1. Jonathan Chait: The Anti-Trump Wave Has Come, and Republicans Can’t Stop It

Democrats have suffered a series of close losses in special elections in 2017, contributing to the broad sense, especially among Democrats themselves, that Donald Trump had a kind of supernatural appeal that defied political physics and rendered metrics such as his dismal approval rating suspect.

The anti-incumbent wave in Virginia has dispelled that particular form of magical thinking. Trump is a deeply unpopular president, and his party is in serious danger of losing control of the House, many of its down-ballot offices, and conceivably even the Senate.

To be sure, Virginia has unique demographic qualities that may have enhanced the power of the anti-Trump wave. It is a racially diverse state with a high proportion of college-educated voters. But there are many House Republicans from districts with similar demographic profiles — in New Jersey, New York, and California, among other places. The suburbs alone could offer up enough Republican defeats to flip the House in 2018.

What is remarkable is that the Republican plan to avert this catastrophe is to inflict economic hardship on these very constituents. The party has convinced itself that the solution to its unpopularity is to vote through an unpopular plan to combine tax cuts for corporations and rich people with tax increases on a large minority of the middle class. The highest doses of fiscal pain of the Republican plan would be concentrated on upper-middle-class voters who live in blue states — like, say, New Jersey, New York, and California.  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/11/the-anti-trump-wave-has-come-and-republicans-cant-stop-it.html

2. Eric Levitz: One Year After Trump’s Victory, the Democrats Aren’t in Disarray

What a difference a year makes. The first 12 months of the Trump era have been terrible for the country — but they’ve been better for the Democratic Party than most ever would have thought.

The party’s performance in Virginia Tuesday was nothing short of a triumph. In the face of a vicious, race-baiting Republican campaign; manufactured controversies over Confederate monuments, (nonexistent) sanctuary cities, and kneeling NFL players — not to mention a rain storm that singled-out the bluest parts of the state — Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam defeated Ed Gillespie by a near double-digit margin. As of this writing, Democrats are expected to overpower GOP gerrymandering and reclaim Virginia’s House of Delegates — a result that most election analysts had thought impossible.

These victories suggest that many of the party’s post-2016 fears were fallacies. Ralph Northam centered his campaign on (a decidedly, low-key brand of) economic populism, savaging Gillespie as a tool of corporate interests, and attacking Trump for proposing cuts to federal funding for health care and education — and won the wealthiest county in the United States by more than 20,000 votes. Down ballot, Virginia elected its first transgender and Democratic Socialist state legislators, developments that belie centrist hand-wringing about both “identity politics” and left populism.

Most critically, Democrats succeeded in turning out nonwhite voters in a non-presidential election and an off-year non-presidential election, at that. This has historically been the Achilles’ Heel of the Obama coalition.  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/11/the-democrats-arent-in-disarray.html

3. Nicholas Kristof: Robert in the Cross Hairs

We may shortly be facing a national crisis. President Trump’s base is egging him on to undertake his own “Saturday Night Massacre” and fire Robert Mueller for committing … for committing … uh, well, for working too hard as a prosecutor.

On Fox News, the host Jeanine Pirro proposed firing Mueller, blaming the Democrats, and imprisoning Hillary Clinton. Speaking of the Mueller investigation, Pirro said, “It’s time to shut it down, turn the tables, and lock her up.”

Wow. I’ve reported from tin-pot countries where public figures talk blithely of shutting down prosecutors and imprisoning rivals. I never thought I’d live in one.

Lou Dobbs of Fox Business Network denounced Mueller’s “gross overreach,” and the pro-Trump site Gateway Pundit excoriated “deep state crooked cop Robert Mueller.” Across the right wing, ideological snipers are taking potshots at Mueller, and even The Wall Street Journal has suggested in an editorial that Mueller resign.

Gingrich describes Mueller as an “out-of-control prosecutor” guilty of “grotesque abuse.”

What changed? Mueller is vigorously investigating whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Moscow, and I believe he has found evidence that it did. A Trump foreign policy aide, George Papadopoulos, has pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about this collusion, which involved meetings with Russian representatives, disclosures by Moscow that it had Clinton emails and discussions with three top Trump campaign officials about how to pursue the relationship. We don’t know whether Trump himself colluded, but thanks to Mueller, it seems to me clear that his campaign did.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/opinion/trump-mueller-fire.html

4. Ryan Cooper: Paul Manafort, the gentleman thief

One of the most striking things about the indictment of President Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and adviser Rick Gates — and the guilty plea from another Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos for lying to the FBI — is the brazenness and incompetence of it all. Manafort and Gates allegedly barely even tried to hide their ill-gotten gains, while Papadopoulos communicated through a hilariously insecure channel (namely, Facebook chat).

It's emblematic of the culture of impunity that has developed in the American elite over the last generation. Rich people like Manafort and Trump have learned that they can get away with just about anything. Why even bother trying to hide things, if nobody will even try to catch you?

If nothing else, perhaps the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller will put some long-overdue fear into the huge population of upper-class American criminals.

As Jesse Eisinger writes, punishment for crime committed by elites has all but collapsed over the past couple decades. Whether it's allegedly paying the district attorney not to prosecute a sexual assault charge or the rise of deferred prosecution agreements for white-collar crime, elites have lately gotten away with a staggering amount of lawbreaking.

This is the result: an absolute plague of dimwitted swindlers, liars, and two-bit cheats in the highest circles of government.  http://theweek.com/articles/734310/paul-manafort-gentleman-thief

5. Paul Krugman: Donald Trump, Paul Ryan and the Con Man Caucus

It really is amazing to watch this chaotic horror show play out at the highest levels of a great nation’s government. But I guess this is what you have to expect when you hand over the reins of power to a con man, whose whole career has been based on convincing naïve marks that he’s a brilliant deal maker, but turns out to have no idea how to actually govern.

Oh, wait — did you think I was talking about Donald Trump? I’m talking about Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, an obvious phony who nonetheless convinced the rubes — that is, much of the news media and the political establishment — that he was a brilliant fiscal expert. What we’re witnessing now is the end of the charade, the political equivalent of what happened when graduates of Trump University tried to get some value in return for their money.

But actual legislation can’t close huge fiscal gaps with vague promises. To hand out those big tax cuts while raising the deficit by “only” $1.5 trillion, Republicans needed to find real money somewhere, and that turns out to be really hard.

The big question should be, why do any of this? Ryan used to claim that his plans were about reducing the budget deficit, but he has now given up that pretense.

And why should tax cuts even be on the table? We have budget deficits, not surpluses, and lots of unmet needs for future spending. U.S. taxes are low, not high, compared with other wealthy countries. Predictions that tax cuts will lead to rapid economic growth have been wrong time and again. And by large margins, voters want taxes on corporations and the wealthy to go up, not down.

The ruling theory among Republicans seems to be that going into the midterm elections they need a “win” to offset their failure to repeal Obamacare. I guess this might be right, although it’s a theory that reveals extraordinary contempt for voters, who are supposed to be impressed by the G.O.P.’s ability to ram through policies that only benefit a tiny elite.

However the politics turn out, this is remarkably terrible policy, devised via a remarkably terrible process. Most Americans realize that Donald Trump is a very bad president; they need to realize that his party’s congressional leadership is pretty awful, too.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/opinion/gop-taxes-paul-ryan.html?emc=eta1

6. Jonathan Chait: The Republican Tax Plan Is Political Suicide

It is a testament to the power of self-delusion that Republicans have convinced themselves that their political self-interest demands that they pass a deeply unpopular tax-cut plan. The House has designed a proposal that not only violates Senate budget rules but seems virtually designed to seed an endless supply of attack ads against congressional Republicans.

A Washington Post poll provides a good starting point for measuring public opinion at the outset of the tax debate. Only one-third of Americans support the plan, against half opposing it. Sixty percent of the public believe it favors the rich. To the extent that people learn more, support is likely to fall even lower.

In order to keep its net cost down to $1.5 trillion, when the tax cuts it gives out cost much more, Republicans went scrounging through the cushions of the tax code for loose change. And the nickels and dimes they’re saving to pay for the corporate and estate tax cuts include things like eliminating the tax credit that offsets the (frequently exorbitant) cost of adoption. Or the tax credit for small business to create access for disabled employees. Or the tax credit for clinical tests for treatment for rare diseases — which, the New York Times explains, is “central to the business model for such firms and eliminating it could mean that big pharmaceutical companies will have little reason to invest in drugs that help small patient populations.” Or repealing the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, which creates an incentive for hiring veterans.

The plan reads as if it was reverse-engineered from 30-second political attack ads. And while it seems very unlikely that Republicans actually designed their proposal by asking Democratic ad-makers for a list of the most sympathetic people in America — veterans, orphans, the disabled, people suffering rare diseases — the effect will be the same.

Republicans could have written a tax-cut plan that hurt nobody. Or they could have written a sweeping tax reform that could stand for years. Incredibly, they have done neither. They have taken on all the political downside of tax reform — but because their plan can’t pass the Senate, they will get none of the upside.  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/11/the-republican-tax-plan-is-political-suicide.html

7.  Annie Karni and Eliana Johnson: Trump’s year of anger, disruption and scandal

It was after midnight on Nov. 9, 2016, and Donald Trump was sitting at the kitchen table of his Trump Tower penthouse.

Trump had been glued to the television, watching what was supposed to be Clinton’s Javits Center victory party — and taking note of the shocked faces in the crowd. “I think he was aware of how unexpected this was,” said his longtime aide, Hope Hicks, now the White House communications director, explaining the un-Trumpian unity rallying cry. “He wanted to give a speech that would de-escalate everything and, while the whole world was watching, be a leader for all.”

Onstage, Trump would say: “To all Republicans and Democrats and independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people. It’s time.”

It was a glimpse of a presidency that could have been.

Instead, in the year since that night, Trump has relished personal fights and nursed grudges; continued to vilify Clinton and defend his own legitimacy amid the expanding Russia probes; stirred racial tensions while measuring his success by the strength of his base; and taken more interest in throwing elbows on cultural issues than on the matters of policy that preoccupy Republican leaders in Congress.  https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/04/trump-first-year-office-244542

8. Paul Waldman: The Republican tax bill is a trainwreck

At the GOP's press conference announcing the release of their tax cut bill, one Republican member of Congress noted that it has been exactly seven years since they took back control of the House in the 2010 election, and now they're delivering on the promise they made back then.

So after seven long years, this mess is what they came up with?

Before we go further, we should acknowledge that they made a few hard choices and inserted some provisions that were destined to be unpopular, for which they deserve a bit of credit. But the deeper you go into this topic, the more you realize why it is that doing genuine tax reform usually takes a matter of years. And yet Republicans believed they could put it together in a few weeks and everything would work out.

It has been a mess up until now, a slapdash bill that validates almost every criticism Democrats make of Republicans. And it's only going to get worse.

I can't say whether Republicans really believe it when they say that this package of tax cuts will supercharge economic growth to such a degree that not only will it pay for itself but it will create a paradise of prosperity for all. Maybe they do. But between now and the day when those riches are showered down upon us all, this bill could wind up being a nightmare for them in all kinds of ways.  http://theweek.com/articles/734839/republican-tax-bill-trainwreck

9. Nicholas Kristof: Slouching Toward War With North Korea

John Brennan, the former head of the C.I.A., estimates the chance of a war with North Korea at 20 to 25 percent.

Joel S. Wit, a Korea expert at Johns Hopkins University, puts it at 40 percent.

Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, says the odds may be somewhere around 50/50.

Yet we’re complacent: Neither the public nor the financial markets appreciate how high the risk is of a war, and how devastating one could be.

The Congressional Research Service last month estimated that as many as 300,000 people could die in the first few days of war — and that’s if it remains nonnuclear. If there is a nuclear exchange, “there easily could be a million deaths on the first day,” says Scott Sagan, an international security expert at Stanford.

Sagan says the odds of war “are certainly greater than is widely recognized by the American public.”

President Trump is traveling in Asia this week, rallying countries to strengthen sanctions against North Korea. His past efforts at this have been quite successful, and during my recent visit to Pyongyang I saw signs that sanctions were biting.

But the goal appears doomed: Almost no expert believes that sanctions will force Kim Jong-un to give up his nuclear weapons or halt his missile program. That puts us on a collision course, for North Korea seems determined to develop a clear capacity to target the U.S. with nuclear weapons, while the White House hints that it would rather have a war than allow the North to become a nuclear threat.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/opinion/sunday/nuclear-war-north-korea.html

10. Juan Williams: Trump's war on media is truly dangerous

President Trump’s opinion. He said in the Oval Office this month that it was “frankly disgusting” that the press is “able to write whatever they want to write.”

Clearly the president has an authoritarian bent when it comes to journalism. His latest comments fit with past labeling of straight news reporters as “dishonest,” “scum” and the “enemy of the American people.”

“I hate some of these people, I hate 'em,” Trump said about reporters at a Michigan rally late last year, a month after he won the presidency. “I would never kill them. I would never do that.”

Trump’s appetite for shutting down the free press is a reminder of his open admiration for strong men dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Erdogan and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte. Those strongmen limit the freedom of the press and, in some cases, kill and jail journalists.

Recall what President Jefferson wrote in his famous letter to Edward Carrington:

“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

How far we’ve come from Jefferson’s wisdom to Trump’s ugly, ignorant threats.

Fake News, indeed.  http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/357748-juan-williams-trumps-war-on-media-is-truly-dangerous

11. Jonah Shepp: The Russian Hacking Scandal Is Way Bigger than Donald Trump

 Trump was at best an unwitting beneficiary in last year’s election meddling, he cannot see past his own role in this story to understand these implications in the longer term. Congress is taking this threat seriously, at least, as is special prosecutor Robert Mueller, but the messaging from the White House has been consistently to downplay the problem by way of denying that any collusion took place. It is hard to see how our government can effectively respond to this new trend in cyber-espionage when the president thinks it’s all fake news.

The masterstroke of Russia’s election disruption is that it’s very hard for any president, especially an ego-driven character like Trump, to acknowledge receiving that kind of help. If this gets reduced to a political fight over whether this administration is in bed with the Kremlin, and if the public becomes divided along partisan lines as to whether the interference happened at all, that will go along way toward ensuring that Russia’s digital army of hackers and trolls continues to work unimpeded.

Perhaps instead of trying to catch the administration in another lie, the White House press corps should start asking what they are doing to prevent this type of interference from happening again in the future. Responding to such threats is part of the president’s job, and if he refuses to do so, he should pay a price for that negligence, at least in the court of public opinion. The scope of the threat here is much bigger than one election and one president, or even one country, and combating it needs to be a focal point of our foreign and national security policies, regardless of which president or party Russia’s machinations are currently helping.  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/11/the-russian-hacking-scandal-is-way-bigger-than-donald-trump.html

12. Jennifer Rubin: Trump’s latest impeachable actions

At the core of President Trump’s unfitness and his malfeasance in office is his interaction with the Justice Department and the courts. This goes from the merely verbal denigration of the courts — “a joke,” “a laughingstock,” “so-called judges” — to actual actions such as firing the FBI director, reportedly imploring the FBI director to lay off of former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, trying to meddle in the prosecution of Joe Arpaio (whom he subsequently pardoned for criminal contempt of court) and, now, directly encouraging the Justice Department to go after a political opponent for spurious, long-ago debunked claims.

In a series of tweets, he called on the Justice Department to go after the Democrats: “Everybody is asking why the Justice Department (and FBI) isn’t looking into all of the dishonesty going on with Crooked Hillary & the Dems … People are angry. At some point the Justice Department, and the FBI, must do what is right and proper. The American public deserves it!” In remarks to reporters, he continued on in this vein. “I’m really not involved with the Justice Department. I’d like to let it run itself, but honestly, they should be looking at the Democrats. They should be looking at [John] Podesta and all of that dishonesty. They should be looking at a lot of things. And a lot of people are disappointed in the Justice Department, including me.”

There is no president in modern memory who has repeatedly and directly called on the Justice Department to investigate a political opponent in such a manner. A politician, one could imagine, upon new and actual evidence of wrongdoing, might say something like, “The appropriate authorities should look into this.” That’s not what Trump is doing here. He is both assuming guilt and applying pressure to go after an opponent based on scurrilous propaganda that he and his followers have generated. This is the conduct of a Third World dictator, and by any stretch of the imagination, an abuse of presidential power.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/11/03/trumps-latest-impeachable-actions/

13. David Faris :The depressing ritual of mass murder in America

Yesterday afternoon, the tenuous peace of the country was interrupted yet again by the latest in a long, seemingly endless line of unfathomable mass killings, this one carried out inside a church in rural Sutherland Springs, Texas. Before he was finished, one man had murdered at least 26 churchgoers in cold blood and wounded many more before dying in a fusillade of gunfire. Americans recoiled in horror. Twitter convulsed with anger and indignation. The country though, by all indications, will quickly move along.

America's mass shooting ritual is, by now, so familiar that it is beyond parody, beyond cynicism, indeed, beyond any reasonable explanation at all other than that we are too weak and too divided to make obvious changes to our laws and society to prevent more such tragedies. Sutherland Springs is Las Vegas is Sandy Hook is Orlando is Columbine. The names of the dead change but the political impotence remains very much the same.

Bet on this: Republican elected officials will tweet their "thoughts and prayers," a shoebox currency so degraded it can barely buy a week of freedom from these atrocities. Someone will post that Onion article, the headline of which contains an irrefutable indictment of America's policies and responses to gun violence. You know the one. Someone will offer Dan Hodges' endlessly retweeted observations that, "In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the U.S. gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over."  http://theweek.com/articles/735541/depressing-ritual-mass-murder-america