RUTHFULLY YOURS

Still reeling from a series of embarrassing disclosures and meltdowns that have blackened her image, Linda Sarsour, the self-promoting anti-Semitic provocateur has found herself once again embroiled in controversy. Sarsour, who has proven to be adept and promoting herself on social media, bit off more than she could chew when she provoked the ire of CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Sarsour had expressed support for Assata Shakur, a fugitive cop killer who murdered a New Jersey state trooper in 1973. Shakur was convicted of first degree murder in 1977 but managed to escape from prison less than two years later and resurfaced in communist Cuba. She is currently on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list. Sarsour has a long, sordid history of expressing support for murderers including Rasmea Odeh, the PFLP terrorist who murdered two Israeli university students, and is slated to be deported from the United States for committing immigration fraud.

Tapper called out Sarsour on her “ugly sentiments” and asked, somewhat rhetorically, if there were “any progressives out there condemning this?” Sarsour, sensitive to the fact that a prominent journalist from the mainstream dared to criticize her, lashed out with a series of bizarre tweets. She ridiculously accused Tapper of “join[ing] the ranks of the alt-right” in an effort to “target” her. Sarsour has a habit of spewing such paranoid absurdities. Last week she claimed to be the victim of an orchestrated “Zionist media” conspiracy after irregularities were discovered in an online crowd-funding campaign she started.

Sarsour then challenged Tapper to cite examples of her ugly sentiments. Tapper proceeded to cut the rabble-rouser down to size in short order by noting Sarsour’s public wish to remove Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s vagina. Ayaan is a victim of the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation, a widespread, sadistic and life-altering ritual still practiced by many Muslims, even in the United States. Sarsour’s frantic effort to delete the infamous vagina removal tweet in an attempt to hide her odious past proved unsuccessful, and continues to hound her as she tries to rebrand her image and infiltrate into the Democratic Party.

Sarsour’s supporters in the twitterverse proved equally unsuccessful in silencing Tapper. Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza called Tapper’s tweets “intentionally inflammatory.” Tapper responded with a biting riposte; “How about being part of a gang that kills a NJ State Trooper? Is that considered inflammatory?” Score 2 for Tapper, zero for the fascist left.

With a few notable exceptions, most of the criticism leveled against Sarsour and her rabid antisemitism has emanated from the center-right. The center-left has been shamefully silent in condemning Sarsour’s abhorrent views, while the hard-left has embraced her fully.

Tapper’s criticism of Sarsour stands in marked contrast to cowardly and pernicious elements on the left who pretend to be progressives but in fact, encourage and support fascism. A good example of this is provided by liberal activist Sally Kohn who tweeted, “#IStandWithLinda today & always…I know @lsarsour to be a defender of justice FOR ALL!” She then absurdly tweeted “both sides have a problem with hateful crazies. The difference is the left denounces theirs. The right elects theirs president.”

The glaring irony strains credulity. Sarsour is on record advocating violence against Israelis and voicing support for terrorists and cop killers. She is a supporter of the anti-Semitic BDS movement, asserted that “nothing is creepier than Zionism,” alleged that supporters of Israel cannot be feminists, and has expressed a desire to remove the vaginas of women with whom she disagrees. She is a supporter of Sharia law of the brand practiced in Saudi Arabia, a country infamous for oppressing women, and which recently arrested a woman who had the temerity to wear “indecent clothing” to wit, a miniskirt. And yet Kohn and others leftists of similar ilk, while claiming to reject extremism within their ranks, still admire and stand with Sarsour.

Antisemitism is a feature ensconced within the hard-left. The hard-left’s embrace of Sarsour is hardly surprising and is in fact, to be expected. The center-left, which seeks to broaden the party’s appeal to more radical elements, is too craven to challenge Sarsour’s outrageous comments and her support for cop killers, convicted terrorists and assorted anti-Semites. But Tapper’s pointed criticism of Sarsour represents a notable crack in the façade. Whether it leads to further action by the center-left to repudiate known anti-Semites like Sarsour, and tackle rampant antisemitism within its ranks is still too early to say. I’m not holding my breath.

What difference does it make?

Bad ideas work their way back to worse premises. The ‘worse premise’ of the bad idea of NeverTrump was that it didn’t really matter if Hillary won. It was an echo of Hillary’s infamous Benghazi testimony.

What difference does it make anyway if the woman behind the Arab Spring were running our foreign policy and if the Clinton Foundation’s gallery of rogue donors were running everything else?

It sure as hell didn’t make a difference to NeverTrumpers who were too busy grading Trump on table manners and finding implausible reasons to believe that President Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be so bad. NeverNeverTrumpland became its own echo chamber with no one to call out its crazy delusions.

Trump won, Hillary lost and NeverTrumpers clings to its “What difference does it make” premise.

At the New York Post, John Podhoretz insists that, “Hillary’s White House would be no different from Trump’s.”

Bad idea meet worse premise.

“The astonishing answer, if you really think it through, is: not all that different when it comes to policy,” he claims.

Only in NeverNeverTrumpland could anyone come up with an “astonishing answer” like that.

It’s an astonishingly astonishing answer since Hillary’s platform called for ending deportations of illegal aliens and allowing them access to ObamaCare. That’s slightly different from building a wall, a 33% increase in illegal alien arrests and a 67% decline in illegal immigration under President Trump.

But a lot of NeverTrumpers seem closer to Hillary’s position there anyway.

Hillary’s platform also called for expanding ObamaCare, killing coal and fracking, automatic voter registration at 18, undermining the Second Amendment, a job-killing minimum wage hike and free college. That’s a long way from repealing ObamaCare, a coal and fracking boom, the restoration of law and order, fixing college abuses and conducting voter fraud investigations.

But what difference does it make in NeverNeverTrumpland where policy doesn’t matter anyway?

On foreign policy, the President of the United States has an even freer hand. And the free hand would have belonged to the woman who handed entire countries over to the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and ISIS.

Podhoretz claims that a Republican congress would have blocked Hillary from getting anything done. The Obama years suggest that putting our faith in the obstructive powers of a GOP Congress ought to come with a free limited edition of the Brooklyn Bridge. And Hillary had made a point of asserting that many of her policy proposals would bypass Congress.

“Trump has gotten very little done. The same would have been true if Hillary had won,” he writes.

Hillary Clinton had promised to bypass Congress on gun control, energy restrictions and immigration. Both Trump and Clinton pledged to roll out a big batch of executive orders. Hers would have been very different than his.

If Congress won’t act, became a theme of hers during the campaign. Would she have done it?

On Thursday, the Trump administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) will release its semi-annual “Unified Agenda,” a master plan for all significant federal regulation which agencies intend to issue in the coming months. According to one conservative leader, this agenda will provide a blueprint for how the administration will cut down on all kinds of regulation — not just official rules, but also “regulatory dark matter.”

“If you go outside and look at the stars tonight, you’re not seeing much of the universe. The bulk of it is dark matter,” explained Clyde Wayne Crews, vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), on a call with reporters. Similarly, while Congress passes a few laws and administrative agencies issue a few official regulations, “there are thousands and thousands of other notices,” bulletins, letters, and so on, issued by agencies every year.

This “regulatory dark matter” is hard to track, because it isn’t even collected or examined. Rather, an agency will set forth specific dictates and companies, organizations, or individuals will follow them, without the intermediate step of an official law or regulation.

The best example of this came last May, when the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) sent a letter to North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory insisting that House Bill 2, the state’s law restricting public, multiple-stall restrooms on the basis of biological sex, violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by institutionalizing sex discrimination.

In one sweeping move, the DOJ had redefined the Civil Rights Act of 1964, extending its protection against discrimination on the basis of sex to transgender people, something foreign to the law itself and with which the law’s authors clearly would have disagreed.

This letter was not an official law passed by Congress and signed by the president. Nor was it an official regulation, submitted in the Federal Register. No, it was an administrative fiat which threatened hefty penalties — the revocation of North Carolina’s $4.5 billion in federal funding for the 2016-2017 school year.

But this infamous transgender mandate — reversed by a Trump administration directive this past February — is just the tip of the iceberg, Crews said.

“It’s long been the case that there are more regulations than laws, and if we’re missing regulations, we’re missing government’s biggest effect on the economy,” the CEI vice president argued. He expanded the astral metaphor adding, “Lately, Washington has gone supernova.” CONTINUE AT SITE

How much goalpost moving should be tolerable in the Trump-Russia collusion investigation?https://amgreatness.com/2017/07/19/muellers-investigation-must-limited-accountable/

Remember, we started with an allegation that the Trump campaign may have been complicit in the Putin regime’s “cyber-espionage”—i.e., the hacking our intelligence agencies have concluded that Russian government operatives carried out against email accounts tied to Democrats. The investigation took a more serious turn last week, when it was revealed that Trump campaign officials met in June 2016 with a suspected emissary of the Putin regime. Yet, there is currently no basis to believe that meeting had anything to do with hacking. So, while the meeting warrants investigation, the original allegation is no closer to being proved.

Of course, it is certainly possible for a political campaign and a foreign government to engage jointly in unsavory behavior that does not rise to the level of crime. The less objectionable the behavior, however, the further afield we would be from the egregious allegation that prompted the investigation in the first place. Unless one is a rank partisan whose goal is to damage the president (rather than hold him accountable for actual, significant wrongdoing), this should be a matter of concern. Investigations are debilitating. They erode an administration’s ability to govern.

The investigation is a moving target because of its slippery vocabulary. It has been discussed and analyzed through the prism of “collusion” and “counterintelligence.”

When we think of an “investigation,” the connotation is a criminal proceeding—crimes, penal law, grand juries, subpoenas, warrants, arrests … prosecution. In that thicket, the terms “collusion” and “counterintelligence” are outliers. The former is a vague term that blurs the legally salient lines between mere association and conspiracy—that is, the difference between innocence and guilt. The latter is an unnecessary term: a counterintelligence investigation is an information-gathering exercise designed to divine the intentions of foreign powers to the extent they bear on American interests; a criminal investigation, by contrast, is an evidence-gathering exercise designed to build a prosecutable case that a specified person has committed a suspected penal-law offense.

The Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016, between Trump campaign figures and suspected Russian agents illustrates our difficulty.

In the criminal law, our sights are trained on conspiracy, which makes things easy. A conspiracy is an agreement to commit a violation of law. If Smith and Jones have a meeting, it is of no concern to the police unless the meeting is for the purpose of, say, arranging a heroin shipment or robbing a bank. It is the criminal offense that is the objective of the meeting, and nothing else, that makes the meeting relevant.

To speak in terms of collusion rather than conspiracy—as the Russia investigation coverage often does—only confuses matters. Contrary to what you may have heard from sundry “strategists” and “analysts,” collusion is neither a crime nor a term that has a legally consequential meaning. The word has a pejorative feel, especially in the last seven months. But literally, all it means is “concerted activity.” That could be criminal or noncriminal, sinister or benign.

She is relentlessly described as a “Russian lawyer” in media reporting. It should not escape our notice, then, that Natalia Veselnitskaya is not an American lawyer. She is not admitted to practice law in the United States.

So why was she admitted into the United States when she was not qualified to do the job that was the rationale for her admission?

We’ll get to that. To cut to the chase, however, it had nothing to do with the Trump campaign.

Veselnitskaya’s arrival at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, after being heralded in Donald Trump Jr.’s e-mails as a Putin-regime emissary bearing dirt on Hillary Clinton, is the first concrete indication of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Collusion in what remains to be seen, there still being no evidence of the collusion scenario initially alleged: Trump’s complicity in Russia’s “cyberespionage” — the hacking by which Putin attempted to influence the 2016 election (and succeeded in paralyzing the U.S. government in the election’s aftermath).

This being politics, the Trump camp has attempted to deflect attention from the Trump Tower meeting by pointing out that it was the Obama administration that enabled Veselnitskaya’s admission into the country. At a press conference in Paris last week, President Trump himself claimed that Veselnitskaya’s entry had been “approved by Attorney General [Loretta] Lynch.”

Of course, the question of why Obama-administration officials permitted Veselnitskaya to enter is likely to be of less consequence than what Veselnitskaya did once she got here. But it is important. Obviously, the Trump camp is intimating that the June 9 meeting was a set-up and that the Obama administration may have been in on it.

I happen to think there is a good chance the Trump campaign was being played. If so, though, the playing was done by Vladimir Putin.

Veselnitskaya probably should not have been allowed into the country, though that is one of those criticisms conveniently offered in 20-20 hindsight. Either way, the Justice Department had nothing to do with Veselnitskaya’s meeting with the Trump campaign. It is unlikely that top Obama officials knew about it, either, much less that they consciously facilitated it.

I suspect the Justice Department — specifically, the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan — reluctantly green-lighted Veselnitskaya’s entry to appease the court in a hotly disputed case with significant foreign-relations ramifications. Prosecutors may have been wrong to do this — it’s a judgment call — but it was clearly unrelated to the Trump Tower meeting, which happened months later under a different visa authorization.

In 2013, the Justice Department filed an asset-forfeiture lawsuit that was sensitive because it focused on Russian corruption. It arose out of a $230 million fraud orchestrated by the Putin regime, and involved the detention, torture, and murder of Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian investigator who exposed the scheme. (I will have more to say about the case in a subsequent column.) At the center of the case was Veselnitskaya’s client, Denis Katsyv.

He is the son of Pyotr Katsyv, a powerful Putin crony — similar to Aras Agalarov, the billionaire Russian real-estate magnate who, according to Trump Jr.’s e-mails, arranged Veselnitskaya’s Trump Tower meeting. Pyotr Katsyv was a powerful transportation minister for many years, and he is now vice president of the regime-owned national railroad system. As related in this useful New York Times profile of Veselnitskaya, her rise in Russia owes to the ties she forged with Katsyv. I do not buy the Kremlin’s claim that Putin had never heard of Veselnitskaya prior to the Trump Jr. controversy, but his chum Katsyv appears to be her patron in any event.

Denis Katsyv owns a Cyprus-based investment company called Prevezon Holdings Ltd. The company was the main defendant in the Justice Department’s lawsuit, in conjunction with which Justice froze about $14 million in property. Katsyv was not a defendant personally (asset-forfeiture cases technically target the asset, not its owner). But the case was highly significant to him and to Russia.

An international litigation can be tricky because our government and its courts often lack jurisdiction to compel the testimony of critical foreign witnesses. In order to get the cooperation necessary to move the case along, accommodations must be made, especially when the foreign government involved is not being helpful. In this instance, Russia was downright hostile.

It was important to the Prevezon case that Denis Katsyv be deposed in New York. Trying to do it in Moscow was out of the question, since lawyers, investigators, and witnesses in probes of Russian activities have a habit of ending up imprisoned, defenestrated, or dead there. Evidently, Katsyv was willing to be deposed and otherwise cooperate, or at least feign cooperation. If he was going to do that, though, he had a condition: He wanted the assistance of his Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, in addition to the top-flight American law firm, BakerHostetler, that was formally representing his company in the case.

In 2015, Veselnitskaya attempted to get a visa to come to the United States. The State Department denied her, and it is not farfetched to believe that one factor in the denial was a suspicion that she is a Putin-regime operative. Subsequently, however, the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan arranged for Veselnitskaya to be admitted through a rarely used immigration-law provision that allows aliens to be “paroled in” if they will perform some service of extraordinary benefit to our country.

It appears that this was done under pressure from the court. Indeed, according to a Daily Beast report, the Justice Department was even directed to reimburse Veselnitskaya’s expenses. The parole lasted just three months, from October 2015 through early January 2016 — meaning that the Justice Department parole had nothing to do with the Veselnitskaya–Trump Jr. meeting six months after the parole ended.

Readers know I am no Loretta Lynch fan, but Trump-camp suggestions that the then–attorney general had a meaningful role in Veselnitskaya’s entry are off base. The timeline does not work. Plus, while unusual, similar immigration complications do come up from time to time, and district U.S. attorneys’ offices generally resolve them without the personal involvement of the attorney general (even though the trial prosecutors may invoke “the attorney general,” “the Justice Department,” or “the United States” in exercising their legal authority).

Should the U.S. attorney’s office have made this accommodation for Katsyv and Veselnitskaya? Probably not.

By her own account, Veselnitskaya is not admitted to practice law in the United States. In a January 2015 declaration filed in the asset-forfeiture case, she claimed to have graduated from the Moscow State Legal Academy in 1998, and then to have worked as a regime prosecutor for a few years before moving “into private practice,” a laughable term as applied to Russia, where Putin’s circle of oligarchs runs the private sector . . . and the country.

Veselnitskaya purports to have extensive experience in Russian criminal, corporate, and property law. In the declaration, however, she did not even pretend to familiarity with American law, much less with the complexities of federal money-laundering and asset-forfeiture litigation. She did not attend an American law school. She is not a member of any state bar, let alone the bar of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. She would not have been eligible to appear in court as counsel for Prevezon Holdings, the Katsyv company in the case. And Prevezon, as already noted, was more than adequately represented by the BakerHostetler law firm.

Moreover, as we’ve also seen, the parole provision is supposed to be reserved for aliens whose presence will be beneficial to our country. Whatever positive effect Veselnitskaya may have portended for moving the case along was outweighed by the facts that (a) she was not qualified to perform the function that was the rationale for her admission; (b) there was reason to believe she was an agent of a hostile government that obstructed the investigation that led to the case; and (c) she was the spearhead of a Kremlin-backed lobbying campaign against the Magnitsky Act — the human-rights provision Congress enacted in response to Russia’s imprisonment, torture, and murder of Sergei Magnitsky.

When Veselnitskaya’s parole ended in January 2016, the U.S. attorney’s office refused to extend it. In explaining this position to the court, prosecutors recounted that she and others in Katsyv’s defense team had run up $50,000 in expenses in connection with his deposition. Veselnitskaya did not even attend the deposition, though she did bill U.S. taxpayers nearly $2,000 for a two-night stay at the Plaza the weekend after the deposition was concluded.

In light of Donald Trump Jr.’s changing story about meeting with a Russian “crown prosecutor” promising to give him damaging information about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign, many Democrat strategists and their liberal counterparts on Capitol Hill are once again overreacting. In the past week alone we’ve heard calls for treason charges, and one Democrat in the House has introduced an article of impeachment.

Because of the hysterical reaction, lets take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Were Trump campaign officials the only ones engaging in questionable behavior regarding Russia? Hardly. The Clintons are in the same category.
First, lets start with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server in hostile countries around the world. After all, she repeatedly bragged about the miles she traveled on the campaign trail.

While FBI investigators say there is no evidence hackers infiltrated the server, they also admit good hackers could have gotten in, taken important information and left without a trail. Further, because Clinton failed to turn over all 13 devices she used to access her private server (after claiming she only used one), the FBI could not conduct a full examination of possible intrusions.

According to an FBI report produced last year, the server was attacked by bad actors multiple times. Foreign spy agencies and enemies of the United States, including Russia, quickly became aware Clinton was using an open, unprotected system and did their best to access it. At one point, the server was attacked 10 times in just two days. When Clinton received emails from aides with details about attacks, she brushed them off and didn’t call for an increase in security on the network. Hackers were notably successful in obtaining emails containing sensitive foreign policy discussions between Clinton and her political allies such as Sidney Blumenthal.

When Clinton traveled to Russia, known for its hackers and cyber warfare against the United States and other democracies, she didn’t bother to tap into the government-protected email system provided by the State Department. Instead, she continued to communicate through her personal, home-brewed and unsecured server. Essentially, she left classified U.S. secrets wide open for access.

While the White House was busy getting its latest Russia story straight, and congressional Republicans were inventing another new way to not pass health-care reform, few noticed the latest double-barreled dose of bad budgetary news. But anyone who cares about the long-term economic health of the country should be paying careful attention.

First, the Congressional Budget Office reported that this year’s budget deficit will hit $693 billion. That’s $134 billion higher than the CBO predicted just six months ago, and $100 billion higher than last year’s shortfall. Under current baselines, deficits are soon expected to hit $1 trillion per year. All this deficit spending will add more than $10 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, bringing it to more than $30 trillion.

Of course, those projections are based on current policies. President Trump has proposed deep cuts in domestic spending. Assuming the president gets everything he wants, the debt will increase to only $27 trillion. Hurray? Of course, after the health-care debacle, and given the president’s other distractions, does anyone really believe that all those cuts are going to happen?

But as frightening as those numbers are, most budget observers know that the real problems come farther down the road, when the true cost of entitlement programs, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid kick in. (Before legions of outraged seniors attack, let me simply point out that “entitlement” is simply a budgetary term for programs that are not subject to annual appropriation.) And it is these programs that are responsible for the second dose of bad news.

According to the latest report of Social Security’s trustees, the program’s unfunded future liabilities now exceed $34.2 trillion (in discounted present-value terms). True, the program can maintain technical solvency until 2034 (cold comfort to anyone 50 or younger today). But that number is largely an accounting fiction that assumes that the Social Security Trust Fund is an asset that can be used to pay benefits. In reality, of course, the Trust Fund is just a claim against general revenues. On the far more important cash-flow basis, Social Security is already spending more on benefits than it brings in through tax revenue.

Big numbers like $34 trillion tend to make the eyes glaze over, so consider this: Restoring Social Security to permanent sustainable solvency would require immediately a roughly one-third increase in the payroll tax (or an equivalent in other taxes), or a permanent reduction in benefits for all current and future beneficiaries of about 25 percent.

Meanwhile, Medicare is in even worse shape. For the record, the Trust Fund for Medicare Part A will be technically exhausted by 2029, but like Social Security, the program is already running a cash-flow deficit. The big Medicare shortfalls, however, will be in Part B and the prescription-drug program, both of which are funded largely out of general revenues. Taken as a whole, Medicare’s unfunded liabilities are nearly $49 trillion, a slight improvement from previous forecasts.

Those projections may, however, be overly optimistic. They assume that Medicare’s rising costs will probably trigger automatic spending cuts through Obamacare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), starting next year. But those cuts, which almost exclusively fall on doctors and hospitals, are potentially devastating. In fact, Medicare’s trustees warn in their report that payments to doctors would “fall increasingly below providers’ costs.” As a result, as many as half the nation’s hospitals, 70 percent of skilled nursing facilities and more than 80 percent of home health agencies would be losing money. More and more doctors will be driven to abandon the program.

People in counties that propelled President Donald Trump’s election victory see him as the change agent needed to shake up political and economic systems that they said are stacked against them, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found.

The president’s job performance and his handling of the economy are viewed more favorably in these so-called Trump counties than in the rest of the nation, helping to overcome doubts some people have about the president’s personal qualities and some of his policy decisions.

The GOP president draws wide support in these counties for bargaining with employers to keep jobs in the U.S., with 75% of residents supporting those efforts and 14% opposing.

More than two-thirds of respondents in those counties back his signaling that he is willing to take action if North Korea goes further in developing long-range missiles and nuclear weapons, and a similar share backs his military response in April to Syria’s use of chemical weapons. A majority supports his push for a ban on entry into the U.S. residents of some countries.

In these counties, 50% said they approve of Mr. Trump’s job performance, compared with 46% who disapprove, the survey found. That is a stronger showing than the 40% in a nationwide Journal/NBC survey from last month who approved of Mr. Trump’s performance in office.

The survey underscored many of the themes that led to Mr. Trump’s surprising victory in November, most notably the resonance of his call to protect U.S. jobs and the unfavorable view that many voters took of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

The GOP’s inability to scrap ObamaCare this week means, among other things, that President Trump will end his first six months in office without a major legislative accomplishment. And one question is how much his supporters care.

Recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News polling gives the president a 40% job-approval rating among all voters, while 55% disapprove. In counties Mr. Trump won last year, however, voters still back him by 50% to 46%. Similar results come from a Washington Post/ABC News survey released Sunday, which found that the president’s approval rating had slid to 36% from 42% in April, while his disapproval rating had climbed five points to 58%. Yet among Republican voters over the same period, Mr. Trump’s favorability has barely budged and remains above 80%.

Moreover, these polling results reflect voter sentiment since news broke that Donald Trump Jr. met during the campaign with a Russian lawyer who claimed to have dirt on Hillary Clinton —the latest development in the Kremlin “collusion” narrative that has saturated cable news for months. According to the Post/ABC poll, 41% of all voters believe that the Trump campaign helped Russia try to influence the election, but that belief is shared by fewer than 1 in 10 Republican voters. The average Trump supporter’s concern about Russia roughly matches his concern about the president’s unreleased tax returns or witching-hour tweets.

Six months into the Trump presidency, the media by and large remain unable or unwilling to understand what drives his blue-collar supporters. Journalists continue to prioritize their own political concerns and play down those of the nearly 63 million people who pulled the lever for him in November. In her new book, “White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America,” Joan C. Williams writes that “during an era when wealthy white Americans have learned to sympathetically imagine the lives of the poor, people of color, and LGBTQ people, the white working class has been insulted or ignored during precisely the period when their economic fortunes tanked.”

In an essay on the rising rate of premature deaths from suicide, opioids and alcohol poisoning primarily among less-educated whites, Carol Graham of the Brookings Institution observes that “poor blacks and Hispanics are much more optimistic about their futures than are poor whites and, in turn, mortality rates have not increased the same way among minorities.” She adds, “A critical factor is the plight of the white blue-collar worker, for whom hopes for making it to a stable, middle-class life have largely disappeared. Due in large part to technology-driven growth, blue-collar jobs in the traditional primary and secondary industries—such as coal mines and car factories—are gradually disappearing.”

Mr. Trump’s ability to appeal to these voters is the reason he won and the reason his base isn’t abandoning him, with or without a significant legislative victory at the six-month mark. Emily Ekins, a Cato Institute scholar who is part of a politically diverse team of academics and pollsters in the process of analyzing the 2016 election, told me on Monday that Trump supporters are less concerned about his policy agenda and more interested in having someone who understands them occupy the Oval Office. The president’s relentless rhetoric about the “costs” of illegal immigration and free trade, his attacks on outsourcing, and this week’s White House “Made in America” stunt are all of a piece.

“I think there’s a lot of evidence to support the idea that Trump’s main appeal was validating the fears and concerns of a certain segment of Americans who felt they were being ignored by elites in the media, elites in politics, elite Republicans,” said Ms. Ekins. “My reading of the data is that he’s not on a timer or a clock. And it’s not clear to me that his supporters are waiting for him to achieve X, Y and Z policy goals. That’s an example of the press imposing their expectations on voters.”CONTINUE AT SITE