1. John Cassidy: The White House’s New Budget Exposes Donald Trump’s Lies About Protecting Medicare and Medicaid

I’ve noted before that Donald Trump lives by a famous dictum from Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist: “When one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it.” (Goebbels attributed this tactic to the English.) And the President has outdone himself with his Administration’s new budget proposal for the 2020 fiscal year, which is entitled “A Budget for a Better America:. Promises Kept. Taxpayers First.”

Promises kept” has a particularly nice ring to it. Almost as nice as what Trump said on that fateful day, June 16, 2015, when he descended the escalator at Trump Tower. “Save Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security without cuts,” he declared. “Have to do it.” Throughout the Republican primary campaign, Trump repeated this pledge many times and also accused his G.O.P. opponents of wanting to slash the three big entitlement programs. In the general-election campaign, he stuck to the same mantra. A few days before Election Day, he suggested that Hillary Clinton wanted to “destroy” Medicare, the public health-care system for the elderly, which she had vowed to expand, and claimed that he alone would “protect” it.

So how does the “Budget for a Better America” treat Medicare and the other programs that Trump vowed to safeguard at all costs? By calling for even larger cuts to them than the White House proposed this time last year, when it formally abandoned Trump’s campaign pledges. The budget for the 2019 fiscal year called for five hundred and fifty billion dollars in cuts to Medicare over ten years. With the budget deficit skyrocketing as a consequence of the Trump-G.O.P. tax bill, the 2020 budget would reduce spending on Medicare by eight hundred and forty-five billion dollars over the next decade. Even in Washington, that’s a lot of money.

No surprise there, you might say. It’s been clear from the beginning that Trump was selling snake oil and that his pledge to protect the safety net was about as valuable as a certificate from Trump University. But it is instructive, nonetheless, to see his mendacity expressed in cold numbers, and it also raises an interesting political question. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-white-houses-new-budget-exposes-donald-trumps-lies-about-protecting-medicare-and-medicaid

2. Greg Sargent: Trump’s emerging reelection strategy: Double down on failure and lies

It is not my purpose here to predict that Trump will lose. He very well could win reelection. Trump will retain some advantages of incumbency, and as David Byler notes, it might not take that much to nudge his approval into reelection territory, particularly if the economy remains relatively good.

Instead, I want to highlight a crucial difference between 2016 and 2020 in light of Trump’s vow to run again on his virulent nationalism. The difference this time is that the American electorate has seen what this means in practice and has recoiled.

In 2016, one could squint at Trump’s nationalist immigration and trade policies and see a different kind of Republican, one who wasn’t in thrall to conventional GOP economic orthodoxy. This was surely helped by Trump’s vows to bring health-care coverage to everybody, to protect social insurance for the elderly and to take on economic elites.

But now the horrors of Trump’s immigration agenda have been vividly illustrated for all to see. The results: Immigrant children in cages, families broken up by deportations, mass protests over his thinly veiled Muslim ban and a wall obsession that’s nothing short of pathological. All this surely drove away swing voters in the midterms — Trump made those elections all about his immigration agenda — yet Trump appears unable to grasp that this rejection happened.

Beyond this, though, Trump’s economic nationalism is failing. Asylum-seeking families have spiked, unmasking cruel deterrence as an unnecessary and ineffective disaster. This is also true on trade: The trade deficit in goods has ballooned, a huge pratfall by his own (demented) metric. Trade wars have not proved “good and easy to win” because the issue turns out to be far more complicated than he ever allowed. Now he’ll probably make a face-saving deal with China, getting few concessions even as all the damage this has done is unlikely to be forgotten.

On top of all that, Trump went all in with GOP economic orthodoxy, trying to strip health care from millions and signing an enormous tax giveaway to corporations, both of which have proved deeply unpopular, and also helped fuel the GOP loss in the midterms.

In short, Trump’s economic nationalist agenda has proved to be both a failure and a fraud. This is the prism through which swing voters will likely judge his promise of four more years of the same. Yet Trump appears certain that for those voters, he can make 2020 all about the Democrats’ alleged “socialism,” and not about his own disastrous presidency. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/03/11/trumps-emerging-reelection-strategy-double-down-failure-lies/

3. Max Boot: Trump is turning U.S. foreign policy into a protection racket

With his diatribes against witnesses who cooperate with the government — “flippers” and “rats” — President Trump has become notorious for speaking like a mob boss. He is acting like one, too, turning U.S. foreign policy into a protection racket and soldiers into a strong-arm squad that needs to be paid off — or else.

Bloomberg News reports that, at the president’s insistence, the administration is formulating plans to demand a vast increase in the subsidies that allies pay to support U.S. forces on their soil. Trump wants countries such as Germany, Japan, and South Korea to pay the entire cost of those deployments — plus 50 percent! This “Cost Plus 50” formula would require those nations to pay five or six times as much as they currently do — and they currently pay a lot. Germany, for example, contributes $1 billion a year, representing 28 percent of the cost of 35,000 U.S. personnel based there.

Trump just got Seoul to increase its cost-sharing from $830 million to $924 million, representing more than 40 percent of the cost of keeping 28,000 U.S. troops in South Korea. But that’s only a one-year deal, so expect another bruising renegotiation with South Korea — and other allies. Trump has already been browbeating NATO countries to spend more on defense, apparently under the mistaken impression that the money will be paid to the U.S. Treasury rather than to their own defense ministries.

There is nothing novel or wrong about asking allies to pay more; past administrations have done so for decades. But unlike his predecessors, Trump shows no awareness of the benefits that the United States derives from its deployments. He is acting like a landlord demanding a rent increase from deadbeat tenants.

The U.S.-led international order has been so successful for so long, that Americans have come to take it for granted.” They’re right — and the proof is in Trump’s determination to mess with success. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/03/11/trump-is-turning-us-foreign-policy-into-protection-racket/

4. Jonathan Chait: Mueller’s Case for Collusion: A Preview

Trump’s efforts to obstruct justice have been so persistent and flagrant that his supporters have hardly bothered to deny it. Instead they have presented obstruction as a “process crime,” a runner-up prize sought by Mueller in lieu of finding proof of true wrongdoing.

But the real wrongdoing is rampant and sitting in front of our faces. And the obstruction is the reason no conclusion Mueller reaches can clear Trump of all suspicion. If the president were innocent, or if he wanted his critics to concede his relationship with Russia broke no laws, he could have encouraged his allies to cooperate with the investigation. But obstructing the investigation, while making it harder to produce evidence of criminality, makes it impossible to produce exoneration. Trump, using his pardon power, persuaded the two campaign staffers in closest touch with Russia’s campaign operations, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, to shut their mouths.

Trump has prevailed upon his underlings to lie and lie and lie about every aspect of his financial and political dealings with Russia. They have conceded nothing voluntarily, admitting only that which has been proven (and sometimes not even that), replacing old lies with new ones. They are hiding a corrupt relationship with Vladimir Putin’s gangster state. All that remains to be learned is details. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/russia-trump-mueller-report-collusion-corruption-guilty.html

5.  Eric Levitz: Of Course Democrats Shouldn’t Let Fox News Host a Primary Debate

The Democratic National Committee has decided that it will not allow a Republican propaganda outfit known for fomenting racial paranoia, facilitating serial sexual assault — and directly advising the GOP president— to host any of the Democratic Party’s 2020 primary debates.

Not that Democrats didn’t consider doing so. As DNC chair Tom Perez said in a statement Wednesday, “I believe that a key pathway to victory is to continue to expand our electorate and reach all voters. That is why I have made it a priority to talk to a broad array of potential media partners, including Fox News.”

But, Perez continued, “Recent reporting in the New Yorker on the inappropriate relationship between President Trump, his administration and Fox News has led me to conclude that the network is not in a position to host a fair and neutral debate for our candidates.”

How Perez could have possibly been unaware of this “inappropriate relationship” before reading Jane Mayer’s latest bombshell is unclear. Nevertheless, The New Yorker article does make said impropriety undeniable. In it, Mayer reveals that, in 2016, a Fox reporter named Diana Falzone had acquired hard evidence of both Trump’s affair with Stormy Daniels and his efforts to buy her silence — only to have an editor kill her story, telling her, in so many words, “Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win.” After the mogul’s victory, the network demoted Falzone. She then sued, and won a settlement that included a nondisclosure agreement.

There are many things you can call a media organization that punishes its employees for digging up stories that are politically inconvenient for the Republican Party — “a legitimate news network” is not one of them.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/dnc-wont-let-fox-news-host-2020-democratic-primary-debate.html

6. Jonathan Bernstein: John Bolton Shows the Dangers of a Weak President

Just how weak a president has Donald Trump become? For an illustration, see a terrific Washington Post article on the foreign-policy decision-making process since John Bolton became Trump’s national security adviser. Or, rather, the absence of anything resembling a process.

When a weak president – or, as with Reagan, a president with significant flaws – doesn’t have a James Baker around, the administration can turn into a free-for-all, with White House staffers and executive-branch personnel pursuing their own preferences, protecting their turf, and generally disrupting the policy process. That seems to be what happened to George W. Bush in the run-up to the Iraq War; whatever his own views, he was ill-served by everyone, from Vice President Dick Cheney on down, who failed to present him with honest options and instead used bureaucratic skills to lock in the choices they wanted. Similarly, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both suffered from foreign-policy inexperience, especially early in their presidencies, and made mistakes as a result.

For Trump, the problem is worse. Even if he wanted to replace Bolton, there’s only a tiny pool of people who are both qualified for the job and willing to work in this White House. Which is yet another consequence of presidential weakness: He can’t persuade many people to work for him. And if Trump is getting rolled in an area where presidents have unusually strong authority – in their capacity as commanders-in-chief – imagine how he’s faring in other policy areas. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-06/john-bolton-is-exploiting-donald-trump-s-weakness

7. Ed Kilgore: For Republicans, Attacking Ilhan Omar Is a Many-Splendored Thing

The interminable brouhaha over U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar’s dubious if murky comments on the reasons for reflexive U.S. support for Israel is obviously a problem for Democrats who aren’t sure whether to criticize her or defend her. But for Republicans, its benefits are almost endless, which is why they are exploiting it for all it’s worth.

All in all, it’s clear Ilhan Omar had a bull’s-eye on her back from practically the moment she entered Congress. To be sure, she’s contributed to her own misfortune with clumsy and sinister-sounding characterizations of Israel supporters. But she’s just too convenient a devil figure for Republicans to be much of anything else for the time being. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/four-reasons-republicans-are-keeping-the-heat-on-ilhan-omar.html

8. Michael Signer: Yes, Trump is undignified. Demagogues have to be.

A textbook demagogue meets four tests. First, he identifies as a man of the masses, usually by attacking elites. Second, he creates great waves of passion. Third, he uses that passion for political benefit. Fourth, he tests or breaks established rules of governance. Taken together, this approach enables the demagogue to create a state within a state — a massive cult — that follows him alone.

Trump is the first demagogue to actually become president, but American history has seen a lot of them, whether the segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace, the Wisconsin senator and communist-chaser Joseph McCarthy, the Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long, or the Detroit “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin. World history has seen Mussolini and Hitler and, more recently, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus.

All of these figures were called undignified by critics who thought their antics could not succeed because they should not succeed.

What Trump understands is that millions of Americans feel left behind by our politics. They are frustrated by everything about conventional politics, including the expectation that traditional rules like decency and dignified behavior will help solve their problems. They are ripe for a demagogue. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/yes-trump-is-undignified-demagogues-have-to-be/2019/03/08/bd8d8d9c-4109-11e9-a0d3-1210e58a94cf_story.html

9. Jonathan Chait: Instead of a New Press Chief, Trump Could Try Committing Fewer Crimes

In a development that comes as a surprise to nobody, White House communications director, Bill Shine, has decided to spend more time with his family and less time being humiliated by Donald Trump. Trump’s first communications director, Sean Spicer, blew up his credibility on day one by following Trump’s orders to tell the national press corps that Trump pulled the largest inaugural crowd in history. In February 2017, Spicer gave the communications director job to William Dubke, who gave it back to Spicer when he resigned in May. On July 21, Spicer was replaced by Anthony Scaramucci, who left after ten days, and was replaced in August by Hope Hicks, who resigned last February, in favor of Shine last July.

Throughout these five or six (depending on how you count Spicer’s two nonconsecutive terms) press chiefs, Trump has had consistently abysmal coverage in the non-party-controlled media. Trump has analyzed the pattern and identified the one constant: His many communications directors keep somehow failing to get the media to show what an honest, well-informed, compassionate president he truly is.

It’s just possible that Trump’s communications directors aren’t the problem. It’s presumably difficult to generate a lot of positive press attention when you’re the subject of so many different criminal and ethical investigations that your best single communications asset is the media’s inability to keep track of them all. Eliminating all the crimes would be a big ask, but maybe Trump should consider doing fewer? http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/bill-shine-fired-trump-communications-director.html

10. Washington Post Editorial: She exposed Russian trolling. Her award for her work was rescinded after she criticized Trump.

LONG BEFORE fears erupted in the United States about Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign, Jessikka Aro, an investigative journalist in Finland, was poking around an unusual company in St. Petersburg, the Internet Research Agency. In early 2015, she identified the building that housed the firm, and by looking at job advertisements and building on earlier reporting by Russian journalists, Ms. Aro identified the Russian online troll factory.

After she reported her findings on the Finnish broadcasting company YLE, she was mercilessly attacked by the same Russian trolls. One troll activist filmed her appearance at a journalism seminar, then posted video online ridiculing every sentence she said in the seminar. “This discrediting method is used almost every time I appear on TV or radio,” she said in a retrospective about living as a Russian troll magnet, subject to vicious hate and abuse, which also spread online. “I was accused of engaging in information warfare, distributing American propaganda and waging war,” she recalled.

One posting that called her and a colleague “media prostitutes” was spread to 16 Facebook pages that mostly disseminate news from the Russian propaganda outlet Sputnik. Their faces were illustrated with a graphic that was a hybrid of the NATO logo and a swastika. Another time, “I received a text message from a person pretending to be my father, who died 20 years ago. My ‘father’ told me in the message he’s not dead, but ‘observing me.’ ”

What Ms. Aro exposed in St. Petersburg was ground zero for the Russian mischief campaign against the 2016 presidential election, according to an indictment subsequently returned in the United States. The troll factory was funded by one of President Vladimir Putin’s cronies, Yevgeniy Viktorovich Prigozhin.

For her journalism, Ms. Aro was informed in January by the State Department that she was to be one of the winners of this year’s International Women of Courage Award, presented Thursday by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and first lady Melania Trump.

The award has been given since 2007 to women around the world who have “demonstrated exceptional courage and leadership in advocating for peace, justice, human rights, gender equality, and women’s empowerment, often at great personal risk and sacrifice.” Ms. Aro got a formal invitation from the State Department on Feb. 12, and a tour around the United States was envisioned.

However, according to Foreign Policy magazine, which broke the story, the State Department then wrote to Ms. Aro to rescind the award, saying there had been a “regrettable error.” In fact, Foreign Policy reported, the award was rescinded because Ms. Aro had criticized President Trump on social media. It wasn’t clear who made the decision. But it is in keeping with a president who has set the tone of prizing loyalty and personal sycophancy over wisdom and vision. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/she-exposed-russian-trolling-her-award-for-her-work-was-rescinded-after-she-criticized-trump/2019/03/08/1bbdc4f8-41ba-11e9-9361-301ffb5bd5e6_story.html

11. Ed Kilgore: Trump Owns the Swamp Now, and It’s Awash in Lobbyists

One of the catchier, if vague, slogans of the Trump campaign in 2016 was “Drain the Swamp!” which normally was interpreted as meaning an attack on special interest influence of government policy-making via lobbyists. But that wasn’t so clear given the fact that Trump borrowed it from Ronald Reagan, who meant it to involve getting rid of “wasteful” federal programs, i.e., those that conservatives didn’t like.

The first tip-off that “Drain the Swamp” didn’t mean an ethics crusade came from the composition of Trump’s post-election transition team, which was thickly larded with lobbyists (in sharp contrast with what the supposed corrupt insider Hillary Clinton had planned: a ban on any lobbyists on the transition team). 

Now a bit over half-way through Trump’s first term, the liberal group American Bridge 21st Century has supplied the Washington Post with a list of lobbyists on Team Trump, and it’s formidable:

Data provided to The Post…identifies over 350 individuals who’ve worked as lobbyists who currently work in the administration, have worked in it or have been nominated to serve in Trump’s administration. Cumulatively, they’ve represented more than 2,800 companies at one point or another, according to lobbying registration documents. Nearly 200 of them now served or have been nominated to serve in divisions of government that they once lobbied.

Most of these people are not as famous (or infamous) as, say, the former oil industry shill and coal lobbyist who have serially run the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump. But 350 ex-lobbyists represent a lot of special interests. And their greatest concentration, the Post notes, is in the Executive Office of the President, where 47 ex-lobbyists toil to set policy for the entire federal government. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/350-lobbyists-swimming-in-trumps-swamp.html

12. NY Times Editorial: Only One Roadblock on the Road to Reform: Mitch McConnell

With the conspicuous perversion of the political system on daily display, congressional Democrats are eager to brand themselves the party of reform. They took another step in this direction on Friday, when the House voted 234-to-193 — along straight party lines — to pass the For the People Act, a sweeping package of proposals aimed at rooting out political corruption and shoring up the integrity of the electoral system.

The bill is the Democrats’ chief policy priority and covers close to 700 pages. H.R. 1, as it is officially known, seeks, among other reforms, to strengthen ethics laws for lawmakers and lobbyists, increase voting access, improve voting security, tighten campaign finance laws and create an alternative campaign-finance system geared toward small donors.

To advance the bill, Democratic leaders had to work through more than 70 proposed amendments. Some were embraced, including several aimed at spotlighting questionable behavior in the Trump administration. One, for instance, bars federal money from being spent at businesses owned or controlled by the president or other top administration officials. Others were rejected, including a plan to lower the voting age to 16.

As a sign of Democrats’ commitment to a cause that helped power its takeover of the House, the bill’s passage was an important achievement. As a practical legislative matter, it’s a bit of a hollow victory. As fired up as Democrats are to shake up the system, Republicans are perhaps even more fired up to stop them.

The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has been openly hostile to the anticorruption package since its inception. This week he made clear that he would refuse even to bring it up for a vote. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/opinion/mcconnell-hr1-democrats-ethics-voting-rights.html

13. Jonathan Chait: Brexit and Trumpism Have Failed Because Conservative Populism Is a Lie

“They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT!,” announced Donald Trump in the summer of 2016. Before long, Trump was calling himself that, after appearing at a rally with Nigel Farage, one of its champions.

The association with Brexit burnished Trump’s self-styled (and utterly fabricated) reputation as a soothsayer. More importantly, the connection seemed to confirm that Trump represented something larger: a wave of conservative populism sweeping the Western world.

And yet the collapse of Brexit, yet again, reveals another, less flattering commonality. Conservative populism has utterly failed to translate the political impulses behind them into a plausible governing agenda. It is a visceral reaction against multiculturalism and modernity that has not only failed to produce concrete solutions for its supporters, but doesn’t even know what to ask for. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/brexit-trump-conservative-populism.html