I got an email about my post on Trump from an old friend Fred Block, a professor of sociology at UC Davis, and the author of pathbreaking books on the relationship between government and the economy. Here is what Fred wrote:

What a week. Who would imagine that Bannon would do the political equivalent of “suicide by cop” by calling Bob Kuttner? But I wanted to respond to your second childhood post about Trump.

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When Donald Trump won the presidency last November, I believed that he would grow into the presidency. I attributed his incendiary views on Mexicans or his past promotion of birtherism to campaign theatrics. He was looking for applause (votes). When he became president, he would be humbled by his responsibility to govern the entire nation (rather than energizing the faithful) and his role as world leader. He would still press some of his policies on trade, immigration, taxes, and infrastructure, but would do so soberly and with a view toward winning majority support.

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Am I the only registered Democrat to have mixed feelings over the defeat of Republican efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act? What happens now, I suspect, is that the Republicans and Trump administration will attempt to undermine the ACA through inattention from Health and Human Services (headed by an avaricious physician), lack of enforcement of the mandate from the Internal Revenue Service, and worst of all, an end to subsidies that allowed the insurance companies to offer lower-cost premiums on the exchanges. Republicans will blame Democrats and vice-versa. That’s better than denying coverage outright to millions, but it’s worse that what is going on now.

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I suspect that some TPM readers are going to disagree with David Goodhart’s assessment of the youth vote in the British election and with his view of Jeremy Corbyn’s politics. I have a somewhat different take myself on the youth vote. But there are two things that I want to point out in this interview that I did with him about British politics. First, he is absolutely right to remind us that Theresa May and the Tories got their highest percentage of the vote since 1983. They failed to live up to expectations. And May made a mistake in calling the election. But the Tories remain Britain’s leading party.

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I’ve never lived through a political period like this one. Even Richard Nixon’s second term had its intermissions, but the Trump presidency hurtles from one self-inflicted crisis to another. The result is that many pressing issues get overshadowed – from the fate of Obamacare (upon which the health coverage of 20 million or more rest) to continuing instability of the global economy, which suffers from huge trade imbalances and the unregulated flow of finance.

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In the last week of France’s presidential election, posters sprung up picturing Marine Le Pen with Donald Trump’s hairdo. The message was clear. Saying “yes” to Le Pen was saying “yes” to Trump. Ads also ran advising voters “ne vous Trumpez pas,” a pun on the verb “tromper” meaning “do not deceive yourself.” My suspicion is that Trump’s election did hurt Le Pen. I haven’t found any evidence from polling, but there is a telling succession of events that suggests a negative Trump effect.

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France’s results on Sunday are certainly welcome. In the December 2015 regional elections, Marine Le Pen’s Front National came in first in the first round with 28 percent. As late as this March, she was nudging 30 percent in presidential polls. If you figured that in the run-off, she would get some of the votes that might have gone to the conservative candidate Francois Fillon, Le Pen looked like she could get 45 percent of the vote. And who knows – a big terrorist attack, a scandalous revelation about her likely opponent, Emmanuel Macron, and she could be France’s next president.

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