Yesterday I mentioned this week’s episode of The Josh Marshall Show, my discussion with historian Timothy Snyder. We talk about his 2003 book The Reconstruction of Nations, the tumultuous evolution of states and national identity in northeastern Europe, Russian revanchism, radical nationalism and more. I really enjoyed this discussion and I hope you do too. Click here to listen.

President Trump whether he believes a “strong Europe is important for the United States”: “Yes, a strong Europe is very, very important to me as president of the United States and it is also in my opinion, in my very strong opinion, important for the United States. We want to see it. We will help it be strong, and it is very much to everybody’s advantage. I look very much forward to meeting the Pope.”

It’s notable that as normally understood, this sounds like a re-statement of decades-long US policy which President Trump, and especially candidate Trump, had departed from rather dramatically. Yet it is equally notable that this statement doesn’t include any explicit mention of the EU or NATO.

Trump at press conference with Italian Prime Minister: “A responsible approach to refugees is one that seeks the eventual return of refugees to their home countries so that they can help to rebuild their own nations.”

Maryland cops create new hate crime protected class (Trump supporters) to prosecute two black teens.

Let’s stop for a moment and note that President Trump and his skeletal foreign policy team have accomplished the fairly difficult feat of deeply alienating South Koreans (and seemingly many Japanese as well) while notionally protecting them from the threat of a militaristic and aggressive North Korea. Read More

I’m very excited about this week’s podcast. I talk with Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale. You’ve likely seen him in the news recently talking about his new book on authoritarianism. You may have read his book Bloodlands. But I wanted to talk about an almost 15 year old book called The Reconstruction of Nations.  Read More

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) is currently running four points ahead of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in the 2018 Texas Senate election – 35%-31%, according to a just released poll. I would not get too excited by these numbers. It’s very early. And those are incredibly low numbers for both candidates. That’s a huge number of undecideds. Read More

Sean Spicer got asked about the Carl Vinson mystery today. It was … well, it was sad. Spicer basically said ‘Oh, you misunderstood what we meant. Sucks to be you.’ (Actual quotes and more here.) That’s silly. Here’s what happened or rather what I think we can be fairly confident happened based on the totality of evidence and anonymous sources at the Pentagon reported in the press. (TPM’s Matt Shuham is just published a detailed timeline of the events in question here.) Read More

Those words in the headline are actually from an AP piece about how countries in Asia, enemies and allies, are seeing Trump.

Okay, we can’t quite call this a wrap yet. But it certainly looks like the Georgia 6th congressional race is going to a run-off. What does that mean? I was fairly pessimistic that Ossoff could win outright tonight. Would have been great if he could have, for obvious reasons. It looked doable early. But it wasn’t to be.

Here’s my takeaway. Read More