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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Michelle Goldberg: We Have a Crisis of Democracy, Not Manners
Last year, the white nationalist Richard Spencer was kicked out of his Virginia gym after another member confronted him and called him a Nazi. This incident did not generate a national round of hand-wringing about the death of tolerance, perhaps because most people tacitly agree that it’s O.K. to shun professional racists.
It’s a little more complicated when the professional racist is the president of the United States. The norms of our political life require a degree of bipartisan forbearance. But treating members of Donald Trump’s administration as ordinary public officials rather than pariahs does more to normalize bigotry than exercising alongside a white separatist. [..]
Faced with the unceasing cruelty and degradation of the Trump presidency, liberals have not taken to marching around in public with assault weapons and threatening civil war. I know of no left-wing publication that has followed the example of the right-wing Federalist and run quasi-pornographic fantasies about murdering political enemies. (“Close your eyes and imagine holding someone’s scalp in your hands,” began a recent Federalist article.) Unlike Trump, no Democratic politician I’m aware of has urged his or her followers to beat up opposing demonstrators.
Instead, some progressive celebrities have said some bad words, and some people have treated administration officials with the sort of public opprobrium due members of any other white nationalist organization. Liberals are using their cultural power against the right because it’s the only power they have left, and people have a desperate need to say, and to hear others say, that what is happening in this country is intolerable.
Paul Krugman: The Great Soybean Conspiracy
The Trump administration appears to be headed for a trade war on three fronts. As far as anyone can tell, it is simultaneously going to take on China, the European Union and our partners in the North American Free Trade Agreement. The economic fallout will be ugly.
But that’s probably not the whole story: There’s also likely to be ugly political fallout, not just abroad but here at home, too. In fact, I predict that as the downsides of hard-line trade policy become apparent, we’ll see a nasty search by President Trump and company for people to scapegoat. In fact, that search has already started.
To understand what’s coming, you need to understand two crucial points.
First, the administration has no idea what it’s doing. Its ideas on trade don’t seem to have evolved at all from those expressed in a white paper circulated by Wilbur Ross, now the commerce secretary, and Peter Navarro, now the trade czar, in 2016. That white paper was a display of sheer ignorance that had actual trade experts banging their heads on their desks. So these people are completely unprepared for the coming blowback.
Second, this administration is infested — I use that word advisedly — with conspiracy theorists. In fact, it seems, literally, to treat belief in absurd conspiracy theories as a job qualification. You may remember the case of an official at the Department of Health and Human Services who was temporarily suspended after reports that she had worked for a conspiracy-theory website. Well, it turns out that she listed that connection on her résumé when she applied for government employment. She was hired not despite but because of her connection to paranoid politics.
So what will happen when cluelessness meets conspiracy theorizing?
Eugene Robinson: You can smell Trump’s fear
President Trump created an immigration crisis to stoke resentment and anger among his base — traumatizing innocent children for political gain. Lacking any kind of moral compass, he makes a show of being pleased with what he has wrought. But you can smell his fear.
Trump is desperate to keep his Republican congressional majorities, not because of anything they might accomplish but because he has cowed them into being afraid to hold him accountable. If his base is not motivated to vote in November, the GOP loses the House — and Trump and his entourage of grifters face a lineup of Democratic committee chairmen with the power to subpoena documents and compel testimony.
To rile up his legions, Trump went back to basics. It is vile and unforgivable that Trump would separate thousands of children from their families just to display his power over the powerless. But it is not surprising. [..]
Trump has to wonder if even his staunchest supporters have the stomach for the kind of cruelty inherent in the family separations and the detention camps. He has to worry that his latest anti-immigration gambit is doing more to energize and mobilize anti-Trump political forces than the “Make America Great Again” crowd. He has to realize that it is hard to whip up punitive anger toward crying children — and that even his great skill at lying is not enough to obscure the truth of a mother’s tears.
And he has to know that backing down is a betrayal of his carefully cultivated brand of damn-the-torpedoes toughness. Who’s the snowflake now?
This was supposed to be a “good” crisis in which only some desperate Central Americans got hurt. Demonizing immigrants has always worked for Trump in the past, but he has to be deeply worried that it’s not working now.
Joseph R. Biden, Jr.: The border won’t be secure until Central America is
When President Trump signed an executive order ending the separation of children from their families at the border, it did not end the crisis in Central America. Nor should it relieve our moral anguish at seeing the poorest and most vulnerable treated in ways that are fundamentally at odds with our nation’s values.
The moment also calls for a renewed focus on the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America — the countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, which together represent the overwhelming source of migrants crossing our southern border. Unless we address the root causes driving migration from this region, any solutions focused solely on border protection and immigration enforcement will be insufficient. [..]
We can both strengthen U.S. border security and treat migrants arriving from Central America with dignity and decency instead of cruelty and callousness. But their overwhelming desire to flee their countries and risk everything to enter the United States shows that their governments are still failing them. This migration will only continue unless we keep up the pressure and provide the support to make the Northern Triangle of Central America a prosperous and secure place to call home.
Catherine Rampell: Factory workers aren’t getting what Trump promised
Factory workers and farmers are slowly learning that President Trump’s fanatical protectionism — plus Congress’s economic absenteeism — has left them painfully unprotected.
That’s not what Trump promised them, of course.
A little more than a year ago, Trump invited executives and union representatives from Harley-Davidson to the White House. There he vowed that the motorcycle manufacturer would flourish under his economic stewardship.
“Thank you, Harley-Davidson, for building things in America,” he said. “And I think you’re going to even expand — I know your business is now doing very well and there’s a lot of spirit right now in the country that you weren’t having so much in the last number of months that you have right now.”
This week, Harley-Davidson became among the highest-profile casualties of Trump’s escalating trade wars.
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