just calling out deceit is insufficient. It is essential as well to understand why Trump tells particular lies at particular moments and to be hardheaded in judging how effective they are.
.. Republicans on the ballot this fall should be asked if they see Pelosi as an “MS-13 lover,” and if not, whether they will denounce Trump for saying such a thing. I am not holding my breath.
.. Yet sometimes Trump engages in a perverse form of transparency. He signaled clearly that the whole point of his screed — during which he also re-upped his claim that Mexico would pay for his border wall — was about the midterm elections. Immigration, he said, is “a good issue for us, not for them.”
.. Why immigration? It’s not the central concern of most voters. A Gallup survey in May found that 10 percent of Americans listed it as the most important problem facing the country. And Trump’s wall is not popular — in a recent CBS News poll, 59 percent of Americans were against building it.
.. But currently, Trump and the Republicans aren’t focused on the majority of Americans. They are petrified that their own loyalists do not seem very motivated about voting in November... just 26 percent of Americans strongly approved of Trump’s job performance, compared with 41 percent who strongly disapproved... Trump and his party feel they need to screech loudly to get their side back into the game, and attacking immigration (going back to Mexican “rapists”) is the signature Trump talking point... Republican House candidates are following Trump’s lead, according to a USA Today study published Tuesday, “blanketing the airwaves with TV ads embracing a hard line on immigration.” By contrast, health care was the topic most invoked in Democratic spots. The GOP’s emphasis may shift some after the primaries, but Republicans seem to know that wedge issues are more useful to them than their record... Political polarization has many sources, but the prime cause of it now is the president himself. Polarization defines Trump’s survival strategy, and it means that demagoguery —
- toward immigrants,
- toward crime,
- toward special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe,
- toward dissenting NFL players,
- toward anyone who takes him on
— is what his presidency is all about... What thus needs exposing is not simply Trump’s indifference to the truth but also the fact that he depends upon the kinds of lies that will tear our country to pieces.
Trey Gowdy’s total rebuke of Trump’s ‘spying’ narrative — and the pattern it fits
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) has spent the better part of the past 15 hours poking holes in President Trump’s dubious trial balloon about a spy in his campaign.
Gowdy, who was one of the few people to get briefed on the situation last week, told Fox News on Tuesday night that the briefing vindicated the FBI: “I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got, and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump.”
.. Even House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), Trump’s most important ally in the House, has been quiet since receiving the briefing alongside Gowdy. That, perhaps more than anything, speaks volumes.
.. But we’ve been here before, and the lack of any real backup for Trump’s claims hasn’t stopped the GOP base from buying into them.
.. Few top Republican members of Congress are calling the Russia investigation a “witch hunt,” as Trump has, yet 82 percent of Republican voters and 44 percent of all Americans believe it is.
The Nunes memo that alleged a political and abusive predicate for the Russia probe wasn’t exactly embraced by Republicans, but it has contributed to Trump’s narrative.
.. Almost none of these conspiracy theories have been embraced by the broader, official Republican Party. Almost all of them have broken through, thanks to Trump’s singularity, his saturation of media coverage and the lack of a concerted pushback beyond people like Gowdy, Graham and Rubio
.. Gowdy is not seeking reelection after this term, so he does not have to worry about the political consequences of speaking out against Trump.
Is Trump the Second Coming of Reagan?
Fox News’s Bret Baier wants you to think he just might be.
.. Bret Baier, chief political anchor of Fox News, President Trump’s favorite network, insists he isn’t living in some alternate reality. He knows that our current President is louder, cruder, and ruder than Ronald Reagan, “a counterpuncher” from New York far different from his genial Republican predecessor.
.. Right before our conversation, Baier had appeared on the radio with Rush Limbaugh, the conservative talk-show host who reveres Reagan so much he refers to him as Ronaldus Magnus. Limbaugh waxed on to Baier about “the parallels” between two different men, and Baier agreed. “Exactly,” he said. “One thing you can say is, like Reagan, Trump has changed the paradigm. I mean, the jury’s still out on the end result, but the game changed in the way Washington worked.”
.. Since the start of Trump’s outsider campaign to remake the Republican Party in his own image, his partisans have branded him a Reagan for our times—a brasher and brusquer one, perhaps, but like Reagan in that they were both renegades who fought the party establishment and politically revitalized the G.O.P. with a new coalition of former Democrats like themselves. This is the “heads were exploding then, heads are exploding now” part of Baier’s argument.
.. An establishment figure no less than James Baker, Reagan’s first-term White House chief of staff, has said that Trump’s ascendance reminded him of Reagan’s; he made the remark during a lunch before Nancy Reagan’s funeral, in 2016, as Trump was in the midst of trouncing sixteen other Republicans to take the nomination of a party whose leaders had hardly welcomed him.
.. when they met in the spring of 2016, Baker handed Trump a two-page memo full of advice, which Trump promptly ignored.
- .. “Number one,” Adelman told me, “Reagan was a Republican. Number two:
- Reagan was a conservative and it’s clear Trump is not. Number three:
- Reagan was a very, very decent person…. And number four:
- basically, Reagan was very competent.”
.. Kristol told me the Republican whom President Trump most resembles is not Ronald Reagan, but Richard Nixon. “I would say Trump is more like Nixon, though it’s unfair to Nixon in that Nixon was a more serious person,” Kristol said. “He’s more Nixon than Reagan, but of course a much degraded version of Nixon.”
.. In Republican circles, Reagan’s brand remains as golden as the lettering on Trump Tower. The endless Fox News segments with pictures of Reagan and Trump flashing on screen together certainly give the impression of a well-timed and not particularly subtle image-burnishing campaign.
.. A report in New York magazine that was released before we met claimed that Sean Hannity, the Fox prime-time star, talks to the President on the phone as frequently as several times a day, often at night before they go to bed.
The Price of Getting Inside Trump’s Head
Michael Cohen has profited from it, but we’re all Trumpologists now.
Christie argued that pesky journalists and amateur Trump watchers were always getting the President wrong, making it out as if there were some “Machiavellian” grand plan by Trump that could explain many otherwise seemingly unexplainable moves. “There is no strategy,” he exclaimed.
.. Several mentioned White House aides or outside advisers, such as Christie, who seem to have the ability to read Trump’s quirks and offer reliable guidance about what a President who delights in the appearance of unpredictability will actually do. One White House reporter, for example, said that Stephen Miller, the combative young aide who writes many of Trump’s speeches and has helped shape his hard-line immigration policy, was “an authentic reflection of his boss,” citing him as a helpful resource “if you’re looking to decode what Trump is really thinking.” Others mentioned informal advisers including Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, and Christopher Ruddy, the C.E.O. of Newsmax and another regular Trump phone buddy; journalists such as the Times’ Maggie Haberman and the Free Beacon’s Matthew Continetti
.. “The truth is, virtually everyone who claims to know what Trump is going to do has been wrong at some point,” one sharp analyst told me. “The best indicator, in my mind, is to go back and read his core campaign pledges and speeches. Those have been far more instructive than anyone in Congress, in the Republican Party, or on his own team.”
.. “All the same traits repeat themselves now,” the correspondent wrote to me. “The grandiosity, the impatience and impulsiveness, the repeated lies.
.. At the time, other observers, less schooled in Trump, wrongly thought that the heavy responsibilities of a job for which he was ill-prepared might change him. Not the Trumpologists. “He’s the same old Trump,
.. What did it mean that the former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, the leader of Germany’s pro-Russia oppositionists at a time of such tensions with the West, was right there in the front row? That Putin only shook hands with three people—Schroeder, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, and a splendidly attired Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill
.. Indeed, the Putin inauguration scene made the former Moscow correspondent in me realize just how much Washington these days feels like Russia.
.. Of course, there’s always an element of Kremlinology in how we cover the White House.
.. But, at least in Administrations of old, there was a process to pay attention to, meetings where actual decisions were made, policy rollouts planned in advance as a result of those decisions. “Process protects you” was a favorite line of Obama’s process-obsessed second-term chief of staff, Denis McDonough, and most of his predecessors, from Republican and Democratic Administrations alike, agreed.
.. Many of this President’s major decisions—from appointing Cabinet secretaries to pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal—are completely opaque and, in many cases, shockingly process-free.