We begin today’s roundup with Stephen Collinson at CNN who summarizes an extraordinary week, even by Trump administration standards:
Something is eating at President Donald Trump.
And in a half hour encounter with the press he lashed out at his favorite target, his predecessor Barack Obama, who has now been in retirement for two-and-half years, more than 20 times -- an outburst of vitriol impressive even for Trump.
Taken together with a barrage of tweets, Trump's day reflected the sheer oddness of his approach to the presidency and his apparent insecurities nearly three years after being elected.
Eugene Robinson at The Washington Post points out that much of this mess is the president’s own making:
Quick, can you name the White House press secretary? Do you have any idea what she looks or sounds like? Stephanie Grisham has held that job for nearly two months now, but if her name doesn’t ring any bells, it’s because she hasn’t yet given a single official press briefing. Trump has foolishly decided to act as his own exclusive spokesman, putting all his prejudices, misconceptions, resentments, insecurities, grudges and fears on ugly display.
The result is what we witnessed Wednesday on the White House lawn. On his way to the waiting Marine One chopper, Trump paused and took questions from reporters for 35 minutes, unfazed by the midday 89-degree heat and smothering humidity. He made much news and little sense.
The latest numbers:
About 6 in 10 Americans disapprove of President Donald Trump’s overall job performance, according to a new poll released Thursday by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which finds some support for the president’s handling of the U.S. economy but gives him weak marks on other major issues. [...] The numbers may be ugly for a first-term president facing reelection in 14 months, but they are remarkably consistent. Trump’s approval rating has never dipped below 32% or risen above 42% in AP-NORC polls since he took office.
Gail Collins dedicates her column to the president’s claim that he is “the Chosen one”:
Trump sees his story in heroic — if not biblical — proportions, and journalists are always the villains, doing something that needs to be decried. Currently it’s the stories that hospitalized victims of the El Paso mass shooting passed up the opportunity to meet with him when he visited. [...] Lots of hints here that the president, at least, thinks of himself as someone far beyond mortal men.
Turning to policy,The Washington Post highlights the Peace Plan put forth by the survivors of the Parkland school shooting:
The ambitious agenda unveiled Wednesday by March for Our Lives, a group led by student survivors of the Valentine’s Day school shooting in Parkland, Fla., in which 17 people were killed, comes in the wake of this month’s back-to-back mass shootings that killed 31 people in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio. “A Peace Plan for a Safer America” calls for a ban on assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines, a national licensing and gun registry, a mandatory gun buyback program for assault-style weapons, a rigorous licensing system and other measures to combat not just mass shootings but also suicides and domestic and urban violence.
And on the issue of the filibuster, Ronald Brownstein at The Atlantic sets out the compelling case for reform:
If the party chooses to keep the filibuster, it faces a daunting prospect: Democrats elected primarily by voters in states at the forefront of the country’s demographic, cultural, and economic changes will likely have their agenda blocked by Republican senators largely representing the smaller, rural states least touched by all of those changes. In fact, since the Senate gives each state two seats, the filibuster allows Republican senators from states representing only about one-fifth of the country’s population to be in a position to stymie Democratic legislation.
On a final note, USA Today has a must-read by DeWayne Wickham on the 1619 Project:
Somehow, my ancestors — who most likely came from a stretch of West Africa that includes Togo, Benin, Cameroon and Congo, according to a DNA search — became the property of the Wickham family. My great-grandfather, John Cassius Wickham, was born in 1847.
My great-grandfather was still enslaved when the Civil War broke out in 1861. The head of the white Wickham clan at that time was Williams Carter Wickham, who quickly rose to the rank of brigadier general in the Confederate Army. In 1864, Gen. Wickham fought in the war’s biggest cavalry engagement, not far from Hickory Hill, his 3,300 acre plantation.