TOUGH-GUY TRUMP SHIES AWAY FROM WAR AGAIN

I'd just finished a post arguing that President Trump doesn't want to go to war (because war is hard) when this appeared, in response to today's drone shootdown:

Iran made a very big mistake!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 20, 2019

But now...

President Donald Trump said Thursday that the Iranian shootdown of an American drone may have not have been intentional, but a "mistake" by someone "stupid."

... When asked early afternoon whether the U.S. would strike back during an Oval Office meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Trump said: "You'll soon find out."

But at the same time, he said, "I find it hard to believe it was intentional if you want to know the truth."

"It could have been somebody who was loose and stupid that did it," he said.

"I would imagine it was a general or somebody who made a mistake in shooting the drone down," Trump said. "Fortunately, that drone was unarmed. It was not -- there was no man in it, it was in international waters but we didn't have a man or woman in the drone, we had nobody in the drone. Would have made a big, big difference."

This must be incredibly frustrating for John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. If they're as bloodthirsty as they seem, they'll slip smoking-gun evidence of impeachable offenses to the Democrats just so they can get rid of Trump and have all the wars they want. (Mike Pence is an old-school Republican -- he wouldn't balk at an Iran war, a Venezuela war, or both.)

DougJ is right:

Yeah, I wonder if some of the anti-anti-Trump foreign policy conservatives like @EliLake will go anti-Trump if he won't go to war with Iran.

— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) June 20, 2019

Trump has been toggling between old-fashioned neoconservative bloodthirstiness and the nouveau edition of paleoconservatism represented by Steve Bannon and, more recently, Tucker Carlson. (Carlson, according to the Daily Beast, has been advising Trump to avoid an Iran conflict.) Trump, alas, seems to have no idea that the two worldviews are in conflict -- he just hires advisers (and has telephone consultations with Fox pundits) who seem to be owning the libs, apparently not realizing that some of them are bloody-minded imperialists and others are white-nationalist isolationists. (Poli sci is also hard!)

Trump wants to act like a tough guy. He'd like some big military victories (but only if they're instant and easy) -- yet he'd also like to be able to say that he's smarter than the presidents who got us into our current and recent wars.

Reportedly, he believed that dumping the deal, tightening the screws, and raising the level of provocation would actually get Iran to back down, or so says a Wall Street Journal article titled "Trump Wanted a More Docile Iran but Got the Opposite." (Alternate title: "Trump Wanted Morale to Improve, but the Continued Beatings Surprisingly Led to the Opposite.")

Trump, and/or Trump's administration without his knowledge, will continue prodding and poking Iran. Iran will continue to be defiant -- and Trump will still want to be both a tough guy and a war avoider. If he doesn't go to war, he'll make some new enemies on the right. I really don't know how this will end.

TRUMP: WAR IS HARD!

Two stories today confirm that the only reason President Trump hasn't gotten us into a war is that it's too much effort for him.

First, from The Washington Post:

With Maduro entrenched in Venezuela, Trump loses patience and interest in issue, officials say

Last winter, the ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro seemed a sure bet to President Trump, a quick foreign policy win at a time when other initiatives in Asia and the Middle East appeared stalled or headed in the wrong direction.

Then came spring, when Juan Guaidó, the opposition leader Trump had recognized as Venezuela’s legitimate president, called for the Venezuelan military to rise up and switch sides. But while the White House had received opposition assurances that many in the upper echelons of the security forces and government had pledged to flip, virtually none answered Guaidó’s call.

A frustrated Trump believed that national security adviser John Bolton and his director for Latin American policy, Mauricio Claver-Carone, “got played” by both the opposition and key Maduro officials, two senior administration officials said. As the president “chewed out the staff” in a meeting shortly after the April 30 failure, in the words of one former Trump official involved in Venezuela policy, he mused that he might need to get on the phone himself to get something done.

Summer arrives this week with Maduro still in place, and little indication that he is imminently on his way out, or that the Trump administration has a coherent strategy to remove him. The president, officials said, is losing both patience and interest in Venezuela.

... Trump has clearly been frustrated about a foreign policy issue he “always thought of ... as low-hanging fruit” on which he “could get a win and tout it as a major foreign policy victory,” the former official said. “Five or six months later ... it’s not coming together.”

He thought he could topple Maduro without reading a briefing book or canceling a golf match, but foreign policy is hard. So Trump just gave up.

On CNN this morning, Maggie Haberman said something similar about Trump and Iran:

During a discussion on news that Iran has shot down a U.S. drone over international airspace on CNN, New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman explained that Donald Trump is in no rush to respond militarily because, for once, he knows he’s “out of his depth.” ...

“He usually responds to a provocation when it’s a smaller thing that he can punch and knock down,” Haberman explained. “He’s pretty aware he can’t actually do that with Iran. So I don’t think you’re going to see the typical, you know, as if he were swinging back at a primary foe. I think he is going to actually be a little more careful in what he says.”

When it was noted that Trump’s latest comments on Iran seemed more in line with the conciliatory tone he takes with North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un, Haberman said it was of a piece.

“Again, he can modulate when he wants to. He’s actually pretty careful when the situation can call for it and when he knows that he is out of his depth, right?” she added. “When he knows there are things he might not necessarily have some great base of knowledge to act on, so I do not expect a ferocious response from him but this is developing.”

Trump has no interest in geopolitics. He cares about winning. And not just winning -- winning without making much of an effort. He'll take a meeting with a dictator -- preferably in a lavish setting he can regard as a reflection on his own greatness -- but he doesn't want to think. He doesn't want to struggle. And he may hold grudges, but he's incapable of patience or endurance or anything that might require character.

So, despite the best efforts of John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, we really might make it to the end of Trump's term without a war, because Trump is a lazy bastard.

POLITICO: BEING AN ATTENTION JUNKIE IS TRUMP'S SUPERPOWER

The toddler president of the United States can't bear the thought that Democrats will likely dominate the news cycle next week when they debate for two nights. Politico looks at Trump's infantile neediness and concludes that it's political genius:

Trump’s plan for the Dem debates: Make it about him

The president aims to suck up as much oxygen as possible from the 20 Democratic presidential contenders debating in Miami.

Donald Trump wants his Democratic competitors for the White House to introduce themselves to the American public next week on his terms.

Ahead of the first two Democratic presidential primary debates next Wednesday and Thursday, the president and his political team are angling to dominate the news cycle with carefully released tidbits meant to keep the public hooked on the machinations of the commander in chief.

And they're going to achieve dominance by doing what exactly?

This will range from the president sitting down for an extended interview with an anchor from Noticias Telemundo, who is also a moderator of the Democratic debates....

Oooh, yet another extended interview. Wow, that'll force the Democrats off their game! Never mind the fact that Trump's extended interview with George Stephanopoulos was a ratings flop, on a network that (unlike Telemundo) is regularly watched by non-Spanish-speaking Americans.

What else is going to dominate the news?

... to an announcement by the vice president next Tuesday in Miami — where the Democrats are holding their debates — that unveils a list of prominent Latino and Hispanic supporters.

Wow, Mike Pence -- Mister Excitement! Mike Pence and a group of political hacks most Americans have never heard of! That'll get Super Bowl-size ratings!

(Are we supposed to be surprised that Trump has Hispanic supporters? He gets the same 25% of the Hispanic vote that most Republicans do, and more in Florida, also like most Republicans, because so many Cuban-Americans lean conservative.)

And here's something we knew about:

And on the night of the first debate, Trump himself might live-tweet the debates as he flies on Air Force One to Japan for the G-20.

Trump posting tendentious tweets? That'll feel like ... every other day for the past four years!

Politico treats this as if Democrats should be quaking in their boots.

Just as Trump has dictated so much of the political narrative over the last four years, the president’s team is hoping the two Democratic debates simply morph into liberal candidates reacting to the president instead of putting forward their own visions for the country, policy proposals or personal stories. The blunt reality, Trump’s allies say, is that a Trump tweet can quickly overtake most actions by any one Democratic presidential candidate — an exasperating scenario for Democrats....

“It would not shock me if one of the moderators of the debate asked a Democrat about one of the president’s tweets and somehow then Trump became an even bigger part of the night,” said one Republican close to the White House.

Right -- the Democratic candidates, who seem to have absolutely no difficulty talking about issues, are suddenly going to be blown off course by ... Trump doing what he does on a daily basis, namely banging his spoon repeatedly on his high chair and saying, "LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME!!!"

And if he does grab attention, so what? If that happens, it will be because he said or did something most Americans would consider appalling -- thus reminding debate viewers why they should vote Democrat and creating a contrast with the mostly very nice, very thoughtful Democratic candidates.

Meanwhile, no one ever writes about how easy it is to get Trump to focus on at least one particular Democrat: Hillary Clinton, who was invoked seven times in a half hour during the president's campaign kickoff rally. And she's not even in office! She occupies much more real estate in Trump's head than Trump does in the heads of most of the Democratic candidates. Why doesn't that make her a political genius?

DID BIDEN LIKE THE SEGREGATIONSTS? AND IF NOT, WHY IS IT SO HARD TO TELL?

It's possible that Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo has this somewhat wrong:

Former Vice President Joe Biden seems to have missed the mark in his wistful reminiscing about the “civility” that used to pervade Congress, as he touted his friendships with virulent segregationists at a New York fundraiser Tuesday night.

According to the Washington Post, he was riffing on his ability to “bring people together” when he name-dropped the late Sen. James Eastland (D-MS), who believed that black people belonged to an “inferior race.” Biden proudly said that Eastland called him “son” and not “boy.”

As the Post points out, it’s unclear why Biden felt that this was an indication of respect, as “boy” was a derogatory identifier used to degrade black men.

The Post story doesn't say that Biden recalled this "proudly." It says:

The Democratic presidential candidate, who has led his competitors in early polls of the crowded nominating contest, briefly imitated the southern drawl of the Mississippi cotton planter, lawyer and lawmaker. “He never called me ‘boy,’" Biden said. “He always called me ‘son.’”

A story in The New York Times says:

“I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Mr. Biden said, slipping briefly into a Southern accent, according to a pool report from the fund-raiser. “He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’”

The Post story adds:

Biden’s campaign didn’t immediately return a request for comment about why it would be notable that the Dixiecrat — who thought black Americans belonged to an “inferior race” and warned that integration would cause “mongrelization” — didn’t call Biden “boy,” a racial epithet deployed against black men.

Here's a charitable explanation: Biden is saying, Well, Eastland didn’t demean me by calling me "boy" the way he would have if I were black, but he did demean me by calling me "son" rather than "Senator." But it's not very charitable -- if that's what Biden is saying, it suggests that he's claiming to have been demeaned nearly as much as black men who were called "boy." If that's what he meant, he was piggybacking on black people's experience, and he's really not entitled to do that.

Regarding the other segregationist cited by Biden, the Times reports:

[Biden] called [Georgia senator Herman] Talmadge “one of the meanest guys I ever knew, you go down the list of all these guys.”

“Well guess what?” Mr. Biden continued. “At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.”

So let's give this the nicest possible interpretation: Biden felt demeaned by Senator Eastland and thought Senator Talmadge was an awful person, but hey, you legislate with the Senate colleagues you have, not with the ones you wish you had, so he sucked it up and got down to work with them.

I'm giving Biden the benefit of every doubt. It seems more likely that Biden misses the backslapping and glad-handing, even with horrible people, and believes he can revive it now (even with horrible people).

He can't of course, as Jonathan Chait notes, with a brief history lesson:

... after Reconstruction was crushed, the Republican Party abandoned its commitment to African-American equality and activist government, while the Democratic Party eventually adopted those identities. In the decades while the Republicans were moving right and the Democrats were moving left, there was a long period in which the parties overlapped. During that time, bipartisanship was the norm. Biden came of political age during the period when polarization had reached its historic nadir....

That’s the era Biden grew up in and recalls fondly. It has disappeared....

... modern leaders have learned that the old conventional wisdom that voters would punish them for failing to get along is false. As Mitch McConnell has bluntly explained, persuadable voters do not pay close attention to policy details. If they see leaders in both parties getting along, they will assume things are going well, and — this is the crucial detail — they will consequently reward the party in power. If they see a nasty partisan fight, they will assume Washington is failing, and reward the opposition. To ask the opposing party to compromise with the majority party is to ask it to undermine its own political interest.

Biden either fails to grasp this dynamic, or believes he can overpower it with sheer charm.

If Biden could persuade us that he hates the ideas of the segregationists as much as he loves the idea of forging consensus, maybe this wouldn't be disturbing. But he keeps trying to sell us on the latter idea while downplaying the former.

Will it hurt him? Well, as Chait notes,

Right now, Biden commands strong support among African-American voters. He may or may not be in danger of losing that support. But one way he might lose it would be, I don’t know, talking constantly about his friendships with segregationists.

And given the fact that older African-American voters seem to be his strongest supporters, it might be a terrible idea to constantly invoke friendships with segregationists those older African-American voters might actually remember.

Oh, and at the same fund-raiser:

Former Vice President Joe Biden told affluent donors Tuesday that he wanted their support and -- perhaps unlike some other Democratic presidential candidates -- wouldn’t be making them political targets because of their wealth.

“Remember, I got in trouble with some of the people on my team, on the Democratic side, because I said, you know, what I’ve found is rich people are just as patriotic as poor people. Not a joke. I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who’s made money,” Biden told about 100 well-dressed donors at the Carlyle Hotel on New York’s Upper East Side....

“Truth of the matter is, you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done,” Biden said. “We can disagree in the margins. But the truth of the matter is, it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living would change. Nothing would fundamentally change,” he said.

He'd still be better than Trump, on a hundred different issues. But he shouldn't be the nominee.

RETURN THE ANTI-VAXXERS' MONEY

It's a mistake to see anti-vaccine conspiratorialism as a purely grassroots movement. This is the new Gilded Age, so it's no surprise that, as The Washington Post reports, fat-cat money is involved.

A wealthy Manhattan couple has emerged as significant financiers of the anti-vaccine movement, contributing more than $3 million in recent years to groups that stoke fears about immunizations online and at live events — including two forums this year at the epicenter of measles outbreaks in New York’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.

Hedge fund manager and philanthropist Bernard Selz and his wife, Lisa, have long donated to organizations focused on the arts, culture, education and the environment. But seven years ago, their private foundation embraced a very different cause: groups that question the safety and effectiveness of vaccines....

The Selz Foundation provides roughly three-fourths of the funding for the Informed Consent Action Network, a three-year-old charity that describes its mission as promoting drug and vaccine safety and parental choice in vaccine decisions....

Thanks largely to the Selzes’s donations, ICAN is now the best-funded among a trio of organizations that have amplified concerns about vaccines. ICAN brought in $1.4 million in revenue in 2017, with just over $1 million supplied by the Selz Foundation, according to tax filings.

Bernard Selz is, naturally, a hedge-fund guy. Lisa Selz has worked in banking, and at Tiffany. They're straight out of Central Casting.

And they're evil.

They're not as bad as the Sackler family, whose relentless promotion of opioids has made them the worst mass murderers in America. The Sacklers like to give to art museums, or at least they used to, until major institutions told them they'd no longer take their blood money.

The Selzes aren't at the Sacklers' level. But that's a high bar to clear.

The Selzes are paying to spread disinformation about vaccines. So other recipients of their largesse should return their gifts and refuse any more of their cash.

The tax document reproduced by the Post lists the 2017 recipients of the Selz Foundation's money. Some are some charities that might really suffer without the Selzes' help (a food pantry in Montana that received $73,000, for instance). But some are large institutions that could well afford to take a stand.

So Columbia University should return the $522,500, and any other recent gifts, and accept no more from these people. Cornell should return the $65,886. New York Public Radio should return the $37,000. The Frick Collection, a well-endowed museum on Manhattan's Upper East Side, should return the $117,000.

Name them and shame them. They're a menace.

A PASSIONATE CULT FOLLOWING IS NOT A NATIONAL CONSENSUS

The president tweeted this yesterday:

The Fake News doesn’t report it, but Republican enthusiasm is at an all time high. Look what is going on in Orlando, Florida, right now! People have never seen anything like it (unless you play a guitar). Going to be wild - See you later!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2019

Today, on the radio, Rush Limbaugh and Vice President Lickspittle took that guitar reference and ran with it:

RUSH: I’m told that there are more people that are lined up to get into your rally tonight than go to Disney World on a daily basis.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: (laughing) It’s just amazing. The president and I were talking about it this morning. And, you know, no guitars, no music. You know, no Epcot. (laughing) People have been lined up for a couple days now. God bless every single one of them....

RUSH: You know, it really is — you make jokes about it — no guitars, no this or that. What —

THE VICE PRESIDENT: (laughing)

RUSH: No, let me explain that. It’s just a guy at a microphone, a guy at a podium.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: (laughing)

RUSH: It normally takes a band and a warmup act to draw 25,000 people, 20,000, at 16 or 18 bucks to get in. You’re doing it with just a guy and a microphone and his vision of the country.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: (laughing)

RUSH: It really is amazing.

I bring this up because Trump probably will have a big crowd tonight, and will be rapturously received, and tomorrow the media, particularly The New York Times, will probably respond with an awestruck sense that maybe Trump is The Voice Of America, and maybe all the polls are wrong again.

But while we're talking about "no guitars," and "just a guy at a microphone" drawing a big crowd, I'm reminded of the identity of the first comedian to sell out Madison Square Garden -- capacity nearly 20,000 -- two nights in a row. Richard Pryor? George Carlin? Jerry Seinfeld? Nope -- it wasn't one of those guys.

It was Andrew Dice Clay, in 1990.

Then what happened? People began to object to his sexist, rapey shtick.

... by the second half of 1990 he had been branded with a scarlet “C,” for controversial. MTV banned him after he recited his trademark lewd nursery rhymes at the 1989 Video Music Awards.

Nora Dunn, a “Saturday Night Live” cast member, and Sinead O’Connor refused to appear on the episode he hosted in May 1990. His manager dropped him; a three-picture deal with Mr. Diller was canceled.

You can say he was blackballed; you can say he was the victim of "cancel culture" and "political correctness run amok."

But if you're old enough to remember the era, you know that once he faltered in his bid for mainstream acceptance, the masses weren't clamoring to have him back. The mass audience still wanted (and still wants) to hear the music of Michael Jackson despite his sexual offenses. There's strong support for R. Kelly as well. I'm not saying that's a good thing. I'm saying that some people are too popular to cancel.

Clay wasn't. And Trump won't be, assuming we're finally rid of him next year. As I said yesterday, Trump fans love Trump, but the rest of us don't -- and we outnumber them.

So don't let easily impressed MSM journalists tell you that tonight means anything. It means Trump leads a crazed cult. It doesn't mean America as a whole wants him as president.

IN IRAN, WHERE'S THE CRAZY HARD-LINER WHEN YOU NEED HIM?

We seem to be on the verge of war with Iran:

The Trump administration and its domestic political allies are laying the groundwork for a possible confrontation with Iran without the explicit consent of Congress — a public relations campaign that was already well under way before top officials accused the Islamic Republic of attacking a pair of oil tankers last week in the Gulf of Oman.

Over the past few months, senior Trump aides have made the case in public and private that the administration already has the legal authority to take military action against Iran, citing a law nearly two decades old that was originally intended to authorize the war in Afghanistan.

In the latest sign of escalating tensions, National Security Adviser John Bolton warned Iran in an interview conducted last week and published Monday, “They would be making a big mistake if they doubted the president's resolve on this.” Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan announced on Monday evening that the U.S. was deploying an additional 1,000 troops to the region for “defensive purposes.” And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo jetted to Tampa, home of Central Command, on Monday evening to huddle with military officials to discuss “regional security concerns and ongoing operations,” according to a State Department spokeswoman.

Or maybe not:

... Yet even as the president’s hawkish advisers have highlighted Iran’s alleged bad behavior, administration officials privately stressed that direct military action remained highly unlikely absent an Iranian attack on an American ship or an American citizen. The president, who campaigned against getting the U.S. bogged down in unnecessary foreign wars, is considered the primary internal obstacle to a counterattack, officials said, noting that Trump continues to press for an improved nuclear deal.

I keep thinking about something Yastreblyansky wrote last month, when Bolton was talking about sending 120,000 troops to Iran and Trump was expressing skepticism:

That absolutely fits the Art of the Deal pattern: violent threats against Mexico and Canada provoking the NAFTA renegotiation, "fire and fury" talk on North Korea leading to the Singapore summit, even his behavior over the Affordable Care Act, which is meant to lead Congress to create something like Obamacare only with lots of marble and gold, the design of which is their problem, not his. His fundamental playbook is really that narrow: scream until you get what you want or, more likely, an opportunity to pretend you got what you wanted, and what he basically wants from the presidency is just to get rid of Obama, obliterate him from human memory, and to have some self-esteem.

Trump's been doing the same thing with Iran all along, tossing the Obama-created JCPOA because Obama created it, not because he agrees with all the criticisms of Binyamin Netanyahu and Mohammad bin Salman and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, or even understands them, at all.... He himself just wants to do his own deal, with his name on it, that will be the best deal ever made.

Bolton and Pompeo

thought [Trump's] violent language about Iran meant he wanted to kill everybody, and salivated over the opportunity, but no, he really wants to fall in love with old Khamenei, take pictures in one of those exquisitely furnished rooms, and sign a document.

That really is Trump's pattern of behavior, isn't it?

Yet I can't quite see Khamenei as the guy Trump wants to negotiate with. Khamenei is old. He's not really the public face of Iran. The original scary mullah from back in the '70s -- Khomeini -- would have been a different story. He was a household name in America. He was once Time's Man of the Year. But even he ruled at some remove from the public.

You know which Iranian leader Trump would have been itching to hang out with? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He was a nasty hard-liner and a public provocateur. He was just the kind of pro-wrestling villain Trump understands -- and admires. Trump would have threatened him with death and then fallen head over heels in love with him. Ahmadinejad would have wrapped Trump around his finger, and Trump would have bragged about the relationship.

I never thought I'd miss that SOB, but there's no way Trump would have gone to war with him. The mancrush would have been too powerful.

THE OBVIOUS MESSAGE IN TWO STORIES ABOUT TRUMP'S POPULARITY

Trump fans are vigorously pushing this story:

President Trump supporters line up 40 hours before Orlando rally

More than 40 hours before President Donald Trump will announce his re-election bid in Orlando, supporters started lining up outside the Amway Center.

Eight Trump supporters started camping out Monday morning, with the first one showing up at 2:30 a.m. The rally is scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. Tuesday.
Gary Beck, a Trump supporter from Panama City, was the first in line.

"There's going to be a bunch of people, and it's going to be pretty intense," Beck said. "The electricity is going to be high. It's time for America to get back on its feet and be made better than it's ever been before."

Trump tweeted Monday that the rally "looks to be setting records," with more than 100,000 ticket requests. The Amway Center seats 20,000.

Are the crowd estimates accurate? Are some people being paid to attend, as was the case when Trump announced his candidacy four years ago? We don't know.

But let's take this on faith. What conclusion should we draw? Trump fans really like Trump. Big news!

Meanwhile:

Trump interview on ABC was a ratings bust

President Donald Trump’s much-teased interview with ABC was not the ratings bonanza the numbers-obsessed president likely would have wanted.

The hourlong special with ABC chief anchor George Stephanopoulos came in third in its timeslot Sunday night, notching 3.91 million viewers according to ratings aggregator TV by the Numbers.

... despite portions of the interview — which had been teased out over the course of several days — making major news, the full special was not enough to draw viewers away from the finale of the U.S. Open on Fox, which pulled in 7.29 million viewers over three hours, or CBS’ “60 Minutes,” which netted 4.67 million viewers in its second hour.

Conclusion? Trump's base loves him. The rest of America isn't interested in him. Most of America doesn't want to cheer him on or even hate-watch him.

That's where we stand going into 2020. Sucks for you, Donald.

KYLE KASHUV WAS THE VICTIM OF A RED-ON-RED ATTACK

Ben Shapiro is appalled.

Our universities may be irrevocably broken.

On Monday, Parkland survivor and outspoken conservative Kyle Kashuv announced that Harvard University had withdrawn his admission from the school over the revelation of racist, offensive, idiotic posts written on a private Google document with friends when he was sixteen years old. Never mind that Kashuv apologized publicly for the comments; never mind that his public behavior has evinced no racism whatsoever.

Forgiveness must be withheld.

Here's the obvious question:

don't most colleges accept applicants based on their actions from age 14 to 18

— darth™ (@darth) June 17, 2019

The Daily Beast's Will Sommer explains:

The messages that cost [Kashuv] his Harvard admission came to light in May when a fellow Parkland student tweeted images of the racist messages Kashuv wrote while still a high-school student. In a shared Google Doc with classmates, Kashuv repeatedly wrote the word “n---er,” adding “im really good at typing n---er ok.” In another message, Kashuv called black student athletes “n---erjocks.”

Yes, and here's the context for the latter:

The racial slurs in an open Google doc have gotten more attention, but I suspect these texts from Kyle Kashuv may have weighed heavier in Harvard's decision. pic.twitter.com/hu7CYyE1M3

— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) June 17, 2019

This text isn't one-upmanship, or herd behavior. It's Kashuv casually using a racial slur in a private conversation to express disgust with a fellow student for dating black men.

— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) June 17, 2019

Harvard's reversal is being blamed on political correctness, of course, but Sommer tells us that Kashuv had been targeted by a couple of fellow conservatives:

Many of Kashuv’s former allies abandoned him after the messages came to light. At the same time, far-right figures like anti-Muslim activist Laura Loomer—who view Kashuv as a member of the GOP establishment—led a campaign urging Harvard to revoke Kashuv’s admission.

Laura Loomer is attempting to pressure Harvard into revoking their acceptance of Kyle Kashuv over his recently unearthed remarks pic.twitter.com/Z7QkUoKhFJ

— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) May 23, 2019

On Monday, right-wing provocateur and Kashuv foe Jacob Wohl celebrated the revoked admission, calling Kashuv a “political charlatan” in a post on the messaging app Telegram.

I don't know the real reason these two turned against Kashuv. But Loomer has her own history of alluding to interracial romance in order to score right-wing racial points.

Back in 2015, an operative for James O'Keefe's Project Veritas who went by the name "Laura Lewis" posed as a white liberal and made contact with Erica Garner, a Black Lives Matter activist and the daughter of Eric Garner, who was killed by a policeman's chokehold on Staten Island in 2014, dying as he repeated the words "I can't breathe." "Lewis" obtained video of Erica Garner accusing Al Sharpton of being overly interested in money and publicity -- a clip that became the source of a front-page story in the New York Post. A writer for the site Animal New York noted how "Lewis" got her footage:

“Yes, that is her in the photo,” wrote attorney and activist Esther Baldwin by email, referring to a screenshot of footage taken by fellow protester Janelle Ryan. “She approached me at the march that I did the day preceding the rebuilding of Eric Garner’s memorial under the pretext of helping her black boyfriend in Florida with some issues of police harassment/brutality. I explained to her at the march that the Dream Defenders were doing good work in Florida and that she should connect with them.”

Like her Twitter account, Lewis was a little over-the-top in her attempt to gain legitimacy. “When I got to Staten Island, almost immediately after greeting Erica, she pulls me aside to talk about the boyfriend again. I guess she didn’t think that I could believe that she had a black boyfriend (as if that is so far fetched), so she pulls up a picture of a black man on her phone to provide evidence of her relationship, which I thought was very odd. Then she begins to tell me that she’s so sick of the system and that Ramos and Liu [two murdered police officers] got what they deserved. That’s when I ended the conversation and walked away from her.”

"Lewis"...



... is clearly Loomer.



So a woman who used a (real? fake?) black boyfriend to worm her way into the confidence of black activists in order to embarrass one of America's most prominent black leaders eventually turned against a fellow right-winger who demeaned whites who date blacks.

I don't know what goes on in the heads of these people.

As for Kashuv, I'm not shedding too many tears. From his Wikipedia page (footnote numbers omitted):

Kashuv became director of high school outreach of the pro-Trump group Turning Point USA and gave speeches about gun rights, until his resignation in May 2019. Governor-elect of Florida Ron DeSantis, a Republican, included Kashuv on his Transition Advisory Committee on Public Safety....

Following the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, Michael Gruen, an "influencer marketer", noticed Kashuv's posts on Twitter and approached him offering to help him get his message out. With the help of former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, and Daily Wire editor Ben Shapiro, meetings on Capitol Hill were set up for Kashuv. During his visit, Kashuv met with President Trump, Melania Trump, and several other politicians including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senator Orrin Hatch.

In April 2018, Kashuv met with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and discussed the Second Amendment.

He has friends in high places. He'll be fine.

THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN FIRES THE WRONG PEOPLE

The Trump campaign has fired some pollsters:

President Trump’s campaign is cutting ties with three members of his polling team after grim numbers showing him trailing former vice president Joe Biden in several battleground states were leaked to the media last week....

Days ahead of Trump’s official launch of his reelection bid on Tuesday, the campaign is severing its relationship with Brett Loyd, Mike Baselice and Adam Geller while keeping pollsters Tony Fabrizio and John McLaughlin.

I believe what 2016 Trump campaign aide A.J. Delgado says:

Funny bc they think the leak came from the pollsters and not, as it did, from ppl on Campaign calls and in the Campaign's orbit. https://t.co/EebrCZRJww

— A.J. Delgado (@AJDelgado13) June 16, 2019

That's very plausible. It makes sense that the numbers came from someone tied to the campaign who wants Trump to understand that he'll have a hard time getting reelected.

The press reports seem careful not to say that the leaked polling data came from the pollsters. Here's a Washington Post story that ascribed the leaks to "Trumpworld":

Trumpworld is trying to wave a red flag in front of the president to warn him that his 2020 reelection battle is going to be a tougher fight than he's willing to acknowledge. That's why, people close to the campaign said, that unflattering internal poll numbers leaked about matchups with Joe Biden and other Democratic contenders in key states.

... campaign sources speculated the bleak poll numbers were leaked for a purpose: to send a wake up call to Trump about his poor standing.

"2020 will be exponentially more difficult than 2016 and everyone needs to realize that,” the source close to the campaign explained.

The message is clearly not one Trump has been receptive to....

Two of the three fired pollsters aren't going very far:

Baselice and Geller are expected to begin working instead with America First, the pro-Trump super PAC, the source said. Lloyd is not expected to continue working with any Trump-affiliated entities.

So with the possible exception of Lloyd, Trumpworld (apart from Trump himself) clearly isn't all that upset with the pollsters.

As for the surviving pollsters, I can see why McLaughlin, at least, is staying on:

Pollster: Trump on Course to Win in 2020

During Sunday’s “The Cats Roundtable” on New York 970 AM radio, President Donald Trump pollster John McLaughlin commented on the president’s chances in 2020.

McLaughlin told host John Catsimatidis that Trump is “on his way to reelection” in 2020 despite polls showing otherwise because pollsters “don’t know how to analyze” Trump voters.

“The polls, when they’re not done well, and they’re done as cheaply and inefficiently as they were done back in 2016, they’re going to be wrong again,” McLaughlin predicted. “They’re doubling down on poor science at the time. And they don’t know how to analyze these Trump voters because they don’t like talking to the media because they know the media is like 90% negative coverage of their president.”

He later added, “I truly believe the president is on his way to reelection.”

That's how you stay in Trump's good graces: flatter him like he's Kim Jong Un, and bash the media while you're at it. Meanwhile, we don't know who really leaked the poll numbers, but it's clear that the boss doesn't want to hear the message.

FRANK BRUNI: GLIB AND WRONG AGAIN

The Democrats seem to have a pretty good shot at victory in the 2020 presidential contest. Since it's difficult to bothsides an election with only one winner, Frank Bruni is attempting the next-worst thing: He's crediting Trump with the state of the Democratic race.



The appropriate response to this is twofold: (1) not, not really, and (2) to the extent it's true, so what?

Bruni writes:

Every incumbent president looms large over the contest to determine his opponent, but the shadow cast by Trump is bloated beyond measure. He’s not just influencing the Democratic race. He’s perverting it....

He’s altering the standards by which candidates are judged. He’s warping the lens through which they’re viewed. Everything is a response to him, a reading of him, a repudiation of him. He’s the reference point, as omnipresent in Democrats’ motivations and calculations as he is on cable news. The Democrat who wins the party’s presidential nomination will be the Democrat who fits most felicitously into a Trump-stamped and Trump-ravaged landscape, and if that Democrat goes all the way, it will be a destiny decreed largely by Trump.

How so, Frank?

Trump, for example, gets credit for the Democratic primary’s defining aspect, which is the sheer number of candidates — 23. They assessed his underwhelming approval rating, factored in his combustibility and decided that if ever a sitting president looked vulnerable and if any year appeared ripe for a Democratic takeover, that president is Trump and that year is 2020.

So Trump's superpower is to be so unpopular that he attracted a field of possible challengers only somewhat larger than the Republican field in 2016? Wow, he really must have awesome mojo to suck that much!

The many long shots among them weren’t dissuaded by their odds, because Trump took an unconventional route to a victory that stunned him as much as it did anybody else. It suggested that the old rules were out the window and you never really know.

It's true that quite a few little-known, obscure Democrats believe they have a shot because a guy who was a celebrity for thirty years won the presidency in 2016. You can give Trump a lot of the blame for that -- or you can blame the candidates for misreading Trump's win. Fortunately, Democratic voters seems to have that problem under control:

But the congested field is suffocating qualified aspirants who would otherwise find oxygen.

Is it? Or are candidates like Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker this year's versions of Bill Richardson and pre-VP Joe Biden -- candidates with solid-seeming résumés who can never seem to get traction, and wouldn't have gotten it even in a more manageable field?

It’s putting an extra premium on viral moments and supersize conceits. It’s privileging celebrity. All of that will factor into who prevails, and all of that is because of Trump.

It's 2019. We all live on our phones. That would have been true even if the president were Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush. Why give Trump the credit (or blame) for the importance of "viral moments" in politics? And what's going viral anyway? Elizabeth Warren's mad dash through a train station went viral for a day or so, but her position papers -- position papers! -- are enduringly viral. They're long strings of words! They're not Instagram videos. Beto O'Rourke's livestreamed dental work also went viral, but as an indicator of his seeming unseriousness.

And if the Democratic race so far is "privileging celebrity," how did the mayor of a midsize city in Indiana make it to the top tier? If Bruni's argument is, "Well, Pete Buttigieg is a celebrity now," that makes the entire discussion meaningless -- everyone who reaches the front of the pack in any contest is therefore, by definition, a celebrity, and therefore it's all an imitation of Trump. By that definition, uncharismatic Paul Tsongas challenging Bill Clinton in '92 was positively Trumpian.

... And every Democratic candidate’s theory of the race is a theory of Trump, reflecting his or her analysis of how Trump pulled off his astonishing upset.

Really? Bernie Sanders seems to be running exactly the same campaign he ran four years ago. Elizabeth Warren seems to be doing exactly the opposite of what Trump did -- she's thinking in depth. Pete Buttigieg is many things Trump isn't -- Midwestern, thoughtful, soft-spoken, young, gay, a military veteran -- which suggests that he's also trying to win by being exactly what Trump isn't.

But that's the problem with this kind of analysis: If you're doing something Trump did, Bruni gets to say, "Aha! It's all Trump's influence!" And if you do something that's 180 degrees different, Bruni gets to say, "Aha! They're all trying to be the anti-Trump!" Watch:

Did [Trump's victory] indeed rest on embittered and economically vulnerable white men in the Rust Belt? Then his challenger must be able to speak to that demographic group. That’s an argument made for and by Buttigieg, Joe Biden, Tim Ryan, Steve Bullock and John Hickenlooper....

Did Trump prevail in 2016 because too few young people, progressives and voters of color cast ballots? Then the key is a candidate who can supposedly energize one or more of those groups. Cue Harris, Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Julián Castro and Elizabeth Warren.

Has Trump’s grossly misogynistic behavior and assault on reproductive rights set the stage for a woman-powered rebellion at the polls? Then Harris, Warren, Amy Klobuchar and Kirsten Gillibrand deserve serious consideration.

Was the lesson of Trump that you must be able to saturate the media, social and otherwise, and become a compulsively watchable character in a narrative of your own invention? Beto O’Rourke obviously thinks or at least thought so, and that’s partly why so many Democratic voters saw such promise in him.

And to the extent that candidates are running to undo what Trump and his fellow Republicans have done, well, so what? Isn't that what a president needs to try to do at this time?

In fact, the candidates don't just want to be anti-Trumps. They want to address climate change, economic inequality, the lack of affordable healthcare, and other problems that have been decades in the making.

Bruni finds Trump's celebrity overwhelming, but the Democratic candidates are thinking about large issues as much as about Trump. But glib pundits gotta be glib.

THEY'RE SAYING WARREN IS A HILLARY CLONE BECAUSE IT SCARES THEM THAT SHE ISN'T

Jim Gerghty's National Review column on "The Many Similarities between Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton" is as forced and unpersuasive as Roy Edroso makes it out to be:

The comparisons are absurdly weak. For example: "Both women were trailblazers in high-powered legal circles; one attended an Ivy league law school, one taught in an Ivy league law school." Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy; Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln. Also:

Clinton took a lot of grief about implausible claims of being “dead broke” when she left the White House or her Tuzla Dash; Warren gets a lot of grief about her implausible claims of Native American heritage.

Hey, how about that, two politicians accused of dishonesty. It's like they're twins!

But the tell is that the comparisons don't hold up, and you get the feeling Geraghty knows they don't. For instance:

For women who have risen to the top of national politics, they’ve faced criticism for being tone-deaf about how they’ve handled sensitive issues.

Examples, Jim? Oh, you don't have any, because while right-wingers have made much of Clinton's (decontextualized and distorted) remark "What difference, at this point, does it make?" in a Benghazi hearing -- I think it's safe to assume that any reference to Clinton's alleged mishandling of "sensitive issues" is a reference to Benghazi -- there's nothing comparable in Warren's career.

Now we get to style:

Both have friends and colleagues who insist they are warm and personable in private; both face accusations of being cold and stiff and inauthentic on the campaign trail. (Recall Warren’s beer chat on Instagram.) Both face the criticism that they’re not “likeable,” and both have allies insisting that criticism is sexist. Warren may face the accusation that her speeches have a lecturing tone, but for most of her adult life, she’s been employed in a job that involves giving lectures.

This is what has Republicans in a mild panic. They thought Warren would come off as "cold and stiff and inauthentic," but she's vigorous, animated, and extremely comfortable as a public speaker. Hillary Clinton was quite uncomfortable -- she's good in one-on-one interviews and she did a fine job overall in that Bengazhi hearing, but she's never been a strong public orator. By contrast, as Geraghty says, Warren spent years lecturing for a living, but she's said that her early ambition was to be a schoolteacher, and there's an intensity in her public presentation that suggests a grade-school teacher who's determined to connect with every pupil in the classroom. Cold and stiff? She's animated and on fire most of the time. Inauthentic? Much of her policy talk emerges from her life story, which -- unlike Clinton -- she recounts in emotional terms. I don't fault Clinton for her failings as a speaker -- she clearly doesn't enjoy it and knows it isn't a strength of hers -- but in politics, awkwardness is described as inauthenticity. (Ask Mike Dukakis, John Kerry, or Al Gore, all of whom have strong, sincere convictions on a lot of issues but are decried as phonies because they aren't gifted speakers.) Elizabeth Warren doesn't have this problem. She's one of the most personable and compelling speakers in the Democratic field. You might not like her personality -- I worry that many dudebros of all ages won't -- but it burns through the screen whenever she's on TV.

Warren has also run a campaign that's emphasized ideas. Clinton had ideas -- she published many detailed policy positions -- but Warren's policy proposals are her campaign's centerpiece. Unfairly, many Clinton critics accused her of running a campaign based on her name, celebrity, and gender; she was said to believe it was "her turn." But Warren can't be accused of that. She doesn't have a famous name or a long career in public life to trade on. She's not emphasizing her gender. She's tirelessly selling her ideas as if there's no other way for her to break through in a crowded field (which appears to be the case).

And Warren, obviously, is to the left of Clinton on most issues.

So Warren isn't Clinton. Republicans know that, and it scares them. A Politico story says that the Trumpers are paying attention to Warren, whom they'd written off.

With the Massachusetts senator rising in polls and driving a populist message that threatens to cut into the president’s blue-collar base, the Trump campaign is training its firepower on Warren with an eye toward blunting her momentum.

If Trump campaign staffers think Warren might "cut into the president’s [white] blue-collar base," they sure don't think she's Hillary. But Geraghty hopes you'll be fooled.

THE TRUMP POLLING SPIN SEEMS INCREASINGLY DESPERATE

Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that internal Trump campaign polling showed the president faring very badly against Joe Biden in seventeen key states. The Times story said that Trump "told aides to deny" that the polling was bad and "instructed aides to say publicly that other data showed him doing well."

Trump had a simpler message when ABC's George Stephanopoulos subsequently asked him about the polls: He said they "don't exist." But they do exist -- ABC has obtained them -- and now Trump's campaign manager is saying publicly that other data show Trump doing well, just as the Times predicted.

The polling data, revealed for the first time by ABC News, showed a double-digit lead for Biden in Pennsylvania 55-39 and Wisconsin 51-41 and had Biden leading by seven points in Florida. In Texas, a Republican stronghold, the numbers showed the president only leading by two points....

When presented by ABC News with these numbers, the Trump campaign confirmed the data saying in a statement that the numbers were old and that they have seen huge swings in Trump’s favor.

“These leaked numbers are ancient, in campaign terms, from months-old polling that began in March before two major events had occurred: the release of the summary of the Mueller report exonerating the President, and the beginning of the Democrat candidates defining themselves with their far-left policy message,” Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale told ABC News in a statement. “Since then, we have seen huge swings in the President’s favor across the 17 states we have polled, based on the policies now espoused by the Democrats. For example, the plan to provide free health care to illegal immigrants results in an 18-point swing toward President Trump.”

Let's take those "two major events" in order. First, the release of the Mueller report summary: As it turns out, the March poll wasn't conducted entirely before that occurred.

Attorney General Bill Barr’s summary of special counsel Robert Mueller investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election was released on March 24. While the Trump campaign’s full poll, which canvassed 17 states, was already in the field, it was well underway for four additional days after the release of Barr’s letter to the public.

The poll was conducted from March 15 through March 28.

And what evidence is there that the completion of the Mueller report has led to a poll bounce for Trump? Here are Trump's approval numbers on March 24 and today, according to the Real Clear Politics average:

March 24: approval 43.1%, disapproval 53.1%
today: approval 44.1%, disapproval 52.7%

Or, in visual form:



Wow, that's a massive uptick in Trump's popularity. (No, really, it isn't.)

As for "the beginning of the Democrat candidates defining themselves with their far-left policy message,” the obvious short response is: Joe Biden? Really?

Biden might not be the nominee, but as The Washington Post's Aaron Blake notes, if you're polling messages rather than candidates, you're doing it wrong.

... perhaps the bigger takeaway from Parscale’s comment is this: They know how bad Trump’s numbers are, and to pump them up, they are apparently relying upon something called an “informed ballot.”

... pollsters will often test how their issues perform by taking an initial head-to-head and then informing the respondent of their candidate’s or their opponents’ positions on something. “What if we told you these Democrats are all socialists who want to ban hamburgers and open the borders to every member of MS-13?” or something like that. That is what Parscale is referring to when he says “the plan to provide free health care to illegal immigrants results in an 18-point swing toward President Trump.”

... I have long said that if you are talking about the informed ballot, you are losing. If the campaign needs to resort to these numbers, that says a lot.

And second, we do not know what kind of issue descriptions there are. Sometimes these informed ballots are done for legitimate reasons; sometimes they are hugely slanted statements, like the one above, intended to goose the polls and make them as rosy for the candidate as possible.

In either case, they quite simply cannot be relied upon.

Also -- as I noted yesterday -- wasn't campaign spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany insisting on Fox Business a couple of days ago that Trump leads "when President Trump is against a defined Democrat"?



So is Trump winning only when the opponent is specified, as McEnany says, or is he winning when (cherry-picked) issues are specified, as Pascale says?

These guys are in trouble, no matter how much they deny it.

TRUMPISM IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE RULERS ENVY THE RULED

In a monologue on the radio yesterday, Rush Limbaugh hinted at a few aspects of the conservative psyche that I don't think he was intending to reveal. He was responding to a statement by George Will, who's a #NeverTrumper. Will said, in part:

What Mr. Trump is doing that is damaging to the country is public and constant.... He is putting into our civic discourse a level of conversation and of name-calling and of abuse that will now seem perfectly normal in the future. I mean, our children, if they were 10 years old, we’d send them to their room without supper if they talked like that.

Limbaugh replied:

You know, George Will is of that universe of Never Trumpers that’s just appalled by the way Trump speaks. Just appalled by the name calling. Just appalled by the constant tweeting. Just appalled by the lack of sophistication. Just appalled by the fact that he probably drinks coffee out of a Styrofoam cup instead of a legitimate Chinese bone crystal cup. That kind of stuff. You know what I mean?

They probably hate Trump because he eats potato chips. Sophisticated people and real presidents don’t eat potato chips. They eat baked or boiled potatoes seasoned properly by the chef. They don’t drink coffee out of a Styrofoam cup.

I don't think that's what upsets people about Trump, but Limbaugh's just warming up.

Trump isn’t breaking the law. Trump is not engaged in corruption. He has not violated the law. He’s just offending these people’s sensibilities. This idea that if your 10-year-old talked like Trump that you would send ’em to the room without supper? No, no. I’m not denying that. I’m just telling you, I don’t think it’s true. I think 10-, 12-, 15-year-olds today reach the bottom of the gutter in normal, everyday conversation — and we’ve been chronicling it here since long before Donald Trump came along.

This culture rot, societal deprecation, it’s been going on for who knows how long — and most of it has been brought to us by the radical American left.

So what Limbaugh seems to be saying is that Trump does coarsen the national discourse ("I'm not denying that") -- but it doesn't matter because "the radical American left" had already done most of the coarsening.

Limbaugh goes on to complain about "political correctness," but if he's talking about "culture rot" that's "been going on for who knows how long," I think I know what he's trying to say. Even though Limbaugh was once a rock DJ, he's part of a political movement that's been complaining for years about popular music and other forms of mass culture. They thought Elvis and the Beatles were anti-Christian. They thought satanic messages were embedded backwards in heavy metal songs. They've railed for years against hip-hop.

They think the music industry and the movie and TV business have eaten away at the fabric of society. But do they resent the power of pop culture -- or are they just envious? Most rock, metal, and rap songs aren't political, but they generally have a cultural message of resistance to authority and propriety. Conservatives don't like that -- but maybe what they wanted all along was to turn that power back on the people who were wielding it.

Trump is their guy because he's harnessed that power on behalf of the already powerful. He's Rage Against the Machine's Zack de la Rocha chanting "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" at the powerless.

See also Megan Garber in The Atlantic writing about Sarah Huckabee Sanders on the occasion of her resignation as White House press secretary:

Sanders ... had all but stopped giving televised press briefings by the end of her 23-month tenure. When she did provide briefings, however, she conducted those events as spectacles of partisanship and wearying demonstrations of gladiatorial ennui.

I know it’s hard for you to understand even short sentences, Sanders told [a] reporter, on [a] heated day last June, and it wasn’t an attack on his intelligence so much as an attack on the intelligence of the whole system he is part of. It was a comment that made the entire exercise—the exchange of information, the performance of democracy that is played out in the White House briefing room—seem silly and pointless and sad....

To watch a Sanders press conference, or to watch her representing the White House on cable news, was to be confronted with a vision of America that is guided by political Darwinism—an environment in which everything is a competition, with the winner determined by who can shout the loudest, who can distract the most effectively, who can get in the best insult before the time for questioning is over.

Reporters sometimes asked tough, challenging questions of previous White House press secretaries. What Sanders brought to the job was the notion that it was her job to be the aggressor, on behalf of the most powerful man in the world. It was now the press's job to take the blows. Reporters represent the governed, and in our system they're supposed to be able to confront those who govern us. But Sanders reversed that. Her job was to attack. The job of reporters was to take it.

That's what conservatism wants: rulers attacking the ruled. We thought free speech gave us the power to make their lives uncomfortable. But in this system, they get to use that power against us. They're the ones who are rudely challenging what they portray as our hegemony, even though they're in charge.

PEOPLE KNOW TRUMP'S STRUGGLING IN THE POLLS AND IT'S FREAKING HIM OUT

ABC's George Stephanopoulos spent a couple of days this week with Donald Trump. During a limousine ride, Stephanopoulos asked Trump about recent bad polling -- one poll showing Joe Biden beating Trump in Texas, as well as internal polls that reportedly show Trump losing to Biden in fifteen of seventeen swing states. Trump, of course, denied everything:

"I don't believe those polls. There's no way [former Vice President Joe Biden] beats me in Texas," Trump told ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday during an exclusive interview. "No, my polls show that I'm winning everywhere." ...

"Nobody showed you those polls because those polls don't exist, George. Those polls don't exist. I'm losing in 15 out of 17 states? Those polls don't exist," Trump said. "I just was given a meeting with my pollster who I frankly don't even believe in pollsters if you want to know the truth, you just run a campaign and whatever it is, it is, but I just had a meeting with somebody that's a pollster and I'm winning everywhere, so I don't know what you're talking about."

But Trump couldn't drop the subject:

STEPHANOPOULOS (voiceover): But the president wanted to know more, so a few seconds later, he asked to go off the record to call his campaign manager.

TRUMP (to an unseen aide in the front seat): Call Brad [Parscale] on the phone, and I want to ask him that question, okay?

Trump can't let anything go if he thinks it reflects badly on him. Stephanopoulos saw him the next morning and he was still talking about this.

TRUMP: On Good Morning America today they had that phony polling information. I explained to you last night that it was phony, but you didn't do anything about it. You should have, but it was late in the evening and perhaps you didn't get a chance--

STEPHANOPOULOS: I didn't see the piece this morning. I listened to-- I've studied those polls, I've heard the explanations--

TRUMP: Ultimately, it doesn't matter.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But why does it bother you so much?

You'll love Trump's answer:

TRUMP: Because it's untrue. I like the truth. You know, I'm actually a very honest guy.

And Trump still can't let this go. He tweeted this an hour or so ago -- Rachel Maddow and others predicting he couldn't win in 2016, followed by a roll call of states he won:

They’ve been wrong all along! pic.twitter.com/z5tSV2JLEf

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2019

Yes, Donald, many of us said you'd lose, and you didn't. So now, using a sample set of 1, you conclude that it's impossible for you ever to lose again.

We know from The New York Times that Trump "told aides to deny that his internal polling showed him trailing Mr. Biden in many of the states he needs to win." We know that Brad Parscale said on Twitter that the public was reading about "selectively leaked information," adding that "the picture being painted is intentionally false, because the information only pertains to a subset of questions asked.”

And we know that the campaign sent spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany to the Fox Business Network to spin all this. She said:

Well, first, let me start by saying that no one on the campaign has been instructed to lie about anything. So that's first.

No, really, I'm not a liar. It's always reassuring to hear that from a person sent out to spin a bad story.

McEnany then said that the polling we're seeing isn't realistic:

... our internal polling shows that when President Trump is against a defined Democrat, meaning once we have defined our opponent, he wins the election.

But the Quinnipiac poll showing Biden beating Trump in Texas has a defined opponent -- Joe Biden. So does the Quinnipiac national poll showing Biden, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Cory Booker all beating Trump.



Trump is desperate to banish this story from the public consciousness (although his obsession with it is generating a Streisand effect). If Democrats did trash talk, this would be an ideal time to call Trump a big fat loser, just to see if his head would explode.

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE PRESIDENT LEAVES THE BUBBLE

The president said something he wasn't supposed to say out loud:

President Trump said on Wednesday that there would be nothing wrong with accepting incriminating information about an election opponent from Russia or other foreign governments and that he saw no reason to call the F.B.I. if it were to happen again.

“It’s not an interference,” he said in an interview with ABC News, describing it as “opposition research.” “They have information — I think I’d take it.” He would call the F.B.I. only “if I thought there was something wrong.”

Laura Ingraham is upset:

Fox News’ Laura Ingraham tonight brought up President Donald Trump‘s ABC News interview in which he talked about being open to receiving foreign dirt, asking why he would be speaking with George Stephanopoulos in the first place....

Ingraham tonight said, “Setting aside the question of why you would have George Stephanopoulos standing over the president in the Oval Office––I don’t know who approved that––what about this notion of accepting foreign Intel about an opponent? Is that a risk for President Trump, getting pulled back into Mueller? Again, why he was put in that situation is beyond me.”

So why was Trump talking to Stephanopoulos anyway? Why this?

With his re-election bid set to officially kick off next week, President Donald Trump granted ABC News an exclusive, wide-ranging interview over the course of two days, offering an unprecedented behind-the-scenes lens into the life of the 45th President of the United States.

ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos joined President Trump on Tuesday aboard Air Force One for his campaign visit to Iowa, where the president sought to reassure farmers as his prospective 2020 challengers – including former Vice President Joe Biden – canvassed the critical first-in-the-nation caucus state.

On Wednesday, back in Washington, Stephanopoulos greeted President Trump at his West Wing residence before embedding in the White House for a day of meetings with staff, cabinet members, the Polish president, and, of course, first lady Melania Trump.

At the conclusion of their time together, Stephanopoulos sat down with President Trump for a one-on-one interview in the White House for a wide-ranging discussion.

Trump gets himself in trouble when he does on-camera interviews outside the protective cocoon of Fox News. It was in an interview with NBC's Lester Holt that Trump acknowledged firing James Comey because of the Russia investigation.

The invitation to Stephanopoulos was extended because Democrats are campaigning for president now. Trump can't stand it -- he wants all the attention, just as he has throughout his life. And when it's not Democratic presidential hopefuls talking smack about Trump, it's Democrats in Congress. Trump needs to seize control of the narrative. He needs to be on television. If the narrative is bad, he alone can fix it. That's what he believes.

The Mueller report tells us that Trump did the interview with Lester Holt in 2017 because he thought his staff was doing a bad job of handling the Comey firing:

... on May 11, 2017, the President participated in an interview with Lester Holt. The President told White House Counsel's Office attorneys in advance of the interview that the communications team could not get the story right, so he was going on Lester Holt to say what really happened.

In all likelihood, Trump will now retreat to the Fox bubble for the foreseeable future. Or maybe he'll start a war or impose some tariffs. He's desperate to regain control of the narrative. But this didn't work.

IRONICALLY, IF TRUMP LOSES IN 2020, IT COULD BE BECAUSE HE DIDN'T LIE ENOUGH

This Washington Post story reminds us of one aspect of the 2016 Donald Trump campaign that he's unlikely to replicate this time around:

Trump’s response to the Pulse shooting in 2016 gave false hope about his LGBT agenda

It was Donald Trump’s response three years ago to a deadly shooting in a gay nightclub that gave some hope that he would be a different type of Republican leader on LGBT issues.

When Omar Mateen, an American who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, gunned down 49 people on June 12, 2016, at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, it became the deadliest mass shooting in the United States at the time. A month later, when Trump accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for president, he pledged to protect gay Americans from future attacks. It was the first time that a GOP nominee had even mentioned the LGBT community in their nomination speech. He said:

Only weeks ago, in Orlando, Florida, 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist. This time, the terrorist targeted our LGBT community. As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBT citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology. To protect us from terrorism, we need to focus on three things.

Trump won praise for his comments — even from members of the LGBT community. But cynics noted that it was Mateen’s loyalty to the Islamist terrorist group that led the then-nominee to address the mass murder more than his concern for the safety of gay Americans.

A few months later, there was this:

Trump waves LGBT flags and says Caitlyn can use his bathrooms.

Hillary takes money from countries that execute gays.

Trump is the bigot. pic.twitter.com/hBgKmeKQGj

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) October 31, 2016

Trump pretended that he'd be a liberal president on LGBT issues, just the way he pretended to be an opponent of concentrated wealth and power in his campaign's final TV ad:

Donald Trump makes a closing argument to voters in a newly released campaign ad, painting a bleak picture of the U.S. economy while issuing oft-repeated warnings about the “corrupt political establishment.”

“The only thing that can stop this corrupt machine is you. The only force strong enough to save our country is us,” Trump says in his spot....

“Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American people,” Trump says in the ad, over dark images of Washington D.C. and crowds of cheering supporters at his rallies.

Trump was going to be a friend to gays. He was going to be a foe of Goldman Sachs. He was going to ensure that everyone had excellent health insurance.

It's clear now that he's barely trying to pull the wool over centrist voters' eyes the way he did three years ago. It's all base, base, base. I don't think he'll even bother to lie to swing voters next year the way he did in 2016.

We can list the reasons Trump pulled of his Electoral College victory: Russia, Wikileaks, GOP vote suppression, some bad choices by the Clinton campaign, late-breaking email talk from the FBI that fed into the media's long-standing contempt for Clinton. All of it helped -- but, in all likelihood, so did the perception that Trump was a Republican who rejected Republican orthodoxy. He might like gays! He might soak the rich!

It doesn't even appear as if he wants to try that anymore. So Trump, oddly enough, may tell fewer lies in the 2020 campaign -- or at least fewer lies of a certain kind. And that might be why he loses.

THE JOE BIDEN OF PUNDITRY ALSO THINKS DONALD TRUMP IS UNIQUE

Joe Biden is often criticized -- deservedly -- for arguing that Donald Trump is an anomaly and the Republican Party will revert to a saner pre-Trump state once he's gone. This obviously isn't true. But why do so many people believe it?

Maybe it's because many pundits seem to believe it. Here's the lede to the latest column by Thomas Friedman, who might be the Joe Biden of punditry:

Just when you think you’ve seen and heard it all from Donald Trump, he sinks to a new low that leaves you speechless and wondering: Is he crazy, is he evil, is he maniacally committed to unwinding every good thing Barack Obama did, or is he just plain stupid?

I mean, what president would try to weaken emission standards so American-made cars could pollute more, so our kids could breathe dirtier air in the age of climate change, when clean energy systems are becoming the next great global industry and China is focused on dominating it?

Seriously, who does that?

(Emphasis in original.)

Who does that? Well, I know who would have done that, or something very similar: most of Trump's rivals for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

Let's look at coverage of those rivals from the time they were running for president, or some time afterward. Let's start with Scott Walker:

Since taking office in 2011 Walker has moved to reduce the role of science in environmental policymaking and to silence discussion of controversial subjects, including climate change, by state employees [in Wisconsin]. And he has presided over a series of controversial rollbacks in environmental protection, including relaxing laws governing iron mining and building on wetlands, in both cases to help specific companies avoid regulatory roadblocks. Among other policy changes, he has also loosened restrictions on phosphorus pollution in state waterways, tried to restrict wind energy development and proposed ending funding for a major renewable energy research program housed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Most recently Walker has targeted the science and educational corps at the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR), which has responsibility for protecting and managing forests and wildlife, along with air and water quality. In his 2015–17 budget, released in February, he proposed eliminating a third of the DNR’s 58 scientist positions and 60 percent of its 18 environmental educator positions. (The cuts were approved by the state legislature’s budget committee in May, and the budget is currently making its way through the legislature.) Walker also attempted to convert the citizen board that sets policy for the DNR to a purely advisory body and proposed a 13-year freeze on the state’s popular land conservation fund—both changes that lawmakers rejected in the face of intense public objections.

Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio:

Not 15 miles from the homes of Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush on the mainland, Miami Beach work crews elevate the streets, turning ground floors effectively into windowed basements, to try to stave off the implacable rise of sea water. Up comes the powerful ocean, threatening people, property and the underground freshwater supply.

Can’t control nature, Rubio quips with a smile. Got bigger problems, Bush insists with exasperation.

“I don’t have a plan to influence the weather,” Rubio said dismissively at a town-hall style meeting in New Hampshire last month.

“It wouldn’t be on my first page of things that wake me up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat,” Bush said in the same state on the same day....

Their energy plans continue to promote coal, oil and gas, the greenhouse-gas emitting power sources that heat the planet and worsen climate change’s most drastic effects: severe droughts, flooding and storms.

They intend to undo President Barack Obama’s stringent emission rules for power plants and to ignore or back out of the landmark accord to reduce greenhouse gases that 195 countries — including the U.S. and China the world’s biggest polluters — approved last month in Paris. They say the president’s rules kill too many jobs, though critics note new ones are created in clean energy. Both mock Obama’s contention that climate change is the “greatest” threat for future generations.

Bobby Jindal:

HOURS AFTER ASSURING reporters he believed “human activity is having an impact on the climate,” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal – a presumptive Republican candidate for President in 2016 – told the Heritage Foundation on Tuesday that global warming amounts to “simply a Trojan horse” for more government regulation.

“For some of the Left,” he said in remarks to the conservative think tank, “it’s a way for them to come in and make changes to our economy that they would otherwise want to make. It’s an excuse for the government to come in and try to tell us what kind of homes we live in, what kind of cars we drive, what kind of lifestyles we can enjoy. It’s an excuse for some who never liked free-market economies, who never liked rapid economic growth.”

Emissions regulations and environmental protections introduced by the White House, he concluded, illustrate that “the Obama administration is holding our economy hostage to their radical ideas.”

Jindal was in the nation’s capital to promote his energy plan, “Organizing Around Abundance: Making America an Energy Superpower” a 43-page argument for rolling back energy regulations and environmental protections, approving the Keystone XL pipeline, repealing the renewable fuel standard, allowing oil and gas exports and opening federal land to drilling.

Chris Christie:

Chris Christie’s defining moment on climate change came early in his first term as New Jersey’s governor.

On May 26, 2011, the brash, trash-talking Republican acknowledged for the first time that humans were causing the climate to change. Then, just three minutes into his 14-minute speech, he announced the Garden State’s withdrawal from a popular and effective interstate pact to lower planet-warming emissions and raise money for energy efficiency projects.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI, includes Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont, which have put limits on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and created a cap-and-trade market that allows utility companies to buy and sell permits to pollute.

Ted Cruz:

Texas Senator and Republican Presidential Candidate Ted Cruz has long been a skeptic of global warming—Cruz does not believe in human-caused climate change, even though 97 percent of climate scientists disagree with him.

The senator, who is also the chairman of the Senate’s Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, made this point at a Senate hearing on climate science on Tuesday.

"According to the satellite data, there has been no significant global warming for the past 18 years," Senator Cruz said. "The global warming alarmists don't like these data. They are inconvenient to their narrative. But facts and evidence matters. And I would note that many in the media reflexively take the side of the global warming alarmists."

Who does that? Who rolls back environmental regulations in the face of a massive climate crisis? Republicans -- all of them, or nearly all. Trump isn't crazy -- on this issue, he's just a mainstream member of the GOP.