TERROR IN LONDON

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

• Seven civilians were killed in a pair of attacks in downtown London on Saturday night, with dozens more injured. The attackers ran over pedestrians on London Bridge, and then stabbed random passersby in the entertainment district of Borough Market. [BBC] 
• From Karla Adam and Rick Noack: “It was clear that the incident was meant for all the world to see. At around 10 p.m., a white van mowed down pedestrians as it zigzagged across London Bridge ... [The three assailants] tore through nearby Borough Market leaving a trail of blood in their wake — seven people died and dozens more were injured. …During the day, it’s a food lover’s paradise — vendors from around the world sell dishes with enticing aromas and tourists from around the world buy them. It is perhaps not surprising that a number of nationalities have been reported among those who were wounded, including French and Australian.”

 Niklas Halle'N/AFP/Getty Images

• All three attackers were killed within minutes of the police’s arrival, thanks to police being unusually free (for the UK) with their bullets. [The Guardian / Vikram Dodd] 
• The relatively contained nature of the attacks is likely part of why Londoners’ reaction to the attacks has been a fairly studied stiff upper lip. (If you would like some anecdotes about charming British fortitude, here are those.) [Rossalyn Warren] 

 Khuram Butt (left) and Rachid Redouane (right)

One of the three London Bridge terrorists made a last visit to his baby daughter just hours before his bloody rampage while his accomplice posted lines from the Quran in the last message he sent on Whatsapp.  Moroccan-born Rachid Redouane went to the mother of his 18-month-old girl's flat in Barking to kiss his daughter goodbye.   The terrorist and Charisse O'Leary, 38, had split in January over his warped Islamic views which included banning his girl watching TV in the fear it would turn her gay. Redouane's estranged wife was one of 12 arrested and released without charge in connection with Saturday night's massacre.

The [second identified]  killer to be named was [a known] British extremist, Khuram Butt, who was filmed unfurling an ISIS flag on national TV and was reported to the police twice. 

Butt, 27, a married father of two nicknamed 'Abz' who was born in Pakistan, was so extreme he called fellow Muslims without beards non-believers, would not speak to women directly and was banned from a mosque for berating worshippers for being 'un-Islamic'.

...

Butt was known to both the police and MI5 who are awaiting what they described as international confirmation before naming the third terrorist as it emerged Molotov cocktails were found in the hired vehicle used in the rampage. The force probed his extremist Islamic views two years ago, but his file slid down the priority list because it was deemed he wasn’t planning an attack. 

Butt's involvement is doubly embarrassing for police and the security services because he appeared in a TV documentary last year about British jihadis – and was also involved in a filmed altercation with police in a pair of Rayban sunglasses after he unfurled an ISIS flag in Regent's Park.On Channel 4's The Jihadis Next Door he was caught on camera alongside two notorious preachers who were well known to police and intelligence officials because of their extremist views. 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4572568/Jihadi-Arsenal-shirt-married-father-Khuram-Butt.html#ixzz4jBzUgcJB
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ELECTORAL IMPLICATIONS:

• UK Prime Minister Theresa May, in a speech Sunday after the attacks, took the opportunity to reopen the idea of a more aggressive “counter-radicalization” agenda that would include regulation of the internet and expanded police powers. [The Atlantic / J. Weston Phippen] 

 Griff Witte and Karla Adam report: “The latest attack to hit Britain this spring became a campaign issue Sunday, with just four days before an unpredictable national election. … Following the May 22 attack in Manchester, Saturday night’s van-and-knife rampage was the second mass-casualty attack to intrude on the homestretch of a parliamentary campaign that was once thought certain to end in a landslide for Prime Minister Theresa May and the Conservatives. The race has tightened in recent weeks, and terrorism has introduced an unexpected variable...

•  Jeremy Corbyn, whom May has often accused of coddling anti-Western militants. May, Corbyn’s backers said, had politicized the attack.

• But by evening, Corbyn had hit back with his own political response to the killing, accusing May and her Conservative allies of weakening security services through years of austerity."

• If the widespread raids in East London Sunday, intended to find people involved in the attacks, are a harbinger of May’s “counter-radicalization” campaign, that’s not a great sign; all 12 of those arrested were released without charge on Monday. [Washington Examiner / Kyle Feldscher] 
• (The reality, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp writes, is that it’s very hard to stop this sort of small-scale, simple attack.) [Vox / Zack Beauchamp] 

The attack took place in the heart of the British capital during a bustling Saturday night. From Karla Adam and Rick Noack: “It was clear that the incident was meant for all the world to see. At around 10 p.m., a white van mowed down pedestrians as it zigzagged across London Bridge ... [The three assailants] tore through nearby Borough Market leaving a trail of blood in their wake — seven people died and dozens more were injured. …During the day, it’s a food lover’s paradise — vendors from around the world sell dishes with enticing aromas and tourists from around the world buy them. It is perhaps not surprising that a number of nationalities have been reported among those who were wounded, including French and Australian.”

-- The hard truth, via former acting CIA director Michael Morell: “More Lone Wolf Attacks Are Inevitable.” (The Cipher Brief)

Pop stars perform at One Love Manchester concert

BRITAIN STRONG:

-- Given the tragic circumstances, Ariana Grande’s Sundaybenefit concert for victims of the Manchester attack took on added significance. Jennifer Hassan and Max Bearak report: “The pop star appeared at Manchester's Old Trafford Cricket Ground, which seats 50,000, alongside Justin Bieber, Coldplay, Usher, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, and many other acts. Proceeds from the show, billed as ‘One Love Manchester,’ will benefit the We Love Manchester Emergency Fund, the British Red Cross and the Manchester City Council. More than 14,000 tickets to Sunday's concert were set aside for those who attended the original May 22 show. … The crowd at Old Trafford exuded a sense of togetherness. People chanted ‘We love Manchester.’ Almost everyone seemed to be holding someone else's hand…By the time the main acts reached the stage, the grounds were almost at capacity. The musicians played their most upbeat hits, and it seemed as though everyone listening knew all the words.”

-- And the uplifting spirit was not confined to the Manchester show. Peter Holley reports: “On Sunday, some Londoners started pushing back against the notion that their city — if not their country — was trembling in fear. They had a simple message: ‘London is not reeling.’ Their resistance was epitomized by an image that has been shared more than 26,000 times showing a British man casually holding a pint as he joins others fleeing the scene of Saturday night's attack. ... Steely resilience in the face of unforgiving tragedy is considered a fixture of British patriotism. ... ’Keep Calm and Carry On’ — the popular World War II mantra that came to define the city's resolute character — was resurrected online.”

Here's the picture of the guy with the beer (on right):

ELECTORAL IMPLICATIONS:

-- Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative Party announced that, in light of Saturday’s attack, it would suspend campaigning for Thursday’s general election. But that did not stop politics from seeping into the fallout. Griff Witte and Karla Adam report: “The latest attack to hit Britain this spring became a campaign issue Sunday, with just four days before an unpredictable national election. … Following the May 22 attack in Manchester, Saturday night’s van-and-knife rampage was the second mass-casualty attack to intrude on the homestretch of a parliamentary campaign that was once thought certain to end in a landslide for Prime Minister Theresa May and the Conservatives. The race has tightened in recent weeks, and terrorism has introduced an unexpected variable...

• “With her premiership on the line, May took an aggressive and combative tone Sunday…She blamed the attack on the ‘evil ideology of Islamist extremism,’ called for a thorough review of the nation’s counterterrorism policies and suggested she will take a much tougher line if she wins Thursday’s vote.
• “The speech was criticized by the opposition Labour Party as a thinly veiled jab at their far-left leader, Jeremy Corbyn, whom May has often accused of coddling anti-Western militants. May, Corbyn’s backers said, had politicized the attack.
• But by evening, Corbyn had hit back with his own political response to the killing, accusing May and her Conservative allies of weakening security services through years of austerity."

Watch a clip of his speech:

Corbyn: ‘Our priority must be public safety’

HE WHO LIVES IN A GLASS HOUSE SHOULD NOT THROW STONES:

-- Trump may be undercutting his own administration’s efforts to be “smart, vigilant and tough” on terror through his sluggish hiring process for key national-security posts. Politico reports: “The president's counter-terrorism strategy could be hindered by dozens of vacancies across the government, not least a permanent FBI director. Top ranks at the State Department remain largely unfilled, as are some key ambassadorships. Trump has not named anyone to lead the Transportation Security Administration, which screens people at airports, or to run the Homeland Security office charged with protecting the country's physical and cyber infrastructure.”

Trump administration officials says Paris climate deal hampered U.S. economy

PARIS FALLOUT:

-- Administration officials defended the president’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement on the Sunday shows. Paige reports: “Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, ... repeated his refrain that questions about President Trump’s personal views on climate change are beside the point. ‘When we joined Paris, the rest of the world applauded … because it put this country at disadvantage,’ Pruitt told Fox News’s Chris Wallace. ‘It’s a bad deal for this country. We’re going to make sure as we make deals we’re going to put the interests of America first.’"

U.N. Ambassador Haley: Trump 'believes the climate is changing'

-- Out over her skis again: With every other administration surrogate ducking the question, Nikki Haley said on CNN: “President Trump believes the climate is changing. And he believes pollutants are part of that equation. So that is the fact. That is where we are. That's where it stands. He knows that it's changing. He knows that the U.S. has to be responsible with it, and that's what we're going to do. Just because we got out of a club doesn't mean that we don't care about the environment.”

But Haley's comments sound more like her position, and they are at odds with the president's own past statements, Mary Jordan notes: “Trump has made contradictory statements about what exactly he believes amid mounting pressure from other world leaders, the scientific community and even Pope Francis, who has urged urgent action to change human activity causing harm to the environment. The president has said flat out that climate change is ‘nonexistent’ — but at other times has hedged his position and said there could be some connection to human activity.”

John Kerry formally signs the U.S. onto the Paris agreement while holding his granddaughter last April. (Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)

-- Supporters of the Paris agreement had much blunter words. Trump claimed Thursday night that he's going to negotiate a better deal after pulling out of the last one. "That's like O.J. Simpson saying he's going to go out and find the real killer," former secretary of state John Kerry said on NBC's "Meet the Press." (Avi Selk)

Paul Ryan speaks at a press conference. (Andrew Harnik/AP)

THE AGENDA:

-- "Trump is finding it easier to tear down old policies than to build his own," by Jenna Johnson, Juliet Eilperin and Ed O'Keefe: “The president and his fellow Republicans have made little progress in building an affirmative agenda of their own, a dynamic that will be on display when Congress returns this week with few major policies ready to advance. Voters are still waiting for progress on the $1 trillion package of infrastructure projects Trump promised, the wall along the Southern border he insisted could be quickly constructed and the massive tax cuts he touted during the campaign. Even debate over health-care reform is largely focused on eliminating key parts of the Affordable Care Act and allowing states to craft policies in their place. After being the ‘party of no’ during the Obama years, Republicans are still trying to figure out what they want to achieve in this unexpected Trump era — beyond just rolling back what Obama did. Even some Republicans have raised questions about what the party now stands for, as opposed to what it is against. “Asked during a recent interview for a Politico podcast what the Republican Party stands for now, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) responded: ‘I don’t know.’”

-- Fears grow about dysfunction in Congress. Politico reports: “Concerns are rising in Washington that Congress may be headed toward the economic and political disaster of a debt default and a government shutdown later this year. And the chamber most likely to get Congress out of the jam — the Senate — is failing to live up to its moniker as the world’s greatest deliberative body.”

Richard Burr rushes to the Senate floor for votes. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

THOSE WHO DON’T LEARN FROM THE MISTAKES OF THE PAST ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT THEM:

-- Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) is trying to retrieve copies of the committee’s 2014 secret report on the CIA’s brutal detention and interrogation program from federal agencies and return them to Congress. From Karen DeYoung: “By late Friday, most of the copies known to have been distributed had been returned to the committee, including by the CIA and its inspector general’s office, the director of national intelligence, and the State Department. … While a 500-page, redacted summary was eventually released, the bulk of the report remains classified. … Burr’s order to collect copies of the 6,700-page document came weeks after the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from the American Civil Liberties Union for the executive branch to release the full report, ending a two-year legal battle. Democrats cried foul, charging that Burr intends to bury the document and ensure that it is never released. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chaired the committee when it was written, said Burr’s intent in collecting copies of what she called ‘the torture report’ was to ‘erase history’ and make sure the document would not be read by current and future officials. … Congress is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, but distribution of the report to federal agencies provided an opening for FOIA requests for its declassification and release.”

Border Patrol agent Emmanuel Santos searches for undocumented immigrants trying to hide in the undergrowth along the Rio Grande in Laredo, Texas, last week. (Matthew Busch/For The Washington Post)

WAPO HIGHLIGHTS:

-- “A tiny Texas border city is leading the charge against the state’s immigration crackdown,” by Maria Sacchetti and Sandhya Somashekhar: “El Cenizo is (working) to block a tough new Texas immigration law that requires police to hold criminal suspects for possible deportation, before the measure takes effect Sept. 1. The lawsuit filed by the city pits Mayor Raul Reyes and his tiny outpost of Democrats against the state’s powerful Republican Party. Almost everyone in town is an immigrant from Mexico — or is related to one — and many are here illegally…The mayor’s move puts this city of 3,300 residents at the heart of a new war raging in Texas over an old issue: illegal immigration…The divisions underscore how illegal immigration has evolved as an issue in Texas, home to an estimated 1.6 million undocumented immigrants.”

SOCIAL MEDIA SPEED READ:

The president’s tweets on Saturday night fit a pattern of responding quickly to acts of terror and more slowly to other attacks. “Critics of the president were quick

Al Franken’s Memoir Is the Best Political Book of 2017

NEW REPUBLIC

With withdrawal from Paris accord, Trump continues to focus squarely on his most devoted supporters.



WASHINGTON POST

Jason Kempin/Getty Images for Children's Health Fund

In (partial) defense of Hillary Clinton.

I’m going to do something unpopular now. I’m going to defend Hillary Clinton.

EZRA KLEIN, VOX

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Why did Clinton lose? And there, factors like Comey, Russia, and the media’s email obsession have real explanatory power. But the harder question — the one this blame game is designed to obscure — is why was the election close enough for Clinton to lose?

Clinton does herself no favors when she suggests that criticism of the paid speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs was motivated by sexism. There was sexism in the 2016 election, as I discuss below. But in 2013, amid an economy wracked by the aftermath of the financial crisis, and after Clinton served in a government that bailed out the financial sector, you didn’t need to be a political genius to recognize that taking $675,000 from the vampire squid might look bad.

Nor is Clinton’s complaint that the Democratic Party lacked campaign infrastructure convincing. You know who lacked campaign infrastructure? Donald J. Trump. His field operation was a joke. The RNC’s efforts were a shaky backstop. The 2016 election didn’t prove the Democrats needed a better ground game. It proved a better ground game wasn’t enough.

Clinton made mistakes. All candidates do. But the question in elections is ... compared to what? Take the criticisms made of Clinton and turn them around. Trump surely did not run a smoother campaign than Clinton. His team featured more infighting, leaking, and churn. He made more obvious mistakes in a week than she made in a year. His finances were far shadier than Clinton’s, his foundation far less ethical, his behavior far more erratic. He walked into the debates unprepared, ran a bizarre and ineffective convention, and appears to have been saved from defeat — albeit narrow defeat — by the twin interventions of Russia and James Comey.

And Clinton was, in ways people have rewritten since her Electoral College loss, an effective candidate in nontraditional ways. After she captured the Democratic nomination, I wrote a piece about the political skills that made her the first woman to achieve that feat. I occasionally see the article thrown back at me as a laughable analysis disproven by her eventual loss, but I think it’s absolutely correct:

She won the Democratic primary by spending years slowly, assiduously, building relationships with the entire Democratic Party. She relied on a more traditionally female approach to leadership: creating coalitions, finding common ground, and winning over allies. Today, 208 members of Congress have endorsed Clinton; only eight have endorsed [Bernie] Sanders.

[...] In order to do something as hard as becoming the first female presidential nominee of a major political party, [Clinton] had to do something extraordinarily difficult: She had to build a coalition, supported by a web of relationships, that dwarfed in both breadth and depth anything a non-incumbent had created before. It was a plan that played to her strengths, as opposed to her (entirely male) challengers' strengths. And she did it....

 David McNew/Getty Images

 Similarly, Clinton really did crush Trump in the debates. As I wrote then, most presidential debates have little effect on the polls. Clinton’s performances were unusual in that they transformed the race. On the eve of the first debate, Trump and Clinton were basically tied. By the close of the third, Clinton had opened up a massive lead — a lead that, if retained, would certainly have won her the election.
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By the end of the campaign, the public had enough information to make basic judgments about who Clinton and Trump were. Trump’s flaws weren’t hidden by Clinton’s mistakes — if she was good at anything, it was goading Trump into error and overreaction. Voters knew what he was when they voted for him. They had seen him lash out at a Gold Star family and at Alicia Machado. They knew he suggested, repeatedly, that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assassination. They had heard him say Mexico was sending us rapists and criminals and call for a ban on Muslim travel. They had watched him babble incoherently about policy, say he could shoot someone in broad daylight without losing support, and brag, on tape, “when you're a star, they let you do it.”

And it’s worth remembering that before Clinton ran against Trump, 16 other Republicans ran against him ... And every one of them was routed. At some point, the record of talented politicians lying at Trump’s feet requires more explanation than “they all screwed up.”

Imagine a slightly alternate universe. Let’s take Nate Silver’s estimate that the Comey letter cost Clinton about 3 percentage points in the election. Imagine it never happened. Now Clinton wins the Electoral College, and lands a bigger popular vote victory than Barack Obama did against Mitt Romney.

In that world, are we talking about what an awful race President Clinton ran? We aren’t. But that is a world in which Trump — with all he revealed during the campaign about his lack of discipline, his casual cruelty, his disinterest in policy, his penchant for conspiracy theories — still won about 44 percent of the vote.

That is a world, in other words, that should still trouble us.

Trump to pull U.S. from historic Paris climate agreement, breaking ranks with more than 190 countries

President Trump will make good on a campaign promise to “cancel” the Paris climate agreement, officials say, breaking away from a global effort to reduce greenhouse gases. The decision followed an intense struggle within the administration over the fate of the agreement, with Ivanka Trump, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and business leaders urging the president to remain a party to the accord, and conservatives such as Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt calling for an exit. [Vox / Brian Resnick] 

• The process could take four years to complete, meaning a final decision would be up to the American voters in the next presidential election.  

• This was expected; here’s our section on it in yesterday’s newsletter, if you need a refresher. [Vox / Dara Lind and Dylan Matthews] 
• But it’s still a dramatic, and globally consequential, decision. In his speech explaining the decision, Trump condemned it as a "massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries," leading to "millions and millions of families trapped in poverty and joblessness." Without the deal, Americans "won't lose our jobs. We're going to grow. We're going to grow rapidly." [Vox / Carly Sitrin] 

Shutterstock)

• Basically all of that is nonsense. The legal implications of the Paris deal are minimal; the Trump administration could still have worked to roll back clean power plant rules without exiting the agreement. Leaving mostly just serves to piss off our allies. [Niskanen Center / David Bookbinder] 
• Trump declared in his speech that he was “elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” which makes it all the more striking that Bill Peduto responded by saying, "As the Mayor of Pittsburgh, I can assure you that we will follow the guidelines of the Paris Agreement for our people, our economy & future.” [Bill Peduto] 

Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post

 HOW TRUMP GOT BOXED IN ON THE CLIMATE PACT: "[Trump's] chief strategist and EPA administrator maneuvered for months to get the president to exit the Paris climate accord, shrewdly playing to his populist instincts and publicly pressing the narrative that the nearly 200-nation deal was effectively dead - boxing in the president on one of his highest-profile decisions to date.” Politico’s Andrew Restuccia and Josh Dawsey report: "Steve Bannon and Scott Pruitt have sought to outsmart the administration's pro-Paris group of advisers, including Trump's daughter Ivanka, who were hoping the president could be swayed by a global swell of support for the deal from major corporations, U.S. allies,

Trump never liked the Paris accord, which he viewed as a “bad deal” and vowed to “cancel” during his presidential campaign, Ashley Parker, Philip Rucker, and Michael Birnbaum report. “[Trump’s] final, deliberative verdict was the same as his initial, gut-level one … Even [as he] moderated months of often heated, and at times downright contentious, discussions among his own advisers, as well as scores of outsiders. Nonetheless, the debate over what Trump should ultimately do — stay in the deal to push for changes or fully pull out — roiled the administration.

  Getty

“During meetings, Steve Bannon and Scott Pruitt and other allies came armed with ‘reams of documents’ -- filled with numbers and statistics showing what they claimed would be the negative impacts on the U.S. economy if the U.S. remained in the climate deal. ‘They were presenting facts and figures’ [Kellyanne] Conway said. Some of those opposed to pulling out of the pact, however, said much of the data the other side presented was either erroneous, scientifically dubious, misleading or out of date.”

Some of the efforts to dissuade Trump from withdrawing actually had the reverse effect, further entrenching his original position. When Trump heard advocates arguing that the era of coal was coming to an end — something Cohn told reporters on last week’s foreign trip … Trump only became more adamant that pulling out of the Paris pact could help rescue the U.S. coal industry, said a Republican operative … ‘When he hears people make comments like ‘Coal jobs don’t matter anymore’ or ‘Those are going away,’ he thinks of all those people who got the election wrong and didn’t realize that, no, these people are important to us,’ the operative said.”

 Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

NEW YORK

Everything Conservatives Said About the Paris Climate Agreement Is Already Wrong

By Jonathan Chait

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It is worth recalling the principal argument that Republicans made against the Paris agreement from the outset was that it would have no effect on developing countries like India and China. “And you know what passing those laws would have — what impact it would have on the environment?” insisted Marco Rubio in 2016. “Zero, because China is still going to be polluting and India is still going to be polluting at historic levels … these other countries like India and China are more than making up in carbon emissions for whatever we could possibly cut.”

Why was the right so certain that India and China would continue to ramp up their carbon emissions regardless of what they said in Paris? Because, they insisted, dirty energy was and would remain the best path for them to raise their standard of living, which was and is well below American levels. National Review editor Rich Lowry, writing in December 2015, dismissed plans to steer the developing world onto a cleaner energy path as “a naive belief in the power of global shame over the sheer economic interest of developing countries in getting rich (and lifting countless millions out of poverty) through exploiting cheap energy — you know, the way Western countries have done for a couple of centuries.”

But this analysis has proven incontrovertibly false. Rather than lagging behind their promised targets, India and China are actually surpassing them. According to Climate Action Tracker, India, which had promised to reduce the emissions intensity of its economy by 33–35 percent by 2030, is now on track to reduce it by 42–45 percent by that date. China promised its total emissions would peak by 2030 — an ambitious goal for a rapidly industrializing economy. It is running at least a decade ahead of that goal.

Why are these countries blowing past their targets? Because the cost of zero-emissions energy sources is plunging. In India, solar energy not only costs less than energy from new coal plants, it costs less than energy from existing coal plants:

The virtuous cycle of political will and innovation is proving more potent than expected. As more governments bind themselves to emissions reductions, business creates the technology to meet those goals, which brings down the cost of reducing emissions, which in turn emboldens governments to raise their ambitions further still. The factual predicate upon which the American right based its opposition to Paris has melted away beneath its feet.

Likewise, the scientific basis for the right’s skepticism of the theory of anthropogenic global warming has collapsed. Conservatives used to dismiss the scientific consensus on heat-trapping gases on account of the fact that 1998 saw an anomalously big spike in global temperatures in the midst of an overall warming trend. For years, conservatives would triumphantly point out that there had been no warming since 1998, as if the data from this one year nullified decades’ worth of rising temperatures. In the meantime, 2014, and every year since then, has since exceeded the 1998 record, rendering the old, misleading talking point outright false. But no rethinking has followed on the right. As justifications for inaction are falsified, new ones take their place, while the conclusion remains the same.

----

 A crude tribalistic impulse overrides any reckoning with the problem. The proximate issue in conservative minds is not climate change itself but the fact that liberals are concerned about all these things. Disintegrating ice shelves, extinctions, or droughts are abstractions.

It is similar to the predominant response to liberal terror over the prospect of handing the most powerful office in the world to an impulsive congenital liar with authoritarian tendencies. Conservatives on the whole devoted less attention to pondering the risks Trump might pose to their own country and party than enjoying the liberal tears.

“Everybody who hates Trump wants him to stay in Paris,” argues conservative activist Grover Norquist. “Everybody who respects him, trusts him, voted for him, wishes for him to succeed, wants him to pull out.” Here is an argument that approaches, even if it does not fully reach, complete self-awareness: The Paris climate agreement is bad because it is supported by people who oppose Trump. Therefore, the opposing position is the correct one.

Trump, The Russian Candidate.

Eliot Blondet/AFP/Getty Images; Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images

NEW YORK

Over the last several days, the Russia scandal has taken a darker turn. Friday night, the Washington Post reported that Jared Kushner tried during the presidential transition period to set up a secret communications channel with Moscow. Tuesday morning, CNN reported that, during the 2016 campaign, Russian officials discussed having leverage of a financial nature over Trump, which could be used to manipulate the Republican nominee. The exact nature of this relationship remains as yet unknown, but its parameters have shifted. The most innocent explanations of Donald Trump’s shadowy relationship with Russia have grown increasingly fanciful, while the most paranoid interpretations have grown increasingly more plausible.

Indeed, in another one of dramatic juxtapositions that would have seemed ham-handed in a spy thriller, the latest scandalous revelations came out just as Trump could be seen carrying out what looks for all the world like his end of a pact with Moscow. If the president did have an objective on his trip to Europe — a premise that, it goes without saying, cannot be assumed — it was to crack up the American alliance with Western Europe. That happens to have been Russia’s primary diplomatic objective since the end of World War II. In Brussels, Trump refused to publicly affirm the Article 5 guarantee of the NATO charter — the foundation of the anti-Russian alliance, and the basis for Europe’s defense against Russian aggression. He directed his trademark wild diatribes against Germany, accusing it repeatedly of abusive trade relations, despite the fact that the United States does not have bilateral trade relations with that country. Amazingly, he kept up the abuse on Twitter after returning Stateside, while simultaneously defending Russia over its intervention in the American election.

Read more at NEW YORK