1. Jelani Cobb: From Louis Armstrong to the N.F.L.: Ungrateful as the New Uppity

It’s impossible not to be struck by Trump’s selective patriotism. It drives him to curse at black football players but leaves him struggling to create false equivalence between Nazis and anti-Fascists in Charlottesville. It inspires a barely containable contempt for Muslims and immigrants but leaves him mute in the face of Russian election intervention. He cannot tolerate the dissent against literal flag-waving but screams indignation at the thought of removing monuments to the Confederacy, which attempted to revoke the authority symbolized by that same flag. He is the vector of the racial id of the class of Americans who sent death threats to Louis Armstrong, the people who necessitated the presence of a newly federalized National Guard to defend black students seeking to integrate a public school. He contains multitudes—all of them dangerously ignorant.

It has been convenient and politically profitable for Trump to paint the black athletes’ protests as an inane attack upon the symbols of the United States, but he is deeply implicated, and is increasingly aggravating the actual cause of this discord. It was Trump who urged police officers in Brentwood, New York, to treat the suspects in their charge with casual brutality. Trump’s Department of Justice has overseen the dismantling of the community-policing initiative, which was meant to encourage greater rapport between law enforcement and the neighborhoods they patrol. It is the President’s D.O.J. that has displayed disdain for the federal consent decrees that had been used to reform dysfunctional police departments.

Amid Trump’s nuclear brinksmanship and social-media provocation toward North Korea, amid the swollen gorges of water streaming through Puerto Rico, amid the craven and indefensible attempts to gut health care, amid the slower-moving crises of voting access, economic inequality, and climate change—amid all these things, Trump yet again found a novel way to diminish the nation he purportedly leads. He has authored danger in more ways than there are novel ways to denounce it. This is his singular genius. When this moment has elapsed, when some inevitably unsatisfactory punctuation has concluded the Trump era, we will be left with an infinitude of questions. But Trump, we will assuredly understand, is a small man with a fetish for the symbols of democracy and a bottomless hostility for the actual practice of it. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-louis-armstrong-to-the-nfl-ungrateful-as-the-new-uppity

2. Ryan Lizza: A Dizzying Week Of Trump-Russia Revelations

“We know that the Russians launched a cyber campaign to help Trump win. We know that the Trump campaign was willing to entertain assistance from the Russian government because Manafort, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump, Jr., eagerly met with a Russian offering such assistance. This latest news suggests—though the reporting is still vague—what many people have long wondered: that Manafort may have been a crucial link between the Trump campaign and Russians seeking to defeat Hillary Clinton.”

“If or congressional investigators unearth proof that Manafort colluded with the Russians, it will fortify the narrative that the Trump campaign worked with a foreign nation to alter the outcome of an American Presidential election—an unprecedented event in the country’s history. Trump could dismiss the evidence, deny knowledge of the collusion, and dismiss the Mueller investigation as a ‘witch hunt.’ But this week’s disclosures moved the theorizing about Trump and Russia one step closer to becoming a politically devastating blow to Trump’s Presidency.  https://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizza/a-dizzying-week-of-trump-russia-revelations

3. Charles E. Cook, Jr: The Urgent Need to Repair Our Broken Politics

“Saddled by a punitive peace imposed by its erstwhile enemies, post-World War I Germany, under the Weimar Republic, slid into fourteen years of political gridlock, civil unrest and social and economic chaos. … Corporate and labor leaders, the landed aristocracy, and other interest groups shortsightedly focused on their individual self-interests at the expense of the nation’s. Wealth and income inequality grew.” The Nazi Party and other extremist factions surged.

Germany between the wars creates an inflammatory analogy, but some of Bruno’s words strike a chord today. “Years of political gridlock”—box checked. “Civil unrest”—box checked. “Social and economic chaos”—box checked. The United States is by no means the second coming of the Weimar Republic, but it’s clear that our social fabric has been fraying for the last 20 or 30 years.

While the term ‘winner-take-all’ overstates America’s economic imbalance, it is more right than wrong. Some experts say that social and economic mobility in the United States is now less than in Britain, a country that for centuries was known for its rigid class system. Sure, there are still Horatio Alger rags-to-riches stories in America, but social scientists and economists say these are far rarer than a half-century ago.  http://cookpolitical.com/analysis/national/national-politics/urgent-need-repair-our-broken-politics

4. Michael H Fuchs: Is Trump about to repeat George W Bush's worst mistake?

It’s hard to overstate the potential disaster of destroying the Iran deal. Iran would be incentivized to race to get a nuclear weapon. The partners that helped make the Iran deal happen – Europe, China, Russia – would leave the US behind and continue doing business with Iran, making impossible any renewal of international pressure. And if Iran actually acquired a nuclear weapon, it could embolden Iran to escalate its regional provocations. All of this would result in more confrontation with the United States, and greater chances of war.

In fact, withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal would undermine Trump’s efforts to convince the world that he is looking for a diplomatic solution with North Korea: if Trump is willing to rip up a deal preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, why should anyone believe he’s willing to deal with North Korea? And why would North Korea deal with Trump if he doesn’t live up to US commitments?

In 2002, less than a year after invading Afghanistan, President George W Bush used his speech before the UN general assembly to make the case to the world for action against Iraq. Let’s hope, when history looks back on Trump’s first UN speech, it’s not viewed as the opening salvo in a completely preventable war with Iran.  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/20/trump-george-w-bush-worst-mistake-iran

5. NY Times Editorial Board: Tax Cuts for the Rich by Another Name

Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee violated their supposedly sacrosanct principles of fiscal hawkishness this week, by saying that it would be just fine with them to add $1.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years in order to cut taxes. They justify this hypocrisy by asserting what has been disproved time and again — that tax cuts spur the economy and compensate for any lost revenue.

In fact, these cuts could hurt the very people they purport to help — small-business owners, middle-class professionals and working-class Americans.

While even initial details of the tax plan are not expected before next week, deep corporate tax cuts have been a Republican priority for some time. Much of the discussion of that has revolved around the top rate, now 35 percent. President Trump has called for lowering it to 15 percent, while his economic aides and House Republicans favor a top rate around 25 percent.

But the rate cut on corporate profits is only part of the plan. A centerpiece of proposals made in the past by Mr. Trump and the House speaker, Paul Ryan, has been to tax so-called pass-through income at the same rate as corporate profits.

If pass-through income were taxed at the same proposed rate as corporate income, the real beneficiaries would be hedge fund managers, law firms and real estate developers like President Trump. Households making more than $1 million would receive more than two-thirds of the benefits if the rate was cut to 15 percent, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

The average tax cut for millionaires would be $114,000 in 2018, raising their after-tax incomes by more than 5 percent. For multimillionaires, the tax savings would pile up even more. The 400 highest-income taxpayers in the country, with average annual incomes exceeding $300 million each, derive about one-fifth of their income from pass-through businesses.

Republicans claim to seek broad support, and a White House official said on Tuesday that the rich would not see a benefit from the tax plan. But the proposals they have floated would not benefit their middle-class constituencies in any lasting way and could actually harm them. If a pass-through plan is enacted, it will deprive the Treasury of revenue that might otherwise be used to invest in infrastructure, health care, science and education — in other words, the real priorities of most Americans.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/21/opinion/tax-cuts-for-the-rich-by-another-name.html

6.  John Cassidy: There is No Trump Doctrine, Only Contradictions and Bluster

In calling Kim Jong Un “Rocket Man” and threatening to turn North Korea into a radioactive ashtray, Trump was presumably trying to goad the North Korean leader into opening negotiations about an agreement to denuclearize the Korean peninsula. But, immediately after his remarks about North Korea, Trump signalled his intention to tear up the nuclear deal that the Obama Administration reached with Iran—despite the fact that the other countries that signed the agreement—France, Germany, the United Kingdom, China, and Russia—all insist that Tehran is living up to its terms. Not only is Trump “courting a second major nonproliferation crisis, but he is putting a negotiated solution to reduce the North Korean threat even further out of reach,” Kingston Reif, an expert at the Arms Control Association, told Vox. “If Trump unravels the deal, Kim will understandably conclude that the United States can’t be counted on to live up to any agreement he might strike with it.”

We can assume that Trump’s sensible advisers recognize that the President was undercutting his own efforts to deal with Kim. Evidently, they have given up trying to impose some over-all coherence on his utterances. Trump hates being managed. The best they can do is to inject some reassuring passages into Trump’s script and hope that he doesn’t veer to far off it, and that nobody takes everything else he says too seriously. This is the man, after all, who during the campaign promised to bring U.S. troops home from Afghanistan, withdraw from nafta, and label China a currency manipulator.

It’s become a truism with Trump: watch what he does, not what he says. This week at the U.N., many countries have adopted this approach. Among America’s allies, the responses to Trump’s General Assembly address were muted. The countries Trump referred to as “the wicked few” reacted more pointedly, but on the whole they were dismissive. The North Korean foreign minister, who is in New York, likened the speech to “the sound of a dog barking,” adding that if Trump thought he could “scare us . . . that’s really a dog’s dream.”

As a columnist for the People’s Daily, an official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, noted, the “risky game of chicken” between Trump and Kim continues. On Thursday, Trump, after meeting with President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, announced that he is extending U.S. sanctions on individuals and firms that do business with Pyongyang. This move seemed to indicate that for now, at least, he is sticking to the diplomatic path. But that raised the question of how much of his fiery rhetoric is brinksmanship, and how much of it is real. The scary thing is, nobody knows for sure. Perhaps not even the President himself.  https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/there-is-no-trump-doctrine-only-contradictions-and-bluster

7. Bloomberg Editorial: Trump Strikes a False Note at the United Nations

For President Donald Trump, apparently, encouraging greater international cooperation is not as important as getting off a good insult. In his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Trump threatened to "totally destroy North Korea" in the event of war and repeated his latest derogatory nickname for its leader, Kim Jong Un: "Rocket Man."

Trump's rhetoric, as well as his many references to the importance of sovereignty, will strike a chord with his American base of support. Before this audience, however, the style was inappropriate -- and the substance was puzzling. If the UN is such a threat to the sovereignty of its largest funder, for example, why has the U.S. seen fit to veto only one out of more than 600 United Nations Security Council Resolutions in the last 10 years?

Moreover, the scorn in Trump's speech for "unaccountable international tribunals and powerful global bureaucracies" ignores the reality that, at their best, the thousands of multilateral agreements the U.S. has signed have helped it meet challenges to sovereignty that no nation can meet by itself: the spread of communicable diseases, corruption, or weapons of mass destruction, for example. The existential threat of climate change -- which Trump failed to mention -- is another case in point.

With his focus on sovereignty, Trump also downplayed the UN's role as a force for spreading universal values, something that its American creators championed. Trump even saw fit to praise the U.S. Constitution's "first three beautiful words" -- neglecting to note that the UN Charter begins with a deliberate echo, "We the peoples."

It's all well and good to celebrate the contributions of "strong, sovereign nations" and to say that "we do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone." But if you're going to take on North Korea, Iran and Venezuela -- or counter the influence of opaque autocracies like China and Russia -- then it makes sense to start by pressing them to live up to the founding ideals of the charter.

None of this is to say that the UN doesn’t need reform, which Trump to his credit pushed for. He was also right to draw forceful attention to the growing threats posed by Iran, North Korea and Venezuela.

But his overheated speech will make mustering support for both causes harder. Threatening a country with annihilation won't hearten its neighbors. And undermining the founding principles of an institution your nation did more than any other to establish won't help it to fulfill its promise.  https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-20/trump-strikes-a-false-note-at-the-united-nations

8. David Remnick: The Racial Demagoguery of Trump’s Assaults on Colin Kaepernick and Steph Curry

Every day, and in countless and unexpected ways, Donald Trump, the President of the United States, finds new ways to divide and demoralize his country and undermine the national interest. On Tuesday, he ranted from the lectern of the U.N. General Assembly about “Rocket Man” and the possibility of levelling North Korea. Now he has followed with an equally unhinged domestic performance at a rally, on Friday evening, in Huntsville, Alabama, where he set out to make African-American athletes the focus of national contempt.

What Trump is up to with this assault on athletes, particularly prominent black ones, is obvious; it is part of his larger culture war. Divide. Inflame. Confuse. Divert. And rule. He doesn’t care to grapple with complexity of any kind, whether it’s about the environment, or foreign affairs, or race, or the fact that a great American sport may, by its very nature, be irredeemable. Rather than embody any degree of dignity, knowledge, or unifying embrace, Trump is a man of ugliness, and the damage he does, speech after speech, tweet after tweet, deepens like a coastal shelf. Every day, his Presidency takes a toll on our national fabric. How is it possible to argue with the sentiment behind LeBron James’s concise tweet at Trump: “U Bum”? It isn’t.  https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-racial-demagoguery-of-trumps-assaults-on-colin-kaepernick-and-steph-curry

9. NY Times Editorial: Mr. Trump Squanders the World’s Trust

At a crucial moment, Donald Trump is forcing the world to confront core questions it really shouldn’t have to ask: Can he be trusted? And, more saliently, can America be trusted? His threats to jettison the Iran nuclear deal are undermining America’s credibility as a negotiating partner and weakening America’s ability to lead the free world as it has for 70 years.

In his rush to bulldoze President Obama’s accomplishments, Mr. Trump has withdrawn from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, leaving China with a freer hand to set trade rules in Asia; abandoned the hard-won 195-nation Paris Agreement to address climate change; and sowed grave doubts about his commitment to NATO, the bedrock alliance that has kept peace in Europe after World War II.

A bellicose stance toward Iran is just one part of the incoherent and inconsistent foreign policy that Mr. Trump described to the United Nations General Assembly. He elevated “sovereignty” as his guiding principle for international relations and used it as a rationale for threatening Iran, North Korea and Venezuela, then gave kid glove treatment to Russia — which has not only seized territory from Ukraine but has also sought to undermine America’s own sovereignty — and China, which has expanded its territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Given the standard that Mr. Trump is setting for foreign policy reversals, his own decisions could eventually be overturned by his successor. But the damage to America’s standing as a trusted, reliable partner won’t be so easily repaired.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/23/opinion/sunday/trump-trust-iran-korea.html

10. Pete Vernon: Dancing around the word ‘racist’ in coverage of Trump

Words matter, particularly when they are used to address the most divisive and politically fraught issue in America. But accurate reporting requires dealing honestly with the context of the situation. A president who launched his campaign with racist comments about Mexican immigrants, who built his political profile on the racist lie that Barack Obama was not born in America, and who saw “fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville last month has provided the evidence necessary to move beyond circumlocution.

A year ago, big media orgs like the NYT faced facts and called Trump a liar on the front page. It's time to use the word racist, too.

Trump’s history of racism is long and well documented. He and his father, Fred Trump, were sued by the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division in the the 1970s for discriminatory rental practices. (The Trumps and their company entered into a consent decree in which they admitted no wrongdoing, but agreed to several safeguards to ensure no discrimination in rental decisions occurred in the future.) In 1989, Trump took out full page ads in four New York City newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty so that it could be applied to the black and Latino teenagers known at the Central Park Five. Even after they were exonerated using DNA evidence, Trump refused to admit his error.

As The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb writes, “It’s impossible not to be struck by Trump’s selective patriotism. It drives him to curse at black football players but leaves him struggling to create false equivalence between Nazis and anti-Fascists in Charlottesville.” Trump’s attacks against Kaepernick, other black athletes, and ESPN sportscaster Jemele Hill are of a piece with previous actions in both his private and political life. Over the weekend, Cobb’s colleague David Remnick wrote of Trump’s speech in Alabama, “It is no longer a matter of ‘dog whistling.’ This is a form of racial demagoguerybroadcast at the volume of a klaxon.”

Opinion writers and columnists have long felt free to label Trump’s words for what they are. Given the surfeit of evidence, of which his castigation of NFL players is only the latest piece, it’s time for reporters to do the same.  https://www.cjr.org/covering_trump/trump-racism.php

11. David Brooks: The Abbie Hoffman of the Right: Donald Trump

The members of the educated class saw this past weekend’s N.F.L. fracas as a fight over racism. They felt mobilized and unified in that fight and full of righteous energy. Members of the working class saw the fracas as a fight about American identity. They saw Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin try to dissuade Alejandro Villanueva, a three-time combat veteran, from celebrating the flag he risked his life for. Members of this class also felt mobilized, unified and full of righteous energy.

I don’t know which planet is bigger, or which would win an election, but that frankly doesn’t matter. All that matters is that Trump is shredding the culture and ending the dominance of the meritocratic establishment.

He continually goes after racial matters in part because he’s a bigot but also in part because multiculturalism is the theology of the educated class and it’s the leverage point he can most effectively use to isolate the educated class from everyone else.

He is so destructive because his enemies help him. He ramps up the aggression. His enemies ramp it up more, to preserve their own dignity. But the ensuing cultural violence only serves Trump’s long-term destructive purpose. America is seeing nearly as much cultural conflict as it did in the late 1960s. It’s quite possible that after four years of this Trump will have effectively destroyed the prevailing culture. The reign of the meritocratic establishment will be just as over as the reign of the Protestant establishment now is.

Of course Donald Trump is a buffoon. Buffoonery is his most effective weapon. Because of him, a new culture will have to be built, new values promulgated and a new social fabric will have to be woven, one that brings the different planets back into relation with one another.

That’s the work of the next 20 years.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/opinion/abbie-hoffman-donald-trump.html

12. Christine Brennan: Donald Trump missed the memo: Don't pick on football players

Let it be noted that Trump mustered more anger Friday over Kaepernick’s personal decision to not stand for the anthem than he did for the neo-Nazis and white Supremacists who marched in Charlottesville’s deadly protest last month.

And this is as good a time as any to mention that Kaepernick is reported to be very close to completing his goal of donating $1 million to charity.

Trump’s other rant -- against the NFL’s attempts to make football safer -- could not have been more ill-timed. 

“They’re ruining the game, right? They’re ruining the game,” Trump bellowed just a day after it was announced that Aaron Hernandez, the former New England tight end who hanged himself in his jail cell after being convicted of murder, had a severe form of CTE, the debilitating brain disease, at the very young age of 27.

One wonders how such comments play in living rooms across the nation, where parents continue to grapple with their son’s (and the occasional daughter’s) interest in playing such a popular and violent game that both delights and scares the masses. 

This isn't just an issue about calling penalties in the NFL. It's about the safety and long-term well-being of millions of young American athletes.

The President of the United States couldn't have cared less about that Friday night.  https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/columnist/brennan/2017/09/23/donald-trump-missed-memo-dont-pick-football-players/696420001/

13. Dana Milbank: The sad suspicion about Trump’s shameful treatment of Puerto Rico

Adm. Paul Zukunft, the Coast Guard commandant, said Monday that he understands why Puerto Rico’s residents feel forgotten. “They feel isolated, and they’re probably getting a sense of betrayal, of, well, ‘Where is the cavalry?’ ” Zukunft said.

Good question. Phillip Carter, a military specialist with the Center for a New American Security, likening Trump’s “anemic” response in Puerto Rico to President George W. Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina. Carter told me Puerto Rico conservatively needs a response of 50,000 U.S. troops. Even Haiti — a foreign country — got the help of more than 20,000 troops after its 2010 earthquake.

“The response to Harvey and Irma and previous disasters has been much more substantial,” Carter said. Trump, he said, “is more interested in the NFL than Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.”

No question the logistics are harder in Puerto Rico. But the 3.4 million U.S. citizens there have long endured second-class status: no voting members of Congress, no presidential vote, unequal benefits and high poverty. Now, the Trump administration’s failure to help Americans in Puerto Rico with the same urgency it gave those in Texas and Florida furthers a sad suspicion that the disparate treatment has less to do with logistics than language and skin color.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-sad-suspicion-about-trumps-poor-treatment-of-puerto-rico/2017/09/26/5a54cde4-a2ef-11e7-8cfe-d5b912fabc99_story.html