Daily Beast:
Trump's Cherry-Picked Polls Still Show More than Half The Country Doesn’t Approve
The president has tweeted out 28 polls during his time in office. The average approval rating of those show him at about 49% approval.
Since the dawn of his presidency, Trump has been tweeting out polls that, he believes, show the American public warming to his job performance. Except, if you add up the numbers, the picture that these polls paint is not all that splendid.
In all, President Trump has tweeted pictures of or references to 28 polls. The average approval rating of those polls is 49.07 percent. In other words, even the president’s cherry-picked data shows that he hasn’t broken through with the majority of the country.
More on the fight over health care below.
Ron Brownstein/Atlantic:
The Most Critical Argument Democrats Will Have in 2020
Expect way more fighting over health care before the next set of presidential debates.
The battle over health care is emerging as the most consequential policy choice facing Democrats in the 2020 presidential contest—and it’s one that could play out over time to Joe Biden’s advantage.
As last week’s debates demonstrated, Democrats now face a stark choice: a nominee who would establish a government-funded, single-payer, national health-care system that bans private health insurance, or one who would maintain the availability of private insurance while seeking to increase coverage by enrolling more Americans in the Medicare system.
On health care, be for whatever you want to be for, but understand where the public is.
McSweeney’s:
I DON’T THINK A WOMAN IS ELECTABLE IN 2020 BECAUSE LAST TIME AROUND THE FEMALE NOMINEE ONLY GOT THREE MILLION MORE VOTES THAN HER OPPONENT
Now don’t get me wrong, I love Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris. But as great as they and the other female candidates are, I think Democrats should be focusing more on a sure-fire nominee who can beat Trump. Electability should be our number one priority, and I’m just not sure if America is ready to embrace a female candidate yet — especially considering that Hillary Clinton only got three million more votes than Donald Trump in 2016.
After that shocking blow, it became very clear that the problem isn’t the antiquated electoral college system that gives disproportionate influence to whiter states, but rather the problem is the woman thing. Americans, excluding those 65.8 million who made Hillary Clinton the person with the second most votes ever, just aren’t yet ready to elect a woman president.
And the stakes are just too high this time around to risk it by nominating yet another highly qualified woman in 2020.
That’s why I think we need someone like Joe Biden, who’s a shining example of electability, and who has only lost two presidential elections before this one. Or even Beto O’Rourke, a person who can really unite people of all shades of white, and who is another pro at getting elected. And even though Bernie Sanders couldn’t unite Democrats the last time around, he surely will be able to unite the country better than any woman could.
Isaac Chotiner interviews Dave Wasserman/New Yorker:
What the Democrats’ Turn Leftward Means for the Party’s Chances in 2020
Trump still got a lower percentage of the vote than Mitt Romney or John Kerry. Do you think there is a chance that we over-learn the lessons of a guy who got forty-six per cent?
Yes, but Democrats shouldn’t under-learn the lessons of Hillary Clinton’s failure. She was viewed not as an Arkansas Democrat but as a Chappaqua Democrat, by 2016. She ran a campaign that didn’t just fail in terms of targeting the right states but failed to drive an economic message. And “stronger together” and “Trump is unfit for office” were not substitutes for “here’s my plan to get the American heartland back to work.”
When you contrast Arkansas and Chappaqua, are you contrasting economics or culture? If you are arguing the latter, it seems like you could be arguing that “Massachusetts Democrat” could also be poisonous?
It’s more cultural in my opinion, but there is no question that Clinton could have talked about the economy more. The pitfalls in a potential Harris or Warren nomination are several. But the first one that comes to mind is the reinforcement of an image that the Democratic Party is dominated by coastal élitists, and, despite Warren’s Oklahoma roots and populist message, her career as an Ivy League academic is a liability, or would be a serious liability in a general-election campaign. In Harris’s case, Republicans would love to run against San Francisco, but, more than that, she hasn’t woven voters’ personal stories into her case for why she should be elected as often as some other candidates have. And that is one area where she probably has room to grow as a candidate.
Tom Nichols/NY Daily News:
Trump’s sad, strange, somewhat Soviet Fourth of July spectacle
There’s nothing wrong with recounting stories of American military heroism and bravery. We even have an entire holiday called Veterans Day devoted to honoring the sacrifices and valor of the men and women who have served our country. And it’s perfectly appropriate to remember that the United States was born out of a revolution, in which both ink and gunpowder were powerful weapons against monarchism and tyranny.
It is another matter entirely, however, to call forward the secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs and make them stand there during a cheerless reading of the exploits of each branch of the armed services while a military chorus sings their anthems and their various aircraft roar past — including the narcissistic insistence that Air Force One fly overhead as the president took the stage. (It was also silly, because Air Force One isn’t “Air Force One” unless the president is on board.)
Mining the glories of past military battles while flanked by defense chiefs is the kind of thing Soviet leaders used to do while droning from their reviewing stand in Moscow. It wasn’t patriotic or stirring; it was cringe-inducing. This is probably one of many reasons that former Secretary of Defense James Mattis and former Chief of Staff John Kelly — both retired generals — reportedly squashed this idea whenever it came up.
Speaking of tabloids, a homage to the soon-to-fold MAD magazine:
Peter Wehner/Atlantic:
The Deepening Crisis in Evangelical Christianity
Support for Trump comes at a high cost for Christian witness.
I recently exchanged emails with a pro-Trump figure who attended the president’s reelection rally in Orlando, Florida, on June 18. (He spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, so as to avoid personal or professional repercussions.) He had interviewed scores of people, many of them evangelical Christians. “I have never witnessed the kind of excitement and enthusiasm for a political figure in my life,” he told me. “I honestly couldn’t believe the unwavering support they have. And to a person, it was all about ‘the fight.’ There is a very strong sense (I believe justified, you disagree) that he has been wronged. Wronged by Mueller, wronged by the media, wronged by the anti-Trump forces. A passionate belief that he never gets credit for anything.”
The rallygoers, he said, told him that Trump’s era “is spiritually driven.” When I asked whether he meant by this that Trump’s supporters believe God’s hand is on Trump, this moment and at the election—that Donald Trump is God’s man, in effect—he told me, “Yes—a number of people said they believe there is no other way to explain his victories. Starting with the election and continuing with the conclusion of the Mueller report. Many said God has chosen him and is protecting him. …
The enthusiastic, uncritical embrace of President Trump by white evangelicals is among the most mind-blowing development of the Trump era. How can a group that for decades—and especially during the Bill Clinton presidency—insisted that character counts and that personal integrity is an essential component of presidential leadership not only turn a blind eye to the ethical and moral transgressions of Donald Trump, but also constantly defend him? Why are those who have been on the vanguard of “family values” so eager to give a man with a sordid personal and sexual history a mulligan?
Part of the answer is their belief that they are engaged in an existential struggle against a wicked enemy—not Russia, not North Korea, not Iran, but rather American liberals and the left. If you listen to Trump supporters who are evangelical (and non-evangelicals, like the radio talk-show host Mark Levin), you will hear adjectives applied to those on the left that could easily be used to describe a Stalinist regime. (Ask yourself how many evangelicals have publicly criticized Trump for his lavish praise of Kim Jong Un, the leader of perhaps the most savage regime in the world and the worst persecutor of Christians in the world.)
Couple that with this Fareed Zakaria observation in WaPo:
Ever since the 1930s, conservatives have been promising their flock the rollback of the progressive agenda. They have warned about the dangers of leaving the welfare state intact and pilloried conservative leaders for failing in this crucial task. Yet, despite the Reagan revolution, the Newt Gingrich revolution and the tea party revolution, the welfare state is still standing as strong as ever. Republicans dominate almost every arena of U.S. politics — and the state is bigger than ever. Should we chalk this up to incompetence? More likely, conservatives know that the public actually wants the welfare state and that a modern country could not function today under some libertarian fantasy experiment. Of course, they will never admit this.
In any case, the result is that conservative leaders left their base permanently aggrieved, feeling betrayed and distrustful of any new campaign promises. In recent years, as the fever grew, conservative voters became desperate for someone who had not played this game of bait-and-switch with them. And into this rage walked Trump, who easily toppled the old conservative establishment and rode the frustration with elites all the way to the White House.
This twofer emphasizes that being deplorable *is the point* and why the rally-going Trump supporters support him. They want someone who is an asshole to everyone else, especially liberals. But not just liberals.
Adam Serwer/Atlantic:
A Crime by Any Name
The Trump administration’s commitment to deterring immigration through cruelty has made horrifying conditions in detention facilities inevitable.
Wirz didn’t see it that way—he insisted that he was just following orders. The conditions at the prison camp at Andersonville were not deliberate, he argued, but the result of the Confederacy’s lack of resources. “I think I may also claim as a self-evident proposition, that if I, a subaltern officer, merely obeyed the legal orders of my superiors in the discharge of my official duties,” Wirz wrote in response to the charges, “I cannot be held responsible for the motives which dictated such orders.”
This was true, but also not truly a denial of culpability. The Confederacy did lack for resources, and that absence contributed to conditions at Andersonville, where, according to McPherson, “33,000 men were packed by August 1864—an average of thirty-four square feet per man—without shade in a Deep South summer and with no shelter except what they could rig from sticks, tent flies, blankets, and odd bits of cloth.” The prisoners “broiled in the sun and shivered in the rain.”
Yet the Confederacy’s lack of resources was not the chief cause of the horrors of Andersonville, because the Rebels did not have to keep the Union troops captive. In fact, they would have preferred to send many of their prisoners back. The Union, though, would not commit to troop exchanges unless black soldiers were included. Not placing such conditions on exchanges would have fatally undermined morale in black units and deeply harmed the Union’s ability to recruit black troops. Moreover, abandoning black troops fighting to preserve the republic would be, in the words of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a “shameful dishonor.