Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will see afternoon showers with a high of sixty-one. Sunrise is 5:53 AM and sunset 7:51 PM, for 13h 58m 23s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 93.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Ulysses S. Grant is born on this day in 1822.
Recommended for reading in full —
➤ Catherine Rampell observes Trump is running America just like his businesses — right into the ground:
Throughout the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly pledged that if elected, he’d run government like a business.
“If we could run our country the way I’ve run my company, we would have a country that you would be so proud of,” he promisedduring one debate.
Well, he was half right. Trump has definitely run the country the way he ran his company. But, no, this is nothing anyone can be especially proud of.
That’s because the president is running the executive branch less like a “Six Sigma” efficiency machine and more like a crappy family business that went bankrupt six times.
Consider Trump’s personnel choices. In both private and public enterprise, he has loaded up the payroll with incompetents, self-dealers and family members — categories that are not mutually exclusive — whose top qualifications are ethical pliability and unwavering devotion to the boss.
(Yes.)
➤ Greg Sergeant describes How to end the Trump presidency:
Put simply: If Democrats can somehow win both the House and Senate, the Trump presidency as we know it — that is, the Trump presidency in its current incarnation as a rampaging, unchecked kakistocracy facing no meaningful oversight or accountability — will be over. The peculiarities of this particular presidency suggest that this would constitute a more debilitating event to the president — and, crucially, a more meaningful event for the country — than it was when the party opposed to the president captured one or both chambers during the past three presidencies.
The New York Times reports that Republicans are growing more nervous about losing the Senate to Democrats, for a specific and telling reason: It would mean that Democrats will act as a much greater check on Trump’s executive branch and judicial nominees. As the Times delicately puts it, a Democratic-led Senate would be “very deliberate” about bringing Trump’s picks for top federal agency jobs to the floor.
(Whether near or far, there’ll be no relent until Trump, and his ilk, meet their political ruin.)
➤ Jason Zengerle describes How Devin Nunes Turned the House Intelligence Committee Inside Out:
In Late August 2016, Donald Trump paid a visit to Tulare, Calif., a small city in the agricultural Central Valley and an unlikely stop for a Republican presidential campaign. California is a solidly blue state, and although Trump was in Tulare to speak at a fund-raiser, the $2,700 that most guests ponied up to attend hardly seemed substantial enough to justify the presence of a busy candidate. (At a fund-raiser Trump attended in Silicon Valley the day before, guests paid $25,000 a head.) At least one senior Trump campaign official argued against the trip, deeming it a colossal waste of time.
But Trump had one very good reason for visiting Tulare: It is the hometown of Representative Devin Nunes. While many Republican elected officials had maintained a wary distance from their party’s presidential nominee, Nunes, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, was one of the few, not to mention one of the most prominent, to offer Trump his unequivocal support — which included holding the fund-raiser. Better still, Trump liked Nunes. Although the 44-year-old congressman seems to wear a permanent grimace in public, as if trying to lend his boyish face some gravitas, in private he is a bit of a bon vivant. “He’s a pretty easy guy to like,” says Johnny Amaral, Nunes’s longtime political consigliere and friend. “And he’s fiercely loyal. I think Trump recognized that.”
The day before the Tulare event, Nunes drove up to the Bay Area to meet Trump and brief him on his district. Nunes expected to drive back to Tulare that evening, but Trump invited Nunes to fly with him to Los Angeles instead and then on to Tulare the next morning. It is unclear just what they discussed over those 24 hours, but by all accounts they seem to have strengthened their bond, and Nunes soon entered Trump’s inner circle — cementing a political alliance that would become one of the most consequential of the Trump era.
(Nunes will find his foul place among the self-degraded American lapdogs.)
➤ Niraj Chokshi reports Trump Voters Driven by Fear of Losing Status, Not Economic Anxiety, Study Finds:
Ever since Donald J. Trump began his improbable political rise, many pundits have credited his appeal among white, Christian and male voters to “economic anxiety.” Hobbled by unemployment and locked out of the recovery, those voters turned out in force to send Mr. Trump, and a message, to Washington.
Or so that narrative goes.
A study published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences questions that explanation, the latest to suggest that Trump voters weren’t driven by anger over the past, but rather fear of what may come. White, Christian and male voters, the study suggests, turned to Mr. Trump because they felt their status was at risk.
“It’s much more of a symbolic threat that people feel,’’ said Diana C. Mutz, the author of the study and a political science and communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics. “It’s not a threat to their own economic well-being; it’s a threat to their group’s dominance in our country over all.”
The study is not the first to cast doubt on the prevailing economic anxiety theory. Last year, a Public Religion Research Institute survey of more than 3,000 people also found that Mr. Trump’s appeal could better be explained by a fear of cultural displacement.
➤ So, Did People Ever Really Put Crocodiles in Moats?: