Republicans were livid with the way Trump handled them over the debt ceiling. They were not livid over all Trump’s other outrages.
Trump has special chemistry with Chuck Schumer, as a fellow New Yorker.
Trump delighted in favorable press coverage from the Mainstream Media he claims to hate.
Ross Douthat: Letting Trump Be Trump
most of the Republican leadership in Congress is opposed to Trumpism, preferring some shriveled thing called “the Ryan agenda” that nobody other than a few thousand of his constituents in a corner of Wisconsin can be plausibly said to have voted for. Worse, significant figures in his Cabinet, and even more in the second and third tiers of his Administration, also reject Trumpism – including, one notes, members of his own family
.. What if, just what if, the fact that Trump has surrounded himself with people (cabinet members and family members alike) who don’t believe in Trumpism, the fact that he has gone along with budgets and health care bills and foreign policy moves that are not obviously congruent with Trumpism, the fact that he generally seems to lack any zeal for a fight when his campaign promises collide with Republican and/or center-left establishment opposition … what if all of this means that he never really believed in Trumpism himself? Or that he never believed in it to the extent required to govern on it, as opposed to just sloganeering on the stump? Or – my basic view at present — that he has a vague but consistent-over-the-years belief that America is getting taken advantage of on trade and defense spending (a theme he apparently returned to today on the European leg of his grand tour), but that he lacks the
- mixture of intellectual curiosity,
- mental creativity,
- seriousness of purpose and
- personal discipline
required to actually make any set of policy ideas his own in the way that a successful populist president would need to do?
.. A talented mountebank with zero policy knowledge who exploited a set of ideas with underappreciated appeal but lacks the aptitude or zeal to implement them, preferring to rage against his cable-news coverage while House backbenchers write “his” budget and the Pentagon conducts “his” foreign policy and the Freedom Caucus amends “his” health care bill to make it still more politically toxic.
.. If this is the case then it’s correct but also a little beside the point to complain about how the wreckers and establishment types and Ryanists are all betraying the voters by submarining Trumpism. The betrayal starts at the top, with a president who doesn’t care enough and probably never really did.
.. But Trump himself is likely to be the primary teacher of that lesson here, and it should have been entirely predictable, from watching the man on the campaign trail and pondering his history, that he was likely to leave many of his supporters more disillusioned than he found them
.. insisting that conservatives or populists must stick with this president no matter his incompetence, lest the establishment prevail and Trumpism go down, becomes a horribly self-defeating sort of loyalty – because it only proves to future politicians, future demagogues, that they too can promise you revolution, deliver only politics-as-usual, and still keep your support.
.. That Trump has any “core principles” beyond self-interest and a certain instinct that America is getting a raw deal is a claim with no foundation in Trump’s business record, personal life or political career.
.. And the idea that the issues Zmirak cares most about – abortion, religious liberty and the persecution of Christians overseas – are also sincerely Trump’s own seems completely implausible, not least because the president himself barely even pretends to fervor on any religious-conservative cause, offering instead a transactionalism that’s almost admirable in its cynicism.
.. it’s striking to me that a writer who has been so cold-eyed and unsentimental about so many institutions that others drape in piety – including his own conservative Catholic subculture — could be so trusting about Trump’s stated commitments and in his celebrity businessman’s capacities.
Trump’s Revolting Betrayal Of Sessions
Think about it: two days ahead of Super Tuesday, an important Tea Party figure endorsed Trump, gutting Ted Cruz. But according to Trump today, Jeff Sessions only endorsed him to jump on the bandwagon and to benefit himself.
Knifing Sessions like that — it’s just dirtbag behavior. Anybody who trusts Donald Trump from now on out is a fool.
.. I find it hard to separate the utter lack of character and judgment displayed by Trump in the Sessions matter from the same qualities on display in the Boy Scout speech. What a revolting spectacle! Full transcript here. A president with a shred of common decency (to say nothing of common sense) would have been ashamed to turn an appearance before the Scouts into a political rally.
.. My friend Ryan Booth is a white Evangelical, a former state GOP committee member, and one of the most sensible, upright people I know. After this Sessions insanity, he writes:
Hillary would not have been worse, folks. As some of you know, I didn’t vote for either. But Donald Trump is an unstable lunatic. If he lasts until 2020, then I’ll likely end up voting for a Democrat for the first time in my life.
.. If he will do this to Jeff Sessions, there is no reason at all to expect that his next SCOTUS nomination will be Gorsuch II. Maybe it will, but how do we know that?
.. a psychological study comparing people who had been raised in an oppressive but stable environment with people who had been raised in a free but unstable environment. Those who grew up in the oppressive but stable environment were happier and had overall better life outcomes than the others. Why? The theory was that predictability had a huge effect on one’s inner state. People who did not know what to expect from day to day, and who therefore could never rest, were significantly less able to thrive.
.. a psychological study comparing people who had been raised in an oppressive but stable environment with people who had been raised in a free but unstable environment. Those who grew up in the oppressive but stable environment were happier and had overall better life outcomes than the others. Why? The theory was that predictability had a huge effect on one’s inner state. People who did not know what to expect from day to day, and who therefore could never rest, were significantly less able to thrive.
.. If you only encounter Trump’s words on TV news, in print, on the radio, or via Twitter, you will not have gotten a sense of how incoherent he is.
.. The camera from the broadcast I was watching didn’t take its focus off the president, but it did show him walking away from the podium and watching as security (apparently) hauled the protesters away. I don’t complain about security removing disruptive protesters from a speech. What was unseemly about it was the obvious pleasure Trump took in watching the protesters removed. With the second one, he sneered something like, “That one looked young. I guess they’re taking him home to Mommy.”
..Can you imagine Reagan acting that way? Can you imagine any American president behaving with such boorishness?
.. Those poor people need hope, hope in something real, not this carnival barker who showed up ranting about immigrants, Muslims, the Fake News, lying Obama, and the rest. What are they going to do when they can no longer deny that Trump is a con man? Who will they blame then?
.. I cannot say with confidence which one is worse, but I’m inclining toward Trump. Our country is in a terrible place now, and we’ve brought it onto ourselves. It is going to take a lot to put back together what Donald Trump has broken, and I don’t trust politicians in either party to do it.
.. the Right is divided into three basic factions:
- Those who hate liberals more than they love anything else;
- those Republican establishment regulars who think that everything can and should go back to being how it was before the Trump aberration; and
- a motley crew of conservatives, traditionalists, and religious folks who still hold on to the old ideals, but despair that there are few if any people in national public life who embody them.
.. Our political future is either Democratic establishmentarianism (whoever Hillary Clinton’s successor is), left-wing populism (whoever Bernie Sanders’s successor is), Republican establishmentarianism (Mike Pence), or Trumpian populism. There is no fifth option. Like I said, the country is in a bad way. If Trump’s treatment of Jeff Sessions isn’t a canary in the pro-Trump conservative coal mine, nothing is.
Jared Kushner Letting Donald Trump Jr. Take The Fall
Lawrence O’Donnell explains why Jared Kushner could be in serious legal trouble for not disclosing the Russian lawyer meeting on his security clearance form and why Trump’s lawyers are right for trying to build a wall between the President and his son-in-law.
The New York Times story was based on White House sources.
Jared Kushner’s lawyers found the email and did their best to manage the legal fallout.
Who would do that to their brother in law? Jared Kushner’s father engaged in witness-tampering. Jared Kushner’s father sent video of prostitution entrapment to his sister.
Jared Kushner gave Trump the worst possible advice on Russia — to fire James Comey.