Lovely cover.

Interesting, but not surprising. Gerard Baker, the Editor in Chief of the Wall Street Journal, has apparently been castigating some of his reporters for being unduly opinionated about Trump.

This goes back a while. For example,

In February, Mr. Baker fielded tough questions at an all-hands staff meeting about whether the newspaper’s reporting on Mr. Trump was too soft. Mr. Baker denied that notion, and he suggested that other newspapers had abandoned their objectivity about the president; he also encouraged journalists unhappy with the Journal’s coverage to seek employment elsewhere.

Hmmm.. I wonder why. Could the explanation perhaps be found in the transcript Politico published of a White House interview conducted by Baker and some of his hacks? “Unusually”, says the NYT,

Mr. Baker took a leading role in the interview and made small talk with Mr. Trump about travel and playing golf.

When Ivanka Trump, the president’s older daughter, walked into the Oval Office, Mr. Baker told her, according to the transcript, “It was nice to see you out in Southampton a couple weeks ago,” apparently referring to a party that the two had attended.

The Wall Street Journal is owned by the media magnate Rupert Murdoch, who speaks regularly with Mr. Trump and recently dined with the president at the White House.

En passant, it occurs to me that the moment we will know that Trump is doomed will be when Murdoch abandons him.

Yeah, I know Brexit is a big deal, but this is a lot bigger: James Clapper, a former Director of National Intelligence, commented yesterday on Trump’s rant in Arizona:

“Having some understanding of the levers that a president can exercise, I worry about, frankly, the access to the nuclear codes,” Clapper told CNN, pointing to the current stand-off with North Korea.

If “in a fit of pique he decides to do something about Kim Jong-un, there’s actually very little to stop him. The whole system is built to ensure rapid response if necessary. So there’s very little in the way of controls over exercising a nuclear option, which is pretty damn scary.”

Clapper did not mention Richard Nixon, who was involved in a tense stand-off with North Korea in 1969, after the regime shot down a US spy plane. Nixon is reported to have gotten drunk and ordered a tactical nuclear strike, which was only averted by his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger.

Nixon’s biographers Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan quoted a top CIA official, George Carver, as saying: “The joint chiefs were alerted and asked to recommend targets, but Kissinger got on the phone to them. They agreed not to do anything until Nixon sobered up in the morning.”

This is the first moment that I’ve ever been glad that Henry Kissinger existed.

Oh, and btw, here’s the process for launching a nuclear strike. The whole logic of Mutual Assured Destruction is that both sides must believe that the other side might actually do it. But it’s also built on the assumption that the US president is not unhinged. Kissinger was so close to Nixon that the military accepted his judgement. The only people in the current White House who might be called upon to exercise the same kind of judgement are members of Trump’s family and John Kelly. But Trump doesn’t drink, so he would need to be incapacitated first.

From The Weekly Standard

“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” Bannon said Friday, shortly after confirming his departure. “We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over. It’ll be something else. And there’ll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over.”

Bannon says that he will return to the helm of Breitbart, the rambunctious right-wing media enterprise he ran until joining the Trump campaign as chief executive last August.

Mark Lilla sums it up:

“So it should come as little surprise that the term liberalism leaves so many Americans indifferent today. It is considered, with some justice, as a creed professed mainly by educated urban elites cut off from the rest of the country who see the issues of the day principally through the lens of identities, and whose efforts centre on the care and feeling of hyper-sensitive movements that dissipate rather than focus on the energies of what remains of the left. Contrary to what the centrist coroners of the 2016 election will be saying, the reason the Democrats are losing ground is not that they have drifted too far to the left. Nor, as the progressives are insisting, is it that they have drifted too far to the right, especially on economic issues. They are losing because they have retreated into caves they have carved for themselves in the side of what was once a great mountain.”

From The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, page 10.

See also Lilla’s acerbic NYT OpEd piece after the election, which began:

“It is a truism that America has become a more diverse country. It is also a beautiful thing to watch. Visitors from other countries, particularly those having trouble incorporating different ethnic groups and faiths, are amazed that we manage to pull it off. Not perfectly, of course, but certainly better than any European or Asian nation today. It’s an extraordinary success story.

But how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware of and “celebrate” our differences. Which is a splendid principle of moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age. In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.”

When pondering the policies of governments, it usually makes sense to assume that they are based on some kind of logic. Try as I might, though, I can’t make this rationalist perspective work for the UK government’s proposals for how the Irish border will be managed after Brexit.

And it turns out that I am not alone. The Irish Times columnist (and Princeton professor) Fintan O’Toole has written a coruscating piece about it. He summarises the May government’s proposition thus:

to understand how this seems to the Irish government and to most people on the island, imagine you are in a decent job. It is reasonably paid, apparently secure and the working environment is quite amicable. Your neighbour, who you like but do not quite trust (there’s a bit of history there) comes to you with a proposition. She’s establishing an extremely risky start-up venture with a high probability of catastrophic failure. Will you join her? Well, you ask, what are the possible rewards? Ah, she says, if – against the odds – everything goes splendidly, you’ll get the same pay and conditions you have now.

This is, in essence, what the British government is offering Ireland. If everything goes fantastically well, you’ll end up with, um, the status quo. Trade will “operate largely in the same way it does today”. The position paper is effectively a hymn to the way things are now. We don’t have a hard border, and we won’t after Brexit. We do have a common travel area that works remarkably well, and it will continue to go splendidly. The position paper takes existing realities and repositions them as a distant mirage, a fantastical possibility: less emerald isle, more Emerald City.

As with the whole Brexit project, the proposals for Ireland are credible only if you accept two mutually incompatible propositions: a) The UK is creating the biggest political and economic revolution since 1973; b) pretty much everything will stay the same…

The only term I can think of that describes the UK government’s approach to the Border issue (and perhaps to many other aspects of the Brexit process) is magical thinking, i.e. “the belief that one’s thoughts by themselves can bring about effects in the world or that thinking something corresponds with doing it.”

From an amazing interview with Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect:

Contrary to Trump’s threat of fire and fury, Bannon said: “There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”

Bannon went on to talk about his main obsession:

“To me,” Bannon said, “the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we’re five years away, I think, ten years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we’ll never be able to recover.”

Bannon’s plan of attack includes: a complaint under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act against Chinese coercion of technology transfers from American corporations doing business there, and follow-up complaints against steel and aluminum dumping. “We’re going to run the tables on these guys. We’ve come to the conclusion that they’re in an economic war and they’re crushing us.”

Terrific blog post by Simon Wren-Lewis. Worth reading in full, but here’s the nub of it:

It is an awkward truth that what many people wanted when the voted Leave is either simply impossible, or cannot happen without making everyone significantly poorer year after year. It is this reality that keeps the government in a fantasy world. Almost no one who voted to Leave is going to be happy with the result of government decisions. Those who wanted better access to public services will not get it. Those who wanted more sovereignty will find their sovereignty sold off cheap in a desperate attempt to get new trade deals. Those who wanted less immigration will also find their wishes largely frustrated because the UK cannot afford to reduce immigration.

The parallels with the US are clear. The Republicans, after spending years denouncing Obamacare, found they could not produce anything better. Those promoting Leave also did so without any thought to how it might actually happen, and therefore they have nowhere to go when confronted with reality. As a result, the government invents a magical customs union so that Liam Fox can have something to do. I have never known a UK government look so pathetic.

From This is what Happens when you let Trump be Trump by Jack Shafer:

The war for the “control” of Trump, that Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon, Javanka, H.R. McMaster, Anthony Scaramucci, and now John Kelly have waged, can now be said to be over. Nobody ever had a chance of taming him, of civilizing, of teaching him which fork to use to stab his political opponents. For months now, his supporters said that all of his problems would vanish if his handlers would just Let Trump Be Trump. They finally have, and this is what it looks like.

And also this from The Intercept:

So can we stop playing this game where journalists demand Trump condemns people he agrees with and Trump then pretends to condemn them in the mildest of terms? I hate to say this, but it is worth paying attention to the leader of the Virginia KKK, who told a reporter in August 2016: “The reason a lot of Klan members like Donald Trump is because a lot of what he believes, we believe in.”

So can we stop pretending that Trump isn’t Trump? That the presidency has changed him, or will change him? It hasn’t and it won’t. There will be no reset; no reboot; no pivot. This president may now be going through the motions of (belatedly) denouncing racism, with his scripted statements and vacuous tweets. But here’s the thing: why would you expect a lifelong racist to want to condemn or crack down on other racists? Why assume a person whose entire life and career has been defined by racially motivated prejudice and racial discrimination, by hostility toward immigrants, foreigners, and minorities, would suddenly be concerned by the rise of prejudice and discrimination on his watch? It is pure fantasy for politicians and pundits to suppose that Trump will ever think or behave as anything other than the bigot he has always been — and, in more recent years, as an apologist for other bigots, too.