“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: A Party Not Ready to Govern
According to Politico, a Trump confidante says that the man in the Oval Office — or more often at Mar-a-Lago — is “tired of everyone thinking his presidency is screwed up.” Pro tip: The best way to combat perceptions that you’re screwing up is, you know, to stop screwing up.
But he can’t, of course. And it’s not just a personal problem.
It goes without saying that Donald Trump is the least qualified individual, temperamentally or intellectually, ever installed in the White House. As he veers from wild accusations against President Obama to snide remarks about Arnold Schwarzenegger, he’s doing a very good imitation of someone experiencing a personal breakdown — even though he has yet to confront a crisis not of his own making. Thanks, Comey.
But the broader Republican quagmire — the party’s failure so far to make significant progress toward any of its policy promises — isn’t just about Mr. Trump’s inadequacies. The whole party, it turns out, has been faking it for years. Its leaders’ rhetoric was empty; they have no idea how to turn their slogans into actual legislation, because they’ve never bothered to understand how anything important works.
Charles M. Blow: Pause This Presidency!
The American people must immediately demand a cessation of all consequential actions by this “president” until we can be assured that Russian efforts to hack our election, in a way that was clearly meant to help him and damage his opponent, did not also include collusion with or coverup by anyone involved in the Trump campaign and now administration.
This may sound extreme, but if the gathering fog of suspicion should yield an actual connection, it would be one of the most egregious assaults on our democracy ever. It would not only be unprecedented, it would be a profound wound to faith in our sovereignty.
Viewed through the serious lens of those epic implications, no action to put this presidency on pause is extreme. Rather, it is exceedingly prudent.
Some things must be done and some positions filled simply to keep the government operational. Absolute abrogation of administrative authority is infeasible and ill advised. But a bare minimum standard must be applied until we know more about what the current raft of investigations yield. Indeed, it may be that the current investigative apparatuses are insufficient and a special commission or special counsel is in order.
Heather Digby Parton: Trump’s Obama gambit: It’s utter nonsense — but not as dumb as it seems
According to The Washington Post and CNN, President Donald Trump was very, very angry that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had recused himself from any further involvement with the ongoing investigations into Russian involvement in the presidential campaign. He was so upset that he banned chief of staff Reince Priebus and senior adviser Steve Bannon from Air Force One and then stormed off fuming that his big, beautiful speech on Tuesday had been overshadowed by yet another “mini-disaster.” A senior White House official told ABC News, “we should have had a good week,” adding, “We should have had a good weekend. But once again, back to Russia.” [..]
We have all been observing Trump long enough now to recognize his game. Whenever he’s accused of something, he throws the same thing back on the accuser. Calling Hillary Clinton “crooked” and “a world-class liar” are the two most obvious examples. Saying she was “pumped up” on drugs was one of the more obscure but revealing episodes. I would imagine that the minute he read that Breitbart story it spoke to him as if he’d come up with it himself.
It’s clever. After months of being under suspicion concerning the Russian government’s intervention on his behalf, Trump can now turn the tables and accuse Obama of intervening on Clinton’s behalf. Isn’t that convenient? Where people have been starting to see this growing Russian scandal as the biggest political imbroglio since Watergate, Trump and his right-wing minions will now deflect attention to this story in the hopes that their followers will treat it as the “real scandal” and if they are lucky, make everyone else’s heads explode. It is a bold misdirection and while it’s fatuous in the extreme, don’t assume that it won’t be effective.
E. J. Dionne Jr.: The Trump Experiment may come to an early tipping point
President Trump’s astonishing and reckless accusation that he was wiretapped on orders from President Barack Obama should finally be the tipping point in how the country views him and his presidency.
Obama, through a spokesman, said the charges were “simply false.” On Sunday afternoon, the New York Times reported that FBI Director James Comey had asked the Justice Department to publicly reject Trump’s claim. It appears that Trump issued his wild tweet storm Saturday morning largely on the basis of reports in conspiracy-minded right-wing media.
He signaled his lack of evidence first by reportedly pushing his White House staff to ransack sensitive intelligence information to find support for his claim. Then on Sunday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump wanted Congress to look into the matter and that the administration would offer no further comment.
Trump has a problem either way. If he was not wiretapped, he invented a spectacularly false
charge. And if a court ordered some sort of surveillance of him, on what grounds did it do so?
Philip Rotner: It’s Still A Travel Ban, And It Still Targets Muslims
With the rollout of Trump’s revised travel ban, we need to be careful not to let keeping score of the lawsuit distract us from the core underlying problem with the ban. Legal or not, it is terrible policy. It makes us less safe.
Trump’s newly minted revision arguably defangs some of the legal objections to the original version. But it’s still a travel ban, and it still targets Muslims. It is driven by the same rationale that drove the original ban, that keeping people from Muslim countries out of the United States will make us safer. It just bans fewer people.
The revision of the ban appears to have been motivated by the pragmatic goal of ending, or at least crippling, the State of Washington’s legal challenge, not by a desire to change policy. Trump has said so. He said at a recent news conference that the ban would be crafted to respond to court rulings in the case brought by the State of Washington.
That legal challenge, if left to run its course, had the potential to lead to a constitutional crisis that could threaten Trump’s presidency. So it isn’t surprising that Trump took this way out.
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