Monthly Archives: August 2017

The Monday Morning Teaser

August 14, 2017 – 7:41 am

As Calvin once said to Hobbes, “The days are just packed.”

It’s been another week where, by Monday morning, everything I thought was so important on Tuesday and Wednesday (like the debate over the Google anti-diversity memo, whose author was being fired as I was posting last week’s Sift) seems like it happened a long time ago. Even North Korea, which on Friday looked like a plausible site for Armageddon to begin, is barely denting the headlines this morning. I imagine a reader thinking: “Why are you still going on about all that?”

Today — or rather this morning; Trump has advertised a big news conference for later today, so who knows what we’ll be buzzing about by this afternoon — it’s the alt-Right violence in Charlottesville, and Trump’s lack of reaction to it.

In short, reasonable commentary is tough these days. By the time you research something well enough to know what you’re talking about, it’s ancient history.

Enough complaining. What caught my attention this week was the Higgins memo, the one that got its author fired from the National Security Council, and seems to be part of the McMaster vs. Bannon power struggle happening inside the White House. Rich Higgins is part of the Bannon faction, and the memo is — I might as well be blunt about it — insane. All the resistance to the Trump administration, it turns out, arises from a multi-decade conspiracy to destroy America by “cultural Marxists”, who have infected not just the media, but both major parties, big corporations, and the Islamists as well. I’ll bet you didn’t realize you were “inter-operating seamlessly on a narrative level” with the Muslim Brotherhood and several international organizations whose names I had to look up. Now you know.

This doesn’t seem to be the work of One Crazy Guy. It’s a point of view that has a following both on right-wing web sites and inside the White House. In particular, the Donald Trumps Sr. and Jr. both seem to be open to it. (The President reportedly was upset to discover that Higgins had been fired.) So this week’s featured post, “The Battles Within the White House Are Even Crazier Than You Think”, fleshes out the cultural Marxist conspiracy theory and how much it explains about the more rabid sort of Trump supporter. It should be out around 9 EDT.

In the weekly summary I’ll discuss (but mostly link to other people’s discussions of) Charlottesville, Google, North Korea, and some other ancient history happened days and days ago, before closing with a Queen parody that spoils the first six seasons of Game of Thrones. Lots of work still to do there, but I’ll try to have it out by noon.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (2)

Faustian Bargain

August 7, 2017 – 1:10 pm

If by 2017 the conservative bargain was to go along for the very bumpy ride because with congressional hegemony and the White House we had the numbers to achieve some long-held policy goals—even as we put at risk our institutions and our values—then it was a very real question whether any such policy victories wouldn’t be Pyrrhic ones. If this was our Faustian bargain, then it was not worth it.

– Senator Jeff Flake, Conscience of a Conservative

The big thing going on this week was a single story with two parts. Republicans in Congress have begun backing away from Trump, which I cover in “Was TrumpCare’s Failure a Turning Point?” The other piece of that story is Trump going back to his base, scapegoating immigrants and minorities. That gets covered in “Returning to the Well of White Resentment“.

This week everybody was talking about Trump’s failures and his attempts to keep his base energized

That’s what the two featured posts are about.

While I’ve got the topic raised, though, I wanted to say one more thing about the Statue of Liberty: Something we always forget about it is that it’s a monument to the end of slavery. That’s why there’s a broken chain at Lady Liberty’s feet. The statue was conceived in 1865, as the defeat of the Southern slave empire opened the prospect that we might actually become worthy of the fine sentiments in the Declaration of Independence. White nationalist may claim that they’re getting back to the original purpose of the statue when they divorce it from Emma Lazarus’ inscription, but they always forget that it commemorates the defeat of their idealized Confederacy.

and race

The NAACP issued a travel advisory warning for the state of Missouri. In addition to the longstanding problems that were made evident at Ferguson, the state just passed a law making it harder to sue employers for racial discrimination. You now have to prove that race was the primary reason you lost your job, not just a contributing factor. So a little racism in the workplace is OK, as long as you don’t fire people primarily because of their race.

Procter and Gamble put out a video about racism called “The Talk“. I had a hard time imagining why anybody would object to scenes of black people talking to their kids about racism, but that just showed my lack of imagination.

I always hate to direct attention to bad examples, but if you have a strong stomach, look at Mike the Cop’s response. Mike thinks one segment (where a black mother worries about how her new-driver daughter will handle being pulled over by police) is anti-cop, because not all cops are like that.

This is yet another version of the #NotAllMen fallacy that was answered by #YesAllWomen. It just doesn’t matter that not all cops mistreat blacks. Enough of them do that just about every black has a police story. So of course, if you are a black mother, you prepare your children for the possibility of police abuse. If Mike wants to get upset with somebody, let him get upset with the racist cops that have given his profession such a bad image.

While we’re talking about racism, Colin Kaepernick still doesn’t have a job. He’s the mixed-race quarterback who silently protested American racism by not standing for the national anthem before football games.

Kaepernick is not what football people call a “franchise” quarterback, i.e., somebody you can legitimately hope to build a championship team around. (If he were, some team would ignore his issues and sign him anyway. There are 32 teams and 15-20 franchise quarterbacks.) The 49ers thought he was for a while, and made it to the Super Bowl with him in 2013. But he lost his starting job in 2015, before his protest started.

Performance-wise, he’s on the borderline between starting quarterbacks and back-up quarterbacks, which makes him way better than a lot of guys who have jobs in the NFL. But he’s “controversial” now — moreso than players who abuse drugs or beat their wives, apparently. So he’s unemployed, too hot for any team to touch.

I still believe what I said when his protest started: Sporting events shouldn’t be patriotic rituals to begin with. We don’t “honor America” before movies or concerts; why do it at football games? So Kaepernick didn’t start this; the NFL started it when it insisted that players begin each game by honoring a country that doesn’t always honor them back. (The fact that he can’t get a job now just proves his point, IMO.) Kaepernick protested in a minimally disruptive way, and should be respected for that.

but we should pay more attention to the bad turn 2020 skirmishing is already taking

Trump is already historically unpopular for a relatively new president, and Democrats have no obvious early front-runner (like Clinton was four years ago). So most pundits expect candidates to come out of the woodwork, creating a free-for-all that might resemble the Republican race in 2016. It’s not hard to find 2020 speculation in the media: Will Bernie run again, or will he be too old? Is Elizabeth Warren serious when she denies she’s running? Does Joe Biden have another run left in him, and would that be a good thing or does the party need a new face, maybe a non-white like Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, or Deval Patrick? What about relatively unknown candidates coming from nowhere, Jimmy Carter style, like John Hickenlooper? Kirsten Gillibrand? Seth Moulton? Tim Ryan?

What’s bugging me right now, though, is not how premature this all is, but the fact that the campaign is already taking a negative turn. Way-too-early presidential campaigns are supposed to be idealistic and full of hope. It’s one thing to start getting excited about somebody years in advance, but why start running people down? For example: This Salon article attacks Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, and The Week‘s Ryan Cooper adds Deval Patrick to the objectionable list. Numerous articles have made something sinister out of Harris’ meeting with some wealthy Democrats, as if they should be barred from looking for someone to support.

The Shakesville blog’s founder Melissa McEwan objects to Cooper’s bifurcation of Democrats into “big money elites on one side and Sanders Democrats on the other”. Genuine progressives, she argues, might favor an incrementalist approach to progress.

Part of the reason that Black voters and non-Black voters, especially white voters from marginalized communities, joined to deliver crucial victories to Hillary Clinton across the Southern U.S. during the primary is because Sanders’ message of revolution, which centered on upending rather than refining the system, failed to resonate. And contrary to pervasive narratives, it was not because voters in those states are too conservative or were too uninformed to appreciate Sanders’ big ideas.

It is precisely those communities living on the edge, she argues, that have the most to fear from tear-it-down-and-start-over visions.

It is a privilege, in many ways, to be able to “think big.” To have the space and safety where one can imagine seismic shifts that don’t come with the risk of falling off the edge. We don’t all have that luxury.

Washington Monthly‘s David Atkins warns both sides:

The worst elements of both sides are engaging cynically in the ongoing civil war. Some Sanders supporters eagerly want to see him run again in 2020, and are actively seeking to kneecap every potential challenger to him–especially those who might be able to more easily secure Hillary Clinton’s coalition of older and minority voters. … On the other hand, establishment moderates since the early days of the Democratic Leadership Council have sought a marriage of the much-vaunted “Emerging Democratic Majority” with an educated, upper-middle-class fiscally centrist donor class. This has been to the detriment of the economy as a whole, and to the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party in general. They have no intention of taking a sharper stand against the predatory financial sector, and actively seek to use ideologically aligned women and minority candidates as a wedge against more radical activists who might threaten to alienate the wealthy donor class they have sought to woo away from the Republican Party since the Reagan era.

… If the fault lines once again pit more moderate minority candidates against more economically progressive white candidates, the resulting warfare will create the worst of all worlds: watered down economic policy that fails to win back disaffected white working class voters, combined with a bruising primary trading insults that could demotivate both class-conscious millennials and identity-conscious older women and minorities, depending on the eventual victor.

and you also might be interested in …

Two weeks ago I adapted Kipling’s poem “If” to reflect what it means to “be a Trump, my son”, and back in March I turned “Casey at the Bat” into the saga of TrumpCare’s initial failure in the House. Well, these days the Trump administration is inspiring a lot of people to take up poetry. Thursday night, Steven Colbert rewrote Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus” (the poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty) to match the Trump immigration proposal: “your huddled MBAs yearning to be tax-free“.

But the one that really got a belly laugh out of me was “American Rhapsody“. People have been asking for weeks whether Scaramucci can do the fandango, but this was the first extended parody I’ve seen. (“Transgender no! We will not let you serve.”)

Lying about trivial things has gotten to be business-as-usual in the Trump White House. Twice last week, he claimed to have received phone calls from people who say they never made them: leaders of the Boy Scouts (who were supposed to have told Trump his speech at the Boy Scout Jamboree was the best one ever) and the president of Mexico (who supposedly thanked Trump for his enforcement of the border).

Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders later admitted neither of those phone calls happened, but bristled at the suggestion that Trump had lied. But it’s hard to see what else to call it: Unless he’s delusional or suffers from dementia, Trump had to know the phone calls never happened, even as he was saying that they did.

Meanwhile, transcripts of calls Trump made to the Mexican and Australian leaders in January leaked to The Washington Post. (How do these things happen?) One thing we learn is that Trump seemed not to care whether Mexico would actually pay for the wall or not. He just didn’t want Mexico to say so in public.

and let’s close with something surprising

From one angle, this church looks very solid.

From another, it’s barely there at all.

That’s a little like theology: Come at it from one angle and its arguments seem very solid. Come at it from another and you don’t understand why everybody doesn’t see the holes.

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

Returning to the Well of White Resentment

August 7, 2017 – 12:16 pm

As Republicans in Congress back away from Trump, he throws red meat to his base.

When things go wrong, you go back to basics. As the down-home saying has it: “I’ll dance with who brung me.”

What “brung” Donald Trump to the White House was not the support of establishment Republicans like Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell, but the white resentment that had built up during the eight years of the Obama administration. And as Congressional Republicans start to back away from him, Trump is responding by going back to that well.

Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild started studying the Trump base years before anybody knew they’d be the Trump base. In her book Strangers in Their Own Land,  she summed up their “deep story” — the narrative of how life feels to them — like this:

You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black — beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you’re being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He’s on their side. In fact, isn’t he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It’s not your government anymore; it’s theirs.

It’s tricky to argue with this narrative, because they’re not wrong about being stuck in an unmoving line: Middle-class wages have been stagnating for decades. The jobs you can get without a college education are going away, except for the insecure ones that don’t pay much. And college is increasingly a highly leveraged gamble: If you don’t finish your degree, or just guess wrong about where the future jobs will be, you may end up so deep in debt that you’re worse off than if you hadn’t tried.

What’s wrong with that deep story is in who it blames: Immigrants, blacks, and Muslims, not the CEOs who send jobs to Indonesia, or the tax-cutting politicians who also cut money for education and training, or the lax anti-trust enforcement that keeps monopolies from competing for workers and funnels so much of America’s economic growth to corporations that occupy a few key choke points. The story, in a nutshell is: Get angry about the real problems in your life, and then let yourself be manipulated into blaming people who are even worse off than you.

Writing in The Washington Post on Friday, Christine Emba summarized how Trump uses this deep story.

First, Trump taps into a mainstream concern, one tied to how America’s economic system is changing and how some individuals are left at the margin: Employment? Immigration? College? Take your pick. Then, instead of addressing the issue in a way that embraces both its complexity and well-established research, [administration] officials opt for simplistic talking points known to inflame an already agitated base: Immigrants are sneaking into the country and stealing your jobs! Minorities are pushing you out of college!

Misdirecting blame onto well-chosen scapegoats is the heart of the Trump technique. Two weeks ago I described how environmentalists have been scapegoated for the decline in coal-mining jobs, taking the real causes — automation and fracking — out of the conversation. This week, in the wake of TrumpCare’s failure, a brewing rebellion in Congress, and the increasing likelihood that the special counsel’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia will actually get somewhere, those dastardly immigrants and minorities were front-and-center again.

Why can’t working-class kids get into Harvard? Tuesday, the NYT’s Charlie Savage reported that the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is looking for lawyers interested in “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.” This appears to presage an attack on affirmative action programs which disadvantage white and sometimes Asians applicants.

Such cases have been litigated for decades, with the outcome so far that affirmative action programs are OK if they are narrowly tailored to serve the goal of creating a diverse student body, which can improve the university’s educational experience for all its students. (Two examples: A history class’ discussion of slavery is going to be more real if some participants are black. And an all-white management program might be poor preparation for actual management jobs.)

Black comedian Chuck Nice lampooned the affirmative-action-is-keeping-my-kid-out-of-Harvard view Friday on MSNBC’s “The Beat”:

I am so happy this has finally come to the fore the way it should be, because whenever I walk onto an Ivy League campus, I always say to myself “Where are the white people?”

Emba’s article was more analytic:

Affirmative action is a consistent hobbyhorse on the right because it combines real anxieties with compelling falsehoods.

The real concern is how hard it is for children of the white working class to either get a top-flight education or succeed without one. Nobody’s laughing about that. But the compelling falsehood is to scapegoat blacks, who have an even smaller chance of getting ahead. The truly blameworthy people who get taken off the hook are the rich, and particularly the old-money families whose children have been going to Yale for generations. They’re the ones who are sucking up all the opportunity.

At Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Georgetown and Stanford universities, the acceptance rate for legacy applicants is between two and three times higher than the general admissions rate.

If you want to blame somebody for why your children didn’t get into their first-choice schools, consider Jared Kushner. Daniel Golden had already researched Jared’s case for his 2006 book, The Price of Admission. In November, when Trump’s win made Jared (and Golden’s book) newsworthy, Golden summarized his findings:

My book exposed a grubby secret of American higher education: that the rich buy their under-achieving children’s way into elite universities with massive, tax-deductible donations. It reported that New Jersey real estate developer Charles Kushner had pledged $2.5 million to Harvard University in 1998, not long before his son Jared was admitted to the prestigious Ivy League school. At the time, Harvard accepted about one of every nine applicants. (Nowadays, it only takes one out of twenty.)

I also quoted administrators at Jared’s high school, who described him as a less than stellar student and expressed dismay at Harvard’s decision.

“There was no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard,” a former official at The Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey, told me. “His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought for sure, there was no way this was going to happen. Then, lo and behold, Jared was accepted. It was a little bit disappointing because there were at the time other kids we thought should really get in on the merits, and they did not.”

It’s not that Somali immigrants are cutting in line ahead of your kid. It’s that there’s a different line for the very rich; your kid was never allowed to get into it.

Let’s shut down immigration, especially by people who don’t speak English. Donald Trump literally loves immigrants; that’s where his mom came from, and two of his three wives. His Mom, though, came from Scotland, where they speak something closely resembling English. And while Melania has a distinct Eastern-European accent, she was what Julia Ioffe calls “the right kind of immigrant. She is a beautiful white woman from Europe, and we like those.”

Those grubby brown Spanish-speaking immigrants, though, something has to be done about them. So Wednesday Trump endorsed a plan by Republican Senators Cotton and Perdue to cut legal immigration in half, and introduce a point system that favors English-speaking, youth, wealth, and education. (Homework: Try to figure out whether your own ancestors could have made it into the country under this system. I’m not sure about mine.)

The plan has virtually no chance of becoming law. Since it was introduced in the Senate a few months ago, no new sponsors have signed on. A number of other Republican senators criticized it, and it seems unlikely even to come up for a vote.

So the point of Wednesday’s push by the White House was purely to throw some red meat to the base. It also gave White House adviser Stephen Miller (who you may remember from his chilling quote in February that “the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned”) a chance to get in front of the cameras and repeat a number of falsehoods about immigrants and their effect on the economy.

He also got to dog whistle to white nationalists. When CNN’s Jim Acosta challenged how this plan aligns with the inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free … ), Miller waved aside the poem as something that was “added later” and accused Acosta of “cosmopolitan bias”.

The added-later part is true, sort of. Emma Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus” as part of a fund-raising campaign for the statue’s base, and it has been part of the monument for only 114 of its 131 years. The idea that its addition was somehow a usurpation of the statue’s original meaning is popular on the alt-right:

We’re having this “great war of national identity” because our New York-based Jewish elite no longer has the power to control the Narrative. The fake news Lügenpresse has steadily lost its legitimacy. Thanks to the internet, the smartphone and social media, they are losing control over everything from radio to publishing to video. I now have the capability to fire an Alt-Right cruise missile of truth from rural Alabama right back at David Brooks in New York City.

The “Occidental Dissent” blog recognized that Miller was repeating its case and felt suitably validated.

Chances are, you have never heard cosmopolitan used as an insult before, either. But that’s because you travel in the wrong circles. Nationalist movements have often used it to denote fellow citizens they thought might fit in better somewhere else. Stalin used it against Jews. It also traces back to Mussolini and Hitler. American white nationalists know this kind of history, which is what makes the word a good dog whistle.

Both these incidents go with Trump’s endorsement of police violence last week, the transgender ban, and his attempt to revive anti-Hillary-Clinton animus in West Virginia Wednesday. Governing is proving to be difficult, so he is trying to relive the glory days of the campaign. We should expect to see a lot more of it.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , | Comments (3)

Was TrumpCare’s Failure a Turning Point?

August 7, 2017 – 10:18 am

Republicans in Congress are still a long way from revolting against Trump. But most of them have stopped covering for him. That won’t create a sharp break in his (already small) support from the public, but it could lead to a long, slow erosion.

Right now it is hard to remember, but the story of the fall campaign and the early days of the new administration was how the various wings of the Republican Party were making peace with Trump’s leadership. Libertarians overlooked his authoritarian side. Theocrats forgave his amoral life and his complete ignorance of Christianity. Corporatists looked forward to tax cuts and deregulation, while agreeing to disagree with him about trade and immigration. NeoCons chose to listen to his belligerent rhetoric (defeat ISIS in 30 days) rather than his isolationist rhetoric (re-evaluate our commitment to NATO).

It’s hard to estimate exactly, but probably only about half of Trump’s voters were truly happy about his victory. The other half had reservations, but eventually came around to the idea that any Republican president, no matter how superficial his connection to the causes that had previously defined the party, would be better than Hillary Clinton. Even Ted Cruz, who famously refused to endorse Trump during his speech at the Republican Convention in July, and who had good reason to remember Trump’s scurrilous attacks against his wife and father, announced in September “after many months of careful consideration, of prayer and searching my own conscience” that he would vote for Trump.

Would Democrats fold? After the election, Trump benefited from a somewhat smaller version of the public goodwill that goes out to all new presidents. His favorables never reached 50% (45.5% on Inauguration Day according to 538’s weighted average), but they exceeded his unfavorables (41.3%). Americans like to give the new guy a chance, and so the transition-period talk was not about the continuing resistance of the never-Trump Republicans, but instead about whether red-state Democrats like Joe Manchin (WV) or Heidi Heitkamp (ND) could be coaxed into supporting him on specific issues. And if Trump chose to begin his administration with proposals that leaned Democratic — a Bernie-Sanders-like infrastructure program or using the government’s negotiating power to beat down drug prices (both issues he had raised during the campaign) — Democratic resistance in Congress might well crumble.

Those of us who feared Trump’s fascist leanings — contempt for democratic traditions and the rule of law, self-dealing, lack of transparency, scapegoating of racial and religious minorities, encouragement of violence, and total disregard for truth — more than his policy commitments had every reason to worry that his authoritarianism might wind up being popular.

If you were among the millions who showed up for one of the Women’s Marches on January 21, you may have wondered what you were accomplishing, beyond having a feel-good moment with like-minded people. In retrospect, the marches were pivotal: They (and the bunker-mentality response from Trump and his people) all but ended talk of Democrats giving in to Trump. That was the first turning point.

The Faustian bargain. Nonetheless, it seemed to go without saying that congressional Republicans would get in line behind him, and they did. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan muted their criticism of the clearly unconstitutional first version of Trump’s travel ban. McConnell shepherded Trump’s somewhat bizarre cabinet appointments through the Senate, and blocked the creation of an independent commission to investigate the Russia scandal. Ryan backed up Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes when he tried to subvert the House’s Russia investigation, and defended Trump’s firing of James Comey. Both of them turned a blind eye to Trump’s widespread conflicts of interest.

The implied agreement seemed to go like this: Whatever leaders like Ryan and McConnell thought of Trump as a man or a leader, unified Republican control of the branches of government would open the way to a long list of conservative proposals, which Ryan and McConnell would assemble. Trump, having few real policy ideas of his own, would sell those proposals to his supporters (who probably would be hurt by many of them) and then sign the bills once Congress passed them. The possibility of making Medicaid a block grant to the states and putting a hard cap on its growth, Ryan said, was something he’d been dreaming about since college. Why should he screw those dreams up by fulfilling Congress’ constitutional duty to check and balance the executive branch?

So: sweep Russia under the rug, let Trump get away with whatever scams he wants to run, and in exchange get a hard-right majority on the Supreme Court, repeal of ObamaCare, significant cuts to safety-net programs, big tax breaks for Republican special interests, and cover from the Justice Department for voter-suppression and gerrymandering efforts that could guarantee Republican domination of Congress into the indefinite future. What a deal!

ObamaCare repeal was supposed to be the easy part of that agenda. During the campaign, Trump promised “immediate” repeal. And even after things got real, when the new Congress began meeting in January, legislation was supposed to be on President Trump’s desk by February 20. But we are now in Congress’ August recess, with ObamaCare repeal in ruins and the rest of the legislative agenda still stuck on Square One.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, but one problem is that Trump has proved to be a terrible salesman. Aside from occasionally tweeting about how “terrific” and “beautiful” the Republican healthcare plan was — whichever one seemed most likely to pass at the moment — he did nothing to rally public support, and little to corral reluctant Republican votes in Congress. His self-created reputation as a great deal-maker proved to be empty. He never spoke to the nation as a whole about healthcare or made a case for his administration’s vision, whatever it is. He was quick to take credit for successes and distance himself from failures. The House bill that he celebrated in May was “mean” just a few weeks later.

Worse, media attention that might have been marshaled behind the Republican agenda has again and again been diverted by Trump himself and the circus atmosphere of his White House. In addition to his personal spats and the infighting of his people, the Russia scandal that he swore was nothing keeps looking more and more like something. Again and again, his people have been forgetful or dishonest about their meetings with Russians, and Trump himself has participated in misleading the public. Even Republicans who want to cover for their party’s president have to wonder what exactly he’s covering up.

In short, congressional Republicans may not have ever liked Trump or approved of him as the leader of their party, but they would have been happy to march behind him to victory. What they’re not prepared to do is follow him off the cliff to defeat.

The second turning. So here’s what we’ve seen recently.

  • Congress overwhelmingly passed new Russia sanctions, which Trump can’t remove without congressional approval.
  • After the TrumpCare defeat, Trump demanded the Senate try again, and not consider any other legislation or leave for vacation until they passed something on healthcare. The Senate ignored him.
  • Some Republican senators are looking for a bipartisan fix for the ObamaCare exchanges (along the lines I discussed last week).
  • The Senate didn’t officially adjourn for the August recess. This prevents Trump from replacing Jeff Sessions via a recess appointment without Senate hearings, which was part of the most likely fire-Mueller scenario. This signal of distrust is something the Senate majority has never before done to a president of its own party.
  • Two bipartisan proposals are being floated to prevent Trump from firing Mueller.
  • A number of Republicans (including Mike Pence, though he denies it) are making preliminary moves in Iowa, as if they didn’t expect Trump to be a factor in 2020. John Kasich and/or Ben Sasse might be planning to challenge Trump if he does run. John McCain comments: “They see weakness in this president. Look, it’s not a nice business we’re in.”
  • Congress shows no signs of taking up the immigration plan the White House endorsed this week.

The current face of Republican resistance to Trump is Senator Jeff Flake, author of the new book Conscience of a Conservative, a section of which was published recently in Politico Magazine:

If by 2017 the conservative bargain was to go along for the very bumpy ride because with congressional hegemony and the White House we had the numbers to achieve some long-held policy goals—even as we put at risk our institutions and our values—then it was a very real question whether any such policy victories wouldn’t be Pyrrhic ones. If this was our Faustian bargain, then it was not worth it. If ultimately our principles were so malleable as to no longer be principles, then what was the point of political victories in the first place?

This isn’t how things were supposed to go. By now, Republicans were supposed to be basking in the glow not just of stealing a Supreme Court seat, but of repealing ObamaCare, awarding their donors a tax cut, and maybe even creating some jobs with an infrastructure program. If any Republicans in Congress harbored doubts about the Trump administration, they would be quiet for fear of a primary challenge from his supporters. Red-state Democrats and maybe even the party leaders would be submissive, looking for ways to argue that they could work with Trump.

If the Women’s Marches were the first turning away from that scenario, I believe we are in the middle of the second.

It would be a mistake to expect this turning to go very far very fast. Elected Republicans are not likely to join the resistance anytime soon. But we also shouldn’t underestimate the effect they can produce just by going silent and working behind the scenes.

For example, look at Trump’s effort to undermine the Mueller investigation. He has been building a witch-hunt narrative and claiming that Mueller is motivated by conflicts of interest, with the obvious intent to justify firing Mueller and shutting his investigation down. Establishment Republicans could be echoing those points. They could have left the door open for a recess-appointed attorney general who could then fire Mueller. That would have left their own hands clean, and they could have tut-tutted about the firing without doing anything.

Instead, most congressional Republicans continue to endorse Mueller’s integrity, and they closed the back door to his firing.

They will continue to support the administration when it puts forward policies that are long-term pieces of the broader Republican agenda. But as Trump continues to make bad decisions, spew outrageous misinformation, and pick fights with whoever raises his ire from moment to moment, more and more he will be defended only White House flacks like Kellyanne Conway, or dedicated Trumpists like Newt Gingrich or Rudy Giuliani. Republicans of independent authority will stand aside.

That silence will be felt. It will not lead to a sudden crash in Trump’s approval among Republicans (which is still fairly high). But the continuing lack of credible defense will cause a slow erosion. And at some point, that erosion might make direct Republican resistance a politically viable course.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged | Comments (3)

The Monday Morning Teaser

August 7, 2017 – 8:00 am

This week I’m focusing on two related stories: Congressional Republicans are beginning to distance themselves from the White House, and Trump is shoring up the support of his base by tossing them red meat like cutting legal immigration in half and going after affirmative action programs at universities. I see these two developments as intimately related, but the details of how each one is happening are separate, so I’ll cover them in two featured posts.

The increasing distance between Trump and Congress will be in “Was TrumpCare’s Failure a Turning Point?” and Trump’s rabble rousing in “Returning to the Well of White Resentment”. They both still need some work, so I’m not sure exactly when they’ll appear.

The weekly summary should short this week, though I still have some links to collect. I’ll cover some racial issues, like the controversy over P&G’s video “The Talk”, the NAACP’s travel advisory for Missouri, and the NFL’s blacklisting of Colin Kaepernick. Naturally, there were more developments in the Russia investigation. A Vatican journal put out a condemnation of the American Catholic leadership’s political alliance with right-wing Protestantism. And I’ll close with a cleverly designed chapel that looks to me like a metaphor for religion itself.

Things will probably come out slowly today, but I expect to have everything out at least by 1 EDT.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (0)