“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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Paul Krugman: It’s All About Trump’s Contempt
For journalists covering domestic policy, this past week poses some hard choices. Should we focus on the Trump budget’s fraudulence — not only does it invoke $2 trillion in phony savings, it counts them twice — or on its cruelty? Or should we talk instead about the Congressional Budget Office assessment of Trumpcare, which would be devastating for older, poorer and sicker Americans?
There is, however, a unifying theme to all these developments. And that theme is contempt — Donald Trump’s contempt for the voters who put him in office.
You may recall Trump’s remark during the campaign that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Well, he hasn’t done that, at least so far. He is, however, betting that he can break every promise he made to the working-class voters who put him over the top, and still keep their support. Can he win that bet?
Richard Wolffe: Make no mistake: Donald Trump has fueled violence against journalists
How did we get to this point? When did our public standards fall so low that charges of physical assault were met with the sound of crickets across the Republican side of Congress?
The assault charge now standing against Montana’s congressional candidate Greg Gianforte is itself a disqualifying moment for anyone attempting to enter elected office.
You can hear for yourself what happened to Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs when he asked Gianforte a simple question about the impact of the Republican repeal of Obamacare. Make up your own mind about Gianforte’s behavior.
But there’s something even more poisonous that threatens our politics today, and it has spread far beyond Montana.
You can trace back the decline in our politics to a single campaign and a single candidate, who riled up his crowds to turn on the press and hurl abuse in their direction.
That’s the same candidate who longed for the days when he could punch protesters in the face. Sure enough, his supporters ended up punching people in the face.
Fortunately the rule of law still endures in the courts, where a Kentucky judge recently denied the candidate’s claims that he was just exercising his rights to free speech and couldn’t be sued for inciting violence.
The candidate is of course now president of the United States, who calls the media “the enemy of the American people.”
This is not a small development in the long history of shocking Trumpisms.
Eugene Robinson: The Trump scandal that has nothing to do with Russia
President Trump’s budget demonstrates the costs of accepting lies as a normal currency in politics, broken promises as a customary way of doing business, false claims of being “populist” as the equivalent of the real thing and sloppiness as what we should expect from government.
Trump’s fiscal plan was described as dead before arrival, but approaching it this way is a mistake. Many of the steep cuts in programs for low-income Americans mimic reductions passed before by Republicans in the House of Representatives. There’s more life in this document than the easy dismissals would suggest.
Particularly astounding from a president who promised better health care for Americans who can’t afford it is the $1.85 trillion reduction over a decade from Medicaid and subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. But didn’t Trump promise not to cut Medicaid? Never mind, budget director Mick Mulvaney told CNBC’s John Harwood. That pledge, Mulvaney explained, had been overridden by Trump’s promise to repeal and replace Obamacare.
Doug Williams: Is shooting unarmed black people considered ‘law-and-order’?
The disregard for black Americans could scarcely have been more visible: Betty Shelby, a police officer in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is back at work just days after a jury decided that her moment of fear justified the killing of Terrence Crutcher, an unarmed motorist. For those who cried out for justice in this case, it seems that call will go unanswered.
When Donald Trump spent the 2016 campaign saying that he would be a “law-and-order candidate”, is this what he had in mind? When his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, says that the US Department of Justice “undermined the respect for our police and made, oftentimes, their job more difficult” through such things as consent decrees and investigations into the police violence that fills our television screens with its bloody aftermath on a nightly basis, can we credibly expect that those who abuse their power will be brought to task?
What does it mean to be “pro-law enforcement” in 2017?
Adam Gafney: The US healthcare system is at a dramatic fork in the road
The US healthcare system – and with it the health and welfare of millions – is poised on the edge of a knife. Though the fetid dysfunction and entanglements of the Trump presidency dominate the airwaves, this is an issue that will have life and death consequences for countless Americans.
The Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) dismal “scoring” of the revised American Health Care Act (AHCA) on Wednesday made clear just how dire America’s healthcare prospects are under Trump’s administration. But while the healthcare debate is often framed as a choice between Obamacare and the new Republican plan, there are actually three healthcare visions in competition today. These can be labelled healthcare past, healthcare present, and healthcare future. [..]
Which of these three visions will win out is uncertain, but the outcome of the contest will have a lasting impact on the country. We can only hope that the thuggish, rapacious vision championed by Trump and his administration does not prevail.
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