David Frum/Atlantic:
Not even 100 days into his presidency, Trump has done exactly what he attacked Hillary Clinton for contemplating.
Some have described this reverse as “hypocritical.” This description is not accurate. A hypocrite says one thing while inwardly believing another. The situation with Donald Trump is much more alarming. On October 26, 2016, he surely meant what he said. It’s just that what he meant and said that day was no guide to what he would mean or say on October 27, 2016—much less April 6, 2017.
Voters and citizens can expect literally zero advance warning of what Donald Trump will do or won’t do. Campaign promises, solemn pledges—none are even slightly binding. If he can reverse himself on Syria, he can reverse himself on anything. If you feel betrayed by any of these reversals, you have no right to complain…
Every decision presents risks and costs, and any responsible decision maker insists on a detailed itemization of those risks and those costs. That cannot have happened here. Trump has walked into a military confrontation that implicates regional and global security with only the haziest notion of what might go wrong. One friend of mine has warned: “If it were good foreign policy, Trump wouldn’t be doing it.” Foreign policy is hard, and even the best process does not guarantee good outcomes. Sometimes you get lucky, and can escape the consequences of a bad process. But the odds are the odds. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, bad processes lead to ugly results.
Danny Vinik/Politico:
It’s three years away, and still a year before its scheduled dress rehearsal, but nervous observers are already asking: What happens to the 2020 U.S. Census under President Donald Trump?
Last week marked three years until Census Day: April 1, 2020. Though it may sound like one of the driest bureaucratic responsibilities of the federal government, the Census has crucial implications for national politics—and requires years of planning, hundreds of thousands of new employees and even a marketing campaign to ensure the broadest possible snapshot of the American population.
Already, Congress’ inability to agree on a full-year funding measure for fiscal 2017 has forced the Census Bureau to cancel multiple field tests and delay opening three field offices. It also had to cut back on new, less labor-intensive methods for verifying household addresses, a critical undertaking that was supposed to make the 2020 Census more cost-effective and accurate.
And more broadly, the Trump administration’s hardline rhetoric and executive orders cracking down on undocumented immigrants may already be creating a major new risk for the census, making members of minority and immigrant communities less likely to respond.
Nathan Gonzalez/Roll Call:
Red Alert: GOP Chances Slide in Two Special Elections
Georgia’s 6th and Kansas’ 4th move in Democrats’ direction
KS is this Tuesday (likely R) and GA is next Tuesday (toss-up). Neither should be contested. Both will be. The goal in KS is party building and making it closer than the 30 point R win it should be. As for GA, we will see.
In both cases, Republicans are throwing resources in. They know what we know.
Huffington Post:
A Montana Special Election Nobody Is Following Could Deal A Huge Blow To Trump
Big Sky Country Democrats are running a legendary folk singer with a populist flair against a cartoon plutocrat. Why won’t the national party pay attention?
Rob Quist, the legendary banjo-strumming folk singer with a populist streak and a penchant for public service, was running as a Democrat for Zinke’s seat.
Democrats chose their nominee at a state convention, where, as the first ballot turned to the second and then third, it gradually became apparent that Quist was deadly serious. He had barnstormed the state, urging locals to set up county parties, get active and come vote for him at the state convention. Bailey, whose journey into political activism had begun with a simple Facebook page, found himself a delegate at the gathering. The 37-year-old organic grain farmer cast his vote for Quist, who won on the fourth ballot.
In a state with 56 counties, at least six saw new Democratic central committees pop up in response to Quist’s statewide tour, said Nancy Keenan, the executive director of the Montana Democratic Party.
When Quist arrived last month in Fort Benton, Chouteau County’s biggest town, nearly 70 people gathered to hear him speak.
“We’re a very Republican, red, conservative area,” Bailey told The Huffington Post by phone in a recent interview, describing the first rally they held with Quist in March. “I was like, ‘Holy cow!’”
Again, the idea isn’t that we win, it’s that we beat expectations. It’s a solid R seat, but party building has to start at ground level.
Josh Marshall/TPM:
It goes to the heart of the Family, Brand-driven, Kleptocratic nature of the Trump White House. The core aim is for the President to be popular, to succeed, a goal in key ways even more important to the thirty-something Kushner/Trumps than the 70 year old President. Politics or policy and ideology, whatever you want to call it, is changeable and secondary, just as Trump can shift from authoritarian isolationist to faux values driven internationalist in a day and a half. This is precisely what you'd expect from people who were probably apolitical or perhaps, if pushed, something like Bloomberg Democrats and then became executors of a far-right, blood and soil, racist nationalist political program. Words and policy have no meaning. What matters is protecting and maximizing the value of the new family acquisition: the presidency.
Bannon and his supporters now appear to be making a rearguard argument that this approach is self-defeating on its own terms.
Alex Pareene/Fusion:
The Long, Lucrative Right-wing Grift Is Blowing Up in the World's Face
Because there was a lot of money in it for various hucksters and moguls and authors and politicians, the conservative movement spent decades building up an entire sector of the economy dedicated to scaring and lying to older white men. For millions of members of that demographic, this parallel media dedicated to lying to them has totally supplanted the “mainstream” media. Now they, and we, are at the mercy of the results of that project. The inmates are running the asylum, if there is a kind of asylum that takes in many mostly sane people and then gradually, over many years, drives one subset of its inmates insane, and also this asylum has the largest military in the world.
For years, the conservative movement peddled one set of talking points to the rabble, while its elites consumed a more grounded and reality-based media. The rubes listened to talk radio, read right-wing blogs, watched Fox News. They were fed apocalyptic paranoia about threats to their liberty, racial hysteria about the generalized menace posed by various groups of brown people, and hysterical lies about the criminal misdeeds of various Democratic politicians. The people in charge, meanwhile, read The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard, and they tended to have a better grasp of political reality, as when those sources deceived their readers, it was mostly unintentionally, with comforting fantasies about the efficacy of conservative policies. From the Reagan era through the Bush administration, the system seemed to be performing as designed.
But if this was a reasonably useful arrangement for Republicans, who won a couple close elections with the help of their army of riled-up kooks, it was a fantastic deal for the real engine of the right-wing propaganda machine: companies selling newly patented drugs designed to treat the various conditions of old age, authors of dubious investing newsletters, sellers of survival seeds, hawkers of poorly written conservative books, and a whole array of similar con artists and ethically compromised corporations and financial institutions.
German Lopez/Vox:
When a drug epidemic’s victims are white
How racial bias and segregation molded a gentler response to the opioid crisis.
These stories show how lived experiences and personal relationships can influence serious policy decisions. After all, politicians bring up the people in their lives who they saw needlessly suffer and die due to drugs for a specific purpose: to call for an approach to addiction focused on public health over criminal justice.
But in this way, these stories also expose the impact of another issue that may not seem related at first: race.
Even after decades of progress on racial issues, America remains a very segregated country. On a day to day basis, most Americans closely interact only with people of the same race. And that impacts our policies.
Benjamin Wallace-Wells/New Yorker:
HOW MODERATES TOOK BACK KANSAS
In the Republican primaries last year, moderates ousted more than a dozen Brownback supporters, most of them explicitly declaring their opposition to the Governor. In the general election, more than a dozen more Brownback Republicans lost to Democrats. When the legislature reconvened, in January, a moderate coalition rejected Brownback’s budget and voted to expand Medicaid. (Yesterday, Brownback vetoed the legislation; the moderates may be a few votes short of overriding him.) At a forum after the election, the executive director of the Kansas Republican Party suggested that there were “some voters who were anti-Brownback and there were others whose main motivation was they didn’t like the status quo.” He conceded, “They had this uncomfortable feeling about Kansas.”