The big stories from a not-so-quiet Sunday are the death of Kobe Bryant in company of others, the spread of coronavirus and the bombshell leak of what’s in John Bolton’s book (making Republican Senators scramble), but the pundits haven’t fully caught up with all of that yet.
Aaron Blake/WaPo:
Mike Pompeo’s blatant gaslighting attempt
“It is shameful that this reporter chose to violate the basic rules of journalism and decency,” Pompeo said. “This is another example of how unhinged the media has become in its quest to hurt President Trump and this administration. It is no wonder that the American people distrust many in the media when they so consistently demonstrate their agenda and their absence of integrity.”
The most remarkable portion of Pompeo’s statement, though, came at the end.
“It is worth noting that Bangladesh is NOT Ukraine," Pompeo said in it.
The implication is unmistakable: Kelly couldn’t correctly identify the location of Ukraine on the map, and she instead pointed to Bangladesh.
Here’s why there is absolutely no way that happened.
Axios:
Republicans fear "floodgates" if Bolton testifies
There may be enough new pressure on Senate Republicans to allow witnesses at President Trump's impeachment trial, after the leak from a forthcoming book by former national security adviser John Bolton that contradicts what the White House has been telling the country.
Why it matters: This is a dramatic, 11th-hour inflection point for the trial, with an eyewitness rebuttal to Trump's claim that he never tied the hold-up of Ukrainian aid to investigations into Joe Biden.
- GOP sources say the revelation could be enough to sway the four Republican senators needed for witnesses — especially since Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine have already strongly signaled they’d vote for witnesses. ...
-
The state of play: Republican sources tell Axios that party leaders and the White House will still try to resist witnesses because, as one top aide put it, "there is a sense in the Senate that if one witness is allowed, the floodgates are open."
- "If [Bolton] says stuff that implicates, say Mick [Mulvaney] or [Mike] Pompeo, then calls for them will intensify," the aide said.
In other words, it would spoil their cover-up. Smoking guns are so annoying.
NPR:
And in a Saturday interview with All Things Considered, NPR President and CEO John Lansing also came to Kelly's defense.
"Mary Louise Kelly is one of the most respected, truthful, factual, professional and ethical journalists in the United States, and that's known by the entire press corps," Lansing told host Michel Martin. "And I stand behind her and I stand behind the NPR newsroom, and the statement from the secretary of state is blatantly false."
Lansing allowed that tensions can and do arise when journalists ask officials hard questions.
"But this goes well beyond tension — this goes toward intimidation," Lansing said. "And let me just say this: We will not be intimidated. Mary Louise Kelly won't be intimidated, and NPR won't be intimidated."
Ron Brownstein/CNN:
Boom and bust: Economy and impeachment capture the forces that will determine Trump's fate
"From the beginning of the [University of Michigan] survey through the administration of President George W. Bush, there was a fairly straightforward relationship: Higher scores on this [economic] index equal better approval ratings,"
Sides wrote recently in The Washington Post.
That relationship began to fray under President Barack Obama. Most experts attributed the change to the nation's increasing political polarization: Polls show that Republicans and Democrats are now more likely to view the economy positively when their party controls the White House. That meant Obama didn't benefit as much as many scholars expected when the economy slowly recovered after the crash of 2008.
But Trump, as with many things, has pushed this dynamic to a new peak. Polls capture an unmistakable improvement in voter attitudes about the economy, but those same surveys show that Trump's standing is much weaker than that of any of his recent predecessors among the voters who express such economic contentment…
The latest CNN/SSRS poll, released this week, illuminates the same trends from another angle. In the poll, 55% of respondents said they approved of how Trump is handling the economy, a robust number that might normally predict smooth sailing to reelection for an incumbent president. But 29% of the respondents who approved of Trump's economic performance say he abused his power in his dealings with Ukraine, and 23% said they still disapproved of his overall job performance, according to detailed figures provided by the CNN polling unit.
The result of this resistance is that despite the spike in positive attitudes about the economy, Trump's overall approval rating has increased by only about 1 percentage point over the past year in the
cumulative index maintained by fivethirtyeight.com.
In support of Brownstein’s piece, this am’s poll: even with strong economic support Trump at best breaks even where anyone else would handily lead:
Edward Isaac-Dovere/Atlantic:
Obama’s 2016 Warning: Trump Is a ‘Fascist’
The newly revealed comment is one of the former president’s strongest known critiques of his successor.
Obama has never gone as far as using the word fascist in public, even though that’s not an uncommon opinion, especially on the left. Journalists and academics who have lived in and studied fascist regimes regularly point to the traits Trump seems to share with those leaders, including demanding fealty, deliberately spreading misinformation, and adopting Joseph Stalin’s slur that the press is the “enemy of the people.” And that’s not to mention Trump’s apparent admiration for living authoritarians, such as Russia’s Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. “He speaks, and his people sit up at attention,” Trump gushed about Kim in a 2018 interview on Fox & Friends. “I want my people to do the same.”
In the footage from Hillary, Kaine seems to suggest that Obama wanted him to be more aggressive against Trump. “He knows me and knows I tend to” hold back, Kaine says. (This past November, Kaine referred to Trump as a “tyrant” in an interview on the Radio Atlantic podcast.)
In the Sundance interview, Clinton said that Obama had never used the word fascist in conversations with her about Trump. But, she said, what Obama “observed was this populism untethered to facts, evidence, or truth; this total rejection of so much of the progress that America has made, in order to incite a cultural reaction that would play into the fear and the anxiety and the insecurity of people—predominantly in small-town and rural areas—who felt like they were losing something. And [Trump] gave them a voice for what they were losing and who was responsible.”
Gary Langer/ABC:
Biden holds steady, Warren slips in national poll as Iowa caucuses approach
Joe Biden holds his ground in the new national ABC News/Washington Post poll.
With the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses drawing near, 77% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents nationally say they’re satisfied with their choice of candidates. Far fewer, 24%, are very satisfied, although that’s near the average in ABC/Post polls since 2000.
See PDF for full results, charts and tables.
This poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, finds plenty of room for movement: Just about half of leaned Democrats are very enthusiastic about their choice, and 53% say they’d consider supporting a different candidate. Warren, while weaker as a first choice, leads in second-choice preference.
Leonard Pitts, Jr/Miami Herald:
No, it’s not the economy, stupid. Trump supporters fear a black and brown America.
This column is presented as a service for those progressive readers who are struggling with something I said in this space. Namely, that I see no point in trying to reason with Trump voters. I first wrote that over a month ago, and I am still hearing how “disappointed” they are at my refusal to reach out. So I thought it might be valuable to hear from the people I’ve failed to reach out to.
I’m sure some of you think those emails were cherry-picked to highlight the intolerance of Trump voters. They weren’t. They are, in fact, a representative sampling from a single day in May, culled by my assistant, Judi.
It’s still an article of faith for many that the Trump phenomenon was born out of fiscal insecurity, the primal scream of working people left behind by a changing economy. But I don’t think I’ve ever, not once, seen an email from a Trump supporter who explained himself in terms of the factory or the coal mine shutting down.
I have, however, heard from hundreds like “Matthew,” who worries about “immigrants” and “Gerald,” who thinks people of color have an “alliance” against him. Such people validate the verdict of a growing body of scholarship that says, in the words of a new study by University of Kansas professors David N. Smith and Eric Hanley, “The decisive reason that white, male, older and less educated voters were disproportionately pro-Trump is that they shared his prejudices and wanted domineering, aggressive leaders …”
Ezra Klein/NY Times:
Why Democrats Still Have to Appeal to the Center, but Republicans Don’t
Polarization has changed the two parties — just not in the same way.
As a result, winning the Democratic primary means winning liberal whites in New Hampshire and traditionalist blacks in South Carolina. It means talking to Irish Catholics in Boston and atheists in San Francisco. It means inspiring liberals without arousing the fears of moderates. It’s important preparation for the difficult, pluralistic work of governing, in which the needs and concerns of many different groups must be balanced against one another.
The Democratic Party is not just more diverse in who it represents; it’s also more diverse in whom it listens to. A new Pew survey tested Democratic and Republican trust in 30 different media sources, ranging from left to right. Democrats trusted 22 of the 30 sources, including center-right outlets like The Wall Street Journal. Republicans trusted only seven of the 30 sources, with PBS, the BBC and The Wall Street Journal the only mainstream outlets with significant trust. (The other trusted sources, in case you were wondering, were Fox News, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Breitbart.)
Matt Grossmann and David A Hopkins made this observation a while ago, but it is worth revisiting.