The Atlantic: Trump Secretly Mocks His Christian Supporters

 The president’s alliance with religious conservatives has long been premised on the contention that he takes them seriously, while Democrats hold them in disdain. In speeches and interviews, Trump routinely lavishes praise on conservative Christians, casting himself as their champion. “My administration will never stop fighting for Americans of faith,” he declared at a rally for evangelicals earlier this year. It’s a message his campaign will seek to amplify in the coming weeks as Republicans work to confirm Amy Coney Barrett—a devout, conservative Catholic—to the Supreme Court. [...]

It helped that Trump seemed to feel a kinship with prosperity preachers—often evincing a game-recognizes-game appreciation for their hustle. The former campaign adviser recalled showing his boss a YouTube video of the Israeli televangelist Benny Hinn performing “faith healings,” while Trump laughed at the spectacle and muttered, “Man, that’s some racket.” On another occasion, the adviser told me, Trump expressed awe at Joel Osteen’s media empire—particularly the viewership of his televised sermons. [...]

The Faustian nature of the religious right’s bargain with Trump has not always been quite so apparent to rank-and-file believers. According to the Pew Research Center, white evangelicals are more than twice as likely as the average American to say that the president is a religious man. Some conservative pastors have described him as a “baby Christian,” and insist that he’s accepted Jesus Christ as his savior. [...]

In fact, according to two senior Utah Republicans with knowledge of the situation, Don Jr. has been so savvy in courting Latter-day Saints—expressing interest in the Church’s history, reading from the Book of Mormon—that he’s left some influential Republicans in the state with the impression that he may want to convert. (A spokesman for Don Jr. did not respond to a request for comment.)

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The Guardian: Trumpism has taken over: but what happens to the Republican Party if Trump loses?

 The debate has been fueled by hints Trump’s current iron grip on the party might weaken. Republican leaders roundly rejected his idea of postponing the election because of the coronavirus pandemic. In negotiations over the latest economic stimulus package, they brushed aside his proposals for a payroll tax cut and a new FBI building.

Meanwhile Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, signaled to vulnerable Republican senators in tough election races that they can distance themselves from Trump if they deem it necessary, according to CNN. [...]

Second, the end of Trump would not necessarily mean the end of Trumpism. Nine in 10 Republicans still approve of the job he is doing as president, according to Gallup. A SurveyMonkey poll for Axios last December showed Republican voters’ favourite picks for 2024 led by Mike Pence, with Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr in second place, followed by Nikki Haley, Ivanka Trump, Marco Rubio and Mike Pompeo. [...]

In a recent interview with the Guardian, the Democratic strategist Paul Begala argued that a crushing defeat for Trump would be a catalyst for Republicans to reassess and revivify, just as Democrats did after three clarifying defeats in 1980, 1984 and 1988. But Stevens believes it will take more than one election. [...]

Thomas Patterson, a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, argues that the party is caught in five traps of its own making, which Trump has only deepened: a steady movement to the right; demographic change; influence by rightwing media blunting its ability to govern; big tax cuts that created a split between its working-class supporters and marketplace conservatives; a disregard for democratic norms and institutions.

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The Atlantic: Melania Trump Derangement Syndrom

But for some detractors of her husband and his party, Melania Trump’s disappearance has provided fuel for all manner of wild conspiracy theories: She was physically abused by the president. She has given up on their marriage and moved back to New York. She is holed up with the Obamas. Though the curiosity may be genuine, the theorizing also reflects Melania’s role as a magnet for the fever dreams of tumult and chaos among her huband’s opponents. [...]

Likewise, when Mrs. Trump wore a wide-brimmed white hat during French President Emmanuel Macron’s first state visit to the White House, to some observers, it was not merely a fashion statement: It was sartorial protest, a sign from the White House wilderness that the first lady was actually a gladiator for good—in the mold of Scandal’s Olivia Pope.  [...]

Gone is talk of anyone inside the administration itself—whether H. R. McMaster or Rex Tillerson or James Mattis or John Kelly—being a mitigating force. The president has already revealed his strategy to discredit the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and, as of Monday morning, pardon himself. And so critics have perhaps wanted Melania Trump to be the surprise ending to this Trump saga, the witness who flipped. Their speculation has gotten increasingly wild as the options for a bailout trend more toward fantasy. What if a white hat is just an unconventional piece of White House head wear, and a pantsuit simply a modern ensemble for a big-ticket event? What if Melania Trump likes the wardrobe budget and just wants to be left alone?

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FiveThirtyEight: Which Power Centers In The Trump Administration Still Have Power?

But recent developments suggest the power couple is running low on wattage. Two White House aides who were close to the pair resigned. (Hicks and Kushner press aide Josh Raffel). Kushner’s access to classified information has been curtailed. And Ivanka Trump’s proposal to create a national paid leave program for new parents has stalled. Whether they keep working at the White House or opt at some point to return to New York, “Javanka” is having fairly limited influence in Trump’s Washington. [...]

Still, much of Trump’s national security agenda is little different from the perspective of Arizona Sen. John McCain, long a leader in the Republican Party on defense issues. Trump, who suggested during the campaign that the U.S. military was too involved in conflicts abroad, has increased the number of troops in Afghanistan and kept up the U.S. policy of using drones to target terrorists abroad. Aside from his bombastic rhetoric and his policy on Russia, much of Trump’s approach is fairly normal for a Republican on national security issues. [...]

And second, the number of departures from the administration should not obscure a broader story of policy stability. Cohn is leaving, and he was perhaps the administration’s most important figure on economic policy. But the dominant figures on other issues remain, including Mattis (national security), Miller (immigration), Pence (abortion and priorities of social conservatives), Pruitt (the environment) and Sessions (criminal justice). Trump may seem erratic. But generally, his policy preferences — perhaps shaped by these powerful advisers — are somewhat predictable.

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Al Jazeera: Analysis: Does team Trump have an Africa plan?

Nearly eight months into his presidency, Trump has yet to nominate an assistant secretary of state for African affairs. Other jobs lower down in the State Department, Pentagon and White House are vacant; there is no US ambassador in either South Africa or Congo. [...]

"It was a massive and unprecedented decision by the court and, right or wrong, it's made a volatile situation in Kenya even worse. It's a moment like this that you really want high-level officers calling from the White House, and that's not necessarily happening," Felbab-Brown said. [...]

Cuts are already having real-world consequences. In July, Trump pushed back a deadline on whether to lift US sanctions against Sudan by three months, amid divisions in his administration and a lack of staff in key posts, including in the National Security Council.

Trump's lack of enthusiasm for Africa was on display at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, that same month. It was closed-door talks on African development that Trump famously stepped away from, giving up his chair to his daughter, Ivanka. [...]

US exports to sub-Saharan Africa have doubled to $21.81bn from $10.96bn in 2000, according to US Commerce Department data, but they were dwarfed by China's $102bn in exports to the region in 2015. 

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FiveThirtyEight: Bannon May Be Out, But Nationalism Probably Isn’t

More than a decade before he was the president, Trump complained that the U.S. was being ripped off in trade deals, and now, he is pushing his administration to reconsider such agreements. He was touting his proposal for a border wall well before Bannon formally joined the Trump presidential campaign. In office, Trump praised John Kelly’s work as homeland security secretary in deporting undocumented immigrants and then promoted Kelly to chief of staff. In a 2011 interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, Trump said that there was a “Muslim problem” and that the Quran “teaches some very negative vibe.” It’s not clear if Bannon urged Trump to make remarks this week suggesting that white supremacists were on an equal moral footing with people protesting racial injustice. But Trump made racially charged comments before Bannon started working for him, most notably his repeated (and false) claims that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. [...]

So will Bannon’s exit change anything? Well, the administration’s internal feuds could be less tense and less public. Bannon and his allies viewed themselves as advancing the true views of the president while arguing that other members of the administration were trying to impose establishment views on Trump. That fight often played out in public. Bannon-aligned staffers on the National Security Council, for example, were allegedly the unnamed sources behind stories that attacked national security adviser H.R. McMaster. Several of those aides were pushed out a few weeks ago. Bannon aide Sebastian Gorka has issued statements on foreign policy that contradicted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s views. Gorka is rumored to be on the way out as well. Bannon himself gave a long interview to The American Prospect in which he publicly disagreed with the administration’s North Korea policy. He is now gone. [...]

That said, even with Bannon out, Trump’s administration still includes at least seven power centers. (Virtually all the staffers who were aligned with Trump’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, have departed, effectively eliminating the “Party Wing” of the White House. I think the Bannon Wing remains, even if its namesake is gone.) Trump’s administration contains a weird mix of strong conservatives (the wing led by Vice President Mike Pence), Wall Street types (White House National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn), foreign policy hawks (Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley) and his family members (Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump). These groups disagree with one another (Kushner and Ivanka Trump are less conservative on issues like abortion and LGBT rights than is Pence, for instance) and with Trump (his foreign policy team is much more skeptical of Russia than the president is). The federal bureaucracy is likely to remain in some tension with Trump, and figures like Kelly and Tillerson still have powerful jobs, even if they don’t fit into an obvious wing.

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Haaretz: By Sidestepping Jewish Victims of Holocaust, Trump Helps Polish Government Rewrite History

Trump’s Poland is a nation of fighters for freedom and justice who fell victim to the dictatorial conquests that ruined the land – but which survived thanks to its devotion to the values of liberty and its love of life. In Trump’s Poland, there is no trace of the Poles who persecuted, betrayed and murdered thousands of Jews in all over the country, before, during and after the Nazi occupation. No trace remains of the deep-rooted anti-Semitism and venomous hatred of Jews, which they suffered throughout the period of Jewish-Polish existence even before the Nazis destroyed it. [...]

In Trump’s Poland, the Poles were and remain the ultimate victims – of the Nazis and the Russians. But there is no mention of the Polish Jews, who were often forced to hide not only from the Nazis but from their Polish neighbors as well. It is therefore not surprising that Trump chose to deliver his main speech at the Warsaw Uprising Monument, which marks the 1944 Polish uprising that ended with the murder of 200,000 Poles by the Germans and the destruction of Warsaw, but skipped a visit to the famous monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the 1943 Jewish revolt which the Polish underground failed to join.

The fact that he chose to skip a visit to the monument (although his daughter Ivanka did visit it) – despite it being barely a mile away from the monument where he spoke – infuriated the local Jewish community. In a protest declaration, they wrote that Trump is the first U.S. president since the fall of communism in 1989 who neglected to visit it. As far as they’re concerned, it’s as though Trump decided to skip a visit to Yad Vashem during his visit to Israel. [...]

The last two statements, referring to “Polish pride” and “great heroes,” are very true when it comes to the thousands of Polish Righteous of the Nations, who risked their lives and saved Jews in the Holocaust, like the Ulma family from the town of Markowa, all of whom, including their six children, were murdered along with Jews they were hiding from the Nazis in their house. But these statements are not at all true when it comes to thousands of other Poles, whose behavior towards their Jewish neighbors during World War II was the exact opposite of “great heroism.”

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Politico: How the Psychology of Cyberbullying Explains Trump’s Tweets

n the case of adults, Patchin says, cyberbullying behavior is less about coping with personal problems, however, and more about gaining status or reputation among certain circles. “Neither kids nor adults, I don’t think, would bully another person unless they thought it would be valuable to them,” he explains. Which leads to Trump: “If the president believed that his tweets would cause people not to vote for him, he wouldn’t do it,” Patchin says. “It’s not just that he’s not worried about political or social backlash. But, more than that, he must think it’ll benefit him in some way.”

According to several surveys, adolescent girls are more likely than boys to experience cyberbullying. In 2014, the Pew Research Center found that young women aged 18 to 24 “experience certain severe types of harassment at disproportionately high levels,” especially on social media; about a quarter of them had been stalked online and had been victims of online sexual harassment. Working to Halt Online Abuse, a nonprofit that fields online harassment complaints, says 72.5 percent of the cyberbullying incidents recorded from 2000-12 were reported by women. With Trump, too, it is women—and women’s bodies—that seem to be most viciously attacked. His tweet at Brzezinski was clearly meant to humiliate a woman based on her appearance, first implying that she needed to improve her looks with plastic surgery and then evoking the image of her altered face, warped and bloodied. Trump has also described Rosie O’Donnell as “fat,” “dumb” and “a loser,” Arianna Huffington as “unattractive inside and out,” and Megyn Kelly as “average in every way.” During the campaign, he tweeted that Hillary Clinton “doesn’t even look presidential.” [...]

Last week, officials from both parties issued statements to that effect: House Speaker Paul Ryan, Republican senators such as Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins, and more. But Bazelon argues that these “pro forma” statements, as she puts it, aren’t enough—the condemnation needs to come from closer to the president. Nicolle Wallace, an alumna of the George W. Bush administration and now a host on MSNBC, called on female members of the Trump administration like Dina Powell, Elaine Chao and Betsy DeVos to “work behind the scenes to educate” the president. None of those women, nor anyone in the Trump family, however, has done so. Ivanka Trump was silent, and Melania Trump’s spokeswoman’s response was: “When her husband gets attacked, he will punch back 10 times harder.” What are our children supposed to glean from this, asks Patchin—“If someone bullies you, bully them worse?”

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The New York Review of Books: Trump: The Presidency in Peril

If Donald Trump leaves office before four years are up, history will likely show the middle weeks of May 2017 as the turning point. Chief among his mounting problems are new revelations surrounding the question of whether Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia in its effort to tip the 2016 election. If Trump has nothing to hide, he is certainly jumpy whenever the subject comes up and his evident worry about it has caused him to make some big mistakes. The president’s troubles will continue to grow as the investigators keep on investigating and the increasingly appalled leakers keep on leaking. [...]

Though younger and more composed, Kushner is a lot more like Trump than is generally understood. Both of them moved their father’s businesses from the New York periphery to Manhattan. Like his father-in-law, Kushner came to Washington knowing a lot about real estate deals but almost nothing about government. Both entered the campaign and the White House unfamiliar with the rules and laws and evidently disinclined to check them before acting. Thus, Kushner has reinforced some of Trump’s critical weaknesses. Trump has thrust project after project upon him (the only top aide he could trust), and Kushner, who has a high self-regard, has taken on a preposterous list of assignments. He was able somehow (likely through his own leaks) to gain a reputation—along with his wife, Ivanka Trump—as someone who could keep the president calm and prevent him from acting impulsively or unwisely. [...]

Among the crimes that the Watergate defendants were convicted of and that might be applicable to the more recent misadventure are bribery, subornation of perjury, criminal obstruction of justice, money laundering, tax evasion, witness tampering, and violations of election laws including campaign finance laws. Other crimes that might have occurred in the Russia affair are violations of the foreign agent registration laws and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, perjury itself (including lying to federal investigators), plus espionage and even treason.

Unlike ordinary crimes, impeachable offenses are “political” questions—ones that deeply affect the polity. Alexander Hamilton said that impeachable offenses were political, “as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” For example, of the three articles of impeachment adopted by the Judiciary Committee against Richard Nixon in 1974, the most important was for “abuse of power.” The critical holding by the committee was that a president can be held accountable for the acts of subordinates as well as for actions that aren’t, strictly speaking, crimes. In the end, an impeachment of a president is grounded in the theory that the holder of that office has failed to fulfill his responsibility, set out in Article II of the Constitution, to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Unless a single act is itself sufficiently grave to warrant impeachment—for example, treason—a pattern of behavior needs to be found. That could involve, for example, emoluments or obstruction of justice.

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Haaretz: U.S. Withdrawal From Paris Accord Exposes Ivanka Trump's Lack of Influence

Ivanka Trump's absence from the "ceremony" marking President Donald Trump's rejection of the Paris deal was highly symbolic. In recent months, ever since the elder Trump's election victory, the media has been portraying his oldest daughter as a strong, moderating influence within the administration, working hard for causes that the president isn't affiliated with, such as women's health, gay rights and above all, efforts to stop global warming. Those reports became completely irrelevant on Thursday. Whatever influence Ivanka Trump might have had on her father, it turned out to be useless and ineffective at the moment when it mattered the most. [...]

These choices mean that the press can examine her effectiveness as an adviser and a “presidential whisperer” just like it does with so many other people surrounding Trump, from White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon to his national security advisor, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster. And upon such examination, it becomes clear that Ivanka Trump has had very little influence so far on the policy decisions that are supposedly most important to her. This was already apparent with the president's health care plan, and it became even clearer on Thursday with his decision to quit the international battle against global warming. [...]

Politico, one of the news organizations that in the past ran articles about Ivanka Trump’s supposed role as a “climate czar” in the Trump administration, declared in a headline on Thursday that the president’s daughter has decided to “move on” following her defeat on the Paris deal. Right after Shavuot, Ms. Trump proved the item correct when she published a tweet on a subject that had nothing to do with the main headlines of the day: her support for the LGBT community.

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The New Yorker: How Climate Change Saved Steve Bannon's Job

Trump himself strongly suggested, in mid-April, that Bannon’s White House service was approaching its end. He told the Wall Street Journal that Bannon was simply “a guy who works for me.” When the New York Post asked Trump if he “still has confidence in Bannon,” Trump declined to say yes. “I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late,” the President told the newspaper. “I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve. I’m my own strategist, and it wasn’t like I was going to change strategies because I was facing crooked Hillary.”

The roots of Bannon’s alleged demise were the long-running battle he was waging with the so-called “globalist” faction in the White House, led by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kusher. For the past two years, one rule has defined Trumpland: if you cross Kushner or his wife, Ivanka Trump, you get fired. That’s how Bannon got his job in the first place. Kushner ousted Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who was replaced by Paul Manafort. Eventually, Manafort lost Kushner’s confidence and was replaced by the team of Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, who were strongly backed by the Mercers. “When Corey was leaking bad stuff about Jared: bye, bye, Corey Lewandowski,” the Trump adviser said. “So Steve is leaking bad stuff about Jared: bye, bye, Steve Bannon.” [...]

On the climate accord, Kushner and Ivanka hardly had a chance. Bannon’s nationalism, especially when it comes to trade and immigration, is still not widely supported in the Republican establishment and conservative donor class. But when Bannon’s views line up with those of Republican leaders and donors—not to mention those of Trump—he almost always prevails. If Trump had taken the less extreme course on climate advised by his daughter and son-in-law, he would have been breaking a campaign promise and going against the wishes of the entire G.O.P. leadership. In addition, Trump, who knows little about policy, is famously narcissistic, and, easily influenced by personal slights, reportedly was perturbed by a remark from Emmanuel Macron, the French President, who said he intentionally made a show of forcefully shaking Trump’s hand at the recent G7 summit. Trump also reportedly believed that angering Europe was a “secondary benefit” of pulling out of the accord.

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Politico: Merkel’s Ivanka moment

In the end, Angela Merkel couldn’t hide it. Seated next to Ivanka Trump at a White House meeting with business leaders on Friday, the German leader tilted her head in the first daughter’s direction as Ivanka spoke, a look of bewilderment tinged with disdain enveloping her face.

“Why are you here,” Merkel, never a good pretender, seemed to be thinking. [...]

The strategy appears to have succeeded. Trump praised Germany’s vocational training system as a model for the U.S. Though he stopped short of calling for even closer business ties, something German industry had been hoping for, Trump stressed the importance of strong trade between the two countries, as long as it was “fair.” [...]

Given Trump’s repeated and harsh insults of Merkel and her refugee stance during the campaign and afterwards, a warm embrace would have been both unrealistic and unconvincing. Most of this disharmony was non-verbal. Merkel shot Trump a skeptical glance during the press conference, for example, when he quipped that both of them appeared to have been wiretapped by the Obama administration. Trump either didn’t hear or ignored her when she suggested they shake hands in front of reporters (they had shaken hands at other times on Friday).

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