Category: Uncategorized

Trump really wants to build a wall, but you know who’s going to pay? Programs that are actually effective at protecting the border and are already being cut to make room for his “priorities.”

Nothing matters, or the ascent of the confirmation bias industrial complex: Read Charlie Warzel’s very good piece on how Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury is the perfect manifestation of the “post-truth” political media era and you’ll understand Sebastian Gorka’s curious op-ed blasting Wolff’s book as untrue while largely confirming his claims of nearly unfettered access to the Trump White House.

It only took a few changes to make this story about Iran’s ban on teaching English in schools sound a lot more familiar.

Texas has banned the teaching of Spanish in primary schools, a senior education official said, after conservative leaders warned that early learning of the language opened the way to a “cultural invasion.”

“Teaching Spanish in government and nongovernment primary schools in the official curriculum is against laws and regulations,” the head of the High Education Council, told Fox News late on Saturday.

“This is because the assumption is that, in primary education, the groundwork for the American culture of the students is laid,” the official said, adding that noncurriculum Spanish classes might also be blocked.

The teaching of Spanish usually starts in middle school in Texas, around the ages of 12 to 14, but some primary schools below that age also have Spanish classes.

Some children also attend private language institutes after their school day. And many children from more privileged families who attend nongovernment schools receive Spanish tuition from day care through high school.

Conservative leaders have often warned about the dangers of a “cultural invasion,” and the president voiced outrage in 2016 over the “teaching of the Spanish language spreading to nursery schools.”

The president said in that speech to teachers, “That does not mean opposition to learning a foreign language, but (this is the) promotion of a foreign culture in the country and among children, young adults and youths.”

I have never been happier to see a weather forecast this cold in my life

John Kelly claimed that he hadn’t seen Trump’s “genius” tweets until the pooler, The Hill‘s Jordan Fabian, literally showed him his phone. Now, I don’t recommend anyone follow @realDonaldTrump — or use Twitter at all, for that matter — but maybe the White House Chief of Staff ought to set up an alert on his phone or something? Or at least get an intern to do it?

Setting aside the arguments in this piece, it’s a very good example of why the royal We should be banned from op-ed writing: one doesn’t need to make the (instantly disprovable) case that everyone already agrees with its thesis in order to make the case for the thesis itself. Indeed, if universal agreement were in fact real, there’d be no point in writing the piece at all except to state an obvious consensus (of which this piece most definitely is not). It’s this unsupported claim that pushes the piece, in my humble opinion, into the terrain of outrage-bait.

The GOP circular firing squad gets in formation following the Trump-Bannon split.

Per the pool, the White House is banning staff and guests from using their personal phones in the West Wing starting next week. Does that include Trump’s?

Is there such a thing as Trumpism without Bannonism? At her White House press briefing today, Sarah Hucakbee Sanders asserted that they are distinct political forces, alluding to the “President’s base” as a different entity from Bannon’s Breitbart media bubble.

But how separate are these two theoretical entities? I’ve argued that the biggest loser of the 2016 election was the establishment GOP, who, after collectively and unsuccessfully stopping Trump in the primary, find themselves bound to a president they privately despise out of fear he will tweet at them. Trump and Bannon may have eviscerated the GOP, but that’s not the same as building up a durable political infrastructure (a lesson Obama taught the Democrats). And today’s split, shows just how fractured and dissolute the Republican Party is and will remain for years.

Between Trump and Bannon, there’s no question about who has more political pull or star power. Still, since Bannon was fired, it’s clear that he views Trump as an imperfect vessel for his program of economic ethno-nationalism. And tactically, at least, you can read his incendiary quotes about where he thinks the Russia investigation will go as a way to protect Bannonism if Mueller brings down Trump.

But what about Trump? His agenda has never been much more than self-gratification of his enormous ego and spiting his enemies (of whom Bannon is now near the top of the list). This vacuum has been eagerly filled by people with other ideas — Bannon first among them — but no one should mistake them as Trumpism.

It’s no mystery where Trump will go from here: the same place he always go, which is narcissism. Trump the egoist may simply overestimate how much of his political appeal is due his own personal brand versus how much of it has been channeling Bannonism.

But if he feels the need to renounce Bannon, what does that look like? Mitch McConnell may be enjoying today’s fireworks, but it’s hard to imagine Trump pivoting his political capital to someone like Martha McSally in the race for Jeff Flake’s Arizona Senate seat at the expesnse of a Breitbart-friendly candidate like Kelli Ward. He might do it just to spite Bannon. But imagine you are Ward: how do you thread the needle now of trying to appeal to the Breitbart crowd without risking Trump’s wrath?

Manafort, Flynn, Spicer, Priebus, Bannon, Sessions, Tillerson, Mattis, Omarosa … it may not be an exaggeration to say that the most effective check on Trump’s authoritarian impulses has been his own inability to maintain relationships with other people for any significant length of time.