Trump vows to ‘move forward in working constructively with Russia’ after Putin denied election hacking

'This is like building an anti-terrorism task force with ISIS': Trump's 'cyber security unit' with Russia is attacked from all sides, as Democrats say 'we might as well mail our ballot boxes to Moscow' 

Donald Trump has revealed US plans to form an 'impenetrable cyber security unit' with Russia, before again blaming Barack Obama for not stopping the Russian interference. Trump fired up his Twitter account on Sunday morning and sent out a series of statements about his meeting with Putin at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, this week. 'I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our election. He vehemently denied it. I've already given my opinion.....,' he wrote. He then added: 'Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded.. ... and safe.' The tweets came after it was reported members of Trump's team - including Don Jr and Jared Kushner - met with a Russian lawyer in New York just weeks after he won the Republican nomination in June last year. Trump's plan ...has been roundly criticized by Democrats and Republicans..

U.S. officials say Russian government hackers have penetrated energy and nuclear company business networks.

NY TIMES


WASHINGTON POST

How to handle an unhinged president.

Republicans and conservatives could start by refusing to play down his revolting lunacy.



WASHINGTON POST

Democrats need to convey to a large swath of the country that they understand and respect their lives, their values and their worth.

To win the working class, Democrats need to start talking straight.




WASHINGTON POST

Highlights of the NY Times' annotated Constitution



DAILY KOS

ISIS LOSING IN SYRIA

Goran Tomasevic / Reuters

1. U.S.-backed fighters breached the wall of Raqqa’s Old City in Syria, marking new progress in a weeks-long battle to wrest Islamic State militants from their most important strongholds. (Liz Sly).

Post columnist David Ignatius argues that working with Russia might be the best path to peace in Syria: “The Euphrates marks the informal ‘deconfliction’ line between the Russian-backed Syrian regime west of the river, and the U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led SDF to the east. U.S.-Russian agreement on this buffer zone is a promising sign. It allows, in effect, for the U.S. and its allies to clear the Islamic State’s capital, Raqqa, while Russia and the Syrian regime take the city of Deir al-Zour … The line keeps the combatants focused on the Islamic State, rather than sparring with each other. What Trump and Putin should discuss at the Group of 20 summit is whether this recent agreement on the separation line is a model for wider U.S.-Russian cooperation in Syria. Russian-American cooperation on Syria faces a huge obstacle right now. [And against all the] negatives, there’s only one positive argument: Working with Russia may be the only way to reduce the level of violence in Syria and to create a foundation for a calmer, more decentralized nation that can eventually recover from its tragic war.”

The Daily Beast

Trump has largely continued Obama’s strategy in the fight against ISIS, working to take down top leaders as a means of weakening the entire group. The Daily Beast’s Kimberly Dozier reports: “U.S. special operations forces have removed roughly 50 top ISIS leaders off the battlefield since President Donald Trump took office, down from 80 killed in the last six months of the Obama administration … The lower numbers of high-value targets killed points to the deadly success of the strategy built by the Obama White House … The effectiveness of the current Obama-era strategy of attacking ISIS via local forces together with allies calls into question whether there’s a need for more dramatic revision. That’s presented a dilemma for those working on the Trump anti-ISIS strategy and slowed its public unveiling … The White House has asked defense officials to come up with new ideas to help brand the Trump campaign as different from its predecessor.”

WILL THEY STAY WITH IT? Dems hit on a mantra for the 2018 midterms: “A Better Deal.”

Getty

Democrats have landed on a mantra for the 2018 midterms: “A Better Deal.”

 Politico’s Elena Schor and Heather Caygle report: “The rebranding attempt comes as Democrats acknowledge that simply running against Trump wasn’t a winning strategy in 2016 and probably won’t work in 2018 either. The slogan, which is still being polled in battleground House districts, aims to convince voters that Democrats have more to offer than the GOP and the self-proclaimed deal-maker in the White House. But even as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi prepare a jobs package centered on infrastructure, trade and the minimum wage, some of their most vulnerable members are making other plans. … Leadership may not find universal support for the left-leaning platform, particularly from those trying to defend seats in Trump-friendly states.”

THE ECONOMY REMAINS STAGNANT.

Al Drago for The New York Times After Donald J. Trump won the presidential election, Americans’ optimism about the economic future soared. But midway through the year, that optimism has not translated into concrete economic gains.

This seeming contradiction exposes a reality about the role of psychology in economics — or more specifically, how psychology is connected only loosely to actual growth. It will take more than feelings to fix the sluggishness that has been evident in the United States and other major economies for years. Confidence isn’t some magic elixir for the economy: Businesses will hire and invest only when they see concrete evidence of demand for their products, and consumers intensify their spending only when their incomes justify it.

President Trump said on Twitter on Sunday that the stock market was at an “all-time high” and that unemployment was at its lowest level in years, both of which are true (he added that wages would start going up, which is certainly possible).



 [But] "Despite bravado and big promises, the economy that President Trump is touting this week looks a lot like the one he lambasted as a candidate: a slow, largely steady grind that has chipped away at the damage done by the 2008-2009 recession but failed to produce the prosperity of decades past,” Damian Paletta and Ana Swanson report: “Now, as he approaches the six-month marker of his presidency, Trump faces several new warning signs that key areas of the economy could be losing steam, including in industries he specifically promised to revitalize. Automobile sales, the heart of the manufacturing economy, are in a months-long swoon. Both General Motors and Ford on Mondayreported that their sales had slid 5 percent in June as the industry’s workers continue to be hit with layoffs. U.S. factory output fell in May … [and] construction of new homes fell to an eight-month low.” Economist Lindsey Piegza said she believes there is a sense of “pessimism fatigue”: “There’s a sense where, it’s not fantastic, but this may be as good as it gets, so let’s celebrate mediocrity."

ACCEPTANCE

THE ATLANTIC, MARK BOWDEN


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Unless Kim Jong Un is killed and replaced by someone better, or some miracle of diplomacy occurs, or some shattering peninsular conflict intervenes, North Korea will eventually build ICBMs armed with nuclear warheads. In the words of one retired senior U.S. military commander: “It’s a done deal.”

Acceptance is likely because there are no good military options where North Korea is concerned. As frightening as it is to contemplate a Kim regime that can successfully strike the United States, accepting such a scenario means living with things only slightly worse than they are right now.

Pyongyang has long had the means to all but level Seoul, and weapons capable of killing tens of thousands of Americans stationed in South Korea—far more than those killed by al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001, an atrocity that spurred the U.S. to invade two countries and led to 16 years of war. Right now North Korea has missiles that could reach Japan (and possibly Guam) with weapons of mass destruction. The world is already accustomed to dealing with a North Korea capable of sowing unthinkable mayhem.

Pyongyang has been constrained by the same logic that has stayed the use of nuclear arms for some 70 years. Their use would invite swift annihilation. In the Cold War this brake was called mad (mutual assured destruction). In this case the brake on North Korea would be simply ad: assured destruction, since any launch of a nuclear weapon would invite an annihilating response; even though its missiles might hit North America, it cannot destroy the United States.

There is already a close-to-even chance that, in the 30 minutes it would take a North Korean ICBM to reach the West Coast of the United States, the missile would be intercepted and destroyed. But the other way of looking at those odds is that such a missile would have a close-to-even chance of hitting an American city.

This is terrible to ponder, but Americans lived with a far, far greater threat for almost half a century. Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. faced the potential for complete destruction. I was one of the kids who performed civil-defense drills in the 1950s, ducking under my school desk while sirens wailed. During the Cuban missile crisis, the possibility seemed imminent enough that I plotted the fastest route from school to home. The threat of nuclear attack is a feature of the modern world, and one that has grown far less existential to Americans over time.

It is expensive to build an atom bomb, and very hard to build one small enough to ride in a missile. It is also hard to build an ICBM. But these are all old technologies. The know-how exists and is widespread. Preventing a terrorist group from acquiring such a weapon may be possible, but when a nation—whether North Korea or Iran or any other—commits itself to the goal, stopping it is virtually impossible. A deal to halt Iran’s nuclear program was doable only because that country has extensive trading and banking ties with other nations. The Kim regime’s isolation means that no country besides China can really apply meaningful economic pressure. Persuading a nation to abandon nuclear arms depends less on military strength than on the collective determination of the world, and a decision made by the nation in question. What’s needed is the proper framework for disarmament—the right collection of incentives and disincentives to render the building of such a weapon a detriment and a waste—so the country decides that abandoning its pursuit of nukes is in its best interest.

It is expensive to build an atom bomb, and very hard to build one small enough to ride in a missile. It is also hard to build an ICBM. But these are all old technologies. The know-how exists and is widespread. Preventing a terrorist group from acquiring such a weapon may be possible, but when a nation—whether North Korea or Iran or any other—commits itself to the goal, stopping it is virtually impossible. A deal to halt Iran’s nuclear program was doable only because that country has extensive trading and banking ties with other nations. The Kim regime’s isolation means that no country besides China can really apply meaningful economic pressure...

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....Acceptance is how the current crisis should and will most likely play out. No one is going to announce this policy. No president is going to openly acquiesce to Kim’s ownership of a nuclear-tipped ICBM, but just as George W. Bush quietly swallowed Pyongyang’s successful explosion of an atom bomb, and just as Barack Obama met North Korea’s subsequent nuclear tests and missile launches with strategic patience, Trump may well find himself living with something similar. If there were a tolerable alternative, it would long ago have been tried. Sabotage may continue to stall progress, but cannot stop it altogether. Draconian economic pressure, even with China’s help, is also unlikely to curb Pyongyang’s quest.

“The North Koreans have demonstrated a strong willingness to continue this program, regardless of the price, regardless of the isolation,” says Abe Denmark, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia under Obama. “To be frank, my sense is that their leadership really could not care less about the country’s economic situation or the living standards of their people. As long as they are making progress toward nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, and they can stay in power, then they seem to be willing to pay that price.”

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...Every test, successful or not, brings him closer to building his prized weapons. When he has nuclear ICBMs, North Korea will have a more potent and lethal strike capability against the United States and its allies, but no chance of destroying America, or winning a war, and therefore no better chance of avoiding the inevitable consequence of launching a nuke: national suicide. ... Perhaps when he feels safe enough with his arsenal, he might turn to more-sensible goals, like building the North Korean economy, opening trade, and ending its decades of extreme isolation. All of these are the very things that create the framework needed for disarmament.

But acceptance, while the right choice, is yet another bad one. With such missiles, Kim might feel emboldened to move on South Korea. Would the U.S. sacrifice Los Angeles to save Seoul? The same calculation drove the U.K. and France to develop their own nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Trump has already suggested that South Korea and Japan might want to consider building nuclear programs. In this way, acceptance could lead to more nuclear-armed states and ever greater chances that one will use the weapons.

With his arsenal, Kim may well become an even more destabilizing force in the region. There is a good chance that he would try to negotiate from strength with Seoul and Washington, forging some kind of confederation with the South that leads to the removal of U.S. forces from the peninsula. ... Kim, who sees himself as the divinely inspired heir to leadership of all the Korean people, is not likely to be satisfied with only his half of the peninsula.

...Perhaps the most reassuring thing about pursuing the acceptance option is that Kim appears to be neither suicidal nor crazy. In the five and a half years since assuming power at age 27, he has acted with brutal efficiency to consolidate that power; the assassination of his half brother is only the most recent example. As tyrants go, he’s shown appalling natural ability. For a man who occupies a position both powerful and perilous, his moves have been nothing if not deliberate and even cruelly rational.

And as the latest head of a family that has ruled for three generations, one whose primary purpose has been to survive, as a young man with a lifetime of wealth and power before him, how likely is he to wake up one morning and set fire to his world?

Read the entire article at  THE ATLANTIC

NO KOREA SUCCESSFULLY TESTS AN ICBM.

AFP PHOTO/KCNA VIA KNS

The U.S. government confirmed that North Korea successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile, crossing a chilling threshold. 

The latest missile flew higher and remained in the air longer than previous attempts — enough to reach all of Alaska,” Anne Gearan and Emily Rauhala report. “The launch follows a string of recent actions by Pyongyang, including a salvo of missiles last month and three tests in May. Kim has now launched more missiles in one year than his father and predecessor in the family dynasty did in 17 years in power. North Korea has also conducted five nuclear weapons tests since 2006, including two last year.

 Experts say the missile was a “real ICBM” and showed technical sophistication that Western experts believed North Korea was years away from mastering. “North Korea’s apparent accomplishment puts it well ahead of schedule,” Joby Warrick explains. “The Hwasong-14 tested Monday could not have reached the U.S. mainland, analysts say, and there’s no evidence to date that North Korea is capable of building a miniaturized nuclear warhead to fit on one of its longer-range missiles. But there is now little reason to doubt that both are within North Korea’s grasp.”

The past three presidents have tried to negotiate, only to learn that Pyongyang can never be trusted....The president-elect believed he could use his reputation for unpredictability to unnerve and intimidate America’s adversaries into making concessions that they would not otherwise make. Some people close to Trump thought, for example, that North Korea might come to the table out of fear that the American president might just be crazy enough to take preemptive military action. 

• Foreign policy experts generally agree there is a handful of possible options, but with a country as unstable as North Korea, none of them are ideal. The first would be to continue the Obama-era policy of “strategic patience,” essentially working to punish the regime through further sanctions and diplomatic means in the hopes that they start behaving better. [The Atlantic / Mark Bowden]

 As the first president in U.S. history with no prior military or government experience, Trump has clearly never studied “deterrence theory”: If he thought a show of force would deter North Korea, he thought wrong. If anything, the president’s previous saber-rattling has only driven the regime to accelerate its efforts to build a nuclear weapon capable of striking the mainland United States.

North Korea’s ability to bomb American population centers – whether Seattle, San Francisco or Los Angeles – would dramatically change the Washington calculus and massively constrain our ability to use military force. That’s the whole point of these tests. “The fear is not that Mr. Kim would launch a pre-emptive attack on the West Coast; that would be suicidal, and if the 33-year-old leader has demonstrated anything in his five years in office, he is all about survival,” David Sanger writes on the front page of today’s New York Times. “As he looks around the world, he sees cases like that of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya — an authoritarian who gave up his nascent nuclear program, only to be deposed, with American help, as soon as his people turned against him. That is what Mr. Kim believes his nuclear program will prevent — an American effort to topple him. He may be right.”

“There is no good option here,” former acting CIA director Michael Morell said on “CBS This Morning.” “There is no military option here to destroy the nuclear program (or) his missile program. There is no option to do that that wouldn't start a second Korean War and wouldn't raise the possibility of him using nuclear weapons against his neighbors. The risks are extraordinarily high in a military standoff.”

While China pledges cooperation with the United States over North Korea, Beijing has not fundamentally shifted away from a strategy that balances pressure on the Kim regime with keeping the regime afloat, said Chris Steinitz, a research scientist at the federally funded, nonprofit Center for Naval Analyses. “It’s kind of how China looks at everything. They have a very long view,” Steinitz told my colleagues Anne and Emily. “They will wait. They will bide their time. They have a lot of priorities.”

• [While] President Xi Jinping of China is known for acting boldly, but for all the grief Pyongyang and its nuclear tests have been causing him, his options are limited as well.

Don’t forget that the U.S.-Sino relationship involves far more than North Korea: China yesterday vowed to step up its air and sea patrols after a U.S. warship sailed near a disputed island in the South China Sea, and last week the United States announced a new arms deal with Taiwan. 

 US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley warned China that if it continues to trade with North Korea, the US would consider pulling its trade deals with China. [Associated Press / Edith Lederer].

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....“Global action is required to stop a global threat,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in a statement yesterday afternoon. “Any country that hosts North Korean guest workers, provides any economic or military benefits, or fails to fully implement UN Security Council resolutions is aiding and abetting a dangerous regime. All nations should publicly demonstrate to North Korea that there are consequences to their pursuit of nuclear weapons.”

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-- Is Trump’s mental health “immaterial”? At the Aspen Ideas Festival last week, during a panel on U.S. national security in the Trump era, former CIA director David Petraeus defended the president’s foreign policy. He said Trump’s national security team is the strongest he had ever seen, and he argued that Trump is far more decisive than Obama, who he said was indecisive to the point of paralysis.

David Rothkopf, who teaches at Columbia University and was previously chief executive at Foreign Policy magazine, was moderating the panel. He noted that, for the first time, he’s getting regular questions about the mental health of the president. He asked Petraeus if he thought the president was fit to serve. “It’s immaterial,” he reportedly replied, arguing that because the team around Trump is so good, they can offset whatever deficits he might have.

“I was floored. It was a stunningly weak defense,” Rothkoph writes in an op-ed for today’s Post. “Daily he shows he lacks the character, discipline, intellect, judgment or respect for the office to be president of the United States.

Democrats will keep losing, unless they go local.



JOE SCARBOROUGH, WASHINGTON POST

TRUMPCARE FLATLINES.

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Repealing Obamacare, which unified Republicans for six years, has now become the party’s albatross. 

• Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is having a rough week. Late yesterday, he announced the procedural vote on the Senate health care bill would be pushed back to an undetermined time after Congress’s Fourth of July recess as it failed to garner enough support among members of his own party. [NPR / Arnie Seipel]

The Senate majority leader believed that the blowback for keeping his health-care bill secret would be less than the blowback for negotiating it in public....But the Kentuckian misread the degree to which members of his own conference wanted a seat at the table. With little margin for error, he also had too much confidence in his ability to hammer out a compromise that could win over both hardliners who want full repeal and moderates who want to protect Medicaid expansion.
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• However, the bill isn’t completely doomed yet, because the draft legislation contains $200 billion that McConnell could theoretically add to appease moderates. He could also potentially get rid of more of Obamacare mandates that conservatives are looking for. [Vox / Dylan Scott]
• But striking that balance between moderate and far-right Republicans is going to be tricky, and McConnell can only afford to lose two votes.

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 Last week, [McConnell] flippantly dismissed complaints about bypassing the committee process. “No transparency would be added by having hearings in which Democrats offered endless single-payer system amendments,” the leader said at a press conference. “That is not what this Republican Senate was sent here to do.”

Many of his members felt otherwise. There was technically a working group of senators that came up with the bill, but McConnell was in the driver’s seat. Republican senators who were invited to closed-door “listening sessions” say they were sounded out about what they could and couldn’t support. But several grumbled that they couldn’t get any information out of leadership about what was and wasn’t on the table. Others said privately that the meetings felt less substantive and more like a box-checking exercise.

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Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, was an early opponent of the Senate health care bill. CreditStephen Crowley/The New York Times

• Throughout the process, McConnell made some tactical errors of his own, such as excluding Republican senators including Collins and Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy — both known for their health care knowledge — from the early working group that drafted the bill. [NYT / Jennifer Steinhauer]

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Another consequence of the secretive process is that almost no Republican senators have been out there trying to sell the bill – to the public or to each other. Dozens of GOP lawmakers who privately planned to vote for the motion to proceed today made a public show of saying that they were undecided and still studying the proposal. They avoided local reporters and put out opaque statements that gave themselves plenty of wiggle room, as they waited to see how things shook out.... That ensured one-sided coverage in the press, which in turn made it even harder for members to justify supporting the bill.

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Sarah Binder, a professor of political science at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution: “First, most closed-door bargaining in the Senate is bipartisan. … Second, when leaders close the doors, it’s often because the legislative process has ground to a halt. … Third, McConnell’s tactics are particularly unusual because Republicans are trying to legislate on one of the nation’s most complicated policy issues. Health care affects one-sixth of the economy … Usually, issues that demand secret negotiations are must-pass measures about to hit a nonnegotiable deadline, such as failing to raise the debt ceiling or to fund the government on time.”

Don Ritchie, the historian emeritus of the Senate, said that the chamber has not taken such a partisan, closed-door approach to major legislation since in the years before World War I. A century ago, Senate Democrats, at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson, drew up major tariff reforms while shutting out Republicans. But when Democratic leaders tried that again when they had large majorities during the Great Depression, rank-and-file senators revolted. It hasn’t happened since, he told the Los Angeles Times.

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Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio, a Republican, at the White House in November.  CreditKevin Lamarque/Reuters

One majorly under-covered angle in the press coverage of why the Senate has punted is the widespread opposition of GOP governors. “More than half a dozen Republican governors, including several from states with Republican senators, expressed either grave reservations or outright opposition to the bill,” Alex Burns reports on A17 of the New York Times: Two examples:

• Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) rejected the Senate proposal so forcefully that he helped sway his state’s Republican senator, Dean Heller, to oppose the measure.
• Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) had a press conference in D.C. yesterday to call the Senate bill “unacceptable,” saying it would victimize the poor and mentally ill, and redirect tax money “to people who are already very wealthy.”

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President Trump spoke in the Cabinet Room of the White House before having lunch with Republican senators on Tuesday. CreditAl Drago/The New York Times

Trump’s inability to twist the arms of wavering Senate Republicans, despite his best efforts, makes him looks impotent. ...Even in private, Trump is unfamiliar with what the bill he has endorsed would actually do: The president convened Republican senators in the East Room yesterday afternoon so that members could air their grievances. “A senator who supports the bill left the meeting at the White House with a sense that the president did not have a grasp of some basic elements of the Senate plan — and seemed especially confused when a moderate Republican complained that opponents of the bill would cast it as a massive tax break for the wealthy,” Glenn Thrush and Jonathan Martin report in the Times. “Trump said he planned to tackle tax reform later, ignoring the repeal’s tax implications.”

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If Senate Republicans manage to pass a health-care bill, it's safe to say the legislation will have come back from the dead... A new Quinnipiac University poll shows just 18 percent of Republicans strongly approve of the bill. The all-important political bloc of independents really dislike it too: 72% disapprove.

The bill, as is, makes nobody happy. It cuts Medicaid deeply and scales back Obamacare’s financial aid for people who buy private coverage. It’s projected to reduce premiums in the long term, but only because people would see higher out-of-pocket costs. But then it also keeps some of the health care law’s major insurance regulations, a cardinal sin for conservatives.

On the other end of the ideological spectrum, more moderate senators have been saying for weeks that they want to soften the Medicaid cuts and want additional funding for the opioid crisis.

In its current form, the Senate bill gradually ends the general federal funding for Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, which covered millions of poor Americans, in 2024. It also places a federal spending cap on the entire program for the first time. The result, according to the CBO, would be a $772 billion cut, versus current law, and 15 million fewer people enrolled in Medicaid a decade from now than under Obamacare.

The bottom line is that CBO estimates 22 million fewer Americans would have health insurance under the plan 10 years from now. “His problem is that the policy is just really bad,” a Republican health care lobbyist said. 

The phony Time cover from March 1, 2009 featuring Trump with the headline 'The Apprentice is a television smash!' was found hanging in frames in the president's various clubs stretching from Florida to as far as Scotland. It is still unclear who is behind the mock-up cover but Time has since asked Trump's clubs and resorts to take them down, according to the Washington Post who first reported the fake cover on Tuesday. Twitter, of course, has since gone wild with thousands of memes poking fun at Trump. 'Russian Bride of the Year. Donald Trump - Vladimir Putin's blushing bride,' one cover read with a photo of Trump dressed in a wedding dress. Another one featured a cartoon of Trump's face with various words pasted across it, including golf, cake, Russian women and Vladimir Putin & Donald Trump BF4ever.



His more recent covers have been, shall we say, less flattering than the fake one: