The latest Pew poll reveals that “Trump’s overall job approval is much lower than those of prior presidents in their first weeks in office: 39% approve of his job performance, while 56% disapprove.” He remains a divisive president, with “75% either approve or disapprove of Trump strongly, compared with just 17% who feel less strongly.
.. Trump would have us believe no one cares about his ethical problems. That is false:
Four-in-ten say they are either very (24%) or somewhat (16%) confident that Trump keeps his business interests separate from the decisions he makes as president. Nearly six-in-ten (59%) say they are either not too (15%) or not at all (43%) confident that he is doing this.
.. Young people and highly educated adults express particularly low confidence that Trump is keeping his business interests separate from his decision making as president.
.. “Nearly two-thirds of Americans (64%) say an increasing number of people from different races, ethnic groups and nationalities in the U.S. makes the country a better place to live; fewer (29%) think growing diversity in the country does not make much difference, and just 5% think it makes the country a worse place to live.”
The Trump administration’s most disturbing trait
A case in point is press secretary Sean Spicer’s continuing refusal to confirm that Trump campaign officials were in touch with Russian diplomats and other Russians before the election, despite persuasive reports based on law enforcement and intelligence agency intercepts — and the Russians’ own confirmation.
.. Some of the best analysis I received in the late 1980s on the impending collapse of the Soviet empire came from a KGB agent and from an East German intelligence officer, both of whom could see the internal rot spreading rapidly.
.. They have incubated suspicion that Trump’s business interests depend on foreign financing that has given the Russians leverage over this president.
.. Spicer has now been caught in so many bare-faced falsehoods that a Nixon-era saying has become current again: He lies not just because it is in his interests but because it is in his nature.
What Trump Is Doing Is Not O.K.
it will finally get the United States government, Congress and the news media to demand a proper answer to what is still the biggest national security question staring us in the face today: What is going on between Donald Trump and the Russians?
.. Every action, tweet and declaration by Trump throughout this campaign, his transition and his early presidency screams that he is compromised when it comes to the Russians.
.. Trump’s willingness to attack allies like Australia, bluster at rivals like China, threaten enemies like Iran and North Korea and bully neighbors like Mexico — while consistently blowing kisses to Russian President Vladimir Putin — cannot be explained away by his mere desire to improve relations with Moscow to defeat the Islamic State.
.. And the Flynn ouster gives our government another, desperately needed opportunity to demand the answers to these questions, starting with seeing the president’s tax returns.
.. We need to know whom Trump owes and who might own him, and we need to know it now.
.. they should ask themselves what they would be saying and doing right now if a President Hillary Clinton had behaved toward Russia the way Trump has
.. House Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, what are you thinking by looking away from this travesty? You both know that if the C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I. had concluded that the Russians had intervened to help Hillary Clinton get elected you would have closed the government and demanded a new election.
Now it’s all O.K.? So you can get some tax cuts?
.. And yet “Mr. Patriotism” has barely uttered a word of criticism on Twitter or off about a Russian president who has intervened in our democratic process.
.. Putin. His regime will fail because he is forever looking for dignity in all the wrong places, by drilling for oil and gas instead of unleashing the creativity of his people.
.. Trump and his senior aides have spent their first weeks in power doing nothing more than telling us how afraid we should be of Muslim immigrants who have not been properly vetted by our intelligence and immigration authorities. Well, Putin was vetted by the F.B.I., C.I.A. and N.S.A., and they concluded that he attacked our country’s most important institution — and Trump has acted as if he could not care less.
Trump’s ‘So-Called’ Judgment
President Trump can’t seem to control his impulse to question his critics’ legitimacy.
.. Andrew Jackson reportedly said of the chief justice that “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” Jackson vetoed reauthorization of the Bank of the United States because he believed the Constitution did not give Congress the power to create a bank, despite the Supreme Court’s decision to the contrary in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819).
.. Franklin D. Roosevelt accused justices who struck down his New Deal of living in the “horse-and-buggy” era and acting “not as a judicial body, but as a policy-making body.”
.. But if presidential attacks on the courts are nothing new, the history also underscores the smallness of Mr. Trump’s vision. Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR knew when to speak and when to keep silent. They invoked the great powers of the presidency to oppose the Supreme Court only when fundamental constitutional questions were at stake: the punishment of political dissent; secession and slavery; Congress’s power to regulate the economy.
.. Mr. Trump is upset about losing a minor procedural test of a temporary executive order. If he doesn’t learn to be more judicious, we’re in for a long four years.