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Is the intelligence community going overboard with the leaks?

I don't have a firm opinion about this yet, but I will say this: Whoever is leaking the dirt about Jared Kushner is doing a very considered job of it. Instead of just dropping a big bomb, they seem to be very carefully dropping one tiny new item every few days. First we hear that a person "close to Trump" is part of the FBI investigation. Then we hear it's Kushner. Then we hear it's about Russia. Then we hear it's about setting up backchannel comms. This guarantees a steady drip of new headlines and keeps the story in the news for weeks and weeks. It's the most damaging possible way of handling leaks like this.

I'll cop to some partisan feelings about this. Is it wrong to deliberately string this stuff out in order to cause maximum damage? Sure, of course. But it's also what Julian Assange did to Hillary Clinton. It's what Judicial Watch did to Clinton. It's what the FBI did to Clinton. It's what Republican congressional committees did to Clinton. This is just the way the game is played these days, and there are no innocents on either side of the aisle.

As Donald Trump is (yet again) pondering a "broad shakeup" of his staff because he can't conceive that his problems might be of his own making, his communications director has resigned. Michael Dubke says it's for "personal" reasons, but it seems more likely that he's getting out while the getting is good. Why wait to be fired as part of Jared-Ivanka-Donald purge, after all?

The Washington Post reports that President Trump prefers to receive his daily intelligence briefing in comic book form, but we already knew that. However, this is new to me:

Most mornings, often at 10:30, sometimes earlier, Trump sits behind the historic Resolute desk and, with a fresh Diet Coke fizzing and papers piled high, receives top-secret updates on the world’s hot spots. The president interrupts his briefers with questions but also with random asides. He asks that the top brass of the intelligence community be present, and he demands brevity.

....Though career intelligence analysts often take the lead in delivering them, Trump likes his political appointees — Pompeo and Coats — to attend, along with national security adviser H.R. McMaster. Pompeo and Coats, whose offices are in McLean, Va., have had to redesign their daily routines so that they spend many mornings at the White House.

It's appropriate for the intelligence chiefs to be present periodically. But forcing two of them to blow off an hour or two of their time every day isn't. It's dumb management.

So why does Trump do it? Mostly for ego and dominance reasons, I suppose. He might also still be convinced that the intelligence community is his enemy and will play games with the orders he gives them. So he wants his own appointees present to make sure they do what he wants.

These are both the marks of an insecure leader. It's not a good sign.

Lunchtime Photo

May 29, 2017 3:30 PM

National Cemetery, Los Angeles, California.

A couple of days ago Paul Krugman wrote about the Trump double-cross:

Let’s talk about West Virginia, which went Trump by more than 40 percentage points, topped only by Wyoming. What did West Virginians think they were voting for?

They are, after all, residents of a poor state that benefits immensely from federal programs: 29 percent of the population is on Medicaid, almost 19 percent on food stamps. The expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare is the main reason the percentage of West Virginians without health insurance has halved since 2013.

....Trumpcare, the budget office tells us, would cause 23 million people to lose health insurance, largely through cuts to Medicaid....Then we need to add in the Trump budget, which calls for further drastic cuts in Medicaid, plus large cuts in food stamps and in disability payments. What would happen to West Virginia if all these Trump policies went into effect? Basically, it would be apocalyptic.

....So many of the people who voted for Donald Trump were the victims of an epic scam by a man who has built his life around scamming. In the case of West Virginians, this scam could end up pretty much destroying their state. Will they ever realize this, and admit it to themselves? More important, will they be prepared to punish him the only way they can — by voting for Democrats?

Since I happened to be chatting about this yesterday, I want to offer an alternative explanation for what's going on here. More accurately, I guess, it's a supplementary explanation, since there's not much question that Donald Trump has indeed pulled a very long con on voters like the ones in West Virginia.

Basically it's this: what do you expect if Democrats don't support their own policies? For the past five years, Republicans have battered Obamacare as the most horrific policy ever enacted. Democrats have—what? Hidden under rocks, mostly. Moderates looked at the polls and decided to avoid even talking about Obamacare. Progressives mostly scorned it as a piece of crap and spent their energy explaining why we should all support single-payer instead. So what's the result? Lots of people think Obamacare is horrific. After all, that's what one side says, and the other side hardly even fights back.

West Virginians on Medicaid probably have no idea they're getting it via Obamacare. West Virginians who buy insurance from Healthcare.gov probably have no idea they're insured via Obamacare. West Virginians who got a payroll tax break early in the Obama years probably have no idea they even got it, let alone that it came from Democrats. West Virginians who got new roads or schools from the stimulus program probably have no idea it came from Democrats. West Virginians who got an increase in the minimum wage in 2007-09 probably have no idea it was passed by Democrats.

On the other hand, they certainly do know that Obamacare is destroying the nation; that Democrats want to take away their guns; that Mexicans took away all their jobs; that Obama wanted to let a flood of ISIS terrorists into the country; and that fanatical leftists want to allow men into their daughters' bathrooms.

Republicans are going to say what they're going to say. There's not much you can do to stop them from lying. What you can do is to loudly and proudly demand credit for the stuff you've done. If no one really knows that you subsidized their insurance or provided them with Medicaid or raised their wages or built them new schools, you can hardly expect them to vote for you.

Eric Levitz argues today that Democrats need to campaign on lowering middle-class taxes:

The party has plenty of internal disagreements on pocketbook issues. But there is a broad consensus on Team Blue that the tax code should be more progressive. It shouldn’t be difficult for Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to unite most elected Democrats around a tax-reform blueprint.

Such a plan could combine return-free filing with a massive increase in the tax credits for earned income and child care, financed by healthy increases in the taxation of high-income individuals and multi-million-dollar estates. The party could also go more ambitious, and offer a detailed plan for overhauling the tax system with an eye toward simplicity and progressivity.

Here's the problem with this: Middle-class Americans barely pay any federal income tax at all. Here's the data from the Tax Policy Center for 2013:

The income quintile in the dead middle pays 2.6 percent of its income in federal income taxes. How much less do even Democrats want to make it?

If liberals really want to have an impact on the middle class, they have to focus on other taxes. For the middle quintile, the payroll tax is about four times higher than the income tax. State sales taxes are in the same ballpark. Those are the taxes that matter. As far as the federal income tax goes, if Democrats really want to lower and simplify it, they should just propose a zero percent rate up to an income of $100,000, along with an EITC that refunds money to the working poor. That would be pretty popular.

Of course, it would also mean that Democrats have decided to battle Republicans on their home field, which is probably a losing strategy. It also means they'll have a much harder time justifying single-payer health care, free college, subsidized daycare, and all the other stuff they support. Sure, they can pay for some of this stuff by raising taxes on the rich, but that only takes you so far.

If I had to guess, I'd say Democrats are better off focusing on more and better services for the middle class, not lower income taxes. That redistributes income at least as well as progressive tax rates. Probably better.

I have a new camera, so that means I need to update my camera gallery. This time I took a family photo, and then practiced my Photoshop skillz by erasing the background so they all look like they're floating in air. I'm really bad at this kind of thing because I can't draw a straight line with a mouse to save my life. So it was good practice even if it was kind of tedious.

Anyway, here it is: 80 years of Drum family cameras. More details in this old post if you're curious about them.

Here's a headline in the LA Times this morning:

Is this really true? I'm not so sure. What Trump demonstrated was big talk far more than big action. He signed a $110 billion weapons deal with the Saudis that was only a hair different from what Obama had agreed to. He announced a bunch of new business that would have happened with or without him. He supported the Saudi war in Yemen, but Obama did too. He visited all the usual places in Israel, just like Obama. He asked NATO countries to spend more on defense, just like Obama did. He played games with our Article 5 commitment, but afterward his aides made clear that nothing had changed.

Rhetorically, of course, Trump was very different indeed. Obama may have given the Saudis nearly everything they wanted, but Trump explicitly said he didn't care about their human rights abuses. John Kerry worked endlessly on a peace deal in Israel, but he did it quietly. Trump blared his commitment to PEACE at every opportunity. Obama pushed our NATO allies to spend more on defense, but Trump gave a loud public speech about it.

Rhetoric matters, for good and ill, but the truth is that Trump's rhetoric wasn't accompanied by much in the way of action.1 In terms of what the US actually plans to do, there really hasn't been much change so far.

1The biggest substantive difference is the possibility of US withdrawal from the Paris climate change agreement. However, Trump hasn't announced his decision about that yet.

Donald Trump has a long history of tweeting nonsense, but this might be his most unbelievable tweet ever:

Uh huh. I'll bet he's going to dive right into that report. He lives for this kind of bedside reading.

In other news, you can ignore all that Kushner stuff you've been reading about. The Times and the Post are just inventing it. "It is very possible that those sources don't exist but are made up by fake news writers," Trump says. I'm glad he's finally put this to rest.

Here's an interesting new tidbit on the Jared Kushner front. The New York Times account of Kushnergate says that the reason Kushner wanted to set up backchannel comms to Russia was so that Michael Flynn could hold private conversations about Syria. The Times didn't characterize their sources for this information, but it turns out it was people providing Kushner's side of the story. So why didn't this detail make it into the Washington Post story?

So these sources said Kushner was setting up a channel to talk about Syria, which sounds fairly benign. But they refused to allow themselves to be quoted even as "sources close Kushner" or somesuch. So the Post passed.

Obviously this makes a difference. If the Syria story is Kushner's alibi, it means a lot less than it would if it came from some relatively neutral source who happened to know what was going on. Discount it accordingly.

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