1. John Cassidy: Trump’s Clueless Abdication of Presidential Responsibility

In blithely threatening to let the Obamacare exchanges collapse, Trump is ignoring his duty as President to protect the welfare of the citizenry.

Has there ever been a more cynical surrender of Presidential authority? The editorial board of the Washington Post posed this question on Tuesday, after Donald Trump reacted to the collapse of the Senate health-care-reform bill by suggesting, in a tweet, that his fellow-Republicans should now “let Obamacare fail” and then look to build a new system out of the wreckage. Ignoring the turmoil that such a course of action would generate for tens of millions of Americans, Trump restated his support for it later in the day, saying, “I think we’re probably in that position where we’ll let Obamacare fail. We’re not going to own it. I’m not going to own it. I can tell you, the Republicans are not going to own it.”

As President, Trump has continued to live by the one imperative that has propelled him for decades: furthering his personal interests and defending his bountiful amour propre. When virtues like consistency, practicality, and decency come into conflict with this overriding concern, they are invariably relegated to secondary status, or ignored completely. July 19, 2017 http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/trumps-clueless-abdication-of-presidential-responsibility

2. Nicholas Kristof: If Dr. Trump Were Your Surgeon ...

It’s a dark and stormy night, and the hospital corridor is eerily illuminated by lightning flashes as Dr. Trump and Dr. McConnell enter a patient’s room and approach the bed of a young woman, Janet.

“Help!” Janet cries weakly.

Dr. Trump looks down at her and shakes his head as she lies gasping. “So sad but inevitable,” he says. “She was bound to implode. Always going to fail. That’s what happens when you get a Kenyan-born doctor. The patient dies on her own.”

“But, but,” Janet tries to speak, “the problem is that you’re stepping on my oxygen hose. You’re the problem.”

“Take my heart,” Janet moans in her last breath, and a thunderclap drowns out her death rattle. “You need it.”  JULY 20, 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/opinion/republican-healthcare-trump-surgeon.html

3.  Peter Fenn: We're Sorry, World

America owes the global community an apology for electing President Trump.

Well, I am ready, many of us are ready, and the times call for it. After six long months in office, it is incumbent upon America as a country to apologize to the world for our so-called president, Donald J. Trump. He is a supreme embarrassment, not a supreme commander-in-chief; he cannot manage or operate as the leader of the free world, but, instead, leaves our country at sea, unable to deal with foreign leaders.

He is unlike any president we have had, certainly in modern times, in his lack of knowledge of world affairs or his desire to learn; he does not grasp the gravity of the job or the awesome responsibility to operate around the globe. He antagonizes 24 percent of the world's inhabitants, the 1.8 billion Muslims, with his statements and policies, further exacerbating what he is trying to stop, terrorism.

Forget about the tweets, the outbursts, the fights with his attorney general or others on his team; it is hard to ignore his changes of mind from day to day on health care or infrastructure or Medicaid or the rocky domestic dealings with Congress. Yet this president has so confused and insulted our allies while cozying up to our enemies that he has put our leadership in the world at severe risk.

Who will trust America with Trump as "the decider," the man in charge of the nuclear football? Who will trust a man who does not trust his intelligence chiefs? Who will trust a man who is so preoccupied with his Russian relations that he cannot make important decisions without consulting Russian President Vladimir Putin?

Yes, it is time to apologize to the world for Donald Trump, to provide "a regretful acknowledgement of an offense or failure." We have a president who does not measure up, pure and simple. https://www.usnews.com/opinion/thomas-jefferson-street/articles/2017-07-20/america-should-apologize-to-the-world-for-president-donald-trump

4.   Maureen Dowd: The Mooch and the Mogul

President Trump has finally found a courtier who can give him the buttery, boundless respect he craves.

A wealthy mini-me Manhattan bro with wolfy smile and slick coif who will say anything and flip any position. A self-promoter extraordinaire and master salesman who doesn’t mind pushing a bad product — and probably sees it as more fun.

For ego gratification, Trump has struck gold — or Goldman Sachs — with his appointment of Wall Street hedge fund guy and cable TV diva Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications director.

The Mogul and the Mooch is a tender love story with dramatic implications for the imploding White House.

They have so much in common beyond an addiction to hair product. Both enjoy stirring the pot and shifting political loyalties. (Both had high praise for Hillary.) They savor counterpunching, especially in donnybrooks with CNN. Trump was taken with Scaramucci’s win in getting CNN to retract a story linking him to a Russian investment fund supposedly under Senate investigation, a debacle that ended in three reporters losing their jobs.

The Mogul and the Mooch have the same fluid relationship with the truth and the same definition of loyalty.

But a change in communications personnel will not solve the central problem for President Trump. He doesn’t understand that Robert Mueller is not a contractor he’s in a civil litigation dispute with, someone he can intimidate and wear down and threaten and bleed out.

Bringing in another New York deal maker won’t help him understand the existential threat he faces in Washington from Mueller. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/22/opinion/sunday/spicer-anthony-scaramucci-mooch-trump.html

5. Jeff Spross: The GOP's Groundhog Day

TrumpCare is all but dead, and most sensible Republican lawmakers have resigned themselves to moving on to the next legislative battle. They want to pass a new budget blueprint for the next decade, complete with a sweeping tax code reform. House Budget Chairwoman Diane Black (R-Tenn.) has shepherded the blueprint through her committee, which voted on it Wednesday. From there, the budget must be approved by the entirety of the House, and then the Senate.

There should be a sense of doom-laden familiarity about all of this.

Here was TrumpCare in a nutshell: Big tax reductions for the wealthy, plus big cuts to government aid for the poor, and all of it packaged together by the reconciliation process, which allows bills to sneak through the Senate with 51 votes, bypassing the filibuster as long as they stick to fiscal policy changes and don't increase the deficit after 10 years.

Reconciliation allows the GOP, which holds a narrow 52-seat majority in the Senate, to avoid cooperating with any Democrats. But it also forces the party to corral its moderate and extremist wings. On health care, the GOP couldn't offer the big tax cuts without the big aid cuts, putting the moderates and extremists on a collision course.

We all know how that turned out. http://theweek.com/articles/712955/gops-groundhog-day

 

6. Damon Linker: The party of failure

Mitch McConnell's last-ditch effort to simply repeal the Affordable Care Act crumbled to dust Tuesday, a little more than 12 hours after he proposed it in the wake of the GOP's repeal-and-replace effort having gone down in flames Monday night. And now, after offering a series of responsibility-shucking explanations for the GOP's utter failure to do anything on health care, President Trump is vowing to let ObamaCare collapse while somehow avoiding any responsibility for the consequences.

This seems like a good time to reflect on just how comprehensively incompetent the Republican Party is.

The GOP controls both houses of Congress. It holds the White House. For seven years its leadership railed against ObamaCare, and its rank-and-file members voted to repeal it, over and over again. Yet here we are, six months into the Trump administration, and what has the party managed to deliver?

Nada. Zilch. Zero.

The GOP is a party in disarray, with antithetical factions pulling in incompatible directions.

Republicans may continue to win elections by uniting around a common hatred of liberalism. The same animus may give them the cohesion to continue blocking Democratic ambitions at every turn. And of course the president's efforts at deconstructing the administrative state from the inside continue apace. But the party accomplishing anything big, new, or ambitious of its own? That is close to impossible. http://theweek.com/articles/712711/party-failure

7. Paul Krugman: Some Pundit Meta On Our Twin Crises

Right now, there are two huge crises in American politics, but one is clearly bigger than the other. Yet looking at my recent columns, and to a large extent my blogging and tweeting, I’ve been focusing mainly on the lesser crisis. A few thoughts about why.

Clearly the most important thing happening in and to America right now is the constitutional crisis. Not potential crisis: it’s already here. The president’s inner circle is under investigation for possible collusion with a hostile foreign power, collusion that may have put him in office; he himself, whether or not he’s currently a direct target of that investigation, is clearly suspect. Yet he has already made clear his determination to block any investigation that gets too close.

This is way worse than Nixon – yet all indications are that the moral rot of the Republican Party now runs so deep that the constitutional answer to a rogue president is null and void. This is an existential threat to the republic, and it can be hard to focus on anything else.

Yet if Trump-Putin-treason weren’t in the news, we’d all be focused on health care, where Republicans are still trying to ram through a disgusting bill, inflicting immense harm, under cover of secrecy and lies. In the process they are bringing conspiracy theorizing to the heart of politics: every attempt at objective analysis, every statement of plain facts, just shows that you’re an enemy. https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/07/22/some-pundit-meta-on-our-twin-crises/?emc=eta1

8. NY Times Editorial: President Trump’s Contempt for the Rule of Law

By In less than an hour on Wednesday afternoon, President Trump found a way to impugn the integrity and threaten the livelihoods of nearly all of the country’s top law enforcement officials, including some he appointed, for one simple reason: They swore an oath to defend the Constitution, not him. 

For a president who sees the rule of law as an annoyance rather than a feature of American democracy, the traitors are everywhere.

In the end, Mr. Trump is concerned with nothing so much as saving his own hide, which means getting rid of the Russia inquiry for good. He previously said this was why he fired Mr. Comey, and it may yet be the undoing of Mr. Sessions, Mr. Rosenstein and Mr. Mueller.

The one person who avoided the president’s wrath was the only one who has not yet had the chance to defy him: Christopher Wray, Mr. Trump’s pick to replace Mr. Comey. “I think we’re going to have a great new F.B.I. director,” Mr. Trump said Wednesday.

Perhaps he forgot that Mr. Wray told senators during his confirmation hearing that he would not hesitate to prosecute the Trump Organization for foreign-corruption crimes if the evidence pointed that way. Or perhaps he thinks he can bend Mr. Wray to his will because, as he told The Times, “the F.B.I. person really reports directly to the president.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/opinion/donald-trump-sessions-interview-law.html

 

9. Matthew Walther: Alone on Trump Island

President Trump must be feeling awfully lonely.

Six months into his presidency, his approval rating is at an all-time low, even according to the most right-leaning of pollsters, which isn't a big deal unless you're the kind of person who's fanatically devoted to tracking your own poll numbers and trumpeting them on Twitter with minimal self-awareness. The Democratic Party, which Trump pledged to work with on issues like trade and infrastructure, has never been more united, arguably even under President Obama, than in opposition to his administration. Vast swathes of the media regard the president as a bigot and a likely traitor whose every utterance should be interpreted according to a kind of hermeneutic of suspicion. (It must be said that Trump has brought much of this upon himself through incompetence, inaction, unkept promises, and cartoonish lies.)

Trump cannot rouse his own party in Congress to pass a bill replacing the Affordable Care Act or funding infrastructure projects or enacting tax reform. He does not have a close working relationship with either House Speaker Paul Ryan or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Members of the party's hard right wing think he is a squish (and not just the ones whose fathers he accused of helping to assassinate JFK), while moderates like Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham have rarely had a kind word for him (often with good reason).

None of this can be a recipe for success at home or abroad. The president cannot live alone on Trump Island. He needs allies and advisers whom he trusts and who trust him. Even Richard Nixon, the most paranoid, bile-filled reactionary of modern times, had friends in the White House and in Congress, and he would have died before bringing internal squabbles voluntarily to the attention of his enemies in the media.

The Nats are still hot. Maybe somebody should take the president to a ballgame. http://theweek.com/articles/713181/alone-trump-island

10. John Cassidy: Donald Trump’s Addled, Ominous Interview

The Times’ transcript shows a President who considers himself above the law, and who believes himself to be besieged by internal and external enemies.

It is often said, and with ample reason, that much of what Donald Trump says isn’t worth a jot. As Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter, noted last year, “lying is second nature to him.” When he isn’t telling outright whoppers, he exaggerates things outrageously, and his utterances often bear little resemblance from one day to the next. On Tuesday, he said that Republicans should let Obamacare crash and burn. On Wednesday, he said that he wanted to see it replaced.

But, whereas Trump’s statements often fail to withstand inspection when examined individually, analyzing a group of them together can sometimes provide valuable insights into his mindset, which, at this time, appears to be even more addled than usual. The interview that Trump gave on Wednesday to three reporters from the Times offers us that opportunity.

A partial transcript of the interview, which the Times posted online, shows him eager to impress his interlocutors despite the fact that they work for a publication he has many times described as “failing” and “fake news.” He boasted about the response he received to the speech he recently gave in Poland, and how much the French President, Emmanuel Macron, likes him. (“He’s a great guy. Smart. Strong. Loves holding my hand.”)

At one point, Trump even played the role of amateur historian, pointing out how the armies of Napoleon and Hitler came to grief in the Russian winter, and adding that Napoleon “didn’t go to Russia that night because he had extracurricular activities, and they froze to death.”

That claim might be dubbed “fake history,” but it wouldn’t do to dwell on it because the interview also covered many more consequential subjects, including the Russia investigation and the now infamous meeting that his son, Donald Trump, Jr., arranged at Trump Tower last June. The overwhelming impression from the transcript is of a President who considers himself above the law, and who believes himself to be, through no fault of his own, besieged by internal and external enemies, particularly in the Justice Department and the F.B.I. As he put it at one point, “I have headaches, that’s what I have, I have headaches.” http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/donald-trumps-addled-and-ominous-interview-with-the-times

11. Bradley P. Moss: Trump Wants to Take on Bob Mueller? Good Luck With That.

The president is used to overpowering and overwhelming his legal opponents, but Mueller – who ran the FBI for 12 years and oversaw the transformation of that agency in the aftermath of the tragedy of 9/11 – is unlikely to be intimidated. Mueller’s team appears to be methodically examining the Russian government’s efforts to meddle in the 2016 election, and it borders on axiomatic that his team will uncover whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin in any way (a question that, of course, remains unresolved).

Mueller’s investigation will go where the facts lead it, but the president is doing himself no favors by providing a fresh set of bread crumbs on a regular basis. His Twitter rants and stream-of-consciousness remarks in media interviews are easy fodder for the special counsel’s team, and provide it with an unusual degree of access to the president’s state of mind and motivations. It may be cathartic for Trump to express these thoughts publicly, and it might rouse his political base, but it is doing nothing to put out the three-alarm political fires that are routinely emerging in the wake of new reports about previously undisclosed contacts with Russian operatives or inquiries into his financial dealings.

If the president truly wishes to survive the mess in which he finds himself, he needs to come to grips with the simple truth that everything he learned before Jan. 20, 2017, is irrelevant. There is no one who can just make this situation “go away.” There is no deal to be made, no financial settlement that can resolve the matter. The investigation will find what it finds, and it very well might ensnare several close associates of the president (and potentially even a family member) along the way.

If President Trump tries to bully his way into Mueller’s lane, however, he could find himself joining Richard Nixon in a two-man “members only” club of presidents forced out of office before the end of their terms. If he hopes to avoid this fate, one smart move would be to stop talking, do his job and let Mueller do his. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/21/donald-trump-bob-mueller-215403

12. Jack Goldsmith: How to Deal With a Kamikaze President

Donald Trump’s angry morning tweet storm reached another new low with attacks on his Attorney General for not investigating his former presidential opponent, and on his acting FBI Director’s integrity. This and other attacks on key law enforcement figures in his own Executive branch goes far beyond breaking norms of investigatory independence. They bring us clearly into the territory, where we may have been for a while, of a president bent on destroying the authority of the Justice Department that he worries, perhaps for reasons only he knows, may destroy him. At no time in modern history (and perhaps ever) has a President been so openly at odds, and bent on discrediting, his senior law enforcement and intelligence officials.”

 There is a natural tendency to think: What can we do to fight back, to tell the President he is wrong, to stop him from attacking us?  The problem is that there is nothing anyone can to do stop the President short of impeachment.  Attorney General Sessions could and should speak out sharply against the President and in defense of the integrity of his Department.  That would hasten Sessions’ departure and not stop the shameless President.  And resignations in protest of Sessions' departure would only make matters worse, especially since there are so very few political appointees in DOJ at the moment. July 25, 2017 https://lawfareblog.com/how-deal-kamikaze-president

13. Ryan Lizza: How Jared Kushner Helped the Russians Get Inside Access to the Trump Campaign

If you read Jared Kushner’s statement to congressional committees looking for evidence of a crime, there isn’t much there. But if you read it from the perspective of the Russians trying to gain a toehold—or more—inside the Trump campaign, you realize how easy he made it for them. As the evidence mounted last year that the Russian government launched an unprecedented hacking and influence campaign to affect the 2016 election in Donald Trump’s favor, the Trump team, including Kushner, became increasingly more solicitous to high-level Russians offering information and requesting meetings.

As with his accounts of all the interactions with Russians, Kushner claims he was simply a naïve staffer exchanging benign pleasantries. His professed innocence about the nature of these contacts may be the most troubling part of his testimony. The Russians were running a complex—and seemingly successful—campaign to gain access to Trump’s orbit, and the President-elect’s most trusted adviser claims he was clueless about what was actually going on. Kushner’s testimony does not reveal evidence of any crimes, but it does reveal a campaign and Presidential transition that were remarkably easy targets for Russian intelligence efforts.

“The Russians clearly thought they had reasons to believe this would be a friendly audience,” Michael Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency said. “If you’ve never seen a major-league curveball, you shouldn’t pretend you’re a major-leaguer.” http://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizza/how-jared-kushner-helped-the-russians-get-inside-access-to-the-trump-campaign

14. Frank Bruni: Donald Trump’s Dominatrix

At this point I think it’s fair to say that Donald Trump has gone beyond taunting and demonizing Hillary Clinton to a realm of outright obsession.

He’s stalking her.

He can’t stop tweeting about her. Can’t stop muttering about her. On Monday he addressed tens of thousands of boy scouts at their Jamboree, and who should pop up in his disjointed thoughts and disheveled words? Clinton. He dinged her, yet again, for having ignored voters in Michigan, which he won.

He’s more or less back to chanting “lock her up,” as if it’s early November all over again. He has frozen the calendar there so that he can perpetually savor the exhilaration of the campaign and permanently evade the drudgery of governing and the ignominy of his failure at it so far.

Nov. 8 is his “Groundhog Day,” on endless repeat, in a way that pleases and pacifies him. That movie has a co-star, Clinton. If he dwells in it, he dwells with her. He can no more retire her than Miss Havisham, in “Great Expectations,” could put away her wedding dress. Clinton brings Trump back to the moment before the rose lost its blush and the heartache set in.

During the second of their three debates, he was accused of shadowing her onstage, but that was nothing next to the way he pursues her now. His administration slips further into chaos; he diverts the discussion to her. She’s the answer to evolving scandals. She’s the antidote to a constipated agenda — or so he wagers. What stature he has inadvertently given her. And what extraordinary staying power. 7/26/17 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/26/opinion/donald-trumps-dominatrix.html?ref=opinion

15. Ed Kilgore: Senate Is Rejecting Two Years’ Worth of GOP Health-Care Policy

Amid the confusion and procedural obscurity surrounding Senate consideration of the FY 2017 budget-reconciliation bill this week, something remarkable is happening that should not be missed: The Republican-controlled chamber is in the process of repudiating two solid years of GOP health-care policy.

Late last night the latest version of the Better Care Reconciliation Act went down to defeat on a procedural vote with no less than nine Republican senators voting to kill it. Lest we forget, the BCRA is really just a variation of the House-passed American Health Care Act. It represents the closest thing Republicans have to a consensus repeal-and-replace plan for Obamacare.

Before the GOP made the fateful decision to develop an Obamacare “replacement,” its big plan was known as “repeal and delay,” based on the legislation Congress passed late in 2015 to simply repeal key elements of the Affordable Care Act with effective dates delayed long enough to allow for future “replacement” legislation. A replica of that 2015 legislation, now known as the Obamacare Repeal Reconciliation Act, is up for a vote in the Senate today. It is universally expected to fail, and in fact is probably only on the floor because Senator Rand Paul and other hard-core conservatives wanted to register a vote for it badly enough to make that a condition for their support of yesterday’s must-pass motion to proceed. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/senate-rejecting-two-years-worth-of-gop-health-care-policy.html