We begin today’s roundup with Richard North Patterson at the Boston Globe and his piece about Donald Trump’s lack of any strategy and governing by chaos:
For a time, the now-departed [advisors] ameliorated his worst instincts, protecting special counsel Robert Mueller and preserving the Iran nuclear deal. No more. Trump careens unconstrained from one self-created flashpoint to the next with no sense of consequence or objective grasp of external reality — compelling attention out of sheer fright at what he may do next. The most appalling thing about his unpredictability is its infinity.
Over at Politico, Brent Griffiths summarizes expert analysis on the consequences of Trump’s lack of foreign policy strategy:
President Donald Trump and his administration’s lack of a consistent and coherent foreign policy is confusing U.S. allies and ceding ground to countries that do not share America’s interests, a group of foreign policy experts said at a debate on Monday evening.
Dana Milbank writes about the chaos we saw unfold on TV yesterday:
Here’s a split-screen for our times: While Israeli troops were killing dozens of Palestinian protesters in Gaza on Monday, Trump administration representatives were 50 miles away in Jerusalem, celebrating with Israeli officials the opening of the U.S. Embassy there and praising their mutual devotion to peace. [...]
The move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv could have been a moment of unity and brotherhood. Instead, as with most everything Trump touches, it became a symbol of division and bitterness. It could have been the capstone of a peace deal, as Republican and Democratic administrations alike had hoped. Instead, it all but dashed hope for a two-state solution.
On the issue of the high cost of prescription drugs, Paul Krugman explains how Trump has no plan:
Last week we learned that Novartis, the Swiss drug company, had paid Michael Cohen — Donald Trump’s personal lawyer — $1.2 million for what ended up being a single meeting. Then, on Friday, Trump announced a “plan” to reduce drug prices.
Why the scare quotes? Because the “plan” was mostly free of substance, controlled or otherwise. (O.K., there were a few ideas that experts found interesting, but they were fairly marginal.) During the 2016 campaign Trump promised to use the government’s power, including Medicare’s role in paying for prescription drugs, to bring drug prices down. But none of that was in his speech on Friday.
And if someone tries to convince you that Trump really is getting tough on drug companies, there’s a simple response: If he were, his speech wouldn’t have sent drug stocks soaring.
And Catherine Rampell writes about how Trump sabotaged the health insurance market:
This is what the start of a death spiral looks like.
Three states have announced preliminary 2019 premium-rate requests for Obamacare individual-market policies, and the numbers don’t look good. [...] It is not hard to see why prices might spike. Thanks to Republican efforts to sabotage Obamacare, the pool of individual-market enrollees is getting smaller and sicker — and, as a result, much more expensive.
At The Week, Paul Waldman gives some perspective on the whole “Democrats has lost their advantage!” narrative:
So let's try to put things in perspective. Has President Trump's approval risen lately? The answer is yes — but not by much. If you look at FiveThirtyEight's aggregation of polls, you'll see that a month ago, Trump was at 40 percent, and now he has rocketed all the way up to ... 42 percent. In fact, his approval has been remarkably steady over his entire time in office, seldom shifting more than a few points from 40 percent in one direction or the other.
That may be surprising, given the regular stream of lunacy emanating from the White House. But it shows the durability of partisan attachment: Even a presidency as alternately catastrophic and comical as this one won't drive away more than a handful of voters from the president's party.
At the same time, however, Trump is indeed different from presidents before him. Ordinarily, a president overseeing an economy in which unemployment had fallen below 4 percent would be basking in the affection of most Americans. Yet Trump's approval has barely budged from where it has always been, even as the recovery that began under Barack Obama has deepened.
Republicans are hoping that Trump is so different that he can become the exception to what for them is a very frightening rule: When the president's approval is below 50 percent, his party doesn't just lose seats in the midterms, it loses big.
On a final note, don’t miss Eugene Robinson’s piece:
The most offensive and corrosive idea in our politics today is that some Americans are more “real” than others. Don’t you dare buy it.
Republicans are cynically peddling this un-American conceit. “Real Americans” elected and continue to support President Trump, they claim, in defiance of snooty “coastal elites” who are hopelessly out of touch with the country. It’s a total crock, and shame on those using it for political gain.