I really don’t want to write about crap in Washington when Irma is tearing up Florida. If you’re affected by the weather, please tell us about it in the comments.

We may be in for a rough weekend, between floods and fires. Stay safe. Do let me know if you see any plagues of frogs or locusts or anything.

James Hohmann writes that immigration has become a litmus test for Democrats. One of the reasons the Dream Act, which passed in the House in 2010, failed in the Senate is that five Democrats voted no. If Senate Dems had unanimously voted yes, it would have passed.

But of those five, only one, John Tester of Montana, is still in the Senate. and now Tester supports DACA and the dreamers. Apparently in 2010 he got slammed for that no vote.

Hohmann continues,

Understandably, most of the media’s coverage of the Trump administration’s Tuesday announcement has focused on cleavages in the Republican ranks. The president has placed his adopted party in a bind by putting the onus on Congress to protect the 800,000 “dreamers” with a legislative fix in the next six months. Reflecting the fraught politics, Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) — who is chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee — backed a bipartisan bill yesterday that would shield young immigrants from deportation and give them a pathway to citizenship.

— The untold story, though, is the degree to which Democrats are now in lockstep on what not long ago was an issue that divided them. Not a single Democrat in either chamber of Congress has expressed support for getting rid of DACA.

— This is part of a larger lurch to the left in the Democratic Party on a host of hot-button issues. No matter where you’re from, it is harder than ever to be a Democratic candidate who is against gun control, abortion rights or single-payer health insurance. That doesn’t mean you cannot be, but one risks losing major donors and drawing the ire of the progressive grass roots – even if you represent a red state.

This is a hopeful sign, I think. Maybe the Dems have gotten the message they have to actually stand for something. And it shows us the progressive grass roots are having an impact.

But I also want to point out that just over a month ago, Democrats were having an internal pissing contest over “litmus tests,” which are supposed to be bad, say some people.

This is from The Hill, July 31:

Democrats will not withhold financial support for candidates who oppose abortion rights, the chairman of the party’s campaign arm in the House said in an interview with The Hill.

Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) said there will be no litmus tests for candidates as Democrats seek to find a winning roster to regain the House majority in 2018.

“There is not a litmus test for Democratic candidates,” said Luján, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman. “As we look at candidates across the country, you need to make sure you have candidates that fit the district, that can win in these districts across America.”

Author Lindy West responded (August 2, the New York Times):

I relate to the flailing panic that is no doubt undergirding such a morally putrescent idea. Nineteen hyenas and a broken vacuum cleaner control the White House, and ice is becoming extinct. I get it. I am desperate and afraid as well. I am prepared to make leviathan compromises to pull us back from that brink. But there is no recognizable version of the Democratic Party that does not fight unequivocally against half its constituents’ being stripped of ownership of their own bodies and lives. This issue represents everything Democrats purport to stand for.

To legislatively oppose abortion is to be, at best, indifferent to the disenfranchisement, suffering and possibly even the death of women. At worst it is to revel in those things, to believe them fundamental to the natural order. Where, exactly, on that spectrum is Luján comfortable placing his party?

I’m mostly with West on this, although it’s also the case that if, hypothetically, an anti-choice Democrat won his primary and had a chance at knocking Ted Cruz out of the Senate, I’d say fund him. But the larger point is that there’s a natural tension between people extolling the “big tent” and those who say the Democratic Party brand means nothing any more.

In years past we’ve seen, time and time again, Democrats being their own worse enemy. We watched many of them vote to allow George Bush invade Iraq. We watched some of them fight against the Affordable Care Act, causing it to be watered down. For a long time the Party pretty much surrendered the field to the Right on gun control. Too many Democrats have been squishy on unions. And, of course, Democrats as well as Republicans have a long history of votes to help the corporate interests that donate to their campaigns.  See also “Democrats once represented the working class. Not any more” by Robert Reich.

Too many Democrats still think that appealing to blue collar voters means moving right on social and cultural issues. This is phony. I say we can stand firm on social and cultural issues and move left on economic issues and labor. Even in “red” districts. We’re not winning those districts, anyway; at least show the voters they have a choice other than Republican or Republican Lite.

“Big tents” are grand, but IMO the problem the Dems have had is that they made the hypothetical big tent so big that the party itself became meaningless. Maybe they’re learning.

I haven’t little to add to what has already been written about Trump’s abrupt ending of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, except for the obvious: This is just Trump getting his jollies by being an abusive son of a bitch. There is no other purpose served by ending DACA.

Jonathan Blitzer, The New Yorker:

On Tuesday morning, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Trump Administration was ending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (daca), the Obama-era policy that protects close to a million undocumented immigrants who grew up in the U.S. Many Americans, including the President, refer to the beneficiaries of the policy as Dreamers, but at a press conference in Washington, Sessions called them by a different name. They were, he said, “a group of illegal aliens” who were taking jobs away from citizens, contributing to “lawlessness,” and threatening the country’s “unsurpassed legal heritage.” The decision to end daca wasn’t personal, he insisted. “This does not mean they’re bad people or that our nation disrespects them or demeans them in any way,” he said. It was just a matter of “protecting the integrity of our Constitution.” President Barack Obama, who created daca by executive action—without congressional approval—had “unilaterally” granted Dreamers “amnesty.” Sessions’s tone suggested that he believed these words were as abhorrent to his listeners as they were to him. “We simply can’t admit everyone who comes here,” he said. Then he took a drink of water, and praised Donald Trump. “The President has delivered to the American people,” Sessions said.

Since daca was implemented, in 2012, its beneficiaries, who came to the U.S. as small children, have been living in the country under “lawful status.” They’ve been able to obtain work visas and driver’s licenses, and were free from the immediate fear of arrest and deportation. But daca does not grant citizenship. “It’s a temporary, stopgap measure,” Obama said when he first announced the policy. Yet years have passed and Congress never formalized Dreamers’ status, despite the fact that a majority of Americans, across ideological lines, supported both their citizenship and their right to remain in the country. Ninety-seven per cent of daca recipients are in school or in the workforce, and—per the conditions of the program—not one of them has a criminal history.

Josh Marshall, Trump Wishes Dreamers Luck as He Tosses Them Out of the Plane

Jennifer Rubin, And Trump didn’t have the nerve to make the announcement himself

Greg Sargent, Don’t be fooled by the scam that Trump will pull today on DACA

James Hohmann, DACA decision highlights chasm between Trump’s compassionate rhetoric and reality

Roberto G. Gonzales, DACA’s beneficiaries landed good jobs, enrolled in college, and contributed to society

Amy Davidson Sorkin writes at the New Yorker:

The problem is not that President Trump does not realize that Harvey is huge; a number of his tweets on the storm have contained the word “Wow,” and he called it “epic” and “historic,” adding that “Texas can handle anything!” But the enormity of the situation does not seem to have organized his thoughts beyond declarations of how it will be matched by the greatness of his Administration and its allies. On the flight to Texas, on Tuesday morning, he had retweeted a message from Brazoria County, which consisted of a red box containing the words “notice: The Levee at Columbia Lakes has been breached!! get out now!!” Get out to where? What are the practical consequences of a breach? Trump didn’t say. (Vox has a more technical breakdown of the levee situation.)

In Corpus Christi, speaking to Governor Abbott, Trump began by acknowledging that it wasn’t time for congratulations, but offered a prediction that Houston would soon be better than ever: “We’ll congratulate each other when it’s all finished.” Later in the day, at a briefing at a control center in Austin, he said that his team’s coördination had been “incredible—everybody’s talking about it,” then offered this observation on the challenge that they faced: “Nobody has ever seen this much water. . . . The water has never been seen like this, to this, to the extent. And it’s, uh, maybe someday going to disappear. We keep waiting!”

Trump seems to think that once the water goes away, everything will just go back to normal.

What will be harder is persuading not only Trump but the Republican Party that Harvey has a reality that reaches beyond the borders of this storm, and involves major policy issues. Both Senators Cruz and Cornyn voted against a major emergency-relief bill allocating funds for rebuilding and recovery after Superstorm Sandy. Cruz, in particular, has misrepresented that bill’s contents and its purpose, saying that two-thirds of the money in it wasn’t really related to Sandy but was, rather, pork and other wasteful government spending. (Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s fact checker, gave Cruz three Pinocchios for that.) Cruz and others, including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, also complained that the bill wasn’t really for emergency spending because it covered things like improving forecasts and repairing damaged infrastructure in a way that protected it against the next storm. This time, for the congressional Republicans, as much as for Trump, the emergency can’t stop when the rain does.

Here’s Glenn Kessler’s fact check of Cruz’s claim.

I think most Americans are looking at Texas and thinking it’s going to take a ton of money to put things right. I have read that up to a million cars are ruined. I have read that 80 percent of people whose homes were damaged or destroyed have no flood insurance. We’re hearing about exploding chemical plants and who knows how much petroleum and other toxic things being released into the water. So far I haven’t heard an assessment of how many businesses have been shut down and how many jobs are lost. I haven’t heard an assessment of repairing roads, bridges and other infrastructure.

And most of the issues involved in all these things deal with policy matters that Republicans don’t like to deal with. They want the private sector to somehow take care of it all.

Speaking of the private sector, there’s a pernicious pattern of disasters being used as opportunities for all kinds of political patronage and profit. See Naomi Klein, “How Power Profits From Disaster.”

One of those moments arrived in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, as I watched hordes of private military contractors descend on the flooded city to find ways to profit from the disaster, even as thousands of the city’s residents, abandoned by their government, were treated like dangerous criminals just for trying to survive.

I don’t think we ever got an honest assessment of how much taxpayer “recovery” money was lost to waste and fraud after Katrina, and a lot of that money disappeared into the pockets of contractors, sub-contractors and various middlemen. People’s lives were put on hold for months and years waiting for help. The Bush Administration was colossally inept, but does anyone think the Trump Administration is going to do better?

On top of that — while everyone’s been focused on Hurricane Harvey, wildfires are raging through the Pacific Coast states. Home owners are getting evacuation orders. Yosemite National Park is threatened.

On top of that, there’s a category 3 hurricane out in the Atlantic named Irma that might strike the Atlantic coast next weekend. That’s not certain though.

On top of that, North Korea.

So, shit’s getting real, and Republicans plan on converging in Washington this month to cut taxes for rich people.

Back to Amy Sorkin:

If the tragedy of Harvey is not met properly and consistently, on a national level and with an eye toward a long-term commitment, it could mean the decline and fall of a great American city.

Today’s Republicans have absolutely no grasp of what “properly and consistently, on a national level and with an eye toward a long-term commitment” even means, and Trump is incapable of commitment except to himself. Twelve years ago, Republicans were perfectly content to leave New Orleans to rot. And they largely got away with it. Somehow, I don’t think they’ll get away with letting Houston rot.

See also:

Donald Trump in Houston: “Have A Good Time Everybody”

He Can’t Even Fake It

And an old Mahablog post, What Is Evil?

Earlier this week it was revealed that Robert Mueller is working with  New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, which opens up the possibility that the investigation will eventually result in state as well as federal criminal charges. Presidents can’t pardon state offenses. There also are reports that Mueller is working with the IRS Financial Crimes Unit, which usually works on tax evasion and money laundering cases. Heh.

Today we’re learning that Mueller has in his possession a letter composed by soulless creep Stephen Miller and Trump himself to justify James Comey’s firing. Andrew Prokop writes at Vox,

When President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey back in May, his administration at first offered a laughably implausible pretext. The claim was that Comey’s ouster had nothing to do with the Russia investigation, and that Trump was merely accepting the Justice Department’s recommendation to fire Comey because he had been too tough on Hillary Clinton in the email investigation.

But that wasn’t the initial story. The New York Times’ Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman report that Trump and White House aide Stephen Miller first drafted a different letter recommending Comey’s firing — a letter that White House counsel Don McGahn blocked because he found it to be “problematic.”

It’s not yet known what, exactly, the letter said or why the White House counsel found it to be so troublesome. But the Washington Post’s Rosalind Helderman, Carol Leonnig, and Ashley Parker report that it is several pages long and mentions “Trump’s frustration that Comey was unwilling to say publicly that Trump was not personally under investigation in the FBI’s inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.”

Obstruction of justice, anyone? See also Bob Mueller has an unreleased Trump letter about firing James B. Comey. Here’s why that’s big.

Josh Marshall writes about the time at which this letter probably was written.

What happened that Sunday night on Air Force One? What am I talking about? Let’s look at the timeline. We know from abundant reporting that in early May (May 6th-7th) President Trump spent the weekend at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey. He apparently stewed over that weekend about Comey and came back to Washington Sunday night determined to fire him. He proceeded to do just that. He called in Rosenstein and Sessions the next day (Monday), got Rosenstein’s recommendation memo and promptly fired Comey on Tuesday (May 9th).

This we all know. But that Sunday evening return flight from New Jersey was also the night something kind of odd happened. Air Force 1 left Morristown at 8:02 PM and landed at Andrews at 8:40. But unlike what normally happens, the President didn’t get off the plane. Just before 9 PM Jared and Ivanka got off the plane with their kids. Jared put Ivanka and the kids into a silver minivan and got back on the plane. He got off the plane again at 9:07 and then got back on the plane a couple minutes later. The press pooler for that night filed an update at 9:18 PM updating colleagues and noting that there’d been no explanation what the hang up was or why the President was still on the plane.

Stephen Miller also was one of the people on the plane.

How worried is Trump? Hard to say from a distance of course, but there are stories yesterday that Trump out-of-the-blue called Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley and pledged his support for ethanol. Grassley is a senator from Iowa, so he likes ethanol subsidies. But note that Donald Trump, Jr., had just agreed to be interviewed by … the Senate Judiciary Committee.

There’s a must-read report at Bloomberg News about the Kushner family finances. Executive summary: You think you have money problems? Boy howdy, you do not want to be them.

Here’s the story: Back in 2007, the Kushners bought a big ugly building on Fifth Avenue, Manhattan — 666 Fifth Avenue, in fact — that they couldn’t afford.

A kingmaker in New Jersey Democratic politics, Kushner had been out of prison just three months for making illegal campaign contributions and, in a bizarre episode that the tabloids couldn’t get enough of, hiring a prostitute to entrap his brother-in-law. He wanted a prestige Manhattan property to mark a fresh start for the family business, which would now be led, if mostly in appearance, by his eldest child, Jared Kushner, who frequently consulted his father. Charlie had recently been turned down for towers including the Seagram Building. He saw securing Tishman’s property as a way to plant his flag.

Over the weekend, the Kushners and their partners worked out a deal in which they would put down $50 million—a pittance. Barclays Bank Plc and UBS Group AG funded $1.75 billion of the purchase, $535 million of it in short-term, high-interest loans. The terms were demanding, bordering on untenable. Nevertheless, after the deal closed in January 2007, the group celebrated with a party at one of the most expensive restaurants in New York, Per Se. Everyone there was given a pair of silver cufflinks fashioned in the embossed look of the building’s exterior.

Note the date, 2007. Then came 2008. And the Kushners were stuck with this turkey.

At 1.5 million square feet, the 1950s building ranks nowhere near the largest of New York skyscrapers. Its low ceilings and closely built columns give it a dark, closed-off feel—anathema in the era of light-filled open-plan offices.

“If that building was beginning to look obsolete at the time of purchase, it is totally obsolete now,” says Jesse Keenan, a Harvard lecturer on architecture who wrote a 2013 report on the building for Kushner Cos. He notes that Manhattan is in the midst of its largest office-construction boom since the 1980s. The most prestigious occupants—hedge funds, private equity and law firms—are moving west to new buildings, shifting the center of gravity away from the Kushners.

Since the purchase there’s been some refinancing and some share selling, but the bottom line is that the Kushner company still holds half of a $1.2 billion mortgage, on which it hasn’t paid a cent, and the full amount is due in February 2019.  See, aren’t you glad you aren’t them?

And they’ve got this big turkey of a building that they probably couldn’t sell for that much. One guy they approached to help bail them out more or less said that the lot was worth more than the building.

Among other plans, the Kushners thought they might gut and renovate the building, turning it into luxury condominiums and high-end retail space. People who were asked to invest in this idea turned it down, saying that the potential return didn’t justify the cost. The New York luxury-retail market is already close to being saturated, apparently.

No American financiers would work with them, so the Kushners have been shopping abroad for someone to take some of the financial load off their hands. This was going nowhere, either, until Trump won the election. Suddenly, people would at least take meetings. The problem is that the thing is such an obvious money-loser that no honest investor wants to have anything to do with it. And those entities that might have other motives for dumping a ton of cash into a building owned by the president’s son-in-law have been frightened off by the scrutiny surrounding Kushner. Chinese and Saudi companies that nearly bought in earlier this year have backed out already.

On top of that, a lot of the Kushner family’s other projects aren’t doing much better, as CNN reported recently. Remember the time they got caught selling visas in China? That was to prop up another project, One Journal Square in Jersey City. Recently a Kushner family request for a 30-year tax abatement and $30 million in city-issued bonds to keep the project alive was turned down by Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop.

Fulop is a Democrat, and his political rival says the mayor didn’t support the tax break because of the political risk he faced for aligning himself with the Kushners in the past.

“This pivot away was clearly based upon Fulop’s identification of a shift in the political winds and recognition that Trump and Kushner are toxic in Jersey City,” said Bill Matsikoudis, a Democrat, who is running against Fulop in the city’s mayoral race.

I haven’t heard that the One Journal Square building project is now dead, but I suspect it is.

No one seems to be asking the obvious question — why isn’t the allegedly wealthy Trump family bailing out the Kushners? One suspects that the answer is that the Trumps are leveraged up to their eyeballs already. I trust Mr. Mueller will sort that out eventually.

The other part of this touches on Jared’s many meetings with people he shouldn’t have met with. Keep in mind that Kushner has kept 90 percent of his real estate holdings. How nervous is he getting, do you think?

Josh Marshall writes,

It was almost unquestionably this money hunt that led Kushner to meet with that chief of a Russian owned state bank during the transition – a source of many of his current troubles.

What all of this amounts to is that while Kushner has been given oversight of numerous key foreign policy issues and problems, his ‘family’ is simultaneously in a desperate hunt for money which basically has to come from abroad – from a lot of the people he meets with in his White House job. It’s like having a Secretary of State desperate for help getting money from every foreign potentate he meets with. In fact, it’s not ‘like’ that. It sort of is that.

This is, um, not good. All I’m going to say further, for now, is that we seriously need a Constitutional amendment that says presidents and their White House advisers must make complete tax returns public before general elections and also sell or place in a genuine blind trust all businesses and investments before taking office. But that’s not going to help us now.

Everything I’m reading about Trump vis à vis Harvey keeps saying he’s avoiding making Dubya’s Katrina mistakes. For example, he insisted on scheduling a trip to Texas even as the rains were still falling —

Mr. Trump, his aides say, is eager to avoid the mistakes made by President George W. Bush in 2005, when he took a relatively hands-off approach to the federal response to Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana.

Even though Vice President Mike Pence and federal officials from the Department of Homeland Security have taken the lead on negotiating many of the details of the response, Mr. Trump has taken pains to emphasize his personal involvement in the crisis.

He’s even trying to improve on the optics —

Trump likely will avoid replicating a George W. Bush moment — the former president deeply regretted the images taken of him flying over New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, as the optics made him look detached from the victims. Sanders told reporters she was unsure as to whether the president would fly over Houston but said due to scattered showers, there are no plans to helicopter while in Texas.

As I remember, the problem Bush had wasn’t with the photos; it was that he was photographed looking at Katrina damage from a plane window, and then he went back to Washington and did nothing until his aides started screaming at him about it.

So Trump wants to be seen doing something about Texas. The problem is, that strutting around in front of cameras is not the same thing as doing something. People ultimately will judge Trump by results, not by optics.

People will cut their politicians some slack for a couple of days. They’re relieved to be alive. But after a few days of being confined to a shelter with clogged toilets, not enough food and no changes of clothes, they start to get irritated. Right now the Houston Convention Center may be turning into the New Orleans Super Bowl II. Let’s hope not.

Trump is fortunate that his director of FEMA, Brock Long, has a background in emergency management, unlike the unfortunate Michael Brown. But Trump has already made one Bush mistake by praising the “great job” his people were doing before they’d done enough to be graded.  If relief efforts get bogged down somewhere, that could come back and bite Trump.

Further, the Trumps have already made one optical mistake. Here they are getting ready to fly to Corpus Christi this morning —

Melania is getting slammed for the stiletto heels. She changed into white tennies on the plane — white, Melania? Not expecting to go anywhere muddy? Some have pointed out that Trump’s off-white chinos probably weren’t a smart choice, either. But I’m looking forward to his showing up in Houston wearing a tool belt in a few months.

The real test isn’t going to be how the Trumps are photographed. The real test is if people can see that work is being done to relieve their immediate suffering and rebuild what was destroyed. The latter will take years, yes. But will the rebuilding effort under a Trump administration avoid the waste, fraud, political favoritism and general boondoggling that marked the federal government’s Katrina efforts? Will Trump be able to pass up using Harvey to make a buck for his own businesses? This is Trump we’re talking about, remember.

Houston, you have a problem …

Former Republican Senator John Danforth complained recently that Donald Trump is not a Republican.

He stands in opposition to the founding principle of our party — that of a united country.

We are the party of Abraham Lincoln, and our founding principle is our commitment to holding the nation together. …

… To my fellow Republicans: We cannot allow Donald Trump to redefine the Republican Party.

I don’t know if you remember John Danforth, who left the Senate in 1995. He’s what I’d call a standard old-school Republican — white, patrician, traditionally conservative, financially comfortable; not a bad sort but oblivious about some things. He probably fervently believes that the Republican Party stood for unity right up until the moment Trump was installed in the White House.

But of course, it’s been the party of division for a long time. Its candidates win elections through wedge issues and dog whistles. You can trace the politics of appeals to racism and scapegoating of “liberal elites” backward from the Tea Party and birthers to Karl Rove, Lee Atwater, Reagan’s welfare queen, Nixon’s Southern strategy, etc.

The Republican base, well trained to respond to the toxic stew of propaganda that replaced any semblance of a governing philosophy, grew crazier and crazier and finally voted in the candidate who seemed to fulfill what Republicans had promised for years but never delivered — Donald Bleeping Trump.

See Max Boot, of all people, “How the ‘Stupid Party’ Created Donald Trump” (July 2016; note that Boot still hadn’t figured out that Paul Ryan is dumber than a box of rocks); John Nichols, “The Republican Party Created This Monster” (October 2016); and Dan Balz, “How the Republican Party Created Donald Trump” (March 2016)  — Balz wrote,

The sight of establishment Republicans recoiling at Trump strikes some analysts, particularly on the left, as ironic. These GOP critics see Trump’s appeal as the logical result of decades of efforts by the GOP to discredit government and more recently of the party leadership’s passive acceptance of virulent and in some cases racially tinged opposition to President Obama. Having sown the wind, the argument goes, the party now reaps the whirlwind.

Others, however, say that Trumpism, no matter how much it threatens the existence of the modern-day Republican Party, is a broader manifestation of the uneven impact of globalization on a significant segment of the population, a rejection by these voters of institutions and elites in both parties, whom they see as having failed to listen to or respond to their plight.

In reality, it is both, a problem that has had implications for both major parties over a period of years but that has become particularly acute for the Republicans at this moment because the party so badly needs those voters to win in November.

Globalization had become a more acute problem for Democrats than Balz realized. We’ll come back to this.

Anyway, the Max Boot article linked above is particularly interesting, with the caveat that it’s written from Boot’s hard-right perspective. Boot admits that a lot of what Republicans were selling was a con —

William F. Buckley Jr. famously said, “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.” … Here’s the thing, though: The Republican embrace of anti-intellectualism was, to a large extent, a put-on. At least until now.

The Republican embrace of “small government” was a put-on; it was always about disconnecting government from the people so that it could better serve special interests. Ordinary Americans clearly got the message, don’t expect government to do anything for you. Republican embrace of “freedom” was a put-on, since “freedom” to a Republican is divorced from civil liberty and is more about national defense and the protection of privilege. We could go on.

The thing is, though, that a lot of those folks disadvantaged by globalism didn’t know it was a con. By now, even a lot of people being elected to office, especially to state government and the U.S. House, didn’t know it was a con. They internalized the message that government, gays and racial minorities are the source of all your problems. They’d been electing politicians for years who told them that, yet nothing changed. So here comes Donald Trump, who promised them that he and he alone could charge into Washington, knock heads, and set things right. And they believed him.

In short, Trump isn’t redefining the Republican Party; he’s the logical consequence of its own messaging going back many decades.

Basically, the Republican establishment lost control of its own party because the base internalized the GOP’s own messaging all too well. And Trump, the ultimate con man, played the GOP’s own game and beat them at it. Trump won’t be able to deliver on the promise, either, but he’ll tear the government apart as he thrashes about trying to accomplish something.

The Democrats have an equal but opposite problem. Matt Stoller has a nice piece at The Atlantic (published October 2016; I’m just now seeing it) called “How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul” that takes us back to the post-Watergate era. Very briefly, way back then there was a struggle within the Democratic party between the remaining New Deal Dems who wanted to keep banks and corporate power in check, and another group that simply didn’t have a problem with banks and corporations doing whatever they wanted. The latter group won.

Indeed, a revolution had occurred. But the contours of that revolution would not be clear for decades. In 1974, young liberals did not perceive financial power as a threat, having grown up in a world where banks and big business were largely kept under control. It was the government—through Vietnam, Nixon, and executive power—that organized the political spectrum. By 1975, liberalism meant, as Carr put it, “where you were on issues like civil rights and the war in Vietnam.” With the exception of a few new members, like Miller and Waxman, suspicion of finance as a part of liberalism had vanished.

To be fair, suspicion of finance as a part of liberalism was always peculiar to American-style liberalism, and in particular that part of liberalism headed by the two Roosevelts, Teddy and Franklin. It’s not an intrinsic feature of liberalism per se. But let’s go on …

Over the next 40 years, this Democratic generation fundamentally altered American politics. They restructured “campaign finance, party nominations, government transparency, and congressional organization.” They took on domestic violence, homophobia, discrimination against the disabled, and sexual harassment. They jettisoned many racially and culturally authoritarian traditions. They produced Bill Clinton’s presidency directly, and in many ways, they shaped President Barack Obama’s.

The result today is a paradox. At the same time that the nation has achieved perhaps the most tolerant culture in U.S. history, the destruction of the anti-monopoly and anti-bank tradition in the Democratic Party has also cleared the way for the greatest concentration of economic power in a century. This is not what the Watergate Babies intended when they dethroned Patman as chairman of the Banking Committee. But it helped lead them down that path. The story of Patman’s ousting is part of the larger story of how the Democratic Party helped to create today’s shockingly disillusioned and sullen public, a large chunk of whom is now marching for Donald Trump.

At close to the same time Democratic Party leaders began to be distrustful of the judgments of its own voters. As the presidential nomination process was taken out of smoke-filled rooms and given to the people, via primary elections, Dems began to see landslide defeats — first McGovern in 1972, then Carter in 1980. Of course, it hadn’t helped that the party establishment itself gave those two men only lukewarm support. But to cover its ass in the future, the party created the superdelegate system to be sure party elders could put a thumb on the scale in case an “undesirable” candidate got too popular.

And then, seems to me, by the 2000s the party establishment had come to be pretty much dominated by Clinton loyalists, and Barack Obama did nothing to change that.

Thus it was that by the time we got to 2016, the leaders of the Democratic Party establishment plus its network of big-ticket donors (many of whom would end up working with the Trump Administration) saw nothing wrong with presenting the voters with its own preselected, prepackaged presidential candidate before primaries even began, and it cleared the path for her nomination. And then they were confounded and outraged that a large part of its base refused to play along.

But the Democratic Party, like the Republicans, also had lost sight of the “uneven impact of globalization” on its base, and didn’t see how a lot of young people in particular were done with being patted on the head and told that what they wanted from government just isn’t practical. Don’t expect government to do anything for you, my dears.

At least the Republicans still pay lip service to being the party of Lincoln. When was the last time an establishment Democrat paid homage to FDR? Never mind.

This is how both parties came to have big problems with their own bases; just not exactly the same problem. Republicans are in trouble because they’ve been running a con and got out-maneuvered by a con man. After years of thumping their chests and promising they had a better plan, they got put on the spot to produce, and couldn’t. And now to get their party back from Trump they’re going to have to disavow their own con, which is likely going to piss off a lot of the voters who were taken it by it.

Democrats are in trouble because, after years of promising a Democratic majority as the population grew more racially diverse and liberal, they managed to alienate the very people they need for a better future by being out of touch with their concerns. Their aging leaders have over-managed and controlled political processes to the point that many voters and activists just plain feel shut out.  And as we approach the midterm elections, the DNC itself is nearly shut out as donors send their money elsewhere and activists work outside the party to support candidates.

IMO over the next couple of election cycles we’re going to see some major shifts in the political landscape in the U.S. I just hope it’s all for the better.

George Caleb Bingham, “Stump Speaking”

It may be a couple more days before we know how much death and damage Harvey is causing in Texas. And it may be much longer before we can fully assess how much death and damage Trump is causing around the globe. But yesterday, we got a glimpse.

Taking advantage of the weekend plus Harvey, the Trump White House made three significant moves. Ones, it flushed Sebastian Gorka. This is a good thing, of course, and I don’t believe for a minute that Gorka voluntarily resigned.

But it’s all downhill from there. Trump issued an executive order that formally bans transgendered people from serving in the military. Details for how this is going to be implemented have yet to be worked out; Trump doesn’t do details. A lot of good servicepeople must be wondering what’s next.

And, of course, he pardoned sleazebag Joe Arpaio. Law professor Andrew Rudalevige writes,

It is hard to gauge the political fallout of the president’s decision — announced as it was late on a Friday night during an impending hurricane. Normally, though, as political scientist Jeffrey Crouch’s book on the pardon power makes clear, pardons are granted for two reasons: either to provide mercy or correct a miscarriage of justice, in an individual case; or on more general grounds based on public policy.

Arpaio’s pardon hardly fits that description.

As a procedural matter, the guidelines of the Justice Department’s office of the pardon attorney — not binding on the president, of course, and not consulted in this instance — state that petitions for clemency are normally considered only after five years have passed after a conviction. (Further, in considering such petitions, “The extent to which a petitioner has accepted responsibility for his or her criminal conduct and made restitution to its victims are important considerations.”)

Pardons also serve as a check against the judicial branch, when the president feels a grave miscarriage of justice has occurred. At his Phoenix rally, Trump seemed to make this claim, saying that “Sheriff Joe was convicted for doing his job.”

The problem with that, though, is that Arpaio was convicted for doing the opposite of his job. As a sworn officer of law enforcement, he violated the law and then ignored court orders designed to bring his policies in line with statutory and constitutional mandates. Two different federal judges found, respectively, that the “constitutional violations” committed by Arpaio’s office were “broad in scope, involve its highest ranking command staff, and flow into its management of internal affairs investigations” and that he “willfully violated” directives to correct those violations.

But Trump thinks he’s a good guy, so the laws don’t have to apply to him.

Philip Bump brings up another point.

The broader question raised by the pardon, then, is where Trump would draw the line. If he’s willing to pardon Joe Arpaio for ignoring a court order in service of a political goal Trump embraces, why wouldn’t he pardon another individual he respects for similarly ignoring a demand from the court. Say, a former employee or a family member who, say, was issued a subpoena to testify before a special prosecutor?

One message from the Arpaio pardon is precisely that Trump sees his evaluation of the boundaries of legality as superior to the boundaries set by the legal system. The Constitution gives him that power. As we’ve noted before the presidential pardon is absolute. He can pardon anyone for any federal crime at any time — even before the person actually faces any charges and even if no crime actually took place. There’s nothing anyone can do about it, except to impeach Trump and remove him from office to prevent him from doing it again. (The president who replaces him might be able to revoke a recent pardon, one expert told us, but it’s far from certain.)

And he’ll do it, too. Trump has no moral compass and no scruples. None whatsoever.