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Sunday, July 15, 2018

Got a late start. Hadn't been paying much attention to the news, least of all Trump's European trip. Indeed, the pattern on domestic issues is pretty well set, with only a few details changing, so few things hold any real surprises. Disgust and outrage, sure, but none of that is surprising any more. So I mostly just went through the motions, grabbing a few links from the usual places, occasionally adding a brief comment.

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: Trump's administration can't clean house because its leader is too soaked in scandal. I've seen critics on the left (e.g., Gary Younge) worry that "we are normalising Donald Trump" by losing our capacity for continuous outrage, but the normalization we should be most worried about is from the right, as they've retreated to the stance that since everyone critical of Trump has a political agenda, everything that Trump does should be defended by attacking the critics. Therefore:

  The ethical and moral standards inside the White House have dropped so low that even on the way out the door, conservatives are painting the comically corrupt former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt as a martyred hero victimized by the hysterical liberal media.

  "I am just so disappointed in the president's failure to support Scott against the angry attacks from the loony left," Republican donor Doug Deason told Politico. "Nothing he did amounted to anything big. He was THE most effective Cabinet member by far."

  Presidential administrations are large, and it's impossible to build one that's entirely scandal-free. But you can vet people properly, you can drum-out malefactors who slip through the cracks, and you can build an institutional culture in which team members are rewarded for exposing impropriety rather than rewarded for covering it up.

  But inside the Donald Trump White House, grifters, abusers, racists, and harassers still get hired; they lurk around the Oval Office after they've been found out; and even in the rare instance where they're forced out, it's only grudgingly.

  Other Yglesias pieces this week:

  • Mueller's new indictments remind us of 2 core truths about the Trump-Russia story:

    First, regardless of the culpability of anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign, real crimes were committed in 2016 with real victims.

    Second, both as a candidate for office and then continuing onward as president-elect and president, Donald Trump has worked to shelter the people who committed those crimes from exposure or accountability.

    These points are worth dwelling on because they cut against two commonplace narratives about the case. One renders the entire issue as a question of mystery and spycraft, leading ultimately to things like Jonathan Chait's maximalist speculation that perhaps Trump has been a KGB asset for decades. The other renders it as a narrowly political question in which passionate fans of Hillary Clinton should perhaps feel robbed of an election win -- but her critics, whether on the right or the left, can feel smugly self-assured that there were other reasons for her loss. . . .

    Trump's inability to even feign anger or outrage at the real crimes committed against real American citizens is remarkable relative to the context of what's ordinarily considered acceptable presidential behavior.

    That it seems banal from Trump itself is perhaps understandable given how flagrantly and constantly he reminds us that he doesn't care about anyone outside his narrow circle of support. But that's merely a measure of how far we've fallen as a society in the Trump era -- it's not a real reason to ignore it.

  • The bizarre media hoopla over Alan Dershowitz's social life in Martha's Vineyard, explained: Opportunistic media lawyer has a new book to hype, The Case Against Impeaching Trump, a title formula he has already exploited six times in a series of outrageously deceitful books about Israel/Palestine.

  • Paul Ryan's pathetic excuse for not challenging Trump on trade, explained

  • Brett Kavanaugh and the new judicial activism, explained: Sure, I was predisposed to object to anyone Trump might nominate to the Supreme (or for that matter any other) Court, and most likely so are you, but if you do feel the urge to bone up on why such a person poses such a threat to liberty and justice, you can start reading here. Key paragraph:

    But where a progressive judge might see judicial intervention as primarily warranted in order to protect the powerless against assaults from the powerful, Kavanaugh and the conservative legal mainstream see it as a tool to protect business owners from majority rule. If one is a sufficiently unprincipled liar -- which Brett Kavanaugh certainly is, as we saw in his remarks after Trump introduced him to the nation -- one can dress this up in the language of democracy or originalism or whatever else.

    The fact of the matter is that conservatives have been grooming lawyers like Kavanaugh for 30-40 years now in the conscious realization that with the life-long terms of US judges they can build a protective wall around corporate power that will be very difficult for democratic majorities to overcome. (That is why Republicans put such emphasis on nominating unusually young judges, to extend present Republican rule and forestall any possible reversal by Democrats once they return to power.)

• Adam Davidson: Where did Donald Trump get two hundred million dollars to buy his money-losing Scottish golf club?

  Even before the financial crisis of 2008, Trump found it increasingly difficult to borrow money from big Wall Street banks and was shut out of the rapidly growing pool of institutional investment. Faced with a cash-flow problem, he could have followed other storied New York real-estate families and invested in the ever more rigorous financial-due-diligence capabilities required by pension funds and other sources of real-estate capital. This would have given him access to a pool of trillions of dollars from investors.

  Instead, Trump turned to a new source of other people's money. He did a series of deals in Toronto, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Azerbaijan, and Georgia with businesspeople from the former Soviet Union who were unlikely to pass any sort of rigorous due-diligence review by pension funds and other institutional investors. (Just this week, the Financial Times published a remarkably deep dive into the questionable financing of Trump's Toronto property.) He also made deals in India, Indonesia, and Vancouver, Canada, with figures who have been convicted or investigated for criminal wrongdoing and abuse of political power.

  We know very little about how money flowed into and out of these projects. All of these projects involved specially designated limited-liability companies that are opaque to outside review. We do know that, in the past decade, wealthy oligarchs in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere have seen real-estate investment as a primary vehicle through which to launder money. The problem is especially egregious in the United Kingdom, where some have called the U.K. luxury real-estate industry "a money laundering machine." Golf has been a particular focus of money laundering. Although the U.K. has strict transparency rules for financial activity within the country, its regulators have been remarkably incurious about the sources of funds coming from firms based abroad. All we know is that the money that went into Turnberry, for example, came from the Trump Organization in the U.S. We -- and the British authorities -- have no way of knowing where the Trump Organization got that money.

• Thomas Frank: It's not wage rises that are a problem for the economy -- it's the lack of them.

• Sean Illing: Why you should give a shit about NATO: Interview with Ivo Daalder, a former US ambassador to NATO under Obama, since settled into a comfy think tank slot, and not a very convincing one. His assertion that Russia today is every bit the threat that the Soviet Union posed in 1949 is laughable. Maybe there are some countries today -- really just former SSRs like Ukraine and Estonia -- that worry that nationalists in Russia would like to recapture the Tsardom's former imperial glory, but that margin has retreated far from the partition of Germany. Even in 1949 there were options other than NATO, such as the neutrality agreements with Finland and Austria. The fact is that military alliances have historically been more likely to provoke war than to prevent it. When the Warsaw Pact dissolved would have been a good time to disband NATO and restore the UN to its intended role as the arbiter of international peace. That didn't happen for several reasons: one result being that NATO's expansion into Eastern Europe pushed Russia into an uncomfortable corner; another was that NATO became a vehicle for a new wave of neo-imperial adventures in Asia and Africa (mostly US-directed, but France and Turkey have also used it to pursue their own agendas). People like Daalder with vested interests and/or prejudices formed in the Cold War and radicalized by their GWOT conceits, have been especially vocal this week in countering Trump's disparaging comments about NATO. But as it turns out, Trump's real game is to stimulate defense spending -- especially the purchase of American weapons systems.

• Aditi Juneja: Like Kylie Jenner, I was on a Forbest list. Here are the hidden privileges that made me a "success."

• Robert Mackey: Live: Dispatches From the UK as Trump Stokes Turmoil. Mackey also wrote: Ahead of UK Visit, Donald Trump Praises Boris Johnson, Who Once Called Him Insane.

• Josh Marshall: Israel Pushed Heavily for Trump to Meet with Putin: Colbert and ilk like to make jokes about Trump being "Putin's bitch," but Trump has bowed deeper and bent over far more often for Israel, even if it isn't always clear whether Netanyahu or Sheldon Adelson is calling the shots. Marshall doesn't mention this, but Netanyahu has pow-wowed with Putin recently, supposedly coming away with some sort of Syria deal which would retain Assad and marginalize Iran there.

• Nadia Popovich, et al: 76 Environmental Rules on the Way Out Under Trump.

• Robert B Reich: What if the Government Gave Everyone a Paycheck?: Review of two recent books on basic income: Annie Lowrey: Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World, and Andrew Yang: The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Umiversal Basic Income Is Our Future. Also in the New York Times Book Review: Emily Cooke: In the Middle Class, and Barely Getting By, a review of Alissa Quart: Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America.

• James Risen: Indictment of Russian intelligence operatives should quell harebrained conspiracy theories on DNC hack. Risen, by the way, has a whole series of articles on Trump and Russia: Part 1: Is Donald Trump a traitor?; Part 2: A key Trump-Russia intermediary has been missing for months, as the case for collusion grows stronger; Part 3: There's plenty of evidence that Trump sought to block the Russia probe, but it will take more than that to bring him down; and Part 4: Republicans' slavish loyalty to Trump in the Russia investigation may permanently deprive Congress of its oversight role.

• Hiroko Tabuchi: How the Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country.

• Matt Taibbi: No, the Mythical 'Center' Isn't Sexy.

• Adam Taylor: For South Korean conservatives, Trump adds to deep political problems:

  But almost 18 months into his presidency, many acknowledge that Trump has been a disaster for South Korea's beleaguered conservative movement.

  "I still can't wrap my head around it," Hong Joon-pyo, former leader of the country's largest right-wing party, Liberty Korea, said of Trump's meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore on June 12. "I never imagined a U.S. government would help a leftist government in South Korea."

  In a nation where the political right has long based its policies on deep animosity toward North Korea and unfailing support for the U.S. military alliance, conservatives now find themselves dealing with an American leader who is not only willing to meet with and praise Kim, but who publicly muses about withdrawing troops.

  South Korea's rightists are in the midst of a full-blown identity crisis. And the effect can be seen in electoral votes and opinion polls.

  In regional elections on June 13, the Liberty Korea Party suffered a humiliating defeat, garnering just two of 17 major mayoral and gubernatorial seats and only a little more than half the votes that the governing Minjoo Party received.

• Nathaniel Zelinsky: The case for not publishing hacked emails. Nor is it only hackers who are guilty of indiscriminate leaking; see Peter Maass: Trump finds a new weapon for his war on journalism -- leak indictments aimed at smearing reporters.

PS: I finished this Sunday night, but didn't post until Monday, by which time the Helsinki summit between Trump and Putin had taken place, with predictable blood curdling howls of outrage from liberal pundits -- as trapped within their militant anti-Russian prejudices as those South Korean conservatives mentioned above. I might as well go ahead and link to Matthew Yglesias: It's time to take Trump both seriously and literally on Russia, just to get the nonsense out of the way before next Weekend Roundup. Yglesias starts by faulting Trump for not raising a stink over a long list of Putin sins (some real, some likely, some unclear and/or distorted), as if the sole point of the meeting is to see who can claim moral high ground. (That is, by the way, a fool's errand for any American president: you seriously want to talk about invading other countries? shooting down airliners? assassinating critics in foreign lands? how many people you've incarcerated? how badly you treat them? efforts to subvert democratic choice? I don't deny that Russia, and Putin in particular, has a checkered record on those counts, but so does Trump and America.)

The point of diplomacy is to find common ground to solve mutual problems. To do that, you need to be realistic, to show respect, to see past differences. It's actually very refreshing when Trump says that both sides have made mistakes. It's also completely clear that if you want to, say, reduce the threat of nuclear war, these are the two leaders you need to get together, to find common ground, even if you don't approve of the common traits of both. There are currently a lot of issues where constructive agreement between Russia and the US would benefit everyone. Demonizing the other simply doesn't help.

Of course, one has little hope that Trump will see his way to solving any of those disputes. He simply seems too incoherent, not to mention too morally skewed. Nonetheless, he brings something to the table that his predecessors lacked: flexibility. As with Korea, it's just possible that clear thinking on the other side(s) of the table could steer him into a breakthrough that someone like Obama or Clinton couldn't conceive of. It would be a terrible shame if Democrats scuttled worthwhile deals just to spite him. (In fact, it would be a godawful Mitch McConnell-like thing to do.)

Also, note that it isn't as if Trump hasn't been giving Democrats plenty of reasons this trip to tear him apart. The problem with Trump's disparaging of the EU, characterizing Europe as a "foe," championing Brexit in the UK, etc., is that he is deliberately, at the highest levels, attempting to interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries -- the same thing Democrats accuse Putin of (just more shamelessly).

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