Just on tradecraft grounds: telling anyone who will listen for weeks about a secret memo that will change everything is not how to drop a political bombshell.
The official conventional wisdom heading into tomorrow’s State of the Union is that Trump will show a softer side and “bring the country together” and “reach beyond the people who voted for him in 2016”. This may seem like Great Pivot thinking, that Trump one day — someday! — wake up and decide to be a generally normal right-of-center Republican. But I think people are missing something, which, if you go back through Trump’s entire career, is his unwavering strategy of taking credit for things he didn’t do. The man first made his name by pretending to be a wealthy real estate investor. After he went bankrupt, he started a business of literally slapping his name on buildings (and steaks and wine and anything else) that he had nothing to do with. Then he became a TV star by pretending to be a chieftain of industry. Pretend is what Trump does. So, if Trump paints a rosier picture than his “American carnage” of his inaugural, it’s not because he’s changed, it’s because he wants to now pretend he has made everything better. Don’t expect a 71-year-old con man to ever change his con.
Here it is, the case, by Ross Douthat of course, for a non-racist basis to be anti-immigrant. It is unpersuasive. 
Each of these “reasonable” arguments rests on xenophobia. “Increased diversity” leads to “distrust” that “stresses our politics.” California, “the model for a high-immigration future” most resembles Honduras. These aren’t subtle.
This White House narrative seems right: career conservatives trying to enact their policy agenda as fast as they can because they expect Trump to politically implode.
Another way of stating the claim in Jonathan Chait’s strong analysis: the GOP won’t turn on Donald Trump because there’s nothing left of the GOP beyond support for Trump.
5 interesting stories
Here are the five most interesting stories I found today instead of relying on social algorithms.
[If this is the kind of thing you’d like by email sign up for my newsletter list here.]
- “Defeated in Syria, ISIS Fighters Held in Camps Still Pose a Threat” (The New York Times) – How do you stop the cycle of sprawling American military detention facilities serving as the cradles of the next wave of radicalization?
- “Little Spartas” (The Nation) – Historian David A. Bell looks at why radicalization happens in some places but not in others: “Radicalization, by contrast, tends to take place in relatively small, contained spaces, where like-minded people can exchange news and ideas, reinforce their shared passions, and magnify their outrage at their opponents.”
- “The Man Who Foresaw the West’s Fantasia” (The American Conservative) – Sociologist Daniel Bell asked, in the words of Gilbert T. Sewall, what if modernism and luxury encourage the breakup of values that make bourgeois comfort and order possible?
- “Captured USS Pueblo displayed as N. Korean propaganda prize” (Associated Press) – North Korea is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the capture of a U.S. Navy vessel. “She looks down with satisfaction at a crumpled American flag kept in a glass case on the bridge and waves her hand at copies of confessions hanging on the wall.”
- “Swiss mummy identified as ancestor of Boris Johnson” (Associated Press) – The mystery of who a mummy discovered in Switzerland decades ago was has been solved. It is the U.K. foreign minister’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, of course.
Donald Trump had a dinner in Davos tonight for 15 European business leaders — and not one was a woman.
Bill Kristol’s career has basically been reduced to trashing all the people he boosted at the peak of his career.
This isn’t how compromises work.
You must be logged in to post a comment.