1. David Brooks: The G.O.P. Is Rotting

A lot of good, honorable Republicans used to believe there was a safe middle ground. You didn’t have to tie yourself hip to hip with Donald Trump, but you didn’t have to go all the way to the other extreme and commit political suicide like the dissident Jeff Flake, either. You could sort of float along in the middle, and keep your head down until this whole Trump thing passed.

Now it’s clear that middle ground doesn’t exist. That’s because Donald Trump never stops asking. First, he asked the party to swallow the idea of a narcissistic sexual harasser and a routine liar as its party leader. Then he asked the party to accept his comprehensive ignorance and his politics of racial division. Now he asks the party to give up its reputation for fiscal conservatism. At the same time he asks the party to become the party of Roy Moore, the party of bigotry, alleged sexual harassment and child assault.

There is no end to what Trump will ask of his party. He is defined by shamelessness, and so there is no bottom. And apparently there is no end to what regular Republicans are willing to give him. Trump may soon ask them to accept his firing of Robert Mueller, and yes, after some sighing, they will accept that, too.

That’s the way these corrupt bargains always work. You think you’re only giving your tormentor a little piece of yourself, but he keeps asking and asking, and before long he owns your entire soul.

The rot afflicting the G.O.P. is comprehensive — moral, intellectual, political and reputational. More and more former Republicans wake up every day and realize: “I’m homeless. I’m politically homeless.”  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/07/opinion/the-gop-is-rotting.html

2. Andrew Totias: This Is An Emergency: We Should Break The Glass 

The Republican Party is doing harm to every cause it purports to serve. If Republicans accept Roy Moore as a United States senator, they may, for a couple years, have one more vote for a justice or a tax cut, but they will have made their party loathsome for an entire generation. The pro-life cause will be forever associated with moral hypocrisy on an epic scale. The word “evangelical” is already being discredited for an entire generation. Young people and people of color look at the Trump-Moore G.O.P. and they are repulsed, maybe forever.

The GOP sold its soul a long time ago. Trump only revealed the black, evil monster that hid behind the doors...

“What shall it profit a man,” Jesus asked, “if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?” The current Republican Party seems to not understand that question. Donald Trump seems to have made gaining the world at the cost of his soul his entire life’s motto. . . .

It’s amazing that there haven’t been more Republicans like Mitt Romney who have said: “Enough is enough! I can go no further!”

The reason, I guess, is that the rot that has brought us to the brink of Senator Roy Moore began long ago. Starting with Sarah Palin and the spread of Fox News, the G.O.P. traded an ethos of excellence for an ethos of hucksterism.  https://andrewtobias.com/this-is-an-emergency-we-should-break-the-glass/

3.  Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush and Peter Baker: Inside Trump’s Hour-by-hour Battle For Self-preservation

Around 5:30 each morning, President Trump wakes and tunes into the television in the White House’s master bedroom. He flips to CNN for news, moves to “ & Friends” for comfort and messaging ideas, and sometimes watches MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” because, friends suspect, it fires him up for the day.

Energized, infuriated — often a gumbo of both — Mr. Trump grabs his iPhone. Sometimes he tweets while propped on his pillow, according to aides. Other times he tweets from the den next door, watching another television. Less frequently, he makes his way up the hall to the ornate Treaty Room, sometimes dressed for the day, sometimes still in night clothes, where he begins his official and unofficial calls.

As he ends his first year in office, Mr. Trump is redefining what it means to be president. He sees the highest office in the land much as he did the night of his stunning victory over Hillary Clinton — as a prize he must fight to protect every waking moment, and Twitter is his Excalibur. Despite all his bluster, he views himself less as a titan dominating the world stage than a maligned outsider engaged in a struggle to be taken seriously, according to interviews with 60 advisers, associates, friends and members of Congress.

For other presidents, every day is a test of how to lead a country, not just a faction, balancing competing interests. For Mr. Trump, every day is an hour-by-hour battle for self-preservation. He still relitigates last year’s election, convinced that the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, into Russia’s interference is a plot to delegitimize him.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/09/us/politics/donald-trump-president.html

4. Paul Waldman: Trump's unintentionally profound insight into American politics

It's not just scandals, sexual or otherwise, in which the GOP has apparently decided it can say literally anything. Their entire party has decided that their tax plan, which showers benefits on the wealthy and corporations, will generate so much economic activity that it will pay for itself, despite the fact that this has never happened and will never happen, and not even conservative economists will claim it to be true. But it's what every Republican in Congress is saying, apparently on the theory that Paul Ryan is in possession of a pocketful of magic beans that will make it come true. That includes the supposedly moderate and thoughtful Sen. Susan Collins, who went on TV and cited conservative economists to support this fantastical claim; when The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin contactedthose economists, they said Collins doesn't know what she's talking about. And she's just about the sanest person they've got.

What unites these episodes is the belief that it really doesn't matter what you say when you're arguing for a candidate, a policy, or even a legal defense. There's no point in even trying to make your argument persuasive, because persuading people who might not already be with you isn't really the point. All you have to is signal to your partisans: This is what we're saying now, and yes I know it's ridiculous, but just say it.

And they will. To return to our friend Billy Bush and his supporting role in that historic episode, you may remember that after the Access Hollywoodtape emerged, many Republicans panicked, assuming that Trump couldn't possibly win after he was revealed on tape bragging about his ability to sexually assault with impunity. But they were wrong, and they've learned their lesson.

"People will just believe you. You just tell them and they believe you."  http://theweek.com/articles/741495/trumps-unintentionally-profound-insight-into-american-politics

5. Erin Gloria Ryan: Dumb And Dumber

A vigorous national debate has erupted over which of President Trump’s adult sons is The Idiot. SNL thinks it’s Eric, because Eric looks dumber than Donald Jr. But there’s really no contest. Donald Junior is The Idiot. Donald Junior is such an Idiot Son that his overconfident dumbassery might sink his father’s entire administration. And he still doesn’t seem to understand how much trouble he could be in.

Via email, Don Jr. accepted a meeting with a Kremlin-tied Russian attorney whom a charlatan intermediary promised would deliver dirt on Hillary Clinton. “I love it!” the Idiot Son replied before ensnaring the top levels of the Trump campaign in at the very least a pretty bad optical moment, at the very worst an attempt to collude with a foreign power.

When The New York Times was about to publish the email trail implicating Junior in the affair this past summer, The Idiot Son released a statement claiming the meeting was about Russian-American adoptions, a statement that was crafted aboard Air Force One and with the aid of an Idiot number of Trump administration officials. When it turned out that the Times had the “I love it!” email, Junior took it upon himself to tweet screen grabs of the emails himself, as though there was a clause in the criminal code that specifies that you can’t get in trouble for something you admit to. (Oddly enough, President Trump would espouse the opposite belief when dodging questions about his support for accused child molester and Senate candidate Roy Moore, who has not admitted to any child molestation despite the nine women who have come forward. But I digress.)

Idiot Sons are often used as leverage in investigations into their less-stupid, but-still-dumb fathers. Michael Flynn, former national security adviser, also has an Idiot Son named Michael Flynn Junior. His Idiot Son was once the chief of staff at Flynn Intel Group and a principle disseminator of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory which posited that Democrats were running a secret child sex ring out of the basement of a pizza restaurant in D.C. News reports indicate that Flynn Junior’s activities associated with the former put him in the line of Robert Mueller’s investigation, which gave the FBI the leverage it needed to convince Michael Flynn Senior to plead guilty to a felony and flip.

Juniors Flynn and Trump might never grasp the extent of their own stupidity; it’s part of what makes them idiots. But for the rest of us, we can take comfort in the fact that the entire course of American history could be changed by the fact that two Idiot Sons don’t know how to do crimes very well.  https://www.thedailybeast.com/if-time-picked-loser-of-the-year-it-would-be-the-idiot-son

6. Jonathan Chait: Why the Trump Tax Cuts Might Jack Up the Deficit More Than Anybody Expects

Republicans in Congress have spent weeks insisting their tax-cut plan would increase rather than decrease tax revenue, the findings of every credible budget estimate notwithstanding. Yesterday, the Treasury Department published an “analysis” purporting to support the Republican claim. The document, one page long, consisted of restating its assumption that the tax cuts — in combination with other, as-yet-unwritten bills to reduce social spending and increase infrastructure — would increase growth enough to pay for itself. It does not show how the tax cuts, or the tax cuts plus all the rest of Trump’s ideas, would produce the growth rate it assumes.

The fiscal defense of the Trump tax cuts is a failure even on its own, Alice in Wonderland-ish terms. If your plan only pays for itself when its effects are combined with the effects of other pieces of legislation, it does not pay for itself. Especially if the other legislation doesn’t exist. It’s like claiming for months you can beat up the toughest kid in school, then finally backing up the boast by describing a hypothetical fight where you beat him up with the aid of your black-belt cousin, when in fact your cousin’s grasp of martial arts has not advanced beyond an intention to enroll in a karate class at the YMCA.

And yet, as cartoonish as the fantasies of the Republican voodoo economists have been, they have succeeded in the most important respects: They persuaded their party’s entire political class that the tax-cut bill will not increase the deficit. And merely by causing the rest of us to refute the silly claims that the tax cuts will fail to lose revenue, it has shoved out of the public eye a much more plausible outcome: that the tax cuts will not lose zero revenue, or less revenue than forecast, but actually more. Possibly much more.  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/12/trumps-tax-cuts-might-jack-up-deficit-more-than-you-expect.html

7. NY TImes Editorial Board: Fox News v. Robert Mueller

If only we could dismiss Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Laura Ingraham and the other well-paid propagandists at Fox News as though they were harmless drunks at the end of the bar, ticking off their conspiracy theories to anyone who will listen. Unfortunately, the guy sitting on the next stool is the president of the United States, and he’s all ears.

When the propagandists say, “Get rid of Mueller,” it’s not the truth they’re trying to protect; it’s Mr. Trump himself. Any genuine interest in objective reality left the building a while ago, replaced by a self-sustaining fantasyland. If it’s hard to understand how roughly three-quarters of Republicans still refuse to accept that Russia interfered in the 2016 election — a fact that is glaringly obvious to everyone else, including the nation’s intelligence community and Mr. Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson — remember that a majority of the same people continue to believe that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

There was a time not too long ago when Republicans in Congress seemed genuinely interested in protecting Mr. Mueller — who, it bears noting, was originally appointed to head the F.B.I. by George W. Bush and who was named special counsel by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, also a Bush appointee. But Fox’s alt-reality vortex has sucked in previously levelheaded members of the G.O.P. like Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator who said as recently as October that there would be “holy hell to pay” if Mr. Trump tried to fire Mr. Mueller. Last Friday, Mr. Graham tweeted in support of “a Special Counsel to investigate ALL THINGS 2016 — not just Trump and Russia.” On Monday night, according to Axios, Jay Sekulow, one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, called for a special prosecutor to investigate … the special prosecutor. The tipping point? An article on Fox News’s website about a top Justice Department official’s wife and her work for Fusion GPS, the research firm behind the so-called Steele dossier.

None of these attacks or insinuations are grounded in good faith. The anti-Mueller brigade cares not a whit about possible bias in the Justice Department or the F.B.I. It simply wants the investigation shut down out of a fear of what it might reveal. But if your man is really innocent, what’s the worry?  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/opinion/fox-news-robert-mueller.html

8. Timothy Egan:Trumpocalypse: The End Game

You can see where this is headed, the once bright and shiny democracy going down the drain before the holidays are out. The Russians, the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his agents, desperate men flipped and singing to save their souls — all may soon be gone, by President Trump’s design.

If there’s any outrage left in the tank, use it now, because Trump has signaled exactly what he’s going to do. First, he had to set some brush fires, impugning the legitimacy of the rule of law — an old dictator’s trick. Trump is no Hitler, but when the German Reichstag burned in 1933, it was all the Nazis needed to gut civil liberties.

So, before Trump can fire the prosecutor who is hot on the corruption trail of those in the president’s inner circle, he needs a pretext. He could just work his way down the line at the Justice Department, until he found a quisling willing to remove the special counsel. But before he gets to that, he has to delegitimize the whole investigation.

Thus, he’s now attacking the F.B.I., saying the agency is in “Tatters” and its standing “the worst in History.” Bashing cops — wasn’t that what those Black Lives Matter people did to disrespect Blue Lives?  https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/opinion/trumpocalypse-russia-democracy-.html

9. Max Boot: America Is Heading for an Unprecedented Constitutional Crisis

White House lawyer Ty Cobb has been attempting to keep the First Client in check by telling him that Robert Mueller’s investigation will soon be over and result in his exoneration. Back in August, Cobb was confident that it would all be over by Thanksgiving. When that didn’t happen, Cobb, like a millenarian cultist adjusting the date of doomsday, claimed that it would end by Christmas. Now Christmas is almost upon us, and no light is visible at the end of the tunnel. Far from it. The investigation, which has already resulted in two indictments and two guilty pleas of Trump advisors, appears to be accelerating and drawing ever closer to the Oval Office.

What will Trump’s reaction be when he figures out he’s been duped — and that the Mueller probe, far from a “nothing burger,” is a carafe of strychnine that poses an existential threat to his presidency? The likely result is that Trump will either pardon everyone involved or try to fire the special counsel, or both. And then the nation will be plunged into a constitutional crisis the likes of which we have not seen since Watergate.  http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/12/11/america-is-heading-for-an-unprecedented-constitutional-crisis/