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The Republicans Are Bolting From The Felon

Numerous reports suggest that the Felon lives in an information bubble surrounded by sycophants only too happy to tell him what he wants to hear and to support his narcissism induced fantasies.  While many suspect he has an awareness to his horrible poll numbers - he calls them "fake" - he continues to push topics increasingly toxic with voters, including his war of choice with Iran, and does nothing to lower consumer prices even as survey after survey shows that affordability is the number one issue with voters. Indeed, Republicans are finding that whipping their voters into a frenzy over the transgender is a tough sell when constituents are paying over $100 to fill their cars' gas tanks.  With more and more prognosticators moving both House and Senate races away from Republicans, some Republicans are finally - and hopefully too late to save themselves - moving away from the Felon and in some instances scrubbing his name from their campaign websites.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the GOP flight:

A few tentative displays of independence among Republicans have expanded in recent days into a stampede, as candidates furiously distance themselves from [the Felon] President Trump ahead of the midterm elections. “This is shaping up to be a nightmare political environment for every Republican, everywhere—period, full stop,” one Texas-based political consultant told us, speaking anonymously to provide a frank assessment. Noting that gas prices across the country are on average $4.50 a gallon, the consultant described the atmosphere as “a fucking disaster for anyone in a competitive race.”

The contrast with the midterm elections of Trump’s first term is particularly stark. An October 2018 rally in Richmond, Kentucky, was a political show of force by a president whose hold on the Republican Party was as firm as bedrock. . . . . Kentucky Republicans have been fawning over Trump for the past decade. But now, as the war with Iran drags on and Trump’s approval ratings crater, even they are starting to keep the president at a distance. Barr, who is running for an open Senate seat, and Alvarado, who is running to replace him in the House, have each recently scrubbed mentions of Trump’s name from prominent portions of their campaign websites. Paul has been more vocal, repeatedly clashing with the White House over the Iran war and the ballooning national debt.

The notably lukewarm embrace of Trump from Republican candidates in Kentucky, a state that he won by more than 30 points in 2024, is just one indicator of the president’s loosening grip on a party he has dominated for the past decade.

Republican candidates seeking a reason to distance themselves from an unpopular president have a buffet of options to choose from. The war in Iran, which began almost seven months ago, has sent diesel prices to record highs. The United States is in an escalating trade war with Canada. The national debt, the elimination of which was once an obsession of conservatives, has ballooned to more than $40 trillion—and that’s before the $5,000 government checks Trump has promised to dole out if Republicans win. Inflation and interest rates, which Trump pledged to bring down, remain elevated. Gas and food are more expensive than they were a year ago, and mortgage rates passed 7 percent yesterday.

The [Felon's] president’s approval ratings on these and other issues are abysmal. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Monday found that his approval rating has dipped to 32 percent—the lowest that pollster has measured at any point in his political career. Only 17 percent of respondents said they approved of the president’s handling of the cost of living. Barring a major change in the Iran war or the price of diesel, his numbers aren’t likely to change substantially, the Texas-based Republican consultant said. Members of his party were hoping the dynamic would improve, but it hasn’t . . . .

The list of Republican candidates publicly noting their differences with Trump keeps growing. Many are in states where polls show tighter-than-expected races for the GOP. Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas spoke out this month about Trump’s calls to ban the sale of jets from the Canadian company Bombardier, whose U.S. headquarters are in Wichita. The Senate candidates Mike Rogers in Michigan, Ashley Hinson in Iowa, and Jon Husted in Ohio have each called for a swift end to the war in Iran . . . .

Even in Trump’s adopted state of Florida, which he’s won three times, candidates are bailing. Representative Byron Donalds, who is running for governor, recently updated his campaign website to remove multiple references to Trump—including a photo with the president and a banner noting that he was “TRUMP-ENDORSED,” the Miami Herald reported Tuesday.

Even red-state Republicans who are not on the ballot are seeking daylight between themselves and the president. Senator John Curtis of Utah this week called for an investigation into Trump’s son Don Jr. over corruption allegations, including concerns about a luxurious, days-long party for his wedding that was funded by a Russian oligarch. Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi on Wednesday took to the Senate floor to admonish the White House for giving “brutal” Chinese President Xi Jinping a “lavish welcome” to the U.S. this week.

“The midterms are going to be a fucking bloodbath, and we all know it and we all know why,” Representative Nancy Mace, a retiring South Carolina Republican, told us of the president she once enthusiastically supported.

Trump has demanded extreme loyalty. Stepping out of line was a rarity during the first year and a half of Trump’s second term, which began with a flurry of executive actions that left much of Washington shell-shocked. But Trump could demand fealty for only so long, Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, told us. “The cascading opposition to the president on multiple fronts now is important not just because of what it might represent for the midterm election, but more so because it reestablishes a kind of fixed point of orientation in the political universe again, . . .

Even as the evidence has mounted that Trump is dragging down his party, the president has highlighted the very positions that have made him unpopular. After it was already clear that public concern over data centers was endangering the campaigns of vulnerable Republicans such as Husted, Trump insulted communities that rejected the projects as places that wanted to end up “backwards and poor.” He has dismissed bipartisan efforts to rein in the dangers of AI, saying he wants technology companies to have freedom to develop what he has begun referring to as “super intelligence.” He has continued to defend the war in Iran—suggesting this week at the United Nations that he might annihilate the entire country—and minimized the economic cost Americans are shouldering as a result.

Trump has also repeatedly told voters to pretend that he was on the ballot. Democrats have been happy to oblige, mentioning the president in 66,000 airings of general-election ads since August 1, according to the political-ad tracking firm AdImpact.

Dozens of Republicans broke with Trump after the January 6 insurrection, only for many to return to the fold after he won office a second time. But for those who have been eager to see the party move on from Trump, the events of the past few weeks mark a potentially more durable shift. Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told us he has been watching the MAGA movement for a decade, asking: “When is this fever swamp gonna finally break?” He thinks the moment is now. Candidates have begun making the calculation that Trump is more of a liability than an asset, and are de-emphasizing their relationship with him. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen that,” he said.

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The Mistake Tearing Apart the MAGA Base

We may never know if the Felon launched his ill-conceived war of choice against Iran as a distraction from the Epstein files, due to false promises and assurances of Benjamin Netanyahu, or because he foolishly thought he could easily reprise his outward success in Venezuela.   Whatever the Felon's true motivation, the war against Iran is proving to have been a huge mistake from which the Felon has no viable exit strategy other than de facto surrender.  While the military situation is largely at a stalemate with Iran controlling the Strait of Hormuz, on the domestic political front the war is even a bigger disaster as gas and diesel prices soar and consumer goods across the board, including food prices, are taking a toll on the budgets of American families.  Most of the time the MAGA base appears to be detached from objective reality and the truth and the base is only too happy to believe the lies coming from the Felon's mouth and the propaganda streaming from Fox News. Yet, now with high gasoline prices, rising consumer costs and a war of choice against Iran going nowhere, the MAGA coalition, if you will, appears to be belatedly realizing that not only has the Felon broken his 2024 campaign promises, but their lives are materially worse off than on the eve of the 2024 election.  All because of the Felon's incompetence. A piece at the New York Times looks at the Felon's costly mistake:

It’s been six months since [the Felon] President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attacked Iran. There are now street protests over fuel costs around the world. But the price of oil is down below $100 again, as it has been for much of the war. In America, we are dealing with higher gas prices and some additional inflation, but given the loud warnings of economic catastrophe we heard in the spring, the economic impact looks relatively modest. As with the tariffs, the war has hurt the economy, but you could also be forgiven for whistling into the fall thinking the panic back in March was a story of the boy who cried wolf.

In politics, though, it’s a different story. There, the war has registered quite conspicuously, right from the start, and now hangs like perhaps the most obvious albatross among many around Trump’s neck. Only one-third of the country approves of Trump’s handling of the war, according to recent polling. But even worse is the effect Americans believe it has had on what they say is their most important issue — and what has become Trump’s worst one. Eight in 10 Americans say the war has raised the cost of living.

[W]hat we see in the polls from the first weeks of September is very clear: a big blue surge on top of what looked already like a big blue wave. Polling averages now put Democrats further ahead this cycle than in the major wave election in 2018. To me, the evidence suggests that Senate seats in Kansas, Iowa, South Carolina and Florida are in play.

The election is still weeks away, Republicans have oceans of cash to spend, and the path to a Democratic Senate always looked from afar like a tightrope walk. But Trump is unpopular, and trending downward. There is no sign of the much-hyped realignment of young, Black and brown voters this cycle — in fact it’s now an open question whether that realignment was really a blip or a mirage. And Democrats don’t even look like a party with a brand problem anymore, steadily surging upward in generic polling and doing even better when candidates are named. Yet what is perhaps most striking to me about the lay of the political landscape heading into the midterm homestretch is the way that among all of Trump’s vulnerabilities — his naked corruption, his malice on immigration, his paltry legislative achievement and his siding so blithely with A.I. accelerationists against a large majority of the country — the Iran war stands out.

The conflict has been a military humiliation, the world’s most expensive and imperious fighting force held at bay by the disposable drones and cheap missiles of a much lesser power. Eighteen U.S. soldiers have been killed, officially, and recent reporting suggests the number may be higher. Regional bases have had to be evacuated to protect American lives, the country’s missile and interceptor stockpiles are now woefully diminished, and conditions on U.S. ships have become a global embarrassment.

The war seemed needless at the outset — at best. Now it looks potentially endless, too.

That’s just the military side of things. At home, in six months of war, Americans have already paid more than $100 billion more for fuel than they would have in the absence of conflict — a Trump-branded surcharge that when annualized is equivalent to nearly 1 percent of G.D.P. The C.B.O. estimates that more than one-third of the increase in American inflation this year is the result of the war, . . . the Iran war may prove just as politically damaging for dramatizing his broken promise to lower prices.

This is new, and not just for Trump. For decades, even if the U.S. wasn’t very good at fighting remote wars, it seemed to feel confident embarking on them without worrying too much about domestic political blowback . . . The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has marked a profound shift of that dynamic, a lesser power expected to duck and cover quickly finding ways to impose costs on the American home front, as well. Look at the president’s approval ratings, and the pattern is remarkably clear. Overall, there is a step down in the spring of this year, coinciding with the beginning of the war. More telling is his approval rating on inflation and the cost of living. Inflation itself jumped in March and has stayed elevated since. And Trump’s net approval on those issues dropped off a cliff . . .

In January, 72 percent of Republican voters said they thought the economy had gotten stronger over the previous year. In September, the number is more than 40 points lower, at just 29 percent.

Not that long ago, liberal commentators in the Biden era spent years racking their brains to explain what was often called the “vibe-cession” — the reality that public sentiment about the economy seemed so much bleaker than the conventional measures suggested. The vibes have collapsed on Trump, too, and quite a lot of that collapse looks tied up with Iran.

Things may be about to get worse still. For six months, the economic effects of the war were muted by a lucky conspiracy of factors: fuel rationing across Asia, growing renewable capacity around the world, political jawboning of markets and the draining of global oil stockpiles, especially by China, whose cut to imports at the start of the war was so significant in this story that it’s been called the demonstration of a new geopolitical weapon. Even so, the gas price signal — that cartoonish standby of American politics — broke through. The price of gas has risen by 50 percent since February. Diesel is now at $6.50 a gallon.

The world’s oil reserves, many of which are already at historic lows, are rapidly approaching their floors. Last week, J.P. Morgan published a research note warning that it had no way to map the chaos of the fall to come. The election is little more than a month away.

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What Are Trump and Hegseth Hiding?

The Felon's war of choice against Iran remains at a stalemate with the Felon speaking of "annihilating Iran" - and committing war crimes - while a defiant Iran says it will not be forced to surrender.  As a result, oil prices are drifting higher again and average Americans are struggling with higher gasoline and consumer prices. Meanwhile, the Felon and the equally deranged Pete Hegseth are trying to hide from both the media and the American public just how severe the damage to U.S. bases in the Middle East has been.  A column in the New York Times looks at some of the destruction:

On Feb. 28, Iranian missiles and one-way attack drones rained down on food, fuel and ship repair depots at the base. High-tech command facilities were demolished. Living quarters were deemed virtually uninhabitable. No deaths were reported, but roughly 1,500 service members and family members were evacuated, leaving behind their vehicles, pets and belongings.

Nearly seven months later, the base that the military once called the busiest 152 acres in the world remains effectively off limits to nonessential personnel. “We’re not getting back in there anytime soon,” Adm. Daryl Caudle, the chief of naval operations, told one displaced sailor during an Aug. 31 global town hall held from Fort Meade in Maryland. “I just want to be completely honest with that.”

It’s not just Bahrain. American bases in Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan have been damaged by Iranian drone and missile strikes. . . . The bloodshed and destruction, a harbinger of America’s future fights, show the need for a long-overdue correction: The Pentagon must revamp how it positions its troops and equipment amid the proliferation of low-cost drones and precision missiles by America’s enemies.

Despite such widespread and severe damage, information on the scale of the damage has come not from the Felon's regime but rather satellite imaging and photos anonymously submitted by service members seeking to get the public to understand the magnitude of the mess the Felon and Hegseth have created.  That piece also notes that with the rise of drone warfare, America may need to rethink its approach to bases and technology.  A second piece in the Times looks at the regime's attempts at covering up it self-created debacle:

On Sept. 15, CBS News published a truly meaningful scoop. It obtained pictures of the extraordinary damage done to American aircraft and American bases by Iranian drones and missiles.

The photographs were astonishing. During my own deployment, I spent many days at Camp Buehring in Kuwait, and now parts of that sprawling base are in ruins. Places I recognized have been blown to pieces. And it’s particularly jolting to see the destroyed remains of American aircraft at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.

It’s an image that would have been unthinkable during the previous phases of our long war on terror.

While we’ve undoubtedly inflicted tremendous damage on Iran’s conventional military (its air force and navy barely exist, for example), the war has not been as one-sided as the administration has claimed. This was not supposed to happen because we are not supposed to be that vulnerable.

I strongly recommend reading my colleague W.J. Hennigan’s piece on the military impact of Iran’s attacks to better understand how much Iran has exposed American military weakness — a weakness that’s based on perhaps an outdated understanding of the nature of modern war.

I’m wanting, however, to talk about something else — something revealed in the second paragraph of the CBS story: “The images were sent to CBS News by active service members on condition of anonymity because of rigid media restrictions within the military.”

As one deployed service member told CBS News: “This is major damage to our bases that hasn’t been communicated to the American public. We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.” The fact that these pictures were leaked by active service members is significant — more significant than many readers might realize.

First, it’s important to note a few things. The Trump administration has waged this war differently from the patterns established by previous presidents. Not only did it attack Iran without any real public debate, without congressional authorization and without a U.N. Security Council resolution, it went to war in the midst of a campaign against the media unlike anything we’ve seen in recent American history.

As The Columbia Journalism Review reported this past summer, “Press conferences are rare. Pete Hegseth, the so-called secretary of war, takes questions only from friendly outlets. No mainstream news organizations have reporters embedded with U.S. military units in the Middle East. Pentagon sources are increasingly reluctant to talk to journalists for fear of retaliation from the administration.”

As a result, during the opening weeks of the war, Americans were robbed of any way of assessing its progress apart from the dueling news releases and statements from the two combatants. And given the administration’s propensity to lie, we had no way of discerning the course of combat.

The fog of war is always thick, and it’s made thicker by the need for secrecy to disguise combat operations. In this conflict, however, we’ve seen a level of secrecy, deception and outright propaganda that has made knowing the truth virtually impossible — until, at long last, the combination of leaks and commercial satellite photos made it impossible for the administration to maintain its spin.

Americans who were dissatisfied with government news releases and Hegseth’s boasts were reduced to chasing rumors and watching snippets of video on social media. You’d see clips and wonder: Is our naval base in Bahrain on fire? Did Iran destroy a number of American planes on the ground? Are its missiles and drones really getting through? And why is it continuing to fire so many missiles and launch so many drones if our military efforts have been so successful?

An administration that violated the Constitution and evaded democratic accountability in launching the war was now evading democratic accountability for its conduct of the war. Even if you support military action against Iran, it’s hard to argue that either its decision to start the war without Congress or its extreme deception and secrecy has benefited the war effort.

It’s a simple matter of common sense — and something that President Trump may soon learn this November — that beginning a war without public support (much less conducting it behind a veil of secrecy and lies) makes it much less likely that the nation will possess the will to prevail.

But Hegseth’s secrecy betrays a bigger problem — he’s breaking faith with the men and women who’ve volunteered to serve. By robbing them of the ability to tell their stories to the nation and the world, he’s not just silencing them, he’s further separating the military from the civilian population it serves.

The good reporters want to report the truth, and — crucially — good soldiers want the public to know the truth. In fact, it matters a great deal to them that other people know the truth and know their stories.

To hear Pete Hegseth describe the ideal soldier, you’d think of a special forces operator (think of a SEAL or member of Delta Force) in a MAGA hat. He’s a “high-T” bearded man who’s wearing cargo pants and a T-shirt that’s a size too small, all the better to show off his ink and his biceps. And this guy absolutely hates the media. To him, it’s weak and woke.

There are certainly people like that in the military, but in my experience they’re a minority even in the special forces community. . . . . And as citizens we need to hear soldiers’ stories. We need to know, as much as possible, what it is like to be on a patrol, wondering if and when the next blast is going to come. Or what it’s like to be under missile fire, hoping and praying that the interceptors can hit their marks or that the bunkers are strong enough to withstand a direct hit.

I am concerned that one side effect of the 25-year war on terror is the further creation of a warrior class of Americans, people who live largely separate from the rest of us, increasingly as disconnected from civilian life as civilians are from the military experience.

The side effect of this separation is that — for all the respect and honor we give them — we’re not cognizant of their sacrifices because we simply can’t grasp their experience.

That’s why good reporters matter, not simply because they can tell us the truth about military campaigns free from government propaganda but also because they connect soldiers and civilians. They allow us to understand one another. And when Hegseth cuts off soldiers from reporters, he isn’t just silencing reporters, he’s silencing soldiers. He’s suppressing the stories of the most meaningful and dangerous and traumatic moments of their lives.

[A]s we watch Trump flounder and fail, the flaws of rule by decree are obvious. He has no lasting legislative legacy. Many of his most important policy priorities are the legal equivalent of vaporware — they’ll be repealed the instant a new president is in office.

His war is floundering and failing as well, at least in part precisely because he skipped the constitutional process (the war would be difficult under any circumstances; Trump made it more difficult). A disgruntled nation (and disgruntled allies) are unwilling to bear the burden of a fight they didn’t ask for and that was imposed on them without their consent.

When I saw that CBS report, I heard the voices of men and women in uniform who wanted their stories known. They wanted us to see and know what they’ve endured, even if it doesn’t reflect well on the administration that sent them to war, or even on themselves.

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Is Trump’s Latest Press Attack Just Another Distraction?

One of the most exhausting aspects of the Felon's occupancy of the White House is the never ending chaos that the Felon foments, often many believe to distract from media coverage the Felon finds unflattering or too focused on the Felon's failures. Before the Felon insanely launched his war of choice against Iran, media coverage was drifting back to the Epstein sex traffic scandal in which the Felon appears to be immersed up to his eyeballs. The war and the huge adverse impact on energy prices and consumer prices across the board has quickly become an albatross around the Felon's neck that he cannot escape. His poll numbers are the lowest ever and some Republicans are belatedly recognizing that the Felon is becoming radio active with voters other than the hard core Kool-Aid drinking MAGA base.  Hence the need for a trade war with Canada that neither Americans nor Canadians want to distract the media.  Now, as piece at The New Yorker lays out, the Felon has declared war on major news outlets whose main offense has been to accurately cover the Felon's disastrous policies and war of choice.  Here are article excerpts:

In November, 2018, the day after midterm elections that went badly for the Republican Party, Jim Acosta, then a White House correspondent at CNN, questioned President Donald Trump about his messaging on immigration. Things quickly got heated. “I think you should let me run the country—you run CNN,” Trump interjected. “If you did it well, your ratings would be much better.” Trump tried to move on, but Acosta wouldn’t yield, even as an aide walked over to take away the microphone. Trump wasn’t done insulting him yet, either. “When you report the fake news, which CNN does a lot,” he said, “you are the enemy of the people.”

Hours later, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, announced the suspension of Acosta’s press pass, and, for good measure, falsely accused him of manhandling the aide who wanted the mike back. The episode was a big deal—a veteran Times reporter said that he’d not seen anything like it in more than two decades on the beat—but some pundits argued that Trump had manufactured it as a distraction, not only from the midterms, but from his decision, earlier in the day, to fire Jeff Sessions, his first Attorney General.

Late last week, just shy of another round of midterm elections that seem poised to go badly for the Republican Party, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he would be barring all of CNN from the White House, along with MS NOW and Politico, “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” (“Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow,” he added.) This, too, was a big deal, but, once again, various observers suspected that Trump was trying to shift focus from more pressing problems, such as the war in Iran.

History repeats itself, each time as farce—though, of course, some things do change. Back in 2018, MS NOW was still MSNBC and Truth Social did not exist. Acosta, for his part, has since left CNN and struck out on his own, taking advantage of the fragmenting media landscape to cultivate audiences as a commentator on Substack and YouTube; indeed, it was he, in this capacity, who warned New York about Trump laying the groundwork for a constitutional crisis. And, if Trump’s latest media ban is in part a distraction tactic, Acosta suggested that a looming constitutional crisis might no longer be the thing he’s aiming to distract from. As we have learned since 2018, Trump doesn’t fear crying havoc from center stage, klieg lights on.

Hindsight is 20/20, and the perception of Trump as the distracter-in-chief has, perhaps, always been an oversimplification; he may get too much credit for his powers of misdirection, or, at least, for their deftness and intentionality. In places, this framing persists . . . and yet, increasingly, it feels as if the attentional capture that should trouble us most is his own. Over the summer, “Regime Change ,” a book by the Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, portrayed Trump as stuck inside a warped information bubble. Natalie Harp, an aide known as the “human printer” for reasons that should be clear from context, has been identified as a key conduit to the President, and, sure enough, it was reported over the weekend (by, who else, CNN) that Harp had been showing Trump news clips—including, apparently, a displeasing graphic from Politico—right before he brought the hammer down.

Whether the ban was a masterful gambit or an unsupervised temper tantrum, its most revealing consequence—and, perhaps, point of contrast with Acostagate—has been in the strong reaction of the targets’ colleagues in the media. The response to Acostagate wasn’t tepid, exactly: CNN quickly sued to get back his press pass, in what the Times called “perhaps the most aggressive action yet by a news organization against a president,” and rival outlets—including, notably, Fox News—filed amicus briefs. The subsequent legal wrangling was a little convoluted, but a Trump-appointed judge, Timothy J. Kelly, preliminarily sided with Acosta, and the White House essentially backed down.

CNN, MS NOW, and Politico are now suing on similar grounds—citing the First Amendment, as well as failures of due process—and Kelly has been assigned to the case again. Trump has already pledged to appeal his ruling, which doesn’t convey much confidence, given that Kelly hasn’t issued one yet.

This time around, though, other news organizations have entered the fray with greater speed and force. CNN is one of five outlets in what is known as the “TV pool” that records and shares footage of Trump’s day-to-day movements; following the ban, the other four—CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox—announced an effective boycott of their duties.

Given Trump’s recent habit of putting his foot in his mouth and the “let them eat cake” vibes of opening a new helipad amid spiralling gas prices, the networks may have done him a favor. Still, as Erin Burnett, a host on CNN, put it on Monday night, Trump “feeds off being covered by the very press he says he loathes” and “cutting his mike is akin to cutting the air he breathes.”

The inaudible helipad footage was, at least, an on-the-nose metaphor for this idea, and for the broader impression that Trump’s grip on power is weakening. The very fact of the pool boycott strengthens this impression, too; it’s hard to imagine such resolve being shown, say, a year ago. I’ve argued before that seeking to accommodate Trump’s unreasonable behavior is a mistake, as he simply pushes and pushes until his targets eventually fight back. The line, apparently, has finally been drawn.

So far, so welcome. But even if Trump backs down on the ban or loses in court, his threats to the free press will persist. . . . This second Administration is taking other, more insidious steps, too: systematically restricting critical coverage of the Pentagon; detaining and deporting immigrant journalists in enforcement sweeps; aggressively seizing reporters’ data and electronic devices in leak probes; flexing once obscure arms of the administrative state, not least the Federal Communications Commission, to create a hostile climate for anti-Trump speech.

[A] victory for CNN, MS NOW, and Politico would be significant. But Trump probably has more paths to winning than does the press. The bans may or may not be a distraction tactic. Either way, they’re just one more thing to worry about. 

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The Press Is Not the Root of Trump’s Problems

All his life the Felon has sought media coverage and attention in order to satiate his narcissism and delicate ego.  However, the Felon always wants coverage to be flattering, always depicting him as a "winner", and never expose his errors since he views himself as a "genius" and smarter than everyone else. Now, with the media increasingly covering the Felon's failures in the Iran war and inability - or perhaps total indifference - to address or empathize with the concerns of voters (e.g., affordability and inflation), the Felon has declared war on the free press. A column in the New York Times argues that the current assaults on the free press are to distract the media from his many failures with the Iran war being perhaps at the top of the list of what the Felon wants the media to ignore. The Felon in reality has no one to blame for the adverse coverage because his own decisions and policies - think tariffs and trade wars and war of choice - have driven consumer prices ever higher even before soaring energy prices are factored in. In the real world, the Felon needs to grasp the reality that such media coverage may only worsen as laid out in a piece at The Atlantic:

[The Felon] President Trump is going through a rough patch—in foreign relations, in the economy, in the courts, and in election outlook—and he believes that he has found the culprits: CNN, MS NOW, and Politico. On Friday, Trump said he was banning the three outlets from the White House “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS” and warned that more bans could come. When he feels beleaguered, he tends to lash out at familiar enemies, especially reporters. The idea that negative coverage is to blame for his predicament is perversely flattering. But Trump’s true scourge is reality, not how the news is covering it.

Although the decision is part of a gradually intensifying attack on free speech, as I noted last month, it has drawn particular pushback. This morning, five major TV networks (including Fox News) agreed to suspend pool coverage of the president and White House events after CNN was blocked from its previously assigned spot in a pool rotation today. The three banned outlets also sued over their exclusion. How such a suit will fare is unclear; Trump banned the Associated Press from the White House press pool last year after it refused to adopt his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, and a lawsuit challenging the ban is still pending.

After Trump committed a Kinsley gaffe on Friday by calling his move “the ban on the free press,” he tried to clean up his spin this morning. “The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS,” he wrote, claiming that it “is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!”

This is nonsense. Trump has every right to hate the way he’s covered, but if the government has the power to decide what is fake and what is true, then the press is not free.

Trump’s post demonstrates his talismanic belief in the power of news coverage. The president himself has been obsessed with attention—how to get it and how to shape it—for his entire life, and he is a relic from an era when the media were so dominant, and had such control over the means of reaching an audience, that they seemed to shape reality.

He is not unpopular because of Politico, an outlet that focuses largely on Washington machinations, or because of MS NOW or CNN, two cable channels that—as he is fond of pointing out—have relatively small audiences for television. The media cannot be “failing” and all-powerful at the same time. Trump is unpopular because (to name a few big reasons) he is losing a war of choice to Iran, making inflation worse without seeming to care how voters feel, overreaching with draconian immigration enforcement, and focusing on vanity projects that don’t matter to voters.

Although the press has made many mistakes in how it has reported on the president, including giving him hours of uninterrupted TV air time in 2016, downplaying bigoted remarks, and “sanewashing” some statements, Trump has also received more intensive investigation and negative coverage than any president in American history.

Some of that coverage has surely been hackish partisanship—which is protected by the First Amendment too—but much of it has been earned. Newspapers, magazines, wire services, and TV networks have turned out a series of scoops about the chaos inside the administration, Trump’s policy errors, and the pervasive corruption around him. . . . . Trump would rather blame news outlets he does not like than confront the reality that some of those same voters are rejecting him because of his choices.

The president faces an additional risk in trying to ban these three outlets. He detests adversarial coverage, but he desperately desires attention. This afternoon, Trump spoke with reporters outside the White House. Usually, his comments are captured by the boom mics from the pool TV team, but without their presence today, he was inaudible. Censorship can silence anyone, it turns out—even the censor.

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The Felon and the End of American Exceptionalism

To be honest, I have never been a fan of what I view as the myth of American exceptionalism.  Under the Felon's second regime, the reality that America is not exceptional has been writ large and worldwide opinions of America have plummeted even as the Felon claims other nations respect him and his faux "golden age" of America.  Yes, America has done good things in the world, but it has much that is ugly in its history - slavery and genocide against Native Americans to name but two.  Under the Felon, the perception of America and the Felon have changed in very negative ways. As a piece in New York Times reports, America's image has cratered and while individual Americans traveling overseas may still receive friendly and respectful treatment in most countries, perhaps the majority of the world now views America as a threat rather than a "shining city on a hill":

Last spring, Pew Research Center released its annual survey comparing how Americans and others around the world view the United States’ global role. It wasn’t pretty. They reported, “In most countries, majorities say the United States does not promote peace and stability around the world and does not take other countries’ interests into account on matters of international policy.” Views within America’s traditional allies, the countries whose leaders Trump claims “stand up” to honor him, are particularly negative. The Pew poll registered huge declines in the belief that the U.S. is a reliable partner since Trump took office for the second time.

Results were even more devastating when it came to global views of Donald Trump in particular. In the countries surveyed, 76% of respondents said they had no confidence in his leadership of world affairs. Majorities above 70% disapprove of his policies on immigration, Venezuela, Ukraine, Iran, Gaza, Greenland and tariffs. Maybe Trump believes that equals respect.

Driving this perception are the Felon's assault on democracy on the home front while decades long allies are maligned and undermined and brutal dictators - think Vladimir Putin in particular - are coddled and given deference. The days of America leading and inspiring others by example are over - at least until America is rid of the Felon.   A long piece at The Atlantic by a professor of international affairs looks at the erosion of any basis for the claim of American exceptionalism. Here are highlights:

America’s days as the exceptional nation seem to be over. At home, President Donald Trump is weakening the foundations of representative government. In the rest of the world, he has set aside democracy promotion and seems more inclined to work with autocracies like China and Russia than with America’s traditional democratic allies.

While Mr. Trump’s assault on American democracy is both without precedent and dangerous, he is right to hold off on the promotion of democracy abroad and to reach across ideological dividing lines. Improving relations with China, as Mr. Trump will aim to do at his summit with its leader, Xi Jinping, on Thursday, is a must in an interdependent world.

Yet Mr. Trump’s dismissal of democracy promotion is flawed and out of step with U.S. history in one critical respect: By compromising America’s own democracy, and backing illiberal populists in other democracies, he is extinguishing the nation’s founding mission to change the world by example. The version of exceptionalism that long guided the nation mandated pragmatism abroad so that Americans could focus on advancing their democratic experiment at home. The settlers of the New World were to build a “city upon a hill,” as the Puritan leader John Winthrop put it in 1630, ultimately changing the world, but only by serving as a democratic model that others would follow. This is the version of U.S. statecraft that urgently needs to be resuscitated.

We are in a worldwide battle for hearts and minds. The future of republican government in the United States, and globally, hangs in the balance. As Mr. Trump oversteps executive authority, weaponizes the Justice Department and tries to cow the media, private sector and universities, the citizens of China, Iran, Russia and other autocracies are watching America’s democratic beacon flicker. . . . .The United States is squandering its ability to bend the arc of history toward more freedom.

Americans embraced a democratic messianism from the get-go. As Thomas Paine put it in 1776, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” But for the next century-plus, the United States sought to foster the spread of republican government by serving as an exemplar rather than by intervening abroad.

This patient approach to spreading democracy was the product of three main considerations. First, Americans were acutely aware of the fragility of their own experiment in self-government. President George Washington explicitly warned in his 1796 Farewell Address that ambition abroad, by centralizing power and requiring an oversize military, risked compromising freedom at home. Adams was also concerned that foreign wars, even if fought for the republican cause, risked changing “the fundamental maxims of her policy … from liberty to force,” tempting the nation to become “the dictatress of the world.”

Second, the nation’s leaders believed that republican government had to emerge organically and could not be imposed from outside. As Americans in the 1820s decided not to intervene in Latin America to support countries breaking away from European empires, Adams asserted that he saw “no prospect that they would establish free or liberal institutions of government” — a view that would prevail for decades.

Third, America’s leaders appreciated the need to navigate the world as it was, not as they might like it to be. As President James Monroe explained in 1823, U.S. policy toward Europe’s monarchies was “not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers; to consider the government de facto as the legitimate government for us; to cultivate friendly relations with it.”

By the late nineteenth century, this pragmatic and transactional brand of statecraft contributed to impressive results at home; Americans not only kept their republic, they turned it into a world power. The results abroad were more modest; only a handful of countries were beating a path toward liberal democracy by the turn of the century. But as the founders had hoped, the success of the American experiment set an example that others were starting to follow.

Beginning in 1898, America’s growing power and ambition lured it into the trap that Adams had warned against: Its idealist aspirations began to outstrip its strategic interests.

President William McKinley launched a war to expel Spain from Cuba and went on to annex Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and Pacific, asserting that he was acting “in the cause of humanity.” Less than two decades later, President Woodrow Wilson ordered a succession of military interventions in the Caribbean and Latin America, reportedly vowing that he would teach “the South American republics to elect good men.” He also guided the nation into World War I, declaring that “the world must be made safe for democracy.”

Americans quickly soured on these more costly efforts to export their ideals. The annexation of Spanish territories turned the nation into a colonial empire; the United States became an occupier, not a liberator. And despite victory in World War I, many Americans regretted entanglement in Old World rivalries, and the Senate rejected U.S. participation in the League of Nations, Wilson’s brainchild to keep the postwar peace. So began America’s interwar retreat and the abandonment of its idealist aspirations in favor of a stubborn isolationism.

During World War II and the Cold War, the United States finally arrived at a stable equilibrium between its strategic interests and its lofty ideals. To do battle with the Axis powers, Washington set aside its ideological misgivings to ally with the Soviet Union, but after vanquishing Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, it went on to democratize both countries.

Amid the Cold War, Washington formed sturdy alliances with fellow democracies while also working with autocracies as needed to contain communism, at times compromising its ideals. Yet the West ultimately prevailed not by defeating the Soviet Union on the battlefield, but by demonstrating the superiority of free societies and open markets, patiently waiting for the Soviet bloc to collapse from within.

As had happened roughly a century earlier, America’s idealist ambitions again began to outstrip its strategic interests after the Cold War ended. . . . At the same time, the triumph of capitalism stoked excessive confidence in the benefits of the unfettered marketplace.

These idealist illusions produced a succession of major setbacks for the United States. After 9/11, regime-change missions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya cost trillions of dollars and produced little good. The United States integrated Russia and China into global markets, expecting the expansion of their middle classes to liberalize their politics and tame their foreign policies. Nothing of the sort happened. Both countries have become more autocratic and more hostile to the United States.

In the meantime, a combination of automation and free trade has undermined the industrial-era social contract, hollowing out middle classes and political centrism across Western democracies. Mr. Trump and the world’s many other populists are a symptom more than a cause of the resulting anti-establishment anger.

We have come full circle. As during the founding era, American democracy is under threat from within. Meanwhile, republican ideals are in retreat; the world is becoming decidedly less free. And since managing an interdependent globe necessitates broad international cooperation, the United States again needs to navigate the world as it is, not as it would like it to be. . . . Mr. Trump’s Iran debacle will hopefully reinforce the due caution that Washington should exercise when it comes to trying to change regimes by force.

[I]n threatening democracy at home and supporting illiberal populists abroad, Mr. Trump is corrupting, not reviving, the original version of American exceptionalism. By imperiling the American experiment, and encouraging fellow travelers to do the same in their own democracies, Mr. Trump is certainly setting an example, but one that will decidedly darken the course of history.

Americans must urgently rescue their democratic experiment. Their ability to do so is critical to reversing the illiberal tide that is rising globally. Only if Americans get their own democratic house in order and demonstrate that democracy can outperform autocracy will they be able to ensure the arc of history again bends toward more freedom.

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