The Weekly Sift

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.

It’s another week where I have to chose between talking about stuff of substantial importance (like the shocking new estimates of the death toll of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico) and outrageous notions coming out of the White House (like the President’s lawyer making us think about Trump pardoning himself by declaring it “unthinkable”).

Everything that was off last week (the North Korea summit, the trade war with everyone from China to Canada) is on again this week. Does any of it mean anything? Are we witnessing the bumbling of an administration that can’t figure out what it wants? Or is it like the aikido master who makes you react to so many feints and bluffs that you fall over without being touched?

I don’t have an answer to that question, but I’ll try to stay on my feet for another week.

White House rhetoric about the Mueller investigation has been building up, and I’m left with the feeling that one side or the other is about to do something major. The White House might be anticipating a move by Mueller: a presidential subpoena, a new set of indictments, a preliminary report. Or it might be laying the groundwork for it’s own bold strike: a wave of pardons, firing Mueller or Rosenstein, naming a second special prosecutor to investigate the investigators. Or maybe the rhetoric is just rhetoric and doesn’t mean anything at all; who can say? It could all be another aikido feint.

I don’t know what I can do about any of that, but I thought I’d get out in front of Mueller’s eventual report by setting down my own general ideas about impeachment. When the report comes out, Trump critics like me will be strongly tempted to adjust our definitions of impeachable offense to match whatever was found. I’d prefer not to do that, so I want to get my basic principles into words now. That post “What is impeachment for?” should be out shortly.

The weekly summary should be out around 11 EDT. It will cover the Hurricane Maria estimates, the on-again trade war, and the bizarre claims Trump’s lawyers make in a recently leaked letter. I’ll use the Roseanne Barr/ Samantha Bee controversy to revisit one of the Sift’s more useful articles “Slurs: Who can say them, when, and why“. And I’ll point to a lot of significant events that haven’t been getting the attention they deserve: the rollback of Dodd/Frank restrictions on the big banks, Illinois’ long-delayed ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, Trump’s attempt to force power companies to burn more coal, and a revolutionary new way to generate power with natural gas. And then I’ll close with the world’s tallest bonfire.

I’m on the road again, relying on the hotel WiFi, so this morning’s Sift may experience unexpected delays.

This week I ran across two statements that, according the way I use language, were so outrageous as to be almost humorous: The RNC praised Donald Trump’s “commitment to religious freedom”, and Mike Pence called Joe Arpaio “a champion of the rule of law”. Neither, however, was trying to be amusing or shocking. Both were saying things that seemed true to them.

Puzzling over that led me to a larger theme: Both religious freedom and the rule of law are centuries-old phrases that conservatives have repurposed to mean something new. People who know the new usages say things to each other that appear ridiculous to those who don’t. To us, it may look like Pence and the RNC are being dishonest or hypocritical, but actually they’re just misappropriating words. If you’re going to argue with them, you need to know what they’re really saying.

That’s the topic of this week’s featured post, “Speaking in Code: two phrases that no longer mean what they used to”. It should be out before 10 EDT, hotel WiFi willing.

The weekly summary has to cover the barrage of lies and contradictions that came out of the administration this week, particularly from Trump’s new lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. More and more, I’m thinking of the administration as running a new kind of disinformation campaign. Previous administrations have presented a spin on the truth, possibly bolstering weak points in their defenses with lies (or, more likely, statements that deceive while being technically true). But the Trump administration seems to be doing away with truth completely. Often they have no version of events, but simply label somebody else’s version as “fake news”. Rather than present a narrative, they just say things, and tomorrow they may say different things without acknowledgement or apology.

In addition, I’ll discuss Adam Schiff’s warning against “taking the bait” of impeachment, the debate over what role party establishments should play in primaries, the bizarre candidates who might be emerging from those primaries, the problems caused by high-deductible health insurance, how the economy is doing, and a few other things. I’ll try to get that out by noon.

The news shows this week were dominated by speculation about Donald Trump’s legal troubles: Will Michael Cohen be indicted? If he is, will he flip and testify against Trump? If he does, what does he know? Will Trump fire Robert Mueller or Rob Rosenstein? Will Congress try to prevent that? Or if not, will it react after the firing happens? How?

If you watched TV news for more than a few minutes, it was easy to forget the most accurate answer to all these questions: We don’t know. The questions are all important, but at the moment there’s not a lot publicly available information about them. All week, it’s been hard to keep straight whether or not anything was actually happening.

One thing that did happen was that James Comey’s book A Higher Loyalty appeared in bookstores Tuesday. It turns to be a well-written and interesting book. You’d never figure this out from the coverage it’s been getting, but most of the book has nothing to do with Trump. It’s Comey’s story of his life in law enforcement, and the lessons about leadership that he draws from it. It turns out he’s been involved in lots of interesting events over the years, like putting Martha Stewart in jail or facing down Alberto Gonzalez over John Ashcroft’s hospital bed. It’s a good read.

So I’ll review that. The post should come out around 10 EDT.

That’s short, and the weekly summary will be correspondingly long: North Korea, anti-gun protests, Barbara Bush — and yes, Michael Cohen, Sean Hannity, the Mueller investigation and all that. I use Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to Mar-a-Lago as an example of the everyday corruption of the Trump White House, point out the promising twist Paul Krugman has put on an old climate-change argument, and discuss a few other recent developments before finishing with a video of engineering students walking on water. I’ll try to get that out by noon.

You see a lot of warnings that American democracy is in trouble in the Trump Era. (You see some of those warnings on this blog.) But how serious is the situation really? Are the comparisons to Mussolini or Putin overblown, or are the people who think so in denial? Will we bounce back and repair the damage as soon as Trump is gone, or has the country been put on a new track that may take us places we never imagined America could go? Or have we already been on that track for a while, and that’s how we got Trump in the first place? Can we get off it, or is already too late?

If only there were some way to set the current challenges in some kind of international or historical perspective and think about them like reasonable people, rather than swinging back and forth between optimism and despair according to whatever mood strikes us.

That’s why the featured article this week traces the discussion in the new book How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. They’ve done the research in a comprehensive way, rather than just seeking out whatever parallel proves some predetermined point. That should be out between 9 and 10 EDT.

In the weekly summary, I will do my best not to be blasé about the usual mix of corruption, foreign disasters, shootings, and rumblings of trade war. I picture that posting around noon.