“Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Eugene Robinson: Does Trump know he’s president?
The Trump administration so far has been smoke and mirrors, sound and fury, self-proclaimed victimhood and angry tweets. Where is the substance? Where is the competence? And where — increasingly — is the public support?
President Trump’s approval rating of 42 percent is the lowest that Gallup has ever measured for a president this early in his term. It should be no surprise that Trump isn’t having a hearts-and-flowers honeymoon, given that his inauguration was followed a day later by the biggest mass protest in the nation’s history. But it usually takes more than a few weeks for the relationship between POTUS and populace to become so curdled.
It is true that most of those who voted for Trump are sticking with him. But they, you will recall, were in the minority — try as he might, Trump will never erase the fact that he lost the popular vote. And he has done essentially nothing to bring skeptics over to his side.
Instead, he has worried his political allies and galvanized his opponents. To me, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) sound a bit uncertain and defensive these days. By contrast, the House and Senate minority leaders, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), seem full of energy and purpose. It’s awfully hard to tell from body language who won the election.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: Trump’s machismo vs. Sweden’s ‘feminist foreign policy’
At a rally in Florida this month, President Trump sparked an international uproar when he seemingly cited a terrorist attack in Sweden that never actually happened. Trump later clarified that he was alluding to a segment he’d seen on Fox News regarding Sweden’s immigration policies, which isn’t much of a defense, but the damage was already done. His comment became a punch line on late-night television and social media. Even the Swedish embassy in Washington piled on, tweeting that it looked forward to “informing” the president.
Yet the widespread mockery of Trump’s flub, while entertaining, somewhat overshadowed the particularly relevant context in which it occurred. Trump was attempting to defend his deplorable Muslim travel ban by invoking the need to “keep our country safe.” And he was doing it by calling attention to a country, Sweden, whose unconventional approach to foreign policy and security issues underscores the senselessness of the agenda that Trump and his chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, are advancing. [..]
In contrast with Trump’s machismo, Sweden, which recently began a two-year term on the U.N. Security Council, has adopted what Swedish foreign minister Margot Wallstrom calls a “feminist foreign policy.” This approach puts the pursuit of gender equality at the center of nearly all of Sweden’s foreign policy initiatives, from pushing for more female negotiators in peace talks to supporting international development programs for women and girls. In one case, Wallstrom even pulled out of an arms deal with Saudi Arabia over concerns about women’s and human rights.
Steven Rattner: Mischaracterizations, Misrepresentations and Lies
There he goes again. Donald Trump may be a month into his presidency, but his public remarks continue to be laden with the same mischaracterizations, misrepresentations and, yes, lies as his campaign.
Mr. Trump’s alternate reality has been on vivid display in venues ranging from an airplane hangar in Melbourne, Fla., to a gathering of conservatives last week just outside the nation’s capital.
All in all, it’s been a kind of greatest hits of his favorite, factually challenged remarks — with more likely to come in his address to Congress on Tuesday night.
“Jobs are already starting to pour back in,” he yelled to the crowd in Florida. “Obamacare covers very few people,” he insisted in Maryland
The small problem with these “facts” and so many more in his florid rhetoric is that they are not true.
Dave Johnson: Tax Cuts Steal Democracy
The Trump administration, as have all Republican administrations, is promoting tax cuts for the rich, saying they will “create growth.” Never mind the destructive history of tax cuts, the destructive history of “trickle-down economics” (and the destructive history of Republican administrations generally) — they’re doing it again.
Any time taxes come up, decades of Republican bamboozlement gets in the way of rational discussion. Republicans say things like “taxes take money out of the economy” and “tax cuts create growth” to trick people into supporting tax cuts for the rich and corporations (which are really just more tax cuts for the rich). [..]
So tax cuts do not “grow the economy.” They just don’t. But tax cuts and the resulting drop on revenue to our democracy are used to force cuts in the things our government does to make our lives better and help our economy prosper in the longer term.
Jon Perr Unlike The Tea Party, Trump Resistance Has Truth On Its Side
On February 8, 2009, CNBC talking head Rick Santelli helped launched the Tea Party movement with an epic rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. But 8 years later, as Republicans are now learning the hard way, the tea bag is on the other cheek.
The signs of sizable, sustained and seriously angry opposition to President Trump and the Republican agenda are everywhere. Trump’s first weekend was marked by the Women’s March that brought over three million Americans to streets of cities and towns in states red and blue. His disturbing and dangerous executive order on immigration and travel was met with thousands of protesters in airports across the country, while an army of lawyers mobilized to protect visa holders and legal U.S. residents from Trump’s draconian Muslim ban. Meanwhile, massive crowds are greeting GOP Congressmen at town hall meetings and public events back in their districts, causing abortion-restricting, Obamacare-repealing, Medicare-privatizing and climate change-denying hardliners to flee from their own constituents.
All in all, the effect is precisely what the organizers of the Indivisible movement sought to create. Those Democratic Congressional staffers who suffered through the Tea Party onslaught of 2009 and 2010 are turning the tables on their tormenters. And as Sarah Kliff recently reported in Vox, many veteran right-wing foot-soldiers from the halcyon days of the Tea Party are grudgingly acknowledging the turnaround:
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