1. Washington Post Editorial: Trump’s shutdown stunt is an act of needless stupidity

“IT’S ACTUALLY part of what you do when you sign up for any public service position.” So said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) when asked about the hundreds of thousands of federal workers who will have to work without pay or be furloughed without pay over the holidays in a partial government shutdown. You won’t get any argument from us about the willingness of those who go into public service to make sacrifices. But they do so hoping to accomplish some good for their fellow citizens, not to be pawns in pointless political gamesmanship.

As it became apparent Friday that no agreement could be reached on a stopgap spending measure, President Trump warned that a shutdown would “last for a very long time.” Affected is about a third of the government workforce — about 800,000 employees — in key departments, including Homeland Security, State and Justice. Because of the weekend and upcoming Christmas holidays, the impacts of a shutdown may not immediately be felt, but there should be no mistake that curtailment of these government agencies will impose costs across Washington and the country.

That seemed to be of little matter to Mr. Trump, who last week boasted he would be “proud” to shut down the government, glad to “take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down.” He changed his tune on Friday in trying to shift the blame to Democrats for not going along with his demand for money to build a border wall he once promised would be financed by Mexico. Nothing better illustrates the needless stupidity of the shutdown than Mr. Trump’s claim to be taking a stand for border security when one of the agencies being caught up is Customs and Border Protection.

Any doubt that it is politics — not principle — driving Mr. Trump was erased when he flip-flopped this week on the stopgap spending bill. He signaled he would sign on to a measure, passed by both House and Senate, without wall funding, but then buckled to criticism from the conservative media. Instead of standing up to him — and doing their job of keeping the government running — House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — went along, once again enabling the worst instincts of a bad president. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-shutdown-stunt-is-an-act-of-needless-stupidity/2018/12/21/5567582c-0551-11e9-b6a9-0aa5c2fcc9e4_story.html

2. Paul Krugman: The Ghost of Trump Chaos Future. Sorry, investors, but there is no sanity clause.

Two years ago, after the shock of Donald Trump’s election, financial markets briefly freaked out, then quickly recovered. In effect, they decided that while Trump was manifestly unqualified for the job, temperamentally and intellectually, it wouldn’t matter. He might talk the populist talk, but he’d walk the plutocratic walk. He might be erratic and uninformed, but wiser heads would keep him from doing anything too stupid.

In other words, investors convinced themselves that they had a deal: Trump might sound off, but he wouldn’t really get to make policy. And, hey, taxes on corporations and the wealthy would go down.
But now, just in time for Christmas, people are realizing that there was no such deal — or at any rate, that there wasn’t a sanity clause. (Sorry, couldn’t help myself.) Put an unstable, ignorant, belligerent man in the Oval Office, and he will eventually do crazy things.

To be clear, voters have been aware for some time that government by a bad man is bad government. That’s why Democrats won a historically spectacular majority of the popular vote in the midterms. Even the wealthy, who have been the prime beneficiaries of Trump policies, are unhappy: A CNBC survey finds that millionaires, even Republican millionaires, have turned sharply against the tweeter in chief. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/opinion/trump-economy-stock-market.html

3. Elizabeth Goitein: What the President Could Do If He Declares a State of Emergency

In the weeks leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, President Donald Trump reached deep into his arsenal to try to deliver votes to Republicans.

Most of his weapons were rhetorical, featuring a mix of lies and false inducements—claims that every congressional Democrat had signed on to an “open borders” bill (none had), that liberals were fomenting violent “mobs” (they weren’t), that a 10 percent tax cut for the middle class would somehow pass while Congress was out of session (it didn’t). But a few involved the aggressive use—and threatened misuse—of presidential authority: He sent thousands of active-duty soldiers to the southern border to terrorize a distant caravan of desperate Central American migrants, announced plans to end the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship by executive order, and tweeted that law enforcement had been “strongly notified” to be on the lookout for “ILLEGAL VOTING.”

These measures failed to carry the day, and Trump will likely conclude that they were too timid. How much further might he go in 2020, when his own name is on the ballot—or sooner than that, if he’s facing impeachment by a House under Democratic control?

More is at stake here than the outcome of one or even two elections. Trump has long signaled his disdain for the concepts of limited presidential power and democratic rule. During his 2016 campaign, he praised murderous dictators. He declared that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, would be in jail if he were president, goading crowds into frenzied chants of “Lock her up.” He hinted that he might not accept an electoral loss. As democracies around the world slide into autocracy, and nationalism and antidemocratic sentiment are on vivid display among segments of the American populace, Trump’s evident hostility to key elements of liberal democracy cannot be dismissed as mere bluster. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/01/presidential-emergency-powers/576418/

4. NY Times Editorial: A Gutted I.R.S. Makes the Rich Richer

The nation’s tax collector today is an enfeebled enforcer. Its budget has been bled dry by a Republican Congress in service to wealthy donors and businesses aggressively pursuing tax avoidance, leaving uncollected 18 percent to 20 percent of potential tax revenues annually. That’s the conclusion in articles by the journalism site ProPublica, co-published by The Atlantic and The Times.

Loopholes are beyond the means of most Americans who earn salaries or are paid hourly wages, and are exploited by those who derive significant income from investments or business revenue. Although we’d all like to pay less, relative to most developed nations our tax burden is a pretty good deal.

It’s an even better deal for the richest Americans, who have benefited the most from President Trump’s tax cuts. The rich are different: They’re more likely to cheat, according to one study of I.R.S. data. And the I.R.S. has about as many auditors now as it did 60 years ago, when there were half as many Americans. The undermining of the I.R.S.’s enforcement capability coincides nicely with the Republican playbook: Enrich wealthy individuals and corporations with tax giveaways that balloon the deficit, justifying spending cuts for health care, education and infrastructure, then amplify the process by not holding high-end taxpayers accountable for the amounts they owe. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/25/opinion/editorials/irs-audits-rich.html

5. Jonathan Chait: Trump Is Building a Team of Lackeys to Go to War With Mueller

Questions about Trump’s basic fitness for office, and even his loyalty, that laid partially submerged, are rising to the surface. Is Trump too beholden to hidden financial interests to look after the public good? Is he mentally capable of understanding politics and policy well enough to make competent decisions? Is his worldview even compatible with democratic values?

Republican professionals had hoped to stagger through four years without fully confronting these questions. Mattis’s resignation letter is mild by the standards of public commentary, but scorching by the standards of a cabinet official. He paints Trump as indifferent or even hostile to the free world, and attracted to the “authoritarian model” of Russia and China.

For all his mental limitations, Trump does have a mobster’s talent for identifying character (or, more precisely, the lack of it). Trump is surrounding himself with lackeys who are untroubled by his corruption and immorality. And Trump grasps that he cannot win a fight like this without the rabid support of his ethnonationalist base and its media. For all the childish emotions that surround his actions, we can discern in them a pattern — a survival strategy. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/trump-building-a-team-of-lackeys-to-go-to-war-with-mueller.html

6. John Cassidy: What the Collapse of the Trump Foundation Tells Us About Donald Trump

Just when you’re getting ready to wrap it up for the holidays and take some time off from anything Donald Trump-related, up pops another story to remind you what sort of man is occupying the Oval Office. On Tuesday, Trump’s lawyers reached an agreement with the New York attorney general, Barbara Underwood, to shut down the Donald J. Trump Foundation, an entity that officially had charitable status but was perhaps best known for its purchase of a life-size portrait of Donald J. Trump—or, possibly, for the seven dollars it donated to the Boy Scouts of America, in 1989.

According to David Fahrenthold, the Washington Post journalist who won a Pulitzer for his dogged and devastating reporting about the foundation during the 2016 Presidential campaign, the seven bucks was used to pay the Boy Scouts registration fee for Donald Trump, Jr., who was then eleven years old. The portrait cost considerably more: Trump agreed to pay twenty thousand dollars for it during a 2007 fund-raiser at his Mar-a-Lago resort, in Florida, but it was the foundation that ended up footing the bill.

At least this money went to a reputable charity. Fahrenthold procured a copy of a 2007 check from the foundation for twenty thousand dollars that was made out to “childrens place at home safe,” an organization in South Florida that provides shelter and care to victims of child abuse and domestic violence. But some of the foundation’s cash didn’t go to charities at all. It went to entities and persons that Trump knew or owed money to. In a statement announcing the agreement to close the foundation, Underwood said that her office had found a “shocking pattern of illegality involving the Trump Foundation—including unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing, and much more. This amounted to the Trump Foundation functioning as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump’s business and political interests.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-the-collapse-of-the-trump-foundation-tells-us-about-donald-trump

7. Victoria Nuland: In a single tweet, Trump destroys U.S. policy in the Middle East

With his decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Syria, President Trump hands a huge New Year’s gift to President Bashar al-Assad, the Islamic State, the Kremlin and Tehran. He also guarantees the reversal of U.S. military gains there and extinguishes any leverage Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his special envoy for Syria, James Jeffrey, may have to drive a diplomatic settlement that meets the administration’s own goals of keeping the Islamic State and Iran out. Most important, Trump falls into the same trap that President Barack Obama did when he withdrew all U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011. Trump’s decision virtually ensures that security will disintegrate further, that the Islamic State and Iran will surge again, and that the United States will be compelled to come back into Syria at even greater military cost and in more adverse conditions than if we had stayed.

Everything about this mercurial decision imperils U.S. national interests as defined by Trump himself. First, the Islamic State is far from gone in Syria. Just six months ago, the Pentagon estimated that 20,000 to 30,000 fighters remained active in Syria and Iraq. The Islamic State may no longer control vast swaths of Syrian territory, but its fighters are hiding in ungoverned pockets in the east and in the back alleys of Idlib. As soon as the United States withdraws, the Islamic State will make three moves. It will claim victory over the U.S. infidels, turbocharging a recruiting binge across the Middle East and South Asia. It will pour fresh fighters into eastern Syria. And it will come out of the shadows to retake territory across eastern Syria from the U.S.-supported Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which can’t hold Raqqa or any other cleared territory without continued U.S. help.

Iran will also flood the zone the United States is abandoning. Tehran has likely already given orders for some of the tens of thousands of Hezbollah militias it controls in western and southern Syria to turn east. Just three months ago, national security adviser John Bolton pledged that the United States would stay in Syria until every last Iranian fighter had been driven out. With one tweet Wednesday, the president has instead invited Tehran to deepen its military, political and economic grip on this vital piece of the Middle East. In the process, Iran will also gain control of the major oil fields in Deir al-Zour protected by U.S. forces and the SDF, allowing it to self-finance its land grab.

Moscow is celebrating, too. After years of pretending to negotiate a diplomatic solution to the Syria crisis with Washington, Russian President Vladimir Putin can ignore the entreaties of Trump’s envoys because the United States will have no military skin in the game to back its diplomacy. The Kremlin will proceed as it has long planned, consolidating control over the rest of Syria for Assad until 2021 and then rigging an election for a new figurehead. Moscow will be too smart to expand its own ground presence in Syria, and will instead broaden its tacit support for the Iranian-backed militias that already serve as de facto local police forces in western Syria. Maybe it will allow Tehran to split the spoils from the Deir al-Zour oil fields; maybe all that cash will go back to Moscow. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/in-a-single-tweet-trump-destroys-us-policy-in-the-middle-east/2018/12/19/eb423434-03da-11e9-b5df-5d3874f1ac36_story.html

8.  Bess Levin: Wilbur Ross Isn’t Even Pretending To Follow The Law Anymore.

When Donald Trump hired Wilbur Ross to serve as his commerce secretary, it was as though the president had placed an ad for a character actor to play the most stereotypical out-of-touch fat cat the world has ever seen—one that counts his money each night, and would screw over his mother for a dollar; thinks the “rules” are for the lower-class; and feels at home in a top hat and a three-piece suit—and Ross more than delivered! Prior to joining the administration, the private-equity investor chaired a Wall Street “fraternity” whose motto is “What happens at the St. Regis stays at the St. Regis,” and during a memorable appearance on Bloomberg TV, suggested that the unwashed masses quit their bitching about income inequality and leave the the 1 percent alone. Since joining Team Trump, the financier has shown up to events wearing $500 velvet smoking shoes; praised the lack of protesters in a country where protesters are executed; described the bombing of Syria as “after-dinner entertainment” for the Mar-a-Lago crowd (where he’s naturally a member); been accused of financial-crisis-era insider trading, cheating his former colleagues, and lying about his net worth; and called people “evil” for alleging that he hid his investment in a Russian shipping company with ties to Vladimir Putin.

All of which is to say: the news that Ross has a habit of claiming to have sold off stock holdings —when actually he didn’t sell them at all—shouldn’t come as a surprise in the slightest. Federal ethics agreements are for plebes! https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/12/wilbur-ross-isnt-even-pretending-to-follow-the-law-anymore

9.  David Nakamura: “He takes no ownership — that’s just Trump’: President eschews responsibility for a shutdown he once craved

In 2014, Donald Trump sued to have his name taken off a pair of Atlantic City casinos he built three decades earlier that had gone bankrupt.

It took the president just 10 days this month to remove his name from something else he once proudly owned but that wasn’t going great — the federal government shutdown.

After threatening a shutdown for months over border wall funding and vowing last week that he would “take the mantle” of responsibility, Trump tried to shift the blame Friday, just hours before a government funding bill expired at midnight.

“The Democrats now own the shutdown!” he wrote on Twitter.

That was news to Democrats. “You own the shutdown,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) responded in a tweet, adding a video clip of his meeting with Trump and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in the Oval Office in which the president declared: “I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it.”

“Yep, you said that,” wrote Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), an enthusiastic Trump antagonist. “There are tapes.”

‘I’m a tough guy. Don’t think I can’t handle the heat,’ Lawrence O’Donnell said. “The fact is, he can’t handle it.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/he-takes-no-ownership--thats-just-trump-president-eschews-responsibility-for-a-shutdown-he-once-craved/2018/12/21/f2590b7c-0541-11e9-b6a9-0aa5c2fcc9e4_story.html

10. Joel Mathis: Trump has the government teetering on the edge of chaos. Is anyone surprised?

In the 21st century tech era, "disruption" has become a buzzword. We've been trained to think of disruption as unambiguously positive — messy, maybe, but always done in the service of upending staid and outdated approaches best left behind. Reality, though, is more complex: Disruption can have good or bad consequences; often, it's a mix of both. Disruption is often painful, and the people who feel the most pain are usually not the instigators of the chaos. If done for its own sake, without a larger vision to guide, the forces of disruption can be likened to a toddler knocking over a pile of blocks just to see what happens — briefly interesting, but ultimately kind of pointless.

That brings us, naturally, to President Trump.

The United States has reached a moment of high, extreme disruption: a stock market in free fall, a government poised to shut down, and a national security establishment in uproar. Each of these developments is at least partly the result of the president's actions: The already-nervous markets are being made even more jittery by the ongoing budget fight. That fight seems likely to lead to a shutdown since Trump, under pressure from his right wing, has announced he won't sign a budget bill that doesn't include his border wall funding. And Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned in protest over the president's decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.

All of this, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller is still lurking out there, somewhere.

We were promised that America would be made greater. Instead it seems like the country and its governance are teetering on the edge of chaos. https://theweek.com/articles/814076/trump-government-teetering-edge-chaos-anyone-surprised

11. John Cassidy: Donald Trump’s Survival Strategy: Chaos, Diversions, and Lily-Livered Republicans

Trump isn’t a conventional President, and these are anything but conventional times. At this point, his only goal is immediate survival. NBC News recently reported that Trump has told friends that he is alarmed about the prospect of impeachment. But he probably believes that, if he can get through the next few weeks and months, and the delivery of the Mueller report, he can regroup for the start of the 2020 election campaign, when he could have dozens of duelling Democratic primary candidates to feast on.

Wishful thinking, maybe. But, as long as Trump can maintain his high approval ratings among Republican voters, he has reason to doubt that the G.O.P. leadership will ever abandon him. He has the tactical advantage that he doesn’t recognize many of the moral, legal, and historical constraints that hemmed in other Presidents. And he lives by Steve Bannon’s maxim that the way to counter his critics in the media and elsewhere is to “flood the zone with shit.”

When there is a disturbing new headline every few hours, it can be hard to know which ones really matter, or even to remember them. (In a look back at the year in Trump freakouts, my colleague Susan B. Glasser stresses this point.) Last week, it was the announced departure of John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, and the incriminating court filings from Mueller and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. This week, it is the swoon in the stock market, the shuttering of the Trump Foundation, the Mattis resignation, and the Trump-induced spending-bill deadlock. At ten-thirty this morning, the great Orwellian shit spreader was back on Twitter, where he announced, “The Democrats now own the shutdown!” https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/donald-trumps-survival-strategy-chaos-diversions-and-lily-livered-republicans

12. Philip Rucker: ’A rogue presidency’: The era of containing Trump is over

For two years, they tried to tutor and confine him. They taught him history, explained nuances and gamed out reverberations. They urged careful deliberation, counseled restraint and prepared talking points to try to sell mainstream actions to a restive conservative base hungry for disruption. But in the end, they failed.

For President Trump, the era of containment is over.

One by one, the seasoned advisers seen as bulwarks against Trump’s most reckless impulses have been cast aside or, as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis did Thursday, resigned in an extraordinary act of protest. What Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) once dubbed an “adult day care center” has gone out of business.

Trump will enter his third year as president unbound — at war with his perceived enemies, determined to follow through on the hard-line promises of his insurgent campaign and fearful of any cleavage in his political coalition.

So far, the result has been disarray. The federal government is shut down. Stock markets are in free fall. Foreign allies are voicing alarm. Hostile powers such as Russia are cheering. And Republican lawmakers once afraid of crossing this president are now openly critical. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-rogue-presidency-the-era-of-containing-trump-is-over/2018/12/22/26fc010e-055b-11e9-b5df-5d3874f1ac36_story.html