Donald Trump recently proposed a dramatic tax reform plan that lowers the top income tax rate to 33% from the current 39.5%. It also cuts the tax on “pass through” income — the partnerships and S Corporations often favored by the rich — to only 15%. Media outlets have speculated about whether these measures could quickly pass Congress, if Congress remains in Republican hands. Trump himself suggested his proposed rates would change after they’re “negotiated” with the legislators, many of whom (especially Dems) would complain the cuts are regressive.

This is all silly. Trump doesn’t need Congress to effectively lower tax rates. All he needs is two words: “prosecutorial discretion.” As president, he could simply have his Internal Revenue Service announce that, while existing law seems to require the rich to pay at 39.5%, it will choose (as it must, given its limited resources!) not to prosecute any individual taxpayer who pays at least 33%. Same for “pass through” recipients who fork over 15%.

Of course, these taxpayers would have to comply with various other criteria that Trump’s tax authority will reasonably take into account: Have they used the proceeds to buy American-made goods? To invest in American factories that refuse to ship jobs overseas? To respect First and Second Amendment rights? All laudable goals! Those that meet those criteria — spelled out in some detail in the fine print — would be rewarded with a letter from the IRS to show investors, saying that they are in the clear.

The inherent executive authority to do this is “well established,” according to Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid.**

__________

** — Of course, Reid was commenting on President Obama’s action to give work permits to — and rule out prosecution of — “dreamers” and certain other undocumented immigrants who met his criteria.  But what difference, at this point, does that make?

[This was published on Breitbart.com on 7/29/16. Cross-posted here for completist reasons]

Notes on Hillary’s acceptance speech:

Beginning: Shaky! Calls Bill “my Explainer in Chief.”  The way she said it, it seemed a bit of a put down. More than a bit. With the required testimonial to Joe Biden and now-ex-Dem Bernie Sanders, the speech’s opening minutes were a festival of phoniness.

Dealing with economic anxieties: Mid-speech, Hillary finally got around to grappling with the fundamental source of conflict in this election the shortcomings of the economy.

And I’ve heard from so many of you who feel like the economy just isn’t working. Some of you are frustrated – even furious. And you know what??? You’re right.

But what’s the first plank in her platform for “good jobs with rising wages”? It’s an odd one!

I believe that our economy isn’t working the way it should because our democracy isn’t working the way it should. That’s why we need to appoint Supreme Court justices who will get money out of politics and expand voting rights, not restrict them. And we’ll pass a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United!

Seems as if Clinton’s wage-boosting efforts are … um, easily sidetracked. More fundamentally, the economy isn’t not working because our government isn’t working. The economy isn’t working the way it should because of large tectonic forces within the economy are conspiring to lower the economic return to labor, especially unskilled labor. Those forces are technology, trade, and (yes) immigration. Basically, trade outsources the jobs of (mainly) the less skilled; technology automates them out of existence — and then we import millions of eager, cheap immigrants to do the unskilled (and skilled) jobs that remain, as kind of a coup de grace to American workers. It’s not at all clear that politics — ungridlocked or not — can produce solutions powerful enough to significantly neutralize these forces (except maybe on immigration, where Hillary is on the wrong side).

Hillary does get around to proposing other possible nostrums:  Preventing corporations from getting tax breaks but “handing out pink slips.” (How?) Green jobs (one of Obama’s conspicuous failures, no?). “Comprehensive immigration reform” (which would have an especially depressing effect on wages if it includes the massive new guestworker provisions of the failed Gang of 8 bill). Profit sharing and a higher minimum wage (promising but limited). Standing up to China (Hillary’s details are as vague as Trump’s). Universal health care. A big infrastructure plan. This portion of the speech is such a jumble, with job-boosting policies so mixed up with other causes — fighting climate change, “a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions” — that it doesn’t give the impression of someone focused like a laser on the roots of the anger that led to Trump’s rise.

Anti-Trumpism: Hillary’s Trump bashing seems more successful — certainly more effective than Obama’s airy idealism of the night before. “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.” Arguably the best line of the night.

Self-humanizing: Less successful! Hillary’s self-history quickly degenerated into the policies she’s supported, and how she pursued them — “we gathered facts” — plus stock representative examples of ordinary Americans, the Ryans and Laurens who allegedly inspired her. In the show-not-tell department of character revelation Hillary wasn’t too strident but seemed more than a bit smug (which I suppose she has a right to be).

Smart moves: Embracing the Dallas police. Distributing lots of American flags. Talking about 9/11. But those are all no-brainers, aren’t they?

Overall: Expectations were low (at least around here). Hillary exceeded them. The speech will do her good (in large part by doing Trump harm). She seemed a plausible president, —  you could imagine living with her for four years, as long as you didn’t have to endure too many speeches like this one.  It will be a shock if she doesn’t retake the lead in national polls. But it’s a long campaign. Plenty of time to see how each candidate reacts under pressure.

Two other points:

1. “I alone can fix it.” Hillary repeatedly mocked this Trump claim as authoritarian. I don’t like it much myself. But there’s a sense in which it is true.  If, as Hillary claims, the power of money in politics is so great that good policies can’t get enacted, then it really is only a rich or wildly famous self-funder, one who doesn’t need to suck up to donors, who can fix it. Donor money was blocking political solutions — e.g., Wall Street regulations — before Citizen’s United, after all.

In fact, Trump said “I alone can fix it” in exactly this campaign finance context. (“When [the] Secretary of State rakes in millions of dollars trading access and favors to special interests [I] know the time for action has come. …I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens.”) It wasn’t a general statement of indispensability.

2) The new new Democrats:  Between this week’s celebration of ethnicities and the convention’s hodge podge of featured causes and the ‘Welcome GOPs” theme and the attempted Hillary character rebuild there wasn’t a lot of time or space for  … the old Democratic policy catechism. (Yes, health care. But welfare? Food stamps? Affirmative action? Unionism? Redistributive taxation — as opposed to ‘following the money’ to the top 1% to pay for things)? They’ve all kind of washed out in Hillary’s new Uniparty. Many of them won’t be missed. We’re down to policies proven to appeal to the middle, which is where a Uniparty more or less has to be.

Except on immigration, where there is a clear policy contrast between Hillary and Trump, and where a lot of the campaign, I suspect, will be waged.

Dem Convention Themes, Ranked:

1) “Welcome, GOPs!”

2)  Trump, gonif

3) The future’s so bright we gotta wear shades!

4) We are the World

5) Fuck Fishtown …

Trump’s speech:  Effective enough.

1) Reagan’s famous circuit-tested “The Speech” was all facts like Trump’s opening. Can be very powerful.

2) Smart decision to implicitly praise Obama (for putatively regretting appointing Hillary!);

3) ‘Americanism not Globalism’ — This section kind of skimpy. Trump seems to have chosen the more conventional law-and-order template. Not so interesting, but he’s not trying for tenure.

4) “Things will never change” vs. “things have to change.” Auspicious anti-reification theme! ‘The Democrats have explained the economy in various ways. …’

5) Hillary’s ‘Terrible, terrible crimes’ — a bit overstated, no? Terrible judgment, yes.

6) Not sure I like the ‘I’m the strong man who can defend you powerless people’ posture.  In a democracy, people aren’t powerless. Why not say that?

7)  “Abandon policy of … regime change.” Can’t say it’s substanceless.

8) “Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African-American and Latino workers.” OK, I’m happy. But Trump quickly goes back to talking about violence. Would prefer mockery of open-borders economic Polyannaism, like that of … Paul Ryan.

9) ‘Not alone any longer.’ OK, that resonates.

10) Any sellout on The Wall just got a bit harder;

11) Visa overstay issue is important to Latino voters — i.e. it’s not just the people (mainly Latinos) sneaking across the Mexican border who can bid down wages and take U.S. jobs.

12)  “Americans want relief from uncontrolled immigration. … Hillary Clinton is proposing mass amnesty, mass immigration, and mass lawlessness. Her plan will overwhelm your schools and hospitals.” Brexit-tested!

13) OK, the Steve Miller section’s over. Time to wrap it up. …

14) Promise to appoint “a person of similar views” to Scalia seems way more significant than Trump’s previously released list of judges (a list that he said could be added to later, meaning it didn’t restrict him much);  

15: “I will fight for you.” Bob Shrum wins again.**

[Posted yesterday at Breitbart.com, where the commenters don’t seem to like it much. They’re very strict! ]

_____

**–Though Trump adds, “and I will win for you,” which isn’t insignificant. The classic Shrum formulations — “I’m on your side,” “I will fight for you” — always seemed to implicitly acknowledge the futility of the Democratic effort to, for example, reverse growing income inequality or — more recently — wage stagnation.

This is the Coming Apart Song: I’ve been tuning in to country stations after ignoring them for years, and I’m hearing a lot of songs like this one (from 2012):

I wake up, put a dip in, crack a cold one
Put my boots and my overalls on
This is the country boy song
I like to gig frogs
I like to gut hogs
….

Chew it up, spit it out
Crack a cold one and tilt it back
I’m tired of these city boys runnin’ their mouths
If their truck gets stuck I ain’t pullin’ them out …

I keep a twelve gauge by my water bed
Cause the next trailer over lives a meth head, uh huh
And that ain’t biscuits he’s cookin’ …

Gettin’ country drunk in the back of my truck
The night is young I’ma gonna get messed up

Didn’t commercial, play-on-the-radio country songs used to reflect a confidence in down-home values (faith, work, marriage, cheating) that formed the sturdy foundation for the country? Now songs reflect a partly bitter, insular, defensive subculture that worries it may no longer be the foundation for the country, and reacts by getting drunk and … well, screw you. I hadn’t realize the full extent to which the music reflects these real trends. It’s Charles Murray in three chords, I tell you. Also Trump, of course. If he could turn the bitterness into something positive, that would be a considerable accomplishment. …

This week’s anti-Trump CW seems to be ‘he’s deranged.’ He rambles and digresses. He turned a one-day Star-of-David story into a three day Star-of-David story! He went off about a mosquito! He stepped on the Hillary email news.

My reaction: With one big exception, none of this is close to deal-breaking. Trump’s the high-risk, high-reward candidate. The potential reward: He’s right on at least four (4) big issues that the pros have been wrong about. 1) The need to moderate free trade dogma to make sure the left-behind unskilled have jobs and decent wages again; 2) Ditto immigration policy; 3) No radical reengineering of  Social Security or Medicare, the only secure framework many American have 4) Skepticism about neo-con military projects (e.g. wars). You don’t usually find those in the same place.

And the risk? Even if Trump is as loose a cannon as critics say, there’s a limit to the amount of damage he can do domestically (given the constitutional restraints on presidential power, among other things). If he’s as vindictive, authoritarian and foul-mouthed as Nixon but builds a wall, mandates e-verify, protects Medicare — well, that’s a good bargain.

The trouble is foreign affairs. The damage a loose cannon (or mere amateur) can do dealing with other nations is exponentially greater — and that’s before you consider the world’s stockpiles of nuclear weapons. A few month’s ago Politico produced a heavy-handed hit piece designed to scare non-expert readers about the possibility of Trump’s finger on the button. It scared me! Polls suggest this concern is shared by the voters. A recent Pew poll found Hillary favored on “making wise foreign policy decisions” by a 54-36 margin — impressive for someone who pushed the unwise Libyan intervention. A CNN survey mid-June found Trump beating Clinton 51-43 on handling the economy, but getting clobbered, 36-57, on foreign policy.

This seems like  a tough issue to defuse. A president may not be able to launch a late-night nuke strike the way he can launch a late-night tweet, but it’s close! There might not be a lot of time to deliberate. Trump seems the sort to question seemingly settled CW, as in ‘We have an advantage in nukes. Why not use it?”

Still, there are probably ways for Trump to put voters minds at ease. The most obvious way: through his vice presidential pick. Certainly defusing the finger-on-the-button issue seems more important, for Trump, than almost anything else he might practically be able to achieve through his pick of a #2.

What sort of #2 would do the job? Well, a proven military figure, most obviously–someone used to making these sorts of decisions and willing to stand up to a mere politician. Some of the names are familiar — McChrystal, Petraeus (both abandoned by Obama), McRaven, Nicholson,, Votel. The much-rumored Gen. Flynn. Or maybe a military-adjacent terrorism expert  like former CIA official Mike Morell. ** Most may not be willing to run with Trump. His job is to find the one who is — and to build from there a foreign policy team that will convince enough voters that under Trump a) we won’t accidentally start wars; b) we won’t intentionally start “stupid wars;” c) we will have a relentless and focused strategy against ISIS.

Ann Coulter, in a recent column, disagrees. She argues Trump should name someone who agrees with him on the main animating issue of his campaign — immigration control:

How is Trump going to find a decent running mate from among the Republicans who have gotten ahead under the old model of sucking up to donors and lobbyists?”

Of course, a general wouldn’t have gotten ahead that way. And before Trump can try to control immigration, he has to win. Maybe Trump could find a two-fer general who agrees with him on immigration — you wouldn’t think the armed services would be a hotbed of open borders sentiment. But if he can’t, he should settle for a respected military or defense figure who can guarantee foreign policy acceptability, especially nuclear surefootedness. There are things more important than immigration. (If you quote me on that I will deny it.)

__________

** — Yes, sources I trust fed me these names. I’m not a defense expert.

More anti-Brexsteria from Krugman: “[W]e aren’t seeing the kind of financial disruption so widely predicted.”

I’ve been noticing more advertisements featuring interracial couples. Seems like a welcome and long overdue trend. But it’s almost always a white man and a black woman, not the other way around — an imbalance with powerful and still semi- taboo explanations . This video for the laudably weird new Rolls Royce concept is the rare exception. …

If Rogoff’s serious … : Economist Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard argues that Brexit should have required a supermajority vote — say, 60%.

But what, exactly, is a fair, democratic process for making irreversible, nation-defining decisions? Is it really enough to get 52% to vote for breakup on a rainy day? [Emphasis added.]

Hmm. I can think of an even more* irreversible and nation-defining decision that we make by ordinary majority rule** — the decision to admit large numbers of new immigrants to (in due course) become citizens. It’s irreversible because once they are citizens we can’t un-make them citizens (and in practice they will not be kicked out before then).*** It’s nation-defining because new arrivals bring their culture with them, and culture is extremely important in defining a nation. If we somehow let in 80 million misogynsts we’ll have a very different country than if we don’t.

So should proposals that would dramatically increase (or reallocate) the number of new citizens — like the Senate’s now-defunct “Gang of 8 bill” or the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act — require a Rogoffian supermajority? Sixty percent of the House? Two separate majority votes two years apart? I’m warming up to this line of reasoning.

[via @FelixSalmon]

__________

*– I would say “more” irreversible because, as we are learning. Brexit may not have the finality it appeared to have before last week’s vote. It’s not hard to conceive of circumstances in which the EU would be happy to take the UK back in. It’s inconceivable (I hope) that a class of law-abiding U.S. citizens would be stripped of their citizenship and removed from the country.

**–Yes, a supermajority is normally required to survive a filibuster in the Senate. But a) that’s the ordinary procedure for approving any law, not just “irreversible, nation-defining” laws; b) it’s not a constitutional rule — it’s an in-house Senate rule that can be eliminated any time via the “nuclear option.” Hardly sufficient protection against majority whim! And c) it doesn’t apply in the House.

***–A decision not to admit new immigrants, in contrast, is quite reversible (by admitting them).

Obvious point: Trump’s obsessive, unfiltered tweets seem to offer a direct view into his mind. We may like what we see, we may not. But at this point, many voters probably feel like they know him, the way they might know their archetypal crazy old uncle.

Hillary’s tweets are written by committees. In speeches, her personality is masked. Nobody can feel like they really know what’s going on in her mind.

Trump is the devil we know. Hillary is the potential devil we don’t know. Voters often pick the former over the latter.

P.S.: 1) That’s another reason why it would be fatal for Trump to start waffling on his signature commitments: build The Wall, renegotiate trade deals, etc. It would not only alienate those who liked those commitments — it would also mean (even to voters who don’t care about The Wall) that we don’t really know him after all, that we’re in uncharted territory. 2) Hillary could be saved from the troubling fear that we don’t really know her deepest thoughts and impulses if voters conclude she has no deepest thoughts and impulses. There’s no devil there. Devils don’t live in vacuums. …

Cold, cold take: Paul Ryan says Donald Trump’s attack on Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge hearing the Trump University lawsuit, is “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” Ben Sasse tweeted that “Saying someone can’t do a specific job because of his or her race is the literal definition of racism.”

Literal definition? Isn’t the literal definition of racism claiming that someone is inferior because of their race? That wasn’t what Trump seemed to be saying at all. He was accusing Judge Curiel of something else, namely frailty, a universal human condition.

We all have biases and conflicts. We usually struggle to overcome them. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we don’t. Judges, who are supposed to be “impartial,” have a special mandate to engage in that struggle. Trump’s saying that Curiel, in this lawsuit, has failed to overcome them and is biased against him. (Certainly the media, as Ann Coulter notes, has said it’s practically Curiel’s duty to be biased against Trump.) ** But you could levy a similar charge against Einstein or Gandhi in the right circumstances. We’re not Vulcans. ***

What Trump said might have been false — I don’t know if Judge Curiel’s rulings were biased or not. It was certainly offensive to Curiel personally. Even if true it was probably stupid, as a litigation strategy. (Trump’s not going to get Curiel taken off the case, and it’s usually not a good idea to piss off the trial judge at your trial.) The comments may have been very bad politics. You can even say they were unhinged (Trump did go on for a while). But on their face they weren’t racist.

It’s pretty clear something else is behind the hyperbolic righteousness of the GOP outrage: either a desire of pols like Ryan to posture distance themselves from Trump politically, or to actively undermine him — maybe in the hard-to-kill hope for a last-minute-sneak convention substitution. Or to simply find what Lindsey Graham called an “off ramp” from participating in his campaign. Fine. They’re allowed. But let’s recognize it for what it is.

_____

** — Justice Sotomayor, when wising Latina, seemed to go even further (Coulter and others note) suggesting

“Whether born from experience or inherent physiological [yikes!] or cultural differences, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.”

It’s not fair to impute these controversial views — she talks of “basic differences in logic and reasoning” — to Trump. I’m not sure it’s even fair to impute them to Justice Sotomayor, who’s struck a different tone on other occasions.

***– Trump isn’t claiming Curiel’s not qualified to be a judge — that he’s not perfectly capable of, say, handling a complex bit of litigation involving someone who isn’t Donald Trump. And he’s not saying that all judges of Mexican heritage would be biased the way he claims Curiel is. He did (at least according to the Wall Street Journal) argue that Curiel’s ethnicity was an “inherent conflict of interest” (given that “I’m building a wall” on the Mexican border).  If Trump means that all judges of Mexican descent should be disqualified from his case — something he didn’t say — he’s proposing a seemingly impractical prophylactic rule in a multi-ethnic society. There are conflicts that are so great we assume nobody will believe a judge was able to transcend them, however. (If a judge owns substantial stock in a company, for example.) It wouldn’t be racist to think ethnic conflict is one of them.

Wrangling the Renegade candidate:
1. Get me @MittRomney!
2. Get me @DavidAFrench!
3, Get me a @DavidAFrench type!
4. …

My fellow Washington Monthlyite James Fallows mocks Trump’s claim that  “illegal immigrants are taken better care of than our veterans.” This is “not true,” Fallows says, “and no one who has thought about it for more than one second could imagine otherwise.” He points to the GI-Bill and federal hiring preferences, but runs into trouble when he hits health care and the VA. Fallows writes:

The VA hospital system has had numerous, serious, well-publicized problems. On the other hand it exists (unlike some notional Illegal Immigrants Hospital System), and before the recent scandals it was often studied and cited as a model of progressive medical practices. Many millions of veterans receive medical care through the VA. Illegal immigrants are not eligible for Medicaid, Medicare, treatment under Obamacare exchanges, or most private insurance coverage and generally rely on emergency rooms or cash-up-front treatment centers. ** [Emphasis added.]

Jim! So before we discovered that VA care was scandalously awful, we thought it was a model!*** And before we learned we were losing the Vietnam war, we were told we were winning it! How is that evidence against Trump, as opposed to those who did the studies? Given what we know now about veterans’ health care, it’s entirely possible that illegal immigrants who are treated in emergency rooms at good hospitals wind up getting better care than vets who play by the rules at the VA. Indeed, I’ve talked to enough liberal, compassionate doctors who rage about all the expensive, unpaid care illegals get that their patients can’t get — one of these docs was attending a Dem event at Matt Miller’s! – to suspect that this indeed the case. Trump is onto something.

P.S.: It doesn’t seem very Washington Monthlyesque to take the existence of a large bureaucracy as evidence citizens are being well-served, or to believe studies of various officially reported outcomes — which in the VA’s case turned out to be crude examples of what TWM founder Charles Peters called “Washington Make-Believe” — over actual accounts of what is happening on the ground.

Update: If you listen to the audio, Trump actually said: “And in many cases, illegal immigrants are taken much care, really are taken much better care, by this country, taken care of than our veterans.” Fallows leaves out Trump’s initial qualifier. If you stick it back in, what Trump said is almost certainly true.

Backfill: D.A. King wrote about the disparity in 2007 — including the 2003 introduction of a means-test for VA care (and why you don’t want to wind up in “Category 8g”).

Alert Reader Alert: If you have experience, positive or negative, with veterans’ care — or with illegal immigrant care, for that matter — please write about it either in the comments below or on Twitter.  That seems like the fastest way to get at the truth. Thanks.

____________

**– What Fallows doesn’t say: Illegals can get free federally-subsidized care even if they don’t qualify for Medicaid under a program called “emergency Medicaid.” This includes maternity care and (in some states) dialysis and chemotherapy. I’m not saying they shouldn’t get it (or should get it). I’m saying it might be better than VA care, or other care that vets get.

***– Even before the scandal broke, Reason’s Peter Suderman criticized Paul Krugman when Krugman touted the VA as a model of “progressive” care. Suderman’s piece describes the VA’s “priority group” system, which, even on paper, makes the agency more useful to some vets than to others. Maybe Trump was talking about the others.

The new kausfiles.com has passed 1,000,000 views. And it’s more profitable than Yahoo! Thanks

Politics and Pros: The NYT says “Donald Trump’s Campaign Stumbles As it Tries to Go Big.” Evidence of the stumbling? 1) Trump met with “dozens of female chief executives and entrepreneurs” last week but “never publicized” it! Instead of putting out this staged campaign news, Trump put out real news (that he’d fired political director RIck Wiley, the man who crash-landed Scott Walker’s campaign.) 2) Trump only has one communications aide. One! Why, Hillary has “a press team of more than a dozen, including people devoted solely to the news media for black and Hispanic audiences”! 3) Trump hasn’t yet violated the spirit of the campaign finance laws by “unofficially” anointing a particular super Pac (a campaign organization he’s technically supposed to be independent of).

This will not do, warns the only critic quoted in the piece– trained seal GOP strategist Scott Reed, the genius behind Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign, who more recently pushed immigration amnesty (with similar success!) for the Chamber of Commerce, and generally represents everything Trump has opposed in the primary. “Mr. Reed stressed that Mr. Trump needed to grow — and fast.”

Reporters Ashley Parker and Maggie Haberman seem guilty here of “pro-ism,” sneering at those who don’t do what political professionals have always done, whether or not these things are all that effective or in the public interest.** It’s an especially odd attitude to see in the Times, which would be quick to laud (in its editorial pages, at least) a campaign — say, Russ Feingold’s –that didn’t have a super PAC. And if bloated campaigns and daily staged “messaging” were the keys to electoral success, Jeb Bush would be the Republican nominee (and Chris Lehane would be David Plouffe).

Maybe when it’s all over Parker and Haberman can write a long magazine takeout complaining that modern campaigns are too fake and dependent on donations. …

_____

** — I noticed this attitude when I ran for Senate — various kibbitzers would snicker if you didn’t end every ad or leaflet with the precise correct campaign disclosure, in the precise mandatory size font, as if ability to comply with unnecessarily complex and arguably unconstitutional rules were the main test of seriousness  (and voters couldn’t be relied on to assume that a leaflet saying, say,  “Vote for Kaus” came from Kaus).

I’ve always thought Trump could win. I’d still take whatever odds are out there. But here’s a wrinkle I hadn’t considered until prepping for today’s Ricochet Podcast: The campaign is going to last forever! The Feiler Faster Thesis already says we can pack an unprecedented amount of drama in a short period of time. But Trump is really putting this theory to the test. He seems to feel he has to launch a new front page story every day. Hillary’s forces (including the NYT) are firing back as if it’s October.

In a campaign of normal length, Trump would probably win the fight. (He seems to be winning now.)  The trouble is, at this rate we’ll have run through a normal campaign’s worth of thrusts and parries by the middle of next month– and there’ll still be five months still to go. That will force voters to learn what is like to live with each of the candidates, and weigh their flaws and virtues with special thoroughness. Hell, by September it will seem as if Trump’s already been president for a year. That means attacking him over last fall’s insults may not work — after all, they will have been a looong time ago, and now we’ll know the guy. If voters turn out to like living with their Daily Trump, he could easily be ten points ahead by Labor Day. But we might also tire of his personality the way … married couples do the way voters typically tire of a President about halfway through his first term. (That habit that seemed fine at first — the Bush loyalty fetish, Obama’s straw men — now grates.)  In particular, I suspect Manafort Trump will not wear so well. … And the constant hints of future sellouts “moderation” could eventually sap Trump’s disruptive aura, as would repetitive attempts to reacquire it.

P.S.: Why won’t the same thing happen to Hillary? It will. But Hillary’s less salient — she isn’t the primary moving force in the drama — and she’s already a familiar figure. We know how dreary she can be to live with (hard to see how she can fail to improve on expectations). Trump’s the new roommate, if you will, with the most to win or lose. At the moment, the race seems like a referendum on him. …

T.A. Frank, who wrote an eloquent piece criticizing the Gang of 8 bill (mainly from the left) for The New Republic, notes that Hillary’s Hispander war with Sanders has left her waaay out of even the turbulent mainstream on immigration –– she seems to have basically promised not to deport anybody except those who’ve committed violent offenses or drug crimes: 

[U]nder Clinton’s policy, if you manage to sneak across the border illegally and make it into a city, you won’t be removed. You could call that open borders, except it’s messier. It’s more like a free-for-all …

I suppose the question is whether Clinton squirms back to a less extreme promise before Trump clobbers her with her current position …

P.S.: When I reread Frank’s 2013 TNR piece, I noticed this eloquent, on point paragraph — worth reprinting because it shows that worry about uncontrolled immigration isn’t really a “right-wing” concern:

The country I want for myself and future Americans is one that’s prosperous, cohesive, harmonious, wealthy in land and resources per capita, nurturing of its skilled citizens, and, most important, protective of its unskilled citizens, who deserve as much any other Americans to live in dignity. This bill threatens to put all of that out of reach, because it fails to control illegal immigration.

No place for that in Hillary’s campaign?

Don’t Tell Trump: Tuberculosis is another communicable disease that seems to be on the rise in the U.S., along with Chagas disease and enterovirus — with scientists and journalists seemingly befuddled as to what might be behind the increase. It’s a mystery! But the following buried sentences in the Tribune News service’s report may contain a clue:

Today four states – California, New York, Texas and Florida – have more than half the nation’s active TB cases, though they have only a third of the country’s population. The four states have the highest numbers of foreign-born residents. The number of cases in Texas rose 5 percent to 1,334 last year.

We must all ask ourselves the question: What would Facebook do? kausfiles.com/2016/05/13/the…

Even apolitical owners of big, mainstream media outlets typically don’t like to bring up the immigration debate. At the very least  it’s “divisive.” More important, reporting on, say, support for a border wall could alienate new, growing blocs of ethnic consumers that businesses (especially newspapers) want to reach. But it’s not easy to write long, important thumbsuckers about Trump’s primary victory without even mentioning the issue that both launched his campaign into prominence and fueled its continued rise.  Luckily, America’s premier journalists are up to the job. Let’s pause to honor three of them:

— Ron Brownstein of the Atlantic numbs the mind and tests the bladder with “How Trump Rose to Power,” an extensive, tedious listing of which groups went marginally more for Trump and which didn’t, without any hint of why they went one way or another. The word “immigration” only appears in a little sidebar box giving results of a poll suggesting it was Trump’s best issue, something Brownstein cleverly ignores. Whatever corporations are funding his elaborate “Next America” boondoggle project should be relieved.

— Jim Rutenberg, who replaced the late David Carr at the New York Times, tries to explain why the press failed to anticipate Trump’s rise. He highlights one early harbinger of turmoil, Eric Cantor’s 2014 defeat, which he describes like this:

 A conservative economics professor and political neophyte named David Brat decided he would challenge the House Republican majority leader Eric Cantor for his Virginia congressional seat. There were few Republicans more powerful than Mr. Cantor, so Mr. Brat’s bid seemed quixotic. Mr. Cantor’s own pollster released numbers days before the election showing a 34-point lead for the congressman, and the closest public poll showed Mr. Cantor up by 13 points.

When Mr. Cantor lost, headlines labeled it an “earthquake” and a “shocker.” And it was, for people who relied solely on polls. It was less so for reporters — like Jake Sherman of Politico, Jenna Portnoy and Robert Costa of The Washington Post and the staff at Breitbart News — who went to Virginia, and talking to actual humans, picked up on the potential trouble for Mr. Cantor.

I don’t know, doesn’t that seem as if those grafs are missing something … like the biggest issue in the race: the Gang of 8 immigration amnesty bill, denounced by Brat’s supporters — an issue Cantor tried desperately to defuse? But really, there’s no need to mention substance when we can focus on the process. We all have to ask ourselves the question: What would Facebook do? … P.S.: Rutenberg also perpetuates the bogus idea that everyone failed to anticipate Trump’s success: “Wrong, wrong, wrong — to the very end,  we got it wrong.” What you mean, “we” …? Lots of people (mainly people who recognized the power of the immigration issue) got it right.

— Howard Kurtz of Fox dashes off a piece on Trump and the “working-class Americans who helped power [his] bid” without mentoning you know what. Of course, “Trump’s appeal to [working class] voters is often described in economic terms,” he notes. But who wants to spend time discussing that (e.g. the waves of immigrants who are plausibly said to have lowered their wages)? The culural aspect is much more interesting! They’re sick of being told to ‘check their privilege’ by Ivy Leaguers, for example.

Kurtz is no fool. He knows the Murdoch network’s tradition of downplaying the immigration/amnesty issue (even when no longer trashing Trump). He can mention trade (twice). But not that other thing.

So who’s the winner of the Omerta Olympics?  I’d have to give it to Rutenberg.  Kurtz and Brownstein have bosses to please. But Rutenberg’s still in the honeymoon period of his new job; he could have gotten away with a little disruption. Instead, he played it safe, issuing a stirring plea for more “on-the-ground reporting.” (If only they’d sent some reporters to New Hampshire.)

P.S.: Additional nominations accepted. ... Update: Alert readers suggest Megan McArdle, whose uncharacteristically blinkered post-mortem lashes anyone who hindered the inevitable victory of Marco Rubio, “the only candidate who could plausibly unite enough of the party’s factions to stop Trump at the voting booth.” It’s a formidable exercise in Omertism– I mean, wasn’t there some issue, some piece of legislation championed by Rubio that held him back in the primaries? Psst. Ang-of-Eight-gay! McArdle ignores it, dismissing the actual electorate as “celebrity” voters who don’t care about policy. …

P.P.S.: New York‘s Jonathan Chait, like Rutenberg, sets out to explain why “almost everyone” failed to predict Trump’s win. His conclusion: “The Republican Party turns out to be filled with idiots” — e.g. voters who unexpectedly didn’t see through Trump the way, say, Jonathan Chait sees through Trump. Never mind that this isn’t so much an explanation as a restatement of the problem — it’s Chait’s job, after all, to anticipate the behavior of voters whether it’s idiotic or not. Why did they so disappoint him and confound his expectations? It’s a mystery–since Chait doesn’t mention immigration either. …

I think we know why they blew it.

Shy Trumpies? The NYT’s Nate Cohn notes Trump has outperformed his polls in the last handful of states.  Cohn speculates this shows “a significant shift in Mr. Trump’s favor over the last month.” What about something else … something that was talked about (somewhat pissily) in December but seems to have been forgotten — though it was raised in the past few days by Michael Walsh and alert kf reader M.S.. Don’t want to say its name. ..

P.S.: I know the “Bradley Effect” is the conceptual last resort of likely losers — i.e., those behind in polls. But here are the last six primary states, with the percentage Trump got in excess of his final RCP poll average:

New York +7 (Polls–53% Actual–60%)

Connecticut +5 (Polls–54% Actual 59%)

Delaware + 8 (Polls–55% Actual–63%) **

Maryland +9 (Polls–47.7% Actual–56.5%)

Pennsylvania +10 (Polls–48% Actual–58%)

Rhode Island +12 (Polls–52.3% Actual-64.7%)

Sense a pattern? Certainly with David Brooks, George Will, and others banishing Trump voters (“tainted forever after” … “quislings”) and others vowing to maintain blacklists, there are plenty of reasons for at least upscale Republicans to not want to confess Trump symphathies to strangers.

I’m not saying this means Trump will be competitive with Hillary in the voting booths. But it seems wise to increase your margin of doubt about his poll numbers. …

__________

** — Only one RCP-listed poll in this state.

The New Venice, Part XVIII: I parked my near my house at 3 A.M. the other night. As I was about to shut off the engine, I looked in the mirror and  saw someone coming up the sidewalk behind me — then, suddenly, they open the door and try to get in the rear seat. I’m terrified, and floor it, leaving a skid mark and perhaps this person’s dismembered arm dangling from my rear door handle. …. Only when I’ve parked several blocks away and calmed down do I realize what probably happened: They thought I was their Uber. … Arianna, fix this problem! …

Wherein lies greatness of Mike Pence? Indiana governor Mike Pence, who just endorsed Cruz, is also the  author of the Pence Touchback Amnesty Scam! [Search for “Pence”] (Unfortunately, Newt Gingrich — who seems to be angling for influence in a Trump administration — embraced a similar scam when he ran for president in 2012.)  The key question, of course, is whether any amnesty (touchback or straight-no-chaser) comes only after essential border control measures (mandatory e-Verify, a border wall, a visa control system for starters) have survived court challenge and have been thoroughly up-and-running for long enough to send a message to would-be future illegal migrants. With Pence, the answer was clearly “no.” His plan was a gimmick to sneak a “comprehensive” Amnesty-First bill through Congress. …

Perfidious Rafael? The competition to come up with a better Trumperic epithet for Ted Cruz than “Lyin’ Ted” yielded these suggestions:

1. Creepy Ted 2. Sneaky Ted 3. Cheatin’ Ted 4. Dirty Ted 5. Tricky Ted 6. TwisTed 7. Cryin’ Cruz  8. Shifty Ted 9. Slippery Ted 10. Two-Timing Ted

I’m partial to #3, “Cheatin’ Ted.” Throws a net over Trump’s process complaint — that Cruz is trying to unfairly deny voters their choice — while flicking at that (unproven) National Enquirer story. The latter subtlety might get Trump in trouble, though, precisely because the Enquirer‘s evidence was so thin (which is also why #10 is over the top). ….Number 5 works, but its Nixonian echoes would distract more than they’d amplify — “Was Nixon really like Cruz? Hmm. I’ll get up and get a beer and think about it.” …. That leaves #2, #8 or 9. They accurately capture Cruz’s semi-clever keep-the-options-open positioning on the issue I follow, immigration. Any of them seems better than “Lyin’ Ted,” which is too crude and generic (even if he lies). …

Thanks to alert kf readers for all the negativity!