1. Amber Phillips: Lindsey Graham’s stunningly fact-free, pro-Trump spin of the Mueller report

There’s shading the truth to suit your message, and then there’s what Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) just did: completely forsaking the facts to play politics.

At Attorney General William P. Barr’s hearing on Wednesday, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee had a chance to clarify key issues related to Barr’s release of the Mueller report into Russian interference in the 2016 election and President Trump.

Instead, in his opening statement, Graham adopted a Trumpian-like worldview in which the president could do no wrong. Graham completely mischaracterized special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report and how damaging it was for Trump. He misstated key facts. He ignored reality and raised conspiracy theories about how the Russia investigation got started in the first place.

Even for a senator who has cozied up to the president and is up for reelection next year in a state that voted for Trump, the overtly pro-Trump display on Graham’s part was stunning. What Graham said in the opening moments of the Barr hearing was misleading and just not true.

In the opening moments of this hearing, Graham made his allegiances clear. He’s going to use his significant weight as head of this committee not to investigate whether the president committed a crime or obstructed an independent investigation or lied to the American people, per the Mueller report. He’s going to put all that aside and dig into conspiracy theories about how the investigation got started in the first place.

It should be no surprise that aligns with exactly what Trump wants done. Graham is conducting this hearing not for the American people, but for Trump. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/01/lindsey-grahams-stunningly-fact-free-pro-trump-spin-mueller-report/

2. Jonathan Chait: William Barr Keeps Lying About Mueller, and People Keep Trusting Him Anyway

William Barr’s letter summarizing Robert Mueller’s report was a high point in the Trump presidency. It set off wild celebrations in the White House, and inspired Trump and his defenders to declare total vindication in the Russia “Witch Hunt”/”Hoax.”

The letter was also a tightly crafted spin job, selectively presenting the facts in the softest form. The misleading nature of the letter has grown increasingly evident — first as Mueller’s prosecutors leaked complaints, then as the report itself painted a far more damning portrait than Barr allowed, and finally last night as the Washington Post reported Mueller himself objected to Barr’s account.

The fact that Trump’s defenders would invest so much credence in a demonstrably untrustworthy official like Barr shows how much they have invested in Barr’s summary. It is the Barr letter, rather than Mueller’s extremely damning report, upon which they have hinged their claims of vindication. http://nymag.com/article/2019/05/barr-lying-mueller-report-trump-russia.html

3. James Comey: How Trump Co-Opts Leaders Like Bill Barr

Amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them. Sometimes what they reveal is inspiring. For example, James Mattis, the former secretary of defense, resigned over principle, a concept so alien to Mr. Trump that it took days for the president to realize what had happened, before he could start lying about the man.

But more often, proximity to an amoral leader reveals something depressing. I think that’s at least part of what we’ve seen with Bill Barr and Rod Rosenstein. Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from. It takes character like Mr. Mattis’s to avoid the damage, because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.

It starts with your sitting silent while he lies, both in public and private, making you complicit by your silence. In meetings with him, his assertions about what “everyone thinks” and what is “obviously true” wash over you, unchallenged, as they did at our private dinner on Jan. 27, 2017, because he’s the president and he rarely stops talking. As a result, Mr. Trump pulls all of those present into a silent circle of assent.

Of course, to stay, you must be seen as on his team, so you make further compromises. You use his language, praise his leadership, tout his commitment to values.

And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/opinion/william-barr-testimony.html

4. Patti Davis: Dear Republicans: Stop using my father, Ronald Reagan, to justify your silence on Trump

Dear Republican Party,

I have never been part of you, but you have been part of my family for decades. I was 10 years old when my father decided to stop being a Democrat and instead become a Republican. From that point on, you were a frequent guest at our dinner table — and an unwelcome one to me. I wanted to talk about my science project on the human heart, or the mean girls at school who teased me for being too tall and for wearing glasses. Instead, much of the conversation was about how the government was taking too much out of people’s paychecks for taxes and how it was up to the Republicans to keep government from getting too big.

You went from an annoying presence at the dinner table to a powerful tornado, lifting up my family and depositing us in the world of politics, which no one ever escapes. I know it’s not completely your fault. My father’s passion for America, his commitment to try to make a difference in the country and the world, and his gentle yet powerful command over crowds that gathered to hear him speak made his ascent to the presidency all but inevitable. He would have gotten there one way or another; it just happened to be as a Republican.

You have claimed his legacy, exalted him as an icon of conservatism and used the quotes of his that serve your purpose at any given moment. Yet at this moment in America’s history when the democracy to which my father pledged himself and the Constitution that he swore to uphold, and did faithfully uphold, are being degraded and chipped away at by a sneering, irreverent man who traffics in bullying and dishonesty, you stay silent.

You stay silent when President Trump speaks of immigrants as if they are trash, rips children from the arms of their parents and puts them in cages. Perhaps you’ve forgotten that my father said America was home “for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness.”

Most egregiously, you remained silent when Trump said there were “very fine people” among the neo-Nazis who marched through an American city with tiki torches, chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”

My father called America “the shining city on a hill.” Trump sees America as another of his possessions that he can slap his name on. A president is not supposed to own America. He or she is supposed to serve the American people.

So, to the Republican Party that holds tightly to my father’s legacy — if you are going to stand silent as America is dismantled and dismembered, as democracy is thrown onto the ash heap of yesterday, shame on you. But don’t use my father’s name on the way down. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dear-republicans-stop-using-my-father-ronald-reagan-to-justify-your-silence-on-trump/2019/04/30/ed61c6de-6b50-11e9-8f44-e8d8bb1df986_story.html

5. Jennifer Rubin: When will Democrats realize Trump desperately wants to run against Sanders?

President Trump rarely conceals what’s on his mind. When he declares — without proof, naturally — that the Democratic primary is rigged against self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) he not doing so out of concern for fair elections.

Democrats should pay attention. They need not agree with Trump’s assessment, but they should listen to the attacks he’s prepared to mount (and is already spouting) against Sanders. Trump delights in comparing dictator Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela to American socialists (“The socialists have done in Venezuela all of the same things that socialists, communists, totalitarians have done everywhere that they’ve had a chance to rule. The results have been catastrophic,” he said in February), and it only helps him pin the extremist label on Sanders when the latter shies away from an outright condemnation of Maduro. (Warren calls Maduro a dictator.)

In short, there are reasons Trump wants to clear the left lane for Sanders in the Democratic primary. Sanders remains the Democrat most easily mocked and demonized by the right. It’s why you don’t hear Trump figuring out how to juice support for Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), former vice president Joe Biden or more than a dozen other contenders. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/29/when-will-democrats-realize-trump-desperately-wants-run-against-sanders/

6. Paul Waldman: Trump may have degraded U.S. politics for a generation to come

Trump threatens to transform our politics in ways other presidents couldn’t? When Nixon’s crimes and corruption were revealed, the specific acts found few defenders. Republicans didn’t rush to the TV cameras to insist there was nothing wrong with breaking into the other party’s headquarters to steal information, or with paying hush money, or with tryingto enlist the CIA to quash an FBI investigation. They did what they could up until the end to minimize the damage, but they didn’t claim that those acts themselves were perfectly fine.

Yet closely analogous actions when committed or celebrated by Trump have not just been defended; they have been defended by almost the entire Republican Party. With just a few exceptions here and there, one of our two great parties has committed itself to the proposition that there is no longer any such thing as standards of presidential behavior that need to be upheld.

We won't know for sure how far Trump has degraded our democracy until some time after he has left office. We don't yet know how long it will take to revive the idea that the president should be a person of strong character — or at the very least, not the embodiment of everything you'd teach your children not to be. We'll have to wait to see how long it will take the nation to recover from the infection of Trump and Trumpism, from the way he encourages us to always cultivate and elevate the worst in ourselves.

But we can say this: If you aren’t disgusted by Trump and what his party does to defend him — and what together they’re doing to American politics — then you’re helping him make things worse. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/29/trump-may-have-degraded-us-politics-generation-come/

7. Bess Levin: Donald Trump May Already Be Committing New Crimes

Donald Trump’s habit of tweeting every insane thought that comes into his head has always been a liability, in that it paints a picture of an unwell man not fit to be left alone unsupervised, let alone run the country. But, as the Mueller report showed, the president’s social-media musings can come back to haunt him, such as when his tweeting about Paul Manafort was cited as possible evidence of obstruction. So you might think that the president would shy away from saying or writing anything that could be used against him when it comes to potential impeachment proceedings—growing more likely by the day!—or future criminal indictments, but then you’d catch yourself and realize that was obvious crazy talk. Instead, Trump has tweeted about the Russia probe more than 50 times in the the days since the redacted Mueller report was released, with increasingly forceful attacks on former White House counsel Don McGahn, who Trump allies fear could help lawmakers build a case for impeachment. Indeed, reports Politico, going on a rage-filled vendetta against McGahn, who knows where all Trump’s bodies are buried, is probably one of the president’s dumber ideas:

“It’s clear that the White House plans to obstruct all legitimate congressional oversight, just like Trump obstructed in Mueller’s probe at every turn, and witnesses previously obstructed our committee,” a House Intelligence Committee source said, arguing that the panel is “uniquely positioned” to investigate obstruction of its own probes, should the running commentary from Team Trump continue. “They’re acting like a scene out of America’s Dumbest Criminals,” said Julian Epstein, a chief counsel for House Judiciary Committee Democrats during the Clinton impeachment. “They just keep fueling a fire that has been the bane of their two years in the White House.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/trump-may-already-be-committing-new-crimes

8. David Rohde: Donald Trump’s Unprecedented Assault on the Power of Congress

President Donald Trump and his allies are invoking an unprecedented form of executive privilege that would systematically undermine Congress’s power and the post-Watergate norms established by Ford. Those practices, followed by six subsequent Republican and Democratic Presidents, involve the executive branch coöperating, at least in limited form, with congressional investigations and subpoenas. Failure to do so, it was assumed, could hurt a President politically.

On Monday, the Democrat-controlled House Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena for Donald McGahn, the former White House counsel and a key figure in the Mueller report, to appear before it and present documents related to investigations of the President. On Tuesday, in a step never taken before by a modern President, Trump declared that he would bar McGahn—and all current and former Administration officials—from testifying before Congress, and, further, that the Administration would ignore all subpoenas from the legislative branch. “We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” Trump told reporters outside the White House on Wednesday. “These aren’t, like, impartial people. The Democrats are trying to win 2020.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/donald-trumps-unprecedented-assault-on-the-power-of-congress

 

9. Susan B. Glasser: Why Is Joe Biden the Only Democrat Who Wants to Talk About Donald Trump?

Given the almost numbing predictability of the President and the ever-increasing difficulty his critics have mustering outrage toward him at this point, it came as a jolt to see Joe Biden go directly at Trump in a video announcing his Presidential campaign, on Thursday. The seventy-six-year-old former Vice-President unabashedly took the Trump-bashing course that most of the eighteen other declared Democratic candidates for 2020 have eschewed. In his launch video, which is three minutes and thirty seconds of Biden mostly talking into the camera, he calls Trump a “threat to this nation . . . unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime” and an existential challenge to the very idea of American democracy. The election of 2020 is “the battle for the soul of the nation,” Biden says, and, if Trump is reëlected, “he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of” the country. In short, Biden adds, “Everything that has made America America is at stake.”

Biden is hardly the only Democratic candidate to think this. But so far he is pretty much the only Presidential contender to make it the centerpiece of his campaign. The new conventional wisdom in American politics holds that Biden is making a mistake. After all, opinions are so fixed about Trump that there is little point in talking about him to voters who have already made their minds up about the President. Hillary Clinton largely focussed her 2016 campaign on Trump and his unsuitability for the White House, and look at how that turned out. When Democrats finally won again, in the 2018 congressional elections, many of them insisted that it was because they ignored Trump and stuck to issues such as health care. Impeachment is seen as political death for Democrats; most of the Democratic Presidential candidates (Elizabeth Warren excepted) have barely even mentioned the damning evidence of Trumpian obstruction laid out by Mueller. They are talking instead about Medicare for All and free college tuition, about the climate crisis and identity politics. But Biden appears to be rejecting their example. He is going all in on the old conventional wisdom, which is that Presidential elections four years into a Presidency are almost always referendums on the incumbent, and this incumbent presents a very large target. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/why-is-joe-biden-the-only-democrat-who-wants-to-talk-about-donald-trump

10. Amy Davidson Sorkin: Twenty Democrats Are Vying to Beat Trump. Can They Avoid Blowing It?

How the candidates interact will be a measure not only of their capacity for respect but of their instinct for victory. Will they refrain from demagoguery? How tough, or how cheap, will the shots be? (The goal is to defeat Trumpism, too.) How will the candidates respond when—as will almost certainly be the case—someone’s campaign is hacked, or a “deep fake” video of an opponent emerges, or their allies set up deceptive Facebook pages? One risk, in a heavily contested primary, is that momentous questions, such as whether to impeach Trump, or to abolish ICE, will be reduced to a litmus test—a matter of hands raised on a stage. Another, as Barack Obama recently warned, is that “a circular firing squad” will form, leaving the Party fractured. But a search for the safe haven of an early consensus pick may not serve the Party well, either; arguably, it didn’t in 2016.

A sensible approach for undecided Democrats, then, is what might be called radical agnosticism. The truth is that no one yet knows who can beat nineteen other Democrats—and Trump. In this varied field, there is a heightened possibility for surprises or breakouts. (If Governor Jay Inslee, of Washington, answers every debate question with a call to focus on climate change, will people drift away or be exhilarated?) Preëmptive dismissals of one candidate or another as a spoiler, or an impostor, or too young or too old, or too staid or too outré, or just a big drag are not likely to be helpful.

Those who want to see the current President defeated might, in other words, stop worrying and learn to love this twenty-person mob. Some of them may be maddening; none of them is Donald Trump. On Thursday, he tweeted, “Welcome to the race Sleepy Joe,” with a prediction that the primaries would be “nasty,” and involve “people who truly have some very sick & demented ideas. But if you make it, I will see you at the Starting Gate!” One of them will. And it may not be the candidate Trump, or anyone else, expects. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/06/twenty-democrats-are-vying-to-beat-trump-can-they-avoid-blowing-it

11. Robert Reich: In fighting all oversight, Trump has made his most dictatorial move

We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” says the person who is supposed to be chief executive of the United States government.

In other words, there is to be no congressional oversight of this administration: no questioning officials who played a role in putting a citizenship question on the 2020 census. No questioning a former White House counsel about the Mueller report.

No questioning a Trump adviser about immigration policy. No questioning a former White House security director about issuances of security clearances.

No presidential tax returns to the ways and means committee, even though a 1920s law specifically authorizes the committee to get them.

Such a blanket edict fits a dictator of a banana republic, not the president of a constitutional republic founded on separation of powers.

If Congress cannot question the people who are making policy, or obtain critical documents, Congress cannot function as a coequal branch of government.

If Congress cannot get information about the executive branch, there is no longer any separation of powers, as sanctified in the US constitution.

There is only one power – the power of the president to rule as he wishes.

Which is what Donald Trump has sought all along. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/28/trump-congress-mueller-white-house-oversight

12. New York Times editorial: Donald Trump Shows a New Level of Contempt for Congress

While executive privilege is a common presidential tool, historians note that Mr. Trump’s usage is decidedly uncommon, if not unprecedented. Unlike his predecessors, who invoked privilege in specific cases, Mr. Trump has vowed that he will not cooperate with any congressional inquiry. He is effectively declaring lawmakers powerless over him. This, warn the experts, puts the nation in uncharted territory and threatens to erode its democratic foundations.

And so the process will grind on, as it must if Congress is to demand any sort of accountability from a president intent on undermining its authority.

Presidents clash with Congress, at times fiercely. The founders wanted it that way. But in declaring war on congressional oversight, Mr. Trump is not looking to maintain a balance of powers. He is looking to blow up the scales. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/opinion/trump-congress.html

13. Jamelle Bouie: The Republican War on Democracy

The demographic changes coming over the next few decades — the continuing rise of a more diverse electorate, with more liberal views than previous generations — won’t destroy the Republican Party or make it electorally insolvent. But it may make right-wing conservatism a rump ideology, backed primarily by a declining minority of older rural and exurban white voters. You can already see this taking shape. Among the youngest Republicans, 52 percent say the government should be “doing more” to solve problems, as opposed to 23 percent of Republican baby boomers.

In this environment, the only way to preserve right-wing conservatism in American government is to rig the system against this new electorate. You tilt the field in favor of constituencies that still back traditional Republican conservatism in order to build a foundation for durable minority rule by those groups. In just the last week, we’ve gotten a glimpse of what this rigging looks like in practice.

Americans have long struggled over the scope of voting and representation. Democracy is — and always will be — a fight. And the lines of this particular conflict are clear. Rather than try to expand our democracy or even preserve it as it stands, Republicans are fighting for a smaller, narrower one that favors their voters over all others so that their power and the interests they serve become untouchable. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/27/opinion/sunday/the-republican-war-on-democracy.html

14. Jonathan Bernstein: Trump’s Dishonesty Isn’t Normal

“The Washington Post’s fact-checking operation has now counted 10,000 ‘false or misleading claims’ by Donald Trump during his presidency.”

It’s hard to convey how big a deal this is. To begin with: It’s real. Anyone can go through the Post’s data and find plenty to argue with – maybe one statement isn’t really false, another was just an exaggeration and some other one was nit-picky. But even if the fact-checkers are wrong an implausible three out of four times, that’s still 2,500 false or misleading claims by the president in two-plus years.

That’s simply not normal. We don’t have equivalent historical data, but I’m confident that even Richard Nixon, who told more than a few important whoppers, didn’t come close to Trump’s level of habitual dishonesty. Barack Obama, George W. Bush? As I’ve said many times, most politicians actually care a lot about establishing a reputation for reliability. Oh, they’ll spin. They’ll present the best-looking version of events that can still count as the truth. But they will very rarely say something that flat-out isn’t so. And if they’re called on it, they’ll usually retreat to a more justifiable position. Trump, instead, just keeps going.

Does he get away with it? In the sense that he’s still president, I suppose so. But his professional reputation is in tatters, which reduces his influence, worsens his relationship with Congress, hinders his ability to negotiate and impedes his broader agenda. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-30/donald-trump-drags-deutsche-bank-into-war-with-schiff-and-waters

15. Jonathan Chait: Rod Rosenstein Embodies the Republican Surrender to Trump

The most bizarre passage in Rod Rosenstein’s letter to President Trump resigning his post as deputy attorney general is praise for “the courtesy and humor you often display in our personal conversations.” It is not standard practice for the president to have personal conversations with the deputy attorney general at all, certainly not when that person is supervising an investigation into the president himself. And while we cannot know the substance of those personal conversations, we do know that Rosenstein was once so alarmed by Trump’s behavior that he discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to have him removed on account of mental unfitness.

Maybe Trump’s private conversations somehow contain the humor that is completely lacking in his public persona, which consist of boasts, lies, and belittling attacks. Trump’s public treatment of Rosenstein included tweeting an image of him behind bars along with other alleged traitors. That Trump, what a jokester.

Rosenstein’s status as a target of Trump’s rage, and his background as a career official, raised broad hopes that he would check the president’s authoritarian impulses. By all indications, he failed to live up to this heroic destiny. Rosenstein ended his career as a dutiful functionary, allowing Trump to trash the rule of law while claiming he had upheld it. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/rod-rosenstein-resigns-letter-trump-mueller-barr.html

16. Greg Sargent: Trump feeds his voters one of his most ridiculous scams yet

As we’ve seen, there’s no end to the ugly, corrupt, destructive and bigoted things that President Trump will do in part to please his base — from separating migrant families, to pardoning racist sheriff Joe Arpaio, to supporting a lawsuit that could destroy our health-care system.

But there’s another move of this kind that deserves its own category: situations in which Trump tells his voters that he’s undertaking some sort of cruel action that he isn’t actually taking, simply because he believes they’ll thrill to his claim that he is. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/30/trump-feeds-his-voters-one-his-most-ridiculous-scams-yet/

17. Windsor Mann: What all of President Trump's 'jokes' have in common

Trump loves to joke around. His wit is so subtle, so nuanced, that sometimes it takes years to decipher it, along with a spokesperson to clarify it.

Earlier this month, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said that Trump "was making a joke during the 2016 campaign" when he said, "I love WikiLeaks." Her clarification came three days after Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, was arrested and three years after Trump made the "joke."

Everyone knows that a joke is not a joke if it has to be explained. With Trump, the inverse is true: When he says something that he can't explain, it becomes a joke. His statements become jokes retroactively, when they become inconvenient.

In 2017, the president of the United States implored police officers to beat up suspects. After the New York Police Department and the president of the Major Cities Chiefs Association released statements rebuking his comments, Sanders said, "He was making a joke at the time."

Similarly, when Trump accused Democrats of treason for not clapping for him at his State of the Union address, he was, Sanders said, "clearly joking with his comments." (No word yet on whether Trump was joking when he tweeted earlier this month that Democrats were "TREASONOUS.") https://theweek.com/articles/836330/what-all-president-trumps-jokes-have-common

18. Jonathan Chait: Trump Claims He Can Ignore Subpoenas Because Congress Is Mean

Last night Donald Trump and his family filed a lawsuit to prohibit Deutsche Bank and Capital One from turning over his financial information to congressional investigators. The legal basis for the lawsuit, in layman’s terms, is as follows: Congress is mean and only wants the information because it hates Trump. Or, to quote the only-slightly-more-sophisticated language of the lawsuit, “The subpoenas were issued to harass President Donald J. Trump, to rummage through every aspect of his personal finances, his businesses and the private information of the president and his family, and to ferret about for any material that might be used to cause him political damage. No grounds exist to establish any purpose other than a political one.”

This same argument runs nearly all of Trump’s refusals to abide congressional subpoenas. “These aren’t, like, impartial people,” the president declared of Congress. “The Democrats are trying to win 2020.”

The first thing to understand about this legal theory is that it is not a legal theory. Congress is a coequal branch of government which has a legal right to conduct investigations, including of the Executive branch and its officials. There is a legal gray zone around “executive privilege,” which describes the right of officials in the Executive branch to have some confidentiality around their internal discussions.

But Trump is not articulating a theory of executive privilege here. Nor would such a privilege cover a president’s right to maintain a business empire that accepts payments that may or may not be bribes disguised as legitimate reimbursements in complete secrecy from Congress and the public.

Essentially Trump’s argument is that congressional oversight is simply “politics” and, therefore, somehow null and void. Trump’s Deutsche Bank lawsuit has a passage that could have been lifted from an op-ed written by a sophomore member of the College Republicans. It quotes Nancy Pelosi promising “checks and balances to the Trump administration,” then asserts she was “not referring to legislation.” It proceeds to quote a series of journalists describing Congress’s investigations as being unpleasant for Trump. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/trump-subpoena-congress-lawsuit-oversight-deutschebank.html