Only Trump Could Lose An Election In The Midst Of A National Emergency To A Candidate As Inert A Biden

Harry Enten, writing for CNN, has been widely quoted over the weekend saying that a new ABC News/Washington Post poll shows "Biden clearly ahead" of the Orange Menace-- double digits, 53% to 43% among registered voters. He added that in context things are even better for Biden and that "Biden's in one of the best positions for any challenger since scientific polling began in the 1930s."

There were more than 40 national public polls taken at least partially in the month of May that asked about the Biden-Trump matchup. Biden led in every single one of them. He's the first challenger to be ahead of the incumbent in every May poll since Jimmy Carter did so in 1976. Carter, of course, won the 1976 election. Biden's the only challenger to have the advantage in every May poll over an elected incumbent in the polling era.

Biden remains the lone challenger to be up in the average of polls in every single month of the election year. His average lead in a monthly average of polls has never dipped below 4 points and has usually been above it.

Biden hasn't trailed Trump this entire year in a single telephone poll in which at least some voters were reached via their cell phones-- historically the most accurate. The ABC News/Washington Post poll is the latest example of these polls. In fact, Biden's never been behind in any of these polls since at least January 2019. No other challenger has come close to that mark.

Indeed, the stability of Biden's edge has been what is most impressive. The May polls had Biden up by 6 points on average. That is right where the average of polls taken since the beginning of this year has been. It's where the average of polls conducted since the beginning of 2019 has been as well.

If we limit ourselves to just the telephone polls that call cell phones, Biden's edge might even be slightly larger. This month those polls have Biden up 7 points on average. Estimating Biden's advantage from state polls of this type shows a similar lead for Biden.

A look at the fundamentals shows why Trump continues to trail. Simply put, he remains unpopular.

His net approval rating (approval - disapproval) in the ABC News/Washington Post poll was -8 points. That's very close to the average of polls, which has it at about -10 points. At no point during the past three years has Trump ever had a positive net approval rating.

The only other two presidents to have a net approval rating this low at this point in the campaign were Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992. Both of them lost reelection.

Imagine how absolutely loathed Trump is with these statistics for one of the most pathetic and useless candidates ever nominated by a major party in that same era! And Enten raises the possibility that even after many anti-Biden ads have been run and even with the pandemic dominating the news, it just may be possible that "nothing will move the electorate substantially in Trump's direction."

There are other reasons-- besides just Trump's awful job approval ratings-- for Trump's inability to catch up with such a nothing like Biden. For one thing, Trump's personal attributes, are weighing him down. About six in 10 registered voters don’t see Trump as honest and trustworthy (35%), don’t think he understands the problems of average Americans (38%) and don’t think he has the personality and temperament for the job (38%)... Trump’s difficulties on personal attributes are well-established and mostly stable. Biden generally does better-- but, at the same time, not particularly well. Fewer than half rate him as honest and trustworthy (48 percent, vs. 35 percent for Trump) or say he understands the problems of people like them (45 percent, vs. 38 percent for Trump). Only 46% say that Trump has the mental sharpness for the job. Somehow, 51% of voters have persuaded themselves that Biden does!

I doubt spiking COVID-cases are helping Trump (and the GOP) in swing states. The numbers look worse and worse outside the early states-- New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts-- which are all seeing significant improvements right now, however tenuous. But in most of the states Trump is counting on for his reelection, the pandemic is headed in the opposite direction, despite fudged statistics in some of those states-- Florida for sure and possibly probably in Texas and Georgia. The cases per million continue a growth pattern that points to increased deaths by autumn-- as well as more ultra-serious problems in the economy. 15 swing or swingy states Trump is counting on (according to his own campaign) with their cases per million as of this afternoon:

• Nebraska- 7,416 cases per million
• Iowa- 6,243
• Pennsylvania- 5,994
• Michigan- 5,761
• Virginia- 5,319
• Georgia- 4,511
• Minnesota- 4,470
• New Mexico- 3,720
• New Hampshire- 3,446
• Wisconsin- 3,185
• Ohio- 3,082
• Arizona- 2,765
• North Carolina- 2,821
• Florida- 2,646 (Florida reports far fewer cases for political reasons)
• Texas- 2,277

As conservative and former Republican George Will wrote in his column today: "The nation’s downward spiral into acrimony and sporadic anarchy has had many causes much larger than the small man who is the great exacerbator of them. Most of the causes predate his presidency, and most will survive its January terminus. The measures necessary for restoration of national equilibrium are many and will be protracted far beyond his removal. One such measure must be the removal of those in Congress who, unlike the sycophantic mediocrities who cosset him in the White House, will not disappear 'magically,' as Eric Trump said the coronavirus would. Voters must dispatch his congressional enablers, especially the senators who still gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting. In life’s unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices. Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than 1,200 days. We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation’s domestic health and international standing, but we know the first step: Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration."

Sharper Republicans Realize What's Headed Their Way-- And They Are Begging Us To Help Save Them.

A NY Fed study shows what anyone with any sense has long known, namely that Trump was full of shit last year when he claimed China would be paying for his trade war tariffs by cutting the prices on Chinese goods to absorb import taxes (as much as 25%) when the goods hit U.S. shores. That isn't the way trade wars go and "the prices Chinese firms charge have barely budged, meaning U.S. companies and consumers are paying the tariff costs, estimated at around $40 billion annually. As a result of the U.S.-China trade war, the government adds as much as 25% to the import price as Chinese goods enter the country. If Chinese companies were absorbing that cost, they would have to cut their prices as much as 20%-- a level that would allow U.S. retailers, manufacturers, or wholesalers to keep their own prices and profits stable. That is not what is happening. Import data from June 2018 to September 2019 shows Chinese import prices fell only 2%, the Fed study found, in line with price declines seen in many other nations as global trade slowed."

As with everything-- yes, every little thing-- Trump says, that was a lie. Yesterday, for example, CNN reported that Mulvaney's "Office of Management and Budget's first official action to withhold $250 million in Pentagon aid to Ukraine came on the evening of July 25, the same day President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke on the phone.

Tim Miller, writing for The Bulwark Tuesday, wanted to make sure his readers are aware that Trump’s Turkey Corruption Is Way Worse Than You Realize. Remember-- John Bolton said that he believes there's a "personal or business relationship dictating Trump’s position on Turkey"-- meaning that, at the very least, Trump's hand-picked national security advisor believes "the commander-in-chief made life or death national security decisions because of an active conflict of interest related to his business." That seems heavy, even for a (literate) Trump supporter, and Miller asserts it "would amount to the biggest scandal in the American presidency in half a century: The most senior security staffer, a man with unparalleled access to the president, believes that Trump acted in a way that is indistinguishable from double-dealing despots the world over."

One more Bulwark post, this one from yesterday by Laura Field on how the alt-right fringe because the mainstream of the GOP: Dear Republicans: Welcome to the New Establishment. "The Trumpists," she wrote, "became the GOP establishment the moment Trump won the nomination, or at least when he won the presidency. But it’s worth remembering that in the early days of the Trump era, anyone who supported Trump was decidedly fringe. His nomination happened in large part because everyone assumed the centripetal power of the establishment would hold. Throughout the 2016 primaries, the more mainstream Republican candidates tiptoed around Trump, believing that inevitably one of them would take the lead... Bannon, Gorka, and Miller are... the face of today’s conservatism and today’s Republican party."

So all this is going on and independent voters-- who will decide the 2020 elections-- are getting a sense of it. The latest CNN poll (yesterday) finds half the country (50-43%) says Trump should be impeached and removed. That's up from 37% in favor of impeachment and 59% against it at the end of April. 53% of us say he used his office improperly-- up from 48% in September-- and 56% say Trump’s attempts to persuade Ukraine to investigate Biden's son Hunter was more for personal benefit than to root out corruption. Only 36% of voters are buying the bullshit about fighting corruption.

If Democrats turn out and take the lion's share of independent voters next year, Trump will be a one-termer. Dems do not need even one Republican, or, more likely, Trump will win a conservative or racist Democrat for every Republican he loses. That's fine. It doesn't matter. One Republican he'll never get its Max Boot's who's Washington Post column yesterday is more anti-Republican than most Democrats sound, and not just anti-Trump... anti-Republican. He wrote that "Republicans have turned their back on conservative principles to become a cult of personality for an aspiring authoritarian. All voters with a conscience should now turn their back on the Republican Party. For aiding and abetting the president’s egregious abuses of power, the Republican Party deserves to be destroyed from top to bottom. We need a center-right party in this country. What we have instead is a party with no fixed principles that is willing to do anything-- no matter how vile-- to serve its maximum leader, a.k.a. 'the chosen one.'"

Over at The Progressive yesterday, Bill Lueders tracked a few other #NeverTrump Republicans, George Will and Charlie Sykes. Lueders noted that Will wrote that "'aside from some rhetorical bleats, Republicans are acquiescing' as Trump makes public display of his 'gross and comprehensive incompetence.' He argues that if Trump continues to get away with insisting that 'the Constitution’s impeachment provisions are unconstitutional,' the instrument of impeachment will be rendered useless as a check on all future Presidents. There may also be a political price to pay, as Will notes in issuing a warning that to Democrats surely sounds like a dream: 'If Congressional Republicans continue their genuflections at Trump’s altar, the appropriate 2020 outcome will be a Republican thrashing so severe-- losing the House, the Senate, and the electoral votes of, say, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, and even Texas-- that even this party of slow-learning careerists might notice the hazards of tethering their careers to a downward-spiraling scofflaw. That conservatives like Will are at the forefront of opposition to Trump creates opportunities for alliances that were once unthinkable. MSNBC commentator Charlie Sykes, a conservative from Wisconsin, says in an interview for this editorial that Trump’s unfitness has the potential to unite the citizenry."

“I would like to think there’s a coalition of the decent out there who are just horrified by watching Donald Trump, by watching what he’s doing, but also what he’s doing to us,” Sykes says. “I would love to see the emergence of a coalition that would set aside ideological differences, at least temporarily, to deal with the current emergency.”

... He believes Trump “poses an existential threat to a lot of the democratic norms that we have right now, and I do think those cross party and ideological lines.”

To this end, Sykes argues, “progressives ought to be willing to make common cause with Republicans and conservatives who are willing to break with Trump. That’s not a surrender of principle. It doesn’t mean that we don’t disagree about things, but it means that at this particular moment in time, it’s more important to be allies than to dwell on what we disagree about. We can go back to debating the tax rates later, but if we want to get past this moment in history, there’s going to have to be this alliance that recognizes the unique emergency that the country faces.”

It’s an intriguing possibility. While Trump’s impeachment now appears certain, it will result in his removal from office only if twenty Republican Senators join Democrats in voting for it. This is unlikely, given the devotion that most Republicans have shown thus far, but it’s not impossible.

The impeachment inquiry has churned up massive new evidence of Trump’s shocking and illegal conduct, as career civil servants reveal the extent to which he has sought to use the power of the presidency to his personal political advantage.

...As Sykes frames it, the question for Republicans is how much more pure humiliation they are willing to take.

“What Republicans right now have to be asking is: Do they really want to support five more years of this? We’re talking about five more years of Donald Trump as the commander-in-chief. Five more years of defending and enabling Donald Trump, particularly as he becomes more and more untethered, more and more unhinged, more and more contemptuous of the truth and of the law.”

There can be little doubt that Republicans are driven largely by political self-interest, as are many Democrats. But that means some of them might still be persuaded to abandon Trump. Sykes, while “immensely disappointed at the degree to which [Republicans] have rationalized and enabled Donald Trump,” has not given up hope that they will turn against him. If a few Republicans do so, a few more will likely follow.

And progressives can be a part of this, as long as they can get beyond blaming their fellow citizens for having the bad judgment to support Trump and instead encourage them to honestly ask: “Do you really want to be part of this anymore?”

The answer, for a broad and growing swath of the American public, is no.

No, we do not want a President who constantly embarrasses us on the global stage.

No, we do not want a foul-mouthed bigot to be America’s face to the world.

No, we are not OK with separating children from their families and locking them in cages.

No, we don’t want a President who doesn’t know the name of his own Defense Secretary, refers to members of his party as “Rupublicans,” and thinks Colorado is on the Mexican border.

No, we will not normalize Donald Trump, his ignorance, his crudeness, his impulsiveness, his meanness of spirit, his contempt for the very notion of Constitutional checks and balances, his open corruption and gross incompetence.

Yet Republican politicians will never abandon Trump as long as they perceive that this will cost them politically. As of midautumn, nine in ten Republican voters and Republican-leaning independents opposed impeachment. But that may change.

To secure the deserved ouster of this President, we need to win over a critical mass of ordinary Trump supporters. That may happen just from the open Congressional debate over impeachment and the weight of daily mounting evidence as to the President’s criminality.

To date, the President’s every response to the possibility of impeachment underscores its necessity. He has set out to obstruct the process, even ordering public officials to refuse to testify about his misbehavior. It is getting clearer that anyone who stands with him stands in opposition to the rule of law.

In the end, there will be some Republicans who will support impeachment-- perhaps not enough to oust Trump from office but enough to more plausibly put the lie to the notion that the push for impeachment is a Democratic plot. There will be more defections of principled conservatives and constituencies that realize, however belatedly, that Trump has been conning them. And the majority of Americans who oppose this President will continue to grow.

What a delightful irony it would be if, in the end, this most determinedly divisive of Presidents ended up bringing the people of this country together.

Damage Control by Nancy Ohanian

Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go-- #NeverTrump Republicans Demand Democrats Nominate Biden

Republicans see this & get sick to their stomachs-- & really scared

Dear Republicans Who Lost Your Shitty Party To Trump— Keep Your Muthafucking, Failed Advice About How To Beat Trump To Yourselves

And that goes for everyone who works at— or reads— The Bulwark and half the people who work at MSNBC. The worst political figure anyone can remember stole your party right out from under you. And now you want to tell the lame enough Democratic establishment how to beat Trump? They may be stupid enough to listen. Hopefully no one down the chain from brain-drained Pelosi, Hoyer, Schumer and Perez will pay you any heed.

The last thing the Democrats need is someone like Jeb Bush with a “D” next to his name. Charlie Sykes has some unsolicited thoughts? Shove them right up your lilly white Republican ass, buster!

You know what, we already knew Trump was “a deeply dishonest, erratic, narcissistic, Twitter-addicted bully” (and rapist). The Democraps already shoved a former Republican with a Republican bottom line in her soul as our champion. She lost. We don’t need a senile, racist version of her now. We need exactly what you think we don’t.

Trump could still win reelection, because he has one essential dynamic working in his favor: You.

Trump’s numbers are unmovable, but yours are not. He doesn’t need to win this thing; he needs for you to lose it. There are millions of swing voters who regard Trump as an abomination but might vote for him again if they think you are scarier, more extreme, dangerous, or just annoyingly out of touch.

And, you have some experience at this, don’t you?

Despite the favorable poll numbers and the triumphalism in your blue bubble, you’ve already made a solid start at guaranteeing another four years of Trumpism. Last week’s pile-on of Joe Biden was a good example of how you might eat your own over the next 16 months.

George Will, Charlie Sykes… all the Republican garbage cans with mouths and pens will tell you every single reason Republicans have always/will always tell you about bold agendas like the New Deal will never work.

FUCK YOU, CHARLIE SYKES
FUCK YOU, GEORGE WILL
FUCK YOU MSNBC REPUBLICANS

The Democrats didn’t listen to your advice-- and the advice of the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- in 1936. You remember what happened right? FDR won 523 electoral votes. You won 8. FDR won 46 states. You won 2. FDR won 27,747,636 votes (60.8%). You won 16,679,543 (36.5%). Democrats won 334 in the House (plus 8 more for “scary”-- to you-- socialists) and you won 88 seats. 88 seats. 88, you muthafucking assholes. In the Senate your scare tactics left you with 17 seats in the Senate. But minority leader Charlie McNary wore the same bow-ties that George Will was wearing last time I saw a photo of him.

Eat shit and die, you scumbags… and take your conservative Democrap friends with you. No, don’t die, don’t die— live long enough to kill yourselves-- ritually, en masse-- when President AOC is sworn in.

Biden ran for president-- or at least started running-- 6 times. And 5 times-- so far-- Democratic primary voters looked him over and said, collectively, "God Forbid!" Mike Lux worked for one of those campaigns in the '70s when he was just a kid. He says he likes Biden and Mike still embraces the lesser-of-two evils strategy that powers the Democratic establishment. Mike openly admits that he would enthusiastically vote for Biden in a general election against Trump. I know many people who would-- and some who wouldn't. If you vote for the lesser of two evils, you're still voting for Evil. Joe Biden is Evil-- and Mike made the case very well in his new video. Take a look as Mike Lux tries to teach a mangy old dog-- possibly rabid-- a new trick:

Who Will Vote With Trump Today To Shred The Constitution?

On Wednesday, Pelosi indicated that Joaquin Castro's Joint Resolution of Disapproval will be debated and, presumably, voted on, today. [I was just told the vote will probably be Tuesday, not today.] The resolution is short and sweet:

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That, pursuant to section 202 of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622), the national emergency declared by the finding of the President on February 15, 2019, in Proclamation 9844 (84 Fed. Reg. 4949) is hereby terminated. 


Pelosi: "I write to invite all Members of Congress to cosponsor Congressman Joaquin Castro’s privileged resolution to terminate this emergency declaration... The President’s decision to go outside the bounds of the law to try to get what he failed to achieve in the constitutional legislative process violates the Constitution and must be terminated." The first co-sponsor was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and there were already 100 co-sponsors by the time Pelosi's "Dear Colleague" letter circulated to all Democrats and Republicans. There was some question whether even Republicans who agree with the Constitution that Trump is shredding the separation of powers with the implications of his fake state of emergency would even vote for Castro's resolution, let alone co-sponsor it.

Jamie Raskin (D-MD) is a member of the Judiciary Committee and this is exactly the kind of powerful and crucial moment in history he takes more seriously than almost anyone. Yesterday he told us that "It may be tempting to dismiss Donald Trump’s declaration of a state of emergency as a laughable attempt to distract everyone from his failure to get either Mexico or the United States Congress to pay for his $35 billion medieval  fantasy border Wall, but the stakes are actually enormous. The hallmark of a Banana Republic is that the Executive unilaterally declares national security and military emergencies and spends the people’s money on his pet projects without legislative consent. If Trump gets away with overriding the clear will of Congress by spending federal money that we have explicitly refused to spend, he puts America squarely in the Banana Republic camp. The House of Representatives must act forcefully to reject this plain violation of the separation of powers and usurpation of our power to appropriate federal funds. It’s a big test to see whether there are any Republicans left who really believe in the Constitution."

Long Island Congressman Tom Suozzi comes to a similar conclusion. "This is not about Donald Trump, the border wall or any other topic of the day," he just told us. "This is about the United States of America, the Constitution, the separate branches of government, and our system of checks and balances. Any Republican who is not concerned about this, should be concerned about a future Democratic President who would potentially try and use this precedent to use executive power to overrule an unwilling Congress. Everyone should wake up."

Republican columnist George Will seems to be blowing a gasket over their reticence. On Wednesday he wrote that Republicans who back Trump on this "should be expelled." It's more likely that the Republicans who refuse to back Trump would be the ones facing expulsion. He is worried that "a majority of congressional Republicans seem poised to support Trump’s evisceration of the Constitution’s architecture of checks and balances. By opposing a binding resolution disapproving the president’s declaration of an emergency, they would approve Congress’ acquiescence in the loss of its core power, that of controlling spending. These Republicans raise two questions: Why is there a Congress? And why are such Republicans receiving salaries? Every Republican who supports the president in this trashing of the Constitution, whose creation began here, thereby violates his or her sworn oath to defend it and to 'bear true faith and allegiance' to it. Voters should expel all of them from public life."

GOP leadership, predictably, is sticking with Trump. How many Republican members will break with them and cross the aisle? Will be a tiny handful-- say Justin Amash (MI), Tom Massie (KY), Brian Fitzpatrick (NY) and a couple for random "gypsy moths?" Or will there be significant numbers of Republicans who take this as an opportunity to stand up for democracy? And among Democrats... can Pelosi, Hoyer and Clyburn hold onto the Blue Dogs whose instincts are to keep their heads down and vote with Trump on something this controversial, especially the real cowardly career types like Jeff Van Drew (NJ), Joe Cunningham (SC), Josh Gottheimer (NJ), Elaine Luria (VA), Kendra Horn (OK), Ben McAdams (UT), Max Rose and Tom O'Halleran (AZ) who are always more into the calculus of how to preserve their jobs than to do their jobs.

Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) looks forward to debating Trump one-on-one after the primaries. For now, she told me last night that his "action declaring a 'national emergency' is unconstitutional and usurps Congressional authority to authorize and appropriate funds to serve the needs of the American people. This blatant power grab sets a dangerous precedent that threatens our democracy. Both Democrats and Republicans alike must put our country and our constitution first and take action to terminate this emergency declaration immediately."

Shahid Buttar is a constitutional attorney who has written about this very topic for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where he's the director of grassroots outreach. You may remember him from the 2018 campaign when he made a courageous run against Pelosi in his San Francisco district. (Many people are trying to persuade him to try again in 2020.) Yesterday I asked him about Castro's joint resolution and he told me that Trump's "assertion of emergency powers lacks any basis either in statute or the constitution. In fact, our constitutional system of checks and balances is gravely threatened by baseless claims of emergency powers, which Congress and the courts must resist to restrain the executive branch. Given the right wing’s success at co-opting our federal courts, Congress must be especially assertive here not only to avoid the misappropriation of federal funds, but also to prevent executive power from expanding beyond its already untenable inflation."

You already know Ted Lieu, although do keep in mind that, like Jamie Raskin, he's one of the most activist members of the Judiciary Committee. Here's what he told us last night (and sent along the accompanying cool video): "Republicans had complete control of government for two years and they didn't fund Trump's vanity wall. So now the President is trying to circumvent Congress and our Constitutional system of government to fulfill a nonsensical campaign promise. Putting aside for a moment that there is a mountain of objective evidence showing there is no crisis on our southern border; putting aside that Trump's wall is a stupid idea to begin with; and putting aside that he promised Mexico would pay for it-- Trump's national emergency declaration is a dangerous power grab by the Executive Branch. For decades consecutive congresses have ceded the war-making power, which has had disastrous results for our national security. With this emergency declaration, Trump threatens to do the same with the power of the purse. Congressional Republicans must stand with Democrats against this blatant unconstitutional power grab."

George Will Eviscerates Lindsey Graham Entirely Without Even Hinting He's a Cowardly Closet Case

Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a column by George Will, Why do people such as Lindsey Graham come to Congress?, which uses Graham as the exemplar of the disintegration of the Republican Party and why it needs to be put out of its misery. "Back in the day," he wrote, "small rural airports had textile windsocks, simple and empty things that indicated which way the wind was blowing. The ubiquitous Sen. Lindsey O. Graham has become a political windsock, and as such, he-- more than the sturdy, substantial elephant-- is emblematic of his party today.

When in 1994, Graham, a South Carolina Republican, first ran for Congress, he promised to be “one less vote for an agenda that makes you want to throw up.” A quarter-century later, Graham himself is a gastrointestinal challenge. In the past three years, he had a road-to-Damascus conversion.

In 2015, he said Donald Trump was a “jackass.” In February 2016, he said: “I’m not going to try to get into the mind of Donald Trump, because I don’t think there’s a whole lot of space there. I think he’s a kook, I think he’s crazy, I think he’s unfit for office.” And: “I’m a Republican and he’s not. He’s not a conservative Republican. He’s an opportunist.” Today, Graham, paladin of conservatism and scourge of opportunism, says building the border wall is an existential matter for the GOP: “If we undercut the president, that’s the end of his presidency and the end of our party.” Well.

Six years after its founding, the Republican Party produced the president who saved the nation. The party presided over the flow of population west of the Mississippi, into space hitherto designated on maps as the Great American Desert. (The Homestead Act of 1862 was enacted by a Republican-controlled Congress.) The Morrill Act of 1862 (Vermont Rep. Justin Morrill was a Republican) launched the land-grant college system that began the democratization of higher education and advanced the science-intensive agriculture that facilitated the urbanization that accelerated the nation’s rise to global preeminence. The party abetted and channeled the animal spirits that developed the industrial sinews with which 20th-century America defeated fascism and then communism. Now, however, Graham, whose mind might not have a whole lot of space for pertinent history, thinks this party’s identity and survival depend on servile obedience to this president’s myopia.

During the government shutdown, Graham’s tergiversations-- sorry, this is the precise word-- have amazed. On a recent day, in 90 minutes he went from “I don’t know” whether the president has the power to declare an emergency and divert into wall-building funds appropriated by Congress for other purposes, to “Time for President . . . to use emergency powers to build Wall.” The next day, he scrambled up the escalation ladder by using capitalization: “Declare a national emergency NOW. Build a wall NOW.” Two days later, he scampered down a few rungs, calling for his hero to accept a short-term funding measure to open the government while wall negotiations continue. Stay tuned for more acrobatics.

But stay focused on this: Anyone-- in Graham-speak, ANYONE-- who at any time favors declaring an emergency, or who does not denounce the mere suggestion thereof, thereby abandons constitutional government. Yes, such a declaration would be technically legal. Congress has put on every president’s desk this (to adopt Justice Robert Jackson’s language in his dissent from the Supreme Court’s 1944 Korematsu decision affirming the constitutionality of interning of U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent) “loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” Or an implausible one. However, an anti-constitutional principle would be affirmed. The principle: Any president can declare an emergency and “repurpose” funds whenever any of his policy preferences that he deems unusually important are actively denied or just ignored by the legislative branch.

Why do they come to Congress, these people such as Graham? These people who, affirmatively or by their complicity of silence, trifle with our constitutional architecture, and exhort the president to eclipse the legislative branch, to which they have no loyalty comparable to their party allegiance?

Seven times, Graham has taken the oath of congressional office, “solemnly” swearing to “support and defend the Constitution” and to “bear true faith and allegiance” to it, “without any mental reservation.” Graham, who is just 1 percent of one-half of one of the three branches of one of the nation’s many governments, is, however, significant as a symptom. When the Trump presidency is just a fragrant memory, the political landscape will still be cluttered with some of this president’s simple and empty epigones, the make-believe legislators who did not loudly and articulately recoil from the mere suggestion of using a declared emergency to set aside the separation of powers.

Trump Is As Bewildered As A Kindergartener At A Seminar On String Theory When Anything Concerning Governance And Economics Comes Up

Late Friday, Rolling Stone ran an interview by Andy Kroll with a rare Republican congressman who is acting like he's more afraid of a 2020 Democratic challenge than he is of Trump. Will Hurd only won by the skin of his teeth in November-- 103,285 (49.2%) to 102,359 (48.7%), 926 votes-- winning at all only because the geniuses at the DCCC couldn't figure out it would have been better to run a Mexican-American in a district that is 71% Mexican-American. Hurd's district includes 820 miles on the U.S.-Mexico border and he's not in agreement with Trump about building a wall. He called Trump's claim of a border crisis is a "myth," and that "building a wall from sea to shining sea is the most expensive and least effective way to do border security. The average is $24.5 million a mile" and is a "third-century solution to a 21st-century problem."

Perhaps that was the kind of thing that inspired George Will to write yesterday that "The shabbiest U.S. president ever is an inexpressibly sad specimen." What a way to think about even an illegitimate fake "president." Will reminded his Washington Post column that "Half or a quarter of the way through this interesting experiment with an incessantly splenetic presidency, much of the nation has become accustomed to daily mortifications.  Or has lost its capacity for embarrassment, which is even worse.... Dislike of him should be tempered by this consideration: He is an almost inexpressibly sad specimen. It must be misery to awaken to another day of being Donald Trump. He seems to have as many friends as his pluperfect self-centeredness allows, and as he has earned in an entirely transactional life. His historical ignorance deprives him of the satisfaction of working in a house where much magnificent history has been made. His childlike ignorance-- preserved by a lifetime of single-minded self-promotion-- concerning governance and economics guarantees that whenever he must interact with experienced and accomplished people, he is as bewildered as a kindergartener at a seminar on string theory.”

Which is why this fountain of self-refuting boasts ('I have a very good brain') lies so much. He does so less to deceive anyone than to reassure himself. And as balm for his base, which remains oblivious to his likely contempt for them as sheep who can be effortlessly gulled by preposterous fictions. The tungsten strength of his supporters' loyalty is as impressive as his indifference to expanding their numbers.

Either the electorate, bored with a menu of faintly variant servings of boorishness, or the 22nd Amendment will end this, our shabbiest but not our first shabby presidency.

Trump had another bad day today

This kind of stuff has real effects in the real word. Early Friday, Noah Bierman answered a question, in part, about the government shut down. Why can’t Trump make deals? No one trusts him anymore. "[T]he president who campaigned as the world’s best deal-maker, vowing that he alone could fix Washington’s dysfunction, has been stymied as he looks for achievements before facing the voters again. Two years in, the man who built a political reputation as a guy who tells it like it is has lost the essential ingredients to closing deals: credibility and trust... The president’s squandered credibility, overlaid with nonstop investigations, is likely to imperil a second-half agenda that includes basic responsibilities-- raising the nation’s borrowing limit, most essentially-- as well as more ambitious goals. Among those are measures to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, win congressional approval of a revised trade deal with Mexico and Canada, overhaul immigration laws and lower the costs of prescription drugs.

Sen. Mitch McConnell was jolted with a fresh reminder of President Trump’s capriciousness last month: The majority leader persuaded Republican colleagues to take a politically difficult vote to temporarily fund the government, but not a border wall, only to see Trump withdraw support-- initiating the longest shutdown in history.

...McConnell, having been burned, has largely left the shutdown fight to Trump. House Republicans, having lost their majority in large part because of voters’ own dismay with Trump, are now on the sidelines as he must battle House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And Democrats, following her lead, are emboldened given their experience with the president’s unreliability as a negotiating partner.

Trump’s tactics were honed over decades. Throughout his business career, he moved from one project to the next-- real estate development, sales, casinos and branding-- often leaving scorned partners or creditors to deal with the fallout from bankruptcies or deals gone bad.

“This was all to stay ahead of his reputation,” said Michael D'Antonio, author of The Truth About Trump. But “in Washington,” he said, “you can’t escape who you are for very long. He’s proven that he can’t keep his word.”

The president has broken records for false statements, according to nonpartisan fact checkers. An increasing majority of voters-- by 61% to 34% in one recent poll-- say he is not honest. The same poll, from Quinnipiac University, found that voters also rated his leadership skills as poor, by 58% to 39%.

Complicating the problem, Trump has churned through staff faster than his predecessors. He has surrounded himself with a collection of temporary officials, family members and inexperienced advisors with little sway on Capitol Hill.

“They’re lacking some of the usual negotiating infrastructure,” said John Lawrence, former chief of staff to Pelosi. “In this White House, everything changes the next day: the personnel, the policies, the view of reality.”

Republican lawmakers’ criticism is muted, however, because even as Trump has ranked among the least popular presidents in modern history, he has consistently commanded overwhelming support from Republican voters, according to polls.

Still, the mistrust from nearly every quarter of Congress has grown each time he has broken his word, complicating efforts to pass his initiatives, according to former lawmakers, aides and close observers.

“Even things that should on paper be easy, there just always seems to be a way for him to step on his own foot,” said a former aide who requested anonymity to avoid upsetting his current employer. “Sometimes, this is unintentional-- he just says stuff.”

The act that precipitated the month-old shutdown, and has come to define it, occurred in December. McConnell received bogus assurances from the White House that Trump would sign a Senate bill to fund and keep the government open to Feb. 8 while negotiations on border money proceeded, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

After senators approved the bill by a voice vote, Trump, egged on by conservative media personalities, rejected the legislation in favor of a fight with Democrats over the wall. Without any bill funding a quarter of the government, a partial shutdown began days later.

McConnell, Republicans’ foremost deal-maker, has since stayed in the background. Other Republican senators were left vulnerable to conservatives’ charges they were too quick to cave, even as they were stuck answering for the government services unfulfilled and hundreds of thousands of federal employees unpaid, with no sense of how the president intended to win.

“It would have been great if they had told us they wanted this fight, because we would have started working on it,” Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio fumed as the shutdown began, three days before Christmas. “We have to deal with it now.”

Lawmakers have been dealing with Trump’s abrupt tactical shifts from his start, and at the White House he leaves the impression with each advisor who talks with him that he shares their point of view, until he doesn’t.

Anyone think any foreign leaders believe a thing he says? Yeah... maybe one.

Do You Know Voters So Disillusioned By Government They're On The Fence About Voting In The Midterms? Send Them These Essays By Conservatives Max Boot, George Will And Michael Gerson

-by Skip Kaltenheuser

Despite democracy’s diminishment by gerrymandering and the playbook of suppression, your vote is still your best Hail Mary defending against the Big Money’s low art of the thinly disguised bribe. It’s your best chance to sink the oligarchy floating in on the tides of captured government. Don’t toss it away in despair like another lottery ticket that didn’t pan out.

If you need fresh perspectives, try some from the conservative end of the spectrum. Here are several from writers unable to keep their heads in the sand.

Max Boot, a former opinion page editor for the Wall Street Journal who now writes for the Washington Post, sent a shock when he excommunicated himself from the Republican Party. Here’s a few lines from a July writing, I left the Republican Party. Now I want Democrats to take over.



“Should I stay or should I go now?” That question, posed by the eminent political philosophers known as the Clash, is one that confronts any Republican with a glimmer of conscience. You used to belong to a conservative party with a white-nationalist fringe. Now it’s a white-nationalist party with a conservative fringe. If you’re part of that fringe, what should you do?”

"Veteran strategist Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, is the latest Republican to say “no more.” Recently he issued an anguished Twitter post: “29 years and nine months ago I registered to vote and became a member of the Republican Party which was founded in 1854 to oppose slavery and stand for the dignity of human life,” he wrote. “Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the party of Trump.”

Last Supper of the 2nd Year by Nancy Ohanian

On Halloween, Boot did a long riff off Joe Biden’s stump phrase, “I’m sick and tired of…”. After an impressive listing of nauseating things Republicans have averted their gaze from or been complicit with, Boot throws all Republican candidates into the abyss. Vote against all Republicans. Every single one.

“...Most of all, I’m sick and tired of Republicans who feel that Trump’s blatant bigotry gives them license to do the same-- with Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX) denouncing his opponent as an “Indo-American carpetbagger,” Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis warning voters not to “monkey this up” by electing his African American opponent, Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-CA) labeling his “Palestinian Mexican” opponent a “security risk” who is “working to infiltrate Congress,” and Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH) accusing his opponent, who is of Indian Tibetan heritage, of “selling out Americans” because he once worked at a law firm that settled terrorism-related cases against Libya."

"If you’re sick and tired, too, here is what you can do. Vote for Democrats on Tuesday. For every office. Regardless of who they are. And I say that as a former Republican. Some Republicans in suburban districts may claim they aren’t for Trump. Don’t believe them. Whatever their private qualms, no Republicans have consistently held Trump to account. They are too scared that doing so will hurt their chances of reelection. If you’re as sick and tired as I am of being sick and tired about what’s going on, vote against all Republicans. Every single one. That’s the only message they will understand."

Republican Values by Nancy Ohanian

George Will. Who can resist an opportunity to say you agree with George Will? I readily give him plaudits for his writings on the travesty of the death penalty, but there’s also this, from an essay in early summer, Vote Against the GOP This November.

"Amid the carnage of Republican misrule in Washington, there is this glimmer of good news: The family-shredding policy along the southern border, the most telegenic recent example of misrule, clarified something. Occurring less than 140 days before elections that can reshape Congress, the policy has given independents and temperate Republicans-- these are probably expanding and contracting cohorts, respectively-- fresh if redundant evidence for the principle by which they should vote.

The principle: The congressional Republican caucuses must be substantially reduced."

"In today’s GOP, which is the president’s plaything, he (Trump) is the mainstream. So, to vote against his party’s cowering congressional caucuses is to affirm the nation’s honor while quarantining him."

Will does go on to have things both ways, hoping that Senate and House machinery could be as gummed up under Democrats as it was under Republicans, which sort of loses his thread of logic. He’s best when avoiding tangential head-scratchers that show off his researchers' liberal arts kitchen sink approach. But he does get to a central point, “…the unimportance of Republican control.” I confess to admiring some turns of phrase, like “Consider the melancholy example of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (WI-01), who wagered his dignity on the patently false proposition that it is possible to have sustained transactions with today’s president, this Vesuvius of mendacities, without being degraded.” “Vesuvius of mendacities”, that's a keeper.

I was slower to include an August 9th essay by Michael Gerson, The only way to save the GOP is to defeat it.

That's not just because I see the GOP as irredeemably corrupt and in need not of saving but of slipping beneath murky waters for the third time, but because whenever I seen Gerson I think of the phrase he penned for Condoleeza Rice, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” That was a major pillar of the ruinous Iraqi WMD fraud by W and his band of neocons, and of all the hellish tragedy it continues to pour from Pandora’s Box. I can’t listen to Gerson without dubbing him “the smoking mushroom.”

     

But I digress. I don’t want to add legitimacy to Gerson’s recurring message that Democrats had best embrace so-called centrism, aka Republican Light. Or his notion that voters should vote strategically for Republican Senate candidates who are “mainstream". There are no mainstream Republican candidates. And there are certainly no Lowell Weickers, no Mark Hatfields. There are only those who will go along to get along, with Trump and Mitch McConnell. They’ll play the electorate for saps while doing the bidding of the Big Money, much of it dark in origin and purpose. And they'll pluck the strings that make the lowest common denominators sing.

But I do want to cherrypick a few of Gersen’s points, including the importance of exposing administration corruption. "Under Republican control, important committees-- such as Chairman Devin Nunes’s House Intelligence Committee-- have become scraping, sniveling, panting and pathetic tools of the executive branch. Only Democratic control can drain this particular swamp.”

Gerson gives a good account of the consequences of Republicans retaining control of the House:

Alternatively: If Republicans retain control of the House in November, Trump will (correctly) claim victory and vindication. He will have beaten the political performances of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in their first midterms. He will have proved the electoral value of racial and ethnic stereotyping. He will have demonstrated the effectiveness of circuslike distraction. He will have shown the political power of bold, constant, uncorrected lies. And he will gain many more enablers and imitators. Perhaps worst of all, a victorious Trump will complete his takeover of the Republican Party (which is already far along). Even murmured dissent will be silenced. The GOP will be fully committed to a 2020 presidential campaign conducted in the spirit of George C. Wallace-- a campaign of racial division, of rural/urban division, of religious division, of party division that metastasizes into mutual contempt.

The Emperor by Nancy Ohanian

Exactly why Gerson’s concerns don’t also apply to Republican control of the Senate escapes me. But after meandering with the conservative columnists’ obligatory genuflections to Reagan and Bush the Elder, he gets to a decent finish. "In a democracy, a vote is usually not a matter of good and evil. It is a matter of weighing competing goods and choosing lesser evils. The possible outcomes this November come down to this: Trump contained, or Trump triumphant... In this case, a Republican vote for a Democratic representative will be an act of conscience."

Because there are too many Democrats that are so-called centrists, an increasingly non-descriptive term that drips with wishy-washy, there needs to be a thumping victory by Democrats. It needs to be big enough to increase progressive heft that pulls the party back toward the traditions of FDR, and out of the clutches of the Big Money. That’s not a quick and easy, but the effort needs to get underway the day after the election, ignoring the pundits crowing about magic in the middle of the road. As Jim Hightower put it, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos."

Much has been made that of those independent voters who view both Democratic and Republican parties as turkeys, there’s a growing shift to viewing Democrats as the lesser turkey. My worry is that voting for the lesser turkey isn’t all that much of a motivator to show up at the polls. But if you know potential voters who are sitting back until they see a solid dime’s difference, send these essays along to them, particularly the one by Boot that minces no words. More years of the current clowns in charge is not a luxury our democracy has, every day brings new risk.

And maybe send along the hour long version of that Clash song to aid their mulling things over.

What Is Trump Most Likely To Give Putin In Helsinki?

Early this morning we looked into the lumbering ape's idiotic foray into Great Falls, Montana. Totally left out that part about North Korea and Kim Jong Un. "We signed," said the imbecile, "a wonderful paper saying they're going to denuclearize their whole thing. It's going to all happen." Maybe he's so popular in Great Falls because the verbal school level is pre-school? Off maybe because the people there like feeling smarter than "the president." First of all, apart from mimicking the verbal skills of a mid-level chimp, he's flat out lying that North Korea has agreed to denuclearize and that "it's going to all happen." There wasn't a binding sentence on "the wonderful" paper he and Kim signed in Singapore, just a p.r. stunt for the two of them who are still at cross-purposes. Infact, last week spy satellites discovered that North Korea is constructing something at a ballistic missile site. Did no one inform Trump? Or did he just leave it out of his idiotic speech so he could play coy?

On person he hasn't fooled is George Will, a conservative critic of the fake president's who's freaking out about what Trump is liable to do when he meets Putin in Helsinki next week, after he (Trump) fucks with NATO to show Putin how loyal he is. "If he does as badly," wrote Will, "in his July 16 meeting with Vladimir Putin in Finland as he did with Kim Jong Un in Singapore, the consequences could be catastrophic." Catastrophic? That's a big fraught word. Well, remember Singapore. What's worse, catastrophic or disastrous?

An exceptionally knowledgeable student of North Korea, the American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt, writing in National Review (“Kim Wins in Singapore”), says the one-day meeting was for the United States “a World Series of unforced errors.” The result was that North Korea “walked away with a joint communique that read almost as if it had been drafted by the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] ministry of foreign affairs.”

Kim, says Eberstadt, is “the boss of a state-run crime cartel that a U.N. Commission of Inquiry wants to charge with crimes against humanity.” Au contraire, said America’s president, who slathered Kim with praise: Kim, with whom Trump has “a very special bond” is a “talented man” who “loves his country,” which reciprocates with “a great fervor.” Trump called Kim a “very worthy negotiator,” which might actually have made sense if Kim had been forced to negotiate for the concessions that Trump dispensed gratis.

North Korea, Eberstadt says, is committed to what he calls its “racial socialism,” which motivates Kim’s “central and sacred mission,” which is “nonnegotiable”-- the unconditional reunification of the Korean Peninsula. This presupposes extermination of the South Korean state, which requires the policy Kim announced last New Year’s Day-- to “mass-produce nuclear warheads and missiles and speed up their deployment.” Eberstadt:

“Such a program would not be necessary for regime legitimation, or for international military extortion, or even to ensure the regime’s survival: All of those objectives could surely be satisfied with a limited nuclear force. Why then threaten the U.S. homeland?” America is the guarantor of South Korea’s security, and if Washington can be made to blink at a time and place of Pyongyang’s choosing, the U.S.-South Korea alliance will end, as will the U.S. security presence there. Hence the delusional nature of Trump’s belief: One one-day meeting sufficed to cause the North Korean regime to abandon its raison d’etre.

In addition to the legitimation supplied to Pyongyang by the pageantry of the summit for which Trump obviously hungered, the official record of the Singapore deliberations reveals no U.S. interest in Pyongyang’s atrocious human rights practices (“unparalleled in the modern world,” Eberstadt says) that raise doubts about the fervor with which North Koreans appreciate Dear Leader’s love for them. In return for Trump’s promise to halt military-readiness operations, Kim gave nothing-- no inventory of his nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, nothing beyond North Korea’s decades-old commitment to “denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula, an opaque goal that means only that Pyongyang is not clearly committed to anything-- beyond a pre-summit promise to decommission a no-longer-useable nuclear test site. The New Year’s Day vow has not been disavowed.

Singapore was, Eberstadt believes, probably the greatest diplomatic coup for North Korea since 1950, and a milestone on “the DPRK’s road to establishing itself as a permanent nuclear power.” And the sanctions that were the Trump administration’s strategy of “maximum pressure” will be difficult to maintain now that a “defanged”-- Eberstadt’s description-- Trump has declared the nuclear threat banished.

The most dangerous moment of the Trump presidency will arrive when he who is constantly gnawed by insecurities and the fear of not seeming what he is not (“strong”), realizes how weak and childish he seems to all who cast a cool eye on Singapore’s aftermath. The danger is of him lashing out in wounded vanity. Meanwhile, this innocent abroad is strutting toward a meeting with the cold-eyed Russian who is continuing to dismantle Europe’s geographically largest nation, Ukraine. He is likely looking ahead to ratcheting up pressure on one of three small nations, Lithuania, Latvia or Estonia, each a member of the NATO alliance that, for the first time in its 69 years, is dealing with a U.S. president who evinces no admiration for what it has accomplished, or any understanding of its revived importance as the hard man in Moscow, who can sniff softness, relishes what Singapore revealed.

So... on to the question in the title up top. What is Putin most likely to get from Trump? A couple of possibilities, that actually could be called catastrophic, and that Trump probably owes Putin because of 2016 or in anticipation of November  and/or 2020:

• Recognition of the Russian annexation of Crimea
• NATO breakup
• Weakening on the Baltic states' independence
• An end of the sanctions
• A guarantee that the U.S. won't interfere with Russian designs on Ukraine

What does Trump extract from Putin in return? The right for his company to build a hotel in Moscow? The right for Americans to adopt Russian orphans? A strategic discussion and some guarantees about the Senate seats and congressional districts the GOP needs a little help in this coming November? Putin's grandmother's recipes for Golubtsy, Okroshka and Öçpoçmaq?