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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Vox: Congress passes historic resolution to end US support for Saudi-led war in Yemen

The war in Yemen, directed by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (or MBS, as he’s commonly referred to in Washington), has killed more than 50,000 people and left more than 20 million Yemenis in need of humanitarian assistance. [...]

That means the US is partially culpable for the death and destruction of Saudi’s enemies in the war — the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels — and the thousands of civilians who have been killed. In one particularly egregious incident, a coalition warplane bombed a school bus full of children last August with an American-made bomb, killing at least 40 of them.

The Yemen resolution invokes the War Powers Resolution of 1973 (WPR), which gives Congress the power to direct a president to remove troops involved in “hostilities” abroad if there has been no formal “declaration of war or specific statutory authorization” from Congress.

Not only does it serve as a censure of Saudi’s conduct in the war, it’s also a clear check on executive power; if the US wants to be involved in a war in Yemen, Congress has to declare it. The Republican-led Senate passed the resolution in March, and it now heads to Trump’s desk. The White House says the president plans to veto it.

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The New York Review of Books: Mitch McConnell, Republican Nihilist

Writing for the Review last fall, the American historian Christopher R. Browning said of the Senate majority leader, “if the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell.” In Browning’s view, McConnell is not dissimilar from the German conservative politicians, who in the 1930s brought Adolf Hitler to power, “thinking that they could ultimately control [him] while enjoying the benefits of his popular support.” With Hitler as Chancellor, the conservatives saw their fulsome policy agenda enacted: rearmament, suspension of civil liberties, the outlawing of the Communist Party, and the abolition of labor unions, among other moves. But as they would later find out, controlling the monster they put in power would be something else altogether.[...]

What separates McConnell from other destructive political actors, such as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his fellow congressional Republican revolutionaries, or President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, is that McConnell’s political actions are unmoored from ideology and policy. For McConnell, politics is fundamentally about accruing political power for the sole purpose of accruing more political power.[...]

McConnell seemed almost to relish the anger his positions engendered. When reformists began referring to him as Darth Vader, he appeared at a press conference toting a light saber. In playing this part, McConnell earned the gratitude of his fellow Republicans, something that would pay off when he sought to become the party’s leader in the Senate. McConnell would adopt a similar position in 2009 after Barack Obama’s inauguration. He became the public face of opposition to Obama’s policies, as he expertly wielded the Senate’s limitless tools for obstruction and delay to block the new president’s legislative goals. In his willingness to again play the role of villain, McConnell displayed a unique understanding of how modern American politics works: the more liberals hated him, the more Republicans loved him.[...]

There was, however, a political downside to McConnell’s unrelentingly rejectionist approach: it played directly into the hands of the extremists in his own party. Indeed, the Senate GOP’s inflexible opposition to Obama, the venomous attacks of Republican partisans (including questions about Obama’s birthplace and religion), and McConnell’s declaration that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president” gave oxygen to the fledgling Tea Party movement. In 2010, the victory of extremist conservative Republicans in party primaries would help cost McConnell the chance to become majority leader in the Senate (postponing that outcome until 2014).

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Vox: Paul Ryan’s long con

To understand the irony and duplicity of that statement, you need to understand Ryan’s career. After the profligacy of the George W. Bush years and the rise of the Tea Party, Ryan rocketed to the top ranks of his party by warning that mounting deficits under President Obama threatened the “most predictable economic crisis we have ever had in this country.” Absent the fiscal responsibility that would accompany Republican rule, we were facing nothing less than “the end of the American dream.” [...]

I was among the reporters who took Ryan’s reboot seriously. “To move us to surpluses,” I wrote of his 2010 proposal, “Ryan’s budget proposes reforms that are nothing short of violent. Medicare is privatized. Seniors get a voucher to buy private insurance, and the voucher’s growth is far slower than the expected growth of health-care costs. Medicaid is also privatized. The employer tax exclusion is fully eliminated, replaced by a tax credit that grows more slowly than medical costs.” [...]

But more important than the differences between Ryan and Trump are the similarities. Yes, Ryan is decorous and polite where Trump is confrontational and uncouth, but the say-anything brand of politics that so outrages Trump’s critics is no less present in Ryan’s recent history. How else can we read a politician who rose to power promising to reduce deficits only to increase them at every turn? Or a politician who raked in good press for promising anti-poverty policies that he subsequently refused to pass? [...]

In important ways, Trump is not a break from the Republican Party’s recent past but an acceleration of it. A party that acculturates itself, its base, and its media sphere to constant nonsense can hardly complain when other political entrepreneurs notice that nonsense sells and decide to begin marketing their own brand of flimflam.

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The Atlantic: Has Trump Irreversibly Altered the GOP's Foreign Policy?

Trump is reprising the conflict between the Republican Party’s internationalist and isolationist wings, which raged between the end of World War I and the early Cold War. That extended scuffle crystallized in the battle for the party’s 1952 presidential nomination, when Dwight Eisenhower, the hero of the internationalist forces, beat Senate Republican Leader Robert Taft, who championed an earlier generation of “America First” nationalism and isolationism.  [...]

But cracks appeared in that Republican consensus under George W. Bush, both because of disillusion with the Iraq War and because of the party’s growing reliance on working-class whites, who are often dubious of any foreign entanglement. Now, President Trump is moving to virtually raze the structure of the U.S-led international order, with his open disdain for the alliances and economic relationships built after World War II. [...]

Data provided to me by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs from its most recent annual national survey of American foreign-policy attitudes tracks these patterns. College-educated Republicans, the survey found, were more likely than their counterparts without degrees to view globalization and trade in general and the North American Free Trade Agreement in particular as good for the U.S. But the share of college-educated Republicans expressing such favorable views has declined in recent years, and today it’s far lower than the proportion of college-educated Democrats who view trade positively. [...]

Yet in recent days, the GOP’s internationalist voices have been stifled at every turn. Beyond Arizona Senator John McCain, stunningly few criticized Trump’s outbursts around the G-7 meeting, when he questioned the cost of nato, urged Russia’s reinstatement to the group, and lashed the trading practices of Canada and the European Union. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked a vote on bipartisan legislation to limit Trump’s power to unilaterally impose tariffs. And House Speaker Paul Ryan stymied a moderate rebellion to demand a vote on legalizing young people brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents.  

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Quartz: Last time Mexico put tariffs on the US, American farmers lost $1 billion

What won’t score points with Trump voters? The painful tariffs that Canada and Mexico will use to hurt Trump-leaning states like Wisconsin and Iowa. While Canada and Mexico had been able to largely ignore the president’s protectionist impulses when they were just rants, they are now being dragged down to Trump’s level.  [...]

The list of products they are taxing has been carefully calibrated for maximum political impact, experts say. The idea is to squeeze states and sectors that can exert pressure on the White House, and/or hit Trump’s base. The tariffs are designed to get a quick reaction from those sectors, says Christopher Wilson, deputy director of the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute. Their effects “will be immediate and fairly devastating.”

For example, in addition to steel, Mexico is targeting a variety of agricultural goods, from apples to hams. The plan, Mexican Economics minister Ildefonso Guajardo told Mexican radio on Thursday, was to identify products from congressional districts and states represented by elected officials who could influence Trump. Guajardo didn’t specify who, but one of those officials is likely house speaker Paul Ryan. His state of Wisconsin produces the bulk of American cranberries, which are on Mexico’s retaliatory list. On Thursday, Ryan said he was against the tariffs. [...]

So, Mexico tracked down the Congress members who had backed the ban and punished products in their states, says Guajardo, who was part of the administration that rolled out those measures. Over those two years, the Mexican government rotated those tariffs to ensure the pain was spread around, adds Council of the America’s Farnsworth.

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Politico: Republicans gobsmacked by Trump’s tariffs

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) called it “bad news” and predicted imminent retaliation from the key U.S. allies. Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said there is "mounting evidence that these tariffs will harm Americans." And Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) warned that similar policies 90 years ago sparked the Great Depression.

“This is dumb. Europe, Canada, and Mexico are not China, and you don’t treat allies the same way you treat opponents,” Sasse said. “‘Make America Great Again’ shouldn’t mean ‘Make America 1929 Again.'"

Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker called the move an “abuse of authority only intended for national security purposes.” [...]

Indeed, trade is the area where Republicans have grown most uncomfortable with the president. They generally tolerate his over-the-top Twitter account and have grown accustomed to his coarse rhetoric, in part because he has enacted and supported many of the center-right policies that the GOP has pursued for years, such as confirming conservative judges and cutting taxes.

Republicans worry that Trump’s protectionist trade policies could undermine all that and threaten a healthy economy before the midterm elections. Yet House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have shown no interest in passing legislation to block Trump’s tariffs or require congressional approval, a move that would essentially bring Capitol Hill to a standstill.

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The New Yorker: How Paul Ryan Got It Wrong

The Tea Party has been a major force in American politics for nearly a decade now, stretching back to the victories that it brought Republicans in the midterm elections in 2010. Ryan did not create the movement, but he did more than any other sitting politician in Washington to welcome it into the Republican fold, to insist that it shared with the G.O.P. establishment an ideological core: that its fury was just atmosphere, and that at its essence was the same stringent set of beliefs—about small government and low taxes—that Ryan himself had grown powerful professing. When the acrimony between the upstarts and the old guard split the House caucus and deposed Boehner, Ryan was the one figure who could repair the breach—who could look at the Tea Party and see his own image—and so he became Speaker of the House. With the rise of Donald Trump, he tried to repeat this maneuver. The new President was bestowed a chief of staff (Reince Priebus) and a press secretary (Sean Spicer) selected from the ranks of Ryan’s Wisconsin allies. And Ryan began insisting to the public that this new regime was headed not toward serial, incandescent feuds but toward tax reform, Obamacare repeal, and entitlement reform—that the order was regular, that the Republican Party was not materially changed. [...]

The country will be better off now that Ryan has less influence. The major accomplishment he claimed on Wednesday morning was the tax bill that he and his colleagues passed last year, a piece of legislation loaded with giveaways to corporations and the wealthy, and which will only escalate the country’s profound inequalities. Whether his party will be better without him is not as clear. In Washington, insiders believe the next Speaker will be either the transactional House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy, of California, or the more stringent conservative Whip, Steve Scalise, of Louisiana, who last year was shot in an assassination attempt at a congressional baseball practice. Ryan was adept at finding euphemisms for his party’s aims, even as many members of his caucus devoted themselves to making a cult of victimized white men. They now find themselves under pressure—facing protests and electoral challenges—from coalitions organized largely by high-achieving women.

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Vox: Paul Ryan is leaving because he lost the fight for the Republican soul

Nehlen was never a threat to beat Ryan. Ryan walloped him in 2016 and was never in serious danger of losing to him in 2018, as far as anyone could tell. But Nehlen’s existence was fundamentally a reminder that a large part of the party Ryan was trying to lead didn’t trust him and didn’t agree with him about what the Republican Party should be. And even if that faction wasn’t going to unseat him in his own district, it’s won the party. [...]

But even though Ryan was the only mainstream Republican the Freedom Caucus trusted even a little, they didn’t trust him unreservedly. Conservatives were deeply worried about his past support for comprehensive immigration reform, including legalization for unauthorized immigrants currently in the US. To become speaker, Ryan promised the Freedom Caucus that he wouldn’t make any sudden moves on immigration by aligning with Democrats over conservatives — that he’d adhere to the Hastert Rule (only bringing bills to the floor if they’re supported by a majority of Republicans) on any immigration bills. [...]

The answer to the question of “What is the Republican Party?” has changed. It’s no longer a political organization dedicated to shrinking government and protecting the free market. It’s now one side of an ongoing culture war — for immigration agents and against immigrants, for police officers and against disruptive (black) protesters, for the White House and against the “deep state.” It’s not exclusively a white identity politics, but without race, it’s hard to imagine the bonds that tie Donald Trump to the Republican base.

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FiveThirtyEight: Four Reasons That Gary Cohn’s White House Resignation Is Different

That Cohn resigned suggests that Trump is serious about implementing these tariffs, despite resistance from fellow Republicans and the business community. This is not like Trump talking about supporting gun control, only to backtrack soon after. Trump has long favored new tariffs, appears to be acting on that policy preference and didn’t stop pushing in that direction when his top economic adviser objected so strongly that he quit. Of course, this is Trump, so he could always reverse course, but so far he appears more serious about following through on tariffs than on his other more unconventional views.

Trump is breaking with GOP orthodoxy in a big way — Cohn isn’t the only person who objects to these tariffs. House Speaker Paul Ryan, who usually avoids direct criticism of the president, went public with his opposition to the tariffs. So has Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who has largely aligned himself on policy with the president since Trump entered office. [...]

As I said before, this is Donald Trump, so he could decide next week to drop the tariffs idea and hire another person from Goldman Sachs to replace Cohn — or even ask Cohn himself to come back. But I doubt it. Instead, I will be curious — with Cohn ostensibly leaving over tariffs — whether Trump will take additional steps to implement his vision in his second year as president, even if he has to dump some well-respected aides along the way.

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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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The Guardian: Trump may celebrate his tax giveaway – but it could speed his downfall

For this bill hands the Democrats just the ammunition they need for their campaign to win back control of Congress in next November’s midterm elections. It’s unpopular – opposed by 55% of US voters, and supported by just 33% of them – and with good reason. [...]

The mega corporations stand to gain the most, as their taxes fall from 35% to 21%. Republicans are trying to cast this as help for “America’s families and small businesses”, as if the chief beneficiaries will be the Mom and Pop who run the neighbourhood general store. But the reality is that Republicans are paying back the mighty plutocrats who have been bankrolling them for years. Admire the candour of congressman Chris Collins, who last month said of tax cuts, “My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.’” [...]

Trump will brag and crow, but there is a danger here for him too. Passing this tax cut has been the driving mission of the likes of House speaker Paul Ryan for decades. It’s why they’ve tolerated the daily outrages committed by Trump: they were ready to swallow anything for the sake of having someone at that Oval Office desk who would sign their tax bill. Once he’s done it, his usefulness diminishes. Should the Russia probe gather pace, should Trump’s poll numbers go even deeper underwater, then the passing of these tax cuts will lead some Republicans to conclude that he is no longer indispensable.

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The Atlantic: The United States Is Already a Low-Tax Country

This is not a widely accepted point, granted. The share of Americans who say that their taxes are too high is at roughly 50 percent, a 15-year peak. Moreover, Republicans have sold their tax bill as an essential tax cut for America’s income-starved, tax-strangled families and businesses, promising to deliver $4,000 a year to the average family and huge boosts to corporate investment. “Today, America has one of the least competitive tax rates on planet Earth, 60 percent. Think of that, 60 percent higher than the average in the developed world. So our taxes are 60 percent higher,” President Trump said this month. “These massive tax cuts will be rocket fuel.” [...]

Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development clearly shows that the United States is not a particularly heavily taxed country at all. Indeed, out of 35 developed economies, the United States’ tax burden as a share of GDP—26 percent—is the lowest save for four others: Turkey, Ireland, Chile, and Mexico. (Turkey, Mexico, and Chile are considerably poorer than the United States, and have considerably younger populations.) The social democracies of northern Europe, like Denmark and France, take in nearly 50 percent of their GDPs and spend the money on ample welfare states, including child-care benefits and old-age pensions. “From a global perspective, [our tax rate is lower] than average,” said Scott Hodge, the president of the Tax Foundation, a Washington-based think tank. “The difference is that other countries tend to have a value-added tax, in addition to the same system we have with income taxes, payroll, and all that stuff.”

Moreover, Trump has insisted that the United States has an extremely high corporate-tax burden, one that forces businesses to keep money overseas and hurts jobs and income growth here at home. He is correct that the United States has very high statutory tax rates on corporate incomes, with a top rate of 39 percent on business’ profits. But the American corporate tax code is also full of exceptions, special provisions, and loopholes that companies use to reduce their tax bills. Factoring in deductions, credits, and so on, the effective corporate tax rate is about 19 percent—lower than the top marginal rate that Republicans would put in place. The OECD has found that the United States is about average when it comes to hitting companies with income taxes. [...]

The overall effect would be to make government far less redistributive, meaning post-tax, post-transfer inequality would become even more severe. Indeed, a new analysis by the Tax Policy Center found that most working families would end up with less money in pocket as a result of the Republican plans. “If you consider plausible ways of financing either the House or the Senate bill, most low- and middle-income households would eventually end up worse off than if the bill did not become law,” writes William Gale, the co-director of the TPC. “In other words, they would lose more from inevitable future spending cuts or tax hikes necessary to eventually offset the costs of the tax bill than they would gain from the tax cuts themselves.”

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The Atlantic: The Architect of the Radical Right

Why does all this matter today? Well, we might begin with the first New Yorker elected president since FDR, a man who has given new meaning to the term copperhead (originally applied to Northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War). Lost amid the many 2016 postmortems, and the careful parsing of returns in Ohio swing counties, was Donald Trump’s prodigious conquest of the South: 60 percent or more of the vote in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia, with similar margins in Louisiana and Mississippi. And the message is still being missed. We’ve heard much about the “older white men” in the administration, but rather less about where they come from. No fewer than 10 Cabinet appointees are from the South, in key positions like attorney general (Alabama) and secretary of state (Texas), not to mention Trump’s top political adviser, Steve Bannon, who grew up in Virginia. [...]

Today we remember ferocious civil-rights struggles waged in Birmingham and Selma. But ground zero for the respectable defense of Jim Crow was Virginia, where one of the nation’s most powerful politicians, Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr., ruled with the authority of an old-style feudal boss. His notorious “machine” kept the state clenched in an iron grip; the oppressions included a poll tax that suppressed black voter turnout so that it was on a par with the Deep South’s (and kept overall turnout under 20 percent). Byrd had allies in the president of the University of Virginia, Colgate Darden, and the newspaperman James Jackson Kilpatrick, who, long before his lovable-curmudgeon TV role on the “Point-Counterpoint” segment of 60 Minutes in the 1970s, was a fanatical and ingenious segregationist. [...]

That was Buchanan’s view, too. It wasn’t enough to elect true-believing politicians. The rules of government needed to be rewritten. But this required ideal conditions—a blank slate. This had happened once, in Chile, after Augusto Pinochet’s coup against the socialist Salvador Allende in 1973. A vogue for public choice had swept Pinochet’s administration. Buchanan’s books were translated, and some of his acolytes helped restructure Chile’s economy. Labor unions were banned, and social security and health care were both privatized. On a week-long visit in 1980, Buchanan gave formal lectures to “top representatives of a governing elite that melded the military and the corporate world,” MacLean reports, and he dispensed counsel in private conversations. But Buchanan said very little about his part in assisting Chile’s reformers—and he said very little, too, when the country’s economy cratered, and Pinochet at last fired the Buchananites.

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The New York Review of Books: Year One: The Mad King

He laid out the clear and present danger posed by Trump. “He creates scapegoats of Muslims and Mexican immigrants. He calls for the use of torture. He calls for killing the innocent children and family members of terrorists. He cheers assaults on protesters. He applauds the prospect of twisting the Constitution to limit First Amendment freedom of the press. This is the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.” [...]

Like so many of his fellow Republicans, Romney would eventually make his peace with Trump, even entertaining over a dinner of frogs’ legs the possibility of becoming his secretary of state. Nearly a year after Trump’s election, congressional Republicans and the president find themselves locked in a relationship of morbid co-dependency, but it is not one based on misunderstanding. There was no mystery, no hidden knowledge, about who or what Donald Trump was, or what it would mean to invest him with the royal purple of the presidency. Republicans gave it to him knowingly. [...]

Even as Robert Mueller’s investigation accelerates, there are few signs that the party has any will to resist him. In the last year and a half, Trump has succeeded in moving the window of acceptability in our politics, especially on the right. The collaborators rationalize their response thus: if they did not go along, then power would shift to even worse actors. As the former presidential aide Steve Bannon plots a populist revanchist rebellion, some Republicans tell themselves that it is better to be a Vichy Republican, a quiescent enabler, than one of the denizens of Bannon’s Crazytown.  

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The Guardian: Donald Trump stabbed his party in the back. It might just pay off

The mainstream, “establishment” Republican leadership made a cynical calculation to tolerate Donald Trump’s dangerous faults, believing they could use him to rubber-stamp their long-sought conservative legislative agenda. They made a bargain with a con man, and now he has betrayed them.

His deal last week with Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi on debt limits and disaster spending is a huge political betrayal. But make no mistake: for Trump, it’s good politics.

Americans are fed up with gridlock and dysfunction in the Washington DC “swamp,” and they blame Republicans as much as Democrats. Furthermore, the legislation which might pass by making deals with Democrats polls well across the political spectrum. [...]

Voters are angry at Congress, and most polling reveals that even Republican base voters support a much more progressive agenda than the party orthodoxy allows. (See here, here and here.) This empowers Trump to unhitch himself from people like Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and other establishment Republican party leaders and venture forth on his own, making deals across the aisle, catering to his base and building a cult of personality broader and more powerful than the Republican party brand. [...]

Trump’s calculation ignores the one truly existential threat he faces: Russia. Trump craves adulation – praise to feed his outsized ego - and to get it he’s happy to betray friend and foe alike. But he also desperately needs the partisan protection of Congressional Republicans to shield him from Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian collusion and obstruction of justice, which is gathering steam every day.

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Bloomberg: Key Republican Calls for ‘Radical Changes’ in Trump's Presidency

“We’re at a point where there needs to be radical changes take place at the White House itself. It has to happen,” Senator Bob Corker told local reporters in his home state of Tennessee. “I think the president needs to take stock of the role that he plays in our nation and move beyond himself -- move way beyond himself -- and move to a place where daily he’s waking up thinking about what is best for the nation.” [...]

Their remarks are some of the strongest Republican backlash to Trump’s suggestions that both sides bear blame in the Charlottesville incident. Several other Republicans have called on Trump to make a clearer denunciation of white supremacist groups, but many GOP leaders have remained silent on the president’s remarks.

Corker’s criticisms are particularly notable because he has previously been a Trump ally and met with him before his inauguration to discuss the possibility of becoming secretary of State. [...]

The reluctance of GOP leaders to confront Trump directly is the latest sign they remain unwilling to challenge even the president’s most controversial remarks and comes despite growing concern among Republicans that their party’s brand could suffer permanent damage from the backlash. [....]

Corker’s relationship with Trump goes back to the election, when the senator campaigned with the president and was said to have been vetted as a potential running mate. Corker also served as a member of the president’s national security advisory committee. He has continued to offer Trump advice on foreign policy.

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Vox: After Charlottesville, how do we cover an immoral president?

The Atlantic: What More Do Trump's Critics Want Republicans to Do?

This is one of the most polarizing political questions of the moment. To Donald Trump’s opponents, the answer is laughably obvious: Of course congressional Republicans aren’t doing enough to hold the president accountable, they argue. Most GOP lawmakers are bending over backwards to excuse and ignore Trump’s bad behavior, while those few who do routinely speak out are still voting with him 93.5 percent of the time. They are all talk and no action: corrupt partisans posing as leaders.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the divide, a popular genre of GOP apologia has emerged to contend that Republicans are being held to an unrealistic standard; that in fact they’ve already done plenty to stand up to Trump. Sure, they’ve voted for conservative bills, the reasoning goes—they are conservatives, after all! But that doesn’t mean their public criticism of a Republican president can be dismissed. As the conservative columnist Ramesh Ponnuru recently put it: “They’re falling pitifully short only if the baseline expectation is that they do whatever liberal journalists think it’s their duty to do.” [...]

Virtually everyone I talked to agreed that the single most important thing congressional Republicans can do right now is to stop the president from shutting down Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Trump’s critics contend that any effort by the White House to meddle with the probe would represent a brazen affront to the rule of law. [...]

But impeachment threats wouldn’t necessarily just be about getting tough on Trump—they could also be a way for congressional Republicans to hold themselves accountable. After all, it’s easy to rationalize keeping your head down and staying quiet while a scandal engulfs the White House. It becomes harder to let yourself off the hook if you’re publicly on the record saying that this particular scandal would be an impeachable offense—and legislators can justify tough votes to angry constituents by saying that they’re bound by their public commitments.

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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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