The Weekly Sift

So Trump has been impeached, and now we wait to see what his trial will be like. Can Republicans really get away with simultaneously claiming that there isn’t enough direct evidence, and that the American people don’t need to hear witnesses with a clear view of what happened (like Mick Mulvaney)? Can senators like Susan Collins and Cory Gardner get re-elected while supporting a sham trial that acquits Trump without hearing any witnesses? We’ll soon find out.

The new NAFTA got through Congress, and the tensions in the trade war with China seem to have diminished. What does that say about the future of trade?

Meanwhile, the Afghanistan Papers came out, painting a picture of cluelessness and lying that stretches through three administrations of both parties. And the NYT and the WaPo had separate scoops about the constant corporate surveillance Americans live with, as both our smartphones and our cars have become spies against us.

This week’s featured post will start with the Christianity Today editorial calling for Trump’s removal, and from there talk about the entire deal-with-the-Devil that Evangelicals have made — and why it’s not going to help them win the culture wars. That post should be out around 11 EST. Expect the weekly summary around 1.

I’m running behind today, so posts should come out a little later than usual.

The featured post is another one where I try to grasp what’s going on in the minds of Trump supporters. This time I’m looking at the ones who are well-educated, well-informed, and aspire to moral values, rather than the kinds of people who chant “Send her back!” at Trump’s rallies. I refer to them as the “Inner Party” and look at two Bill Barr speeches to see what the administration’s message to them is. The post is called “What Does Trump’s Inner Party Believe?”, and I’m hoping to get it out by noon EST.

The weekly summary will cover the progress in the impeachment effort, the import of the McGahn court decision, Thanksgiving, the threat of rising corporate debt, and a few other things. It should be out around 1.

I have to confess failure this week: I should have watched the impeachment hearings for you, and I couldn’t make myself do it. My full confession is in this week’s featured post “Why Can’t I Watch This?”. It should be out shortly.

The weekly summary has a lot to cover. The impeachment hearings, of course, but also the Roger Stone conviction. The regime’s response to the Hong Kong protesters escalated. We got more explicit information about Stephen Miller’s role in promoting white supremacy. Pete Buttigieg grabbed the lead in the Iowa polls, while new candidates entered the race. Kentucky’s defeated governor Matt Bevin finally conceded, and Democrats held on to the governorship in another red state, Louisiana. Turkish President Erdogan came to the White House to make Trump’s Syria surrender official. There’s more, and then we close with a fascinating graph about the drastic decline in the cost of artificial lighting since 1300.

That should be out, say, around noon EST.

Impeachment dominated the news these last two weeks. That’s appropriate in the sense that it’s important, but it’s also not the only thing happening. The world continues to be the world, and doesn’t stop to watch the Trump drama play out: California is burning again. We got economic news that can be interpreted as either reassuring or worrisome. Brexit got delayed again, and a new UK election got scheduled. Elizabeth Warren met the challenge to explain how she’ll pay for her healthcare plan, as Tim Ryan and Beto O’Rourke dropped out of the race. Katie Hill’s resignation from Congress raised all sorts of larger issues about sexism and revenge porn. Dahlia Lithwick wrote a deeply personal essay about why she hasn’t been able to bring herself to cover the Supreme Court in the year since the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.

So anyway: impeachment. One featured post explains why I think impeachment is necessary, even if you accept the prediction that it will divide the country and leave Trump in office anyway. A more event-oriented view of the impeachment process will be in the weekly summary.

The other featured post is less timely, but does have a current-events hook: I’ve invented a hypothetical Christian denomination to test the notion that Christians’ religious freedom should allow them to ignore discrimination laws: What if some group took Psalm 90:10 — “The days of our years are three score and ten.” — as prescriptive, and its healthcare professionals insisted on their right to discriminate against those over 70?

The impeachment post should be out soon, maybe by 8 EST. The religious freedom post should follow around 11, and the weekly summary by noon.

It’s been a week of interesting times, in the Chinese-curse sense of the term.

When I posted last week’s Sift, Trump had announced that American troops in Syria were pulling back from the border zone that Turkey wanted to occupy, apparently abandoning the Kurdish allies who had defeated ISIS under our guidance. Turkey hadn’t moved yet, but an invasion was expected soon.

Since then, Turkey has invaded, the UN Security Council’s condemnation of that invasion was blocked by the odd couple of the US and Russia, Trump made noises about economic sanctions against Turkey but did nothing, the Kurds flipped their alliances and sought protection from the Putin-supported Assad regime, some unknown number of ISIS prisoners escaped to sow new mayhem, and now the remaining US troops in Syria are making a chaotic retreat to avoid getting caught in a Syrian-Turkish crossfire. The only clear winner in all this is Putin. Funny thing; weird Trump administration stories always seem to come back to Putin somehow.

The Trump impeachment story also got more interesting. Our recently fired ambassador to Ukraine defied Trump’s gag order and testified behind closed doors for nine hours. Two of Rudy’s cronies got arrested for channeling Ukrainian (and possibly Russian) money into Republican campaigns, amid tales of plots to manipulate the Ukrainian national gas company to the advantage of Republican donors. Giuliani himself is said to be under investigation by the SDNY, which he used to run. The administration lost a series of court cases, but that didn’t stop the White House Counsel from staking out a maximal Trump-is-above-the-law position in a letter to Congress.

Meanwhile, Trump announced a breakthrough in the China trade war, which so far looks a lot like his “breakthrough” to denuclearize North Korea. The Democrats are about to hold another presidential debate. Another big Brexit deadline is coming up. Poland’s voters endorsed its authoritarian-populist ruling party. California had a series of brownouts and blackouts. The kettle kept boiling in Hong Kong. And … well, you get the idea. The world kept being the world, even while we were all looking in some other direction.

So anyway, there will be two featured posts this week. The first one, out soon, is my answer to Republicans like Lindsey Graham, who have supported Trump in everything else, but are shocked by his betrayal of the Kurds: “Backstabbing the Kurds is just Trump being Trump”. A trust-is-for-suckers theme has run through his entire life, so you can’t really be surprised that the Kurds are joining Trump U students and his three wives on the list of people whose trust he’s abused. As Trump often says about immigrants, you knew he was a snake when you took him in.

The second featured post will focuses on impeachment, and in particular how the Ukraine shakedown gets bigger and bigger the longer Congress investigates. At first we thought it was just a simple phone call, but now it looks like large chunks of the State Department — and possibly Energy Secretary Perry and VP Pence — got pulled into a months-long corrupt scheme. That should be out around 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover more of the operational developments in Syria, plus a lot of important stuff that isn’t getting the attention it deserves while we all focus on Syria and impeachment. It should appear between noon and 1.