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 New Yorker: Seattle’s Leaders Let Scientists Take the Lead. New York’s Did Not

Epidemiology is a science of possibilities and persuasion, not of certainties or hard proof. “Being approximately right most of the time is better than being precisely right occasionally,” the Scottish epidemiologist John Cowden wrote, in 2010. “You can only be sure when to act in retrospect.” Epidemiologists must persuade people to upend their lives—to forgo travel and socializing, to submit themselves to blood draws and immunization shots—even when there’s scant evidence that they’re directly at risk. [...]

The lead spokesperson should be a scientist. Dr. Richard Besser, a former acting C.D.C. director and an E.I.S. alumnus, explained to me, “If you have a politician on the stage, there’s a very real risk that half the nation is going to do the opposite of what they say.” During the H1N1 outbreak of 2009—which caused some twelve thousand American deaths, infections in every state, and seven hundred school closings—Besser and his successor at the C.D.C., Dr. Tom Frieden, gave more than a hundred press briefings. President Barack Obama spoke publicly about the outbreak only a few times, and generally limited himself to telling people to heed scientific experts and promising not to let politics distort the government’s response. “The Bush Administration did a good job of creating the infrastructure so that we can respond,” Obama said at the start of the pandemic, and then echoed the sohco by urging families, “Wash your hands when you shake hands. Cover your mouth when you cough. I know it sounds trivial, but it makes a huge difference.”At no time did Obama recommend particular medical treatments, nor did he forecast specifics about when the pandemic would end. [...]

Public-health officials say that American culture poses special challenges. Our freedoms to assemble, to speak our minds, to ignore good advice, and to second-guess authority can facilitate the spread of a virus. “We’re not China—we can’t order people to stay inside,” Besser said. “Democracy is a great thing, but it means, for something like covid-19, we have to persuade people to coöperate if we want to save their lives.” [...]

Today, New York City has the same social-distancing policies and business-closure rules as Seattle. But because New York’s recommendations came later than Seattle’s—and because communication was less consistent—it took longer to influence how people behaved. According to data collected by Google from cell phones, nearly a quarter of Seattleites were avoiding their workplaces by March 6th. In New York City, another week passed until an equivalent percentage did the same. Tom Frieden, the former C.D.C. director, has estimated that, if New York had started implementing stay-at-home orders ten days earlier than it did, it might have reduced covid-19 deaths by fifty to eighty per cent. Another former New York City health commissioner told me that “de Blasio was just horrible,” adding, “Maybe it was unintentional, maybe it was his arrogance. But, if you tell people to stay home and then you go to the gym, you can’t really be surprised when people keep going outside.”

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Social Europe: The corona crisis will define our era

It was February 26th when the US vice-president and the scientists united in prayer, for—or, rather, against—the coronavirus epidemic. As governor of Indiana, Pence had made a name for himself driving drastic cuts in public-health funding and access to HIV-testing. This contributed to one of the largest outbreaks of the infection ever in his home state. [...]

Already however, we know this: this type of disease cannot be efficiently fought at an individual level, but only as a society. It requires preparation, co-ordination, planning and the ability to make rapid decisions and scale up efforts. A strong state. [...]

The 2008 financial crisis did not lead to any reassessment. Quite the contrary. No one knows what conclusions we will draw this time around, at an individual and collective level. I wonder if young people might come to think that authoritarian China dealt with the crisis better than the US—the land of the free.

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UnHerd: Will the Evangelicals dump Trump?

This was Donald Trump’s third appearance at the convention in the last four years, a necessity when 81% of white Evangelicals voted for him in 2016. After sticking with Trump through sexual assault accusations and scores of half-truths and outright lies, it seemed as though nothing could shake their faith in the man; yet an accumulation of factors may be eroding Evangelicals’ enthusiasm for the President, and perhaps even undermining their support altogether. [...]

Even religiously conservative politicians are starting to break ranks. Retiring Illinois Rep. John Shimkus, who gained notoriety for using the Bible to dismiss climate change, officially withdrew his support for the President over the “despicable” decision regarding Syria. And prominent conservative Christian media personality Erick Erickson tweeted at Nancy Pelosi to speed up the impeachment process so that “perhaps we’ll still have time to save some of the Kurds”. [...]

This betrayal is especially hard to swallow because Christian persecution in the Middle East has been a prominent issue for American conservative Christians, and many have therefore been keeping track of how the Kurds became the major defenders of Christian minority populations in Iraq and Syria. American Evangelicals fear these Middle Eastern Christians may now be endangered by a policy that decimates and alienates the Kurds and allows for the resurgence of ISIS. [...]

Yet even with Trump’s apparent success in reshaping the courts, Evangelicals may be in for a disappointment. New Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh have pushed the Court somewhat to the Right, but they haven’t been the firebrand conservatives that many conservatives were looking for. The new justices may prove unwilling to halt the trend of advances made to LGBT rights, and sexual identity may be ruled a federally protected class.

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FiveThirtyEight: There Are Plenty Of Anti-Trump Republicans — You Just Have To Know Where To Look

But looking at Trump’s standing only among people currently inside of powerful Republican-controlled spaces — the party itself, Fox News, the White House, etc. — presents an incomplete picture and understates opposition to Trump among Republican politicians and activists. Almost by definition, that opposition can’t happen within the obvious GOP spaces — the president and his acolytes have accumulated enough power that it’s increasingly hard to be both be anti-Trump and a Republican in good standing at a major conservative institution. [...]

There were 241 Republicans in the U.S. House in early 2017, at the start of Trump’s tenure. Since then, more than a quarter have either been defeated at the ballot box, in last November’s elections (29), or retired (36).3 Some of them, such as former Rep. Mia Love of Utah, blame Trump’s unpopularity for their defeats. Others, such as Rep. Will Hurd of Texas, hint that they are leaving Congress in part because they are uncomfortable with the direction Trump is taking the GOP, as the Washington Post recently reported in a story detailing the exodus of House Republicans. [...]

In a clear and public rebuke to Trump, chiefs of staff for Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush recently told the New York Times that the presidents they served would never have asked for help winning an election from a foreign government. A group of conservative lawyers, many of whom served in top positions in the Department of Justice under Reagan or one of the Bushes, are supporting the impeachment inquiry. [...]

All of this helps explain why Republican voters are among the most loyal-to-Trump constituencies in the Republican Party. Surveys have long suggested that between 85 and 90 percent of Republican voters approve of the president. Only about 13 percent of people who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 said that they disapproved of Trump in a poll conducted in late 2018 and early 2019 by the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. According to FiveThirtyEight’s average of impeachment polls, about 14 percent of Republicans support impeachment.

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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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The Guardian: ‘Brought to Jesus’: the evangelical grip on the Trump administration

The secretary of state’s primary message in Cairo was that the US was ready once more to embrace conservative Middle Eastern regimes, no matter how repressive, if they made common cause against Iran.

His second message was religious. In his visit to Egypt, he came across as much as a preacher as a diplomat. He talked about “America’s innate goodness” and marveled at a newly built cathedral as “a stunning testament to the Lord’s hand”. [...]

The gravitational pull of white evangelicals has been less visible. But it could have far-reaching policy consequences. Vice President Mike Pence and Pompeo both cite evangelical theology as a powerful motivating force. [...]

For many US evangelical Christians, one of the key preconditions for such a moment is the gathering of the world’s Jews in a greater Israel between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. It is a belief, known as premillenial dispensationalism or Christian Zionism – and it has very real potential consequences for US foreign policy. [...]

The comparison is made explicitly in The Trump Prophecy, a religious film screened in 1,200 cinemas around the country in October, depicting a retired firefighter who claims to have heard God’s voice, saying: “I’ve chosen this man, Donald Trump, for such a time as this.”

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Politico: EU and China break ultimate trade taboo to hit back at Trump

Brussels and Beijing on Wednesday launched explosive cases at the World Trade Organization, in which they will argue that Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum, imposed in May, cannot be justified on grounds of national security, as the White House claims. The EU and China were joined in their protest by Mexico, Norway, Russia and Canada. [...]

Whichever way the WTO rules, Pandora’s box has been opened. If it rules that national security can justify tariffs, the decision could inspire other countries to play the security card. On the other hand, if Washington finds itself backed into a corner, it could simply quit the WTO.[...]

A common position from the EU and China is a blow to many European and American officials, who had hoped that the trade war would morph into a united front against Beijing. The Trump administration has just unveiled a hardline policy on China. U.S. Vice President Mike Pence last week delivered a blistering speech against China, saying that Washington was in no rush to end the trade war and “would not change course until China changes it ways.”

The cases against the national security justification are not the first to reach WTO panels. There are two other cases still under investigation — involving Qatar and Russia — but the U.S. case is by far the most geopolitically significant. There has never been a ruling on the legitimacy of the national security defense.

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UnHerd: Is Trump killing or curing American conservatism?

The reality is not so bleak. Fading American conservatism has an excellent chance to renew itself and become again a dominant political force. But to do that, it needs to be a little less distinctively American and bit more like the conservatism found in other Anglosphere countries. [...]

Vice President Mike Pence excellently encompasses them, however. His acceptance speech for the Republican Party’s nomination in 2016 started: “I am a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order.” This expression of faith is non-controversial within conservative circles. But fewer than one-third of Americans would be able say the same about themselves. [...]

If Pence’s sincere but ostentatious religiosity is off-putting for tens of millions of Americans, his devotion to conservative economic nostrums dismays millions more. American conservative thought remains opposed to virtually any expansion of social welfare programmes; it has opposed efforts to expand government-subsidised healthcare coverage, regardless of whether such efforts were pushed by Republican or Democratic presidents. Pence enthusiastically opposed both Obamacare and President Bush’s expansion of the popular health insurance programme for senior citizens, Medicare.[...]

Trump’s tenure in office does, however, show how certain longstanding conservative priorities can be part of the new emerging conservatism. Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation of business are longtime conservative priorities. His focus on religious liberty, without the ostentatious preaching of religious belief so common among other Republicans, is proving popular. Trump is even curbing some of the less central elements of the social welfare state. The number of people receiving disability insurance benefits had been rising dramatically for over 15 years, but the number has been shrinking since Trump’s inauguration. Conservatives may not be getting what they want, but they are getting what they need.

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The New York Review of Books: Mike Pence, Star Witness

Because of these extraordinary circumstances, some of the president’s men decided that they had to take extraordinary action. I have learned that, in order to force the president’s hand in firing Flynn, two senior government officials instructed aides over the weekend that followed to leak sensitive information to The Washington Post and other news organizations in order to underscore that Flynn had likely lied about his conversations with Kislyak, and that there were concerns at the highest levels of the Justice Department and the FBI about Flynn’s conduct. These two officials believed that they were, in the words of one person familiar with the effort, “protecting Trump’s presidency from himself” and the country’s “national security from the president.” I have no information that Vice President Pence was involved in the leaking of this information, but Pence had certainly by then become a strong advocate of Flynn’s firing and, together with Priebus and McGahn, was extremely frustrated that the president had taken no action. [...]

This new information suggests that Vice President Pence could prove to be a crucial witness in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump obstructed justice. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by the vice president. If the special counsel questions him, it would almost certainly be only as a witness, and it is far from certain that he will necessarily be questioned by investigators. [...]

Pence, Priebus, and McGahn then spoke with the president. All three counseled Trump that Flynn should be asked to resign, or be fired, according to White House records. Pence “took the lead” during this discussion, one well-placed source with knowledge of the matter told me. The vice president was uncharacteristically outspoken during their conversation because he no longer had any doubt that Flynn had lied to him and had done severe damage not only to the White House’s reputation, but also to Pence’s personal reputation, according to two people familiar with the matter. Attempting to depersonalize the issue, Pence said that the issue was not only that he had been lied to, but that Flynn had embarrassed the president and the administration. But as one person familiar with this presidential discussion told me, it was also about Pence himself, who felt that “for the president to not care about that aspect of it was disrespect for the vice president personally.” [...]

To date, Pence has played the part of deferential deputy to the president who, above all, demands loyalty from his subordinates. It is clear from this new account, though, that Pence interceded forcefully with the president about firing Flynn. There are few other people who know as much as Pence does about whether the president possibly broke the law. The president and his legal team have based their claim that Trump did not obstruct justice on the premise that Trump did not know that Flynn was under FBI investigation and did not know that Flynn had possibly lied to the FBI. Pence, according to the new information in this story, has some knowledge as to whether that is true. Pence also would have significant insight into the president’s frame of mind—his intent and motivation, the foundational building blocks of any obstruction case—when he allegedly pressured Comey to shut down his investigation of Flynn.

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The Atlantic: Mike Pence’s Outer-Space Gospel

This kind of language, the invocation of past conquests to promote future ones, persists to this day, and the current White House has described the aspirations of the American space program in similar terms. But it has added an extra layer to the rhetoric, courtesy of the vice president. Since the Trump administration was sworn in, Mike Pence has been the unofficial spokesperson for the U.S. space program, touring nasa centers and delivering remarks about the country’s ambitions on behalf of the president. Even now that nasa finally has an administrator—it took nearly 15 months after the inauguration to get a Donald Trump nominee into the job—Pence remains the headliner at space-related events. [...]

No leader before Pence has injected this much religious rhetoric into speeches about the space program, according to space historians. Which makes sense, since Pence is an Irish Catholic turned evangelical Christian, and outspokenly so. Pence has a long record of presenting his political beliefs in the context of his religious ones; even before he was elected to any office, Pence liked to say he was “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order.” As a congressman, he cited scripture to explain his votes and prayed with his staffers. [...]

In his famous speech, Kennedy had asked for God’s blessing: “As we set sail, we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.” Buzz Aldrin, who followed him, brought a small plastic container of wine and a piece of bread, and actually took Communion on the moon. The stunning success of the landing strengthened the notion that the United States was favored by God over other would-be spacefaring nations, Weibel says.

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The Atlantic: Religious Leaders Condemn Family Separations—but Not Necessarily Trump

But the volume of the criticism can also be deceiving. Many of the groups that have been most vocal against the border policy are already outspoken Trump skeptics. Among the ranks of Trump’s closest allies—including those who advise him on conservative religious voters—the condemnation has been more tempered. Some even see hypocrisy in this latest round of media attention to the border, pointing to Obama-era policies, which also jeopardized the welfare of children. [...]

Of all the comments made against the administration’s “zero-tolerance policy” in the last week, Graham’s have been the most surprising. The preacher’s son has recently been on a tour across America encouraging evangelicals to turn out and vote, and his comments on and off the stage are often highly supportive of the president and Republican policy priorities. Outright criticism of a Trump administration policy is unusual for Graham. But his recent comments arguably were more nuanced than that: He also said the president isn’t responsible for the situation at the border. On social media, he reaffirmed his opposition to family separations, but also noted that “many in the media want to portray this as @POTUS’s fault, but this predates him by decades.” He objects to the way the situation at the border has been politicized, he added: “It’s even more disgraceful to see that our political leaders won’t work together in a bipartisan effort to solve this. Some just want to use the situation for their own political gain.”

A number of other religious leaders close to Trump’s inner circle have echoed Graham’s caution. Jentezen Franklin, a mega-church pastor from Gainesville, Georgia, who serves on Trump’s evangelical advisory board, told me in an interview that Trump “really does want to do the right thing for these families and these children.” He condemned Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s use of the Scripture to justify family separations—“I don’t believe the Bible is on his side,” he said—but expressed frustration with criticism of the president. “I think it’s disingenuous to just attack President Trump when he didn’t create the problem,” Franklin said. “He didn’t start the problem. But he’s willing to fix the problem permanently if Congress will just do their job.”

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Quartz: Trump’s foreign policy looks a lot like Rapture Christians’ plan to welcome the apocalypse

Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Barack Obama all faced pressure from wealthy potential campaign donors to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, but Trump is listening to a voice they were not: evangelical Christians who appear to believe in the “Rapture.” Some, like vice president Mike Pence and secretary of state Mike Pompeo, hold posts inside his cabinet. For Rapture Christians, returning Jerusalem to the Jewish people is a key to the second coming of Christ.

Robert Jeffress, a pastor who preaches the Rapture, was selected to delivered the new embassy’s opening prayer. Jeffress has previously said that Mormons are heretics, Jews fated to hell, Islam promotes pedophilia, and homosexuals are filthy. He prayed, “We thank you everyday that you have given us a president who boldly stands on the right side of history, and more importantly on the right side of you, oh God, when it comes to Israel.” [...]

Belief in the Rapture, also known as millenialism or eschatology, has multiple variations, but the core view is that there will an apocalyptic war, Jesus will return, and true Christians will be “raptured” or ascend to heaven, with the rest of the earth’s inhabitants punished. Rapture believers are split about the order of events, but they are united in the belief that only Christians will be saved. [...]

On May 8, Capitol Ministries put out its latest study, “The Bible on When War Is Justifiable,” rebutting pacifism. If Jesus calls us to be “peacemakers,” it asks, “then how could a Christian Cabinet Member or Congressman support the idea of going to war?” The answer, Drollinger, explains, is simple: Saint Peter instructs men to submit “to every human institution” and the Book of Revelations discusses the “righteousness” of a God who “judges and wages war.”

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The Atlantic: Ukraine’s Successful Courtship of Trump

Trump has said repeatedly that “no one is tougher on Russia” than him. But his critics have accused him of challenging Putin only superficially. Shortly after the Trump administration expelled 60 Russian diplomats in March—48 of whom were actually intelligence officers, according to a State Department spokesperson—the State Department acknowledged that the Kremlin would be allowed to refill the vacated positions. The Treasury Department recently sanctioned more than three dozen Russian oligarchs, officials, and entities who “profit” from Russia’s “malign activity” and “corrupt system.” But many of the sanctioned oligarchs had four months’ notice to move their money, thanks to a list of Russia’s wealthiest individuals released by the Treasury in January. That money might already be back in Russia. “As they say, ‘a barking dog cannot hinder a caravan’s journey,’” Putin told Russia’s TASS news agency at the time. He mocked his own absence from the list. When UN Ambassador Nikki Haley announced new sanctions against Russia over its support for embattled Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, she was contradicted by the White House hours later. [...]

Trump, ever transactional, also wanted to make sure he was not giving away something for nothing. The U.S. official said it was emphasized to the president that this would be a sale, not a gift, and Poroshenko won favor with Trump by facilitating an $80 million coal deal—the first between the U.S. and Ukraine—that was politically expedient for both leaders. In February, Ukrainian Railways signed a $1 billion locomotive deal with GE Transportation. Trump had promised during the campaign to revitalize the U.S. rail industry. “The Trump administration is very much focused on jobs creation,” said Daniel Vajdich, the president of the strategic advisory firm Yorktown Solutions. “So, naturally, Ukraine has thought about its ability to help create jobs for Americans in the context of creating leverage by feeding into Trump’s policy desires.” A Ukrainian-American lobbyist who spoke to me on condition of anonymity put it more bluntly: “Poroshenko has become a hostage of Trump,” he told me. [...]

In the months following the weapons sale, Poroshenko ordered Ukraine’s top anti-corruption prosecutor tasked with probing corruption under former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to stop cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s work in Ukraine and ties to Russia, according to two sources familiar with the request. The New York Times first reported on that order on Wednesday, indicating that Kiev had blocked the Manafort investigations just as the Trump administration was finalizing the weapons deal in an attempt to stay on Trump’s good side. Trump, according to the U.S. official, saw Manafort’s legal problems as a function of Yanukovych’s regime rather than a reflection of Poroshenko’s.

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FiveThirtyEight: Making Sense Of Trump’s Two Big Moves On North Korea And Tariffs

1. Trump is leading — Trump often seems like a weak and disengaged president, with his ideas downplayed and/or ignored by Republicans on Capitol Hill (his infrastructure proposal) and even his own staffers (his Democrat-friendly positions on immigration and guns at recent bipartisan meetings). But on tariffs and North Korea, Trump appears to have taken control. He took advantage of the fact that Congress doesn’t have to sign off on either of these decisions and that even if his staffers want to rein him in (as they sometimes do), that becomes a lot tougher when he publicly announces a policy. [...]

Even Trump’s bold moves this week demonstrate the extent to which he is still operating within constraints. While Trump aides initially said his tariffs would have no exceptions, the final policy exempted Canada and Mexico as the president seemed to bow to complaints from congressional Republicans. [...]

4. Trump’s moves are only opening bids, so a lot depends on how he follows up — Outside of a few Democrats running in red states, it’s hard to find many people in Washington who agree with Trump’s tariffs. Economic experts on the right and left strongly oppose them, arguing that they will start a trade war that hurts the U.S. economy. Trump now owns the course that tariffs take, whether that lurches the country toward economic warfare or not.

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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: Trump and the Evangelical electorate

Incidentally, when we use the word "Evangelicals" here, we are using it in the manner it is most used in US political commentary, to refer to conservative, white Protestants. There are white Evangelicals who are politically liberal. But they are few. They are so few that 81 percent of white Evangelicals who voted in 2016 voted for Trump.

There are also African American Evangelicals. They vote for Democrats. There are some Latino Evangelicals, though most are not Protestants.

Such Evangelicals have long been self-described "values voters" and the "moral majority". The idea of "values" here does not refer to paying taxes for more and better public education, medical care, social services and the like that benefit the society at large and should stem from the Christian values of compassion and care for the poor. It does not refer to defending the oppressed or welcoming refugees.

Rather, it refers to a very singular idea of "family" and what needs to be done in order to "protect" it. Two of the more powerful religious-political organisations in the US are called Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council. Evangelicals oppose any policy, behaviour or practice that they deem threatening to a monogamous two-gender marriage. [...]

The fervent commitment of Evangelicals, like Pence, to Israel, seems to be rooted in a belief that it is necessary for Israel to be back in the hands of the Jews for the second coming of Jesus Christ to take place. According to this belief, the Rapture would send all the good true Christians to heaven and leave behind the bad and non-believers - including the Jews - in an all-inclusive hell on earth. That means that Christian Zionism concludes with an act of the ultimate anti-Semitism. 

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The Washington Post: Long, uneasy love affair of Israel and U.S. evangelicals may have peaked

The idea of a Palestinian state conflicts with the belief of some evangelicals that the entire territory — from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, including the West Bank — was promised by God to the Jewish people.

And those voices are becoming louder. Evangelical lobbying groups such as Christians United for Israel, advocating views that align more tightly with the Israeli right, now rival the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in their influence on behalf of Israel. While AIPAC backs a two-state solution, CUFI does not.  [...]

Over the past half-century, many American evangelicals came to support Israel through an end-of-days theology. The idea — popularized in the 1970 book “The Late Great Planet Earth,” which later became a movie with Orson Welles, and the Left Behind series, which began in the 1990s — is that the establishment of Israel was part of a preordained divine plan preparing for the return of the Messiah. [...]

A poll released last month by the evangelical firm LifeWay Research asked American evangelicals about their overall perception of Israel. Among people over 65, 76 percent said it was positive, compared with 58 percent among those ages 18 to 34. About 30 percent of the people in the younger group said they were “not sure,” nearly double the figure for the older group.

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Politico: Republicans warn Trump of 2018 bloodbath

The backstage talks provide a window into how those closest to Trump are bracing for a possible bloodbath in the 2018 midterms, which could obliterate the Republican congressional majorities and paralyze the president’s legislative agenda. The potential for a Democratic wave has grown after Republican losses this fall in Virginia, New Jersey and Alabama, and as the president’s approval ratings have plummeted to the 30s.  [...]

Among GOP leaders, however, there is widespread concern heading into 2018. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has said privately that both chambers could be lost in November. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has told donors that he fears a wave of swing district Republican lawmakers could retire rather than seek reelection. [...]

Trump is well aware of the dangers his party faces in 2018, those who’ve discussed it with him say. During political briefing sessions, top aides highlight positive developments — but also more concerning ones, such as his declining numbers among well-educated voters and higher earners. He has peppered advisers with questions about his approval ratings, and about whether he is getting enough credit for his accomplishments. [...]

“There are 10 months to improve the fundamentals here, and the Senate map is, on paper, good. But maps don’t make majorities and I think there’s a realization that there’s at least a 50 percent chance one or both chambers could fall,” Jennings said. “In less than one year, this first term could be, for all intents and purposes, over if the Democrats take control of either chamber.”

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