1. Glenn R. Simpson and Peter Fritschjan (Founders of the research firm Fusion GPS): The Republicans’ Fake Investigations

A generation ago, Republicans sought to protect President Richard Nixon by urging the Senate Watergate committee to look at supposed wrongdoing by Democrats in previous elections. The committee chairman, Sam Ervin, a Democrat, said that would be “as foolish as the man who went bear hunting and stopped to chase rabbits.”

Today, amid a growing criminal inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, congressional Republicans are again chasing rabbits. We know because we’re their favorite quarry.

In the year since the publication of the so-called Steele dossier — the collection of intelligence reports we commissioned about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — the president has repeatedly attacked us on Twitter. His allies in Congress have dug through our bank records and sought to tarnish our firm to punish us for highlighting his links to Russia. Conservative news outlets and even our former employer, The Wall Street Journal, have spun a succession of mendacious conspiracy theories about our motives and backers.

The intelligence committees have known for months that credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia were pouring in from independent sources during the campaign. Yet lawmakers in the thrall of the president continue to wage a cynical campaign to portray us as the unwitting victims of Kremlin disinformation.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/opinion/republicans-investigation-fusion-gps.html

2. Incoherent, authoritarian, uninformed: Trump’s New York Times interview is a scary read

The president of the United States is not well. That is an uncomfortable thing to say, but it is an even worse thing to ignore.

Trump does not know what he doesn’t know, and he overestimates what he does know

In psychology, there’s an idea known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. It refers to research by David Dunning and Justin Kruger that found the least competent people often believe they are the most competent because they “lack the very expertise needed to recognize how badly they’re doing.” This dynamic helps explain comments like the one Trump makes here.

I’ve talked to policy experts who have sat in the Oval Office explaining their ideas to the president and to members of Congress who have listened to the president sell his ideas to them. I’ve talked to both Democrats and Republicans who have occupied these roles. In all cases, their judgment of Trump is identical: He is not just notably uninformed but also notably difficult to inform — his attention span is thin, he hears what he wants to hear, he wanders off topic, he has trouble following complex arguments. Trump has trouble following his briefings or even correctly repeating what he has heard.  https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/29/16829806/trump-interview-new-york-times

3. Juan Williams: GOP will suffer for tax giveaway

With so much money concentrated in the hands of so few Americans, it is no wonder that polls show the GOP tax bill is wildly unpopular, with support ranging in major polls only from 26 to 32 percent.

“Don’t let your Uncle Bob be fooled: Republicans are voting for this because their wealthy patrons demand it,” former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote last week on his website. “Their tax plan will weaken our economy for years — reducing demand, widening inequality, and increasing the national debt by at least $1.5 trillion over the next decade.” 

And now for the political fall-out:

Before the tax cut vote, Democrats led Republicans on the generic Congressional preference ballot question by 15 points. Fifty-one percent said they would vote or lean towards voting Democratic, while just 36 percent said the same about Republicans, according to Monmouth University.

Look for those numbers to sink even lower when Trump voters realize they’ve been had. They were sold a bill of goods by his party when they voted for Trump-style economic populism in 2016.  http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/366398-juan-williams-gop-will-suffer-for-tax-giveaway

4. Joe Scarborough: A Storm Is Gathering

A storm is gathering, and there is every reason to believe that 2018 will be the most consequential political year of our lives.

The reckoning upon us follows a year mercifully drawing to a close this weekend. Over that horrid year, President Trump has questioned the legitimacy of federal judges, used Stalinist barbs to attack the free press and cast contempt on the rule of law, while his campaign manager, his national security adviser and a foreign policy aide have been marched into federal courts. Those anti-democratic instincts were made all the more ominous by his praising of autocrats across the world as they were ruthlessly consolidating power in countries such as Russia, China and the Philippines.

It is difficult to pinpoint the nadir for a man who has savaged Mexicans, Muslims and Gold Star mothers while fat-shaming beauty queens and face-shaming female news hosts (disclosure: in the latter example, my own fiancee ). But the low moment in this presidency may have occurred four months ago, when Trump claimed a moral equivalency between neo-Nazis and those standing against them. Or perhaps it was three weeks ago, when the president told Americans to vote for an accused child molester who had called our country the focus of evil in the modern world and once suggested opposition to the constitutional amendments that ended slavery and gave women the right to vote.

Others would surely consider the president’s malignant idiocy in foreign affairs to be the most damning legacy of his first year. World leaders continue to watch dumbstruck as the United States retreats from organizations that were created following the allies’ victory over Hitler. Those same alliances that Trump now undermines with reckless tweets and discarded treaties carried the United States to victory in the Cold War. But this is a White House that heaps contempt on history. And so, America’s dangerous retreat from the world continues.

This president is ripping apart the carefully woven fabric of U.S. foreign policy that bound administrations together from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, and across the American century.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-storm-is-gathering/2017/12/28/a03dc436-ec01-11e7-b698-91d4e35920a3_story.html

5. Mark Landler: Trump, The Insurgent, Breaks With 70 Years Of American Foreign Policy

Nearly a year into his presidency, Mr. Trump remains an erratic, idiosyncratic leader on the global stage, an insurgent who attacks allies the United States has nurtured since World War II and who can seem more at home with America’s adversaries. His Twitter posts, delivered without warning or consultation, often make a mockery of his administration’s policies and subvert the messages his emissaries are trying to deliver abroad.

Mr. Trump has pulled out of trade and climate change agreements and denounced the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. He has broken with decades of American policy in the Middle East by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. And he has taunted Kim Jong-un of North Korea as “short and fat,” fanning fears of war on the peninsula.

He has assiduously cultivated President Xi Jinping of China and avoided criticizing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — leaders of the two countries that his own national security strategy calls the greatest geopolitical threats to America.

Above all, Mr. Trump has transformed the world’s view of the United States from a reliable anchor of the liberal, rules-based international order into something more inward-looking and unpredictable. That is a seminal change from the role the country has played for 70 years, under presidents from both parties, and it has lasting implications for how other countries chart their futures.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/us/politics/trump-world-diplomacy.html

6. Michael Grunwald: Donald Trump Is a Consequential President. Just Not in the Ways You Think.

The most consequential aspect of President Trump—like the most consequential aspect of Candidate Trump—has been his relentless shattering of norms: norms of honesty, decency, diversity, strategy, diplomacy and democracy, norms of what presidents are supposed to say and do when the world is and isn’t watching. As I keep arguing in these periodic Trump reviews, it’s a mistake to describe his all-caps rage-tweeting or his endorsement of an accused child molester or his threats to wipe out “Little Rocket Man” as unpresidential, because he’s the president. He’s by definition presidential. The norms he’s shattered are by definition no longer norms. His erratic behavior isn’t normal, but it’s inevitably becoming normalized, a predictably unpredictable feature of our political landscape. It’s how we live now, checking our phones in the morning to get a read on the president’s mood. The American economy is still strong, and he hasn’t started any new wars, so pundits have focused a lot of their hand-wringing on the effect his norm-shattering will have on future leaders, who will be able to cite the Trump precedent if they want to hide their tax returns or use their office to promote their businesses or fire FBI directors who investigate them. But Trump still has three years left in his term. And the norms he’s shattered can’t constrain his behavior now that he’s shattered them.  https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/12/30/rating-donald-trump-year-one-2017-216199

7. Ryan Cooper: The American empire is crumbling

Because of Trump, our own addle-brained, would-be dictator, and Western powers are dealing with the shocking possibility that America is best considered an enemy. In his first foreign policy tour, while cozying up to the brutal Saudi monarchy, Trump offended Western European leaders for no reason, especially Angela Merkel, who said afterwards that "[t]he era in which we could rely completely on others are gone, at least partially." Trump also badly cracked the U.K. alliance simply by impulsively retweeting a British fascist, stoking fury across the country.

The American empire was built by people who recognized that often the best way to exert power was through non-coercive means. Trump represents a different tradition — a pinched, ignorant, aggressive, insecure tradition, one that insists only military force and chest-thumping belligerence matters.

As I said above, it is worth emphasizing the horrific carnage American imperialism has wreaked in places like Guatemala, Vietnam, or Iraq. But this kind of chaotic collapse is perhaps the worst of all worlds. The likeliest non-authoritarian nations to fill some of the power vacuum are Germany and France, but they are trapped in a grotesque failure of a currency areathat will sap their strength indefinitely. The real core of the U.S empire was always its decent relationship with Western countries, and so as that goes, so will the bulk of its power. But it will retain more than enough strength to completely wreck poor countries for the foreseeable future. The most obvious successor to the U.S. is China, and it's a safe bet that sort of empire will be no better than the American version — and perhaps worse in some ways.

Future presidents will have their work cut out for them just salvaging any sort of workable international system from the Trump disaster.  http://theweek.com/articles/745597/american-empire-crumbling

8. E.J. Dionne Jr.: This new year, tell Trump: Enough

Trump, not some ingenious new policy, will be the issue on voters’ minds, and opposition to him will be the most powerful force pushing voters to the polls. Yes, progressives should talk about Trump policies they would try to check or roll back — beginning with the GOP’s egregious tax giveaway — and work to make their ideas on health care, jobs, infrastructure, the environment and education more persuasive. But the point of 2018 is to meet the emergency this presidency has created.

Let’s not shilly-shally about this. To truly check Trump, Democrats will need to win elections in usually unfriendly territory. As my loyally Republican Post colleague Michael Gerson wrote recently, Republican politicians will abandon Trump only “if they see it as in their self-interest.” For this to happen, they will have “to watch a considerable number of their fellow Republicans lose.”

A campaign in defense of democracy that transcends immediate policy goals will make it easier for moderately conservative voters to do something a lot of them won’t relish: vote for a party they usually shun.

Since electoral politics is about addition rather than subtraction, progressives ought to welcome the anti-Trump conservatives without expecting them to alter all their views. Again, none of this requires the left to abandon its purposes. Many progressive positions on matters from health care and family leave to fairer taxation and workers’ rights are widely popular. The fact that revulsion over Trump has shaken loose many normally Republican voters can be embraced as an opportunity for dialogue and persuasion.

The priority of 2018 is for our nation to rise up and say: Enough.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-new-year-tell-trump-enough/2017/12/31/c5ffb092-ecc1-11e7-9f92-10a2203f6c8d_story.html