Another week, another attempt by Donald Trump to dominate the news cycle through insults and attacks. Last week it was Kim Jong Un, this week it’s the people who play professional sports — apparently all of them — who are in for Trump’s ire. It doesn’t really matter. Trump just wants the outrage. He wants people to be angry, upset, and divided. How he gets there isn’t that important. Whether it’s risking nuclear war or simply wiping his feet on the Constitution, eh, whatever works.
Trump doesn’t care about domestic policy. He doesn’t care about foreign policy. He cares about Trump and about how many times he can get the people to say and write the word Tru… that word. And since he has absolutely no idea how to engage people’s hopes and aspirations, how to lift up and encourage, how to stir people to positive action and greater ambitions … he does this.
He knows how to demean. How to belittle and mock. His natural expression is a sneer, his first instinct to deride. Because, to lift a few words off a film, he’s a little man, a silly man, greedy, barbarous, and cruel—and he thinks everyone else is the same.
“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!’” ...
“You know, some owner is going to do that. He’s going to say, ‘That guy that disrespects our flag, he’s fired.’ And that owner, they don’t know it [but] they’ll be the most popular person in this country.”
Trump said this right before he called for changes in NFL so that more people would be more likely to be injured for life.
Maybe the most horrible thing about having Donald Trump in the White House is the power it gives him to make people talk about Donald Trump. Because, really, that guy is simply disgusting.
Oh, and complaining about football is also Trump’s way of distracting you from the fact that it increasingly seems like Robert Mueller is going to come along and say “Get that son of a bitch out of that office, right now.” Which is going to make Mueller the most popular person in the world.
Come on. Let’s go read some pundits.
Nick Fox on Trump’s insistence that he’s the only one who gets to talk.
His demand for Mr. Kaepernick’s silence came two days after The New York Times reported on another form of silence that comes with the privilege of dedicating your life, breaking your body and soul, to be in the N.F.L. Doctors, it said, had found a severe level of the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., in Aaron Hernandez, the 27-year-old former New England Patriot who committed suicide in April while imprisoned on a murder sentence. His brain showed the kind of damage usually seen in players in their 60s.
Maybe Trump didn’t get around to hearing that part — the part where two lives were taken and many more made miserable by just one instance of damage caused by repeated head trauma. Maybe. But I’m betting he did read that. I’m betting that his asking for more head trauma came expressly because he did catch this part of the story.
But the president was not just speaking to Mr. Kaepernick. His message was to anyone who would protest racial injustice or inequity. Shut up. Stop complaining. That’s his message of privilege.
I’m planning on taking a knee tomorrow while I’m just watching the game. I hope everyone on and off the field does the same.
The New York Times on Trump’s (lack of) trustworthiness.
At a crucial moment, Donald Trump is forcing the world to confront core questions it really shouldn’t have to ask: Can he be trusted? And, more saliently, can America be trusted? His threats to jettison the Iran nuclear deal are undermining America’s credibility as a negotiating partner and weakening America’s ability to lead the free world as it has for 70 years.
And of course, the answer is no. Trump can’t be trusted to pay a bill for carpet. Or pay a bill for plumbing. Or pay a bill for custom woodwork. Or pay a bill for painting. Or pay his workers for overtime. Or pay charities when he promises. Or … keep going as long as you want. Trump didn’t get sued 3,500 times because he was punctual and honest.
In his rush to bulldoze President Obama’s accomplishments, Mr. Trump has withdrawn from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, leaving China with a freer hand to set trade rules in Asia; abandoned the hard-won 195-nation Paris Agreement to address climate change; and sowed grave doubts about his commitment to NATO, the bedrock alliance that has kept peace in Europe after World War II.
In a single speech, Trump attacked North Korea, and attacked the agreement signed with Iran. Iran came to the table after the US pressed for sanctions that were tougher than those applied to North Korea. Then the US leveraged those sanctions to force Iran to agree to an extensive, comprehensive inspection regime—and what do you know, Iran does not have a bomb. The pressure being applied to North Korea could potentially result in the same outcome, except that Trump is anxious to demonstrate that there’s no point in negotiating with the United States. Under Trump, the US can’t be trusted to stand by a treaty. It’s not military force that Trump’s taking off the table. It’s everything except military force.
Bret Stephens reminds you that Trump hasn’t bothered to appoint an ambassador to Australia.
A visit to the Australian War Memorial is a moving reminder that Australians have fought alongside Americans in nearly all of our wars over the past century: in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and — to this day — Afghanistan. More than 100,000 Aussies perished in these efforts, a staggering sacrifice for a country with less than 8 percent of America’s population.
But taking the time to send someone there would interfere with valuable Twitter planning. Seriously, Donald Trump is not interested in anything but making you say … Donald Trump. How does sending someone to Australia who will make the relationship work better work with the goal of making you say Donald Trump.
The appearance of normality masks deep unease. Australian security officials seem to have a pretty good read on Kim Jong-un’s mind-set; it’s his American counterpart whose instincts and motives they find baffling and worrisome.
Which means, of course, that everyone in America and Australia says Donald Trump. Sure, the word asshole is used in every sentence. Or maybe “arsehole.” But for … that guy, it still counts.
Richard Parker on how Texas is coming back to earth.
… the dysfunctional, ideologically driven State Legislature, which spent the last weeks of this year’s session debating, of all things, who gets to use which bathroom. Then there’s the oil and gas sector, which, as it has so many times before, expanded into a bubble and then, as global energy prices sank, popped, taking thousands of jobs with it.
Texas’ woes are interconnected. Rising energy prices allow politicians to take their hands off the legislative wheel. Less attention to smart, controlled growth at the state and local level allowed unchecked sprawl along the coast. And now declining revenues will make it harder for the state to address its very real needs, assuming the Legislature can get its act together. The silver lining to this tale? It finally seems to be dawning on people that low taxes, less regulation and more oil are no substitute for actually governing.
Extraction industries are always cyclical. Jobs and funding go up and down with the changes in availability and the market. In the latest spike of fracking-driven oil and gas production, it’s not that Texas doesn’t have shale areas suitable for expanded production from the new techniques, it’s that so does everyone else. And the high availability means low prices that don’t look to end for years. They may not even ever as solar and wind absorb any slack in the market.
Two years ago Texas had one of the nation’s lowest unemployment rates; today it is in 28th place. Though it is now at 4.4 percent, it was as high as 5 percent a few months ago, and there’s a good bet it will bounce back up, and likely higher, soon.
When you look at a small West Virginia town dependent on coal mining, it’s easy to see how the extraction industry doesn’t just drive the economy with every fluctuation, but long term stunts the community. For states like Texas — and even more for states like Wyoming — fossil fuel industries have meant sitting back comfortably with the assumption that the gravy train would continue forever. That there would always be money for roads and schools and for sneering at blue states with things like an income tax. When the gravy train stalls, it’s also easy to shake a fist at Washington and pretend that “regulations” are at fault. Shake away. It’s not going to help.
Paul Krugman on how Graham-Cassidy is a perfect fit for Trump.
Graham-Cassidy, the health bill the Senate may vote on next week, is stunningly cruel. It’s also incompetently drafted: The bill’s sponsors clearly had no idea what they were doing when they put it together. Furthermore, their efforts to sell the bill involve obvious, blatant lies.
But here’s the thing: A reasonable, well-structured plan wouldn’t generate the outrage and revulsion that keeps Trump glowing with two parts mustard, one part ketchup highlights.
The Affordable Care Act, which has reduced the percentage of Americans without health insurance to a record low, created a three-legged stool: regulations that prevent insurers from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions, a requirement that individuals have adequate insurance (and thus pay into the system while healthy) and subsidies to make that insurance affordable. For the lowest-income families, insurance is provided directly by Medicaid.
Graham-Cassidy saws off all three legs of that stool.
Actually, Graham-Cassidy achieves a kind of inverse miracle: It saws four legs off the three-legged stool by destroying not just Medicaid expansion, but Medicad as it has existed for four decades.
Zeynep Tufekci on Facebook’s willingness to provide a discount means of political interference.
What does it take to advertise on Facebook to people who openly call themselves “Jew haters” and want to know “how to burn Jews”? About $10 and 15 minutes, according to what the investigative nonprofit ProPublica recently uncovered. ...
How could the site that we use to keep in touch with friends and family, share baby pictures, and keep up with politics and volunteer work be made so easily to cater to the interests of Nazis?
To make a long story short—because it’s actually a very short story—the Nazis paid for ii. And Facebook’s carefully though out policy on ads is: Did they pay for it? Run the ad!
Anyone who understands how Facebook works shouldn’t have been surprised. That’s because the same digital platform that offers us social interaction, news, entertainment and shopping all in one place makes its money by making it cheap and easy to send us commercial or political messages, often guided by algorithms. The recent scandal is just a reminder.
Selling your personal information for profit isn’t a sideline at Facebook. That’s the line, the whole line, and nothing but the line.
Blaine Harden on the worst possible reason to think there might not be a nuclear exchange.
With a quiver of nuclear-tipped intercontinental missiles, the North Korean leader seems to have a good shot at doing what his father and grandfather did — living despotically to a ripe old age and dying from natural causes. Yet deep in his dictatorial DNA, Kim Jong-un surely knows the risk of provoking a full-scale war with the United States. It did not go well for his family the last time around. During the Korean War (1950-53), his grandfather — Great Leader Kim Il-sung — cowered in bunkers as American bombs flattened his cities and legions of his people died.
What this should teach American policy makers — especially our history-challenged president and his blood-and-soil backers — is that a North Korean offensive strike is unlikely. That is, unless the Kim regime is provoked, perhaps by a particularly warmongering early-morning tweet, into believing that its existence really is at risk. The Trump administration needs to keep Kim family history in mind. It is a criminal enterprise focused on long-term survival, far more adept at enslaving its people than fighting big-boy wars.
On the other hand, maybe what Kim Jong Un took from granddad’s story is that you can hunker safely in your bunker and go on to sire generations whose biggest problem is looking for a new adjective to stick in front of the word “leader.”
Frank Bruni on the confluence of immigration and innovation.
Every year since 1981, the [MacArthur Foundation] has bestowed so-called genius grants on more than 20 of the country’s most accomplished and promising scientists, scholars, artists and writers. These awards are a huge deal, trumpeted in the media and worn with pride forevermore. And the winners, typically in the middle of their careers, get $625,000 each.
Of the 965 geniuses (or, more properly, MacArthur fellows) to date, 209 were born outside the United States, according to Cecilia Conrad, who leads the fellowship program. That’s 21.7 percent. The 2010 census determined that less than 13 percent of the American population is foreign-born.
Now we just have to wait for Sarah Huckabee Sanders to tell us how immigrants are taking valuable awards from millions of American geniuses.
Walter Shapiro and the odds of Manafort bringing down Trump.
A May 2016 Wall Street Journal story on lobbyists in presidential politics devoted just one sentence to Manafort “whose firm in the past represented a number of foreign governments”.
That bland statement was the equivalent of describing the first world war as a small territorial misunderstanding among European nations. This week we learned, through a series of leaks, that Manafort’s foreign entanglements appear to be a central target of Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Possibly because Manafort seems to have broken the law. Not a law. The law. As in, you got a law, he probably broke it.
For those of us who wake up every morning with a sense of dread that Trump has nuked Denmark overnight, it is tempting to take these investigative fragments and imagine Chief Justice John Roberts presiding over an impeachment trial in the Senate. Or to picture a high-profile federal trial in which Manafort details the Trump campaign’s direct coordination with Vladimir Putin.
There is only one problem with these liberal fantasies – suggestive incidents do not automatically add up to unequivocal evidence. …
In legal terms, maybe all that Trump is guilty of is terrible taste in campaign advisers and bad luck with his son-in-law.
Yeah. Maybe. Except for the better than a decade of real estate deals, some of which involved Trump and Manafort, where oligarch funds were converted into Trump properties. Real estate developers have uniquely lax regulations … thanks to folks like Donald Trump who lobbied Congress to keep their wheeling and dealing safe from the kind of scrutiny that every other business deal has to withstand. Even so, between the collusion, the money-laundering, and the obstruction, it certainly seems like Donald Trump is going to get a lot more out of this than a shake of Mueller’s finger.