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: The Day the Trump Boom Died
Why has business confidence collapsed?
Last spring Donald Trump and the people around him probably thought they had a relatively clear path to re-election.
On one side, it looked as if Trump had weathered the threat of politically fatal scandal. The much-awaited Mueller report on Russian election intervention had landed with a dull thud; the details were damning, but it had basically no political impact.
At the same time, Trump was convinced that he could run on the basis of a booming economy. Never mind that his claims to have run up the best economic record in human history were easily refuted; the reality seemed good enough to sell as a big success story.
What a difference a few months make.
Everyone is following the impeachment story, and I don’t have much to add, except a warning: At every stage of this process, Republicans have proved willing to engage in stunningly bad behavior. Did anyone foresee Wednesday’s physical attempt to disrupt the House inquiry? The point is that as the net closes in, the G.O.P. response is likely to be uglier than you can possibly imagine.
What’s getting less attention, understandably, is the way the Trump economic narrative is falling apart.
Michael Boskin: The 2020 US election hinges on the economy – it’s time to start talking about it
Be it donald Trump or Elizabeth Warren, America urgently needs to start talking about candidates’ sharply diverging economic policies
A year from now, the US will elect its next president. The stakes are high and the outcome will reverberate across the world in a number of spheres, not least the economy. Yet, thus far, most discussions of candidates’ economic policy proposals have been based more on feelings or ideology than rigorous analysis.
Barring a major unforeseen catastrophe, US economic performance will play a decisive role in the election. If the economy remains strong – unemployment is at a 50-year low for all workers, and its lowest-ever level for African-Americans and Hispanics – President Donald Trump stands a good chance of a second term.
Yet downside risks are mounting. If they materialise, a Trump victory would become less likely. According to recent models by Moody’s Analytics, it would take a tanking economy – or unusually high voter turnout among Democrats, but not Republicans – for Trump to lose in 2020.
Colbert I. King: No, this is not a ‘lynching’ of Trump. It’s just the nation’s laws at work.
This week, President Trump told us that the impeachment inquiry unfolding in the House of Representatives is “a lynching” — presumably of himself. That bit of lunacy might be chalked up to the delusional musings of a desperate president who knows that his squalid behavior is being revealed through Democrats’ meticulous legal discovery. Next week, however, Trump gets the opportunity to return to a state that was the national leader in the kind of public, extralegal murders that Trump accuses the House of perpetrating.
Trump’s rally at the BancorpSouth Arena in Tupelo, Miss., next week lands him in the state with the most total lynchings of blacks from 1882 to 1968, according to the NAACP. Over that time span, 581 lynchings took place in Mississippi; more than 90 percent of victims were African American. [..]
That ploy might work for Trump in Mississippi. But it gets him nowhere in our nation’s capital, where he’s cornered by the Constitution.
There is no ritualized execution taking place in the House of Representatives. At work is a constitutionally approved inquiry into whether Trump has engaged in high crimes and misdemeanors through the abuse of his authority, gross dishonesty, lawbreaking and engaging in conduct unbecoming of a president of the United States.
That’s not a public lynching of Donald Trump. On display is nothing less than a nation of laws at work.
Jamelle Bouie: Donald Trump’s ‘Lynching’
The president lives to celebrate his own victimhood. What’s Lindsey Graham’s excuse?
Donald Trump is reckless with words and careless with actions. There’s no evidence that he thinks deeply about anything. Which is why I was not shocked when he condemned the House impeachment inquiry as a “lynching” earlier this week.
“So some day, if a Democrat becomes President and Republicans win the House, even by a tiny margin, they can impeach the president, without due process or fairness or any legal rights. All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here — a lynching. But we will WIN!” [..]
Trump’s behavior didn’t shock me. What did shock me was a comment from Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. When asked about the president’s “lynching” remark, Graham said the comparison was apt: “Yes, this is a lynching and in every sense this is un-American. I’ve never seen a situation in my lifetime as a lawyer where someone is accused of a major misconduct and cannot confront the accuser or call witnesses on their behalf.”
Trump is ignorant; Graham is not. In 2005, during Graham’s first Senate term, a unanimous Senate passed a resolution apologizing to lynching victims and their descendants for the chamber’s failure to enact anti-lynching legislation. It expressed “the deepest sympathies and most solemn regrets of the Senate to the descendants of the victims of lynching, the ancestors of whom were deprived of life, human dignity, and the constitutional protections accorded all citizens of the United States.” It also called on the Senate to “remember the history of lynching, to ensure that these tragedies will neither be forgotten nor repeated.”
Rebecca Solnit: Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric shows the danger of misplaced empathy
Whose stories are we not telling when we worry about the feelings of those who are offended by equality?
On 10 October, at a rally for his faithful in Wisconsin, the president of the United States spewed lies and spread hate. He claimed, for example, that the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee elected in the blue wave of 2018, supported terrorism and, repeating an obscene rightwing smear, that she had married her brother. He attacked refugees like her: “As you know, for many years, leaders in Washington brought large numbers of refugees to your state from Somalia without considering the impact on schools and communities and taxpayers. Since coming into office, I have reduced refugee resettlement by 85%.” He added: “In the Trump administration we will always protect American families first.”
But American families don’t need to be protected from refugees. Even to frame it that way is a dehumanization of the most vulnerable and an attempt to induce fear when there is no basis for it. Omar is an American citizen and a congresswoman elected by her fellow Minnesotans, but Trump and his ilk talk about immigrants as though even those who are citizens, even those who vote, are not Americans.
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