RECAP OF THE WEEK: I lay this stuff out there only to show that, in Normal Times, almost any one of these stories would have been existential-threat-type stories for a president. Now it’s just Tuesday.
- Monday: Everyone was talking about a new book by Michael Wolf “that depicts Trump as a functionally illiterate, mentally unbalanced figurehead, frighteningly incapable of doing the most important job in the world.”
- Tuesday: Trump held a televised meeting on immigration to show that he was not in the early stages of dementia. At the meeting, he was utterly uninformed of the policies in question, and seemed to agree with whatever lawmaker last spoke to him. But the media fell all over itself to credit him for, I guess, his ability to sit up in a chair without screaming obscenities or demanding McDonalds, and his ability to remember lawmakers’ names -- or, rather, reading the name tags that were placed in front of them.
- Wednesday: I must have blacked out on Wednesday.
- Thursday: In the morning, Trump got tricked by Fox into tweeting out against a signature policy of his administration. Two hours later, one of his handlers had to tweet out a face-saving reversal. That afternoon, Trump said he wanted fewer black immigrants and more white ones. (See below.) Oh, and he gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal in which he boasted about how he had succeeded at everything he did; declared, “I was always the best athlete”; said he had a good relationship with Kim Jong Un; and accused an FBI agent of treason. (You missed that one, didn’t you?)
- Friday: In the morning, Trump blatantly lies about why he canceled his trip to the U.K. In the evening, news broke that Trump’s lawyer paid, in October 2016, $130,000 in hush money to a porn star that Trump had had an affair with while married to Melania.
THERE IS ALWAYS A NEW LOW: The lesson from this presidency is that there is always a new low, and we will never, ever reach the bottom. Thursday’s entry came when Trump, while being briefed on immigrants from Haiti and Africa, asked, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? We should have more people from Norway.” This echoes earlier reports that he decried immigrants from Haiti because “they all have AIDS” and those from Africa because, once coming to the U.S., they won’t want to “go back to their huts.” On Friday, NBC put together a revoltingly unsurprising list of other blatantly racist statements Trump has made in private as president, including repeatedly asking an American intelligence analyst of Korean descent where she was from (after refusing to accept her answer of “New York”), and then, upon learning that her parents were Korean, demanding to know why the “pretty Korean lady” was not in charge of negotiations with North Korea. Oh and the other time he asked members of the Congressional Black Caucus if they knew Ben Carson -- and then seemed surprised that they did not. These are textbook examples of racist statements. Not “controversial.” Not “charged.” Not “vulgar.” Racist. (At least some of the press is willing to admit it.) (These statements also entirely consistent with Trump’s habit, on the campaign trail, of spinning lurid and imagined tales of how black Americans live like animals.) Trump’s racism has real consequences for real people. This week, Trump abruptly canceled the temporary protected status of tens of thousands of immigrants from El Salvador, who were permitted to live in the U.S. for more than a decade following a devastating earthquake in 2001. “The decision came just weeks after more than 45,000 Haitians lost protections granted after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, and it suggested that others in the program, namely Hondurans, may soon lose them as well.”
P.S. Just to be absolutely clear on this, because I think some of the coverage I’ve read is missing the point of what is so truly offensive about this. It’s not just that he denigrated an entire continent as a shithole. It’s that it was explicitly linked to immigration: He does not want black African immigrants; he wants white Norwegian immigrants. If he were just saying that he didn’t want to travel to Africa because it was a shithole, that’d be ignorant and disgusting and offensive, but it is the explicit link to immigration policy -- and the contrast with desirable immigrants from Norway -- that makes the statement so shockingly racist and deplorable.
DEMS APPEAR TO BE CAVING ON DACA: Shithole-gate came out of discussions Trump had with legislators over immigration, the hot topic this week. Despite Trump repeatedly professing to want to protect the Dreamers -- he told the WSJ on Thursday: “I think that we should be able to do something with DACA. I think it’s foolish if we don’t, they’ve been here a long time, they’re no longer children, you know.” -- the actual policy of the White House (apparently set by “C+ Santa Monica fascist” Stephen Miller) is to demand significant concessions for passing a Dream Act. And the Democrats appear to be going along with it. On Thursday, a bipartisan group of Senators announced a deal in principle, which would provide a 10-year path to citizenship for Dreamers, $2.8 billion in border security (including $1.6 billion for a wall), a bar on citizenship for parents of Dreamers (though they would be protected from deportation), and changes to the 500,000 visas that are given out through a lottery every year. It was this deal that Graham and Durbin went to the White House to present -- but because Miller was apparently so worried Trump was going to make a deal, he called in far-right-wing senators to surround Trump and make sure he rejected any deal. Which Trump did -- after telling the senators he wanted more white immigrants and fewer black ones. So the Democrats have bent over backward to give concessions -- substantially increased border security and changes to the lottery program -- only to have the deal shot down by the most conservative elements of the Senate. This is insane. The Democrats must insist on a clean DACA bill -- a bill that gives Dreamers a pathway to citizenship, period -- given that so many Republicans and Trump himself have repeatedly said they want to protect Dreamers. We must NOT offer any further concessions, and we have to be willing to vote against a budget (ie, for a shutdown) that continues to enforce racist and dangerous immigration policies that a majority of congressmen and the president all profess to want to fix. It doesn’t seem that complicated to me.
OH ALSO, THERE’S THIS: Trump talking literal nonsense on the vast difference between “DACA” and “Dreamers.” WTF is he talking about??
MORE NEW LOWS, HEALTH CARE EDITION: This week, the Trump administration announced that, for the first time in its 50+ years of existence, Medicaid would be permitted to have work requirements attached, if a state required. Medicaid -- a health insurance program for the poor and disabled. Because apparently we don’t want poor and sick people to be lulled into, um, poverty and illness by the promise of free health care. This is what it means when people say health care is a privilege, not a right. Chait points out that this measure will increase bureaucratic red tape and administrative costs, and create frustration and coverage gaps -- all in service to right-wing fever dreams of the Indolent Moochers. “[T]he pathology of seeing medical care as a privilege, and the fear that it is being extended to the wrong kinds of people, is an embedded characteristic of American conservatism.” This is Reason Number 657,476 that liberals need to focus on control of state legislatures if we have any hope of preventing the further immiseration of our fellow citizens.
THERE IS SOME ACTUAL GOOD NEWS THIS WEEK: Shock of all shocks, some good things happened this week! First, and biggest of all, a panel of three federal judges in North Carolina struck down the state’s gerrymandered district maps as so outrageously partisan as to be unconstitutional -- the first time a court has struck down a map based on partisan gerrymandering. “Judge Wynn, who sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and was a member of a special panel considering the congressional map, said that ‘a wealth of evidence proves the General Assembly’s intent to “subordinate” the interests of non-Republican voters and ‘entrench’ Republican domination of the state’s congressional delegation.’” This was a particularly egregious map: The Republican leader said he created a map with 10 Republican districts and 3 Democratic only because he could not figure out a way to create a map with 11 Republicans and 2 Democrats. For the lawyers out there (and others who may be interested), check out Nick Stephanopoulos’ thoughts on the case on Election Law Blog here, including an explanation of what appears to be an entirely workable legal standard the court employed.
Second, in a somewhat surprising ruling, “The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Monday unanimously rejected a proposal by Energy Secretary Rick Perry that would have propped up nuclear and coal power plants struggling in competitive electricity markets.” This rejection came despite the fact that four of the five members of the board are Trump appointees.
Third, two vulnerable California Republicans decided to hang their hats rather than face reelection, increasing Democrats’ chances of taking back the House. Darryl Issa, a man whose lips were stolen from a lizard, and Ed Royce, a standard-issue Republican I know nothing about, both announced they would retire from their districts in southern California, both of which were won by Clinton.
THE STORY THE GOP DIDN’T WANT YOU TO HEAR: Let’s review where things stand in the right-wing alt-narrative of the Russia investigation: According to this view, Hillary Clinton hired Fusion GPS to investigate Trump. Fusion hired a British spy, Christopher Steele, to dig up dirt on Steele. Steele improperly obtained info, some of which may have been disinformation intentionally planted by the Russians, who, for some unexplained reason, were out to sully Trump’s name and hurt his electoral chances (they’ve never explained their theory on that part). Steele then gave this disinformation to the FBI, which maybe paid him for it, and the FBI used that information to open an illegal investigation into Trump. Thus, the whole investigation is a fraud perpetrated by the Russian government through the FBI -- and thus we need to purge the FBI of its rampant, anti-Trump bias. Okay, so we’re caught up on Visions From Crazy Town. Note that the hinge of this unhinged thesis is that the FBI opened its investigation on the basis of findings from Steele. That thesis was undermined by reporting in the Times last week that found that the FBI was tipped off by an Australian diplomat to whom Trump foreign policy advisor George Papadopolous confided about the soon-to-be-made-public hack of emails. The thesis was blown to smithereens by the under-oath testimony of Fusian GPS leader Glenn Simpson, whose testimony was released unilaterally by Dianne Feinstein after GOP congressional leaders had refused to make it public for weeks -- even as they continued to peddle false claims that were belied by the testimony. Simpson testified that, when Steele took his findings to the FBI (because he was so concerned that he had uncovered a massive scheme to harm the US), the FBI made it clear they had already started an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian governmental figures, and that they had been tipped by someone inside the campaign. We further learned that Steele, with his decades of experience in intelligence gathering, was convinced that none of his sources were planting disinformation, and that when he presented the info to the FBI (and later the media), he did not cherry-pick the evidence to produce only the most damning material.
As Brian Beutler points out, though, we learned even more from the testimony transcript. The questioning from the Republican staffers on the committee, he writes, “is a monument to Republican complicity in Trump’s jaw-dropping misconduct. By my count, over the course of about five hours, Chuck Grassley’s lawyers asked Simpson literally zero questions designed to increase their own understanding of Russian efforts to disrupt the election. . . . They spent their hours instead trying without much success to impeach Simpson’s credibility and paint him as a partisan. . . . Confronted with the allegation that the Trump campaign was complicit in a criminal plot to sabotage the Clinton campaign, Grassley’s representatives wanted to know why Simpson had the nerve to try to alert the public, through the media.” It is clear that the Republicans no longer have any interest in actually uncovering the truth about what happened or didn’t happen during the 2016 campaign. They are interested solely in protecting Trump. They have spent weeks peddling false stories about the origins of the FBI investigation and the conduct of FBI agents, knowing full well that the stories were false but working their hardest to prevent the truth from coming out. There is no low to which these people will not stoop. There will not come a day when their eyes will open and the fever will break. The only hope we have is to beat them, and beat them thoroughly.
Endorsements:
- This thread on Oprah’s charisma and why, with Trump so historically unpopular, Oprah is not the candidate we should look for -- because we could do better. (I also found this piece, arguing against an Oprah candidacy, persuasive.) My view is that 2018 is probably the most important election in the last 100 years, and a full 100% of our energy should be directed at that. Every minute we spend talking about 2020 is a minute wasted that should be spent organizing for 2018.
- Portland police and prosecutors said they had the absolute right to go through people’s trash without a warrant. So reporters went digging through the trash of the District Attorney, the police chief, and the police commissioner. Hilarity ensues.
- This thread about how, exactly, “shithole countries” became that way -- and the United States’ starring role.
- This absolutely perfect account of the White House’s inability to figure out how to work a conference call.
- This exchange between Trump and the WSJ:
WSJ: You think North Korea is trying to drive a wedge between the two countries, between you and President Moon?
Mr. Trump: I’ll let you know in—within the next 12 months, OK, Mike?
WSJ: Sure.
Mr. Trump: I will let you know. But if I were them I would try. But the difference is I’m president; other people aren’t. And I know more about wedges than any human being that’s ever lived, but I’ll let you know.
Mr. Trump: I’ll let you know in—within the next 12 months, OK, Mike?
WSJ: Sure.
Mr. Trump: I will let you know. But if I were them I would try. But the difference is I’m president; other people aren’t. And I know more about wedges than any human being that’s ever lived, but I’ll let you know.
- Alexandra Petri on #MeToo.
- There has never, ever been a more perfect Twitter exchange ever ever.
- Charles Pierce: Are Americans Going to Vote Their Hopes, or Their Fears?
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