Robert Reich

So after six months, has he delivered what he promised you?

1. He told you he’d repeal Obamacare and replace it with something “beautiful.” You bought it. But he didn’t repeal and he didn’t replace. (Just as well: His plan would have knocked at least 22 million off health insurance, including many of you.)

2. He told you he’d cut your taxes. You bought it. But tax “reform” is stalled. And if it ever moves, the only ones whose taxes will be cut are the wealthy.

3. He told you he’d invest $1 billion in our nation’ crumbling infrastructure. You bought it. But his infrastructure plan, which was really a giveaway to rich investors, is also stalled.

4. He said he’d clean the Washington swamp. You bought it. But he’s brought into his administration more billionaires, CEOs, and Wall Street moguls than in any administration in history, to make laws that will enrich their businesses, along with former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who are crafting new policies for the same industries they recently worked for.

5. He said he’d use his business experience to whip the White House into shape. You bought it. But he created the most chaotic, dysfunctional, back-stabbing White House in modern history, in which no one is in charge.

6. He said he’d close “special interest loopholes that have been so good for Wall Street investors but unfair to American workers.“ You bought it. But he picked a Wall Street financier Stephen Schwarzman to run his strategic and policy forum, who compares closing those loopholes to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

7. He told you he’d “bring down drug prices” by making deals with drug companies. You bought it. But now the White House says that promise is “inoperative.”

8. He said that on Day One he’d label China a “currency manipulator.” You bought it. But then he met with China’s president and declared "China is not a currency manipulator.”

9. He said he wouldn’t bomb Syria. You bought it. But then he bombed Syria.

10. He called Barack Obama “the vacationer-in-Chief” and accused him of playing more rounds of golf than Tiger Woods. He promised to never be the kind of president who took cushy vacations on the taxpayer’s dime, not when there was so much important work to be done. You bought it. But in his first 6 months he has spent more taxpayer money on vacations than Obama did in the first 3 years of his presidency. Not to mention all the money taxpayers are spending protecting his family, including his two sons who travel all over the world on Trump business.

11. He said he’d force companies to keep jobs in America. You believed him. But despite their promises, Carrier, Ford, GM, and the rest are shipping jobs to Mexico and China.

12. He said he’d create coal jobs. You believe him. He hasn’t. But here’s what he has done: Since 1965 a federal program called the Appalachian Regional Commission has spent $23 billion helping communities in coal states fund job retraining, reclaim land, and provide desperately needed social services. A.R.C. helped cut poverty rates almost in half, double the percentage of high-school graduates, and reduce infant mortality by two-thirds. Trump’s first proposed budget eliminates A.R.C.

What did Trump say when confronted with proof that his son jumped at the prospect of meeting with a “Russian government attorney” offering to dish dirt on Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support” for his candidacy?

Trump said: “many people would have held that meeting.” 

The next day, Trump revised “many” to “most,” saying: “I think from a practical standpoint, most people would have taken that meeting. . . . Politics isn’t the nicest business in the world, but it’s very standard.”

It’s true that politics isn’t the nicest business in the world. I’ve been there. Real estate development isn’t the nicest business in the world either, for all I know. But breaking the law and flirting with treason isn’t standard practice in either realm.  

Much ink has been spilled over the last six months documenting Trump’s tin ear when it comes to all matters ethical: His refusal to put his business into a blind trust, as every one of his predecessors in recent memory has done. His refusal to reveal his tax returns, like his predecessors. The never-ending stream of lies that he continues to spew even after they’re proven to be lies (three to five million fraudulent votes, Obama spied on me, fake news, and so on).  

None of this is “very standard” for presidents. It’s the opposite of standard.

I think we’ve been missing the boat by characterizing these as ethical breaches. Ethics assumes some sort of agreed-upon standard against which an ethical breach can be defined and measured.

But Donald Trump doesn’t live in a world that has any standards at all, and he never has. His entire approach to life, to business, and now to the presidency has nothing whatever to do with standards. It’s about winning, at all costs. Whatever it takes.

Winning at all costs is the only thing that’s standard in Trumpworld.

When he was in business and couldn’t repay his creditors, he declared bankruptcy. Again and again. And when his bankers finally wised up and refused to lend him any more money, he found foreign bankers who would oblige.

When he could have chosen to pay his contractors, or others who worked for him, he didn’t. He stiffed them.

Trump has spent most of his life in business being sued or sueing – as if our judicial system was just another standard tool for winning.

To make a name for himself in politics, he suggested Barack Obama wasn’t born in America. Hey, whatever it took.

To win the presidency he told lies about undocumented immigrants and crime, about Arabs cheering as the World Trade Center went down, about  his business smarts. He promised his followers he’d jail Hillary Clinton, drain the Washington swamp, build a wall along the Mexican border, create vast numbers of jobs, repeal the North American Free Trade Act.

He’d lie about anything. He’d promise anything. All was just a means to becoming president. There are no standards. Whatever it took.

“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” he said.

Did he collude with Russia to become president? That wouldn’t be standard practice in politics, but it would be consistent with Trump’s standard.

“I said [to Putin] ‘Did you do it?’” Trump reported back on his meeting with Vladimir. “And he said, ‘No, I did not. Absolutely not.’ I then asked him a second time in a totally different way. He said absolutely not.”

And that’s supposed to be the end of it? 

The  U.S. intelligence community has told Trump that Russia interfered on his behalf in the presidential election of 2016, at Putin’s direction. So why does Trump ask Putin if he did it? 

He should be telling Putin what the United States is planning to do in response to what Putin did.

We may never know the exact answer to whether Trump himself colluded with Putin to win the presidency. Or, more likely, his core supporters may never know, because Trump will tell them not to believe whatever Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the intelligence agencies come up with, and to blame the press for reporting fake news. Politics isn’t the nicest business in the world, he might say, but whatever he did was very standard.

A president’s major responsibilities are to protect the United States and the Constitution, and to see that the laws are faithfully executed.

But Trump’s major goal now is to remain in power and to accumulate even more money. Whatever it takes.

On Sunday morning Trump seemed to promote violence against CNN.

He tweeted an old video clip of him performing in a WWE professional wrestling match, with a CNN logo superimposed on the head of his opponent.

In it, Trump is shown slamming the CNN avatar to the ground and pounding him with punches and elbows to the head. Trump added the hastags #FraudNewsCNN and #FNN, for “fraud news network.”

The tweet culminated a bizarre week of Trump attacks on the media.

The night before, Trump used a portion of his speech at the “Celebrate Freedom” rally at the Kennedy Center to denounce the press. “The fake media is trying to silence us, but we will not let them. The people know the truth,” he said. “The fake media tried to stop us from going to the White House, but I’m president and they’re not.”

Trump’s words drew a standing ovation from the crowd, which waved miniature American flags.

On Thursday, Trump posted a crude tweet blasting the co-hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” who have been critical of him – calling Mika Brzezinski “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” and Joe Scarborough “Psycho Joe,” and claiming that when they visited him New Years Eve, Brzezinski “was bleeding badly from a facelift.”

On Wednesday, Trump charged that “The ‪#AmazonWashingtonPost, sometimes referred to as the guardian of Amazon not paying internet taxes (which they should) is FAKE NEWS!” It wasn’t exactly clear what Trump meant by this, except to take a jab at Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who purchased the Post in 2013. (Trump’s blast seems to have been provoked by a Post story the previous day revealing that a TIME Magazine cover featuring Trump hangs in at least four of his golf clubs around the world, but the cover is a fake.)

What’s going on here?

Maybe Trump’s attacks on the press were his way of distracting public attention from a week of embarrassing news – the Congressional Budget Office’s conclusion that the Senate’s version of Trumpcare would cause 22 million Americans to lost their coverage, and the inability of Senate Republicans to pass it; the refusal of election officials in most states to cooperate with Trump’s commission on voter fraud; and the news that Republican financier Peter W. Smith last fall assembled a team of computer experts to contact hackers connected with the Russian government, saying he was working with Trump campaign advisor Michael Flynn.

If Trump’s goal was deflection, he did a fairly good job. His inflammatory tweets and statements took up a lot of newspaper space and airtime. 

Or perhaps Trump is truly losing it. “President Trump is not well,” Scarborough and Brzezinski concluded after the Trump tirade against them. Maybe the strain of being a thin-skinned narcissist under the continuous and critical glare of the press is finally tipping him over the edge. 

But I fear an even more menacing reality.

Trump began his presidency attacking the press for “fake news.” Then he called the networks and publications that criticized him “enemies of the people.”

His new attacks seem to be going a step farther – mobilizing his supporters against media personalities and executives that are critical of him.

As the tweets and rallies become shriller and more provocative, their clear message is that Trump’s critics are bad people who are conspiring to undo his presidency – people whom Trump supporters must “not let” silence him, who deserve to be slammed the way Trump took it out on CNN in the mock video he posted Sunday morning. 

It’s a narrative that’s showing up increasingly on right-wing websites.

In one recent video from the National Rifle Association, for example, Dana Loesch, an N.R.A. spokeswoman and former editor at Breitbart News, charges that a left-wing cabal “use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again.”

As black-and-white images of recent protests play in the background, Loesch says “the only way we stop this, the only way we save our country, and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with a clenched fist of truth.”

This “clenched fist” theme is being legitimized by the President of the United States who’s on a warpath against news organizations and professionals who criticize him.

Will news organizations be intimidated? Probably not, at least not at this point. But we may be on a slippery path. Trump’s increasingly incendiary tweets and messages constitute an overt assault on freedom of the press, the cornerstone of our democracy. 

Whether you agree or disagree with Donald Trump’s policies, all of us must stand up against this.

Mitch McConnell is delaying a vote on the Senate Republican version of Trumpcare because he doesn’t yet have a majority.

Some Senate Republicans think the bill doesn’t go get rid of enough of the Affordable Care Act. Others worry that it goes too far – especially in light of the Congressional Budget Office’s finding that it would eliminate coverage for 22 million Americans.  

What should be the Democrats’ response? Over the next weeks or months, Democrats must continue to defend the Affordable Care Act. It’s not perfect, but it’s a major step in the right direction. Over 20 million Americans have gained coverage because of it.

But Democrats also need to go further and offer Americans a positive vision of where the nation should be headed over the long term. That’s toward Medicare for all.

Some background: American spending on healthcare per person is more than twice the average in the world’s thirty-five advanced economies. Yet Americans are sicker, our lives are shorter, and we have more chronic illnesses than in any other advanced nation.

That’s because medical care is so expensive for the typical American that many put off seeing a doctor until their health has seriously deteriorated.

Why is healthcare so much cheaper in other nations? Partly because their governments negotiate lower rates with health providers. In France, the average cost of a magnetic resonance imagining exam is $363. In the United States, it’s $1,121. There, an appendectomy costs $4,463. Here, $13,851.

They can get lower rates because they cover everyone – which gives them lots of bargaining power.

Other nations also don’t have to pay the costs of private insurers shelling out billions of dollars a year on advertising and marketing – much of it intended to attract healthier and younger people and avoid the sicker and older.

Nor do other nations have to pay boatloads of money to the shareholders and executives of big for-profit insurance companies.  

Finally, they don’t have to bear the high administrative costs of private insurers – requiring endless paperwork to keep track of every procedure by every provider.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Medicare’s administrative costs are only about 2 percent of its operating expenses. That’s less than one-sixth the administrative costs of America’s private insurers

To make matters even worse for Americans, the nation’s private health insurers are merging like mad in order to suck in even more money from consumers and taxpayers by reducing competition.

At the same time, their focus on attracting healthy people and avoiding sick people is creating a vicious cycle. Insurers that take in sicker and costlier patients lose money, which forces them to raise premiums, co-payments, and deductibles. This, in turn, makes it harder for people most in need of health insurance to afford it.

This phenomenon has even plagued health exchanges under the Affordable Care Act.  

Medicare for all would avoid all these problems, and get lower prices and better care.

It would be financed the same way Medicare and Social Security are financed, through the payroll tax. Wealthy Americans would pay a higher payroll tax rate and contribute more than lower-income people. But everyone would win because total healthcare costs would be far lower, and outcomes far better.

If Republicans succeed in gutting the Affordable Care Act or subverting it, the American public will be presented with a particularly stark choice: Expensive health care for the few, or affordable health care for the many.

This political reality is already playing out in Congress, as many Democrats move toward Medicare for All. Most House Democrats are co-sponsoring a Medicare for All bill there. Senator Bernie Sanders is preparing to introduce it in the Senate. New York and California are moving toward statewide versions.

A Gallup poll conducted in May found that a majority of Americans would support such a system. Another poll by the Pew Research Center shows that such support is growing, with 60 percent of Americans now saying government should be responsible for ensuring health care coverage for all Americans – up from 51 percent last year.

Democrats would be wise to seize the moment. They shouldn’t merely defend the Affordable Care Act. They should also go on the offensive – with Medicare for all.

The Senate’s bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act is not a healthcare bill. It’s a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, paid for by a dramatic reduction in healthcare funding for approximately 23 million poor, disabled, and working middle class Americans.

America’s wealthiest taxpayers (earning more than $200,000 a year, $250,000 for couples) would get a tax cut totaling $346 billion over 10 years, representing what they save from no longer financing healthcare for lower-income Americans.

That’s not all. The bill would save an additional $400 billion on Medicaid, which Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and Donald Trump are intent on shrinking in order to cut even more taxes for the wealthy and for big corporations.

If enacted, it would be the largest single transfer of wealth to the rich from the middle class and poor in American history.

This disgrace is being proposed at a time when the nation’s rich own a higher percentage of the nation’s wealth and receive the highest percent of America’s income since the era of the Robber Barons of the late nineteenth century.

Almost all of the transfer is hidden inside a bill that’s supposed to be a kinder and gentler version of its House counterpart, which Trump called “mean, mean, mean.”

Look closely and it’s even meaner. 

The Senate bill appears to retain the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies for poorer Americans. But starting in 2020, the subsidies would no longer be available for many of the working poor who now receive them, nor for anyone who’s not eligible for Medicaid.

Another illusion: The bill seems to keep the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion. But the expansion is phased out, starting in 2021.

The core of the bill – where its biggest savings come from – is a huge reduction in Medicaid, America’s healthcare program for the poor, elderly, and disabled.

This, too, is disguised. States would receive an amount of money per Medicaid recipient that appears to grow as healthcare costs rise.

But starting in 2025, the payments would be based on how fast costs rise in the economy as a whole.

Yet medical costs are rising faster than overall costs. They’ll almost surely continue to do so – as America’s elderly population grows, and as new medical devices, technologies, and drugs prolong life.

Which means that after 2025, Medicaid coverage will shrink.

The nonpartisan Urban Institute estimates that between 2025 and 2035, about $467 billion less will be spent on Medicaid than would be spent than if Medicaid funding were to keep up with the expected rise in medical costs.

The states would have to make up the difference, but many won’t want to or be able to.

One final major deception. Proponents of the bill say it would continue to protect people with preexisting conditions. But the bill allows states to reduce insurance coverage for everyone, including people with preexisting conditions.

So insurance companies could technically “cover” people with preexisting conditions for the cost of, say, their visits to a doctor, but not hospitalization, drugs, or anything else they need.

The Senate bill only seems like a kinder, gentler version of the House repeal of the Affordable Care Act, but over time it would be even crueler.

Will the American public find out? Not if McConnell can help it.

He hasn’t scheduled a single hearing on the bill.

He’s shut out major hospitals, physician groups, consumer advocates and organizations representing millions of patients with heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other serious illnesses.

McConnell thinks he’s found a quiet way not only to repeal the Affordable Care Act but also to unravel Medicaid – and funnel the savings to the rich. 

For years, Republicans have been looking for ways to undermine America’s three core social insurance programs – Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. The three constitute the major legacy of the Democrats, of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. All continue to be immensely popular.

Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act is almost part of that legacy. It’s not on quite as solid a footing as the others because it’s still new, and some wrinkles need to be ironed out. But most Americans support it.

Now McConnell believes he can begin to undo the legacy, starting with the Affordable Care Act and, gradually, Medicaid.

But he knows he has to do it in secret if he’s to be successful.

If this shameful bill is enacted, McConnell and Trump – as well as every Republican senator who signs on – will bear the burden of hundreds of thousands of deaths that could have been avoided, were they not so determined to make rich Americans even richer.

Bad enough that the Republican Senate bill would repeal much of the Affordable Care Act. 

Even worse, it unravels the Medicaid Act of 1965 – which, even before Obamacare, provided health insurance to millions of poor households and elderly.

It’s done with a sleight-of-hand intended to elude not only the public but also the Congressional Budget Office. 

Here’s how the Senate Republican bill does it. The bill sets a per-person cap on Medicaid spending in each state. That cap looks innocent enough because it rises every year with inflation. 

But there’s a catch. Starting 8 years from now, in 2025, the Senate bill switches its measure of inflation – from how rapidly medical costs are rising, to how rapidly overall costs in the economy are rising.

Yet medical costs are rising faster than overall costs. They’ll almost surely continue to do so – as America’s elderly population grows, and as new medical devices, technologies, and drugs prolong life.

Which means that after 2025, Medicaid will cover less and less of the costs of health care for the poor and elderly. 

Over time, that gap becomes huge. The nonpartisan Urban Institute estimates that just between 2025 and 2035, about $467 billion less will be spent on Medicaid than would be spent than if Medicaid funding were to keep up with the expected rise in medical costs.

So millions of Americans will lose the Medicaid coverage they would have received under the 1965 Medicaid act. Over the long term, Medicaid will unravel. 

Will anyone in future years know Medicaid’s unraveling began with this Senate Republican bill ostensibly designed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act? Probably not. The unraveling will occur gradually. 

Will future voters hold Republicans responsible? Again, unlikely. The effects of the unraveling won’t become noticeable until most current Republican senators are long past reelection. 

Does anyone now know this time bomb is buried in this bill? 

It doesn’t seem so. McConnell won’t even hold hearings on it. 

Next week the Congressional Budget Office will publish its analysis of the bill. CBO reports on major bills like this are widely disseminated in the media. The CBO’s belated conclusion that the House’s bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act would cause 23 million Americans to lose their health care prompted even Donald Trump to call it “mean, mean, mean.”

But because the CBO’s estimates of the consequences of bills are typically limited to 10 years (in this case, 2018 to 2028), the CBO’s analysis of the Senate Republican bill will dramatically underestimate how many people will be knocked off Medicaid over the long term.

Which is exactly what Mitch McConnell has planned. This way, the public won’t be tipped off to the Medicaid unraveling hidden inside the bill. 

For years, Republicans have been looking for ways to undermine America’s three core social insurance programs – Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. The three constitute the major legacies of the Democrats, of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. All continue to be immensely popular. 

Now, McConnell and his Senate Republican colleagues think they’ve found a way to unravel Medicaid without anyone noticing.

Don’t be fooled. Spread the word.

My friend Tom phoned this morning:

“I can’t take any more Trump. It’s summer. I’m taking a vacation from him,” he said.

“I understand,” I said.

“I’ve been so stressed out since that moron was elected that sometimes I can’t sleep,” he said.

“Totally get it,” I said.

“I quit. If others want to carry on the fight for the next three months, be my guest.”

“You’ve earned a vacation.“

“You bet I have. Every time I see his stupid face my blood pressure goes into the stratosphere. I can’t take it any more,” Tom said.

“You don’t need to,” I said.

“That’s exactly my point. I don’t need this. He’s a selfish, greedy, narcissistic, fascistic, unhinged, bigot. And to think he’s running this great country makes me want to puke.”

“Right.”

“So … (long pause) “You think it’s okay if I take a vacation from him?”

“Of course, if that’s what you want to do.”

“It’s not as if I’ve had very much effect. I’ve been writing letters, calling my members of congress. I’ve demonstrated. Even gone to a few meetings.”

“Sounds like you’ve been doing a lot,” I said.

“So why the fu*k isn’t he impeached already?” Tom raised his voice.

“These things take time.”

“He’s taken bribes from foreign governments, obstructed justice, abused his power. And the as*hole does nothing but lie! Probably conspired with Putin to win the election! Doesn’t give a damn that Russia’s trying to kill our democracy!”

“I agree.”

“We can’t let this happen!” he almost shouted.

“No, we can’t.”

“We have to fight this tyrant!”

“Couldn’t agree more.”

“Legally, peacefully.”

“Yes.”

“If the Dems take back the House next year, they could start the impeachment process. So we have to begin organizing soon, get ready,” Tom said.

“Absolutely,” I said.

“If Jon Osoff is elected in Georgia Tuesday, that could send a clear signal,” he said.

“Right!”

“I’m gonna phone bank all day tomorrow, calling voters in his district.”

“Good,” I said.

“The least I can do.”

“It will help.”

“Good to talk with you, Bob.”

“And to you, Tom. Be well.”

Last Monday, the White House invited reporters in to watch what was billed as a meeting of Trump’s Cabinet. After Trump spoke, he asked each of the Cabinet members around the table to briefly comment.  

Their statements were what you might expect from toadies surrounding a two-bit dictator.

“We thank you for the opportunity and blessing to serve your agenda,” said Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. “Greatest privilege of my life, to serve as vice president to a president who’s keeping his word to the American people,” said Vice President Mike Pence. 

When I was sworn in as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, I took an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” I didn’t pledge loyalty to Bill Clinton, and I wouldn’t have participated in such a fawning display.

That oath is a pledge of loyalty to our system of government – not to a powerful individual. It puts integrity before personal loyalty. It’s what it means to have a government of laws.

But Trump has filled his administration with people more loyal to him than they are to America.

“I need loyalty, I expect loyalty,” Trump told then FBI Director James Comey in January – even though FBI directors are supposed to be independent of a president, and Comey was only 4 years into a 10 year term. Comey testified before the Senate that Trump tried to “create some sort of patronage relationship,” based on personal loyalty.

Preet Bharara, who had been the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York before Trump fired him, said Trump tried to create the same sort of relationship.

Bharara’s office had been investigating Trump’s secretary of health and human services, Tom Price, and also looking into Russian money-laundering allegations against Deutsche Bank, Trump’s principal private lender. Bharara said Comey’s testimony “felt a little bit like déjà vu.”

In his first and best-known book, “The Art of the Deal,” Trump distinguished between integrity and loyalty – and made clear he preferred loyalty.

Trump compared attorney Roy Cohn – Senator Joe McCarthy’s attack dog who became Trump’s mentor – to “all the hundreds of ‘respectable’ guys who make careers out of boasting about their uncompromising integrity but have absolutely no loyalty … What I liked most about Roy Cohn was that he would do just the opposite.”

Trump continues to prefer loyalty over integrity.

His top advisers are his daughter, Ivanka, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

The White House director of social media is Dan Scavino Jr., who had been Trump’s caddie. 

Lynn Patton, just appointed to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s important New York office, knows nothing about housing. She had organized golf tournaments for Trump and planned his son Eric’s wedding. 

To run his legal defense and be his spokesman on the investigation into collusion with Russian operatives, Trump has hired Marc Kasowitz.

Kasowitz is not an expert in criminal or constitutional law. His only apparent qualification is his utter loyal to Trump.

Kasowitz has been Trump’s personal legal fixer for almost two decades – representing him in his failed libel lawsuit against a journalist, the Trump University fraud case, and candidate Trump’s response to allegations of sexual assault by multiple women last year. (Kasowitz called the New York Times article containing interviews with the women “per se libel” and demanded “a full and immediate retraction and apology,” which the Times refused.) 

Not incidentally, Kasowitz has said he played a central role in the firing of Preet Bharara. Kasowitz told Trump, “This guy is going to get you,” according to a person familiar with Kasowitz’s account.

Now, Kasowitz is taking on a public role. Bypassing the White House Counsel, he instructed White House aides to discuss the investigation as little as possible, and advised them about whether they should hire private lawyers.

The horrifying reality is that in Trumpworld, there is no real “public” role. It’s all about protecting and benefiting Trump.

When loyalty trumps integrity, we no longer have a government of laws. We have a government by and for Trump.

At a roundtable discussion with state transportation officials on Friday, Donald Trump said America’s aging roads, bridges, railways, and water systems were being “scoffed at and laughed” at. He pledged that they “will once again be the envy of the world.”

This seems to be a core theme for Trump: America’s greatness depends on others envying us rather than scoffing and laughing at us.

He said much the same thing last week when he announced his decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. “At what point does America get demeaned? At what point do they start laughing at us, as a country? We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore. And they won’t be. They won’t be.”

To be sure, America is in dire need of massive investments in infrastructure. The nation suffers from overflowing sewage drains, crumbling bridges, rusting railroad tracks, outworn roads, and public transportation systems rivaling those of third-world nations.  

The American Society of Civil Engineers, giving America’s over-all infrastructure a grade of D-plus, says we would need to spend $3.6 trillion by 2020 to bring it up to par.

The problem isn’t that we’re being laughed at. It’s that we’re spending hours in traffic jams, disrupted flights, and slow-moving trains. And we’re sacrificing billions in lost productivity, avoidable public health problems, and increased carbon emissions. 

But what Donald Trump is proposing won’t help. It’s nothing but a huge and unnecessary tax giveaway to the rich.

His “$1 trillion infrastructure plan,” unveiled last week, doesn’t amount to $1 trillion of new federal investment in infrastructure. It would commit $200 billion of federal dollars over ten years, combined with about $800 billion of assorted tax breaks to get developers to build things instead of the federal government doing it.

And it’s hardly a plan. It’s not much more than a page of talking points.

Worse, its underlying principle is deeply flawed.  It boils down to a giant public subsidy to developers and investors, who would receive tax generous tax credits in return for taking on the job. 

Which means the rest of us would have to pay higher taxes or get fewer services in order to make up for the taxes the developers and investors would no longer pay.

For example (in one version of the plan I’ve come across), for every dollar developers put into a project, they’d actually pay only 18 cents – after tax credits – and taxpayers would contribute the other 82 cents through their tax dollars.

No one should be surprised at this scheme. It’s what Trump knows best. After all, he was a developer who made billions, often off sweeteners like generous tax credits and other subsidies.  

The public would also pay a second time. The developers would own the roads and bridges and other pieces of infrastructure they finance. They’d then charge members of the public tolls and fees to use them.

In place of public roads and bridges, we’d have private roads and bridges. Think of America turning into giant, horizontal-like Trump Tower wherever you looked.   

These tolls and fees won’t come cheap. They’d have to be set high in order to satisfy the profit margins demanded by the developers and the investors who back them.

Worst of all, we’d get the wrong kind of infrastructure. Projects that will be most attractive to developers and investors are those whose tolls and fees bring in the biggest bucks – giant mega-projects like major new throughways and new bridges.

Developers and investors won’t be interested in the thousands of smaller bridges, airports, pipes, and water treatment facilities across the country that are most in need of repair.

They’re not likely to respond to the needs of rural communities and smaller cities and towns that are too small to generate the tolls and other user fees equity developers and investors seek.

They won’t be attracted to the most important first priority for our nation’s infrastructure: Better maintenance of what we already have. With improved maintenance, it wouldn’t be necessary to completely rebuild.

But investors and developers want to build anew. They can’t reap big rewards from maintenance.

Nor will they want to put their efforts and money into projects that don’t yet have proven financial track records, like many clean energy innovations – which, not incidentally, might have enabled us to meet our targets under the Paris climate accords, were we still part of the Paris accords.

We shouldn’t have to pay twice over for the wrong infrastructure.

To really make America great again we need the correct infrastructure in the right places – infrastructure that’s for the public, not for big developers and investors.

Sorry, Donald. The only way we get this is if big corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes to support it.

Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) is already drafting articles of impeachment related to Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, believing there’s enough evidence of Trump’s obstruction of justice to begin an impeachment inquiry (not to mention Trump’s blatant violation of the Constitutions emoluments clause by profiting off his presidency, and much else).

But Democratic leaders are pushing back, warning there aren’t enough facts to justify an impeachment inquiry at this point, and, in any event, such an inquiry would politicize ongoing congressional investigations. 

Baloney. 

Historically, the three previous impeachment inquiries in the House (involving presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton) rested on less evidence of obstruction of justice than is already publicly known about Trump.

Comey’s testimony to Congress is itself more than enough – confirming that Trump demanded Comey’s loyalty, asked Comey to stop investigating Michael Flynn, repeatedly told Comey the FBI investigation was a “cloud” on his presidency, and asked Comey to declare publicly that Trump wasn’t an object of the investigation

In addition, we have Trump’s interview with Lester Holt on NBC and Trump’s subsequent meeting with Russian officials in the Oval Office. In both instances, Trump connected his firing of Comey with the Russian investigation.

Also bear in mind the obstructions of justice that caused the House to impeach previous presidents concerned issues far less serious than Trump’s possible collusion with a foreign power to win election.

Democratic leaders say they don’t want to talk about impeachment now because they’re worried about politicizing the current congressional investigations, which aren’t impeachment inquiries. Hello? Republicans have already politicized them. 

The real reason Democratic leaders don’t want to seek an impeachment now is they know there’s zero chance that Republicans, who now control both houses of Congress, would support such a move. So why engage in a purely symbolic gesture? 

Democratic leaders figure that between now and the midterm elections there will be even more revelations from non-partisan sources – future testimony by Trump operatives like Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, early reports from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, and leaks to the press – that will build the case, and fuel more public outrage. 

That outrage will give Democrats a strong chance of taking back the House and maybe even the Senate. Then they’ll really impeach Trump.

I can’t argue with the political logic of Democratic leaders. And if their strategy will lead to Trump’s ouster sooner than any other way, I’m all for it.

But here’s the problem. It’s not clear America can wait for the midterm elections, followed by what’s likely to be a long and drawn-out impeachment investigation, followed by a trial in the Senate. (Note that none of the presidents listed above was ever convicted by the Senate and thrown out of office.) 

With each passing day, Donald Trump becomes a greater danger to America and the world. We don’t have time. 

The advantage of introducing a bill of impeachment now – even attempting to do so – is that such an action might itself galvanize the vast majority of Americans who want Trump out of office. It could mobilize and energize people around the most important immediate issue facing the country. 

Never underestimate the power of a public aroused to action. It is worth recalling that Nixon resigned of his own accord before the House had even voted out an impeachment resolution. The American public demanded it. 

The arrest of Reality Leigh Winner, a 25-year-old federal contractor from Atlanta, Georgia, for leaking a National Security Agency report describing in far more detail than previously known Russian efforts to intrude in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump, comes in the midst of a deluge of Trump tweets and leaks.

Among the most sensitive leaks about national security since the start of the Trump administration was Trump’s own Oval Office conversation with top Russian officials last month, in which he revealed allied intelligence information apparently coming from Israel. At that same meeting, Trump discussed his firing of former FBI Director James Comey the previous day, thereby relieving “great pressure” on him, he said. (Comey will be testifying before Congress Thursday).

How do we even know about these discussions between Trump and Russian officials? They were leaked! So we had a leak about a leak, coupled with a leak about a potential coverup by the president of his attempt to obstruct justice.

The essential message of the Justice Department’s decision to go after Reality Winner is that those who leak will be targeted for prosecution if the information they give journalists is about Russia helping Trump win the election.

But let’s be clear. This particular leak of an NSA report is not the central problem.

The problem is Russia has directly and brazenly interfered in our democratic system. Yet we don’t know exactly how – and we don’t have a means of stopping Russia from doing it again.

The other part of the problem is that instead of resolutely focusing on this brazen attack on American democracy, we have president who’s been actively trying to obstruct public knowledge of what happened.

To Donald Trump, the world is made up of only two sorts of people, or nations: strong winners whom others respect and fear, and weak losers whom others exploit and laugh at. There is no other alternative.

“At what point does America get demeaned? At what point do they start laughing at us, as a country?” Trump asked Thursday during his major announcement from the White House Rose Garden that the US would be withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement. “We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore. And they won’t be. They won’t be.“

For Trump, there is no such thing as collaboration for mutual gain. Cooperation is a sham. 

Similarly, social insurance is a con. Billionaires can be trusted because they’ve already made their money – presumably by out-exploiting others. 

Dictators are admirable because they’re respected and feared. But democratically-elected prime ministers and presidents need to be shown who’s boss – their hands grabbed in white-knuckled contests of dominance, their bodies shoved aside if they get out in front. And treaties and compacts need to be renegotiated so America wins.

It’s the same at home: Political opponents must be humiliated, White House staffers demeaned (even the Vice President shown his place), the press degraded, recalcitrant judges debased, others intimidated. 

Everything is a giant zero-sum game in which either you win and they lose, or they win and you lose. And if they dare put up a fight, you get even.

This is the personality of a sociopath. 

Trump is now the single most powerful person on the planet, with the ability to order the destruction of the world in just over four minutes. It is necessary to get him out of the White House, peacefully and legally, as quickly as possible.

Say you’re Vladimir Putin, and you did a deal with Trump last year. I’m not suggesting there was any such deal, mind you. But if you are Putin and you did do a deal, what did Trump agree to do?

 1.  Repudiate NATO. NATO is the biggest thorn in your side – the alliance that both humiliates you and stymies your ambitions in the Baltics and elsewhere. Trump almost delivered on this last week by pointedly not reaffirming Article 5, which states that an attack on one NATO ally is an attack on all.

2.  Antagonize Europe, especially Angela Merkel. She’s the strongest leader in the West other than Trump, and you’d love to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Germany. Your larger goal is for Europe to no longer depend on the United States, so you can increase Russia’s influence in Europe. Trump has almost delivered one on this, too. Merkel is even saying Europe can no longer depend on America.

3. Take the U.S. out of the Paris accord on the environment. This will anger America’s other allies around the world and produce a wave of anti-Americanism – all to your advantage. Nothing would satisfy you more than isolating the United States. Trump has already delivered. 

4. Then unravel the accord. Russia is the world’s second-largest exporter of oil after Saudi Arabia, and biggest exporter of natural gas. And the oil and gas industry contributes about half the revenues to your domestic budget. The last thing you want is for the world to shift to wind and solar, so you’d love for the whole Paris accord to unravel. Trump has promised to help. 

5.  Embark on a new era of protectionism. Or at least anti-trade rhetoric. This will threaten the West’s economic interdependence and loosen America’s economic grip on the rest of the world. Trump is on the way to delivering on this one.

6.. End the economic sanctions on Russia imposed after the annexation of Crimea and Russian backing of separatists in eastern Ukraine. Oil production on land is falling, so you want to tap the vast petroleum and gas reserves offshore in the Arctic. In 2011, you and ExxonMobil’s Rex Tillerson, signed a $500 billion deal to do this. But sanctions imposed in 2014 by that damned Obama administration stopped the project. Tillerson, now secretary of state, and Exxon lobbied against the sanctions. Trump has promised to lift the sanctions, so you can get on with oil and gas extraction in the Russian Arctic.

No delivery on this as yet, but you understand why. Trump has got to cope with all the suspicions in America about his deal with you. (Why can’t he stop all those leaks?) Once that business dies down, he’ll end the sanctions. In the meantime – as a symbolic down payment – he’ll hand back to you two diplomatic compounds in America that were taken by the U.S. government in late December as punishment for Moscow’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

And what did you agree to do in return, Vladimir? What was your side of the deal? Two things: You’d help him win the presidency. You’d also shut up about your help so Trump wouldn’t be impeached and convicted of treason.

In other words – if you did do a deal (and I’m not suggesting you did, Vlad) – Trump has delivered part of it but is still in the process of delivering the rest. And you’ve delivered part but are also still delivering the rest. That way, each of you can maintain pressure on the other. It’s what’s so beautiful about the art of the deal.

Trump’s budget isn’t just about massive tax cuts for rich and major cuts in assistance for the poor. He also wants to roll back civil rights. Under his proposed budget:

1. The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice – which  has long investigated hate crimes, voter suppression, and other forms of discrimination – would lose at least 121 positions.

2. The Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Program – in charge of policing against discrimination by companies with federal contracts – would be eliminated altogether. That’s 600 positions. (Just last September, the office reached a $1.7 million settlement with tech giant Palantir for discriminatory hiring practices.)

3. The Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice program – which combats higher-rates of pollution in communities of color – would be eliminated.

4. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights – charged with investigating discrimination in America’s schools – would be drastically cut. The Trump administration itself has admitted these cuts will hamper its ability to conduct investigations.

Trump has made clear his priorities: Benefit the most comfortable Americans and stick it to the most vulnerable.

Last Wednesday, on the eve of his election to the House of Representatives, Montana Republican Greg Gianforte beat up Ben Jacobs, a reporter for the “Guardian" newspaper.

What prompted the violence? Jacobs had asked Gianforte for his reaction to the Congressional Budget Office’s report showing that the House Republican substitute for the Affordable Care Act would result in 23 million Americans losing their health insurance.

Then, in the words of a Fox News team who witnessed the brutal attack: “Gianforte grabbed Jacobs by the neck with both hands and slammed him into the ground behind him. … Gianforte then began punching the reporter. As Gianforte moved on top of Jacobs, he began yelling something to the effect of, ‘I’m sick and tired of this!’ Jacobs scrambled to his knees and said something about his glasses being broken…. To be clear, at no point did any of us who witnessed this assault see Jacobs show any form of physical aggression toward Gianforte, who left the area after giving statements to local sheriff’s deputies.”

After the attack, Jacobs was evaluated in an ambulance at the scene and taken to Bozeman Health Deaconess Hospital. Several hours later he left the hospital wearing a sling around his arm. Gianforte was charged with misdemeanor assault.

Donald Trump’s reaction? He praised Greg Gianforte’s election as a “great win in Montana.”

For years, conservatives warned that liberals were “defining deviancy down” by tolerating bad social behavior.

Donald Trump is actively defining deviancy down in American politics. He’s also making America meaner.

Last year, Trump said of a protester at one of his campaign rallies: “I’d like to punch him in the face.” He added “in the old days, protesters would be carried out on stretchers.“

In a different era, when decency was the norm, the members of the U.S. House of Representatives would not seat a thug like Gianforte in the chamber. But House Republicans seem eager to have another kindred spirit.

Charlie Sykes, a conservative former talk-show host in Wisconsin, says “every time something like Montana happens, Republicans … normalize and accept previously unacceptable behavior.”

Gianforte’s attack on Jacobs was shameful enough. Almost as shameful was Gianforte’s  press release about what occurred, which blamed Jacobs. “It’s unfortunate that this aggressive behavior from a liberal journalist created this scene at our campaign volunteer BBQ.”

It was a blatant lie, as evinced by the Fox News team and the charge against Gianforte. But under Trump, blatant lying is the new normal. And a “liberal journalist” is the enemy.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, says Donald Trump “has contributed to a climate of discourse consistent with assaulting a reporter for asking an inconvenient question.”

It used to be that candidates and elected officials were supposed to answer reporters’ questions. We thought democracy depended on it. But we’re now in the era of Donald Trump, who calls the press the “enemy of the American people.”

In America, candidates or officials didn’t beat up reporters who posed questions they didn’t like. That kind of thing occurred in dictatorships.

More generally and menacingly, Trump has licensed the dark side of the American psyche. His hatefulness and vindictiveness have normalized a new meanness in America.

Since Trump came on the scene, hate crimes have soared. America has become even more polarized. Average Americans say and do things to people they disagree with that in a different time would have been unthinkable.

“I’d submit that the president has unearthed some demons,” says Rep. Mark Sanford, a Republican Representative from South Carolina.  “I’ve talked to a number of people about it back home. They say, ‘Well, look, if the president can say whatever, why can’t I say whatever?’ He’s given them license.”

The new meanness is also finding its way into public policy, where Trump wants unprecedented cuts in Medicaid, Social Security disability, and food stamps, and to shove 23 million Americans off health insurance – all so the rich and corporations can get big tax cuts.

I recall a time in America where this kind of proposal would be considered an affront to decency. Now it’s the baseline for negotiations.

A president contributes to the norms of our society. He sets the moral tone. Trump is setting them at a new low.

Very soon Senate Republicans will have to decide what to do about Trumpcare. Their choice is severely limited. 

The Congressional Budget Office has made it crystal clear that the House version of Trumpcare will cause 23 million Americans to lose their health coverage. 

Which means that unless Senate Republicans repudiate their own Congressional Budget Office (whose director they appointed), they’ll have to either vote to take away healthcare for 23 million people, or come up with their own plan. 

But if they try to come up with their own plan, they’ll soon discover there’s no way to insure those 23 million without (1) mandating that healthy people buy insurance, so that sick people with pre-existing conditions can afford it; and (2) keeping the existing taxes on rich people so that poor people can afford to buy health insurance. 

In other words, they’ll be back to the Affordable Care Act.

Some Senate Republicans will no doubt claim that the Affordable Care Act can’t be sustained in its present form because private insurers are beginning to bail out of it.

That’s an awkward argument for Republicans to make because Republicans themselves have been responsible for this problem. 

In 2010 Congress established “risk corridors” to protect insurers against uncertainties in setting the level of insurance premiums when they didn’t know who would sign up. Since then, Republicans have reduced or eliminated this backup. And the Trump Administration has done everything possible to generate even more uncertainty among insurers. 

The obvious solution is to restore this backup and reduce uncertainty, in order to attract insurers back in. 

This is surely better than repealing the Affordable Care Act and taking away health insurance coverage for 23 million people.

The only alternative is a single-payer plan – Medicare for all – that would provide universal coverage more cheaply than our present system, as embraced by most other advanced nations.

But Senate Republicans won’t get near a single payer. 

Which means, as a practical matter, they have no choice. They may wrap it up in different garb and call it by a different name, but in the end the logic is unavoidable: They’ll have to strengthen the Affordable Care Act. 

For years, conservatives warned that liberals were “defining deviancy downward.” They said that by tolerating bad social behavior, liberals in effect lowered what was deemed acceptable behavior overall – allowing social norms to decline.

There was never a lot of evidence for that view, but there’s little question that Donald Trump is actively defining deviancy downward for the nation as a whole – whether it’s by lying, denigrating basic democratic values, celebrating tyrants around the world, using his office to build his family wealth, or stopping at nothing to win the presidency.

Now comes his budget. Budgets are overall expressions of values and priorities. Trump’s budget is cruel and deviant. He proposes to cut federal spending by more than $3.6 trillion over the next decade, much of it for programs that help the poor (Medicaid, food stamps, Social Security disability, and health insurance for poor children) – in order to finance a huge military buildup and tax cuts for corporations and the rich.

Trump’s budget won’t get through Congress, but it defines deviancy downward in 3 respects:

1. It imposes huge burdens on people who already are hurting. Not just the very poor, but also the working class. In fact, among the biggest losers would be people who voted for Trump – whites in rural and poor areas of the country who depend on Medicaid, food stamps, and Social Security disability.

Yet will they know that Trump is willing to sell them out to the rich and corporate interests, or will they fall for the right-wing Republican propaganda (amplified by Fox News and yell radio) that the budget is designed to help people take more responsibility for themselves?

2. It sets a new low bar for congressional and public debate over social insurance in America, and of government’s role – far lower than anything proposed by Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. It pushes the idea that each of us is and should be on our own, rather than that we are part of a society that benefits from social insurance – spreading the risks and costs of adversity that could hit any one of us.

As White House OMB director Mick Mulvaney absurdly put it, the government should show “compassion” for low-income Americans but it should “also…have compassion for folks who are paying [for] it.” That illogic eliminates the justification for social insurance altogether.

The budget thereby frames the debate over Trumpcare, for example, as “why should I pay for her pre-existing health problem if I’m healthy?”

3. Finally, the budget eviscerates the notion that an important aspect of patriotism involves sacrificing for the common good – paying for public services you won’t use but will be used by others and will thereby help the nation as a whole, such as schools, roads, clean air, and health care.

Trump’s budget celebrates a cruel and virulent form of individualism – much like Trump himself. Until Trump, this view of America was considered deviant. But Trump is defining deviancy downward.

We are a better nation than this.

European governments, preparing for a round of major summits with Donald Trump, are wary.

I spent much of the past week speaking with officials and cabinet ministers in Europe. All they wanted to talk about was Trump. 

Here, in summary, are the most frequent remarks I heard from them, and from others in my travels, in rough order of frequency:

1. Trump is unstable, and we’re not going to count on anything he says or commits to.

2. Trump doesn’t support NATO or European integration.

3. Trump is actively encouraging racist nationalists in our country.

4. Trump is allied with Putin to bring Europe down.

5. There’s no doubt Trump worked with Putin to win the U.S. presidential election.

6. If Trump’s polls drop too low, he’ll start a war in order to get Americans to rally around him. (Opinions varied on whether Trump’s war would be with North Korea, Iran, terrorists in Nigeria, or an escalation in Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan.)

7. How did you Americans come to elect this ego-maniac? (Others called him an infant, moron, ignoramus, fool.)

8. He’s another Berlusconi (or Franco, Mussolini, Salazar, Hitler).

9. We remember fascism. We never thought it would happen in America.

10. The world depends on American leadership. We’re very worried.

My overall impression: Anti-Trump sentiment is even stronger in Europe than it is in the U.S. If Trump expects his European trip to give him a reprieve from his troubles at home, he’s mistaken.

The question is no longer whether there are grounds to impeach Donald Trump. It is when enough Republicans will put their loyalty to America ahead of their loyalty to their party.

Trump’s statements last week about his firing of former FBI director James Comey provide ample evidence that Trump engaged in an obstruction of justice – a major charge in impeachment proceedings brought against Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton.

It’s worth recalling that the illegality underlying Nixon’s impeachment was a burglary at the Watergate complex, while the illegality underlying Clinton’s was lying to a grand jury about sex with an intern in the White House.

Trump’s obstruction is potentially far more serious. It involves an investigation about whether Trump or his aides colluded with Russia in rigging a presidential election – the most direct assault on American democracy in history,

Last Thursday, in an interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt about his firing of Comey, Trump said: “I was going to fire regardless of recommendation.” Trump also said that he had pressed Comey during a private dinner to tell him if he was under investigation.

Trump conceded that the ongoing investigation into Russian influence on the 2016 election, which includes a probe into the possibility that Moscow was coordinating with the Trump campaign, was one of the factors Trump considered before firing Comey.

“In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won,’ ” Trump said.

The law is reasonably clear. If Trump removed Comey to avoid being investigated, that’s an obstruction of justice – an impeachable offense.

On Friday, Trump tweeted that Comey “better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”

Here, the law is also clear. Seeking to silence, intimidate or even influence someone who is likely to offer evidence in a congressional or criminal proceeding is also an obstruction of justice – and an impeachable offense.

As a practical matter, though, nothing will happen until a majority of the House decides on bringing a bill of impeachment. Which means, under the present congress, twenty-two Republicans would have to join with House Democrats to put enough pressure on the Speaker of the House to allow such a bill to be considered.

The odds of this occurring in this Congress, under present circumstances, are approximately zero.

So – barring a “smoking gun” that shows Trump’s complicity with Russian operatives in interfering in the 2016 election – Trump’s fate seems to hinge on the midterm elections of 2018.

Those elections are less than eighteen months away. That’s a long time in American politics. Under a Trump presidency, that’s an eternity.

But there’s another possibility.

In my experience, most elected politicians have two goals – to do what they consider to be the right things for the American public, and to be reelected (not necessarily in that order).

If Trump’s poll numbers continue to plummet – particularly among Republicans and Independents – twenty-two House Republicans may well decide their chances for being reelected are better if they abandon him before the 2018 midterms.

Paul Ryan and the House Republican leadership might make a similar calculation, at least enough to put a bill of impeachment on the table.

Most House Republicans prefer Vice President Mike Pence to Donald Trump anyway. As one said to me several months ago, “Pence is a predictable conservative. Trump is an unpredictable egomaniac. Most of us are more comfortable with the former.”

There’s a good chance Trump’s polls will continue to fall. First, he’s shown to be his own worst enemy. Even when things are going reasonably well, he seems bizarrely intent on stirring controversy – and saying or tweeting things that get him into trouble.

There’s also a matter of the economy. The expansion that began in 2009 is getting long in the tooth. If history is any guide, we’re due for a slowdown or recession. And justified or not, presidents get blamed when Americans lose jobs.

Donald Trump doesn’t have the character or the temperament to be president of the United States. But this obvious fact isn’t enough to get him fired.

He’ll be fired when enough Americans decide they can’t abide him anymore.

Then, maybe in an impeachment proceeding, it will come out that Trump did something incredibly stupid – like give a nod of approval to one of his campaign bottom feeders like Roger Stone to tell a Russian operative to go ahead with their plan to interfere in the 2016 election.

The House impeaches. The Senate convicts. That’s the end of Trump. 

Trump warning to former FBI Director James Comey against leaking anything negative about him – tweeting “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” – is deeply troubling.

The core issue here is not whether Trump is secretly recording his meetings or telephone calls (Trump and his White House aides refuse to say whether he tapes his visitors, something he was suspected of doing when he was in business in New York).

The real issues are these:

(1) The illegality of a President of the United States seeking to intimidate a potential witness in a congressional investigation.

(2) The illegality of a President potentially intimidating current FBI personnel who are investigating that president or his aides, by firing the former FBI head who was leading such an investigation and now threatening retaliation against him.

These illegal acts cannot be ignored. We are facing a constitutional crisis potentially larger and more significant than Richard Nixon’s “Watergate.” As long as Donald Trump remains president, our governing institutions are threatened.

The question now is whether there exist 22 House Republicans whose loyalty to the United States exceeds their loyalty to the Republican Party, who would join with House Democrats in seeking a bill of impeachment.

Shame on every one of the 217 Republicans who last Thursday voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and substitute basically nothing.

Trumpcare isn’t a replacement of the Affordable Care Act. It’s a transfer from the sick and poor to the rich and healthy.

The losers are some 24 million Americans who under the Affordable Care Act get subsidies to afford health insurance coverage, including millions of people with pre-existing conditions and poor people who had access to Medicaid, who may not be able to afford insurance in the future.

The winners are wealthy Americans who will now get a tax cut because they won’t have to pay to fund the Affordable Care Act, and healthy people who won’t have to buy health insurance to subsidize the sick.

House Republicans say they have protected people with pre-existing health problems. Baloney. Sick people could be charged premiums so high as to make insurance unaffordable. 

America has the only healthcare system in the world designed to avoid sick people. Private for-profit health insurers do whatever they can to insure groups of healthy people because that’s where the profits are. They also make every effort to avoid sick people, because that’s where the costs are.

The Affordable Care Act puts healthy and sick people into the same insurance pool. But under the Republican bill that passed the House, healthy people will no longer be subsidizing sick people.  Healthy people will be in their own insurance pool. Sick people will be grouped with other sick people in their own high-risk pool – which will result in such high premiums, co-payments, and deductibles that many if not most won’t be able to afford.

Republicans say their bill creates a pool of money that will pay insurance companies to cover the higher costs of insuring sick people. Wrong. Insurers will take the money and still charge sick people much higher premiums. Or avoid sick people altogether.

The only better alternative to the Affordable Care Act is a single-payer system, such as Medicare for all, which would put all Americans into the same giant insurance pool. Not only would this be fairer, but it would also be far more efficient, because money wouldn’t be spent marketing and advertising to attract healthy people and avoid sick people.

Paul Ryan says the House vote was about fulfilling a promise the GOP made to American voters. But those voters have been lied to from the start about the Affordable Care Act. For years Republicans told them that the Act couldn’t work, would bankrupt America, and result in millions losing the healthcare they had before. All of these lies have been proven wrong.

Now Republicans say the Act is unsustainable because premiums are rising and insurers are pulling out. More rubbish. Whatever is wrong with the Affordable Care Act could be easily fixed, but Republicans have refused to do the fixing. Insurers have been pulling out because of the uncertainty Republicans have created.

The reason Republicans are so intent on repealing the Affordable Care Act is they want to give a giant tax cut to the rich who’d no longer have to pay the tab.

Here we come to the heart of the matter.

If patriotism means anything, it means sacrificing for the common good, participating in the public good. Childless Americans pay taxes for schools so children are educated. Americans who live close to their work pay taxes for roads and bridges so those who live farther away can get to work. Americans with secure jobs pay into unemployment insurance so those who lose their jobs have some income until they find another.

And under the Affordable Care Act, healthier and wealthier Americans pay a bit more so sicker and poorer Americans don’t die.

Trump and House Republicans aren’t patriots. They don’t believe in sacrificing for the common good. They don’t think we’re citizens with obligations to one another. To them, we’re just individual consumers who deserve the best deal we can get for ourselves. It’s all about the art of the deal.

So what do we do now? We fight.

To become law, Trumpcare has to go through 4 additional steps: First, a version must be enacted in the Senate. It must then go a “conference“ to hammer out differences between the House and Senate. The conference agreement must then pass in the House again, and again in the Senate.

I hope you’ll be there every step of the way, until Trumpcare collapses under the weight of its own cruelty. House Republicans who voted for this travesty will rue the day they did. Any Senate Republican who joins them will regret it as well.

Emmanuel Macron is the next president of France, defeating his far right rival Marine Le Pen by a comfortable 65.1% to 34.9% (according to a usually reliable vote estimate by pollsters Ispos/Sopra Steria for French state TV and radio and Le Monde). At 39, Macron will become France’s youngest president. He has never held elected office, and just over a year ago his political movement En Marche! did not even exist.

Still, the fact that racist nationalist Le Pen could summon more than a third of the French vote is cause for worry about the future. Xenophobia toward Muslims has played a part. More responsible are widening inequality and mounting job insecurity – coupled with a growing sense that the political-economy is rigged in favor or the privileged and out of touch with average working people.

The French haven’t suffered the same degree of economic stresses as have Americans in recent decades – France’s social safety net is still relatively intact – which may explain why they didn’t elect Le Pen while we elected Trump. But France, like most modern political economic systems, is heading in America’s direction under the guise of business “flexibility” and austerity economics.

My humble advice to Macron: Don’t follow America.

Hopefully, Saturday’s hacked leaks purporting to show offshore accounts and tax evasion by France’s independent candidate Emmanuel Macron won’t jeopardize his lead over racist nationalist Marine Le Pen in Sunday’s French election.

But there may be a larger significance to the leaks and their distribution – their  apparent connection both to Russian operatives and to the American alt-right. It’s the same network that sought to deliver the U.S. presidential election to Trump.

Like Trump before he was elected, Le Pen has been an outspoken advocate of pivoting France’s foreign policy toward Putin’s Russia. She met with Putin two months ago in Moscow. For years, Le Pen has benefited from Russian financial support and from favorable coverage in state-run Russian media.

We don’t know for sure that Russian hackers have sought to help Le Pen as they did Trump. But it seems likely. 

Meanwhile, analysts have determined that the social-media campaign in France following the leak originated in the United States, in a well-known network of alt-right Twitter accounts that had been associated with the Trump campaign. 

Ben Nimmo, a research fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, said in an interview that the subsequent #MacronLeaks Twitter storm — notably in English, not French — largely began with the account of Jack Posobiec. Prosobiec is a Washington-based correspondent for the alt-right website TheRebel.media. He has written that he served, in 2016, as “Special Projects Director of Citizens for Trump, the largest Trump grassroots organization in the US.”

From there, news of the Macron leaks was retweeted by William Craddick, another alt-right activist known to have spread in December a fake news story about German Chancellor Angela Merkel tolerating Islamic State terrorists to deploy an “E.U. army” to subdue her country’s neighbors. Then the “#MacronLeaks” was retweeted in France by well-known National Front accounts — reaching 47,000 tweets in just three hours.

These alt-right American activists operate through sites like 4chan and Discord – sites previously used to coordinate support for Trump’s presidential campaign.

Hopefully, Macron will win Sunday’s election in France. 

But the parallels between what happened in the United States during the presidential election of 2016 and what has occurred in the French election are too close to ignore. 

Are Western democracies under attack from Russia and the alt-right in America, in an effort to put racist nationalists in power? 

It is critically important that U.S. intelligence agencies, working with Interpol and other international intelligence agencies, answer this question. And whatever the answer, we must better guard our democracies.

Shame on every one of the 217 Republicans who voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act on Thursday, and substitute basically nothing. 

Trumpcare isn’t a replacement of the Affordable Care Act. It’s a transfer from the sick and poor to the rich and healthy. 

The losers are up to 24 million Americans who under the Affordable Care Act get subsidies to afford health insurance coverage, including millions of people with pre-existing conditions and poor people who had access to Medicaid who may not be able to afford insurance in the future. 

The winners are wealthy Americans who will now get a tax cut because they won’t have to pay to fund the Affordable Care Act, and healthy people who won’t have to buy health insurance to subsidize the sick. 

House Republicans say they have protected people with pre-existing health problems. Baloney. Sick people could be charged premiums so high as to make insurance unaffordable. Trumpcare would even let states waive the Obamacare ban on charging higher premiums for women who have been raped — which actually occurred before the Affordable Care Act. 

America has the only healthcare system in the world designed to avoid sick people. Private for-profit health insurers do whatever they can to insure groups of healthy people, because that’s where the profits are. They also make every effort to avoid sick people, because that’s where the costs are. 

The Affordable Care Act puts healthy and sick people into the same insurance pool. But under the Republican bill that passed the House, healthy people will no longer be subsidizing sick people.  Healthy people will be in their own insurance pool. Sick people will be grouped with other sick people in their own high-risk pool – which will result in such high premiums, co-payments, and deductibles that many if not most won’t be able to afford. 

Republicans say their bill creates a pool of money that will pay insurance companies to cover the higher costs of insuring sick people. Wrong. Insurers will take the money and still charge sick people much higher premiums. Or avoid sick people altogether. 

The only better alternative to the Affordable Care Act is a single-payer system, such as Medicare for all, which would put all Americans into the same giant insurance pool. Not only would this be fairer, but it would also be far more efficient, because money wouldn’t be spent marketing and advertising to attract healthy people and avoid sick people.

Paul Ryan says the House vote was about fulfilling a promise the GOP made to American voters. But those voters have been lied to from the start about the Affordable Care Act. For years Republicans told them that the Act couldn’t work, would bankrupt America, and result in millions losing the healthcare they had before. All of these lies have been proven wrong. 

Now Republicans say the Act is unsustainable because premiums are rising and insurers are pulling out. Wrong again. Whatever is wrong with the Affordable Care Act could be easily fixed, but Republicans have refused to do the fixing. Insurers have been pulling out because of the uncertainty Republicans have created.

The reason Republicans are so intent on repealing the Affordable Care Act is they want to give a giant tax cut to the rich who’d no longer have to pay the tab.

Here we come to the heart of the matter. 

If patriotism means anything, it means sacrificing for the common good, participating in the public good. Childless Americans pay taxes for schools so children are educated. Americans who live close to their work pay taxes for roads and bridges so those who live farther away can get to work. Americans with secure jobs pay into unemployment insurance so those who lose their jobs have some income until they find another. 

And under the Affordable Care Act, healthier and wealthier Americans pay a bit more so sicker and poorer Americans don’t die. 

Trump and House Republicans aren’t patriots. They don’t believe in sacrificing for the common good. They don’t think we’re citizens with obligations to one another. To them, we’re just individual consumers who deserve the best deal we can get for ourselves. It’s all about the art of the deal.

So what do we do now? We fight.

To become law, Trumpcare has to go through 4 additional steps: First, a version must be enacted in the Senate. It must then go a “conference“ to hammer out differences between the House and Senate. The conference agreement must then pass in the House again, and again in the Senate. 

I hope you’ll be there every step of the way, until Trumpcare collapses under the weight of its own cruelty. House Republicans who voted for this travesty will rue the day they did. Any Senate Republican who joins them will regret it as well. 

After more than 100 days into his presidency, it seems fair to ask: What is Donald Trump’s governing philosophy? 

He isn’t really a Republican (he didn’t join the GOP until 2012). He’s hardly a free-market conservative (he’s eager to block trade and immigration). No one would mistake him for a libertarian (he’s okay with preventing abortions and gay marriage).

So what is he? 

An authoritarian.

Political scientists use this term to describe a way of governing that values order and control over personal freedom, and seeks to concentrate power in the hands of a single “strongman.”

Viewed through the lens of authoritarianism, Trump’s approach to governing is logical and coherent.

For example, an authoritarian wouldn’t follow the normal process in a constitutional democracy for disputing a judicial decision he dislikes – which is to appeal it to a higher court.

An authoritarian would instead assail judges who rule against him, as Trump has done repeatedly. He’d also threaten to hobble the offending courts, as Trump did last week in urging that the 9th Circuit (where many of these decisions have originated) be broken up. 

Likewise, an authoritarian has no patience for normal legislative rules – designed, as they are in a democracy, to create opportunities for deliberation.

Which is why Trump told Mitch McConnell to use the “nuclear option” against the time-honored Senate filibuster, in order to confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. 

Last week, Trump called House and Senate rules “archaic,” and urged they be abandoned. “We don’t have a lot of closers in politics, and I understand why: It’s a very rough system. It’s an archaic system,” he said.

Through the eyes of an authoritarian, rules that block what the authoritarian wants to do are always “bad for the country,” as Trump said of them. 

Trump would like to get rid of the filibuster altogether. “The filibuster concept is not a good concept to start off with.”

An authoritarian also seeks to intimidate the press, in order to avoid criticism and consolidate his power.

Trump still doesn’t miss an opportunity to assail the media for publishing “fake news.” His chief of staff has revived Trump’s campaign proposal to widen libel laws so that he can sue the press for stories he doesn’t like.

Authoritarians do not tolerate other levels of government with their own powers and responsibilities. Which is why Trump wants to force states and cities to report on unauthorized immigrants, even though this violates the principle of federalism enshrined in the 10th Amendment.

Finally, authoritarians promote other authoritarians, in an effort to normalize authoritarian rule.

Last Saturday, Trump invited President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines to visit the White House.  

Duterte, you should know, is an authoritarian leader accused of ordering extrajudicial killings of thousands of people suspected of using or selling narcotics as well as others who may have had no involvement with drugs. He has referred to former President Barack Obama as a “son of a whore.” And he has declared open season on suspected terrorists, saying that if he were presented with a suspected terrorist, “give me salt and vinegar and I’ll eat his liver.”

Two weeks ago, Trump phoned to congratulate President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey for his victory in a referendum filled with voting irregularities that expanded Erdogan’s powers and has put Turkey on the road to dictatorship.  

Trump also opined that the recent terrorist attack in Paris will help the right-wing extremist Marine Le Pen.

Trump has praised President Xi Jinping of China, the most authoritarian leader China has had since Mao Zedong.

Trump also hosted at the White House Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who had not been granted an invitation to the White House since seizing power in a military coup almost four years ago.

And don’t forget Trump’s vow during the presidential campaign to pursue a warmer relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. (The effort has faltered in light of possible links between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.)

Donald Trump’s authoritarianism is a consistent and coherent philosophy of governing. But it’s not America’s.  

In fact, the Framers of the U.S. Constitution created separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism precisely to avoid concentrated power. Their goal was to stop authoritarians like Donald Trump. 

Not long ago Trump adviser Stephen Miller declared “the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.” Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton would have been appalled. 

One way dictators take over democracies is by threatening the independence of a nation’s courts. Donald Trump is doing just this. 

Connect the following dots:

1. In January, Trump blasted a federal judge for staying his travel ban. “The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!” he tweeted.

2. In February, after the judge made the stay permanent, Trump issued a veiled threat: “Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!”

3. Last week, after another federal judge issued a nationwide injunction blocking Trump’s travel ban, Trump’s Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, said “I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power.”

4. On Tuesday, after another federal judge blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a threat to take away funds from sanctuary cities, the White House issued a statement condemning the judge as “unelected.” The statement charged “this San Francisco judge’s erroneous ruling is a gift to the criminal gang and cartel element in our country, empowering the worst kind of human trafficking and sex trafficking, and putting thousands of innocent lives at risk. This case is yet one more example of egregious overreach by a single, unelected district judge.”

5. On Wednesday, Trump said he was considering breaking up the court of appeals for the 9th Circuit, in which these three federal judges hear and decide cases. "There are many people who want to break up the 9th Circuit,” he said. “It’s outrageous.” The 9th Circuit Court covers Arizona, California, Alaska, Nevada, Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Washington and Hawaii, as well as Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. Eighteen of the court’s 25 judges were appointed by Democratic presidents.

It is the job of the Justice Department to provide a reasoned case for overruling a federal judge’s decision. In condemning individual judges and threatening to break up the court of appeals instead, Trump is attacking the foundations of the separation of powers in the Constitution. 

This assault on the federal judiciary is an abuse of Trump’s constitutional authority – yet another ground for impeachment.

Trump wants to cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent, in order to “make the United States more competitive.”

This is truly dumb, for 5 reasons:

1. The White House says the United States has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. Baloney. After corporate deductions and tax credits, the typical corporation pays an effective tax rate of 27.9 percent, only a tad higher than the average of 27.7 percent among advanced nations.

2. Trump’s corporate tax cut will bust the federal budget. According to the Congress’s own Joint Committee on Taxation, it will reduce federal revenue by $2 trillion over 10 years. This will either require huge cuts in programs for the poor, or additional tax revenues from the rest of us.

3. The White House says the tax cuts will create a jump in economic growth that will generate enough new revenue to wipe out any increase in the budget deficit. This is supply-side nonsense. The Congressional Research Service reviewed tax cuts since 1945 and found no evidence they generate economic growth. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both cut taxes, and both ended their presidencies with huge budget deficits. Bill Clinton raised taxes, and the economy created more jobs than it did under Bush or Reagan.

4. American corporations don’t need a tax cut. They’re already hugely competitive as measured by their profits – which are at near record highs.

5. The White House says corporations will use the extra profits they get from the tax cut to invest in more capacity and jobs. Rubbish. They’re now using a large portion of their profits to buy back their shares of stock and to buy other companies, in order to raise their stock prices. There’s no reason to suppose they’ll do any different with even more profits.

Don’t fall for Trump’s corporate tax giveaway. It will be a huge windfall for corporations and a huge burden on ordinary Americans.

Trump’s failure to accomplish little or any of his agenda during his first 100 days shouldn’t blind us to the vast harm he has done in this comparatively short time to our system of government, especially his degradation of the presidency.

From early in the Republic, we have looked at the office of the president as a focal point for the nation’s values. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and the two Roosevelts exemplified for generations of Americans the moral authority of the highest office in the land. It is not merely what these men accomplished, but how they did it; not just their policies but their positive effects on the institutions of democratic governance.

True, many of our presidents have fallen short of those ideals. But our disappointments in those individuals reflected the high expectations we have had for those who hold that office.

Yet under Trump, the moral authority of the presidency has all but disappeared.

I’m old enough to recall when John F. Kennedy invited the world’s great artists, writers, and philosophers to dine at the White House. The nation felt ennobled. 

Donald Trump invites Sarah Palin and Ted Nugent, who once called President Obama a “mongrel,” and we feel sullied.

But it has not just been Trump’s vulgarity.

There have also been Trump’s lies – blatant, continuous, and unsubstantiated even after the lack of evidence has been pointed out repeatedly. 

They are not just any lies, but lies that deepen Americans’ suspicion of one another and undermine our confidence in our system of government – such as his repeated contention that “three to five million” people voted illegally in the last election, or that Obama spied on him during the campaign.

Prior presidents have embellished the truth and on occasion have lied about a particular important thing, such as the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But never before Trump have we had a president who chronically lies, whose lies have become an integral part of his presidency even in the first 100 days.

There is also Trump’s vast family business, from which he continues to benefit even though the decisions he makes in office affect what he earns, and the almost certain decisions by foreign governments to curry favor with him by bestowing benefits on his business. 

Trump shrugs off such conflicts – even refusing to release his tax returns, even inviting his daughter and son-in-law, each with their own businesses and conflicts of interest, to join him at the highest reaches of the White House.

Some presidents have profited from their presidencies after they leave office through large speaking fees and book contracts. But never before Trump have we had a president for whom conflicts of financial interest during his presidency are so flagrant yet ignored.

The first 100 days has also been marked by Trump’s divisiveness – turning Americans against each other, legitimizing hatefulness toward Mexican-Americans and Muslim-Americans and African-Americans, fueling violence between his supporters and his opponents.

We have had divisive elections before. But after them, other presidents have sought to heal the wounds. Even after the horrors of the Civil War, Lincoln famously asked us to come together without malice. 

Trump, by contrast, has fomented the warring camps – calling his opponents “enemies,” suggesting they are plotting against his administration, and staging rallies to encourage and fuel his bedrock supporters.

We have also seen Trump’s cruelty – toward refugees, undocumented immigrants, and the poor among us. He has issued a budget that would deeply harm the least advantaged Americans, and supported a repeal of the Affordable Care Act that would also hurt those most in need.

He has refused asylum to refugees at a time when the world faces the largest refugee crisis since World War II, and unleashed immigration enforcers on 11 million residents of the United States, many of whom have been productive members of their communities for years. He has even deported people who have been here since childhood and know know no other nation.

Other presidents have on occasion been cruel. But Trump’s cruelty has defied reason. It is utterly unnecessary.

There has also been Trump’s affect on the rest of the world – legitimizing crude nationalism and hateful xenophobia. He has promoted France’s Marine Le Pen and encouraged authoritarians such as Turkey’s Tayyip Erdogan, while at the same time confusing our democratic allies and friends.  

Finally, there is Donald Trump himself – who in the first 100 days as president has shown himself to be narcissistic, xenophobic, paranoid, vindictive, and thin-skinned; who takes credit for the work of others and blames others for his own failings; who lashes out at the press and journalists when they criticize him, and who demonizes judges who disagree with him.  

We have before had presidents whose personality defects harmed their presidencies and tainted the office of the president, such as Richard Nixon. But Donald Trump is in a different league altogether. He exhibits the opposite of every civic virtue ever encouraged in our school rooms, town halls, and churches.

The first 100 days is an artificial landmark for presidents. But it does offer an opportunity to pause and assess what they have done. Too often, though, we think in the narrow gauge of policies and legislation.

With Trump, it’s important to think more broadly. Among the most significant legacies of his first 100 days is his degrading of the moral authority of the office of the president, and, thereby, of America.

Coulter is back. Today (Thursday), officials at the University of California, Berkeley, changed their mind about cancelling a planned speech by Ann Coulter. They say they found a safe venue.

Yesterday, in a letter to a campus Republican group that invited Coulter to speak, university officials said that they made the decision to cancel Coulter’s appearance after assessing the violence that flared on campus in February, when the same college Republican group invited right-wing provocateur and Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos to speak.

It was a grave mistake. I’m glad the university has reversed course.

How can students understand the vapidity of Coulter’s arguments without being allowed to hear her make them, and question her about them?

It’s one thing to cancel an address at the last moment because university and local police are not prepared to contain violence – as occurred, sadly, with Yiannopoulos. It’s another thing entirely to cancel an address before it is given, when police have adequate time to prepare for such eventualities.

Free speech is what universities are all about. If universities don’t do everything possible to foster and protect it, they aren’t universities. They’re playpens.

With Steve Bannon on way out, official Washington is jumping for joy that Gary Cohn – the former president of Goldman Sachs who’s now running Trump’s National Economic Council, along with Dina Powell, another influential Goldman Sachs alumnus,  – seems to be taking over Trump’s brain.

As CNBC puts it, Cohn will push “more moderate, business-friendly economic policies.” The Washington Post says Cohn is advocating “a centrist vision.” The Post goes on to describe “The growing strength of Cohn and like-minded moderates" as revealed in Trump’s endorsement of government subsidies for exports, and of corporate tax cuts. Says the Post: “The president’s new positions move him much closer to the views of … mainstream Republicans and Democrats.”

In reality, Cohn, Powell, and other Wall Streeters in the Trump White House are pushing Trump closer to the views of Wall Street and big business – views that are reflected in the views of “mainstream” Republicans and Democrats only to the extent the “mainstream” is dependent on the Street and big corporations for campaign money.

These views aren’t “centrist,” and they’re not sustainable. More tax breaks for the rich and more subsidies for big corporations aren’t much better for America than xenophobia.

Wall Street and corporate America seem not to have learned a thing from what’s happened over the past year. Do they really believe the anger, rage, hate, racism, and nationalism that welled up during the 2016 election was a random, passing phenomenon, like a particularly bad hurricane?

If so, they’re wrong. These sentiments came from a shrinking and ever more anxious working class. From millions of people so convinced the game is rigged against them they were prepared to overthrow the established order in order to get fundamental change. From voters whipped up into a fury over tax breaks and subsidies and bailouts for those at the top – socialism for the rich – but who for years have been getting the harsh losing end of the capitalist stick: declining wages, mass firings, less job security, emptying towns and cities, and their children with even lower and fewer prospects.  

They came from people who during the Great Recession lost their jobs, homes, and savings, as Wall Street got bailed out for its wanton greed, and not a single top Wall Street executive went to jail.

The so-called “centrist” policies that Wall Street and big corporations are now happily promoting via Gary Cohn and Dina Powell won’t reverse these sentiments. They’ll add to them, because these were same sort of the policies that got us to this point.  

There’s a better alternative. It’s to make it easy for people who lose their jobs to get new ones that pay at least as well, through wage insurance;  expand the Earned Income Tax Credit and raise the minimum wage so every job pays a living wage; invest in great teachers and great schools, along with a system of lifelong learning, and high-quality early childhood education; and provide Medicare for all.

And pay for all of this with a 2 percent tax on wealth over $1 million and a carbon tax. While we’re at it, get big money out of politics.

Here’s a  “centrist” agenda that big business, Wall Street, and the rest of America should agree on because it (or something very much like it) is the only way to move forward without inviting even more inequalities of income, wealth, and political power – and ever more vicious backlashes against such inequities.

If Wall Street and big business used the 2016 election as a teachable moment, they would realize this.

What’s the “Trump Doctrine” of foreign policy? At first glance, foreign policy under Trump seems inconsistent, arbitrary, and devoid of principle.

A few weeks ago, even before the airstrike on Syria, Trump communications director Mike Dubke told Trump’s assembled aides that international affairs presented a messaging challenge because the Trump administration lacks a coherent foreign policy. “There is no Trump doctrine,” Dubke declared. 

I think Dubke is being grossly unfair. Of course there’s a Trump Doctrine. You just have to know where to look for it. 

The Trump Doctrine began to emerge when Trump issued his travel bans (both the first and second) on predominantly Muslim countries.

But he notably excluded predominately Muslim countries where Trump has business interests.

So under what might be called the First Principle of the Trump Doctrine, people living in a predominantly Muslim country have a chance of entering the United States only if their country contains an edifice with Trump’s name on it.

The Second Principle follows logically from the first. Countries that are potential markets for Trump’s business – nominally run by his two sons, but still filling his pockets – may be eligible for special favors if they allow Trump to make money there.  

For example, Trump’s business currently has 157 trademark applications pending in 36 nations, according to the New York Times.

Registered trademarks are giant financial assets for a business like Trump’s, which in recent years has made big money by selling his name rather than by building or making anything.

Soon after he was sworn into office – but only after Trump backed off of his brief flirtation with a “two China” policy – the Chinese government granted Trump preliminary approval of 38 trademarks of his name.

“It was a gift,” said Peter J. Riebling, a trademark lawyer in Washington, of China’s decision. “Getting the exclusive right to use that brand in China against everyone else in the world? It’s like waving a magic wand.”

One potential obstacle for the Second Principle is the Constitution’s “emoluments” clause, which bars U.S. government officials from receiving gifts from foreign powers.

No matter. Apparently the Trump Doctrine, well, trumps the Constitution.

A group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) joined by several prominent law professors, is suing Trump over this.  

But the United States – through the U.S. Department of Justice – argues in a legal brief, expected to be filed this month, that the framers of the Constitution meant only to rule out gifts that compensate presidents or other office holders for services they might do for a foreign power, not for public policies they advance that benefit a foreign power. 

Interpretations of the U.S. Constitution by the Department of Justice aren’t like the musings of any random defense attorney. They carry special weight. They represent the views and interests of the United States.

Which makes this one official U.S. government policy – and thereby, confirms it as the Second Principle of the Trump Doctrine. 

The Third Principle comes down hard on countries that kill their own children with poison gas. They will be bombed.

You may recall Trump had long been opposed to bombing Syria. But, as he recently explained, Syrian dictator Basha al-Assad’s “attack on children … had a big impact on me,“ adding that "my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much.” The bombing ensued. 

This doesn’t mean endangered children will be given refuge in the United States, though. Recall the First Principle: Nobody gains entrance to the United States from a predominantly Muslim nations unless their country contains a Trump hotel, spa, or golf course.  

Which brings us to the Fourth Principle.

Not long after the Syrian bombing, Trump authorized the Pentagon to drop a 22,000-pound GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB) on people described as “Islamic State forces” in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border.

It was the first time the bomb – nicknamed the “mother of all bombs,” and one of the largest air-dropped munitions in the U.S. military’s inventory – had ever been used in a combat.

Trump’s rationale? The group was allegedly connected to ISIS.

So under the Fourth Principle of the Trump Doctrine, the United States reserves the right to drop a mother of a bomb on any group seemingly connected with ISIS.

This applies even if the group is not fighting to gain or hold territory claimed by the Islamic State. The group could be thousands of miles away from the Islamic State, anywhere around the world. 

Could a mother of a bomb be dropped on such a group if it’s located in a country containing a Trump hotel, or considering a Trump trademark application? 

Frankly, I don’t know. That pesky detail hasn’t been worked out yet. 

But this one uncertainty doesn’t undermine the overall consistency or clarity of the Trump Doctrine of foreign policy. Its four major principles are firmly rooted either in making money for Trump, or stopping bad people from doing bad things.

If Mike Dubke had a clearer grasp of Donald Trump’s worldview, he’d surely see this – as would everyone else. 

The starkest difference between dictatorships and democracies is that democracies are ruled by laws, and dictatorships are ruled by dictators.

The “rule of law,” as it’s often referred to, stands for laws that emerge from a process responsive to the majority, that are consistently applied, and are applicable to everyone regardless of their position or power.

Donald Trump doesn’t seem to understand this. Within a matter of days, Trump has bombed Syria and a group of fighters in eastern Afghanistan.

On April 12, Trump authorized the Pentagon to drop a 22,000-pound GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB) on people described as “Islamic State forces” in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border.

It’s the first time this bomb – nicknamed the “mother of all bombs,” and the largest air-dropped munition in the U.S. military’s inventory – has ever been used in a combat.

It’s the largest explosive device America has utilized since dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. (By comparison, U.S. aircraft commonly drop bombs that weigh between 250 to 2,000 pounds.)

Why, exactly? It’s not clear. And what was Trump’s authority to do this? Even less clear.

We still don’t know exactly why Trump bombed Syria. He said it was because Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, used chemical weapons on innocent civilians, including children.

But it wasn’t the first time Assad had used chemical weapons. When he did in 2013, Trump counseled against bombing Syria in response.

And where did Trump get the authority to bomb Syria? Assad is a vicious dictator who does terrible things to his people. But U.S. law doesn’t authorize presidents to go to war against vicious dictators who do terrible things to their people.

The Constitution leaves it up to Congress, not the president, to declare war.

In 2014, President Barack Obama began hostilities against the Islamic State, arguing that Congress’s approval of George W. Bush’s wars against Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2002 provided him sufficient to authority.

Well, maybe. But there’s no way Trump can rely on Congress’s approval of these wars to bomb Syria.

And it’s a stretch to argue that a group claiming or alleged to be connected to ISIS, but located in eastern Afghanistan far away from where ISIS is attempting to establish an Islamic State, is the same as the Islamic State.

In a democracy, the rule of law means that we the people are supposed to be in charge, through our elected representatives in Congress.

It can be a heavy responsibility. It is especially weighty when it comes to warfare, to the destruction and annihilation of human beings.

As Commander-in-Chief, a president is empowered to manage the military might of the nation. But he is not empowered to initiate warfare on his own. That’s our job. 

The world according to Trump is becoming increasingly dangerous, in part because we are not doing our job. 

1. He said he wouldn’t bomb Syria. You bought it. Then he bombed Syria.

2. He said he’d build a wall along the border with Mexico. You bought it. Now his secretary of homeland security says “It’s unlikely that we will build a wall.”

3. He said he’d clean the Washington swamp. You bought it. Then he brought into his administration more billionaires, CEOs, and Wall Street moguls than in any administration in history, to make laws that will enrich their businesses.

4. He said he’d repeal Obamacare and replace it with something “wonderful.” You bought it. Then he didn’t.

5. He said he’d use his business experience to whip the White House into shape. You bought it. Then he created the most chaotic, dysfunctional, back-stabbing White House in modern history, in which no one is in charge.

6. He said he’d release his tax returns, eventually. You bought it. He hasn’t, and says he never will.

7. He said he’d divest himself from his financial empire, to avoid any conflicts of interest. You bought it. He remains heavily involved in his businesses, makes money off of foreign dignitaries staying at his Washington hotel, gets China to give the Trump brand trademark and copyright rights, manipulates the stock market on a daily basis, and has more conflicts of interest than can even be counted.

8. He said Clinton was in the pockets of Goldman Sachs, and would do whatever they said. You bought it. Then he put half a dozen Goldman Sachs executives in positions of power in his administration.

9. He said he’d surround himself with all the best and smartest people. You bought it. Then he put Betsy DeVos, opponent of public education, in charge of education; Jeff Sessions, opponent of the Voting Rights Act, in charge of voting rights; Ben Carson, opponent of the Fair Housing Act, in charge of fair housing; Scott Pruitt, climate change denier, in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency; and Russian quisling Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State.

10. He said he’d faithfully execute the law. You bought it. Then he said his predecessor, Barack Obama, spied on him, without any evidence of Obama ever doing so, in order to divert attention from the FBI’s investigation into collusion between his campaign and Russian operatives to win the election.

11. He said he knew more about strategy and terrorism than the generals did. You bought it. Then he green lighted a disastrous raid in Yemen- even though  his generals said it would be a terrible idea. This raid resulted in the deaths of a Navy SEAL, an 8-year old American girl, and numerous civilians. The actual target of the raid escaped, and no useful intel was gained

12. He called Barack Obama “the vacationer-in-Chief” and accused him of playing more rounds of golf than Tiger Woods. He promised to never be the kind of president who took cushy vacations on the taxpayer’s dime, not when there was so much important work to be done. You bought it. He has by now spent more taxpayer money on vacations than Obama did in the first 3 years of his presidency. Not to mention all the money taxpayers are spending protecting his family, including his two sons who travel all over the world on Trump business.

13. He called CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times “fake news” and said they were his enemy. You bought it. Now he gets his information from Fox News, Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, and InfoWars.

More to come.

The White House war between Stephen Bannon and Jared Kushner wouldn’t matter in a normal administration with a normal president. But there’s nothing normal about the Trump White House, whose major occupant exists in a giant narcissistic bubble impenetrable by anyone but close relatives and a few strong personalities.

Which makes this brawl especially important. 

Kushner is his trusted son-in-law, a 36-year-old scion of New Jersey and New York real estate who knows nothing about government but a great deal about Trump, and whose portfolio of responsibilities keeps growing by the day.

Bannon is the rumpled hero of the anti-establishment populist base that drove Trump’s Electoral College victory, but who appears to be losing clout.

The fundamental difference between Kushner and Bannon is over populism. Kushner is a politically moderate multi-millionaire with business interests all over the world – some of which pose considerable conflicts of interest with his current duties – and who’s quite comfortable with all the CEOs, billionaires and Wall Street moguls Trump has lured into his administration.

Bannon hates the establishment. “There is a growing global anti-establishment revolt against the permanent political class at home, and the global elites that influence them, which impacts everyone from Lubbock, Tex., to London, England,” he told the New York Times when he took the helm at Breitbart News in 2014.

These opposing views could coexist for a time. For example, Bannon explained to the Conservative Political Action Conference in late February that one of his major goals is the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

If Bannon meant trimming back regulations emanating from administrative agencies, it’s an idea that Wall Street and CEOs love. Trump has wholeheartedly embraced it. “We are absolutely destroying these horrible regulations that have been placed on your heads,” Trump declared last Tuesday to a group of enthusiastic chief executives from big companies like Citigroup, MasterCard, and Jet Blue.

But Bannon actually meant something quite different. To Bannon, “deconstructing the administrative state” means destroying the “state” – that is, our system of government.

“I’m a Leninist,” Bannon told a reporter for the Daily Beast a few years back (he now says now he doesn’t recall the conversation). “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

Under Bannon’s tutelage, Trump has attacked the core institutions of American democracy. He’s lashed out at judges who disagree with him; called the press the “enemy of the American people;” denigrated fact-finding groups such as the intelligence agencies, the Congressional Budget Office, and government scientists; alleged without evidence that his predecessor wiretapped him; and repeatedly lied about his electoral victory.

And rather than support a full and independent inquiry into whether anyone in his campaign might have conspired with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election, Trump has done everything he can to subvert it.

Does Bannon’s recent demotion and Kushner’s promotion mean we’ve seen the end of these sorts of attacks? I doubt it. After all, Trump originally embraced Bannon because Bannon gave Trump exactly what Trump has sought for decades – controversy, screaming headlines, and, above all, the appearance of being an irreverent outsider who rejects politics as usual and rattles Washington to the core.  

So it’s doubtful that either Bannon or Kushner will emerge the winner. They’ll both continue to advance their own views and agendas in Trump’s chaotic White House.

Which means we’re likely to be left with – and Trump is already on the way to adopting –  the worst of both worlds: Bannon’s brand of anti-establishment populism that seeks to undermine the core democratic institutions of government, and Kushner’s oligarchical Republicanism that empowers and enriches CEOs, Wall Street, and billionaires.

This is exactly the reverse of what most Americans want.

Americans hate big money in politics, but have deep reverence for the institutions of government – the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, an independent judiciary, the office of the president (regardless of who inhabits it), freedom of the press, the right to vote, and the truth.

Americans are rightfully incensed that the system is rigged against them. But they’re angry at the riggers – not at the system.

Yet Kushner will protect the riggers and Bannon is out to destroy the system. And Trump is quite happy to do both.  

Trump’s technique for dealing with bad news is to create enough confusion and partisanship to envelope it in dense fog. 

Consider the most explosive news to come along in recent history – that the FBI has commenced an investigation of Trump aides to find out if they colluded with Russian agents to throw the election to Trump.

America’s intelligence agencies have already concluded that Russian agents interfered in the 2016 presidential election on Trump’s side.

The ranking member of the Senate intelligence committee, who has seen the intelligence reports, says they show that Russia’s interference affected the outcome of the election.

Nothing remotely as serious has ever occurred in United States politics. Russia’s interference is a direct attack on American democracy. If Trump’s aides were involved, that’s treason. If Trump knew about it and did nothing, that’s an impeachable offense at the very least.

Which is why Trump wants to bury it inside a fog of diversions, distractions, claims and allegations that appear to have something to do with it but lead elsewhere.

It’s why he has repeatedly blasted the press as  “fake news,” “going crazy with their conspiracy theories and blind hatred;”  lashed out at the intelligence agencies for their “unauthorized leaks” “just like Russia;” and conjured up “witch hunts” and conspiracies against him resembling “Nazi Germany.”

But as evidence of Trump’s advisors’ collusion with Russian operatives kept mounting through February, Trump needed a bigger fog machine.

So on March 4th he alleged that Barack Obama had wiretapped him in the Trump Tower during the campaign.

Even if Trump had evidence, his claim was irrelevant to the FBI investigation of Trump’s aides’ possibly treasonous behavior and Trump’s potentially impeachable acts.

But Trump is enough of a con artist to know that merely making this preposterous allegation would give him the fog he needed.

Almost immediately, news stories about the FBI investigation were replaced by stories about Trump’s allegation, about Trump’s lack of evidence for it, about reactions from FBI Director James Comey and others, and about the White House’s desperate attempts to find credible proof.  

Which is where Devin Nunes, Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee comes in.

Soon after Comey’s testimony before Nunes’s committee last week, Nunes went to the White House to look at intelligence reports that, he said, “clearly show the president elect and his team were at least monitored” during the presidential transition. The rest of Nunes’s committee wasn’t allowed to view the documents in question.

Two days later, Nunes said he wasn’t sure whether Trump and his aides were monitored and he needed to review more information. No matter. By then the fog machine was working overtime, generating a thick haze of stories about what Nunes saw or didn’t see, about whom his potential source might be, about whether Nunes’s revelation supported Trump’s claim of Obama’s wiretapping (it didn’t). All which ignited a storm of outrage among Democrats on the Committee – and, thereby, further stories.

Then, when it looked as though three top officials who had served under the Obama Administration were going to testify before the Committee – including Sally Yates, the former Deputy Attorney General who briefly served as acting Attorney General before being fired by Trump – Nunes cancelled the hearing, bringing the House investigation to a temporary halt.

And on it goes, day after day, a thickening fog of diversion and obfuscation – taking public attention away from the FBI’s investigation into possible treason by Trump and his aides, and focusing it instead on a thickening smog of other controversies.  

Trump knows that reporters need stories, and he is only happy to oblige. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous or baseless they might be. The more they obscure the big story, the more useful they are.

Trump figures that at some point the murk will seem too complicated and too partisan. 

By then, even if the FBI and other intelligence agencies find that Trump or his advisors colluded with Russian operatives to win the election for him, it won’t much matter. Trump and his surrogates will have created an impenetrable fog of claims and counterclaims, plots and subplots, unproven allegations and lies. 

The public will have become lost and confused in the fog – exhausted, confounded, cynical. Facts and findings will vanish. It will all come to seem like politics at its worst.

Could Trump get away with it? Possibly.

The biggest danger he faces is that Republican statesmen might emerge from the mist, who are sufficiently concerned about the integrity and sanctity of our democracy to act as lighthouses. They would guide the public through it and shine a beam of clarity on one of the worst outrages in American history. 

Do they exist? We will soon find out.

The White House has announced that Trump will name his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to run a new Office of American Innovation – described as a SWAT team of strategic consultants staffed by former business executives, designed to infuse fresh thinking into Washington and help make government work more like a business. 

It’s good to have fresh thinking about how government might function more efficiently. But it’s important to remember that government is not a business. The purpose of government is not to show a profit. It is to achieve the common good.

Precisely because there are many different views about the common good, government leaders must be capable of listening and responding to many different opinions and perspectives.

They must also be public educators – telling the public the truth, explaining the consequences of different options, and conducting public deliberation about what is best for society.

Above all, presidents should enrich and strengthen democracy – building trust in democratic institutions, avoiding conflicts of interests, and promoting tolerance and social cohesion.

So far, Donald Trump has done the opposite. He doesn’t need more business advice. He needs more advice about how to lead a democracy.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, in his press conference following the demise of his bill to replace Obamacare, blamed Republicans who had failed to grasp that the GOP was now a “governing party.”

“We were a 10-year opposition party, where being against things was easy to do,” said Ryan. “You just had to be against it. Now, in three months’ time, we tried to go to a governing party where we actually had to get 216 people to agree with each other on how we do things.” 

It was, he said, “the growing pains of government.”

Rubbish.

Apparently Ryan doesn’t grasp that he put forward a terrible bill to begin with. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, it would have resulted in 24 million Americans losing health coverage over the next decade, hardly make a dent in the federal debt, and transfer over $600 billion to the wealthiest members of American society.

The so-called “Freedom Caucus” of House Republicans, who refused to go along with the bill, wanted it even worse. Essentially, their goal (and that of their fat-cat patrons) was to repeal the Affordable Care Act without replacing it at all. 

Ryan is correct about one thing. Congress is in the hands of Republicans who for years have only said “no.” They have become expert at stopping whatever a president wants to do but they don’t have a clue how to initiate policy.

Most of the current Republican House members have not shared responsibility for governing the nation. They have never even passed a budget into law.

But their real problem isn’t the “growing pains” of being out of power. In reality, the Republicans who are now control the House – as well as the Senate – don’t like government. They’re temperamentally and ideologically oriented to opposing it, not leading it.

Their chronic incapacity to govern didn’t reveal itself as long as a Democrat was in the White House. They let President Obama try to govern, and pretended that their opposition was based on a different philosophy governing.

Now that they have a Republican president, they can no longer hide. They have no philosophy of governing at all. 

Sadly for them – and for the rest of the country, and the world – the person they supported in the election of 2016 and who is now president is an unhinged narcissistic child who tweets absurd lies and holds rallies to prop up his fragile ego.

His conflicts of financial interest are legion. His entire  presidency is under a “gray cloud” of suspicion for colluding with Russian agents to win office.

Here’s a man who’s advised by his daughter, his son-in-law, and an oddball who once ran a white supremacist fake-news outlet.

His Cabinet is an assortment of billionaires, CEOs, veterans of Wall Street, and ideologues, none of whom has any idea about how to govern and most of whom don’t believe in the laws their departments are in charge of implementing anyway.

Meanwhile, he has downgraded or eviscerated groups of professionals responsible for giving presidents professional advice on foreign policy, foreign intelligence, economics, science, and domestic policy.

He gets most of what he learns from television.

So we have a congress with no capacity to govern, and a president who’s incapable of governing.

Which leaves the most powerful nation in the world rudderless. 

The country on whom much of the rest of the world relies for organizing and mobilizing responses to the major challenges facing humankind is leaderless.

It is of course possible that Republicans in congress will learn to take responsibility for governing. It is possible that Donald Trump will learn to lead. It is possible that pigs will learn to fly. 

But such things seem doubtful. Instead, America and the rest of the world must hold our collective breath, hoping that the next elections – the midterms of 2018 and then the presidential election of 2020 – set things right. And hoping that in the meantime nothing irrevocably awful occurs.