In historical terms, forcibly clearing Lafayette Square for a presidential photo op could live in memory like Mayor Daley’s police swinging clubs at protesters during the 1968 Chicago convention, or Herbert Hoover sending Douglas MacArthur to evict the Bonus Army in 1932.
Biden's speech was presidential, and totally normal. Demonstrated competence. Won't have staff or others explain what he really meant or what policies actually are. That just may be what people are looking for right now.
Delta’s rules say don’t fly if you’ve been exposed to someone with Covid -19 within the past 14 days. But three Minnesota Republican congressman who were with Trump on AF1 for Duluth rally ignored the rules and flew on Delta last night.
@StarTribune
Many people regard AG Barr’s resignation, reportedly negotiated by White House counsel Pat Cippolone, as a relief. But it’s probably the best sign that the next five weeks will bring a barrage of pardon controversies that Barr didn’t want to be near.
Little-noted in the “suckers” uproar: For any historically minded person—which nearly all presidents before Trump were—visiting the WW1 cemetery (with experts by your side to narrate) would be not just solemn duty but incredibly interesting, a cool perk of the job.
The Lost Cause finally admits it’s lost. The Confederate soldier statue in Old Town Alexandria, erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy in 1889 and the subject of angry debate for decades, was taken down early this morning.
The
@politico
newsroom is in anguish. Blake Hounshell had a dazzling mind, full of original insights about a vast array of subjects. He was a deeply idealistic and curious man with an exhilarating ability to perceive both patterns and contradictions in the news.
.
@brithume
could have covered Washington for 240 years and not seen a president challenge the lawful transfer of power in this way, nor seen members of Congress let institutional responsibilities be so eclipsed by devotion to/fear of a cult of personality.
I’ve covered Washington for more than 50 years, including 11 years covering Congress specifically. I’ve never seen a committee all of whose members were chosen by one party, and where there is no cross-examination or any attempt to present both sides.
Sanders embraces the Trump precedent in telling journalists to pound sand....Can a 78-year-old man with heart disease renege on pledge to release full health records and not pay a price? Column this morning. 👇
The idea that a man in a state of agitated delusion can launch nuclear weapons is insane. But
@SecDef19
and
@TomCollina
remind us the larger insanity is one we live with all the time—why does any president have sole launch authority?
US govts “incapacity to conduct widespread testing slowed diagnoses, creating chains of infection. It also deprived epidemiologists of a map that could have told them how how far and how fast the virus was traveling.
@JoanneKenen
@politico
It’s a fitting day to remember that except for arguably illegitimate and inarguably freakish circumstances Al Gore and Hillary Clinton would have won the presidency—and the history of this century would be very different.👇
Memory itself is challenged by the rush of modern life—people struggle to recall what they were up in arms about the day before yesterday—but this seems a moment that will echo vividly for historians.
McConnell got scratchy and defensive w
@jdickerson
as they debated the history of sinking nominees. The irritation suggests his own dissonance: He likes to think of himself as a Senate institutionalist but knows his legacy is placing ideological aims over institutional values.
All whiny-reporter grumbling aside….In the context of a country facing questions about the security of its elections and their potential vulnerability to manipulation, the clumsiness and confusion around these Iowa results is a serious debacle.
Trump’s taunt of Franken as quitter will stoke an anxiety that haunts many Dems I know, and that confidants say
@BillClinton
has long believed: the GOP is simply tougher and more ruthless in partisan brawls....”They fight on, we pile on.”
For all that his critics called him “Slick Willie,” in my experience it was very hard for
@BillClinton
to say things he didn’t genuinely believe, and this artful dodge on Ken Starr is an illustration.
Bill Clinton on the death of Ken Starr: "I read the obituary and I realized that his family loved him, and I think that's something to be grateful for. And when your life is over, that's all there is to say."
The Kavanaugh yearbook is striking as window into prevailing norms...that a kid who was no rebel but a teachers pet would fill his self-description with boasts about drunkenness and sexual innuendo suggests this was viewed then by school adults as funny, charming, expected.....
One way to think of it: Biden’s 48 years in public life are two years longer than John F. Kennedy’s entire life. No major presidential candidate in history has ever had such a long record on the national stage.
He didn't disclose when he'll stop appearing on the series, but he knows how he'll say goodbye to his loyal viewers. “What I would do on that day is tell the director, ‘Time the show down to leave me 30 seconds at the end. That's all I want.’”
We join our friends
@nytimes
@ForeignPolicy
and many other places in grieving Blake and ensuring that people will remember the qualities that made him special, and how deeply and he was admired.
The Trump attempt to overturn the election is not like 9/11 in sheer horror but is similar in some respects: Both are attacks on the basic functioning of U.S. institutions. Both revealed systemic vulnerabilities people overlooked until disaster struck.👇
No matter how hard we try....It is virtually impossible to preserve a sense of how bizarre it is by any historic measure....A president of the United States taunting a cable network about its ratings, while a pandemic rages.
.
@FoxNews
daytime ratings have completely collapsed. Weekend daytime even WORSE. Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was
@FoxNews
!
Devastating phrase from
@JamesFallows
: “What happened once the disease began spreading in this country was a federal disaster in its own right: Katrina on a national scale, Chernobyl minus the radiation.”
With his latest concessions, Kevin McCarthy has done something desperate and dangerous: Signaled to everyone that there are more benefits to being his enemy than his friend. New column👇
Some senators who were in the chamber when Joe Biden first got to Washington: Barry Goldwater, George McGovern, Jacob Javits, Hubert Humphrey, William Fulbright, Mike Gravel.
He's old, is what I'm saying.
The fascinating thing about these iconic photos courtesy
@BeschlossDC
are the unknown faces. JFK is minutes from death. But what about those children? They are probably living but where and what do they remember? The other adults in the picture—what came of their lives?
The language of this crisis is a bit distorted. The govt shut down many sectors of the economy, for a vital public interest. What comes now seems less a “bailout” and more like eminent domain, when property gets taken to build a road and involuntary sellers get compensation.
Would love to know
@Liz_Cheney
thought bubble this morning...Is it: “I warned you I’m through putting up with Trump crowd. I won and I’m going to keep speaking my mind.” Or: “Ugh, that was scary—gotta be more careful next time.” ???
@peterbakernyt
@maggieNYT
on “the profound need for personal praise, the propensity to blame, the lack of human empathy, the penchant for rewriting history, the disregard for expertise, the distortion of facts, the impatience with scrutiny or criticism.”
This is an epiphany we all keep having again and again, like Groundhog Day. Trump has a keen eye for which cultural scabs to pick at, and does so with a purpose, not through random free associating.
High winds over Atlantic last night produce new record for (non-Concorde) travel time from New York to London: “A British Airways 747 operated the flight in just 4hr56min.” Two hours faster than scheduled, says
@OneMileataTime
I’m not actually quite as sour as this headline....but am struck by how people always seem to trick themselves into believing that catastrophe will have a cleaning effect on politics and we’ll emerge stronger.
@joelockhart
wonders why more newspaper editorial boards aren’t clamoring for Trump’s resignation like many did for Bill Clinton and even more did for Richard Nixon.
Many higher ed presidents have been reluctant to criticize activists on left but
@NorthwesternU
president Morton Shapiro in all-campus email has sharp words for defund-police protesters, accusing them of vandalism and intimidating language he said flirted with anti-Semitism.
“Whatever the outcome of this contest in coming hours or days, Kevin McCarthy can rest assured he has earned a legacy — as a symbol of pathos and ineffectuality, an emblem of the cannibalistic spirit of the age.” New column👇
@RahmEmanuel
dusts off a Clinton-era term this morning with
@GStephanopoulos
: “Democrats should triangulate. They should find everything that Mitch McConnell and the president don't agree on and go right at it, because that will force a division in the Republican Party.”
Blake sometimes had an appealingly absent-minded affect, but it didn’t take long before you realized what a perceptive, engaged, witty and life-enhancing person he was…
Increasingly it seems pretty simple: This race has room for one Bernie and one Not-Bernie. We have basically have 24 days, through Super Tuesday, to find out who that is.
An obsession of
@jmartNYT
and mine....the volume of casual alcoholism among the American professional class on everyday display on US airlines. Even if destination is O’Hare for sales conference rather than beach you see people getting tanked in morning.
Man sitting next to me at DCA orders a bloody mary. I marvel that it is 7:15 AM. "This is number three," he says cheerfully. He is going to Cozumel to sit on the beach. I am going to Minnesota for a Trump rally.
“A lot of people are talking about the left-right debate,” says
@jonfavs
“I see it as top-bottom or inside-outside. The energy is outside of Washington, and it’s very much returning to a healthier progressive populism unlike [what] Trump is promoting.....Clintonism is gone.”
What will happen to strange bedfellows brought together by Trump? Perhaps they will mumble awkward goodbyes and try to forget the whole evening. Or maybe they will exchange numbers and shyly suggest it would be nice to see each other again. New column👇
When Joe Biden joined the Senate in January 1973 he served with six colleagues who were born in the late 1800s. If he becomes president, he surely will have some young aides who will be alive in the early 2100s. thread
A friendly reminder that almost no aspect of Palin v. New York Times is on the level, and that James Bennet remains one of the most conscientious journalists of his generation. New column👇
Many times in that year of madness covering the White House in 1998 I wondered what would happen to
@monicalewinsky
for the rest of her life. She’s matured with dignity, while the political culture that made her famous continues to decay.
@ddiamond
talks to health officials who “described a chaotic situation in which leaders rushed to address presidential requests that sometimes seem to come on a whim while losing focus on longer-term challenges.”
So our funny little web startup from 2007 is old enough to drive…w/ supremely talented people spanning 16 time zones from Berlin, Brussels, London, Washington, Sacramento to an outpost in Sydney. Happy 16th anniversary
@politico
…Congrats to everyone who shared this great ride.
The most consequential political dynamic of Biden’s opening days is that Fox and others in right-wing echo chamber are more interested in culture and conspiracy than Dems historic expansion of govt.
@RyanLizza
cracks the code for
@playbookdc
This has been a devastating week at Politico, with the sudden loss Thursday of
@POLITICOEurope
editor in chief
@Stephen_G_Brown
. He was an extraordinary journalist, with a special gift for human connection. Please read
@herszenhorn
's well-turned obituary.
For a half-century, American politics trended inexorably in one direction—toward the loosening and obliteration of media filters. Twitter’s ban on Trump is historic because it reasserts the idea that filters still have a place in public discourse.👇
@RadioFreeTom
has interesting piece wondering how Trump can attract working-class men when he seems to shred traditional 20th Century norms of what it means to be a man. I’ve been fixated on the same theme, which I chewed over in January here. 👇
Donald Trump - a vain, cowardly, lying, vulgar, jabbering blowhard - is not a real "man" your father and grandfather would have respected. Nor should any man, but as I write in
@TheAtlantic
: especially not the ones who claim to support him the most.
Do you think you could ever achieve such success that you would no longer worry about whether other people might be even more successful and better-connected? A week in Davos suggests the answer: No, you couldn’t.
13 years ago today: a few dozen people joined for an exhilarating/terrifying launch of
@politico
. Now we have 700+ brilliant journalists and business pros across nine timezones w
@POLITICOEurope
This team is still growing, still lighting a path for the future of quality media.
This Dershowitz profile by Connie Bruck
@newyorker
shows a classic style of journalism still holds vast power. The piece is understated, reporting-driven, nouns and verbs with hardly any adjectives. By the end, the portrait is disturbing and indelible.
Whole thread worth reading.....Everyone’s memory seems so perishable in the age of nonstop frenzy but
@jaketapper
reconstruction of then/now is on target.
1/Folks are noting “there’s always a tweet” re the below but backstory is illustrative.
On Feb 22, 2013, the WaPo published a
@realBobWoodward
oped about the “$85 billion in ugly and largely irrational federal spending cuts set by law to begin Friday.”
Biden’s inaugural address grappled with a central question of human relations: How to restore respect when people feel fully justified in their contempt?
Hmm....Superintendent for Alexandria public schools, which are all virtual, has child in private school, which are operating partly in-person. Interesting scoop via
@TCTheogony
@nikki_harris7
After 9/11 people said, “We can’t let the terrorists win.” Now we have an inauguration with armed troops all over the capital, the National Mall closed, and citizens told to stay away. It’s all for sensible reasons but we should admit domestic terrorists have won this occasion.
Wonder how Trump feels that
@marcthiessen
is offering a conservative *defense* of his conduct: “His handling of Ukraine seemed less the execution of an intelligible plan than a chaotic mishmash of constantly changing urges and demands.”
President Trump on Wednesday said US airlines are “in good shape” and flying public has “great confidence in us.”
@Delta
CEO Ed Bastian tells employees this morning the carrier is bleeding $50 million daily and is cutting its fleet to deal with long-term reduction in demand.
I'm hoping that in the future, Senator Sanders will take time to speak to some of my constituents before he decides to sing the praises of a murderous tyrant like Fidel Castro.
@BeschlossDC
I was only ten but remember it so well….Summer camp at Colorado River Ranch. They rolled in black and white televisions to the cafeteria so we could watch history in the making.
Democrats lose again. And some wonder if they just aren’t ruthless enough to win against the likes of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell.
I check in this morning with a bunch of leading lights of the Wet Rag Party.
Biden hopes, at 76, to be seen as a kind of American Churchill, the man and moment aligned at last. But the last 24 hours raise the possibility that he is perceived as the political equivalent of Grampa Simpson.
Great portrait not only of Mondale but of young
@JaneMayerNYer
in 84 running across the tarmac, arms waving to pilots, as she nearly missed the campaign plane.
Woodward, Cohen, The Atlantic.....Trump’s undoing isn’t the Deep State of anonymous people burrowed in the government. It is the Shallow State of well-known people who worked directly for him and are on record or on obvious background calling him a menace.
The world is always dark and dangerous but governments are now crossing lines that before were crossed rarely and only with trepidation.....in the same way that big-city mobsters usually don’t murder police or prosecutors because the glare is too great and price too high.
Putin’s killing people in the U.K., the Chinese regime has created a massive Uighur gulag, and the Saudis have murdered a journalist who was living here. None seems to fear serious consequences from the Trump administration, as the world becomes a darker and more dangerous place.
POLITICO is turning 15. What I believed in 2007: Journalism was in an entrepreneurial age, not an institutional one. What I hope now: That institutions reclaim agenda-setting power, while keeping the disruptive spirit of the past generation.
#POLITICO15
27 years ago I was warned by a woman candidate about sexist double-standards in politics. Took me a while to realize she was on to something. New column 👇
Anthony Clark, an expert on presidential libraries, has a convincing argument on why the performance artist formerly known as President Trump likely will never have one.
@POLITICOMag
Fun anecdote from
@BresPolitico
@JakeSherman
via this morning’s Playbook. Richard Shelby went to see Trump about Veterans relief. Trump said let’s call Kevin McCarthy. Shelby and McCarthy got in heated debate in front of Trump.
“Perot was a brash, can-do showman who expressed contempt for politics as usual and promised voters that the path to national greatness was to send an autocratic businessman with a touch of jingo to the White House to kick ass in Washington.”
The good old days in Virginia were bad. These days are worse....My take on the Northam-Fairfax meltdown in Richmond, with cameo appearances lower down by
@mikeallen
and
@HowardKurtz
. Sorry could not squeeze in
@peterbakernyt
YES, AGREE, BE IT RESOLVED.....Colleagues let’s do better, I say as someone who in the past often has not observed the sensible principle
@MonicaLewinsky
invokes here.👇
a gentle reminder for ways other than using my name re 1998. let’s not frame it by the woman + youngest, least powerful person involved:
The Starr Investigation
The 1998 Impeachment
The Scandal of 1998
The Clinton Impeachment
That Crazy, Fucked Up 1998
Sole launch authority is a Cold War relic that had flimsy rationale then and is indefensible now, says Bill Perry, 93, whose entire career was in national security dealing with the nuclear dilemma.
People often chat and mill about the room when the president of the White House Correspondents Association is speaking but
@OKnox
held the crowd tonight with a crisp and impassioned statement about the value of journalism and the perils faced by many journalists.
@Sykescharlie
: “In case it’s not yet obvious, what’s happening in Wisconsin is a dry run for what’s coming for the rest of the country in November: Elections roiled in partisan rancor, dysfunction, voter suppression, and questionable legitimacy.”
Last night’s failure to rise to the occasion: “It felt like one of the early debates last summer in its static and smallness. This is the Democratic argument, just a week before the climactic Super Tuesday primary contests?”
“One of Republicans’ central defenses in the impeachment inquiry has been that Trump cares deeply about corruption in Ukraine....That the president did not adhere to his NSC’s advice to discuss corruption with Zelensky during their April call appears to undermine those claims.”
NEW from
@NatashaBertrand
: Trump ignored NSC talking points on raising corruption with Zelensky on the April call, but the White House put out a readout saying he did anyway
The post-election memo from progressive groups shared by
@lbarronlopez
@hollyotterbein
is a lot more nuanced and illuminating than the surly it's-your-fault name-calling between left and moderate House members.