New York Magazine: What Will Republicans Do If Trump Goes Down?

If there is a Republican cascade against Trump, in retrospect, it will look inevitable, as if the steady drip of revelations and testimony was always destined to reach that final dramatic tipping point. But a note to future historians: As of this moment, it does not look inevitable at all. [...]

The obvious figure who could keep a party together composed of MAGA folk and other sorts of conservatives who for one reason or another dumped Trump, it would be Mike Pence. He’s been loyal to POTUS to the point of embarrassing sycophancy. Yet before he joined Trump’s ticket, he was a rigidly conventional conservative with many friends among his fellow House Republicans. And he’s beloved (at least at the leadership level) among Trump’s and the GOP’s single most important constituency: white conservative Evangelicals. As McKay Coppins notes, he could represent a soothing alternative if the stormy barbarian in the White House just vanished [...]

Indeed, Pence seems to have been involved up to the eyeballs in the Ukraine plot. His team’s messaging — Yes, he pressed the Ukrainians to investigate corruption, but he never appreciated that Trump’s true purpose was to pursue the Bidens — fails the laugh test. Pence’s taint presents a political problem for him, but raises a much graver question for the country. If the Senate ever could muster the integrity to remove Trump from office, there would be no Ford to put in his place, only a vice president who participated in Trump’s dirty schemes, from staying at a remote resort to direct government funds to Trump’s failing Irish golf course to extorting an invaded country to fabricate political dirt to help Trump’s reelection. [...]

Besides, outside Utah and LDS circles, and perhaps some Wall Street precincts, Romney has never been and will never be a beloved party titan. He was tolerated by many in 2012 because his rivals turned out to be feckless. But he’s become a symbol of Establishment Republican failure, the most important contributor to Trump’s ascent in the first place. Replacing Trump with the Mittster would be the deepest insult imaginable to mourning MAGA folk who view him as the epitome of the Swamp, both as a politician and as a champion of financial elites. It really wouldn’t make much sense. [...]

By process of elimination, if Trump goes down and Pence is cast aside, Republicans would need to quickly find a unity figure not involved in 2016 or more recent, divisive intra-party squabbles. That narrows it down to possibly one person: Paul Ryan. He’s obviously very well-known, with plenty of friends on Capitol Hill and on Wall Street. He’s been on a national ticket before, with the Mittster, whose defeat no one blamed on him. He’s in the neighborhood, having recently moved back to Washington, probably in anticipation of getting the Mother of All Lobbying Gigs — which fortunately he has not yet secured. He’s from the state many experts believe will decide the 2020 election, Wisconsin. And he knows how to graciously accept a call to service while appearing to resist it, having become Speaker of the House precisely through this role as a reluctant party savior.

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Politico: The Rise and Fall of Donald Trump’s Mini-Me

Collins, 69, leveraged his notoriety as the first Republican member of Congress to endorse Trump to hold on to his deep-red district in western New York despite a federal indictment. Then, on Monday, after more than a year of insisting on his innocence, he resigned and pleaded guilty to two felony insider trading charges, including conspiracy to commit securities fraud and lying to the FBI. His sentencing is scheduled for January and he faces up to five years in federal prison for each count. [...]

Collins criticized national outlets for printing “outright lies” and ripped a page from Trump’s playbook by calling his hometown paper “the fake Buffalo News.” He exploited conservatives’ resentment of the press and went to war with The Buffalo News in his fundraising emails. For those who had watched Collins’ rise in politics, his Trumpian treatment of the press seemed out of character for Collins. Up until the News began to cover Collins’ involvement with Innate, he had a more or less cordial relationship with the paper. [...]

Like Trump, he also never really stepped away from his businesses, despite campaign promises to do otherwise. As he unwound his relationships with several companies before becoming county executive, he remained an unpaid director and lead shareholder of Virionyx, a New Zealand-based biopharmaceutical company now known as Innate. Collins argued that he had stayed on because he had a responsibility to his investors, a cadre of wealthy Buffalonians that included then-Sabres coach Lindy Ruff. [...]

His fiscal conservatism could curdle into a Scrooge-like miserliness. In 2010, he dealt a blow to working mothers when he decreased child care assistance, a cut that would reverberate into the next county executive’s term. As he searched for ways to trim the county budget, he took aim at small theaters, libraries and cultural organizations in the Buffalo area, slashing operational funding in the 2011 budget for all but 10 of the largest cultural groups in the county.

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FiveThirtyEight: If Republicans Ever Turn On Trump, It’ll Happen All At Once

It’s not exactly a secret that if congressional Republicans could hold a secret-ballot no-confidence vote,1 they’d probably vote to oust Trump. There’s just one problem with that logic (aside from the fact that it’s not how our democracy works): Private preferences aside, congressional Republicans actually have some very strong incentives to support Trump publicly, at both the individual and collective level. [...]

Collectively, Republicans want to keep Trump popular so they can keep winning elections. In our era of increasingly nationalized politics, most Republicans can’t run independently of the president, even if they want to. Perhaps recognizing this, many have instead tied themselves more closely to him. Trump defines the Republican Party brand as president, so if Trump is unpopular, the Republican Party is unpopular, which would likely spell steep electoral losses for the party.

The only way this dynamic changes is if the entire Republican Party apparatus (not just politicians, but also media commentators and surrogates) turns on Trump en masse. But for this to happen, somebody still has to speak up first, and others have to follow. But it could happen. Let’s use political scientist Timur Kuran’s classic work, “Private Truth, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification,” as a guide to understanding major political transformations. He argues that political regimes can persist despite being unpopular, which is why a government overthrow, when it does come, can often seem so sudden. [...]

Even if most Republicans believe Trump is bad for the long-term health of the party, they have a major here-to-there problem. Turning against Trump seriously jeopardizes their immediate political fortunes. So all signs point to Republicans sticking it out with Trump. That means they’ll continue to find new ways to dance and dodge, and eventually, they’ll probably even vote to exonerate him in a Senate impeachment trial, if things come to that. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in particular, has no incentive to break from Trump. After all, his plan for grinding out partisan victories with Trump in the White House involves the same zero-sum attack politics as the president uses. Not to mention, McConnell is also among those red-state Republicans up for election in 2020.

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Politico: Trump’s impeachment defiance spooks key voting blocs

Nearly a half-dozen polls conducted since last Tuesday, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi directed her colleagues to proceed with pursuing Trump for potentially impeachable offenses, have shown women voters rallying behind her decision, exacerbating concerns among White House allies that white women who helped carry Trump to victory in 2016 can no longer be counted on next November.

The development comes as independent voters and college-educated whites — two more demographic groups that could make or break Trump’s reelection bid — have shown signs of softening their resistance to impeachment. Taken together, the latest polls paint an alarming picture for the president, whose base is sticking by him but cannot be counted on by themselves to deliver him a second term. [...]

Back-to-back polls this week found greater support for the impeachment proceedings than opposition among white voters with college degrees — a group that backed Trump over Hillary Clinton by a slightly greater margin in 2016, according to publicly available exit data. Fifty percent of college-educated whites in an NPR/Marist College survey said they approved of House Democrats’ decision to launch the formal impeachment inquiry into Trump. That compares to a narrower margin of support for the move, 45-43, in a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll released Wednesday. [...]

A Monmouth University poll released Tuesday also highlighted areas of confusion involving the facts that led to the impeachment inquiry against Trump. Among Republican respondents, only 40 percent said they believed Trump mentioned the possibility of an investigation into Joe Biden’s son Hunter on his July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which led Pelosi to pull the trigger on impeachment proceedings. Trump does not use the word “investigation” in a transcript of the call made public by the White House, but does claim the former vice president “went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution” of his son. 

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Politico: ‘An avoidable, unforced error’: Trump’s Ukraine trap starts worrying allies

High-level Trump supporters who have stood by the president for years are growing increasingly unsettled by his latest strategy of dismissing the latest fight as Russia 2.0. Half-a-dozen senior Republicans, including those who both talk directly to Trump and advise him on everything from campaign strategy to policy, communications and fundraising, said in interviews that they fear the president's plan to tie Russia and Ukraine could be ineffective because it dismisses the seriousness of the allegations and the fact that he admitted his actions. [...]

None of the advisers think Trump will be removed from office — not enough Senate Republicans would vote for that — but they say he’s hurt himself in what is expected to be a tight reelection campaign. A Republican close to the president said the notion that impeaching Trump will help his campaign, as some are pushing, is ludicrous. “It isn’t a positive,” the person said flatly. [...]

Michael Steel, a Republican strategist who worked for the presidential campaigns of Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, said the Ukraine controversy is much more clear-cut than Russia because Trump was personally involved, he admitted what he did and, perhaps most important, it happened while he already was sworn into office. [...]

A second Republican close to the president said Trump's problem is that he‘s still so fixated on anyone trying to discredit him during the 2016 election — including former President Barack Obama and his vice president — that he went after Biden. “Should he have mentioned Biden? No,” the person said. “I wish he wouldn’t have. ... But I don’t fault him as much as other people.”

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Nautilus Magazine: Your Brain Chooses What to Let You See

And automatic background subtraction, it turns out, can also manifest in intriguing, unexpected ways. Take a counterintuitive finding that Tadin and his colleagues made in 2003: We’re good at perceiving the movements of small objects, but if those objects are simply made bigger, we find it much more difficult to detect their motion. [...]

The team further confirmed this idea with a training experiment conducted in older adults. Other researchers had previously reported that there’s not much difference between how well seniors observe the motion of a small object and the motion of a larger one. Because of this, Tadin and his colleagues predicted that older people would have problems spotting small moving objects against a moving backdrop—and that’s exactly what they found. Still, with a few weeks’ training, the test subjects got much better at recognizing that motion.

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The New York Times: Afghan Town’s First Female Mayor Awaits Her Assassination

Ms. Ghafari is not the first woman to take over a traditionally male job in Afghanistan’s patriarchal society. But she has one of the toughest imaginable positions.

Women have been appointed as governors of Daikundi and Bamiyan Provinces, which are culturally tolerant areas by Afghanistan’s standards. For two years, Nili, a town in Daikundi, had a female mayor. She eventually moved to the United States.

But Wardak is a particularly conservative province, where support for the Taliban is so widespread that many major highways are not safe for civilians.

Maidan Shar’s only high school for girls had just 13 graduates last year. Before Ms. Ghafari became mayor, the only woman in town to have held a government job other than teacher was the head of Wardak’s women’s ministry, and she did not dare live in the city, instead residing in Kabul, the country’s capital. Ms. Ghafari also commutes from Kabul for safety reasons. [...]

After she arrived for work that July day, her office was mobbed by angry men brandishing sticks and rocks. She had to be escorted out by Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate for Security, which sent a squad of paramilitary officers to her rescue.

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euronews: Denmark calls for EU ban on all diesel and petrol cars by 2040

Denmark made headlines in October 2018 when its government announced that it would ban the sale of all fossil fuel-powered cars by 2030 but it subsequently scrapped the idea because this would have breached EU rules. [...]

Lithuania, Latvia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and several other countries, however, suggested that more must be done to stop the "carbon leakage" of selling second-hand autos from western Europe to the eastern region.

Jorgensen said it was important to communicate the bloc's long-term policy directions to carmakers and that Denmark's next step was to set up an alliance with the 10 member states that support its proposal.

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euronews: Pope Francis adds 13 like-minded cardinals to Catholic hierarchy

Among the 13 are 10 cardinals who are under age 80 and therefore eligible to vote in a conclave, increasing the likelihood that a future pope might end up looking an awful lot like the current one. These are churchmen who care for migrants, promote dialogue with Muslims and minister to the faithful in poor, far-flung missionary posts.

With Saturday's consistory, Francis will have named 52% of the voting-age cardinals. Many hail from churches in the developing world, a sign of Francis' desire to mirror the universal face of the Catholic Church in its leadership ranks. [...]

The consistory comes at a fraught time in Francis' six-year papacy. Opposition is mounting among conservative Catholics who disapprove of his emphasis on the environment, migrants and other issues rather than the doctrinaire focus of his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI.

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