A headline in Politico Monday read: “ Trump national security team blindsided by NATO speech.” If this report is correct, President Trump left his top team—national security adviser H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson —in the dark regarding his May 25 speech at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels. All three officials, Politico reports, believed the president’s address would explicitly affirm his commitment to Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which states that an attack on one ally is an attack on all. Only when Mr. Trump began speaking did they realize he had removed the crucial sentence, reportedly with encouragement from chief strategist Steve Bannon.
.. The president withheld information from his top advisers and then forced them to offer “awkward, unconvincing, after-the-fact claims that the speech really did amount to a commitment they knew it did not make.”
.. veteran national-security scholars and officials who regard this as a turning point in their assessment of the administration. Until now they believed Mr. Trump’s experienced advisers would be able to run American foreign policy along more or less conventional postwar lines
.. They no longer believe this. Instead, they say, his modus operandi will be transactional.
.. a highly placed Asian official who said Washington “is now the epicenter of instability in the world.”
.. Lt. Gen. McMaster and Gary Cohn, the head of the National Economic Council, teamed up to publish a startling defense of Mr. Trump’s crockery-breaking European tour. The key doctrinal sentence runs: “The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.”
.. Lest the reader conclude that the authors regard this as a disagreeable reality, they declare: “Rather than deny this elemental nature of international affairs, we embrace it.” Hooray for the war of all against all!
.. There is a lot of daylight between Hobbes and Kant. Anarchy is not the only alternative to World Federalism.
.. Lt. Gen. McMaster and Mr. Cohn continue, “we delivered a clear message to our friends and partners: Where our interests align, we are open to working together.” The implication is that where they do not, we aren’t.
.. What about doing the right thing for its own sake, as President George W. Bush did when he placed America’s moral authority and material resources behind the global struggle against AIDS?
.. President Truman and Secretary of State George Marshall had learned the answer to these questions from Franklin Roosevelt : In the long run, the U.S. will not survive as an island of democracy in a sea of autocracy.
.. By contrast, Mr. Trump embraces self-interest wrongly understood, and his enablers, who surely know better, are helping him peddle this poison as medicine.
.. Yes, NATO partners should contribute more to the common defense. But even if they paid nothing, a free and democratic Europe would still serve the interests of the U.S.
Democratic Hypocrisy and Hysteria Don’t Make Trump Right
the evidence is accumulating that Trump fired James Comey in the middle of an accelerating investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and then lied to the American people about the reason. No amount of Democratic hysteria can make that right. There is no amount of leftist hypocrisy that makes that acceptable.
.. To believe Trump’s story, you have to believe that he did a complete about-face, that he’s repudiated his previous praise and his previous critiques of Comey. For example, at a campaign rally on October 31, he said, “It took guts for director Comey to make the move that he made” to publicly announce that the FBI had reopened its e-mail investigation. Now that gutsy move is grounds for termination?
.. throughout, there was a consistent theme: Trump’s thoughts about Comey always directly reflected Trump’s political self-interest.
.. Lawyers are familiar with a term called “pretext.” Employment lawyers encounter it all the time. For example, if a boss wants to fire an employee because she’s black or Christian, they’ll rarely say: “I hate Christians. Pack your things.” Instead, they’ll look for another justification that masks the real motivation. “Jane was late Friday. She has to go. Jill didn’t fill out her TPS report correctly. Time to leave.”
.. Lawyers are familiar with a term called “pretext.” Employment lawyers encounter it all the time. For example, if a boss wants to fire an employee because she’s black or Christian, they’ll rarely say: “I hate Christians. Pack your things.” Instead, they’ll look for another justification that masks the real motivation. “Jane was late Friday. She has to go. Jill didn’t fill out her TPS report correctly. Time to leave.”
.. It’s time to stop enabling Trump and start seeking the truth — even if the truth hurts.
Major Hurdle for a Tax Code Overhaul: Trump’s Own Field
Many tax experts say a key element to any fundamental overhaul is getting rid of certain deductions for businesses — the “special-interest giveaways that are masked as tax breaks,” as House Republicans describe many of them in their own proposal.
.. But there is a major roadblock to that fundamental change, and it comes from a sector well known to the president: the real estate industry.
.. “There’s probably no special interest that’s more favored by the existing tax code than real estate,” said Steven M. Rosenthal, a real estate tax lawyer and senior fellow at the centrist Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. “It’s really hard to take that industry on.”
.. the tax deduction for interest payments by businesses, a provision that Mr. Trump has used to great advantage in what little has been seen of his past tax returns. The House Republican plan calls for eliminating the deduction as part of an overall plan, helping offset lower tax rates. The nonpartisan, conservative-leaning Tax Foundation says the provision could be a $1.5 trillion proposition over the next decade.
.. After the last major overhaul of the tax code, in 1986 — under a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, and a Democratic Congress — it was a Democrat, Bill Clinton, who signed legislation that restored lost real estate tax breaks seven years later.
.. Start, for example, with the ability of businesses to deduct interest payments. More than in just about any industry, real estate investors use leverage — borrowed money — to enhance returns. They lower their taxes by deducting interest payments.
.. a growing number of economists and tax experts have called for abolishing the deduction, as does the House Republican tax plan, “A Better Way,” on grounds that it distorts capital markets by favoring debt over stock.
.. Mr. Trump came out in favor of another key element of the House Republican plan: immediate deductibility, or expensing, of capital expenditures, rather than the practice of depreciating assets over time.
.. “Reagan didn’t get into the details,” Mr. Burman said. “But he made the calls, he gave the speeches, and he got people excited about the idea of fixing our broken tax system.”
“It’s hard to imagine President Trump doing that,” he said. “Because at the end of the day, the existing tax code is great for people like him.”