The reason I use scare quotes here is that the single-page document the White House circulated this week bore no resemblance to what people normally mean when they talk about a tax plan. True, a few tax rates were mentioned — but nothing was said about the income thresholds at which these rates apply.
.. Meanwhile, the document said something about eliminating tax breaks, but didn’t say which. For example, would the tax exemption for 401(k) retirement accounts be preserved?
.. So if you were looking for a document that you could use to estimate, even roughly, how much a given individual would end up paying, sorry.
.. Trump is like a temperamental child, bored by details and easily frustrated when things don’t go his way; being an effective staffer seems to involve finding ways to make him feel good and take his mind off news that he feels makes him look bad.
The White House’s game on Russia has now been fully exposed
Republicans may be successful at subverting the possibility of getting to the bottom of the scandal — which they are now clearly trying to do, by creating a distraction aimed at diverting public attention away from story and instead towards conspiracy theories involving the Obama administration.
.. The aim is to cast the Russia investigation as another Benghazi — by turning former National Security Advisor Susan Rice into the villain of the story, and fixing the focus of the hearings on her.
.. All of Trump’s efforts to smear his predecessor, including accusing former President Obama of ordering surveillance of Trump Tower, and claiming that Rice had committed a crime, have been proven false — something Trump and his allies refuse to even acknowledge.
.. rather than retract his baseless tweet, Trump and his allies latched onto it, spinning implausible theories in an effort to drum up even a sliver of evidence for it after the fact.
.. the White House “put out an all-points bulletin” to “find something that justifies the President’s crazy tweet about surveillance at Trump Tower.”
.. Nunes appeared to collaborate with the White House to review cherry-picked classified intelligence and leak it to the media to craft a false narrative that the Obama administration had somehow surveilled the Trump team.
.. One thing to watch for now is the role the conservative media — allied with Trump — will likely play in shifting the focus to Rice. Primed by another spurious, politicized GOP investigation involving Rice (Benghazi), conservative pundits are eager to portray Rice as a devious figure in this new narrative.
.. But it now looks as if the House Intelligence Committee will try to embroil Rice in the Russia hearings, anyway. If so, it will show just how far the Committee’s Republicans are willing to go to prop up Trump’s lies — and to distract from efforts to get to the bottom of Russian meddling, as well as any possible Trump campaign collusion with it.
Why Americans Vote ‘Against Their Interest’: Partisanship
Working-class Americans who voted for Donald J. Trump continue to approve of him as president, even though he supported a health care bill that would disproportionately hurt them.
Highly educated professionals tend to lean Democratic, even though Republican tax policies would probably leave more money in their pockets.
Why do people vote against their economic interests?
.. “Partisan identification is bigger than anything the party does,”
.. it stems from something much more fundamental: people’s idea of who they are.
.. “It more or less boils down to how you see the conflicts in American society, and which groups you see as representing you,”
.. “That often means race, and religion, and ethnicity — those are the social groups that underlie party identification.”
.. That often leads people to say that they are independent, she said, but in fact most voters consistently lean toward one of the parties.
.. “Older voters who scored high on racial resentment were much more likely to switch from Obama to Trump,”
.. She believes that he successfully made a pitch to what she calls “white male identity politics,” convincing older, less-educated white voters that he would represent their interests.
.. Economic status, it turns out, is not so important in partisanship.
.. Mr. Trump was able to win the G.O.P. nomination even though he broke with Republican ideology on economic matters like trade protectionism. His arguments played to white working-class voter identity
.. while those multiple identities might once have pushed people in different partisan directions .. today it’s more common to line up behind one party.
.. people now feel that they are fighting for many elements of who they are: their racial identity, professional identity, religious identity, even geographical identity.
.. he as a politician, kind of for the first time, said ‘we’re losers.’ ” Social psychology research has shown that the best way to get people to defend their identity is to threaten it. By saying “we don’t win anymore — we’re losers — and I’m going to make us win again,”
.. Mr. Trump’s pitch to voters both created the sense of threat and promised a defense: a winning political strategy for the age of identity politics.
.. people responded much more strongly to threats or support to their party than to particular issues.
.. He has been careful to recast every potential scandal and policy struggle as a battle against the Democrats and other outside groups.
.. Mr. Trump has insisted, for instance, that the F.B.I. investigation into his campaign staffers’ contacts with Russia is meaningless “fake news,” and that the real issue is whether President Obama wiretapped him before the election.
.. Abandoning him would mean betraying tribal allegiance, and all of the identities that underlie it.
Jonah Goldberg: Trump Is Wrong and Should Spend His Time Doing What He Was Elected To Do.”
I made the point that even if Donald Trump was 100 percent right in claiming he was wiretapped by President Obama (he wasn’t), it would still be foolish to say what he did in those tweets. Put aside that Trump based his accusation on some flimsy news articles he had read. Let’s imagine he had a credible source with real evidence to back up the claim. The correct response would be to call in the heads of the NSA, CIA, DOJ, and FBI and get to the bottom of it. Then, after you’ve completed a behind-the-scenes investigation, press charges against those responsible.
Trump went a different way, and a month of his first 100 days has been eaten up by the furor. I added that, politically, this whole thing was a huge waste and distraction, including the response by my friend Devin Nunes. He, as the House Intelligence Committee chairman, may indeed have some important revelations to make. But the whole thing could have been handled better.
I say with all humility: I was 100 percent right.
The response, however, from Trump’s amen corner was the usual outrage and ridiculous claims: “Trump was vindicated! He’s playing four-dimensional chess! Shut up! Etc.”
.. Obama really believed that he was a post-ideological president who only cared about “what works.” This progressive understanding of pragmatism is a kind of exquisite confirmation bias. We’re not ideological, we just want to do the smartest, best thing (which just happens to line up with our undisclosed and unacknowledged ideological biases).
.. During the election, lots of people told me that a businessman would cut through all the politics by running the government like a business. Jared Kushner is apparently heading up the latest version of this incredibly hackneyed and ancient idea. The simple problem is that government isn’t a business (never mind that Donald Trump is not a typical businessman). The incentive structure of politics is entirely different than the incentive structure for a businessman. A CEO can walk into a meeting and explain to his employees that if they don’t hit their widget sales quota, no one will get their bonus. Politics doesn’t work like that.
.. If you don’t think politics matters, keep in mind that the incentives for GOP congressmen to cooperate with Trump drops in tandem with his approval ratings.
.. The people who think that the way to help conservatism is to support everything Trump says and does simply have it wrong. If he tweets “2+2=5,” you don’t help him (or the cause or the country) by saying “He’s right!” or “This is a brilliant ploy to deconstruct the ‘alt-left’ mathematical establishment!” The best thing you can do is say “Trump is wrong and he should spend his time doing what he was elected to do.”
.. Trump’s one truly great success so far was the nomination of Neil Gorsuch. Why was that a success? Because he outsourced the task to Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society and Mitch McConnell — two guys who relied on a tried-and-true playbook.
.. The essence of conservatism is to respect practices, customs, norms, and values that have survived the brutal acid of trial and error. “What is conservatism?” Lincoln asked. “Is it not the adherence to the old and tried against the new and untried?”
.. Acolytes of Trump’s cult of personality don’t want to hear it, but the worst thing they can do is keep shouting “Let Trump be Trump!” If he’s going to succeed, Trump needs to start acting like a normal president who deals with the reality of politics.