My favorite thing about yesterday’s apparent Democratic victory in Pennsylvania 18 yesterday was this:

Republicans had banked heavily on selling their tax cuts to voters as proof that they’re getting things done for working- and middle-class people. But in the final days, Republicans dialed down their messaging about the tax cuts, because it wasn’t working.

Also:

At the beginning of February, almost two-thirds of GOP ads were about the Republican tax law, according to a Politico analysis. By election day, the same groups had pivoted sharply to decrying so-called sanctuary cities, as Politico reported:

Since the beginning of March, tax ads have been essentially non-existent. Only two are on the air now — one from the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action which briefly mentions the tax law, and a radio ad from a progressive group attacking Saccone for supporting the law.

That doesn’t mean Republicans are going to stop messaging on taxes for the 2018 midterms. They were all but doubling down during a GOP press conference on Capitol Hill Wednesday.

I think this is an example of Washington Republicans being out of touch with the voters. They’ve gone to the well with tax cuts too many times. Even people who have noticed a little bit more money in their paychecks probably realize that tax cuts do not magically make the overall economy better. They might even realize that increased deficits will ultimately lead to cutting benefits they need, like unemployment benefits and Medicare.

There was some speculation that Trump’s tariffs were aimed at winning yesterday’s election. If so, that didn’t work, either.  It probably helped the Dems that the United Steelworkers Union was going door to door for Conor Lamb. The Union does not like Lamb’s opponent, Saccone, who has an anti-worker voting record.

Conor Lamb ran as an old-fashioned labor Democrat.

Lamb’s performance also demonstrates how vital union support is for Democrats running in white, blue-collar Trump country. Lamb, who ran as a staunch defender of Medicare and Social Security, engaged heavily with the United Mine Workers and won their support after he promised to back legislation that would fund their pensions. Lamb downplayed his connection to the national Democratic Party and elided differences on cultural issues, but he pulled in Trump-voting Democrats by promising a robust defense of popular safety net programs.

The DCCC put very few resources into this race, even though Lamb was the sort of “centrist” candidate the DCCC usually loves. Lamb was careful to not badmouth Trump. He’s opposed to an assault-weapons ban and single-payer health care but supports restoring Obamacare to its former glory. He says he is personally opposed to abortion but does not support legal restrictions on abortion. (This is significant, since he is replacing a guy whose opposition to abortion rights was his signature issue.) However, he also said he was not going to support Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, which is probably why he was dissed by the DCCC.

Back to Greg Sargent:

There is a robust argument underway among Democrats over whether they should prioritize outreach to the suburban and educated white voters, mostly women, who are deeply distressed and energized by Trump, or redouble their focus on the blue-collar whites that Trump lured away. But last night’s results perhaps suggest that the GOP agenda is unpopular among both those demographics (as some Democratic pollsters have noted), meaning that this may be a false choice. If that holds, it will ensure a broad map with many districts seriously in play — and a better shot for Democrats at capturing the House.

Right after the 2016 election there was a huge uproar about whether the Democrats should emphasize “identity politics” and social issues or economic populist issues. And I wrote that this was a false choice. One set of issues does not negate the other. On a local level you might want to emphasize one set of issues over the other, depending on demographics, but there’s no reason on earth that Dems can’t run on economic populism and still be the party of social justice and equality.

And it looks like the Republican agenda is a vote killer.

Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg suggests that the results show not just that the GOP tax plan is failing, but also that the whole Trump/GOP agenda is an albatross for Republicans. Trump has fully embraced Paul Ryan’s plutocratic agenda — trying and failing to repeal a huge chunk of the safety net and passing a huge permanent tax cut for the wealthy and corporations — while continuing the drumbeat of racist and xenophobic cultural provocations (with a hasty, haphazard gesture toward protectionism in the form of the tariffs thrown in). But Lamb apparently won back large numbers of disaffected blue-collar Democrats, or at least outperformed Hillary Clinton among them. As Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman told me: “He overperformed Clinton by the most in old union precincts.”

These are exactly the people who are supposed to believe Trump when he tells them his tax plan is good for them. They didn’t. And the surge of suburban voters against Trump appeared to continue. In short: The pluto-populism isn’t working.

Remember, Trump ran as an actual populist. He was going to give everybody better health care and jobs and protect Social Security and Medicare and all that. But instead, when it became apparent he had no real agenda or plan, he just signed on to Paul Ryan’s “starve the poor” policies.

BTW, now Paul Ryan is trying to claim that Conor Lamb ran as “a conservative,” which is especially funny considering that Lamb opposes  Ryan’s agenda —

But he also campaigned on a pro-union platform. He toed the Democratic line on health care, aired advertisements opposing Ryan-backed reforms to Medicare and Social Security, and hammered the Republican tax bill, arguing it would balloon the deficit and lead to cuts to entitlement programs.

To paraphrase another Republican politician, “Rarely is the question asked: Is our Republicans learning?” We’ll see.

Seriously, does it get more bare-assed than this? This was Rex Tillerson, yesterday.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says the poisoning of ex-spy Sergei Skripal in Britain “clearly came from Russia” and “certainly will trigger a response.”

Tillerson says he doesn’t know whether Russia’s government had knowledge of the poisoning. But he is arguing the poison couldn’t have originated anywhere else. He says the substance is known to the U.S. and doesn’t exist widely. He says it’s “only in the hands of a very, very limited number of parties.”

Tillerson calls the poisoning “a really egregious act” and says it’s “almost beyond comprehension” that a state actor would use such a dangerous substance in a public place.

But he says he won’t elaborate on what response might follow.

This interview took place while Tillerson was returning from Nigeria to Washington, and I’m not sure exactly when Tillerson left Africa. But I believe it was yesterday late afternoon or evening.

The British Evening Standard ran this news story 14 hours ago, and I’m not sure when Tillerson said this, but it may have been before he got on the plane —

“There is never a justification for this type of attack, the attempted murder of a private citizen on the soil of a sovereign nation, and we are outraged that Russia appears to have again engaged in such behavior. We have full confidence in the UK’s investigation and its assessment that Russia was likely responsible for the nerve agent attack that took place in Salisbury last week. There is never a justification for this type of attack – the attempted murder of a private citizen on the soil of a sovereign nation – and we are outraged that Russia appears to have again engaged in such behavior. From Ukraine to Syria – and now the UK – Russia continues to be an irresponsible force of instability in the world, acting with open disregard for the sovereignty of other states and the life of their citizens.”

Three hours ago, Trump tweeted this.

Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State. He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service! Gina Haspel will become the new Director of the CIA, and the first woman so chosen. Congratulations to all!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2018

According to several news stories (such as), this tweet amounted to Tillerson’s pink slip. This is how Trump fired Tillerson. Well, Putin hired Tillerson, so I guess he might as well fire him, too.

The one event from yesterday that doesn’t fit the timeline is the bullshit announcement from the House Intelligence Committee that there was “no collusion” with Russia and the investigation was ending. This came as a surprise to the Democrats on the committee.  This appears to have happened before Tillerson went rogue and criticized Russia. However, if Tillerson had informed the White House what he was going to say before he said it, one might think the House Republicans were ordered to issue a report to cover Trump’s ass.

Charles Pierce, after noting that Tillerson in recent weeks had missed appointments because of “fatigue,” said:

The official line from Camp Runamuck was that the president* shuffled Tillerson out for cause, leaving the rest of us to recall what Tillerson had said about the poisoning of the Skirpals. However, the Post also has reported that Tillerson knew he’d been fired on the previous Friday, so what the hell did he have to lose by speaking his mind on Monday?

If that was the case, they kept it damned quiet. Maybe, but one of Tillerson’s deputies has told the Associated Press that the Secretary was caught by surprise and learned about his dismissal when the president* tweeted about it on Tuesday morning. (Jesus, you wouldn’t run a gas station this way.) In any event, they had a health-related out, and they declined to use it. Graceless is as graceless does. This was defenestration, pure and simple.

I seriously doubt that Tillerson knew he’d been fired on Friday. He was supposed to have still been in Africa today, actually, but canceled today’s appointments yesterday because, he said, he had to attend to something in Washington.

Tillerson was a really bad Secretary of State, but I fear Mike Pompeo will be much, much worse.

Update: This is probably unrelated:

The charges are not related to the President, the source said.

Minutes after news of his departure broke, the Trump campaign announced McEntee would be joining the reelection effort as a senior adviser for campaign operations.

This past week the Senate passed a bank deregulation bill. This comes under the heading of why are they wasting our time on this crap in my book.

The Sixteen Weenies are:

Bennet, Colorado
Carper, Delaware
Coons, Delaware
Donnelly, Indiana
Hassan, New Hampshire
Heitkamp, North Dakota
Jones, Alabama
Kaine, Virginia
Manchin, West Virginia
McCaskill, Missouri
Nelson, Florida
Peters, Michigan
Shaheen, New Hampshire
Stabenow, Michigan
Tester, Montana
Warren, Virginia

What did this crew vote for?

The bill — one of the few important bipartisan pieces of legislation to move through Congress — would peel back key parts of Dodd-Frank, the 2010 law that was one of former President Barack Obama’s signature achievements, while leaving most of its regulations intact.

It has several elements aimed at scaling back lending rules. They include: relaxed mortgage regulations for small banks; broad exemptions from oversight for regional banks with up to $250 billion in assets; a mandate that the Federal Reserve tailor its rules for big banks; and easier capital and liquidity requirements for a number of the nation’s largest lenders.

The bill includes a handful of consumer protections, such as a requirement that credit reporting companies like Equifax provide free credit monitoring to members of the military — a proposal that has alarmed conservatives who warn that it would expose the firms to lawsuits.

Democrats who helped draft the bill argue that the legislation is an overdue recalibration of Dodd-Frank that would help make it easier for small and midsize banks to provide credit, particularly in rural areas.

Well, that sounds benign. But let’s hear from the other side.

Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat who worked with the Obama administration on banking industry oversight after the 2008 crash, pledged to fight the bill, even if she faced long odds.

“There’s Democratic and Republican support because the lobbyists have been pushing since the first day Dodd-Frank passed to weaken the regulations on these giant banks,” she said during a morning press conference.

Ironically, I recently found an article on Democratic Senators Most Likely to Lose to a Republican in November. There are five Democrats up for re-election who are currently behind in polls against either their general election opponent or Generic Republic. All five of them are on the list above. Behind in polls:  Tester, Montana; Manchin, West Virginia; McCaskill, Missouri; Donnelly, Indiana; and Heitkamp, North Dakota. Stabenow is slightly ahead in a squeaker.

Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Voting to weaken Dodd-Frank is terrible politics. Ross Barkan writes at The Guardian:

This week, it became clear again Democrats have not truly internalized 2016. Democrats in the Senate joined the Republican majority to vote in favour of gutting key banking regulations passed in the wake of the 2008 crash, leaving dissenters like Elizabeth Warren to howl into the wind.

Beyond the immorality of the votes, they represented poor politics – a concession to the banking lobby in exchange for further distance from the beating heart of the party.

“I hope that our bipartisan work can rub off on the rest of Congress so we can break through the partisan gridlock that has plagued Washington for too long,” said Jon Tester, one of the moderate Democrats who worked on the legislation. …

… It’s worth considering when bipartisanship can still exist in this deeply polarizing moment. It cannot live where there is a growing national consensus, as over the severity of climate change or the scourge of mass shootings.

It cannot live in any kind of economic matter that benefits the working class or the poor, even after Donald Trump managed to shred rightwing economic orthodoxies on his way to the presidency — never mind that he’s governing like a Koch brothers pawn.

Democrats and Republicans can only come together to feather the nests of the rich and powerful. Weakening Dodd-Frank confirms the worst suspicions of any cynical voter – that the political class really is colluding to screw them over.

What Tester doesn’t understand is that this “bipartisan work” will not “rub off” on Congress. This bill only exists because the largest funders of the Democratic party want it to exist. Big donors on the Republican side will kill efforts to ban assault weapons, fix our healthcare system or end our reliance on fossil fuels.

There is only bipartisanship when the rich demand it. Where no demand exists, the war commences. And make no mistake, 21st-century American politics is war.

I realize there’s an argument that more conservative states will only elect conservative Democrats. The problem is that this assumes the most palatable challenger to a hard-core conservative is a “centrist” conservative. But, seriously, there’s no center any more. Voters who don’t want the crazy right-wing asshole Republican to win are not looking for a candidate who is a watered-down crazy right-wing asshole. They want something that’s clearly different.

Here in Missouri, I never hear liberals gush about how much they like Claire McCaskill. People shuffled off to the polls and voted for her six years ago to keep the misogynist creep the Republicans nominated out of office. But there’s no real enthusiasm. To win in a state like this, Democrats have to whip up enthusiasm among not-crazy voters who are not Democratic loyalists, and I don’t see them doing that. McCaskill does have a primary opponent, but I didn’t know that until I looked it up. So far, there’s no primary campaign.

The one thing McCaskill has had going for her is the Missouri Republican Party, which is pretty much a clown act. But her current Republican opponent, state attorney general Josh Hawley, hasn’t yet said anything stupid about “legitimate rape” and, interestingly, is keeping some distance between himself and the Republican establishment in Washington, including Mitch McConnell. If he runs a smart race he’ll probably beat McCaskill pretty easily. (Although, so far, he hasn’t been running much at all. But it’s early yet.)  The only thing that might help her is if Trump is seriously tanking in the Fall and Hawley is put on the spot to support Trump or not. Or, if Hawley were to lose to his primary opponent, Courtland Sykes, McCaskill will enjoy six more years in Washington. Sykes is a one-man carnival sideshow even by Missouri standards.

Yesterday Trump lobbed a weird insult at Chuck Todd. Referring to Meet the Press, he said,

“A show now headed by ‘Sleepy eyes Chuck Todd,’” Trump said Saturday. “He’s a sleeping son of a bitch.”

Trump first used the moniker in April of 2017 when questioning why Todd and NBC News were not covering his claim that the Obama administration illegally spied on his campaign. Trump has a longstanding feud with NBC News and Todd, whom he considers to be biased against his administration.

“When will Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd and @NBCNews start talking about the Obama SURVEILLANCE SCANDAL and stop with the Fake Trump/Russia story?” Trump tweeted last year.

I had never noticed Todd looking particularly sleepy, so I wondered what this was about. But my friend Jeffrey Feldman explained it.

The “sleepy eyes” thing is an antisemitic dog whistle, in other words. The interesting thing is that yesterday,  in another interview with Megyn Kelly, Vladimir Putin blamed 2016 interference on Jews.

“Maybe they’re not even Russians,” he told Kelly.

Both slurs took place on the same day. One might think it was a coordinated effort.

There are calls for Trump to denounce what Putin said, although (except for Jeffrey Feldman) I’m not hearing much about what Trump said.

Every Jewish supporter of Donald Trump should be pressing the WH to see if the President agrees with his friend Putin on this statement. And every Jewish person resisting Trump just got another reason to fight even harder. https://t.co/7FZTXCzxeH

— Ronald Klain (@RonaldKlain) March 10, 2018

See also Haaratz. Trump won’t criticize Putin, of course.

So let’s talk about the proposed Trump-Kim summit. I’m betting it will never happen. Indeed, the White House already is walking it back.

Jeffrey Lewis wrote in Foreign Policy,

Although President Trump seems to be under the impression that the meeting would be to discuss the elimination of North Korea’s nuclear weapons, the North Koreans haven’t said anything remotely like that.

In fact, all we have from the North Koreans is the secondhand account of a South Korean diplomat of his boozy dinner with Kim Jong Un and an email sent by the North Korean ambassador to the United Nations to Anna Fifield at the Washington Post.

What Kim said, according to the South Korean envoy Chung Eui-yong, was pretty thin gruel: that North Korea would not need nuclear weapons if “military threats towards the North are cleared and the security of its regime is guaranteed.” The email to Fifield didn’t seem to mention it at all, merely offering to explain North Korea’s position to the United States.

Jonathan Chait describes how this came about.

Donald Trump snared headlines across the world by announcing yesterday he would meet with North Korea, breaking with years of American policy that held such a meeting could only happen if North Korea made concessions on its nuclear program first. It turns out Trump’s foreign policy masterstroke did not come as the result of a Metternichtian calculation but instead a completely spontaneous outburst.

South Korean official Chung Eui-yong was in the White House yesterday meeting with other officials. Trump decided to see Chung right away; maybe Fox News was in repeats or something. Trump “then asked Mr. Chung to tell him about his meeting with Mr. Kim,” reports the New York Times. “When Mr. Chung said that the North Korean leader had expressed a desire to meet Mr. Trump, the president immediately said he would do it, and directed Mr. Chung to announce it to the White House press corps.”

It sounds from this account that Trump had no real idea that North Korea has always wanted a face-to-face meeting with the U.S. president, and the U.S. has always imposed conditions. That would certainly be the logical interpretation of this account, given that, in the last week, Trump has confused North Korea with the other, extremely different South Korea, and demanded a laughably tiny $1 billion trade concession from China when he was supposed to demand $100 billion. It certainly appears Trump believed, in the moment, that North Korea had not been interested in a meeting until then, so he needed to take the deal before they changed their mind. Whatever. Art of the Deal.

Trump confused North and South Korea? Yes, Trump claimed that North Korean officials called him on the phone.

“Now we’re talking,” Trump said, referring to North Korea. “They, by the way, called up a couple of days ago; they said, ‘We would like to talk.’ And I said, ‘So would we, but you have to de-nuke.’”

We Now Know that this conversation never happened. The only phone conversations he had was with South Korean officials, which suggests he was confused about which country he was talking to.

Regarding the $1 billion trade concession from China, Matt Yglesias explains that Trump boldly announced he was asking for a $1 billion concession. Which is a joke, because the actual trade deficit is $375.2 billion, or more than $1 billion per day.  Trump was supposed to ask for a $100 billion concession, apparently. That rumbling sound you hear is China laughing its ass off.

With this promising start, what could go wrong?

The Kim family has been wanting a summit meeting with the U.S. for at least 20 years. Back to Jeffrey Lewis:

North Korea has been desperate for a state-visit from a sitting U.S. president since at least the Clinton administration. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders has said that the United States has not made any concessions, but let’s be clear: THE MEETING IS THE CONCESSION. …

… Trump seems to have thought that Kim would meet to give up his nuclear weapons. But for Kim the meeting is about being treated as an equal because of his nuclear and missile programs.

In other words, in agreeing to this meeting Trump didn’t exactly accomplish anything any other president couldn’t have accomplished. It’s just that Trump’s predecessors weren’t idiot enough to agree to a summit meeting with whichever Kim was ruling North Korea at the time. And with no one with any expertise on North Korea in Trump’s administration, there’s really no hope that such a summit meeting wouldn’t be an unmitigated disaster for the U.S.

Now Sarah Sanders is explaining that the summit won’t take place unless Kim Jong Un agrees to conditions on denuclearizing first, which is the same policy the past several previous presidents followed, which is why no summit ever happened. Back to Jonathan Chait:

Which means Trump shot off his mouth and got excited and then his advisers had to explain to him why he can’t do that. Or maybe they haven’t explained it to him and are backing out without his permission. Whatever the explanation, the major policy change Trump announced appears to be completely moot because he plays the president on television but isn’t really president.

At American Conservative, Daniel Larison writes that there’s a real possibility that such a summit, were it to happen, would make everything so much worse. If the meeting produces no results, which is likely, the two nations might not be able to just slip back into the old status quo of mutual saber rattling. Actual armed conflict could happen. No sensible person wants that, but we’re not dealing with sensible people here. On either side.

There’s much fainting and grasping for smelling salts among the editorial page elites these days. Young people aren’t listening to them, I take it.

You’ll remember Brooks advising us that the reason we don’t get anywhere with the gun control debate is that gun control advocates are too nasty to the second amendment activists, and we must all simply treat the rubes  simple country people gun enthusiasts with respect and let them lead the way to sensible legislation. No, seriously that’s what he said. If in a subsequent column so much as hinted at the death threats and smears the fascists thugs gun enthusiasts were visiting upon the student survivors of the Parkland school massacre, I must have missed it.

Now Brooks has a column up in which he tries to put himself in the place of a Young Person and understand all this disrespectful heckling of their betters public intellectuals going on at colleges these days. This is what he came up with:

Today’s young people were raised within an educational ideology that taught them that individual reason and emotion were less important than perspectivism — what perspective you bring as a white man, a black woman, a transgender Mexican, or whatever.

These students were raised with the idea that individual reason is downstream from group identity. Then along came the 2016 election to validate that point of view! If reason and deliberation are central to democracy, how on earth did Donald Trump get elected?

The fact that young people and minorities and a lot of other groups routinely get shafted by an economic and political elite who aren’t listening to them doesn’t cross his mind. That they have genuine grievances that our government refuses to address is not on his radar. He doesn’t like their tone, apparently.

And isn’t it the case that whenever oppressed peoples rise up against their overlords, the overlords always complain but we did so much for them! How could they turn on us like that?

For example, well-paid elitist idiot public intellectual Christina Hoff Sommers was recently heckled at a talk she gave at Lewis & Clark Law School in Oregon. Bari Weiss at the New York Times wasn’t having it. “Yes, these future lawyers believe that free speech is acceptable only when it doesn’t offend them. Which is to say, they don’t believe in it at all,” she sniffed.

Whereupon Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept called out Weiss for her long career of “trying to ruin the careers of Arab and Muslim scholars for the crime of criticizing Israel.”

Anyone remotely familiar with the wars over the Middle East Studies Department at Columbia University, in which Weiss played a starring role, knows that her claim here — that the campaign was just a benign attempt to protect students’ rights — is utterly false. The campaign was designed to ruin the careers of Arab professors by equating their criticisms of Israel with racism, anti-Semitism, and bullying, and its central demand was that those professors (some of whom lacked tenure) be disciplined for their transgressions.

Greenwald provides links, testimony and examples. In other words, to Bari Weiss, free speech is acceptable only when it doesn’t offend her. And, in fact, egregious twit public intellectual Sommers was allowed to finish her speech. Indeed, there is broad suspicion that the students were set up. Alex Pareene:

Last weekend, the Lewis & Clark College chapter of the Federalist Society, the enormously influential legal arm of the conservative movement, invited contrarian political personality Christina Hoff Sommers to speak on campus. They did this mainly because they knew it would annoy or outrage liberal, left-wing, and feminist students, and some small number of them would ask the school to cancel the appearance or show up to protest it. All of that happened. Some students protested and heckled Sommers, footage of which was immediately made grist for the “free speech wars” mill.

Oh no, someone was rude to Christina Hoff Sommers, the anti-feminist who made fun of me for being “off his meds again” the other day. That’s basically the same thing as the Spanish Inquisition, if you’re the smartest person working at the New York Times. pic.twitter.com/Sgk7asoYm5

— David Klion (@DavidKlion) March 6, 2018

This whole thing was staged. She shows up, taunts the students, says she’s going to call their moms on them. They take the bait, Sommers gins up outrage, and right on cue Bari Weiss, David Frum, Joe Scarborough, etc are hyperbolically denouncing the students. It’s a racket. pic.twitter.com/2JNM12gxkU

— David Klion (@DavidKlion) March 6, 2018

But the New York Times editorial page isn’t done making an ass of itself.  It’s also hosting a column by Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor in chief of hard-core libertarian Reason magazine. She blames our dysfunctional public discourse on Jon Stewart.

WTF? Seriously. I’m not making that up.

The explosion of the smugs-vs.-trolls phase of our political discourse is traceable to a now infamous 2004 confrontation between Jon Stewart and Tucker Carlson in the waning days of “Crossfire,” in which Mr. Stewart, a comedian, dropped his jester’s mask and accused Mr. Carlson and his ilk of undermining serious discourse with their partisan feuding and made-for-TV talking points. “Stop hurting America,” was his specific request. Mr. Carlson sputtered and fumed; it was generally agreed that Mr. Stewart won the day. …

… for many on the right, the real lesson of the Stewart-Carlson exchange was “Do as I say, not as I do.” Mr. Stewart urged sincerity and good-faith efforts at dialogue when lecturing Mr. Carlson but practiced the opposite when it suited him. Mr. Stewart’s smugness was itself a form of trolling. And conservatives, no matter what liberals might think of them, are not stupid. The clear lesson was that if you want to win, stop being the debate team kid in the bow tie and start being the class clown who gives that guy a wedgie.

The idea that right-wing television pundits had been the “debate team kid in the bow tie” before the famous Crossfire incident is too ludicrous even to qualify as farce. For years, the Right had engaged in such verbal aggression in public debate that whoever represented “the Left” on television — often, someone more centrist than Left — was never allowed to speak. At some point in the 1980s, right-wing political hacks began the tactic of simply refusing to stop talking and allow whoever they were debating to get a word in edgewise. Many years ago I wrote,

For years it’s been an ironclad law that no progressive is allowed to speak on a television political talk show without having a rightie goon at his side, shouting him down. I once decided that if I ever saw Joe Conason appear on Hardball and be allowed to finish a sentence without interruption I could die happy.

Crossfire itself encouraged the degradation of political discourse by turning two hacks screaming talking points at each other into a crude form of reality television. This was, of course, Jon Stewart’s point, totally lost on clueless ideologue hack editor-in-chief Mangu-Ward. The hosts, of course, never corrected the many lies or provided any sort of editorial context; it was all propaganda. This works well for demagogues, but not so much for poor schmucks who are serious about public policy.

So, having set the Rule of Public Debate is that the “winner” is the guy who talks loudest and won’t shut up and listen, the elites are shocked, shocked I tell you, that public discourse ain’t what it probably never was to begin with.

Alex Pareene’s takedown of this whole conceit of anti-free speech liberalism is worth reading, and savoring.

If you think offensive speech shouldn’t be aired in certain contexts and venues, you don’t believe in free speech. Which is why it is incumbent on Weiss, and her bosses, to ask me to come to the offices of the New York Times and give a talk to the editors and columnists of the opinion page about how stupid they are.

It is absolutely necessary, for the sake of democratic ideals, that the staff attend my talk, and they must listen politely (and quietly) as I condescendingly dismiss their idiotic worldviews and personally insult them. They cannot yell at me or express indignation in any way. For them not to allow this to happen would be an alarming sign of the decline of liberalism in the West. …

…I can criticize editorial page editor James Bennet as clearly not up to the task of running a vibrant and interesting op-ed section at a time when finding smart new voices has never been easier or more necessary, but I can’t also call him a pompous twit to his face, while he just has to sit there and take it, because it would be anti-speech of him to object.

How is that acceptable? How will the minds of the New York Times opinion section staff ever be expanded, how will they ever leave their ideological bubble, if they aren’t exposed to ideas that challenge them, like “all of you are charlatans”?

Preach it, brother Alex.

And you know what this is heading for, don’t you? The Right wants laws and regulations quashing campus speech, for the sake of “freedom.”  That’s the whole point of this obviously coordinated campaign.

At Slate, Jamelle Bouie discusses some real threats to free speech. And they aren’t coming from the young folks, or the Left.

What actually looms are more traditional threats to free speech, from the state using its power to suppress dissidents and minorities (or protect those who would), to extremist groups using the threat of violence to monopolize and control public space. Focusing on campus protesters in the face of this danger is like worrying about the crumbs on your floor when your kitchen is on fire.

For example,

On campuses, it’s clear the most dangerous attacks on free expression are coming from state lawmakers. Last year in Wisconsin, the GOP-controlled Assembly passed a bill that would suspend or expel University of Wisconsin students who disrupted campus speakers or presentations. Gov. Scott Walker supports the measure, which is based on a proposal from the conservative Goldwater Institute in Arizona, and backed by Americans for Prosperity, a right-wing advocacy group.

Stunts like Sommers’s trolling of the students, or anyone inviting professional trolls like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak anywhere, look to me like coordinated efforts to accomplish exactly that — take away the free speech of college students on their own campuses. Further,

Republican lawmakers in several states proposed bills that would protect drivers who caused injury or death to someone blocking a roadway, as long as they exercised “due care.”

And how about,

In 2016, Arizona passed a statute that bars the state from “entering into government contracts with companies or persons who engage in or advocate for economic boycotts of Israel,” a policy that banned pro-boycott speakers from Arizona college campuses.

Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order that amounted to the same thing in New York. DINO Andrew Cuomo is a toad. You can tell him I said so. I’m in Missouri where he can’t get me.

Alabama, Arizona, Texas, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Mississippi all have laws that ban the positive portrayals of homosexuality in public schools. In Alabama, the law states that “any program or curriculum in the public schools in Alabama that includes sex education or the human reproductive process shall, as a minimum, include and emphasize…in a factual manner and from a public health perspective, that homosexuality is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public and that homosexual conduct is a criminal offense under the laws of the state.”

Bouie doesn’t mention it, but several states have laws dictating what doctors must say to women seeking abortions, including medical “facts” that aren’t true, such as “abortion causes breast cancer.” See “New laws force doctors to lie to patients about abortion” at MSNBC.

President Trump encouraged team owners in the National Football League to fire players who protested police brutality by taking a knee during the national anthem, a clear call to punish speech. The White House took a similar line on a sports journalist who labeled the president a “white supremacist.”

We can go on and on about the many ways Trump has signaled his contempt for the First Amendment. But I think the point is made.

George Nader seems to be another key to Trump’s various plots. Josh Marshall:

George Nader was returning to Dulles airport on January 17th, apparently from abroad, when he was met by FBI agents with search warrants and a subpoena. Nader was planning to travel on to Florida to Mar-a-Lago for a celebration of Trump’s first year in office. Presumably, he planned to meet Trump himself or other members of the Trump inner circle. The FBI swooped in, confiscated Nader’s electronics, began questioning him at length and appear to have presented him with evidence and knowledge that more or less immediately turned him into a cooperating witness. He’s been cooperating ever since and has recently made at least one appearance before Mueller’s grand jury.

This isn’t something that happens when you’re pursuing a vague lead or someone didn’t file the right form. This has all the hallmarks of a serious counter-espionage, counter-intelligence investigation. The FBI confiscated his electronic equipment and all its records. They apparently presented him with evidence against him serious enough to compel immediate cooperation. They also appear to have wanted to stop him from making that trip to Mar-a-Lago and conveying whatever goods or information he had with him, though this is admittedly an inference and less certain than the other points.

Nader was a participant and perhaps a convener of that Transition meeting in the Seychelles which brought together a representative of President Trump (Erik Prince) with representatives of Putin and the United Arab Emirates.

If you’d forgotten (as I had) the Transition meeting in the Seychelles, here’s the background, from nearly a year ago:

SHORTLY BEFORE Donald Trump’s inauguration, Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater and head of Frontier Services Group, traveled to the Seychelles, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, and met with a Russian official close to President Vladimir Putin. According to the Washington Post, the meeting between the Russian and Prince, who presented himself as an unofficial envoy of Trump, took place “around January 11” and was brokered by Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, to establish a backchannel between the president-elect and Putin.

The identity of the Russian individual was not disclosed, but on January 11, a Turkish-owned Bombardier Global 5000 charter plane flew Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, to the Seychelles, flight records obtained by The Intercept show. Dmitriev’s plane was an unscheduled charter flight and flew to the island with two other Russian individuals, both women. The RDIF is a $10 billion sovereign wealth fund created by the Russian government in 2011. …

… During the same period in January when Dmitriev and Prince were in the Seychelles, Alexander Mashkevich, a Kazakh businessman linked to a shady Trump investment vehicle known as Bayrock, also arrived to meet with Zayed, who was “holding court” at his mansion on the island, a source familiar with the meetings said. Abdulrahman Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi billionaire whose grandfather founded the first Saudi private bank and whose father allegedly helped Al Qaeda, was also present. The meetings came several weeks after Zayed flew to New York to meet with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, former chief strategist Steve Bannon, and Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who is now a subject in the federal Russia probe.

Now we know that George Nader was at that meeting, representing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the effective ruler of the Emirates. The New York Times reported:

The meeting, convened by the crown prince, brought together a Russian investor close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia with Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater and an informal adviser to Mr. Trump’s team during the presidential transition, according to three people familiar with the meeting.

More on George Nader, from Josh Marshall:

He was also in close and on-going contact with the Trump Transition and during the Presidency. He appears to have been an interlocutor with Jared Kushner in Kushner’s dealings with Gulf states, which connect up with Kushner family’s failed attempt to secure a loan from Qatar and subsequent Kushner green-lighting of the Saudi/UAE et al. blockade of Qatar. Finally, Mueller’s investigators are reportedly examining whether Nader helped facilitate illegal transfers of foreign funds to the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.

But what about this Erik Prince guy?

Prince, the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, never held a formal role in the Trump campaign, the transition team, or the administration, but has been a vocal supporter of Trump nonetheless. According to the Post, Prince donated $250,000 to the Trump campaign after the Republican National Convention and developed a close relationship with Bannon. The Intercept has reported that Prince later lobbied contacts inside the Trump administration to set up a private network of intelligence contractors for the C.I.A., an idea that U.S. officials and the White House appeared to reject.

When he was first asked about the Seychelles meeting, on CNN, Prince told anchor Erin Burnett that he had been there “on business” to meet with Emirati officials and that he only had a brief meeting with “some fund manager—I can’t even remember his name” over a beer. (“The meeting had nothing to do with President Trump,” a spokesman for Prince said at the time. “Why is the so-called under-resourced intelligence community messing around with surveillance of American citizens when they should be hunting terrorists?”)

Speaking of Betsy DeVos, this morning she made a weird appearance at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and refused to talk to any students. She then held a press conference at her hotel at which she claimed to have spoken to students, but then ended abruptly after only eight minutes.  I don’t think anyone asked her about her brother.

Back to the New York Times:

The meeting in the Seychelles also took place against the backdrop of a larger pattern of secretive contacts between the Trump team and both the Russians and the Emiratis. In the weeks after the 2016 presidential election, Crown Prince Mohammed aroused the suspicions of American national security officials when they learned that he had breached protocol by visiting Trump Tower in Manhattan without notifying the Obama administration of his visit to the United States.

Mr. Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and a senior transition adviser, met at Trump Tower with Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to Washington at the time, and discussed setting up a back channel to communicate with Moscow during the transition — circumventing American diplomatic channels normally used during a presidential transition. Mr. Kushner met a few days later with a Russian banker close to Putin, Sergey N. Gorkov — whose bank was also under sanctions — in what Mr. Kushner has said was an attempt to establish a direct line of communication to Mr. Putin during the transition.

Speaking of Jared Kushner, ABC News is reporting that several White House staffers — although not Kushner — were terminated today because of their security clearance problems.

Drippity drippity drip.

Today there are reports that the Trump Organization ordered replicas of the presidential seal to be used as markers on his golf courses. This is probably illegal.

Yesterday we learned that former Trump campaign officials are being subpoenaed by Bob Mueller for all communications — meaning emails, texts, handwritten notes, etc. — they received from the following people: Carter Page, Corey Lewandowski, Donald J. Trump, Hope Hicks, Keith Schiller, Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Roger Stone, and Steve Bannon, beginning November 1, 2015. I don’t know that anyone has figured out why that date is significant.

Today we learned that one of these officials, Sam Nunberg, is going to defy the subpoena.

Sam Nunberg, one of President Trump’s earliest campaign advisers, has been subpoenaed to appear in front of a grand jury Friday as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, The Washington Post reports. Nunberg told the newspaper he will not comply with the subpoena and plans to tear the document up during an appearance on Bloomberg TV.

Good luck with that, Mr. Nunberg. I hope they give you a nice jail cell. See also Wonkette and Martin Longman.

Nunberg appears to be a five-alarm nutcase. Aaron Blake writes at WaPo that Nunberg told CNN that Trump “may very well have done something during the election with the Russians.” He also said that he hated Trump, and that Trump treated him “like crap.” But he’s going to go to jail for Trump? One wonders whether to fetch Nunberg in the Paddy wagon or a padded wagon.

Charles Pierce, on the subpoenas:

Here’s what all this means. This means that Mueller and his staff have likely concluded now that the entire Trump For President campaign was a corrupt enterprise in one way or another almost since the moment it was first conceived and that the same can be said of the Trump presidency*. It’s the money. It’s the Russians. The whole damn dirty deal is one great writhing ball of poisonous snakes and Mueller seems to be perilously close to untangling it.

At the New Yorker, Jane Mayer writes that there is evidence Trump allowed Putin to veto his cabinet picks.

One subject that Steele is believed to have discussed with Mueller’s investigators is a memo that he wrote in late November, 2016, after his contract with Fusion had ended. This memo, which did not surface publicly with the others, is shorter than the rest, and is based on one source, described as “a senior Russian official.” The official said that he was merely relaying talk circulating in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but what he’d heard was astonishing: people were saying that the Kremlin had intervened to block Trump’s initial choice for Secretary of State, Mitt Romney. (During Romney’s run for the White House in 2012, he was notably hawkish on Russia, calling it the single greatest threat to the U.S.) The memo said that the Kremlin, through unspecified channels, had asked Trump to appoint someone who would be prepared to lift Ukraine-related sanctions, and who would coöperate on security issues of interest to Russia, such as the conflict in Syria. If what the source heard was true, then a foreign power was exercising pivotal influence over U.S. foreign policy—and an incoming President.

See also Wonkette, again.

Finally, be sure to see this piece by John Harwood that walks us through all the ties between Trump and Russia that are already in the public record.

Mueller Is Now Looking Into Middle Eastern Influence as Part of the Trump Investigation

Special counsel Robert Mueller has expanded his investigation to look into the Trump White House’s ties to a Lebanese-American businessman who works closely with the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, the New York Times reports.

Saturday evening, the Times reported that Mueller has interviewed George Nader, a businessman with long standing ties to the Middle East. Mueller has also pressed other witnesses about what role Nader might have played in trying to influence the White House and possible attempts by the UAE to buy influence during the presidential campaign. Since his election, Trump has forged a close relationship with the UAE After feuding broke outlast year between Qatar, a close US ally in the Persian Gulf and the home of a large US air base, and other Arab states, including the UAE, the Trump administration loudly sided with Qatar’s opponents–even over the objections of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

So hard to keep up.

Bottom line, Trump’s tariffs and trade war lay bare his colossal ignorance of economics. For one thing, he misunderstands what a “trade deficit” is.

When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore-we win big. It’s easy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 2, 2018

At Econolog, David Henderson takes this tweet apart.

When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with.

Trump’s premise is false. You don’t lose billions of dollars on trade: you gain on trade. If people were to lose from trade, they wouldn’t trade. They trade to gain–and they do gain. Let’s say I buy a car from Japan or a toy from China–pardon me, since the Chinese government temporarily banned the use of the letter “n”–I buy a toy from Chia. I value that car or that toy at something greater than what I pay for it or I wouldn’t buy it. So I don’t lose; I gain.

Economists have been pointing out that Trump doesn’t “get” international trade, even before he was elected. See, for example, “What Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand About the Trade Deficit” by Neil Irwin in the New York Times, from July 2016. But Trump thinks in terms of winners and losers; if the U.S. has a trade deficit, it must be losing.

Paul Krugman wrote of Trump’s tweet:

Trump has always had a thing about trade, which he sees the way he sees everything: as a test of power and masculinity. It’s all about who sells more: if we run a trade surplus we win, if we run a trade deficit, we lose …

This is, of course, nonsense. Trade isn’t a zero-sum game: it raises the productivity and wealth of the world economy. To take a not at all random example, it makes a lot of sense to produce aluminum, a process that uses vast amounts of electricity, in countries like Canada, which have abundant hydropower. So the U.S. gains from importing Canadian aluminum, whether or not we run a trade deficit with Canada. (As it happens, we don’t, but that’s pretty much beside the point.)

Trump isn’t intelligent enough to grasp what stopping trade and starting trade wars with long-established trading partners would actually do to our economy. As Scott Sumner wrote at Econolog, “How’d Smoot-Hawley work out?”

Part of the problem for working Americans is that the big, splashy trade agreements produced mixed results. Yes, they create more wealth, but some jobs are lost, and many wages are suppressed.  And it seems to most working folks that the big shots didn’t care about the parts of the economy that got left behind, and until that aspect of “free trade” is worked out, trade deals will be regarded with great suspicion. But that doesn’t mean throwing up a bunch of trade barriers to protect individual industries will necessarily help anybody, especially in the long run.

Even I can grasp that if Canada really is able to produce aluminum more efficiently than we do, it makes sense for American manufacturers to buy aluminum from Canada rather than make it ourselves. Otherwise, it becomes more difficult to make things with aluminum that are competitive with stuff made in other countries with aluminum. However, somebody’s got to think of what to do with out-of-work aluminum workers and the communities they live in.

But I digress. Steel is something Trump probably thinks he knows about, because buildings are made of steel. Back during the 2016 campaign, Kurt Eichenwald reported that for years Trump had been importing Chinese steel for his buildings. (Ironically, China is not a major steel exporter to the U.S. any more and won’t be much affected by the tariffs. The top steel importers to the U.S. are Canada, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico and Russia.) But Trump doesn’t really seem to know much of anything.

The bigger concern is that, according to many sources, nearly everybody advising Trump on trade told him not to do the tariff thing, and he did it anyway. It appears that he is kicking his perpetual tempter tantrum mode into even higher gear. Mike Allen and Jonathan Swan write at Axios that Trump is getting ready to blow off everybody:

His staff at times managed to talk him off the ledge. No more. Tired of the restraints, tired of his staff, Trump is reveling in ticking off just about every person who serves him.

Trump hates rigidity and rules. He has grown to especially hate Kelly’s rigid rules, so he purposely blew off Kelly’s process and announced planned tariffs in a haphazard way.

There are signs Trump has also had it with his National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, who he complains is long-winded and inflexible. MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace reported Trump is ready to bounce him.

The tariffs call was also a big middle finger to economic adviser Gary Cohn, who has fought for more than one year to kill tariffs that would provoke a trade war or higher prices for consumers, a de facto tax increase. Cohn, who stuck around to fight tariffs, now seems more likely to leave.

Zack Beauchamp wrote at Vox:

Trump has decided to put the global economyat risk because he was in a pissy mood.

The evidence for this scary-sounding theory comes from a Friday afternoon report published by NBC News, tracing Trump’s recent decision to slap large tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum. These tariffs have already prompted threats of retaliation from America’s leading trade partners; European Union President Jean-Claude Juncker has discussed putting tariffs on blue jeans, bourbon, and Harley-Davidson motorcycles — three iconic American exports. Australian Trade Minister Steven Ciobo is openly warning that Trump’s actions may cause another recession.

So how did Trump come to such a monumental decision? According to NBC’s sources in the White House, it was because he got some bad press.

Here is what NBC said:

On Wednesday evening, the president became “unglued,” in the words of one official familiar with the president’s state of mind.

A trifecta of events had set him off in a way that two officials said they had not seen before: Hope Hicks’ testimony to lawmakers investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, conduct by his embattled attorney general and the treatment of his son-in-law by his chief of staff.

Trump, the two officials said, was angry and gunning for a fight, and he chose a trade war, spurred on by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro, the White House director for trade — and against longstanding advice from his economic chair Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

Back to Zack Beauchamp:

Dig deeper into the NBC story and the picture gets even more worrisome. Even after his initial outburst, Trump apparently didn’t bother to consult with his economic and diplomatic advisers on the best way to implement these tariffs. In fact, almost no one important was warned of Trump’s monumental decision before it was made, and the White House did virtually nothing to prepare for the all-too-predictable angry response from foreign leaders. …

…The reason this kind of thing hasn’t happened before, according to report after report from inside the White House, is that Trump’s advisers have been able to keep his impulses in check. …

…The problem is that Trump’s staff is disintegrating amid a series of mounting scandals. The Russia investigation, allegations of domestic violence by a top White House staffer, reports of outlandish spending by Cabinet officials, and just general frustration with Trump’s chaotic management style have led to a number of departures from the Trump White House. This has led to a weakening of the personnel wall between Trump and his more outlandish impulses.

This whole mess played out in the tariff case: A piece in Politico suggests that Rob Porter — the former White House staff secretary who resigned amid multiple allegations of domestic abuse — had been organizing meetings designed to block imposition of new tariffs. “Porter’s resignation removed a fierce opponent of the tariffs from the West Wing and revived the chaotic policy review process that defined the early weeks of Trump’s presidency,” Politico reports.

White House staff chaos is letting Trump be Trump.

I’ll give Paul Krugman the last word:

Never mind the net loss of jobs from a full-scale trade war, which would in the end probably be a relatively small number. The point instead is that the gross job losses would be huge, as millions of workers would be forced to change jobs, move to new places, and more. And many of them would suffer losses on the way that they would never get back.

Oh, and companies on the losing end would lose trillions in stock value.

So the idea that a trade war would be “good” and “easy to win” is surpassingly stupid. And the way Trump seems to be starting his war is also remarkably stupid: start by protecting goods that are inputs to industries that employ far more people than those being protected? Do so in the name of national security — a justification that is, for good reason, almost never invoked — when the biggest source of those inputs is that hostile foreign power Canada?

In themselves, these tariffs aren’t that big a deal. But if they’re a sign of what future policy is going to look like, they’re really, really bad.

For another last word, see David Atkins, Trump’s Ignorant, Infantile Game of Civilization.