The Weekly Sift

For the last few days, the media has been focusing on the right story — Trump revoking John Brennan’s security clearance — but has been missing what’s really worrisome about it: An overarching theme of Trump’s actions has been to break the link between presidential powers and presidential responsibilities. That link is the key difference between the chief executive of a republic and an autocrat.

I’ll go into that theme in much more detail in the featured post, but here’s how it applies to Brennan: Presidents have power over security clearances because they bear responsibility for safeguarding the nation’s secrets. But Trump isn’t even trying to claim that Brennan has compromised classified information; he’s just striking back at people who were involved in launching the Russia investigation.

In other words, he’s treating his power over clearances as if it belongs to him personally, rather than as a trust that he holds and must account for. It’s similar to the way he has treated his pardon power and several other presidential powers. Many people talk abstractly about the “norms” of American democracy, and how the erosion of them threatens the Republic. This is a very specific and clear example.

That post should appear around 9 EDT. The weekly summary needs to cover a lot of stuff: the Manafort trial, Aretha Franklin, the continuing sabotage of ObamaCare, Warren’s vision of accountable capitalism, Turkey, and several other topics. I also ran into a lot of great amusing videos this week. I’ll link to Denmark’s sharp response to Fox Business Network, Tracey Ullman’s “MelaniaBot” series, and James Corden’s fantasy about Mueller announcing his Trump indictment. That should be out between noon and 1.

I started a vacation yesterday, but I’m avoiding canceling two consecutive Sifts by putting out a weekly summary (but no featured post) this morning. (I’m writing this from the breakfast room of a Best Western in Pennsylvania, and I’ve got Cubs tickets for Friday.) I’m going to try to have the summary out by 10 EDT.

As usual in the Trump Era, a lot is going on:

• Across the government and the country, Americans continue to wonder what Trump promised Putin in their private meeting two weeks ago. Secretary of State Pompeo tried to convince the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that they know everything they need to know, but instead raised doubts about how much he knows himself.
• The government tried to claim that it met a court deadline to reunite the migrant families it separated, but it did so by classifying the parents who hadn’t gotten their kids back as “ineligible”. The judge doesn’t seem to be buying it.
• Trump prematurely announced that he has resolved the trade war he started with Europe. The 2nd quarter GDP numbers look good, but come with a major asterisk.
• Trump is also facing increasing legal pressure on a variety of fronts: Michael Cohen seems to be flipping against him, Paul Manafort’s trial is starting, a lawsuit challenging his receipt of unconstitutional emoluments cleared a major hurdle, and his long-time CFO got a subpoena. Meanwhile, his supporters are trying to impeach Rod Rosenstein and starting to say “So what if he did collude with the Russians?”

I’ll try to flesh all that out, plus a few other things (like some interesting environmental developments), before closing with a funny-not-funny video about the questions gay couples get asked.

So Trump is meeting Putin in Helsinki as I type this. We haven’t been told what this meeting is about, and it’s behind closed doors with no one but interpreters present, so we may never know. We can be sure that Trump will emerge from the meeting and declare it a great success, no matter how many concessions he yielded or how little he got in return.

Anyway, I’m not equipped to do breaking news, so I’ll try to suppress the temptation.

There will be two featured posts this week. The first one explores a different aspect of an issue I raised in the weekly summary last week: Trump usually frames his objections to immigrants in terms of illegal immigration of unskilled people, and talks about how we need to enforce our laws, while also changing them to claim a more useful class of immigrant. But that’s not really what’s going on. Last week I linked to articles describing how he’s making life harder for legal immigrants, and blocking their paths to citizenship. This week I’ll describe how he’s discouraging skilled immigrants from coming to America. The point is to keep America white; everything else is just rhetoric.

I haven’t titled that article yet, but it should be out before 9 EDT.

The second featured post will look at Judge Kavanaugh and ask what we could expect from him as a justice on the Supreme Court. There’s been a huge amount of speculation both ways about whether he would reverse Roe v Wade, and I’ll cover that, but a lot of other important issues are at stake: the government’s ability to regulate corporations at all, including worker-safety regulations; the survival of any right (other than corporate rights) not specifically listed in the Constitution; the Court’s willingness to reverse precedent; the limits of presidential power; the increasing partisanship of the Court; and so on. I’ll try to get that out by 11.

The weekly summary will discuss Trump’s tumultuous European tour, the new Mueller indictments, Peter Strzok’s televised testimony to Congress (which already seems so long ago, but it was Thursday), Jim Jordan, the administration’s declaration of victory in the War on Poverty, and a few other things, before closing with a very satisfying story about a guy tormenting email spammers. I’ll try for noon, but it may slip to 1 or so.

OK, this was not our best week. If you went to one of the keep-families-together demonstrations on Saturday, you might have gotten energized by that. But overall, the news was pretty depressing.

As I warned last week, that sense of victory we felt when Trump appeared to reverse the family-separation policy was premature. It’s still uncertain whether or not the policy will come back or what will replace it. In the meantime, about 2,000 kids are still separated from their parents, and the government is either unwilling or unable to reunite them. We’re now seeing the spectacle of kids too young to know which country they came from facing an immigration hearing.

And then there was the Supreme Court. Every year, there’s a flurry of decisions at the end of the term in June, and usually there’s a little something for everybody. You’re happy about this, sad about that, you hoped for more here, and so on. This year, the news was uniformly bad. The Muslim ban, voting rights, gerrymandering, unions, gay rights … it all came out wrong. Some of the decisions were merely disappointing, while others were horrible.

And then, guess what? We found out that it’s going to get worse. Justice Kennedy is retiring. Unless a miracle happens, Trump will replace him with a clone of Gorsuch, making Roberts the new swing vote. Since Roberts is already Chief Justice, he’ll be the most powerful American jurist in a long, long time. If you know anything about him, that’s seriously bad news.

Personally, I bounce back and forth between being depressed and being energized, so I wrote two featured posts this week. The depressing one is “Minority Rule Snowballs”. Back in 2013, I outlined what I saw as the new Republican strategy: They were going to stop trying to appeal to a majority of the American people, and instead see if they could rule from the minority. That’s been way more successful than I thought was possible, and this post will describe how. It should be out shortly.

Then there’s a post about not giving up — actually, the depressing post ends with a riff on not giving up too — that I haven’t titled yet. When I look at the aw-fuck-it temptation in my own heart, it’s uncomfortably rooted in my sense of privilege. That’s why I wasn’t prepared for a decades-long struggle against fascism: Once people like me get mobilized, what we want is supposed to happen pretty quickly. And it’s also why I imagine that giving up is an option: If the worst happens, I could easily melt into the population of “good Germans” who get along relatively well.  Aw-fuck-it-we’re-going-to-lose-anyway is a much too easy way out. If the Gandhis and Kings and Mandelas had gone that way, the world would be a much worse place.

So let’s call that for 11 EDT and the weekly summary for noon or so.

This week the separating-families-at-the-border issue blew up, with even Republicans trying to distance themselves from it. Hostage-taking has been part of the Republican toolbox at least since the debt-ceiling crisis of 2011, but it has never been done this nakedly before. Trump is terrorizing young children, and promises to keep doing it until his demands are met. He wants a wall, changes in immigration laws, and safe passage to a country of his choice. (OK, I made that last one up.)

More significant reports were issued this week than I was able to read. There was the NY attorney general’s lawsuit against the Trump Foundation, the Supreme Court’s OK of Ohio’s voter suppression plan, and the Justice Department Inspector General’s report on how the FBI handled the Clinton email investigation. I’ll have to rely on other people’s opinions on most of that.

Oh, and North Korea. Remember North Korea? That’s so last week, but people have been making up their minds about the outcome of the Trump/Kim summit. My opinion is that we’ll be lucky if it turns out to have been just a big photo op. A far worse outcome is that Trump makes a bad deal and then can’t admit it, so to protect his own ego he winds up covering for Kim’s misbehavior (in much the same way that he has been covering for Putin).

What I like to do with the Sift is mention and link to the important stories of the week, but also take a step back and look at the bigger picture. This week’s big-picture view de-wonkifies a Paul Krugman column that explains something important: There’s a reason why the big corporate tax cut passed in December is never going to trickle down to workers, and it has to do with the difference between an information economy and an industrial economy. We all sort of know that things are different now, but still a lot of our economic intuitions come from the age of Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan. That article “The corporate tax cut will never trickle down” should be out before 9 EDT.

Another long-view question I want to raise is whether Trumpism is turning into a religion. As the majority of evangelicals continue to support him (in defiance of just about everything Jesus ever said) and the anti-Trump minority begins to peel off, more and more people are starting to use religion as a metaphor for Trumpism. But what if it isn’t a metaphor? What if Trumpism is really, literally becoming a new American religion? I still haven’t decided whether that’s its own article or just a paragraph or two in the weekly summary.

There’s still a lot to do on the summary, so I’ll be lucky to get it out by noon.