Politico: How Trump Changed After Charlottesville

Nobody understands the attention economy better than President Donald Trump. Whenever he slips from his coveted position as Topic A in the news, or whenever the news angle of the latest reports displeases him, you can count on Trump to bludgeon his way back to control the media agenda. This time it was with a series of tweets hammering four congresswomen of color as un-American, and telling them to go back where they came from. [...]

At a Monday Cabinet meeting, Trump parried the question of whether his tweets being called racist bother him. “It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me,” he said. During the week, he escalated his attacks on the Squad. And at a Wednesday evening campaign rally in Greenville, N.C., Trump tore into Rep. Omar for seven minutes, inspiring the crowd to chant, “Send her back! Send her back!” [...]

Why has Trump suddenly come to terms with his racism? It’s always a mistake to ascribe everything Trump does to forethought and calculation. He’s too impulsive for that. But we know from his Wednesday comments (made before the rally) to the Daily Mail that he’s pleased about the noise generated by his attacks. That goes a long way toward explaining why he pressed the racism button all week, and it’s a strong clue that he will put his thumb on it during the campaign. “The only thing they have, that they can do is, now, play the race card,” Trump said, turning the race onus back on the Squad. “Which they’ve always done.” Omar probably delighted Trump on Thursday when she told Washington reporters that he was a “fascist.” Set your watch for his return fire.

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The Guardian: Here's the real reason Trump is attacking 'the squad': he's scared of their politics

As the 2020 election campaign begins, Trump and the Republicans have not been coy about their strategy. They intend to foment hatred of “the other” among their predominantly white base, to weaponize false accusations of antisemitism against progressive politicians, to pour kerosene on the fires of the culture war and fight – against women’s rights, LGBT rights, reproductive rights – with renewed vigor. [...]

These proposals are popular, and not only among liberal Democrats, but across a wide swath of the American public. A poll conducted earlier this year found that 60% of independent voters supported Ocasio-Cortez’s 70% top tax-rate proposal, as did 45% of Republicans. Polls consistently show a clear majority of Americans back Medicare for All. Even as sweeping a proposal as the Green New Deal enjoys more support than opposition among likely voters, Obama-to-Trump voters, and moderates. There is an obvious desire among the broader public for the kind of transformational politics that the members of the Squad have brought to Congress.

Indeed, while much of the media coverage of the various Squad members have focused on their identities, their appeal goes far beyond matters of representation. Of course, representation is important, and the Squad, comprised of women of color, represents not only important “firsts” – the first Muslim-American congresswomen, the youngest ever member of Congress, the first black female representative from Massachusetts. They represent what America looks like today far better than the pale, greying gerontocracy that rules the country. At 45, Pressley is the oldest member of the Squad; Nancy Pelosi, for comparison, is 79, and Trump, 73.

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Axios: Trump's new impeachment problem

Why it matters: This has the potential to fundamentally change the conversation around impeachment, which has so far mostly focused on possible instances of obstruction of justice as laid out by Robert Mueller's findings. [...]

Our thought bubble: Does racism fit the definition of high crimes? Congress gets to define the term. And if past is prologue, one of Andrew Johnson's articles of impeachment was a non-criminal high misdemeanor of speaking ill of Congress. [...]

What to watch: It's too early to tell whether other members of the Democratic caucus, including Green's colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus, will take up impeachment with him now that he's renewing bigotry as the reason.

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Vox: Democrats’ impeachment dilemma, explained

Pursuing articles of impeachment against Trump would be politically explosive. Democrats know the Republican-led Senate under Mitch McConnell won’t take the next step after impeachment — a trial in the Senate — and they doubt the public would support them. In March, just 36 percent of voters polled by CNN supported impeachment. That number dropped to 34 percent after the Mueller report’s release, according to a Morning Consult poll released Monday. [...]

On one side, there’s a handful of Democrats, including Reps. Rashida Tlaib (MI), Ilhan Omar (MN), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Al Green (TX), and Steve Cohen (TN), who have been vocal about their belief that Trump is unfit for office. Many of them have signed on to articles of impeachment. On the other side, a number of moderate Democrats believe impeachment is a distraction from issues like infrastructure and health care — the very things that got them to a Democratic majority in the first place. And then there’s a bunch of people in the middle who aren’t ruling out impeachment but want more information before they make a decision. [...]

Even Democrats skeptical of impeachment took notice of the 10 specific episodes in which Mueller investigated Trump for obstruction of justice. Part of Mueller’s reason for not charging Trump himself was clearly the Justice Department’s longstanding practice not to indict a sitting president. Instead, Mueller wrote that Congress gets to decide what happens next. [...]

Even though Trump’s 40 percent public approval rating is extremely low, Pelosi and the majority of her caucus only want to move toward impeachment if there’s something so bad that Republicans can also get on board. They remember when Republicans who impeached President Bill Clinton in the 1990s reaped the political consequences in the 1998 midterms, when they lost seats in the House and made few gains in the Senate. Historians later concluded that backlash against Republicans for Clinton’s impeachment resulted in the GOP’s weak showing in the midterms.

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The Guardian: Don't be fooled. The midterms were not a bad night for Trump

True, some of the most strident white nationalist and white supremacist Republicans were defeated – although an open neo-Nazi like Arthur Jones still got over 25% of the vote in the third congressional district of Illinois, while openly white nationalist and pro-Confederate Corey Stewart lost the Virginia Senate race with virtually the same score as his conservative predecessor six years ago. Perhaps most painful for Trump was that Kris Kobach, a key player in his ill-fated and ill-named Presidential Advisory Commission on Electoral Integrity who has a decade-long history of racial voter suppression, was handsomely defeated in the Kansas gubernatorial race. [...]

On the other side of the political spectrum, the Democratic party made modest overall advances, in terms of seats rather than votes – barely taking the House, while staying well behind a US Senate majority. That said, the party has changed fundamentally in composition. Two years after Bernie Sanders’ failed challenge for the presidential nomination, there will be almost as many democratic socialists as conservative-leaning Democrats (known as Blue Dog Democrats) in Congress. While still a minority, they will be a loud minority, convinced they represent the future of the party. [...]

Whether the Republican establishment likes it or not – and more and more are actually perfectly happy with it – the Grand Old Party is now Trump’s Party. Their fate is intertwined with his. The old conservative Republican party is dead, for now. In the coming two years they will campaign as a radical right party, led by an omnipresent leader, who will define the Republican party for a whole generation of Americans.

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