Bloomberg: Trump Isn’t Getting the Brexit He Wanted

That trade deal is prized by Brexiters as proof it was all worth it. The U.S. is Britain’s largest single-country export market, though it is well behind the EU, where about 43 percent of U.K. goods and services exports go and which is the source of 54 percent of imports. But it’s difficult to believe it matters that much to Trump. The U.S. does more trade with Canada, Mexico and China. A U.K.-U.S. trade agreement would be nice, especially as a reward for Britain’s security support. But it’s not the kind of deal that is going to keep Trump up at night. [...]

It’s becoming clear now to Britons that the promised benefits of Brexit aren’t likely to materialize, and that the best they can hope for is a divorce settlement with Europe that minimizes the disadvantages of leaving. [...]

May’s plan is so offensive to hardcore Brexiters that two senior ministers resigned in the days after her plan was revealed to the cabinet, and many more have been plotting to undermine it. And yet, it’s just an opening bid in negotiations that have a long way to run. There’s every possibility that the EU — which insists that its single market freedoms of goods, labor, capital and services cannot be turned into an a la carte buffet — will reject the offer. There’s still a possibility that the U.K. and the EU will not reach a deal, in which case a very harsh Brexit that exposes Britain to hostile economic relations with longtime allies indeed is possible.  [...]

Both Brexiters and Trump channeled dissatisfaction with the status quo and capitalized on the emotional draw of a clean break with an established order. But both movements lacked a workable vision of a new order. Trump stumbles from border-control edicts to tariffs to summit-wrecking. In the same way, British hard-leavers still haven’t articulated a vision of Brexit that is workable, as the new Brexit minister Dominic Raab noted on Thursday.

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The Huffington Post: Trump Says Europe Is ‘Losing’ Its Culture Because Of Immigration

“And I don’t mean that in a positive way,” Trump told the paper in a sit-down interview. “I think allowing millions and millions of people to come into Europe is very, very sad. I think you’re losing your culture. Look around. You go through certain areas that didn’t exist 10 or 15 years ago.” [...]

“You have a mayor who has done a terrible job in London. He’s done a terrible job,” Trump said of London Mayor Sadiq Khan, with whom the president has had a long-running feud. “Take a look at the terrorism that’s taking place. Look at what’s going on. He’s done a terrible job.”

Trump continued, “I think that all of this immigration has really changed the fabric of Europe. Now, I speak as an outsider when I say that, but I speak as somebody who loves Europe, and I think it’s too bad. I think he’s done a very bad job on terrorism. I think he’s done a bad job on crime.”

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Political Critique: Are the media the main allies of Matteo Salvini?

It is an innovation in the relationship between politics and communication. Mateo Salvini, Deputy Prime Minister of Italy and Minister of the Interior since 1 June 2018, seems to have understood more than others, also of Grillo’s supporters who seemed to be at the forefront of the field, the extemporaneous and volatile nature of contemporary political communication, as well as how to relate to it. Salvini’s efforts are all aimed at a constant production of “novelties”, newsworthy information, dictating the agenda to newspapers and online media in particular, with outbursts against the enemy of the day, in an attempt to dominate the political scene with a sort of ubiquity.

Salvini acts in a decidedly linear way. Generally he rants the loudest, the way Trump does in the United States, he waits to see what “effect” this has, and once he has fired up his supporters, once the controversy is unleashed, he stands his ground with a “decisionist” and unrelenting attitude, head-on, further reinforcing his image as a strong man in charge. This is how he prevents a real debate on the issues he raises from taking shape, because yet another rant immediately shifts the attention to another issue, and so on.  [...]

This interpretation also stems from an intelligent analysis of the new relationship between economy and media. The success of social networks has also entailed a decrease in profit of the press. The economic policies of today’s press is also driven by the logic of click-baiting, i.e. the constant need of editors to publish articles capable of attracting repeated views. And so, of attracting investments of advertisers, which have become increasingly pivotal in ensuring the economic sustainability of a newspaper.  [...]

In other words, it is a communication tactic whose only objective is to outstrip the media’s role as fact checker and address the audience directly and that, however, employs these same media outlets which have become mere carriers of information. The fact that Salvini is behind the exponential growth of his party, not the other way round, is, by the way, indicative of how the new media-driven political economy is a decisive factor in the personalization of politics, in the rise of parties constructed around a single personality and in the redefinition of the party system in a “populist” sense.

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The Atlantic: Trump vs. NATO: It's Not Just About the Money

If the president’s problem with NATO was only about money—about more equitable “burden-sharing” among allies, as Trump’s NATO ambassador told reporters in a recent briefing—he might have refrained from repeatedly exaggerating the imbalances in NATO contributions. He might have claimed victory this week in Brussels for spurring Canada and NATO’s European members to commit to an additional $266 billion in military spending by 2024, even if that leaves some countries short of the target 2 percent of GDP. Or he might have stuck to the 2-percent goal in Brussels, rather than abruptly informing stunned European leaders that he would now like them to spend 4 percent of their GDP on defense—more than the United States itself presently devotes to its military. [...]

As Trump seems to see it, allies—with their free-trade deals and military alliances and unending expectations of preferential treatment—tie down the United States, Gulliver-like, and infringe on its sovereignty. They cynically take advantage of their superpower patron while cloaking their naked self-interest in the high-minded language of multilateralism and shared interests. They flourish by exploiting America’s largesse and sapping the United States of its strength. (Hence, perhaps, why Trump is blasting Germany for buying gas from Russia—and not from the energy-rich United States—while depending on the United States to defend it from Russia.) Trump’s gripes about the “$151 Billion trade deficit” with the European Union or the U.S. spending “at least 70 percent for NATO” are really just numerical ways of saying the United States is getting screwed by supposed friends who are laughing all the way to the bank. [...]

IThese ideas of Trump’s, moreover, are not new; they appear to be among the president’s core convictions. In 1987, he took out a full-page ad in several newspapers calling on the U.S. government to “tax” allies such as Japan and Saudi Arabia so that the American economy could “grow unencumbered by the cost of defending those who can easily afford to pay us for the defense of their freedom” and whose “stake in their protection is far greater than ours.” In a 1990 Playboy interview, he argued that “our country needs more ego” because “our so-called allies” have “outegotized this country” and made “billions screwing us” by controlling “the greatest money machine ever assembled and it’s sitting on our backs.” A President Trump, he said, “wouldn’t trust anyone. He wouldn’t trust the Russians; he wouldn’t trust our allies.” (Ahead of this week’s NATO summit, Trump deployed strikingly similar language, accusing America’s allies of being “worse” than its adversaries by “robbing” the U.S. “piggy bank.” He also lamented that the United States disproportionately supports NATO even though it “helps [the Europeans] a lot more than it helps us.”)

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Vox: Forget the Rust Belt. Florida is now Trump’s strongest swing state

Trump’s state-by-state approval rating has significantly dropped over the past year and a half. In January 2017 he had a net-positive approval rating in almost every state in the country, except California, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Rhodes Island. That’s far from the case now. [...]

As you can see, Trump is currently polling better in Florida than he is in Arizona, Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Utah, Nevada, or North Carolina (all states that proved crucial to his 2016 presidential win). [...]

In Florida Trump’s voter base isn’t comprised of the overlooked white working-class voters who figured prominently in postmortems of the 2016 election. As Michael Grunwald wrote for Politico, the “economically secure retirement meccas” that delivered Trump his presidential victory are giving Republicans hope they can stave off a possible “blue wave” election in 2018:

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