HOUSTON: Obviously, the horrific disaster in Houston and the surrounding areas in Texas cannot (and should not) be reduced to my usual snark. We are just at the beginning of the recovery process, and we still have no real idea as of now exactly the scope of the catastrophe. But I wanted to bring it up to encourage everyone to donate where they can. The New York Times has a list of good local places to donate to, including food banks and diaper services. I would encourage you to look elsewhere than the Red Cross; Slate has a pretty damning article about their lack of effectiveness in recent large-scale disasters, and ProPublica tweeted out its own summary of the Red Cross’s failures. As far as understanding Houston as a city, I highly recommend this Jia Tolentino piece from the New Yorker. She vividly describes her hometown, and I learned a lot. (For example: Houston “currently resettles twenty-five of every thousand refugees that the United Nations resettles anywhere—that’s more than any other city in America, and more than most countries.”) Also, you should read Charles Pierce on the chemical plant that exploded today. He noted that under Texas law, the owners of the plant have no duty to tell anyone what chemicals, exactly, are actually in there (and thus what went into the air when it exploded), and how Texas’s freedom-enhancing laws allow chemical corporations to have the run of the place, safety be damned -- to the extent that local officials do not even know what and where hazardous materials are being stored all over the region. Pierce: “This is no accident. This is a political philosophy put into action, and a triumphant one at that.” Finally, this the best the White House could come up with to show Trump witnessing the hurricane devastation “first hand.” Pathetic.
UPDATE ON RUSSIA INVESTIGATION: There was a bunch of reporting this week that was a bit confusing but, taken together, present some pretty big news. Josh Marshall summarizes: “But for the first six months of his presidential campaign he was actively trying to secure a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow and in early 2016 a top Trump business executive solicited the assistance of one of Vladimir Putin’s top aides in making the deal happen. This of course was happening while Trump was singing Putin’s praises on the campaign trail.” The Times reported that longtime Trump associate and all-around scumbag Felix Sater wrote a bunch of emails to Trump’s chief dealmaker, Michael Cohen, in 2015 promising to help build Trump Tower in Moscow and to get Russia on board for Trump’s campaign, writing: “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.” In another email, he wrote, “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected.” And then in early January 2016 -- well into the middle of the presidential campaign -- Cohen emailed Putin’s personal spokesman to ask for help on the Trump Tower deal, which had stalled. Commenting on the Don Jr. email and the Sater email, Chris Hayes noted the “incredible irony that not a single Clinton/Podesta email was as incriminating as the *two* Trump campaign emails we've seen.” As Chait remarks, this story reveals a third channel for potential collaboration between the Trump world and the Russian government, with the other two being the Don Jr./Kushner/Manafort meeting in Trump Tower with Russian agents and the attempt by a Republican operative to obtain Clinton’s emails through Russian hackers.
That was just the beginning of the Russia news this week. We also got more indications that investigators are turning up the heat on Paul Manafort. On Tuesday, it was leaked that Mueller had issued subpoenas to Manafort’s former lawyer and his current spokesman. Wednesday night, Politico reported that “Mueller’s team is working with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman on its investigation into Paul Manafort and his financial transactions.” This is significant for a few reasons. One, it demonstrates how aggressively Mueller is pursuing this investigation; as Chait puts it, Mueller is “handling his investigating like the prosecution of a mob boss, pressuring underlings to flip on the boss.” Second, it destroys Trump’s only leverage: his pardon power, which he demonstrated last week he would use baselessly and to excuse contempt of court. Trump can’t pardon anyone for state crimes. So if Schneiderman is the one doing the charging, Trump has no way to protect his underlings. Things are getting continue to be interesting! P.S. Here’s a good thread from Journalist Seth Abramson, pulling together the top-line basics of what we already know to show there’s a pretty open and shut case that Trump and his buddies have committed crimes with respect to all of this.
PEOPLE ARE (MAYBE?) WAKING UP: On Wednesday night, Fox News (yes, Fox News) released a poll finding that 56% of Americans believe Trump is tearing the country apart, 64% are not happy with the way things in the country are going, and “a record 55 percent disapprove of the job [Trump’s] doing as president, while 41 percent approve. That’s a net negative by 14 points and his worst score to-date.” And look who he’s lost the most ground with since Fox’s earlier poll in April: conservatives (down 7 points), Republican men (-9 points), and whites without a college degree (-9 points) -- in other words, his base is slowly starting to turn on him. (Oh, and 56% say Trump doesn’t respect racial minorities.)
GOOD NEWS OF THE WEEK: We have two stories this week, for a change. First, Illinois passed a law automatically registering eligible voters to vote, which could add 1 million people to the voting rolls. “Eligible voters will automatically be registered through an electronic process when they apply for a driver’s license or state ID at the DMV or interact with other government agencies, unless they opt out.” Second, “[a] federal district judge on Wednesday ruled against the state of Texas and halted a controversial state-based immigration enforcement law just days before it was scheduled to go into effect.” Among other things, this law would allow the state to punish cities that refuse to hold undocumented immigrants who are arrested for petty crimes (so-called “sanctuary cities”).
MORE STELLAR PERSONNEL CHOICES: This week, a former executive of for-profit Devry University was appointed to lead the Department of Education’s “Student Aid Enforcement Unit, which was established by the Obama administration to more aggressively combat fraud and deceptive practices at colleges and universities.” What’s that? Oh, right: Last year, Devry was forced to pay $100 million to settle fraud claims for misleading students about its graduation rates. Awesome. Then we have William Bradford, who until this evening ran the Energy Department's Office of Indian Energy. He resigned tonight after CNN’s KFile reported this week that, in September 2016, he appears to have commented on an online article by calling Obama’s mother “a fourth-rate p&*n actress and w@!re” (spelling in the original); he also claimed that Obama’s birth certificate was fraudulent. In June, the Washington Post reported that Bradford had “tweeted a slew of disparaging remarks about the real and imagined ethnic, religious and gender identities of former president Barack Obama, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, TV news host Megyn Kelly and Japanese Americans during World War II.” Just last December, he referred to Obama as a “Kenyan creampuff” who received “his mission in Tehran.” In February 2016, he tweeted that the internment of Japanese Americans was “necessary.” Real stand-up guy. Anyway, after this latest reporting this week, he claimed that his online accounts had been hacked, but then resigned tonight. These people.
TAX PLAN: Yes, Trump went to Missouri this week to give a speech on taxes in which he offered 0 details and 0 specifics except for lowering corporate taxes (obviously the most important thing). I don’t have much to say on this obviously inane and stupid idea. As Chait points out, Trump’s script is all populism and “stick it to the man” aphorisms, while the policy (such as it exists) is a straight giveaway to the GOP’s donor class. We’ll see how this plays out.
Endorsements:
- This Slate interview with Mark Lilla, in which the hollowness of his ideas and the inspidity of his thesis become painfully clear the moment he is confronted with even the most mild questioning.
- This Chait piece on the basic corruption at the heart of Trump’s administration. Kicker: “The spectacular and telegenic failures of the Trump administration are obscuring the highly effective policies under way. Trump has transformed the government into an apparatus for protecting and enriching incumbent wealth. His chaos and incompetence are tolerable to his party because Trump is fashioning an American oligarchy.”
- This incredibly lengthy compilation of all the times Republicans, White House staffers, or other Trump insiders have described the president as a toddler.
- Yes it’s cheesy, but this GMA segment on “Mattress Mack” and his unbelievable generosity in Houston is incredible and heartwarming and all the other adjectives.
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