Walter Shapiro/Guardian:
Trump's presidency is built on lies. Does he actually believe them?
From the phantom peace in Syria to the phantom wall on the Mexican border, the Trump presidency is based on the theory that reality is created by mere assertion. The scariest interpretation of the torrent of Trump lies is that the president actually believes the words that he is saying each time his lips move.
If truth is this malleable, why did Trump go to such lengths to delve for actual evidence in Ukraine about Hunter Biden’s finances and the 2016 DNC hacking?…
By any rational measure, the Watergate break-in was dangerously unnecessary since Nixon would go on to carry 49 states against the hapless McGovern, even without planted microphones at Democratic headquarters.
But at least Watergate, at the beginning, was a tight-lipped conspiracy with the burglars, CIA-trained veterans of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. In contrast, everyone from career diplomats like William Taylor to the government in Kyiv seemed to know about Trump’s plotting in Ukraine.
Carol D. Leonnig and Josh Dawsey/WaPo:
Trump frustrated as White House effort to defy impeachment inquiry fails to halt witness testimony, advisers say
After weeks of dismissing the impeachment inquiry as a hollow partisan attack, President Trump and his closest advisers now recognize that the snowballing probe poses a serious threat to the president — and that they have little power to block it, according to multiple aides and advisers.
The dawning realization comes as Democrats rapidly gather evidence from witness after witness testifying about the pressure put on Ukraine to investigate Trump’s political rivals. The president is increasingly frustrated that his efforts to stop people from cooperating with the probe have so far collapsed under the weight of legally powerful congressional subpoenas, advisers said.
The Democratic strategy got a boost Friday from a federal judge, who ruled that the House impeachment inquiry is legal. In the coming week, House investigators are scheduled to hear testimony from five more witnesses, including on Saturday from an acting assistant secretary of state for Europe, who is expected to testify about the efforts to oust the previous U.S. ambassador.
Amber Phillips/WaPo:
Republicans are increasingly flailing while defending Trump from impeachment inquiry
Now, as the impeachment inquiry presents stronger evidence Trump was holding up military aid for his personal gain, his congressional defenders are pulling even more Trumpian tactics. Most of them collapse under the weight of the facts. Some are so obviously political stunts that there’s no other way to describe them.
Jennifer Senior/NY Times:
Why Does Only One Party Play by the Rules?
Thanks to Trump’s deepening dependence on “alternative facts,” the assertion of reality is now a viable campaign strategy for 2020 Democrats.
So, to repeat: What to do about this? Do you capitulate, sell your soul and resort to the same lawless tactics as your opponents? Or do you take the high road and run the risk of losing?
The only guide we have is 2018. But it’s not a bad one. What it showed was that sometimes it pays to go high. The Democrats just have to aggressively sell an honorable message.
Specifically, what the Democrats should say is: Anyone who’s not in the business of peddling the truth shouldn’t be in the business of government. Or publishing, for that matter. Trump once said that he could probably get away with murder. (And his lawyers recently, surreally, made this same case in a federal appeals court.) That’s what Mark Zuckerberg is doing on Facebook, figuratively speaking, by allowing political ads with demonstrably false content to run on his platform, no matter what other features the company rolls out.
Rebecca Traister/New York:
Why Donald Trump — and Other Powerful Men — Love to Cast Themselves As Victims
The anger Trump wanted these kids — who would spend 13 years in jail before being fully exonerated in 2002 — and the public to understand was the anger of a powerful white New Yorker who did not want to tolerate the presence of less powerful New Yorkers. More than that, he wanted millions of readers to understand the potency of that anger: its money, its influence, its public reach, its ability to cast the mere presence of people he didn’t like on the street as a violent threat to him and others like him.
These were the dynamics — fury at any disruption to his presence or preferences in the world, or to a social order which would keep him at the top — that Trump was so adept at conveying on a campaign trail in 2016, when he encouraged his massive, screaming, mostly white crowds to enact physical violence against any protesters who might take up space or challenge them. After one Black Lives Matter protester was beaten following one of his events, Trump told Fox News, “Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.” At another rally, in Las Vegas, Trump told his jeering crowd, as a man was led out by police, “You know what they used to do to a guy like that in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”
These calls echo the language and thinking of lynching, the extrajudicial torture and murder of mostly nonwhite people, and especially African-Americans, that was most common in the Jim Crow South. According to the King Center in Atlanta, “More than 4,400 African-American men, women, and children were hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, and beaten to death by white mobs between 1877 and 1950.” This is the greatness of American history to which Trump has promised his fans a return; these are the flames he has consciously stoked: the return of the mob, and with it the ability, via public spectacle, to punish and hurt those with less power who would challenge or inconvenience an old kind of authority. The cruelty, as Adam Serwer has written, is the point. Yet when Trump is leading the mob, he is rarely fully explicit in his evocation of an era of racist violence.
WaPo:
House Democrats look to take impeachment probe public as soon as mid-November
Democrats have long been expected to shift to public hearings, which offer the opportunity to build the case against Trump while also building support among American voters.
“It’s going to be the difference between reading a dry transcript and actually hearing the story from the people who were in the room,” said Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “I think the story needs to be told, you know, the story of the abuse of power. . . . People like the various ambassadors who have come to testify need to come tell it.”
The move toward the public spotlight comes as Trump and his Capitol Hill allies have cast Democrats’ closed-door investigation as a secretive smear campaign against the president.
Politico:
Giuliani probe snowballs
The Justice Department is bringing more resources to the investigation, indicating widening trouble for one of Trump's lawyers.
Giuliani’s troubles aren’t just his alone. He has turned members of the Trump team he’s worked with over the past 18 months into potential witnesses for federal prosecutors, who are trying to unravel the tangled relationships he brought to the mix in advising the president while still juggling an international consulting business that promised proximity to the White House.
“He appears to be a subject, if not a target of an active investigation. So to have him be a part of the legal team would be troublesome to say the least,” said Greg Brower, who served as the FBI’s top liaison to Congress until 2018. “At best, it’s a messy situation and more likely it’s just completely dysfunctional.”
Damon Linker/The Week:
The GOP goes gonzo
To grasp what's distinctive about the gonzo style of politics, we first need to clarify what it isn't.
"Normal" politics involves politicians and other public figures articulating principles and proposing policies to advance a normative vision of the public good. It presumes that all of us share a reality of truth and facts and that it's possible to determine the best way to order that common life. The partisan clashes we associate with normal politics emerge from the fact that different classes and factions within the polity disagree about the public good and what it demands and requires. This clash of views prompts citizens to make arguments and deploy rhetorical appeals in order to persuade the greatest possible number of people to join one side in the conflict against the others. The tacit expectation of normal politics is that this debate will be conducted in good faith.
Everyone who studies politics or engages in it seriously is well aware that this vision of it as a debate society with an active, well-meaning audience of voters rendering well-considered judgment is obviously idealized. In reality, politics also involves deal-making, compromises with principles, and even dirty tricks designed to undermine the authority of opponents and woo and manipulate the views of citizens. When it gets especially nasty, political actors get accused of hypocrisy. "You profess to be high-minded and concerned only with the public good, but your actions show that you're just as willing as your opponents to crawl around in the mud! What a hypocrite!"
Yet it's important to recall the old adage that describes hypocrisy as the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Even the nastiest form of "normal" politics still presumes a relatively fixed public standard of truth and commonly shared notions of right and wrong. Political actors simply prove themselves willing to diverge from such standards from time to time in order to advance their substantive ends.
Gonzo politics is different in kind. Its hypocrisy is so absolute that the concept itself becomes meaningless. That's what happens when truth and any sense of commonality, the good, or a shared public world collapses in on itself like a black hole, with the only thing remaining the pursuit of power solely for the sake of its own selfish rewards. Under such conditions, politics becomes all show, all performance, with no objective criteria of truth or goodness available to evaluate it.
Politico:
How Warren could pay for 'Medicare for All'
The top-tier Democrat — whose motto is that she has a plan for everything — doesn’t have one yet for how to pay for universal health care.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s pledge to reveal how she'd pay for her "Medicare for All" plan carries big risks, no matter which path she takes.
Taxing the wealthy won’t cover the trillions in cost. Raising taxes on the middle class is a political third rail. Other options, like reducing health care benefits or raising payroll taxes are also politically dicey.
…
But with Warren’s primary rivals pressuring her for details, lawmakers, health policy experts and academics say she has several credible options for paying to extend government health insurance to all Americans. Here are some of the taxes, spending cuts and budget shuffling ideas under consideration by experts, and the pros and cons.
CNN:
Judge says impeachment inquiry is legal and justifies disclosing grand jury material
A headline that gets it right! Oh well, scratch off another GOP talking point.
NY Times also with correct headline:
Impeachment Inquiry Is Legal, Judge Rules, Giving Democrats a Victory
Here’s Rudy butt dialing an NBC reporter: