Maybe the president is exactly as compromised as he looks.
.. No matter how low your expectations for the summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on Monday, it was hard not to be staggered by the American president’s slavish and toadying performance... Dan Coats, gave a speech about America’s vulnerability to cyberattacks, particularly from Russia. “I’m here to say, the warning lights are blinking red again,” he said, comparing the threat to the one that preceded Sept. 11... Trump sided with the Russian president against American intelligence agencies while spewing lies and conspiracy theories. “He just said it’s not Russia,” he said of Putin’s denials. “I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Continuing in a free-associative fugue, he asked, “What happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the D.N.C.?” referring to a debunked right-wing claim about a former Democratic I.T. staffer... Perhaps the most sinister part of the news conference was Trump’s seeming openness to a deal in which F.B.I. investigators could question people in Russia in exchange for letting Russians question Putin critics in America... Putin referred specifically to associates of his arch-nemesis Bill Browder, a businessman (and British citizen) who has succeeded in getting seven countries, including the United States, to pass laws punishing Russian oligarchs suspected of corruption. (The Russians who met with members of the Trump campaign at Trump Tower in June 2016 wanted to discuss this law, the Magnitsky Act.).. “I’ve known for a long time that Putin has been trying to use every trick in the book to get me arrested in a foreign country and extradited back to Russia,” Browder told me after the news conference. It’s chilling that Trump appeared willing to help Putin with his vendetta... John McCain, Republican of Arizona, described it as “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.” Even some Trump partisans were aghast. Newt Gingrich decried it as the “most serious mistake” of Trump’s presidency... Trump’s behavior on Monday recalled his outburst at Trump Tower after the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, when he insisted there were “very fine people” among the racist demonstrators... everything Trump said was in keeping with things he’d said before. The shocking part was his frankness... it forced, if just for a moment, a collective apprehension of just what a repulsive abomination this presidency is... It’s always been obvious that Trump does not hold Russia’s hacking of the 2016 election, which he publicly encouraged and gleefully benefited from, against Putin... None of us yet know the exact contours of Trump’s relationship with Russia, whether Putin is
- his handler,
- his co-conspirator
- or just his hero.
But it’s clear that Trump is willing to sell out American democracy for personal gain.
.. on July 27, 2016, he publicly called for Russia to find Clinton’s emails, and, thanks to Friday’s indictments, we now know Russia started trying to hack the domain used by her personal office that very day.
.. Trump’s collusion with Russia has always been out in the open, daring us to recognize what’s in front of our faces.
.. Some doubt that Trump is a Russian puppet precisely because his fealty to Putin is so blatant and undisguised.
.. Mariia Butina
.. who worked for the Russian politician and alleged organized crime figure Alexander Torshin, presented herself as a Russian gun rights activist, and spent years cultivating links to the National Rifle Association.
.. She became a fixture in some pro-Trump circles and was reportedly especially close to a conservative operative named Paul Erickson.
.. hosting a birthday costume party that was attended by Trump aides.
“She dressed as Russian Empress Alexandra while Erickson was dressed as Rasputin,”
.. At the party, Butina reportedly boasted that she’d helped the Trump campaign communicate with Russia. If there was a reason to doubt that she was a Russian spy, it was only that one would expect a Russian spy to be subtler.
.. This weekend, Butina was arrested in Washington, and on Monday a criminal complaint against her for acting as a Russian agent was unsealed. She was accused of conspiracy to “exploit personal connections with U.S. persons having influence in American politics in an effort to advance the interests of the Russian Federation.”
.. Sometimes things are exactly as bad as they appear.
John Paul Stevens: Repeal the Second Amendment
Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.
.. In 1939 the Supreme Court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a “well regulated militia.”
.. During the years when Warren Burger was our chief justice, from 1969 to 1986, no judge, federal or state, as far as I am aware, expressed any doubt as to the limited coverage of that amendment. When organizations like the National Rifle Association disagreed with that position and began their campaign claiming that federal regulation of firearms curtailed Second Amendment rights, Chief Justice Burger publicly characterized the N.R.A. as perpetrating “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
.. In 2008, the Supreme Court overturned Chief Justice Burger’s and others’ long-settled understanding of the Second Amendment’s limited reach by ruling, in District of Columbia v. Heller, that there was an individual right to bear arms. I was among the four dissenters.
That decision — which I remain convinced was wrong and certainly was debatable — has provided the N.R.A. with a propaganda weapon of immense power.
Trump Stuns Lawmakers With Seeming Embrace of Gun Control
In a remarkable meeting, the president veered wildly from the N.R.A. playbook in front of giddy Democrats and stone-faced Republicans. He called for comprehensive gun control legislation that would expand background checks to weapons purchased at gun shows and on the internet, keep guns from mentally ill people, secure schools and restrict gun sales from some young adults. He even suggested a conversation on an assault weapons ban.
.. At one point, Mr. Trump suggested that law enforcement authorities should have the power to seize guns from mentally ill people or others who could present a danger without first going to court. “I like taking the guns early,” he said, adding, “Take the guns first, go through due process second.”
.. “We’re not ditching any constitutional protections simply because the last person the president talked to today doesn’t like them,” Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, said in a statement.
Democrats, too, said they were skeptical that Mr. Trump would follow through.
.. At the core of Mr. Trump’s suggestion was the revival of a bipartisan bill drafted in 2013 by Senators Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, and Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Despite a concerted push by President Barack Obama and the personal appeals of Sandy Hook parents, the bill fell to a largely Republican filibuster.
.. Democrats tried to turn sometimes muddled presidential musings into firm policy: “You saw the president clearly saying not once, not twice, not three times, but like 10 times, that he wanted to see a strong universal background check bill,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota. “He didn’t mince words about it. So I do not understand how then he could back away from that.”
.. Just what the performance means, and whether Mr. Trump will aggressively push for new gun restrictions, remain uncertain given his history of taking erratic positions on policy issues
The gun control performance on Wednesday was reminiscent of a similar televised discussion with lawmakers about immigration in January during which the president appeared to back bipartisan legislation to help young immigrants brought to the country illegally as children — only to reverse himself and push a hard-line approach that helped scuttle consensus in the Senate.
.. Mr. Trump’s comments during the hourlong meeting were at odds with his history as a candidate and president who has repeatedly declared his love for the Second Amendment and the N.R.A.
.. But at the meeting, the president repeatedly rejected the N.R.A.’s top legislative priority, a bill known as concealed-carry reciprocity
.. Mr. Trump also flatly insisted that legislation should raise the minimum age for buying rifles to 21 from 18
.. When Mr. Toomey pushed back on an increase in the minimum age for rifles, the president accused him of fearing the N.R.A. — a remarkable slap since the association withdrew its support for Mr. Toomey over his background check bill.
.. The president did return several times to a proposal that conservatives like: arming teachers in schools and ending the so-called gun-free zones around schools
Trump’s Idea of Arming Teachers Is Crazy but Clarifying
the exchanges between Trump, Inslee, and several other governors were overshadowed by the President’s laughable claim that even unarmed, he would have tackled the Parkland school shooter.
.. It vividly illuminates the collective madness that beckons when you have an unprincipled man like Trump in the White House, the G.O.P. in control of Congress and the majority of states
.. Inslee .. brought up a program in his home state that gives the family members of disturbed or depressed individuals the ability to obtain court orders to seize their guns.
.. I have listened to law enforcement who have said they don’t want to have to train teachers as law-enforcement agents, which takes about six months.
.. Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, who explained how his state has already adopted a “school-marshal program,”
.. “They will have signs out front, a warning sign that, be aware, there are armed personnel on campus.”
.. Asa Hutchinson, the Republican governor of Arkansas and a former U.S. Attorney who once developed a school-safety program for the N.R.A.
.. “Essentially, what you are saying is that when a sick individual comes into that school, they can expect major trouble, right, major trouble. The bullets are going to be going towards him, also. . . . You know what’s going to happen, nobody’s going into that school.”
.. In making this argument, which follows the logic of the jungle, and of failed states like Yemen and Iraq, Trump seemed blissfully, or purposely, unaware of the fact that many school shooters end up shooting themselves, and, therefore, might well be immune to the logic of deterrence.
- .. Adam Lanza, who killed twenty-six people at Sandy Hook Elementary School, shot himself in the head before the police arrived. Similarly,
- Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two Columbine shooters, made no effort to escape after carrying out their massacre, and they shot themselves after the police arrived.
.. he asserted that arming educators would be cheaper and more effective than hiring more armed guards, or relying on local police officers, such as the ones who failed to stop Nikolas Cruz at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida. “They don’t love the students; they don’t know the students,” Trump said dismissively. “The teachers love the students. They want to protect the students.”
.. he is putting his own unhinged spin on this decivilizing agenda... “The bad guy has to understand that there is a big price to pay when they mess around with our students. You can’t just say we are going to harden our schools. . . . You have to let people know they are going to suffer the ultimate price. And you know what? And I said it before, you’re not going to have incidents, they are not going to do it because they are innately cowards.”