can't go down any further. Of course, it's impossible to know for sure, since unlike every president in the last half-century, he refuses to release his tax returns. But if we set aside that no-tax possibility, we can look at the plan to see the ways Trump and other rich people would get a windfall from the changes he wants to make to the tax code. And there are plenty.  http://theweek.com/articles/727647/trump-says-wont-benefit-from-tax-plan-thats-nonsense

7. Charles M. Blow: Divert, Divide, Destroy

In one week’s time, President Trump has again demonstrated that his sympathies stretch no further than his personal fortunes and personal favors.

Last week, Trump diverted attention from his dying health reform plan and failing Republican senatorial choice in Alabama by denigrating N.F.L. players protesting for racial justice and equality. That got people talking, and arguing. It was all over TV, Trump’s gauge of all things good.

Furthermore, Trump saw the issue as a winning one for him. Indeed, a CNN/SSRS poll released Friday found that about half of respondents overall and nearly nine in 10 Republicans believed that “protesting players are doing the wrong thing to express their political opinion when they kneel during the National Anthem.”

But I would argue that first, if a majority agreed with a protest it would partially negate the need to protest, and second, majorities are not the measure of what is moral.

Using the majority-equals-morality argument, Bull Connor was on the right side of the civil rights protests. According to Gallup polls conducted in the early 1960s, a majority of Americans disapproved of the “freedom riders,” and thought “sit-ins” at lunch counters, “freedom buses” and other demonstrations were more likely to hurt than help integration in the South.

So Trump ran with his crusade against the players, even as he paid little attention to the suffering of millions of American citizens on the hurricane-ravaged island of Puerto Rico. (They are not Trump’s base. They can only vote in primaries, and in the Republican primary there last year, Marco Rubio trounced Trump.)  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/opinion/columnists/divert-divide-destroy.html

8. Bloomberg Editors: Trump's Cynical Betrayal of Obamacare. The Affordable Care Act needs repair, not sabotage.

Annoyed by Congress's failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the Trump administration is redoubling its efforts to undermine the law. The latest act of sabotage: Top federal health officials have been told not to help states sign up Americans for insurance policies as part of this fall's open enrollment period. 

Reducing the number of people who buy policies will raise premiums for those who do. And the administration has already done plenty on that score -- by signaling it may weaken enforcement of the requirement to have insurance, by repeatedly (and falsely) claiming that the law is collapsing, and, most of all, by routinely threatening to stop reimbursing insurers for lowering out-of-pocket costs for low-income customers.

For good measure, the administration is cutting Affordable Care Act advertising by 90 percent and closing the federal insurance exchange -- which serves 39 states -- on Sunday mornings. For maintenance, you understand.

This behavior is spiteful, irresponsible and a violation of the Constitution's insistence that the president "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." And it will inflict needless added expense on American taxpayers.

The administration and congressional Republicans should be working with Democrats to fix Obamacare's flaws and strengthen the U.S. health-care system. This comprehensive effort to wreck, as opposed to repair, the Affordable Care Act is a cynical betrayal of the public's trust.  https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-29/trump-s-cynical-betrayal-of-obamacare

9. Matthew Yglesias: Puerto Rico is all our worst fears about Trump becoming real

For the first nine months of Donald Trump’s administration, observers have had occasion to wonder — and wonder, and wonder, and wonder — how exactly he would manage to handle a real crisis imposed by external events rather than his own impulsiveness. The answer is now apparent in the blackened streets of San Juan and the villages of interior Puerto Rico that, more than a week after Hurricane Maria struck, remain without access to food or clean water.

To an extent, the United States of America held up surprisingly well from Inauguration Day until September 20 or so. The ongoing degradation of American civic institutions, at a minimum, did not have an immediate negative impact on the typical person’s life.

But the world is beginning to draw a straight line from the devastation in Puerto Rico to the White House. Trump’s instinct so far is to turn the island’s devastation into another front in culture war politics, a strategy that could help his own political career survive.

The rest of us will just have to pray for good luck.

We’re witnessing the Trump administration at peak performance, and it’s appalling. Bismarck supposedly said that God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America. If we’re lucky, he’ll be proven right, and nothing much else bad will happen for the next three years. If not, buckle your seat belts.  https://www.vox.com/2017/10/1/16390006/puerto-rico-trump

10. Doyle McManus: Promise the moon, deliver tax cuts for the wealthy

“My plan is for the working people,” the president said. “There’s very little benefit for people of wealth.” Including, emphatically, himself: “I don’t benefit. I don’t benefit.”

Except he does. Trump and his family would benefit in at least four ways from his plan. The top tax rate on any regular income they earned would drop from 39.6% to 35%. The top rate on the profits of the Trump Organization, their family firm, would drop to an even lower 25%. They no longer would have to worry about the Alternative Minimum Tax, which cost Trump $31 million in 2005. And the president’s heirs no longer would face the estate tax, which could have cost them as much as $1.1 billion, according to the New York Times.Other billionaires would benefit from those provisions too, and other breaks as well. So much for the wealthy getting “very little.”

Some kind of tax cut still appears likely to pass, for the simple reason that many Republicans believe their political survival depends on it.

“It’s the difference between succeeding as a party and failing,” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said last week. “It’s the difference between having a majority in 2018 or losing it. It’s the difference between one term and two.”

But wait. Didn’t he say that during the healthcare fight too?  http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-mcmanus-tax-plan-20171001-story.html

11. Timothy Egan: The Trump Fog Machine

Do you remember what monstrous, contemptible or demonstrably false thing Donald Trump said one year ago? Six months ago? O.K., last week? Probably not. The effect of this presidency-by-horrors is to induce amnesia in the public, as if we’d all been given a memory-loss drug.

To recap: A year ago, Trump lied repeatedly in his first debate with Hillary Clinton, and was reminded that he had called women pigs, slobs and dogs. Six months go, he settled for $25 million two lawsuits and a fraud case regarding his phony university, a huckster scheme that duped people out of their personal savings. And last week, he unleashed an attack on the free-speech rights of athletes, using a profanity that could not be repeated on the news without a warning to children.

It’s. All. Going. According. To. Plan. The Trump presidency is a monumental failure on multiple levels. None of what he has promised — the wall, paid for by Mexico, repealing Obamacare, “so much winning” — has been achieved. He’s made much of the world hate us, and a majority of his fellow citizens believe that he is unfit for office.

What’s been forgotten at times in the blur of bloviation is astonishing. Possibly colluding with Russia to hijack an American election. Firing the F.B.I. director who was looking into that maze of questions. Pulling out of the Paris climate accord. Rolling back protections for clean air, water and workplace safety. Losing half his staff to scandal, deceit or overt idiocy.

He has made a joke of civility, promoted bullying and sexual assault by his words. He pardons one criminal, a racist sheriff found guilty of contempt of court, and implies that he would do the same thing for the people around him who may have sold their country out to Russia.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/opinion/trump-agenda-distraction-.html

12. Paul Waldman: America's most radical gun nuts are the Republicans in Congress

The American people are, as a whole, reasonably sane when it comes to guns. But we have the craziest gun laws in the developed world. Why is that? The biggest reason is the pernicious influence of a group of radical activists who would rather thousands upon thousands of Americans die every year from gun violence than the country take even the most modest steps to try to rein in the carnage.

I speak not of the National Rifle Association, as important as it is. No, I'm talking about the Republican Party, particularly its politicians who populate the U.S. Congress and state legislatures around the country.

Perhaps the two most critical facts about horrific mass shootings like the one that happened in Las Vegas are that they are made possible by our lax gun laws, and that they aren't the heart of our real gun problem. There's a reason that events like this one are vanishingly rare outside the United States, and it isn't that Americans are an inherently homicidal people. People murder each other all over the world, with whatever means they have at their disposal; the difference is that Americans can get their hands on as much weaponry as they want.

The daily parade of dead bodies from gun violence produces no new laws to address the problem. The reason is simple: One of our two great parties, the one that happens to control Congress and most state legislatures at the moment, is categorically opposed to any law that might restrict gun rights in any way.  http://theweek.com/articles/728279/americas-most-radical-gun-nuts-are-republicans-congress#