The Destruction of Hillary Clinton and Shattered review – was Trump’s victory inevitable?

Throughout the campaign, blinders kept most of us from taking aboard a lot of what we were seeing: Hillary Clinton wasn’t giving people a reason to vote for her. “Stronger together” meant what? It’s been reported that for much of the fall Bill Clinton worried that the leaders of his wife’s campaign were too fixated on their supposedly fearsome get-out-the-vote drive and were failing to craft a coherent message for her, and he chewed on the staff about this. Why Hillary Clinton didn’t develop a message is a puzzle. The reconstructions to come of her campaign should tell us why.

....On a different front, we could see that the email server issue was dogging Clinton and we knew that this got at what bothered people most about her: they couldn’t quite trust her; there’d been a slight deviousness about her since her early days at the White House. So when one first heard about the private server, the long-missing billing records from her Arkansas law firm that suddenly turned up in the White House came immediately to mind.

Thus, when the server story hit her, Clinton didn’t have a deep reservoir of trust to draw on—not even much of a shallow one. According to a Pew Research Center poll, when the story broke in March of 2015, about half the country found her honest and trustworthy, hardly a fabulous number but one she never saw again.

What had all along been the greatest danger to Clinton was exacerbated by the server: a lack of enthusiasm for her. (I’ve been writing since the fall of 2015 that this is what could bring her down.) Her handling of the emails issue kept working against her (and worried her campaign staff): she started off being dismissive, and then sarcastic: asked in a press conference if she’d wiped her server she replied, “With a cloth?” And her explanations were often legalistic and evasive (“not marked classified at the time”).

-- “ Shattered,” a narrative of Hillary Clinton’s losing campaign by journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, is also out this morning. Campaign manager Robby Mook comes across especially poorly in their account. “As we dive into the Clinton apparatus in Brooklyn, we discover a somewhat different picture of Mook, who was largely portrayed as an affable, modern-age data whiz during the campaign,” Steven Ginsberg, The Post’s senior politics editor, writes in a review of the new book. “In ‘Shattered,’ he is depicted as a ‘professional political assassin’ who pushes aside anyone who threatens his control-freak grip on power. He fights with (John) Podesta. There’s tension with chief strategist Joel Benenson (who appears to have been almost completely sidelined months before Election Day). Mook has little regard for communications director Jennifer Palmieri. He thinks the old-style politics of Bill Clinton are relics of a bygone time. Some of the criticism of Mook rings true — his celebrated voter modeling, for instance, turned out to be catastrophically off — but his portrait also carries the stench of bitter co-workers conveniently tossing after-the-fact blame his way.”



WASHINGTON POST


VOX



-- Yahoo News' Matt Bai has an interesting take on “Shattered" and other modern campaign books, which he calls the “Us Weeklys” of political history: “The best campaign books of an earlier era captured the political moment in a way that reflected the upheaval happening everywhere else in the culture. Today’s imitators somehow manage to do the reverse; they grab a screenshot of political minutiae that seems to exist in isolation, as if it were totally disconnected from deeper trends in the society. 

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And so today’s campaign chroniclers are left to ‘reconstruct’ events after the fact, eagerly inviting operatives to share endless anecdotes that burnish their own images while tearing down everyone else.


GUARDIAN

Google, the echo chamber & you.


DAILY NEWS

GOP leaders urge patience — not panic — amid the president’s early stumbles Some Republicans say the party will thrive if the president fulfills his central promises on jobs and wages.

President Trump walks along the West Wing Colonnade before a Rose Garden ceremony at the White House on April 10. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

WASHINGTON POST

More Americans disapprove than approve of President Trump’s job performance. His White House is in a perpetual state of turmoil. Fellow Republicans control Congress, but no signature legislation has passed. And in ruby-red Kansas last week, the Republican candidate in a special election got a scare from a turbocharged Democratic base, winning a House seat by a far slimmer margin than expected.

For a Republican Party already starting to strategize ahead of next year’s midterm elections, the turbulent, inchoate environment as the Trump presidency nears its 100th-day mark could be a cause for concern or even alarm.

Yet party leaders and strategists are preaching patience, not panic.

These Republicans — who acknowledge that their political brand will be shaped by the 45th president as long as he holds office — say their political fortunes will be told over the next year and a half in the answers to two overriding questions: Does Trump project strength? And does he achieve progress that amounts to more jobs and higher wages?

“What matters is a record of accomplishment,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster who has been conducting focus groups of Trump supporters. “People can disagree over the details or the significance of the change, but if you have a record of accomplishment, that fixes everything. . . . If you don’t, no rhetoric will fix it.”

Read more at  WASHINGTON POST

Don’t underestimate the cyberthreat from Syria and North Korea


TED KOPPEL, WASHINGTON POST

A wake-up call for Republicans in Georgia, but Democrats remain unlikely to win the House in 2018

Jon Ossoff speaks at his party last night. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON POST, THE DAILY 202, JAMES HOHMAN


The results from Georgia’s special election should scare Republicans, but Democrats shouldn’t overread the results.  Democrats remain unlikely to win the House in 2018

With all the precincts reporting, Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff pulled 48.3 percent of the vote in the open House race to replace Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price. He needed to break 50 percent in the jungle primary to avoid a head-to-head June runoff with the top Republican finisher.

Money mattered. Ossoff raised more than $8.3 million with the help of celebrities and the liberal netroots. About 95 percent of that haul came from outside Georgia.

Supporters of Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff watch election returns on TV last night in the special election for Georgia's 6th Congressional District. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

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-- Several of the takeaways I wrote about last Wednesday after the unexpectedly close special election in Wichita Kansas, are now doubly true: This will make GOP recruiting harder. Some House Republicans might become scared about being vulnerable and change their behavior. Congressional Democrats are going to become less likely to bail out House GOP leadership on tough votes. Democratic campaign committees will face more pressure than ever from the left flank to spend money in red districts, even if there’s no realistic path to victory.

While it votes Republican, the district’s demographics – affluent and highly educated suburbs north of Atlanta -- make it well-suited for Democrats to pick off in the age of Trump:

Consider this: Democrats control nine of the 10 congressional districts with the highest percentage of college-educated voters. Georgia-6 is the only exception, Dante Chinni pointed out last week in the Wall Street Journal.

A lot of these center-right, upper-middle-class, well-educated professionals view Trump warily.

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[BUT] Picking up 24 seats to win control of the House will still be very hard for Democrats. Despite all the national help Ossoff got, he only outperformed Hillary by about 1 point in the district.

“To win back the House, coming close won’t be enough,” National Journal political editor Josh Kraushaar writes this morning. “Republicans were able to use their traditional playbook (to force a runoff), painting Ossoff as a down-the-line liberal to stunt his momentum. If that strategy works in the midterms, they’ll be well-positioned to hold their House majority. Democrats need to win these types of diverse, affluent Republican districts to regain control of the lower chamber. … All told, it doesn’t look as if many typical Republican voters -- even those who don’t care for Trump -- were inclined to vote for a Democrat to send a message…

“If there’s anything that should concern Democrats, it’s that they know what they’re against but not what they’re for,” Josh adds. “They’ve mastered the art of mobilization in the age of Trump, but are still struggling to persuade winnable voters. Ossoff’s campaign ads struck all the right notes, portraying him as a fiscal conservative and a pragmatist who’s tough on national security. But on the stump, Ossoff never really articulated much beyond bland Democratic talking points. 

With their pumped-up base, Democrats should have a productive midterm election. But to capture a House majority, they’ll need to pick off Republican-friendly seats with candidates who can reassure GOP-leaning voters with a moderate message. Balancing the energy of the progressive activists with that sort of pragmatism won’t be an easy task.”

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-- Doug Sosnik, who served as Bill Clinton’s White House political director, believes Democrats are unlikely to win control of the House next year. Barring a complete Trump meltdown, the Democratic strategist thinks that the path is just too tough because the last round of redistricting was so effectively controlled by Republicans in many states.

Doug agreed to let me share with Daily 202 readers a 24-slide deck he just prepared on “Politics in the Age of Trump.” It has a bunch of charts and maps that you may want to print out for future reference. (See the whole thing here.)

The way he sees it, the significance of the 2017-18 cycle is largely about the 2020 presidential campaign and, as importantly, political power in the next decade surrounding reapportionment and redistricting.

The GOP’s performance in the 2010 midterm election positioned the party to dominate in the House for the entire decade. Consider that, in 2012, Republicans controlled the chamber despite getting 1.2 million fewer overall votes across all the House races. That’s how important it is to be able to draw the lines. (See slide 19.)

This also helps explain why there has been a steady decline in true swing seats since the 1990's. Red districts have gotten redder and blue districts bluer. There are fewer and fewer split districts. (See slide 10-12.)

Most of the tea party incumbents are unlikely to lose, so the action is going to be more in the moderate districts. (See slide 12.)

House races still matter, of course. How many seats the Democrats gain will affect Trump's ability to govern. That will impact whether he can hold the White House in 2020.

Due to the nature of the states with elections in 2018, Doug also thinks the Democrats are unlikely to take back the Senate for the rest of the decade. Again, barring a complete Republican meltdown. (See slides 7-9.)

Governors who win in 2018 will likely drive the redistricting process across the country. There are 38 governors races this cycle. Half are in open seats. There are contests in nine of the country’s 10 largest states. The outcome in these races will go a long way in determining who is in charge until the end of the 2020s. (See slides 15-16. Slide 20 shows who dominates the process in each state.)

History says that the party out of power should be highly motivated and do well. There seems to be signs of that now, but is it real? The greatest single question mark, which no one got right in 2016, is who is going to vote. That is even more difficult to predict in an off-year election. (See slide 24.)

7 reasons why today’s left should be optimistic

VOX

Where Evangelicals Came From

GARRY WILLS, NY REVIEW OF BOOKS

The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America

by Frances FitzGerald

Simon and Schuster, 740 pp., $35.00


How Trump breathed new life into the cultural war waged by evangelicals

WASHINGTON POST

Bill Clinton’s Secretary Of Defense Likes Trump’s North Korea Strategy

HUFFINGTON POST


President Donald Trump’s strategy of threatening North Korea could set “the stage for successful diplomacy” to limit the hermit nation’s nuclear program, William J. Perry, Bill Clinton’s second secretary of defense, told The Huffington Post in an interview.

Perry, who endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race, has been advising presidents on nuclear activity since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. A mathematician by trade, he has devoted much of his time since his government work to nuclear disarmament through the William J. Perry Project, a nonprofit he founded....[He argues that] the U.S. needs to be seen as a credible threat to North Korea for diplomacy to be an option.

 By sending North Korea a message that a military strike is indeed on the table, Trump could create an environment where diplomacy might be possible — and limit the cooperation between the country and China.
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The first step to a successful North Korea strategy is leading the country to “believe that we’re serious about military action,” Perry said. “They did not believe that during the Obama or the Bush administrations. They believe it now.”

“We have never been able to get China to cooperate with us in the past, but China now is fully convinced that North Korea’s action is posing dangers to their own security.”

The facts on the ground have also changed. For many years, China didn’t think Pyongyang was capable of building a sizable nuclear arsenal, Perry noted. “That was wrong,” he said.

“In addition, North Korean aggression could propel South Korea and Japan to build their own nuclear weapons,” he said, “which would be very undesirable to [China].”

China is responsible for so much of North Korea’s economy ― it is North Korea’s largest trade partner, and 90 percent of North Korean oil imports come from China ― that any Chinese pressure could bring results, Perry said. 

President Trump with President Xi Jinping of China at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., this month. The Trump administration has urged Mr. Xi to exert greater pressure on North Korea.Credit  Doug Mills/The New York Times

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North Korean leaders are rational enough to respond to Chinese pressure, Perry argued: They may be reckless, but they are shrewd. “They’ve taken a very weak hand and they’ve played it very shrewdly,” he said. “Their objective was to sustain their regime and they have succeeded, and they think that their nuclear program has played a big role.”

Read more at HUFFINGTON POST

Trump’s Wisconsin win was an aftershock of the Great Recession.

WASHINGTON POST

Donald Trump won significantly more votes than Paul Ryan in the House Speaker’s home county last fall, partly by making inroads with traditionally Democratic autoworkers who have struggled to adjust since losing their jobs when the General Motors plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, closed in 2008.

-- The president is traveling to Ryan’s congressional district this afternoon for an event at Snap-on, which manufactures hand tools. Trying to show his blue-collar base that he’s following through on his promises, Trump will sign a “Buy American, Hire American” executive order. The White House says it will make it harder for tech companies to replace American workers with cheaper foreign labor and strengthen rules barring foreign contractors from bidding on government projects. (More details here.)

-- Today also happens to be the publication date for Amy Goldstein’s terrific new book, “Janesville: An American Story.” It is a close-up look at what happened after G.M. shut down the assembly line two days before Christmas, as the company sought to survive and the country tried to fend off another depression. In a city of 63,000, as many as nine thousand people lost their jobs.

Amy, a staff writer at The Washington Post for three decades, has doggedly pursued this project for six years now. She took a two-year leave from the paper to conduct research, immersing herself in the lives of a handful of people in the community. With 55 vignettes, some as short as a page, she weaves a powerful narrative about their struggles and their perseverance from 2008 to 2013. Throughout the story, as she writes at one point, “The carcass of a 4.8-million-square-foot cathedral of industry still sits in silence on the river’s edge.” 

(Read an excerpt about three of the families she followed here.)

Paul Ryan gave then President-elect Trump a Green Bay Packers jersey during a "thank you" rally last December in West Allis, Wis. (Morry Gash/AP)

-- Trump’s name does not appear until page 292 of “Janesville,” but this really is one of the best books to understand how he could become the first Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan to carry the Badger State.

To this day, most Washington elites don’t fully grasp just how painful the Great Recession was for tens of millions of Americans. Government spending increased, and the military-industrial complex prospered, so D.C. denizens were mostly insulated from the economic crisis.

-- Importantly, Janesville is not part of the Rust Belt. Places like Youngstown, Ohio, and Pittsburgh have been decaying for decades. But this area was faring relatively well until the 2000s. Generations of Janesville kids, going back to 1923, grew up excited to follow their dads onto the assembly line so they too could make Chevys. They saw a union card, not a college degree, as the ticket to a respectable middle-class livelihood.

-- Trump’s name does not appear until page 292 of “Janesville,” but this really is one of the best books to understand how he could become the first Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan to carry the Badger State.

To this day, most Washington elites don’t fully grasp just how painful the Great Recession was for tens of millions of Americans. Government spending increased, and the military-industrial complex prospered, so D.C. denizens were mostly insulated from the economic crisis.

-- Importantly, Janesville is not part of the Rust Belt. Places like Youngstown, Ohio, and Pittsburgh have been decaying for decades. But this area was faring relatively well until the 2000s. Generations of Janesville kids, going back to 1923, grew up excited to follow their dads onto the assembly line so they too could make Chevys. They saw a union card, not a college degree, as the ticket to a respectable middle-class livelihood.

Ryan, who refused to campaign with or defend Trump after the “Access Hollywood” tape came out last October, will miss Trump’s event in Kenosha today. He’s leading a congressional delegation in Europe, focused on reassuring NATO allies about the U.S. commitment to the alliance.

This is in the parking lot outside the UAW local in Janesville. (Alyssa Schukar for The Washington Post)

-- In many ways, the town is a useful microcosm to understand the broader trends Trump capitalized on:

Union power has dramatically dissipated. The United Auto Workers local shrank from 7,000 active members to 438 by 2012, with 4,900 retirees. To make money, the union started renting out its hall – once a heart of the community. A major festival over Labor Day weekend has gotten smaller. In 2014, Labor Fest went from three days to two. Then it was canceled altogether in 2015 on short notice. It managed to resume in 2016, but the future is precarious.

The civil war in Wisconsin after Scott Walker took on public employee unions also divided Janesville. Some of the civility that the town had really prided itself on was lost during the recall fight in 2012.

Jobs have finally come back to Janesville, but they don’t pay as well. And they’re not in manufacturing. The unemployment rate recently slipped below 4 percent, but many who are working again are not earning enough for the comfortable lives they had a decade ago. Rock County had about 9,500 manufacturing jobs in 2015 – about half as many as in 1990.

Dollar General decided to put a distribution center on the south side of town, thanks to generous incentives offered by the city. But most of the jobs will pay $15 an hour – compared to the $28 a lot of guys earned at GM before the plant closed. But people will take what they can get: A Dollar General job fair not long before Amy’s book went to press drew three thousand people.

Many folks who lost jobs never fully regained their confidence. Working with the University of Wisconsin Survey Center, Amy conducted a major survey of Rock County residents. She includes the results in an eight-page appendix: More than one in three who responded had lost work or lived with someone who had. Economic pessimism lingered years after the recession itself. Attesting to the financial and emotional pain that losing work caused people, half said they have had trouble paying for food and nearly two-thirds reported strain in family relationships. Three-quarters of the people who responded, in 2013, said that the U.S. economy was still in a recession. Slightly more than half said their financial situation was worse than before the recession. (Buy Amy’s book here.)

 (Photo by Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN:

-- New York Magazine, “Steve Bannon’s Biblical Fall,” by Olivia Nuzzi: “Media reports have not been subtle in characterizing Bannon’s political future. The New York Times branded him ‘doomed’ while Politico planned his funeral. … But as with all things Trump, the truth may be at once less and more predictable than that. ‘You’re always up and down with Trump,’ another source said. ‘There’s always gonna be a favorite.’ White House sources tell me the ideological split with (Jared) Kushner is real but not quite the point — Bannon’s primary ‘gunfight’ is with economic adviser Gary Cohn … whose influence has ballooned as Bannon has fallen out of favor with the president. The Goldman Sachs alums … can comfortably ‘shoot the [breeze]’ but mutual suspicion looms beneath the superficial friendliness. ‘Look, in all honesty? Steve has said things to me about Gary,’ [said a source close to Bannon]. ‘He’s never said one thing to me derogatory about Jared.'"

“The president has started his love affair with Gary,” another source said, “Gary’s not aware of this: That love affair will end abruptly. Gary Cohn will step on a landmine.”

Many sources believe Bannon’s “fatal mistake” was choosing to stay out of early, top-tier hiring disputes, focusing instead on his big picture, anti-globalist agenda. But now Bannon stands alone — a self-styled radical seated at the table with ideological opponents Kushner and Cohn, who haven’t similarly been blamed for the turmoil of the first 100 days. Even White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, a natural ally to Bannon, has been working more closely with Kushner recently, a source said.

Trump is “both prone to nostalgia” and also “deeply unsentimental”: “You could play golf with this guy for 40 years, have a heart attack on the ninth hole, he’ll pick up a new golf partner on the tenth hole like nothing happened,” one official said, adding: “As soon as you think you’re in Trump’s good graces and you start to be at ease and take that for granted, that’s when you get annihilated.”

North Korea’s show of force falls short after failed missile launch

The attempted launch of a missile — which blew up almost immediately, the U.S. military said — followed a dizzying display of North Korea’s weaponry during a military parade honoring the birth of the state’s founder. But despite the failed launch, the arsenal illustrated Kim Jong Un’s resolve to develop a missile capable of reaching the United States. The timing of the failed ballistic missile launch was an embarrassment for Kim Jong-un, because it appeared to have been intended to coincide with the approach of a fleet of American warships.

Weapons experts pore over Pyongyang’s jaw-dropping display of missiles

Analysts were stunned by the range of apparently new missiles on display, and the sheer number of them. 

Inside Bannon’s struggle: From ‘shadow president’ to a marked man

The president’s chief strategist, who was publicly debased by his boss during an interview Tuesday, is struggling to keep his job, with a reduced portfolio and a damaged profile.

By Philip Rucker, Ashley Parker and Robert Costa  •  Read more »

Bomb First.

What the fawning response to the bombing of Syria says about our political culture.


NY REVIEW OF BOOKS

Trump administration moving quickly to build up nationwide deportation force An internal Department of Homeland Security assessment obtained by The Post shows the agency has already found 33,000 more beds to house undocumented immigrants in detention centers, opened discussions with dozens of local police forces and identified where construction of Trump’s border wall could begin. But costs are prohibitive. By David Nakamura  •  Read more »

The Twitter mob serves a purpose. Bill O’Reilly and United prove it.

KATHLEEN PARKER, WASHINGTON POST

No One to Blame But Trump

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Elizabeth Drew

 NY REVIEW OF BOOKS

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There’s been a great deal of speculation about shifting alliances among Trump’s White House staff—it’s virtually a daily exercise—but in the end Donald Trump defines his administration. Trump has a mediocre staff, whom he doesn’t treat well. They’re hesitant to give him news he won’t like for fear of being screamed at, a frequent event. Experienced potential aides haven’t been keen to work in a Trump White House and though it’s not widely known by the outside world many of those who are there are unhappy. As one close observer put it to me, “They came to work for the president but found themselves working for Donald Trump.” The moody man at the top is strongly affected by what’s in the news. But so far only one significant aide has seen fit to quit, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus’s deputy Katie Walsh; while some reporters described her departure as part of a White House “shakeup,” it’s more likely that Walsh left because she couldn’t stand the unpleasantness of working for Trump. According to reports, with things not going well for him, the atmosphere in Trump’s White House has grown progressively worse.... 

Yet despite the weakness and disorder of the president’s staff, and though previous White House staffs have tried it (if not as thoroughly but without success), Trump and his top aides seem particularly determined to hold power throughout the government. This is why even more than halfway into the first hundred days most of the Cabinet officers are home alone. It’s not accidental that few of them have a deputy, not to mention the legally established complement of assistant secretaries and deputy assistant secretaries—some 550 appointments the president makes and the Senate confirms. As of now, Defense Secretary James Mattis is the only newly confirmed official in the entire Pentagon leviathan, but the wars he has to fight and the crises he has to try to avert won’t wait until he gets his own staff. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is also without a deputy, the one he wanted having been vetoed by Trump because he’d criticized him during the primaries. Such a consideration would rule out a great many potential presidential appointees. Tillerson is another tycoon who is more than a little lost in government. The generals whom Trump has appointed (three of them) are more accustomed to a political atmosphere and to dealing with elected politicians. This is no guarantee of success but they do tend to be less bewildered in their new positions of power....

Yet the thinness of the ranks of officials to propose and implement the laws is actually also how Trump and his top aides want it. “A lot of those jobs, I don’t want to appoint someone because they’re unnecessary to have,” Trump said in late February. “In government, we have too many people.” Trump, Bannon, and son-in-law Jared Kushner have been particularly keen to keep control of the government in the White House. Kushner now has more assignments than any single figure known of in a modern White House and shows no inclination to devolve power. These people may well be taking on the impossible, and this would be true even if they’d had any government experience....

 Kushner is in over his head. But Trump, as inexperienced in government as his son-in-law is, does not seem to realize that, and so he keeps loading new responsibilities on him, apparently as the only person inside the White House he’s been able to trust. Ivanka is of course a trusted and cherished daughter, who has just officially become a presidential adviser. This odd arrangement would raise more hackles if it weren’t that people see Ivanka and Jared as calming influences on the president. Since they haven’t completely cut themselves off from some of their former sources of income the possibilities for conflict of interest—for which, unlike the president, they’re not legally exempt—are rife.



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That Trump announced a rollback of environmental regulations adopted by Barack Obama is probably the least surprising thing he’s done as president. Climate change has been eliminated not only as a consideration in formulating policy but even as a term that can appear in official government documents and websites. But while Trump’s proposals pleased the merchants of the extraction industries and many other private businesses, and outraged environmentalists, they may turn out to be far less effective than it first appeared.

Sheldon Whitehouse, senator from Rhode Island, who has given a speech on the environment every Monday that the Senate’s in session—he has given more than a hundred thus far—told me, “We have to be on our guard against Trump’s instincts to please polluting industries, but because of his limited grasp of things, he won’t achieve what he thinks. He doesn’t grasp the economics of what natural gas is doing to coal mining jobs in Appalachia. He doesn’t grasp how courts require administrative agencies to adhere to fact and law.” And, according to Whitehouse, in eschewing the environmental movement’s achievements and goals, Trump is bringing onto himself a political problem: “He also doesn’t appear to grasp that America is not on his side as he sells out the environment to big donors.”

It was widely understood, even by the happy coal mine operators present at Trump’s announcement of his deregulations, that so much has happened in the development of cleaner fuels that coal mining jobs aren’t coming back in any significant number. But Trump has led unemployed coal miners in Appalachia—which contains two crucial electoral states, Pennsylvania and Ohio, both of which Trump carried—to believe that they will.

This is a pattern that might cause Trump a great deal of trouble over time. Coal miners aren’t the only disenchanted working class voters to whom Trump addressed his campaign. He led a great many unemployed and underemployed people in depressed industrial areas to believe that he could get their jobs back.

But despite the relative success of Trump’s early flim-flam about saving some jobs at a few plants—never to the extent that he claimed—companies are again showing no compunction about relocating to Mexico. He misdiagnosed the cause of job losses as being the result of trade deals that he says cheated the US, when in fact the much larger problem is that the jobs are obsolete; even if, as he kept promising, he could get other countries to yield the US more in those deals, he’s not going to produce any significant number of new jobs that way. And then his budget cut funds for training for other kinds of jobs. That’s the thing: though he campaigned with the rhetoric of a champion of the displaced and angry middle class, his policies would make their situation worse....

Carlo Allegri/Reuters

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When the subject comes up, as it does incessantly in Washington, of whether in fact Trump will end up serving as president for four years, a major argument against his somehow having to leave office (for reasons other than health) is that he has a strong base. Richard Nixon also did, until he didn’t. Gradually, Nixon’s onetime backers became disenchanted for one reason or another; he still had support at the end, but it wasn’t strong enough to save him. How long will Trump’s base stick with him even in the face of seeing their hopes betrayed? This isn’t a fanciful question: a recent poll by Geoffrey Garin for Priorities USA, showed a ten-point drop in support among Trump voters in the third week in March (the week the health care bill failed).

.... The discontent with Donald Trump on Capitol Hill runs very deep and also very wide. I’ve been told that upwards of two-thirds of the Senate Republicans, in particular, discuss—in the gym and in clusters on the Senate floor—their desire to see him gone. These senators talk rather openly—even with their Democratic colleagues—about their fear of Trump’s recklessly getting the country into serious danger, about the embarrassment he causes it in the world (his petulantly refusing to shake hands with Angela Merkel was just one example of his mishandling of foreign leaders), about his overall incompetence.

Whether or not anything is ever proved, most members of Congress, including Republicans, think something was amiss in the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia, or Russians, including plutocrats who owe much to Vladimir Putin. No one thinks that FBI Director Comey would have opened, much less announced, a counter-intelligence investigation of the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with the Russian government in its attempt to sway the election if he didn’t have serious evidence. On the Senate floor the other day, a cluster of Republicans jocularly made a betting pool on the way in which they think Trump will be forced to leave office.

April 5, 2017, 8:52 pm