The Incapacitated President →

Trump's administration is unstable. His own hand-picked advisors are cutting him out of decision-making, which is short-circuiting the ability of the executive branch to get things done, for good or ill. If Trump really is this incompetent, though, his continuation illustrates a massive, system-wide political failure: one party is essentially keeping the president in office because they find him a useful tool. This is a constitutional crisis.

Indeed, much of Washington seems to know and accept this—even members of the majority party. “He concerns me,” said Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee in an interview with the New York Times last October. “He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation.” Corker, who leaves office at the end of the year, said Trump was treating the presidency like “a reality show,” with reckless threats that could put the United States “on the path to World War III.” Peter Wehner, a veteran of the last three Republican presidential administrations, has written of private conversations with unnamed Republican lawmakers, who disparage Trump as a “child king,” “incompetent,” and “unfit” for the office.
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Washington may understand and acknowledge the fundamental dysfunction of the Trump White House, but the relevant power brokers—congressional Republicans and their allies—have shown no desire to act upon this slow-motion collapse of the executive branch. Their reasons are narrowly self-interested: Trump may be incapable of effectively carrying out the duties of the presidency, but there is enough of a working policymaking apparatus to accomplish key goals like crippling the regulatory state and building a durable conservative majority on the federal judiciary.
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More than the public nature of President Trump’s deterioration, it’s the inaction and complicity of the majority party that truly differentiates the present situation from those of Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon. Like them, Trump has a cadre of aides and advisers essentially acting in his stead as president, working around him and circumventing his worst impulses. But unlike those presidents, Trump is also insulated by a political movement that ranks pursuit of its ideological goals above all else, including the integrity of the presidency.

Trump's administration is a poorly-organized criminal cabal

Trump's administration is filled with people that put themselves before the rest of us. Far from choosing the best people, he mostly chooses corrupt rich people like him. Thankfully the law is finally catching up with some of them, though they've already harmed our country.

Sure, Trump’s advisers aren’t the first to push back against a president. But what’s happening now is completely unprecedented. →

It’s true, as some observers have pointed out, that people inside an administration often resist the president’s views and preferences. It’s also true that all administrations leak. Indeed, members of all recent administrations have apparently leaked to Woodward in particular.
But what’s happening in the Trump administration is very different. My research, and that of others who study presidential advisers, suggests that what we’re seeing is essentially unprecedented.
First, the stories of the past 48 hours are not about civil servants in the bureaucracy — whom Trump characterizes as a shadowy “deep state” working against him. Rather, they are about presidential advisers and Cabinet officials, who are by nature political actors.
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We know from research on the politics of advising that controlling and even manipulating information is part of what advisers do. They set agendas, formulate and vet options, and process and distill information for leaders whose time is severely limited.
But once a decision is made, presidents can expect advisers to fall in line, even if they may slow-roll implementation...
But removing a paper that, if signed, would carry out the president’s preferred policy is quite different.
What’s even more striking, if Woodward has the story right, is that Trump did not notice the paper had disappeared — even though it would have undone a trade agreement. Antipathy to trade agreements is one of the few fixed beliefs that Trump has held for decades. That reveals an inexperienced leader failing to oversee policy execution and implementation on one of his core issues. All presidents struggle to get their policies implemented, even by top advisers they’ve appointed. But this episode suggests a major breakdown in presidential ability to make and carry out decisions...

This Is a Constitutional Crisis →

Impeachment is a constitutional mechanism. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment is a constitutional mechanism. Mass resignations followed by voluntary testimony to congressional committees are a constitutional mechanism. Overt defiance of presidential authority by the president’s own appointees—now that’s a constitutional crisis.
If the president’s closest advisers believe that he is morally and intellectually unfit for his high office, they have a duty to do their utmost to remove him from it, by the lawful means at hand...
On Wednesday, though, a “senior official in the Trump administration” published an anonymous op-ed in The New York Times, writing:
Many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
I would know. I am one of them.
The author of the anonymous op-ed is hoping to vindicate the reputation of like-minded senior Trump staffers. See, we only look complicit! Actually, we’re the real heroes of the story.
But what the author has just done is throw the government of the United States into even more dangerous turmoil. He or she has enflamed the paranoia of the president and empowered the president’s willfulness.
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Speak in your own name. Resign in a way that will count. Present the evidence that will justify an invocation of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, or an impeachment, or at the very least, the first necessary step toward either outcome, a Democratic Congress after the November elections.
Your service in government is valuable. Thank you for it. But it is not so indispensable that it can compensate for the continuing tenure of a president you believe to be amoral, untruthful, irrational, antidemocratic, unpatriotic, and dangerous. Previous generations of Americans have sacrificed fortunes, health, and lives to serve the country. You are asked only to tell the truth aloud and with your name attached.

Bob Woodward’s new book reveals a ‘nervous breakdown’ of Trump’s presidency →

According to this article on Woodward's new book, Trump's White House barely survives from one day to the next. He doesn't care to govern. He's a horrible manager. He routinely ignores the expertise of his own people, and often aggressively insults them unnecessarily. He's so moody and lazy that his own hand-picked staff often cut him out of the decision-making, going so far as to covertly remove papers from his desk that they don't want him to look at or sign.

If there's any silver lining to this mess, it's that this administration may be so bad that the country finally wakes up to some of its worst problems. Trump's authoritarianism is what we get for decades of slowly growing elite corruption and failure that have eroded our democracy.

The book’s title is derived from a remark that then-candidate Trump made in an interview with Woodward and Post political reporter Robert Costa in 2016. Trump said, “Real power is, I don’t even want to use the word, ‘Fear.’ ”
A central theme of the book is the stealthy machinations used by those in Trump’s inner sanctum to try to control his impulses and prevent disasters, both for the president personally and for the nation he was elected to lead.
Woodward describes “an administrative coup d’etat” and a “nervous breakdown” of the executive branch, with senior aides conspiring to pluck official papers from the president’s desk so he couldn’t see or sign them.
Again and again, Woodward recounts at length how Trump’s national security team was shaken by his lack of curiosity and knowledge about world affairs and his contempt for the mainstream perspectives of military and intelligence leaders.

Trump rolls back worker safety rules →

Under the Obama administration, inspections had to occur before workers began their shifts — to scale away, for instance, loose pieces of rock that might fall on them. But in April, the Zatezalo-led Mine Safety and Health Administration said it would allow inspections to begin while miners were already at work...
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At the Interior Department, administration officials are seeking to roll back regulations on offshore oil rigs — former President Barack Obama’s response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout that killed 11 workers and flooded the Gulf of Mexico with millions of barrels of oil. A proposed rule would rescind the requirement that only government-approved third parties may inspect blowout preventers that seal a well in the event of a pressure surge. 
The revisions would also allow rig operators to test equipment less frequently, to prevent “wear and tear.” All told, the changes would save industry more than $900 million over 10 years.
But environmental advocates and southern lawmakers of both parties worry the changes could lead to another deadly spill.
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At the Agriculture Department, officials are weighing whether to raise line speeds at meat-packing plants, a change that worker advocates say would increase repetitive motion injuries and accidents. According to government data, the injury rates in meatpacking are already higher than in U.S. industries as a whole.

Overwhelmed: Venezuela's migrant crisis is reshaping Latin America →

This is an absolute humanitarian crisis.

...As their numbers skyrocket, Venezuelans fleeing hunger and repressionin their collapsing socialist state are reshaping cities and towns across the Western Hemisphere. The sound of Caracas slang is now ubiquitous in some Miami neighborhoods. Thousands of miles to the south, the scent of Caribbean cooking wafts through streets in Santiago, Chile. In English-speaking Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuelans make up a new working class.
Aid groups estimate that between 1.6 million and 2 million Venezuelans will leave their nation this year, escaping hyperinflation and desperate shortages of food and medicine. Those numbers are on top of the 1.5 million Venezuelans who left between 2014 and 2017. Roughly 1 in 10 Venezuelans will have left their country in a four-year span.
Compared with the European nations receiving Syrian refugees in recent years, Latin American countries have few resources to cope with the deluge of migrants...

The School Shootings That Weren't →

How many times per year does a gun go off in an American school?
We should know. But we don't.
This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, "nearly 240 schools ... reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting." The number is far higher than most other estimates.
But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened...
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At least 53 new school safety laws were passed in states in 2018. Districts are spending millions of dollars to "harden" schools with new security measures and equipment. A blue-ribbon federal school safety commission led by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is holding public events around the country, including one in Alabama Tuesday. Children are spending class time on active-shooter drills and their parents are buying bulletproof backpacks.
Our reporting highlights just how difficult it can be to track school-related shootings and how researchers, educators and policymakers are hindered by a lack of data on gun violence.