We woke up this morning to the news that President Trump is calling his purge of supposed disloyalists within the government good for America AND demanding that Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg recuse from any cases involving Trump.
It recalls the brilliant long-running episodic Slate series: “If It Happened There”
While overseas in India, President Trump not only confirmed reports of his disloyalty purge, he claimed it was good for the country.
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We’ve been overwhelmed by great emails engaging this debate about Obama and the rise of Trumpism, which of course is also a debate about the nature of the Democratic party at its heart. I am trying to make my way through them and choose if not necessarily the best (it’s hard to pick!) then the ones that pivot the conversation in an interesting or helpful direction.
TPM Reader JO makes a separate but good point …
JoinMy tuppence worth on this debate.
In assessing the role of the Obama administration in the rise of Trumpism, I certainly would agree that it cannot be attributed to policy failures as such. But neither was it an Act of God that Democrats were helpless to do anything about.
For those of you who are following the news of the spread of the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19), here are a few links that I find helpful.
Here’s a good article that gets at the real issues with predicting how strong a general election candidate Bernie Sanders would be. It’s different because it gets down into the specifics with real data. Indeed, what is particularly strong about it is that much of what it says people on both sides of the intra-Democratic debate agree on. (We’ll get to that in a moment.)
As I’ve argued, I don’t think you can say Sanders is unelectable or some kind of sure loser when a year’s worth of public polls show him beating President Trump. Current polls show Sanders and Biden both beating Trump by comparable margins. Until recently, they showed Biden doing somewhat better. But compared to all the other candidates they ran relatively similar margins against the incumbent President.
This article gets into the fact that even though the toplines are similar, they’re made up of significantly different coalitions.
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A few days ago I got into a rather intense spat with a longtime reader who became incensed with me after reading this tweet exchange.
Here’s the tweet, which is a reply to a tweet by Bernie Sanders.
JoinHere in the Editors’ Blog we’ve been hashing out a bunch of questions about the past and future of the Democratic party and just what’s going on in this primary season. If you’re a Prime member and in the greater New York area, please join us for an evening of drinks and discussion at our next TPM event. It’s on Thursday March 5th from 6 to 9 PM in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York. To purchase tickets click here and use the password TPMTALKS.
I look forward to seeing you there with our special guests.
8:48 p.m.: This was a moment …
"I bough … I got them." pic.twitter.com/cnWBySYmd0
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 26, 2020
8:34 p.m.: This is pretty wild. That’s all I’ve got.
8:20 p.m.: Jeez, that one fusillade from Warren on Bloomberg. I’m not sure, in the current dynamics of this race, that any of this will redound to Warren’s benefit. But these attacks on Bloomberg on merciless.
8:07 p.m.: Warren’s line here about why she’d be a better President than Sanders, let me say something about that. I tend to see all of this through the prism of who can beat Trump and who can build the largest political coalition. But when I think about who would likely be the best President in terms of actually using the levers of the presidency, I think Warren would be the best. It’s the mix of her deep grasp of policy and — something that is talked about much less — a deep understanding of the intricacies of how the federal bureaucracy works. Over her dozen years at the highest level of American politics she’s demonstrated that again and again.
8:06 p.m.: Yikes, that Putin line from Bloomberg.
That was a pretty messy debate. The moderators managed to tsk-tsk the candidates without actually controlling the time or keeping people on point. Many of the questions were trivial, meant to trip up rather than illuminate or simply gross. Asking the two Jewish candidates about whether to move the US Embassy in Israel back to Tel Aviv was a good example of that of gross. Asking Amy Klobuchar whether she’d bar US citizens from returning to the US to prevent the spread of Coronavirus was both dumb and trivial: a question meant to put a candidate on the spot for purely theatrical reasons.
But if it was a messy debate it was still a pivotal one.