monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

The good news is that if the 2016 election were to be re-held today, Donald Trump would take 40% of the black vote and, in the 2020 election that number may be more like 50 or 60%.

Chris Hayes
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The op-ed is an attempt to take out an insurance policy for the GOP and conservatism if and when things get much much worse. It's a very public hedge meant to preserve the reputation of the GOP's entire political and governing class.

Hayes gets it

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I Am Willing to Sacrifice Anything to Protect Our Democracy, Up to But Not Including Losing an Election or Giving Up Literally Any Policy That I Support: A Hero's Story

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I can't wait to read the eventual book, I Too Was Secretly Dismayed the Whole Time, Also: A Memoir of Service

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@danpfeiffer
Great. A bunch of anonymous cowards who love tax cuts and pollution are the one thing standing between the country and the Mad King

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More Matthew Yglesias Retweeted Chris Hayes
After Bush failed, he was denounced as a faux conservative and we got first the Tea Party rebrand and then the Populist rebrand and now we’re set up to run the play again with Trump

Impeachment is a constitutional mechanism. The 25th Amendment is a constitutional mechanism. Mass resignations followed by voluntary testimony to congressional committees are a constitutional mechanism. Overt defiance of presidential authority by the president’s own appointees—now that’s a constitutional crisis.

If the president’s closest advisers believe that he is morally and intellectually unfit for his high office, they have a duty to do their utmost to remove him from it, by the lawful means at hand. That duty may be risky to their careers in government or afterward. But on their first day at work, they swore an oath to defend the Constitution—and there were no “riskiness” exemptions in the text of that oath.

On Wednesday, though, a “senior official in the Trump administration” published an anonymous op-ed in The New York Times, writing:

Many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am one of them.

The author of the anonymous op-ed is hoping to vindicate the reputation of like-minded senior Trump staffers. See, we only look complicit! Actually, we’re the real heroes of the story.

But what the author has just done is throw the government of the United States into even more dangerous turmoil. He or she has enflamed the paranoia of the president and empowered the president’s willfulness.

What happens the next time a staffer seeks to dissuade the president from, say, purging the Justice Department to shut down the Mueller investigation? The author of the Times op-ed has explicitly told the president that those who offer such advice do not have the president’s best interests at heart, and are, in fact, actively subverting his best interests as he understands them on behalf of ideas of their own.

He’ll grow more defiant, more reckless, more anti-constitutional, and more dangerous.

And those who do not quit or are not fired in the next few days will have to work even more assiduously to prove themselves loyal, obedient, and on the team. Things will be worse after this piece. They will be worse because of this piece.

The new Bob Woodward book set the bad precedent. The high official who thought the president so addled that he would not remember the paper he snatched off his desk? Those who thought the president stupid, ignorant, beholden to Russia—and then exited the administration to return to their comfortable, lucrative occupations? Who substituted deep-background gripe sessions with a reporter for offering detailed proof of presidential unfitness, or worse, before the House or Senate? Yes, better than the robotic servility of the public record. But only slightly.

What would be better?

Speak in your own name. Resign in a way that will count. Present the evidence that will justify an invocation of the 25th Amendment, or an impeachment, or at the very least, the first necessary step toward either outcome, a Democratic Congress after the November elections.

Your service in government is valuable. Thank you for it. But it is not so indispensable that it can compensate for the continuing tenure of a president you believe to be amoral, untruthful, irrational, anti-democratic, unpatriotic, and dangerous. Previous generations of Americans have sacrificed fortunes, health, and lives to serve the country. You are asked only to tell the truth aloud and with your name attached.

The Trump administration said Thursday it is preparing to circumvent limits on the government’s ability to hold minors in immigration jails by withdrawing from the Flores Settlement Agreement, the federal consent decree that has shaped detention standards for underage migrants since 1997.

The maneuver is almost certain to land the administration back in court, where U.S. District Court Judge Dolly M. Gee, who oversees the agreement, has rejected attempts to extend the amount of time migrant children can be held with their parents beyond the current limit of 20 days.

But under changes proposed Thursday by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services, the administration said it would issue new regulations that “satisfy the basic purpose” of the Flores settlement and ensure migrant children “are treated with dignity, respect and special concern for their particular vulnerability as minors.”

“Today, legal loopholes significantly hinder the Department’s ability to appropriately detain and promptly remove family units that have no legal basis to remain in the country,” said DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, in a statement. “This rule addresses one of the primary pull factors for illegal immigration and allows the federal government to enforce immigration laws as passed by Congress.”

The proposal sets up a new immigration battle in court, and comes less than three months after the Trump administration’s short-lived attempt to halt an increase in illegal migration by separating children from parents who entered unlawfully. The practice was widely condemned and forced the administration to reverse course and regroup.
... ... ...

Trump’s paranoid rage is getting worse. But the White House ‘resistance’ is a sham.

The mystery Trump administration official’s op-ed piece declaring President Trump mentally unfit to serve, combined with the startling revelations along the same lines that people in his orbit shared with Bob Woodward, have driven Trump into a frenzy and hinted at much worse to come.

White House aides have launched an internal search for the apostates in both cases, and The Post reports in alarming detail that Trump is sinking deeper and deeper into rage and paranoia, even as public commentators fret that we’re at a moment of serious crisis.

Both also raise a question: Is there really a “resistance” inside the administration, quietly and heroically toiling away at great professional risk, to protect the country and alert us all to the dangers Trump poses, until the storm has passed?

I call B.S...

When this New York Times oped was released yesterday afternoon I was in the process of having a wisdom tooth removed. So I didn’t hear anything about it until the early evening. So when I got to reading it we were already into people’s 2nd or 3rd impressions of what to make of it. I’ve been reading it over and I want to share a few thoughts about its potential authorship.

First, a few points of context. I say ‘faux-resistance leader’ because I see this exercise primarily as one of anticipatory self-exculpation...

President Trump and the Koch brothers have made it clear that they don’t like each other. Politically speaking, they are in fundamental disagreement over trade, tariffs and immigration.

Nonetheless, there is a functional Trump-Koch alliance, and the Republican Party has capitalized handsomely on it. Trump’s racially freighted, anti-immigrant rhetoric has been essential to persuading white voters to agree to Republicans’ long-sought tax and regulatory policies. These policies are inimical or irrelevant to the interests of low- and moderate-income Americans. They have been promulgated by the Trump administration, but many of them have been meticulously prepared and packaged by the Kochs’ massive political network.

Trump’s paranoid rage is getting worse. But the White House ‘resistance’ is a sham.


I call B.S...

"Politicians and bureaucrats jumping ship like rats? Swamp denizens stabbing their leader in the back to preserve their power and privilege? Never!!"