THE COURTS CHECK TRUMP AGAIN:

-- A federal judge in San Francisco dealt the Trump administration another legal blow last night, temporarily halting the president's threat to withhold unspecified federal funding from cities and towns that refuse to cooperate with immigration authorities. From Maria Sacchetti [Washington Post] :“U.S. District Judge William H. Orrick imposed a nationwide injunction against Trump’s Jan. 25 executive order on what are called ‘sanctuary’ jurisdictions and said lawsuits by Santa Clara County and San Francisco challenging the order were likely to succeed. Orrick pointed to discrepancies in the administration’s interpretation of the executive order, which broadly authorized the attorney general to withhold grant money from jurisdictions that do not cooperate with immigration officials on deportations and other enforcement actions. At the same time, the judge said the Justice Department may hold back grant money that is awarded with immigration-related conditions, if those conditions are violated.

(Gertty)

Slow pace of Trump nominations leaves Cabinet agencies ‘stuck’ in staffing limbo.

Lisa Rein has a fascinating story on the front page of the Washington Post about Cabinet secretaries who are growing increasingly exasperated with how slowly the White House is moving to fill top-tier posts. They believe the vacancies in their departments are hobbling efforts to oversee basic government operations and promote Trump’s agenda.

It turns out that one important explanation for the sluggish process is that lots of people inside the White House have veto power over who gets even junior jobs. Trump, who fancies himself a decisive leader, is in many ways governing by committee.

“Prospective nominees … must win approval from competing camps inside the White House," Lisa explains. "Around the table for weekly hiring meetings are chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, representing the populist wing; Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, leading the establishment Republican wing; White House Counsel Don McGahn; Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Josh Peacock; and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, representing a business-oriented faction. ... For economic appointments, Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, also sits in, as does the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, when a hiring decision piques her interest."

With so many people able to nix nominees, it is inevitable that well-qualified people will be knocked out of contention for reasons big and small.

Consider this remarkable statistic: “The Senate has confirmed 26 of Trump’s picks for his Cabinet and other top posts. But for 530 other vacant senior-level jobs requiring Senate confirmation, the president has advanced just 37 nominees. That’s less than half the nominees Obama had sent to the Senate by this point in his first term."

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-- The president himself is keenly interested in certain appointments, especially when it comes to choosing the federal prosecutors in his hometown, which also slows the process. From Politico’s Josh Gerstein and Josh Dawsey: “Trump removed almost all of the sitting, Obama-appointed U.S. attorneys in a Friday afternoon purge in March, in a highly unusual move that’s left federal prosecutors’ offices under the supervision of acting U.S. attorneys since then. As with other political appointments, the Trump White House has been slow to fill the vacancies. … None are more important to him than the U.S. attorney posts in Manhattan and Brooklyn … which are known for handling white-collar crime cases … The Manhattan office, which oversees the Southern District of New York, was previously headed by Preet Bharara, who was the only U.S. attorney fired in March, after he refused to resign. He’d visited Trump Tower in November, after the election, and had said that Trump promised him he’d be able to remain in his post. White House officials and outside advisers with a crucial say in the picks, like former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, are still talking to candidates for the two New York jobs.”

-- Daily Beast, “Senate Trump-Russia Probe Has No Full-Time Staff, No Key Witnesses,” from Tim Mak: 

There are just seven part-time staffers working on the Senate inquiry. Not one of them is a trained investigator. And they haven’t interviewed a single player in Trump’s orbit.

“The Senate Intelligence Committee’s probe into Russia’s election interference is supposedly the best hope for getting the public credible answers about whether there was any coordination between the Kremlin and Trump Tower. But there are serious reasons to doubt that it can accomplish this task, as currently configured. More than three months after the committee announced that it had agreed on the scope of the investigation, the panel has not begun substantially investigating possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. … The investigation does not have a single staffer dedicated to it full-time, and those staff members working on it part-time do not have significant investigative experience. [And] no interviews have been conducted with key individuals suspected of being in the Trump-Russia orbit.”

800 Workers Had Their Jobs Saved. Over 700 Didn’t.

By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ 7:03 PM ET

At an Indiana factory that assembles parts for Carrier, blue-collar workers are being laid off as their jobs move to Mexico. Many say they still support Mr. Trump, even though his intervention didn’t save their jobs.

President’s approval ratings sit at record lows but base stays steady, poll shows

President Trump is nearing the 100-day mark of his administration as the least popular chief executive in modern times. His voters are largely satisfied with his performance, but his base of support hasn’t grown since he took office, according to a Post-ABC News poll.

• By Dan Balz and Scott Clement

• The Fix: 15% of Clinton supporters say they would vote differently if they had a do-over

Working-class whites can’t handle their status as ‘the new minority.’

A dispassionate perspective on what's driving support of President Trump.


WASHINGTON POST

JANESVILLE

NY TIMES



WASHINGTON POST


NEW YORKER

10 Myths About Immigration in the United States

TRUTHDIG

THE TRUMP RESISTANCE: A PROGRESS REPORT

JOHN CASSIDY, NEW YORKER

TRYING TO HOLD OBAMACARE FOR RANSOM. CONGRESS GEARS FOR FIGHT.

Trump’s threat prompts Democrats to play hardball over Obamacare payments


WASHINGTON POST



JONATHAN CHAIT, NEW YORK

Trump’s Attempt to Hold Obamacare Hostage Is Backfiring

NEW YORK (2)

Republicans may not want to end Obamacare payments The GOP — in control of Congress and the White House — is well aware that the public is likely to blame the party for premium increases after it has so far failed to put forth an agreeable health-care replacement plan. By Paige Winfield Cunningham  •  Read more »

The myth of the disillusioned Trump voter.
These voters do exist. They are not anything close to a movement.

WASHINGTON POST

Racism motivated Trump voters. 

By a lot.

By Amber Phillips

Finding of the day: Racism motivated Trump voters more than authoritarianism, income inequality A voter casts a ballot in Georgetown, Wis. (Nicki Kohl/Telegraph Herald via AP) Let me be very clear on this one: Just because someone voted for President Trump does not mean they harbor nor tolerate racist attitudes. But political scientists who just finished studying the 2016 electorate as part of the nonpartisan American National Selection Survey found that people who voted for Trump — specifically, white people — were less likely to object to statements like "If blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites" than white Hillary Clinton voters. "Since 1988, we’ve never seen such a clear correspondence between vote choice and racial perceptions,"  wrote Ohio State political scientist Thomas Wood, analyzing the survey for The Post's Monkey Cage blog.

The red bubbles and blue bubbles below represent Republican and Democratic voters' reactions, respectively, to the statements in every presidential election since 1988. While Clinton voters significantly backed away from racist sentiments than voters of Democratic presidents in years past, Republicans did not.



The survey found no such trend among voters' preference for authoritarianism nor income inequality, which led Wood to believe that racism motivated Trump voters more than these other factors. Never underestimate the power of racism and bigotry.

Read all the details of this report at   WASHINGTON POST

 ( John Moore/Getty Images)

The message to the country: Racism wins

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In a feature on the racist and anti-immigrant sentiments that fueled support for Trump in the same way they fueled the Brexit decision, Vox’s Zach Beauchamp wrote in January:

Michael Tesler, a professor at the University of California Irvine, took a look at racial resentment scores among Republican primary voters in the past three GOP primaries. In 2008 and 2012, Tesler found, Republican voters who scored higher were less likely to vote for the eventual winner. The more racial bias you harbored, the less likely you were to vote for Mitt Romney or John McCain.

With Trump, the opposite was the case. The more a person saw black people as lazy and undeserving, the more likely they were to vote for the self-proclaimed billionaire. Tesler found similar effects on measures of anti-Hispanic and anti-Muslim prejudice.

Photo credit: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

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Multiple other studies have supported Tesler’s findings. An April Pew survey looked at whether Republicans had "warm" or "cold" feelings toward Trump and how they felt about the census projection that the US would be majority nonwhite in 30 years.

It found that 33 percent of Republicans thought this shift would be "bad for the country." These people were also overwhelmingly likely to feel warmly rather than coolly about Trump, by a 63-to-26 margin.

Meanwhile, as  Dylan Matthews wrote for Vox in October, there was no evidence to support the idea that Trump voters were disproportionately poor, and in fact, a major study from Gallup's Jonathan Rothwell showed the opposite: Trump support was correlated with higher, not lower, income, both among the population as a whole and among white people.

If anything, Trump’s win was powered by a not-so-subtle message that these people’s racial resentment was that of the potential president’s too. And all voters had to do to know this was take a look at his track record....Members of fringe groups told the New York Times in the days before his election that he’d emboldened them to work toward their agendas. And when he won, white supremacists predictably delighted in his victory.

Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

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These huge swaths of white voters were willing to overlook the many ways in which Trump was unqualified, temperamentally unfit, and dangerous and represented a massive threat to American democracy.

The most generous interpretation is that white voters chose him despite his racism, not because of it. But that’s a very difficult case to make, given his massive weaknesses.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

It’s no secret that racism and xenophobia have long been powerful forces in American life, and that the election of Barack Obama didn’t represent the end of that. In fact, racial and political polarization increased in response to the first African-American president, and racist conspiracy theories about Obama’s citizenship were Trump’s way into national politics.

The deep and widespread disdain for Obama and the accompanying willingness on the part of many Americans to believe things that were objectively false — that he was a Muslim and wasn’t a citizen — and to embrace policy positions against their own self-interest looked to many like warning signs about the power of racial anxiety to shape political decision-making.

But how can we say that the white vote for Trump represents racism when in previous elections, Obama won their states? Social science has an answer, and it’s that white voters change their views to become more conservative when their fears of nonwhites are stoked. And it’s not hard to stoke them. As Matthews has written, Harvard political scientist Ryan Enos conducted studies concluding that even casual encounters with racial minorities can cause liberal whites to take on more conservative views. In one of Enos’s experiments, these encounters were between white voters and Spanish-speaking Latino men on commuter trains.

"The results were clear," Enos wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. "After coming into contact, for just minutes each day, with two more Latinos than they would otherwise see or interact with, the riders, who were mostly white and liberal, were sharply more opposed to allowing more immigrants into the country and favored returning the children of illegal immigrants to their parents’ home country. It was a stark shift from their pre-experiment interviews, during which they expressed more neutral attitudes."

Trump’s version of the train encounter was his campaign rhetoric, and its message to would-be voters that immigrants, black people, and Muslims were to be feared. It especially stood in contrast to Obama’s delicate, even-handed treatment of issues related to race and identity. As a result, it’s entirely possible that people whose racism hadn’t shaped their political thinking in previous years suddenly found it activated by Trump’s campaign and guiding their votes.

Photo from "Postcards From America" by Mark Power/Magnum Photos

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As this election fades into the distance, explanations for the outcome will become gentler and more opaque. In a reflexive effort to find ways to be hopeful, we’ll spin a collective fairy tale about how a neglected group of white Americans who themselves were victims simply wanted change and used their votes to demand it, opening our eyes to their perspectives.

There will be a push to “understand” them, and this will be presented as the mature and moral thing to do. In the name of coming together, and in an attempt to avoid finger-pointing that many will warn could further divide the nation, we’ll normalize the way they see the world. We’ll twist history and tweak data and adjust our values to frame their outlook as reasonable.

And when that happens — when the deep bigotry that fueled the result is forgotten or explained away — racism will win yet again.

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