Scroll down to see the CNN story about Mueller and sealed indictments. It’s too early for the pundit weigh-in on this. But not too early for twitter.
CNN:
There is a web of connections between the Trump campaign, the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks and the public disclosures it injected into the presidential campaign. Federal investigators are examining some of these relationships and whether any of them were part of an effort to coordinate with Russia's election-meddling campaign.
This week, a new thread emerged: Multiple sources confirmed to CNN that the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, contacted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in summer 2016 to ask for access to emails from Hillary Clinton's private server. Sources told CNN that he asked for the emails because he wanted to catalog them on a searchable database that would be made available to the Trump campaign or a pro-Trump PAC.
Monica Hesse and Dan Zak/WaPo:
Who’s next? A moment of reckoning for men — and the behavior we can no longer ignore
Around the time the Weinstein scandal broke, a spreadsheet circulated among women who work in media, sharing their intel about certain men who work in media. It sorts men by their “affiliation” and “alleged misconduct,” with those accused of physical violence highlighted in red. There are names you’d recognize and names you wouldn’t. The allegations are all over the place in terms of seriousness: “leering” and “flirting,” “gave a woman a black eye” and “drugged a woman and attempted to rape her.”
Take the attempted rapist. Put him in jail.
Take the gross flirter. Teach him how to read signals from women. Figure out how each offense should be categorized. Begin the emotionally laborious process of reeducating millions of males, even despite the valid criticism that women experiencing harassment don’t particularly want to also be in charge of educating harassers.
“What we need to start talking about is the crisis in masculinity,” the actor Emma Thompson told the BBC.
Never forget Trump is a sexual predator. He belongs on any such list.
Vox:
Why Harvey Weinstein is disgraced but Donald Trump is president
The allegations against Weinstein and Trump are strikingly similar. Why have the outcomes been so different?
Weinstein’s community rejected him — Trump’s hasn’t
In the days after Ashley Judd, Asia Argento, and several other women publicly accused Harvey Weinstein of harassment and assault in the New York Times and the New Yorker, Weinstein was fired from the Weinstein Company and kicked out of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. His brother Bob (who has now been accused of sexual harassment as well) called him a predator and said, “I want him to get the justice that he deserves.”
Max Boot/USA Today:
Republicans in Washington cover their cowardice by claiming they need to genuflect to Trump to pass their policy agenda, as if it were worth risking “World War III” — Corker’s words — to cut taxes. In a sense the arch-populist Stephen Bannon is right to exult that “the establishment Republicans are in full collapse.” Even some like Corker and Bush who now speak out were too cowed to do so last year when it could have mattered more.
Trumpism is triumphant — at the moment. Just as appeasement was once triumphant. But Flake is correct that “this spell will eventually break.” And the judgment of history will not be kind to those who indulged a man so unfit for the highest office in the land.
Charles Sykes/Politico:
Jeff Flake is about to find out what it means to be a political orphan.
I know because I’ve been there and I can give Flake a sense of what he can expect now that he has left the safe confines of the tribe. His conservative credentials will be attacked and his motives questioned; he’ll be filleted as a sellout, a RINO, a Judas, and even as a closet liberal. Even though he and Senator Bob Corker gave voice to what many of their colleagues say in private, they will become pariahs among many of the groups that had once been allies. And they will lose friends.
I suspect Flake already knows some of this. Although his announcement that he would not seek reelection came as a surprise, it was also somewhat anti-climactic. Ever since he published his searing indictment of Donald Trump, Conscience of a Conservative, Flake has been a dead man walking.
Thomas Edsall/NY Times:
The Party of Lincoln Is Now the Party of Trump
In a 2017 paper, “All in the Eye of the Beholder: Asymmetry in Ideological Accountability,” Iyengar and Sood provide further insight into how so many Republicans found their way to voting for Trump.
They demonstrate that partisan voters’ approval of their party’s leaders “bears little relationship with their ideological extremity.” Because of this, candidates like Trump “enjoy considerable leeway to stake out positions at odds with the preferences of their supporters.”
Iyengar and Sood buttress their analysis by pointing out that from December 2008 to August 2010, “Sarah Palin’s support never once slipped below 69% among Republicans,” even though her positions were well to the right of the average Republican voter and she was subjected to brutal ridicule in the liberal media.
The growing strength of the kind of partisanship that is widespread today — whether you call it visceral, expressive, affective or tribal — undermines the workings of democratic governance. Not only are Republicans willing to support Trump, but both Democrats and Republicans are inclined to demonize the leadership of the opposing party.
David A Hopkins/Vox:
Republican elites cheered the right-wing insurgency. Now it’s coming for them.
It’s not just about Trump. Power has shifted markedly toward non-elected figures like Steve Bannon and Sean Hannity.
It’s not really about an angry Republican “base”
The turmoil in Republican ranks is often described as pitting the party’s leadership class against an unruly popular “base.” But as scholars of public opinion often point out, few citizens develop strong political opinions or are mobilized to political action without influence from trusted authorities. What’s changed is whom voters are listening to: Unelected elite actors, especially conservative media figures, are gaining influence over the behavior of Republican voters while officeholders and candidates are losing it. (Despite occasional suggestions otherwise, no equivalent purge campaign exists in today’s Democratic Party.)
A number of self-styled “constitutional” conservative elites like Flake were dismayed and baffled by Trump’s ascendance to the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, but Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric and combative manner found fertile ground among a Republican primary electorate primed by years of aggressive conservative media messages. Conservative media outlets have incessantly painted conventional party leaders as overly accommodating to liberalism, ineffective in achieving major rightward policy shifts, and inattentive to the costs and threats of contemporary social change. In such a context, the Trump campaign’s lack of public support among Republican politicians during the 2016 presidential primaries turned out to be far from fatal to his popularity with party voters.