The Huffington Post: One way Trump is different from European nationalists

Both Trump and Kaczyński have appealed to explicit xenophobia. Both promise to return “greatness” to their country, even as their isolationism and extremism distance them from former allies. Both evoke memories of a lost era of job security and prosperity for industrial workers, and claim that they can bring those good days back. Most of all, both cultivate a worldview based on an existential struggle between themselves and a mysterious, conspiratorial network of enemies.

Even the path to power for both Trump and Kaczyński has been similar. Neither represents a majority, but both took advantage of constitutional quirks to transform extraordinarily tight electoral results into a victory.

In Poland, parties that get fewer than 5 percent of the vote get no seats in Parliament. Their votes are distributed proportionately among the larger parties. Because the left splintered into multiple parties, none of them got more than 5 percent and PiS’s 38 percent of the votes translated to 51 percent of the parliamentary delegates. As in America, a couple hundred thousand Polish votes cast differently would have led to a totally different outcome. Since the elections, PiS’s support has remained in the low to mid-30’s. That should give us some pause before we attribute either victory to profound cultural or sociological shifts. [...]

Despite all these similarities, there is an essential difference between the two leaders. Kaczyński, like his European counterparts on the far right, is genuinely hostile to capitalism. [...]

The base that elected him is more closely aligned to their European counterparts than to the Republican leadership. This difference is crucial. Trump and Kaczyński are similar, but the latter is at the head of a coherent and committed movement, while the former is trying to ride two horses that won’t be going in the same direction for very long.

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The Atlantic: Obama and the Limits of 'Fact-Based' Foreign Policy

The very notion of “facts” has been demeaned by Republicans, and most of all by Team Donald Trump. As Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes put it, “There’s no such thing, unfortunately anymore, as facts.” In response, Democrats have doubled down on their tendency to wield facts as cudgels, demonstrating their righteousness in the process. It would be a loss, though, if this came to be seen as merely another partisan schism. As it turns out, Obama’s foreign-policy legacy can offer an important window into whether facts—and being “reality-based”—are quite as critical to real-world policy success as we might like to think.

Unlike Kennedy and Johnson, Obama was very much the technocrat-in-chief, setting the tone for the people he would surround himself with. His intelligence was generally in little doubt. During his eight years in the Oval Office, the president was an almost unbelievably voracious reader, devoting around an hour on most days to books of history, philosophy, biography, or even sci-fi novels. But being smart and well-read doesn’t necessarily lead to good judgment or bold vision; in some cases, even, the former can undermine the latter. [...]

Matters of judgment still loom large four decades later. I, or any critic of Obama’s foreign policy, could sit with an Obama administration official, and, even if we agreed on all the facts and specifics of a particular country or conflict, it wouldn’t matter much. Divergences in how people interpret Obama’s legacy have much more to do with fundamentally different starting assumptions about America’s role in the world and even human nature—in other words, the very reasons why we do what we do. In fact, looking back at my own meetings with officials during the Obama era, rarely do I ever recall hearing something and thinking to myself that I had just heard some gross error of fact. This is why I found such meetings so frustrating and circular: The only things we disagreed on were the most important. [...]

Due to the formative experience of the Iraq war, as well as domestic political considerations, Obama hoped to reduce America’s footprint in the Middle East. This meant a general bias toward disengagement, irrespective of whether greater U.S. involvement could produce better outcomes in particular crises (even the Iran nuclear deal was basically about removing the possibility of an American war with Iran). There was also a general discomfort around the direct use of U.S. military force, a discomfort which was as ideological as it was practical.

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FiveThirtyEight: Can You Trust Trump’s Approval Rating Polls?

That third possibility is pretty much exactly what happened. Trump beat the final FiveThirtyEight national polling average by only 1.8 percentage points. Meanwhile, he beat the final FiveThirtyEight polling average in the average swing state — weighted by its likelihood of being the tipping-point state — by 2.7 percentage points. (The miss was larger than that in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, but Clinton met or slightly exceeded her polls in several other swing states.) This was nothing at all out of the ordinary. The polls were about as accurate as they’d been, on average, in presidential elections since 1968. They were somewhat more accurate than they’d been in the most recent federal election, the 2014 midterms. But they were enough to tip the election to Trump because Clinton had been in a precarious position to begin with. [...]

There’s one other critical distinction that people often miss. The margin of error, as traditionally described, applies only to one candidate’s vote share (“Clinton has 47 percent of the vote”) or one side of a yes/no question (“41 percent of voters approve of Trump’s performance”). The margin of error for the difference between two candidates (“Clinton leads Trump by 5 percentage points”) — or a candidate’s net approval rating (“Trump has a negative-10 approval rating”) — is roughly twice as high: [...]

But so many of the articles I read toward the end of last year’s campaign didn’t convey any sense of uncertainty at all. A small Clinton lead was misreported as a sure thing. And then a small polling error was misreported as a massive failure of the data. It’s a fairly minor part of the puzzle, but if journalists want to rebuild trust in their reporting, ending the boom-and-bust cycle in how they report on polling — first overrating its precision and then being shocked when it’s even a couple of percentage points off — would be one way to start. Doing so would make it harder for Trump, or other politicians, to undermine confidence in polls they don’t like.

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The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Moment of Tangency: A Glimpse of What Might Have Been

The New Yorker: Draining the Swamp

There are moments in a hard-fought campaign when a catchy cluster of words can suddenly bubble up from the depths and become like a shiny new lily pad. “Drain the swamp” worked on many levels—it was active, it was funny, and it sounded like something a man in the real-estate business would actually say. It offered no details—another plus—and held a folksy charm.

It was also historically accurate. Indeed, the candidate had landed on a point the Founders had gone to some trouble to conceal—that the foundation upon which they built their capital included a great deal of water, sand, and mud. [...]

A scrap of paper in the Library of Congress, from around March, 1791, shows the earliest appearance of the plan. With a few quick strokes of his pen, Thomas Jefferson outlined a master vision: the single word “President” above the future location of the White House, and another word, “Capitol,” to the east. In between, there would be “public walks,” which was an accurate description of the Mall to come.

Jefferson was channelling the ancients as he daydreamed of the future. Over a small stream, he sketched the word “Tyber,” after Rome’s river. A nearby elevation called Jenkins Hill would soon be renamed Capitol Hill, after Rome’s Capitoline. Soon, elaborate street plans, with parks, grids, and slashing diagonals resembling those of Versailles, would be traced over a terrain that still housed more bears than people. [...]

Sometimes the waters demand attention more urgently. In 2006, the long-forgotten Tiber Creek reasserted itself, by rising up from its underground bed, where it still courses below Constitution Avenue, and threatening the actual Constitution of the United States. That document is preserved in a secure vault in the National Archives, along with the Declaration of Independence. After a severe rainstorm, the underground waters rose rapidly, stopping, fortunately, well short of the documents, but reaching alarming levels, coursing through the Archive’s basement and a theatre, where visitors could find an unwelcome reflecting pool the next day, lapping their feet.

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