Summations Only

Trump signed the tax bill yesterday. ABC News has a short and very readable summary of what is true about the tax plan: AP FACT CHECK: Facts about the tax bill. Summary:

• It is not, as Trump claims, the biggest tax cut in history. It is the eighth biggest since 1918.
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• Middle class incomes below say $150,000 will average a 1.6% tax cut. The tax cut for these earners will average around $930 for the 2018 tax year. Tax cuts for higher wage earners are much higher, 3.4% for those in the $308,000 to $733,000 range.
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• Obamacare has not been repealed. Fines for people who don't carry health insurance end for the 2019 tax year. They're still in force for 2018.
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• Only $3 billion of the funding for Obamacare comes from the fines. The rest, $117 billion, comes from the government. Eliminating the mandate should have only a small effect on insurance rates.

--Percy

If you like most of the rest of the United States are wondering why Trump's base still supports him as strongly as ever, an editorial in yesterday's Washington Post explains why. In To beat President Trump, you have to learn to think like his supporters economist Andrs Miguel Rondn writes:

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If you’re among the majority of Americans who oppose Trump, you can’t understand why. And it’s making you furious. I saw the same thing happen in my native Venezuela with the late Hugo Chvez, who ruled as precisely the sort of faux-populist strongman that Trump now loves to praise. Chvez’s political career (which only ended with his untimely death) seemed not only immune to scandal, but indeed to profit directly from it. Why? Because scandal is no threat to populism. Scandal sustains populism.

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You got that? Scandal sustains populism! But why? Rondn explains:

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Like all populists, Trump offers a much different deal Vote for me: I will destroy your enemies. They are the reason you are not rich/have less rights/America is not great anymore. Scandal is the populist’s natural element for the same reason that demolishing buildings makes more noise than constructing them. His supporters didn’t vote for silence. They voted for a bang.

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That's why populism works. It invents enemies, your enemies, and vows to destroy them for you. Of course it's incredibly popular - that's why it's called populism. It's also called racism, bigotry, xenophobia, stealing, pollution, misogyny, cover-up, and last but not least, blatant lying. Rondn continues:

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That’s how populism works. As long as Trump is still swinging back, scandals help him to polarize the country further. The scorn of his adversaries, in the eyes of his supporters, proves that he’s doing exactly what they voted him for to do: dismantling a rigged system that they believe destroyed their hopes.

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What do we do? Well, Rondn has some advice about what not to do (parenthesized links to other editorials removed - see the full text of the editorial if you want to see them):

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Sheer outrage at the president’s scandals is pointless. When directed at Trump, your anger gives him rhetorical ammunition to point toward his besiegers to bolster his claims to be fighting for his base. But worse still is directing your anger at his supporters. Then you’re doing the same thing Trump is: believing your side is all right and the opposite side is all wrong. Rejecting your common humanity and sense of country, you’re playing into the polarization game instead of defeating it.

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Okay, so that's what not to do. But what do we do? The answer is obvious, and Rondn tells us that, too:

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If dwelling on scandal too much can be counterproductive, then the focus must be elsewhere. Again, I believe it should rest on understanding and emphasizing with the grievances that brought Trump to power (wage stagnation, cultural isolation, a depleted countryside, the opioid crisis). Trump’s solutions may be imaginary, but the problems are very real indeed. Populism is and has always been the daughter of political despair. Showing concern is the only way to break the rhetorical polarization.

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Finally, there is indeed a place for your legitimate moral outrage: not the dining table, but the voting booth. Just ask Alabama Democrats.

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--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

Vanity Fair posted a twitter video suggesting New Year's resolutions for Hillary Clinton that has liberal panties all in a bunch. Plenty of fun is being had at Donald Trump's expense - can't Hillary people teach Trump supporters how to take a joke?Maybe because I'm not a Hillary supporter I couldn't see why those who are were offended, but In truth I didn't find the video funny. Just seemed like a failed attempt at humor. Trump's combination of arrogance and incompetence makes him a prime humor target, but Hillary, at least to me, just seems sad and pathetic, so a different approach to humor seemed necessary.AbE: The Washington Post just posted an opinion piece about the Vanity Fair video: Please stop talking about Hillary Clinton. Brief quote:

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The video had sexist overtones, and the lameness of the jokes made them all the more offensive. It’s harder to plead comedic license when your comedy isn’t funny.

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--PercyEdited by Percy, : AbE.Edited by Percy, : Fix link.

I missed this Pew Research Center piece when it came out in June, but a Politico article I was reading just linked to it, so here it is: U.S. Image Suffers as Publics Around World Question Trump’s Leadership. Here's the first paragraph and the opening chart:

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Although he has only been in office a few months, Donald Trump’s presidency has had a major impact on how the world sees the United States. Trump and many of his key policies are broadly unpopular around the globe, and ratings for the U.S. have declined steeply in many nations. According to a new Pew Research Center survey spanning 37 nations, a median of just 22% has confidence in Trump to do the right thing when it comes to international affairs. This stands in contrast to the final years of Barack Obama’s presidency, when a median of 64% expressed confidence in Trump’s predecessor to direct America’s role in the world.

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And this was back in June, 6 months ago. Naturally it must be even worse now.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

Ojn Thursday, December 28, Trump participated in a 30 minute interview with New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt: Trump Interview. The Washington Post has now fact-checked the interview and reported the results in this article: In a 30-minute interview, President Trump made 24 false or misleading claims. Here are the most egregious items. The text was cut-n-pasted from the article:

• I think it’s been proven that there is no collusion.
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  Trump is entitled to his own opinion, but he sidesteps the fact that the investigation has revealed that members of the Trump campaign interacted with Russians at least 31 times throughout the campaign. There are at least 19 known meetings, in addition to the indictments or guilty pleas of his campaign manager, national security adviser and others. Here’s The Fact Checker’s video on our count.
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• There was collusion with the Russians and the Democrats. A lot of collusion. . . . Starting with the dossier. But going into so many other elements. And Podesta’s firm.
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  Trump has falsely accused Clinton campaign manager John Podesta of being involved with a Russian company. Tony Podesta co-founded the Podesta Group, a lobbying firm, with his brother John. But it’s a U.S.-based company, not a company in Russia. Trump likely is referring to the Podesta Group being paid $170,000 over six months to represent Sberbank, a Russian bank. The Podesta Group said its work for Sberbank USA was never about getting sanctions lifted, and was simply about helping to clarify to what extent our client, the U.S. subsidiary [of Sberbank], was subject to sanctions. We confirmed they were not. As for alleged collusion between the Democrats and Russia, Trump is referring to the fact that Fusion GPS, the political research firm that assembled the dossier as part of an assignment for Democrats, relied on a British intelligence agent who used Russian sources for his research. So that’s a rather big stretch.
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• There was tremendous collusion on behalf of the Russians and the Democrats. There was no collusion with respect to my campaign.
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  This is a breathtakingly false statement. Little evidence has emerged of any collusion between the Democrats and Russia, whereas evidence has emerged of many contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russian-linked individuals. The FBI, CIA and National Security Agency earlier this year concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.
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• What I’ve done is, I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department.
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  Presidents do not have unfettered right to interfere with Justice Department investigations, unless they are actively seeking a constitutional crisis.
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• I’m the one that saved coal. I’m the one that created jobs. You know West Virginia is doing fantastically now.
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  West Virginia’s gross domestic product increased 3 percent in the first quarter of 2017. The recent bump is due in part to the increased price of metallurgic coal, which is used to make steel, and a price increase in natural gas exports. West Virginia produces roughly 5 percent of the natural gas in the U.S. and as the price of natural gas rises, the demand for coal increases, spurring growth in the state. Trump can’t take credit for the change in prices, which fluctuate with market forces. He previously earned Four Pinocchios for this claim, but he keeps saying it.
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• They made the Russian story up as a hoax, as a ruse, as an excuse for losing an election that in theory Democrats should always win with the electoral college. The electoral college is so much better suited to the Democrats.
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  Trump is falsely labeling nonpartisan investigations as made up by Democrats. The CIA concluded in 2016 that Russia intervened in the U.S. presidential election to help elect Trump, an assessment backed up by FBI Director James B. Comey and then-Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. As we noted, the intelligence community released a declassified report expressing high confidence in this judgment. Senate and House committees led by Republicans have begun their own investigations, and a special prosecutor has been appointed. Meanwhile, Democrats obviously do not have an electoral college lock. According to a tally by John Pitney of Claremont McKenna College, every Republican president since Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 won a larger share of the electoral college votes than Trump, with the exception of George W. Bush (twice) and Richard Nixon in 1968.
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• I was for Strange [Republican Senatorial primary opponent of Roy Moore in Alabama], and I brought Strange up 20 points. Just so you understand. When I endorsed him, he was in fifth place. He went way up. Almost 20 points.
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  Polls indicate that Trump’s endorsement made little difference and in fact Strange lost to Roy Moore by a greater margin than polls suggested at the time of Trump’s endorsement. While Trump says Strange was in fifth place, there were only three candidates in the GOP primary.
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• I endorsed him [Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore]. It became a much closer race because of my endorsement. People don’t say that. They say, ‘Oh, Donald Trump lost.’ I didn’t lose, I brought him up a lot.
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  Polls can vary, but there is little evidence this is the case. The fact remains that Moore lost an election in a state where Democrats usually lose by double digits.
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• I know the details of taxes better than anybody. Better than the greatest C.P.A. I know the details of health care better than most, better than most.
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  Lawmakers who dealt with Trump on taxes and especially health care privately told reporters they were shocked how little he knew about these issues.
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• We’ve created associations, millions of people are joining associations. Millions. That were formerly in Obamacare or didn’t have insurance. Or didn’t have health care. Millions of people.
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  Trump is referring to an executive order, mentioned above, but it has no force in law on its own and no one has yet joined these associations. The rules spelling out how the executive order would work have not been issued yet, so Trump is simply making up his millions number.
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• Now that the individual mandate is officially killed, people have no idea how big a deal that was. It’s the most unpopular part of Obamacare. But now, Obamacare is essentially You know, you saw this. It’s basically dead over a period of time.
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  While the individual mandate was an important incentive for Americans to seek health insurance, it was only one part of a far-reaching law that remains intact. The repeal does not take effect until 2019, and enrollment in Obamacare has remained strong. The Congressional Budget Office says the marketplaces are expected to remain stable for years.
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• We see the drugs pouring into the country, we need the wall.
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  The wall will have virtually no effect on drugs coming into the country. According to reports by the DEA, the majority of drugs are smuggled through legal ports of entry or smuggled through underground tunnels. Trump previously earned Four Pinocchios for this claim, but he keeps saying it.

See the article for all 24 Trump errors.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Change Title.

I thought "false or misleading claims," the phrase from the title of the article, wouldn't fit in the message subtitle, but it turns out it does, so I changed the message subtitle.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Change title.

In today's New York Times conservative columnist Bret Stephens explains Why I’m Still a NeverTrumper. Highlights:

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And want to preserve your own republican institutions? Then pay attention to the character of your leaders, the culture of governance and the political health of the public. It matters a lot more than lowering the top marginal income tax rate by a couple of percentage points.

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This is the fatal mistake of conservatives who’ve decided the best way to deal with Trump’s personality the lying, narcissism, bullying, bigotry, crassness, name calling, ignorance, paranoia, incompetence and pettiness is to pretend it doesn’t matter. Character Doesn’t Count has become a de facto G.O.P. motto. Virtue Doesn’t Matter might be another.

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But character does count, and virtue does matter, and Trump’s shortcomings prove it daily.
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Responsibility invariably lies with the president’s intemperance and dishonesty.
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Now look at the culture of governance. Trump demands testimonials from his cabinet, servility from Republican politicians and worship from conservative media. To serve in this White House isn’t to be elevated to public service. It’s to be debased into toadyism, which probably explains the record-setting staff turnover of 34 percent, according to an analysis from the Brookings Institution.
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Trump is empowering a conservative political culture that celebrates everything that patriotic Americans should fear: the cult of strength, open disdain for truthfulness, violent contempt for the Fourth Estate, hostility toward high culture and other types of elitism, a penchant for conspiracy theories and, most dangerously, white-identity politics.

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--Percy

I originally posted Message 1604 as a new thread instead of as a response to this thread. Before I noticed the error Nwr posted a response at Message 2, here it is: --Percy

Today's New York Times presents the analysis piece For Trump, a Year of Reinventing the Presidency, summarizing how Trump has changed the presidency over the past year. It is well worth reading. Here's a few paragraphs from near the beginning:

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Under Mr. Trump, it [the presidency] has become a blunt instrument to advance personal, policy and political goals. He has revolutionized the way presidents deal with the world beyond 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, dispensing with the carefully modulated messaging of past chief executives in favor of no-holds-barred, crystal-breaking, us-against-them, damn-the-consequences blasts borne out of gut and grievance.

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He has kept a business on the side; attacked the F.B.I., C.I.A. and other institutions he oversees; threatened to use his power against rivals; and waged war against members of his own party and even his own cabinet. He fired the man investigating his campaign and has not ruled out firing the one who took over. He has appealed to base instincts on race, religion and gender as no president has in generations. And he has rattled the nuclear saber more bombastically than it has been since the days of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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The presidency has served as a vehicle for Mr. Trump to construct and promote his own narrative, one with crackling verve but riddled with inaccuracies, distortions and outright lies, according to fact checkers. Rather than a force for unity or a calming voice in turbulent times, the presidency now is another weapon in a permanent campaign of divisiveness. Democrats and many establishment Republicans worry that Mr. Trump has squandered the moral authority of the office.

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--Percy

To repeat something said upthread (Message 1526), there's nothing more risk than being a Trump friend. In the upcoming book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff, Steve Bannon is quoted thusly:

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"The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers. Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the F.B.I. immediately."

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Naturally Mr. Trump responded in kind in just the way we have come to expect (from Trump’s Reaction to Steve Bannon’s Comments):

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Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.

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Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my basehe’s only in it for himself.

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Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.

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We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda. Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up, rather than simply seeking to burn it all down.

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You have to give Breitbart News (which Bannon has returned to running) credit, they didn't try to soften Trump's words:

• TRUMP FURIOUS: BANNON ‘NOT ONLY LOST HIS JOB, HE LOST HIS MIND’
  
• WHITE HOUSE BLASTS WOLFF BOOK: ‘TRASHY TABLOID FICTION’

--Percy

If you look at Trump’s Reaction to Steve Bannon’s Comments you'll see I left out these lines:

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From press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders:

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Statement from the President of the United States

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--Percy

Are we grading on a scale of 1 to 10, or can I use negative numbers? --Percy

The Washington Post ran an opinion piece today discussing some of the legal ramifications of the cease-and-desist letter: Trump’s cease-and-desist letter: A ‘desperate’ attempt to silence Bannon--Percy

An opinion piece in today's New York Times tells us what we already know: Everyone in Trumpworld Knows He’s an Idiot. I'll include some quotes from the piece, but two facts in combination are incredibly scary:

• Trump's a buffon, an idiot, a moron, and many other adjectives along those lines.
• 30-40% of the American people are either just fine with that or can't recognize idiocy and disfunction when they see it.

What does it mean for us if 30-40% of the country has no problem with someone as obviously unfit for office as Trump? He's a great performer in front of crowds, and he's mastered the art of playground insult and figured out how to apply it effectively in adult interactions. And he's caused many to stoop to his level, not because he's caused them to lose their cool, but because playground adjectives are the only ones that accurately apply to someone so dismally unqualified to be an adult, let alone president of the most powerful (economically and militarily) country in the world.Some of that 30-40% of Americans both recognize Trump's incompetence and support him anyway because he shares their positions on issues, but what does it say about people who support an incompetent just because he supports the same causes? And especially what does it say about people willing to work in his administration who are, in effect, enablers of the whims of an insane, cruel, ignorant, impulsive man who has been handed great power. Some probably believe they're doing good by attempting to mitigate the damage, but Trump has proved he can't be managed.A couple quotes from the opinion piece:

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But most of all, the book confirms what is already widely understood not just that Trump is entirely unfit for the presidency, but that everyone around him knows it. One thread running through Fire and Fury is the way relatives, opportunists and officials try to manipulate and manage the president, and how they often fail. As Wolff wrote in a Hollywood Reporter essay based on the book, over the past year, the people around Trump, all 100 percent came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.

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According to Wolff, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, the former chief of staff, called Trump an idiot. (So did the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, though he used an obscenity first.) Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, compares his boss’s intelligence to excrement. The national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, thinks he’s a dope. It has already been reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a moron, which he has pointedly refused to deny.

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--Percy

Thanks for finding this. Boy do I ever want to comment on this one.First, about the columnist, Michael Bradley, he's the managing partner of Sydney law firm Marque Lawyers, and he writes a weekly column for The Drum, which is an ABC News outlet in Australia.Very little in the piece is about the comparison to Hitler. It's near the beginning, and I'll just focus on that portion. The rest of the piece was about the anger of the Trump constituency at being abandoned by the American Dream, and about the psychology of mobs. I don't differ with it enough for it to be worth taking issue with.

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In 1932, Germany had an unemployment rate of about 30 per cent. It had been bankrupted by the First World War, the reparations bill imposed by the Allies, and then the Great Depression.

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It had suffered ridiculous hyperinflation - the Reichsmark collapsed to 4.2 trillion per US$1 in 1923, wiping out everyone's savings. These statistics, stacked on 2-3 million war deaths, bear no comparison with America's recent history.

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This is both true and untrue. The second paragraph about hyperinflation and the Reichsmark collapse and the loss of savings is true, but by 1932 Germany was well on the road back to recovery, no matter what Bradley claims the unemployment rate was. The 30% unemployment rate might be the official statistic, but it doesn't include the large underground economy that arose during the hyperinflation and economic displacement of the previous decade.The Germany of 1932 also had a disaffected class that had been left behind economically, just like the America of today. Trump and Hitler took advantage of similar circumstances.

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It's equally obvious that Trump is not Hitler.

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Fine, he's stating his conclusion up front, but he's wrong except in a literal sense.

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He is equivalently irresponsible and narcissistic,...

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Hitler was not irresponsible. Rash and brash and consumed by his own goals , but not irresponsible. I agree that Trump is irresponsible, mostly due to, as far as can be told, ignorance. He's right about Trump and Hitler's narcissism.

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...but he has no discernible personal ideology beyond the sheer delight of being the centre of attention.

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This is wrong. Trump has a very "discernible personal ideology." True, he also demands being the center of attention, but his ideology is clear. He believes in small government, autocracy, minimal regulation, unrestrained capitalism, and exploitation of resources. He doesn't understand science and hence rejects its findings, such as environmental concerns and climate change.

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He is not a buffoon;...

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He *is* a buffoon and many other things besides, such as racist, nativist, misogynistic, ignorant, bullying, childish, lying, manipulative, insulting...well, I've got better things to do with my time than enumerate the full list of appropriate adjectives. Hitler possessed some of the same qualities, such as racism, nativism, lying, manipulative, insulting, but he was also ruthless, murderous and traitorous.

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...he knows exactly what he's doing,...

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This is true, and it was true of Hitler, too. Hitler didn't know what he was doing militarily during WWII, but that was later. Hitler's rise to power and his consolidation of that power is similar to Trump's: compromise and intimidate the instruments of government to his own purposes. We can already see the weakening of American institutions in the face of the Trump onslaught. The FBI has reopened the investigation into the Clinton Foundation, and it won't be a surprise if the investigation into the Clinton emails is reopened, and a couple Senators just released a letter demanding an investigation of Daniel Steele for lying to the FBI, he of the Trump dossier requested by the Clinton campaign. This use of governmental power to pursue political enemies is precisely what Hitler did.Trump also knows what he is doing, and goes beyond Hitler, in using the powers of his office to enrich both himself and his cronies.But there are ways in which Trump, unlike Hitler, does not know what he is doing. Regarding carrying out the duties of the office of the president and working with the other branches of government to manage the country's business responsibly, Trump has not a clue what he's doing. On this point Bradley is correct, Trump is not like Hitler. Hitler successfully embarked upon a program of rebuilding and improving German infrastructure and its military, and within a few years of taking the reins of power was enormously successful and popular (those with concerns about his means of taking and maintaining the reins of power were silenced). Yes, both Trump and Hitler were populists.

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But his motivation and goals are completely different.

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This is true, too. Trump doesn't want to rule the world - he just wants to be the richest and most admired man in the world. The details of government don't interest him, even those details that would enrich him. He relies upon others to manage the details - Trump just sets the goals, like protecting him from the Russia investigation, raising taxes, eliminating regulations, etc.

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Commentators persistently misunderstand everything about the Trump phenomenon, and this final resort to doomsday fatalism, concluding that fascism is once again nigh, is just the natural end point of their failure to look behind what's playing out on TV.

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Trump's constant complaint as president is that he isn't all powerful. He bemoans that there are things he cannot do. "Where's my Roy Cohn?" he laments (Roy Cohn was McCarthy's chief lawyer. McCarthy and McCarthyism shouldn't need to be explained, but I've linked to the Wikipedia article). Paraphrasing, "My Attorney General should protect me the same way Bobby Kennedy protected John Kennedy and Eric Holder protected Obama," as if Attorneys General's responsibility is to protect a president's illegal activities rather than protect and defend the constitution and the country. John Dean serves as an example, even though he served as White House Counsel (president's personal legal adviser), not Attorney General. He was sentenced to 1-4 years for his efforts to protect Nixon during Watergate.Trump wishes to be an autocrat, and he is moving in that direction, hopefully slowly enough that he neither achieves his goal nor irredeemably damages our institutions. He is merging the goals of government and business, and his efforts to exclude and marginalize Muslims, his racism, his attempts to shape society, his disregard for the rule of law, his belief that he is president for only some of the people, make him far more a fascist than a legitimate president.But I should mention one other significant difference between Trump and Hitler, that Hitler believed war or at least conflict was the natural state of affairs for a nation, that a nation not so engaged was growing weaker instead of stronger, both economically and militarily.This is the point at which Bradley ceases the comparison between Trump and Hitler and goes off in another direction, but I can't help commenting on this:

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For one thing, they miss Karl Marx's point: if it can be said that history is repeating, then it is as farce.

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History does not in fact repeat, ever.

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This is monstrously untrue. The entirety of human history is the same thing over and over. Probably the most common repetition is war. Genocide is another. Economic boom/busts are another. The rise and fall of civilizations is another.I'll comment about one more thing:

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There is nothing inevitable about Trump or the death of democracy which his rise is said to portend. We are not captive to history, but it has much to teach us. The historical lessons here are that the unthinkable is always possible, and that a political vacuum will always be filled by opportunists.

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All true, and this is a lesson of history we ignore at our own peril.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Formatting.