Eric Trump’s business trip to Uruguay cost taxpayers $97,830 in hotel bills →

It was a high-profile jaunt out of the country for Eric, the fresh-faced executive of the Trump Organization who, like his father, pledged to keep the company separate from the presidency. Eric mingled with real estate brokers, dined at an open-air beachfront eatery and spoke to hundreds at an “ultra exclusive” Trump Tower Punta del Este evening party celebrating his visit.
The Uruguayan trip shows how the government is unavoidably entangled with the Trump company as a result of the president’s refusal to divest his ownership stake. In this case, government agencies are forced to pay to support business operations that ultimately help to enrich the president himself...

Trust Records Show Trump Is Still Closely Tied to His Empire →

This kind of thing would send even an Illinois governor to jail immediately, for a long time. The president should aim to be above reproach, yet President Trump isn't even trying.

While the trust structure, outlined in documents made public through a Freedom of Information Act request by ProPublica, may give the president the appearance of distance from his business, it drew sharp criticism from experts in government ethics.
“I don’t see how this in the slightest bit avoids a conflict of interest,” said Frederick J. Tansill, a trust and estates lawyer from Virginia who examined the documents at the request of The New York Times. “First it is revocable at any time, and it is his son and his chief financial officer who are running it.”
It is not uncommon for people to place assets in a trust with themselves as beneficiaries for estate-planning purposes. But Mr. Trump’s situation is unprecedented because it involves a wealthy president acting to avoid an appearance of conflict of interest.

Do women matter to national security? The men who lead U.S. foreign policy don’t think so. →

...Researchers found that nations with higher rates of violence against women also had higher risks of conflict and instability and that when women were part of peacemaking, that peace was more durable. The United Nations’ Women, Peace and Security initiatives sought to put these insights into action globally.
Incoming Trump administration officials, on the other hand, have suggested that gender- and other development-focused programming detracts from a focus on U.S. security and have signaled hostility toward U.N. efforts, such as considering gender in security efforts.
In the United States at least, Trump’s team is not unusual according to our new survey of nearly 500 U.S. foreign policy leaders. This establishment remains overwhelmingly male and thinks quite differently about the importance of gender in national security efforts. Further, national security policymakers, particularly men, appear uninformed about the latest research that shows how women’s social status predicts stability and how ensuring that women are involved in building peace and democracy results in more stable and secure nations...

The Trump Threat to the Rule of Law and the Constitution →

Taken together, these and more seem to give a pretty clear picture of Trump's authoritarianism:

Also highly troubling is the fact that Trump has maintained and apparently plans to continue to maintain a private personal security force independent of the Secret Service—the same security force that policed his rallies, and has been accused of excessive force as well as racial profiling... It is already being sued for allegedly violently interfering with political protest. Yet Trump’s chief private bodyguard has been named Director of Oval Office Operations, and there are no indications that the private security force will be disbanded.
This force is unaccountable to the usual political and legal checks and balances—Congress cannot cut its budget or audit its records, it may not count as a government actor for purposes of Constitutional challenges to his operations, like racial discrimination or retaliation for political speech. I would argue that the security force actually has become a government agency for Constitutional purposes, but there’s no good way to predict how a court would respond to this argument...
...
Reinforcing worries about the undermining of the professionalism of the security services are Trump’s most recent moves to reshuffle the National Security Council. On January 28, Trump removed the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff from the NSC “principals committee” and replaced them with Stephen Bannon. This raises the worrying risk that intelligence information will be channeled to political operatives, and that political operatives with greater loyalty to Trump than to the Constitution will be exercising unchecked authority over the use of America’s military and intelligence apparatus.
Equally alarming are Trump’s efforts to undermine the free press. It doesn’t seem like an exaggeration to say that millions of his supporters completely distrust the media, and are unlikely to believe reporting on any of his misconduct. And this appears to be a conscious strategy of Trump’s, who has been attacking the media in speeches and on Twitter, who put the press in a pen at his rallies to be abused by the attending mobs, and who has installed the CEO of the leading far-right “news” site in the West Wing, ready to feed the house interpretation of his actions directly to his supporters, no independent input required. This, of course, is Bannon again, who has also described the media as the “opposition party.”
No catalog of Trump’s danger to the free press can omit his evident disregard for the First Amendment. Trump has threatened to “loosen up the libel laws,” to allow suits against the press, and his campaign manager made thinly veiled libel threats against no less than the outgoing Senate Minority Leader...

Does Trump Want to Lose the EO Battle in Court? Or is Donald McGahn Simply Ineffectual (or Worse)? →

The Immigration EO has a surprisingly strong basis in law but was issued in haste, without proper interagency coordination, without proper notice, without adequate consideration of its implications, and with a media strategy, if it was that, that suggested that the EO was motivated by discrimination against Muslims.  These factors combined with the subject matter and scope of the EO to alarm many people and to invite a fierce initial legal reaction from civil society groups, states, and judges across the country.
...
 
The clearly foreseeable consequence of the roll-out combined with Trump’s tweets is to weaken the case for the legality of the EO in court.  Why might Trump want to do that?  Assuming that he is acting with knowledge and purpose (an assumption I question below), the only reason I can think of is that Trump is setting the scene to blame judges after an attack that has any conceivable connection to immigration.  If Trump loses in court he credibly will say to the American people that he tried and failed to create tighter immigration controls.  This will deflect blame for the attack.  And it will also help Trump to enhance his power after the attack.  After a bad terrorist attack at home, politicians are always under intense pressure to loosen legal constraints.  (This was even true for near-misses, such as the failed Underwear bomber, which caused the Obama administration to loosen constraints on its counterterrorism policies in many ways.)  Courts feel these pressures, and those pressures will be significantly heightened, and any countervailing tendency to guard against executive overreaction diminished, if courts are widely seen to be responsible for an actual terrorist attack.  More broadly, the usual security panic after a bad attack will be enhanced quite a lot—in courts and in Congress—if before the attack legal and judicial constraints are seen to block safety.   If Trump assumes that there will be a bad terrorist attack on his watch, blaming judges now will deflect blame and enhance his power more than usual after the next attack.
Many people responded to my tweet last night by saying that I was giving Trump too much credit.  He is not that clever, they said.  His tweets are an angry impulsive reaction, not part of a plan.  Perhaps these criticisms are right; I don’t know.  But if they are right, then the White House has a different problem (among others): An ineffectual or incompetent White House Counsel.

OpEd: Prophetic Moral Challenge After the National Prayer Breakfast →

Trump's need to praise himself at a prayer breakfast might have passed as an awkward moment in civil religion if the actions of his first two weeks in office had not already inspired mass protests. But in the face of the moral outrage that millions of Americans feel, the awkward silence of so-called faith leaders as they listened to a braggart drone on about himself was revelatory. The President went on to say, essentially: the world is a mess. I'm here to fix it. The Bible has a name for this political position: idolatry. 
The emperor had no clothes, but there wasn't a prophet in the house who was prepared, like the boy in the story, to point out the obvious.
But outside the Washington Hilton, on DC's streets, moral witnesses stood vigil in solidarity with the millions who've gathered across this nation, in our airports and on our streets, to challenge President Trump in the prophetic tradition of Frederick Douglass. Many well-intentioned Christians objected. "Even if we disagree with some of his actions," they asked, "doesn't the Bible still instruct us to pray for our leaders?" 
Not the Book of Jeremiah. "Don't waste your time praying for this people," God says to the prophet. "Don't offer to make petitions or intercessions. Don't bother me with them. I'm not listening." Scripture is clear that there comes a time when religion that simply blesses injustice is heretical—an offense to the God who has made clear what true religion requires: to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly.

10 Ways to Take on Trump →

Seyla Benhabib of Yale, writing one of several excellent analysis for this article:

We have to be careful, however, about throwing around the language of fascism. Yes, Hitler was also elected. But Trump does not represent a strong fascist movement. We are not living in a dictatorship—not yet! It’s going to be a rough ride, but let’s avoid the exaggerated examples. Trump is sui generis.
I prefer to call what Trump is engaged in “autocratic presidentialism,” meaning I’m the one who lays down the rule of law. To what extent is he going to respect the division of power laid out in the Constitution? Are our public institutions—Congress, the Supreme Court—going to be strong enough to prevent the country from sliding toward a kind of presidential dictatorship? To oppose these tendencies, we need as many moments of resistance as possible. We need to hold politicians’ feet to the fire.
There’s another way in which Trump differs from authoritarian leaders of the past. He has tried to use the language of nationalism: triumphal whiteness, “Make America Great Again.” But what we are really hearing from Trump is the corporate language of business success—­the language of “making deals.” He and the Republicans are likely going to move toward privatizing everything. That is not something you can say about past authoritarian movements. Most authoritarian leaders believe in a strong state. Trump doesn’t. For Trump, the state is a corporation—and he is going to treat it as such. In that sense, he’s almost more dangerous than previous authoritarian leaders. If the government is like a big corporation, we are clients, not citizens.
How are we to oppose this? We need a new, constructive vocabulary. It’s not enough just to call him “fascist,” “patriarchal,” “white,” “reactionary.” He is all that. But to mobilize people against him—especially people who might not necessarily agree with a progressive, left agenda—you have to create a language of caring for civic institutions, caring for the Constitution, caring for making democracy better. You have to instill a sense that this may really be the end of a certain kind of republicanism, with a small r. The art of the deal has to be opposed by a language of civic commitment and solidarity.
We have to be careful, however, about throwing around the language of fascism. Yes, Hitler was also elected. But Trump does not represent a strong fascist movement. We are not living in a dictatorship—not yet! It’s going to be a rough ride, but let’s avoid the exaggerated examples. Trump is sui generis.
I prefer to call what Trump is engaged in “autocratic presidentialism,” meaning I’m the one who lays down the rule of law. To what extent is he going to respect the division of power laid out in the Constitution? Are our public institutions—Congress, the Supreme Court—going to be strong enough to prevent the country from sliding toward a kind of presidential dictatorship? To oppose these tendencies, we need as many moments of resistance as possible. We need to hold politicians’ feet to the fire.
There’s another way in which Trump differs from authoritarian leaders of the past. He has tried to use the language of nationalism: triumphal whiteness, “Make America Great Again.” But what we are really hearing from Trump is the corporate language of business success—­the language of “making deals.” He and the Republicans are likely going to move toward privatizing everything. That is not something you can say about past authoritarian movements. Most authoritarian leaders believe in a strong state. Trump doesn’t. For Trump, the state is a corporation—and he is going to treat it as such. In that sense, he’s almost more dangerous than previous authoritarian leaders. If the government is like a big corporation, we are clients, not citizens.
How are we to oppose this? We need a new, constructive vocabulary. It’s not enough just to call him “fascist,” “patriarchal,” “white,” “reactionary.” He is all that. But to mobilize people against him—especially people who might not necessarily agree with a progressive, left agenda—you have to create a language of caring for civic institutions, caring for the Constitution, caring for making democracy better. You have to instill a sense that this may really be the end of a certain kind of republicanism, with a small r. The art of the deal has to be opposed by a language of civic commitment and solidarity.