1. Australian Broadcasting’s political editor Chris Uhlmann: G20: Does Donald Trump's awkward performance indicate America's decline as world power?

The G20 became the G19 as it ended. On the Paris climate accords the United States was left isolated and friendless.

It is, apparently, where this US President wants to be as he seeks to turn his nation inward.

Donald Trump has a particular, and limited, skill-set. He has correctly identified an illness at the heart of the Western democracy. But he has no cure for it and seems to just want to exploit it.

He is a character drawn from America's wild west, a traveling medicine showman selling moonshine remedies that will kill the patient.

And this week he underlined he has neither the desire nor the capacity to lead the world.

Some will cheer the decline of America, but I think we'll miss it when it is gone.

And that is the biggest threat to the values of the West which he claims to hold so dear. 7/08/17 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-09/did-trumps-g20-performance-indicate-us-decline-as-world-power/8691538

2. Maureen Dowd: Vlad, the Trump Impaler

In his attenuated first meeting with his side bae, Trump staged a Kabuki show of confronting the former K.G.B. agent.

Their conversation boiled down to this:

Trump: “Did you do it?”

Putin: “Nyet.”

Trump: “Whew! Glad that’s out of the way. So let’s do a joint cybersecurity program and share our passwords.”

Putin: “Da.”

He should have had a showdown to rival the one Adlai Stevenson had at the U.N. with the Soviet ambassador on the Cuban missile crisis. “I am prepared to wait for an answer until hell freezes over,” Stevenson snapped.

Trump should have slapped down the evidence and doled out the punishment. Instead, he and Putin commiserated about bumptious journalists.

“Polonium works well,” Putin was probably saying.

“Spasibo,” Trump probably replied.

In the end, Trump and fellow bumbling neophyte Rex Tillerson opened the portal wider for Putin to sneak through in coming elections.

I don’t know how much information the tyro pol in the Oval has absorbed — or even wants to absorb — in his dumbed-down briefings. But, brainwashed by his father’s exhortation that the world belongs to “killers,” Trump clearly doesn’t recognize the danger before him.

This is a simple fact he might want to let sink in: The Russians do not have our best interests at heart. They are conjuring Trump’s worst “1984” fear: playing him for a sucker. 7/8/17 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/opinion/sunday/putin-trump-bannon-taxes.html?ref=opinion

3. Sean O'Grady: Why I'm glad Ivanka Trump is now leader of the free world

Maybe someone told Donald Trump it was “Bring Your Daughter to Work Day”, but seeing images of Ivanka Trump wedged between the Prime Minister and the President of China at the G20 Summit is certainly arresting.

People used to say that the Trump presidency was beyond parody – which was true – but it's now gone beyond the known parameters of parody. We're barely six months in to Trump's reign: whatever next?

Still, given everything, maybe we should be grateful, pragmatically, that the First Daughter was up there at the most bigly of diplomatic top tables. She is, by all accounts, more level headed and far less insecure than Daddy, and we all know of her principled interventions on Syria.

She is smart where her dad is challenged; charming where he is a boor; humane where he is heartless. It is a bit like having a Democratic advisor by proxy when Ivanka gets to have a say, or at least there's a White House where someone isn't another “yes man” massaging the gigantic Trump ego and nursing his insecurities.

So Ivanka is "a good thing". Maybe she'll get him to ease up on the Mexican wall, protectionism and climate change. Maybe. 7/9/17 http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/ivanka-trump-g20-summit-donald-trump-stood-in-democrat-white-house-control-a7830836.html

4. Las Vegas Sun Editorial: Trump creating hardship, danger by widening net on ICE arrests

Immigration arrests are up 39 percent thus far in Donald Trump’s presidency compared to the same period in 2016 — Jan. 22 to June 24.

No doubt, Trump would love for Americans to believe that’s proof of follow-through on his campaign promise to kick “really bad dudes” out of the country.

But is someone driving without a license a really bad dude? Is someone whose record contains only a years-old DUI conviction a really bad dude?

No, which is why the increase in arrests is a cause for alarm.

Obviously, people who commit serious crimes should be targeted, but that should be happening regardless of the perpetrator’s citizenship status. Plus, arrests of undocumented immigrants who’d committed serious crimes was already happening during the Obama administration.

So by suppressing crime reporting in the immigrant community, the crackdown actually encourages violent crime.

Widening the net to include nonviolent, low-level offenders is cruel. It discourages well-meaning immigrants from pursuing citizenship, provides cover for criminals by destroying cooperation with law enforcement, separates families and robs communities of our neighbors.

No wonder voters buried Trump in Clark County, where Hillary Clinton got 52 percent of the vote to Trump’s 41 percent.

His ugly campaign against well-intentioned people is another indication that he deserved even less. 7/9/17 https://lasvegassun.com/news/2017/jul/09/trump-creating-hardship-danger-by-widening-net-on/

5. Alan Rappeport: Health Care? Taxes? Budget? G.O.P. Has Big To-Do List, but Little Time

An iffy health care vote. An unresolved budget resolution. A heavy debt ceiling lift. And, of course, there is that tax overhaul plan.

When members of Congress return next week from their Fourth of July break, they will be greeted by a mammoth legislative logjam. Republicans are increasingly skeptical that they can get everything done. There are even calls from some to forgo their sacred August recess — a respite from the capital in its swampiest month.

The wild card continues to be Mr. Trump. Of late he has failed to live up to his declared reputation as a deal maker. Instead, he has been more of a distraction.

“His tweets in general have discomfited many of his Republican allies,” said Steve Bell, a former Republican staff director of the Senate Budget Committee who now works at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “Here is the majority leader trying to get votes. Boom comes all of these tweets, and people say, ‘I’m done with dealing with this guy for a while.’”

A veteran of the vicious fights over taxes and budgets in the 1980s, Mr. Bell said, “This is particularly messy.”7/5/17 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/us/politics/republicans-congress-trump.html

6. Matt Flegenheimer: Senator, (Un)Interrupted: Kamala Harris’s Rise Among Democrats

California’s very junior senator has emerged as the latest iteration of a bipartisan archetype: the Great Freshman Hope, a telegenic object of daydreaming projection — justified or not — for a party adrift and removed from executive power.

Few Democrats have voted against more Trump administration nominees, enshrining Ms. Harris in a group known derisively by Republicans and some Democrats in the Capitol as “the 2020 caucus.” Ms. Harris’s team remains particularly pleased with two “no” votes that most Democrats declined to join, given the officials’ performances so far: Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, and John F. Kelly, the Homeland Security secretary.

But rampaging populist rhetoric seems to come a bit less naturally to Ms. Harris, at least compared to Senate colleagues like Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts or Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Ms. Harris, who served as state attorney general and San Francisco district attorney, tends instead toward a courtroom bluntness.

“She speaks, she’s heard,” Gov. Jerry Brown of California said in an interview. “She gets to the point.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/us/politics/senator-kamala-harris-democrats.html

7. Richard L. Hasen; Trump’s Voter Fraud Endgame

Kobach has requested that every state send detailed voter information to the commission. Never mind the privacy concerns or the fact that this intrudes on what the right always refers to as states’ rights to run elections as they see fit. If a left-wing Obama appointee requested this information, it would prompt a federal investigation and be at the top of every Fox News segment for months.

Kobach’s likely going to use this information to try to “match” voters and show there is bloat on the voter rolls, such as dead voters and people who have moved but have not been removed from the rolls. He’ll also likely find a small number of noncitizens who are registered to vote. Doing this kind of matching well is tough business: It is easy to claim that two people with the same name are the same person, or that someone is a felon because he has the same name as a felon. But Kobach will not be relying on election administration professionals to do that work; he’s going to use the president’s staff.

The report will likely conclude that even if there is no evidence of actual voter fraud, the potential for voter fraud and noncitizen voting is there because of inaccurate rolls. Accordingly, they will argue it is necessary to roll back the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (or “motor voter” law)—a law which folks like Kobach hate because among other things it requires states to offer voter registration at public service agencies. They’ll want federal law to do what federal courts have so far forbidden Kobach to do: Require people to produce documentary proof of citizenship before registering to vote. In other words, show us your papers or you can’t register. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/
2017/06/donald_trump_s_voter_fraud_commission_is_itself_an_enormous_fraud.html

8. Julian Borger: Investigators explore if Russia colluded with pro-Trump sites during US election

The spread of Russian-made fake news stories aimed at discrediting Hillary Clinton on social media is emerging as an important line of inquiry in multiple investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

Investigators are looking into whether Trump supporters and far-right websites coordinated with Moscow over the release of fake news, including stories implicating Clinton in murder or pedophilia, or paid to boost those stories on Facebook.

The head of the Trump digital camp, Brad Parscale, has reportedly been summoned to appear before the House intelligence committee looking into Moscow’s interference in the 2016 US election. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee carrying out a parallel inquiry, has said that at least 1,000 “paid internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia” were pumping anti-Clinton fake news into social media sites during the campaign.

Warner said there was evidence that this campaign appeared to be focused on key voters in swing states, raising the question over whether there was coordination with US political operatives in directing the flow of bogus stories.

Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed by the justice department to oversee the investigation into the Russian role in the election, is thought to be looking into all these issues, as well as possible links between Russian fake news factories and far-right sites in the US.

It is a wide-ranging investigation that is examining the unusually large number of contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials during the campaign, as well as the possibility that the Kremlin has personal or financial leverage over members in the Trump camp, including the president himself according to his own remarks on Twitter.

The role of Russian generated fake news is a separate strand which has gained less attention up to now, but the part it played in depressing the Clinton vote in key states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in the critical last days of the 2016 campaign could have helped change the course of recent American history.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/05/donald-trump-russia-investigation-fake-news-hillary-clinton

 

9. Charles Krauthammer: North Korea: The Rubicon is crossed

Across 25 years and five administrations, we have kicked the North Korean can down the road. We are now out of road.

What are our choices? Trump has threatened that if China doesn’t help we’ll have to go it alone. If so, the choice is binary: acquiescence or war.

War is almost unthinkable, given the proximity of the Demilitarized Zone to the 10 million people of Seoul. A mere conventional war would be devastating. And could rapidly go nuclear.

Acquiescence is not unthinkable. After all, we did it when China went nuclear under Mao Zedong, whose regime promptly went insane under the Cultural Revolution.

The hope for a third alternative, getting China to do the dirty work, is mostly wishful thinking. There’s talk of imposing sanctions on other Chinese banks. Will that really change China’s strategic thinking? Bourgeois democracies believe that economics supersedes geostrategy. Maybe for us. But for dictatorships? Rarely.

We do have powerful alternatives. But each is dangerous and highly unpredictable. Which is why the most likely ultimate outcome, by far, is acquiescence.. 7/7/17 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/north-korea-the-rubicon-is-crossed/2017/07/06/6645766e-6279-11e7-a4f7-af34fc1d9d39_story.html

10. Daniel Kurtz-Phelan: How Trump Made the Nearly Impossible North Korea Problem Even Worse

After years of mocking Barack Obama for passivity in the face of North Korea’s growing nuclear-weapons stockpile, Trump confronts the same grim set of choices. As seemingly every article on the July 4th missile test has stressed, those choices are “few and risky” and have been for years. Yet, after six months of Trump’s presidency, they are grimmer than ever before. His degradation of language, his destruction of American diplomacy, his disdain for alliances: Trump’s foreign policy has wrecked the very tools needed to navigate a crisis that would be frightening even under the stewardship of the most judicious commander-in-chief. The options were always bad, but Trump has made them considerably worse.

“The era of strategic patience,” Trump recently declared, “is over.” Strategic patience was the Obama administration’s attempt to put the best possible spin on a tacit admission of paralysis. North Korea tested nuclear weapons (first under Bush, then repeatedly under Obama), developed missiles, issued flamboyant threats, and repressed its citizens by outlandishly brutal means. In turn, Washington toughened sanctions and, according to subsequent reports, waged a cyberwar on the North Korean missile program. But major changes to U.S. policy were seen to carry disqualifying drawbacks or intolerable risks — drawbacks and risks that persist today.

Secretary of State Tillerson was right when he declared this week that “global action is required to stop a global threat.” But here, too, Trump has made bad options worse. The rest of the globe is less inclined than at any other time since the lowest point of the Bush administration to follow where Washington leads. According to the most recent Pew survey, international confidence in American leadership plummeted from 64 percent at the end of Obama’s presidency to 22 percent today. Dyed-in-the-wool America First–ers may not think they particularly care what the citizens of foreign countries think — until suddenly we are calling for “global action” in a crisis and find that few of them are willing to come forward and join us. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/how-trump-made-the-north-korea-problem-even-worse.html

11. Maya Kosoff: Republicans’ New Line: Health-care Bill Will Give Americans “freedom” To Go Uninsured

One talking point repeated over and over again by Republican lawmakers hoping to repeal and replace Obamacare is that the Better Care Reconciliation Act, which stands to leave 22 million more Americans uninsured while delivering a hearty tax break to the wealthy, actually gives Americans the freedom to choose their insurance, rather than being compelled to participate in Obamacare. One such elected official sticking to this rhetoric is Senate Republican majority whip John Cornyn.

On Thursday, Cornyn tweeted a Wall Street Journal op-ed, entitled “How Many Jobs Does Obamacare Kill?” What happened next is instructive. Mic editor Emily Singer highlighted the senator’s tweet and added, “Apparently to Cornyn, he views 22 million people losing health care as a fair trade for maybe 250K jobs.” Cornyn’s response: “Not lose, choose. Apparently you believe freedom is optional.”

Cornyn’s position is an emerging talking point among defenders of the Better Care Reconciliation Act. But the Congressional Budget Office’s assessment of the Senate Republicans’ bill reveals the claim is essentially a lie. From the report: “few low-income people would purchase any plan.” Not simply because they don’t want to, but because they can’t afford to, especially given the expectation that premiums on reasonably high-quality insurance (so-called “silver plans”) are likely to increase for all Americans under the Republican plan.

One national poll conducted in 2015 found that 26 percent of uninsured responders said that Obamacare’s individual mandate made them more likely to buy health coverage themselves, and nearly 8 in 10 uninsured responders said they couldn’t afford a plan. As Senate Republicans inch toward repealing Obamacare, some, like Cornyn, are doubling down in an effort to assure the American people that, yes, 22 million more people will soon be uninsured—but they’ll have the ability to exercise their freedom to choose their insurance plan, instead of having to fall under the mandate. Nothing more American than having the freedom to pay for your own insurance coverage—or, in the case of many Americans, not be able to afford coverage at all. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/republicans-new-line-health-care-bill-will-give-americans-freedom-to-go-uninsured

12. Cokie Roberts: ANALYSIS: A world without US leadership

Here’s the bottom line on President Trump’s time in Hamburg, Germany: The United States is no longer the star on the world stage. A man who strives always to be the center of attention managed to relinquish the leading role that this nation has played since winning World War II.

President Trump's highly-anticipated tete-a-tete with Russian leader Vladimir Putin simply served as a sideshow to the main event, which was the meeting of the G-20. It was an important and instructive sideshow but probably not the one that will mean the most for America going forward.

While it’s no surprise that Putin adamantly denied Russia's interference in the U.S. election, his ability to get away with that fiction does come as something of a shock. No matter who said what to whom in that cozy confab, it’s clear that Putin will pay no price for his nation’s meddling in the fundamental exercise of democracy in the United States of America.

That’s a big win for him.

The mere fact of the meeting was itself a victory for Putin. Only Russia's nuclear arsenal makes that country anything more than a bit player internationally. But all of the hoopla over the encounter between the two leaders had the laughable effect of putting a nation whose gross domestic product ranks lower than Italy’s on a par with the U.S.

Meanwhile nations with far larger economies were quietly going about the business of dealing with trade and climate, issues that could have much more impact on the lives of average Americans than anything that happened in the session with Putin. 7/09/17
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/analysis-world-us-leadership/story?id=48523205

13. Paul Waldman: Why Trump thinks he's knocking his presidency out of the park

No defeat, no setback, no screwup could lead Trump to think about what he had done wrong or what kinds of adjustments might be made. The answer is always simple: Keep telling everyone how great you're doing, and everything will turn around in your favor.

Which might happen. But in the meantime, things are not going well. Trump's approval ratings are in the 30s. His White House is riven by backstabbing and infighting, with unprecedented levels of leaking as the various factions try to position themselves as not responsible for the mess being made. As for the top item on the GOP legislative agenda, though Trump promised that the Republican health-care plan would deliver "something terrific," in fact it is nothing less than the most unpopular piece of legislation in the history of polling. Trump's withdrawal from international agreements on climate and trade has led other countries to decide to go ahead and craft a new international order without us. America's image in the world has plummeted; a recent Pew Research Center poll of 37 countries found that in 35, people expressed less confidence in Trump's decisions than they had in President Obama's (Israel and Russia were the exceptions). Many of the worst results were among our closest allies, where confidence in the American president dropped by 60, 70, or even 80 points.

Or as Trump might describe it, "so much winning you'll get tired of winning." http://theweek.com/articles/710666/why-trump-thinks-hes-knocking-presidency-park

14. Max Boot: It's more obvious than ever: Trump doesn't care a whit about the national interest

Trump is hardly ignorant of Russian machinations. Even before receiving the full intelligence briefings on what the Russians did —and it appears that the intelligence community has proof that Putin personally ordered the election meddling — he showed his awareness of the Russian role in July 2016 when he called on the Kremlin to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. This is what the lawyers call “guilty knowledge.”

But Trump isn’t mad about this assault on American democracy because he was its beneficiary. He is only mad that the “fake news” media, his political opponents and special counsel Robert Mueller continue to probe the Russian role. The most benign explanation is that Trump is worried that such investigations undermine his political legitimacy. The more sinister explanation is that he is worried that collusion between his campaign and the Kremlin will be exposed — something that appears more likely after the new revelation that Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer to seek dirt on Hillary Clinton. Either way, the president is not treating this with the seriousness that an attack on our democracy deserves.

Trump is effectively giving the Russians a pass, refusing to impose any sanctions beyond the inadequate steps taken by President Obama — namely kicking out a few Russian diplomats and confiscating a couple of Russian diplomatic compounds. His administration is even lobbying to water down in the House a sanctions bill passed 97-2 by the Senate.

The result of Trump’s passivity is likely to encourage more such Russian assaults. James Clapper warns that the Russians are already “prepping the battlefield” for the 2018 election — and beyond. That may be just what Trump is counting on. Given current opinion polls, Republicans are facing a tough election next year and Trump will have trouble getting reelected in 2020. Maybe he’s counting on winning, to mash up two Beatles titles, “with a little help from my friends … back in the USSR.” http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-boot-trump-putin-voter-fraud-20170711-story.html

15. Frank Rich: Watching the Downfall of a Presidency in Real Time

The good news for those who want to see justice done is that this scandal not only resembles Watergate but also The Godfather — albeit a Godfather where every Corleone is a Fredo and not a single lawyer is as crafty as Tom Hagen, despite the fact that Little Donald’s private attorney has a history of defending clients from mob families. The level of stupidity of the conspirators is staggering: Not the least of the week’s news is that Kushner thought he could get away with omitting this Trump Tower meeting on the government questionnaire he filed to get his security clearance. (The $2.5 million that Charles Kushner donated to Harvard to gain his son admission was not money well spent.) My other favorite detail of the week (so far) is that Rob Goldstone, the former British tabloid writer and Miss Universe entrepreneur who served as the Trump campaign’s Russian middleman, posted on Facebook that he was “preparing for meeting” at Trump Tower on the day it took place.

Now it’s every man (and his lawyer) for himself as the president, having hidden from the press and the public ever since he returned home from his Yalta-themed tête-à-tête with Vladimir Putin, escapes to France, of all places. His press secretary is also in hiding, as is his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, who as recently as Sunday dismissed the Donald Jr. story as a “nothingburger” — Trumpspeak for the Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler’s designation of Watergate as a “third-rate burglary.” About the only administration stalwart not remaining silent is the vice-president, whose statement following the release of the Donald Jr. emails let it be known that he was “not aware” of the Trump Tower meeting and that it had taken place before he joined the campaign. Mike Pence has clearly been boning up on Gerald Ford, and may already be brooding about the risks entailed if he should eventually be in the position to pardon the 45th president. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/watching-the-downfall-of-a-presidency-in-real-time.html

16. Ezra Klein: We are past the point of innocent explanations on Trump and Russia

The best defense of Trump’s associates, at this point, is they were too dumb to know what they’re doing — a defense that doesn’t work when it includes experienced international operators like campaign manager Paul Manafort and ex-Defense Intelligence Agency Director Michael Flynn. Donald Trump Jr.’s own defense of himself is that he attempted to collude with Russian agents but they didn’t have any useful information and so he didn’t. This is, as my colleague Zack Beauchamp notes, no defense at all — even if it is true, Trump Jr. may well have committed a crime.

What’s more, we know for a fact that the Russian hacking of Democratic files happened, that it was successful, and that Trump has stubbornly resisted efforts to admit or investigate Russia’s intervention into the campaign while repeatedly praising Putin. We also know Trump has, since taking office, undermined the NATO alliance while cozying up to Vladimir Putin — the two of them joked about their shared dislike for the American media at the G20 last week and pledged to work together on cybersecurity.

This isn’t just smoke. We can see the damage done by the fire. We are watching our president pal around with the suspected arsonists. And so we are past the point where innocent explanations on Trump and Russia remain credible. 7/11/17 https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/11/15950664/trump-jr-russia-meeting-clinton

17. Will Bunch: Don Jr. and the email chain that devoured American democracy

It was about 30 years ago — right, it turned out, as the Cold War was winding down — that ABC aired a seven-night television event called Amerika, a fantastical mini-series about life in these United States after a bloodless takeover by the Soviet Union. The show was something of a flop — the concept was poorly executed and already seemed dated by 1987, thanks to the dramatic reforms under Mikhail Gorbachev that would soon lead to the end of the USSR. But the biggest problem was that critics found the basic premise so gosh-darned hard to imagine, with the New York Times arguing that the idea that “the United States would simply crumble from within because of a national moral flabbiness is monumentally implausible.”

Today, it doesn’t sound that way.

That seismic political rumbling that you felt at exactly 10 a.m. Tuesday was the son of the president of the United States, Donald Trump Jr., releasing his email chain with an intermediary showing that the highest-ranking officials in Trump’s 2016 campaign were informed that Russia was helping Trump and that “a Russian government attorney” wanted to provide them with damning info about rival Hillary Clinton, prompting the younger Trump to enthuse, “I love it..”

When I looked at Donald Trump Jr.’s email chain, I saw what may have been the smoking gun that could — could — eventually bring down Trump’s presidency, but I also saw a lot more. I saw the symptoms of a deeper sickness in American politics — the ridiculously blurred lines among entertainment, political discourse, wealth, and what once passed for reality, with concert promoters and sleazy developers accustomed to making deals over the Miss Universe pageant and cutting pop-music videos instead plotting to put an unqualified man’s finger on the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. And a win-at-all-costs, destroy-your-opponent, “I love it” culture that doesn’t even have the phrase “but this is wrong” in its vocabulary. In other words, I saw the “moral flabbiness” — a casual willingness to destroy everything that America was supposed to stand for — that the New York Times didn’t think was in our national character less than two generations ago. And it was building up for a long time before that fateful nanosecond when Donald Trump Jr. finally hit the “send” button. http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/will_bunch/don-jr-and-the-email-chain-that-devoured-american-democracy-20170712.html