Here’s a story at Wonkblog today:

Trump said he’d shrink the trade deficit with China. It just hit a record high.

The trade deficit with China hit a record high in 2017, defying President Trump’s repeated promises to shrink a number that he regards as a test of whether other nations are treating the United States fairly.

Oh come on. Baiting Trump is risky business, and there’s certainly no need to do it based on bad data. As usual, this “record” is based on nominal dollars, which are meaningless. What we care about is the trade deficit with China as a percent of GDP:

There’s no record there. There’s nothing there. The trade deficit with China in 2017 was 1.93 percent, which is pretty much where it’s been ever since the Great Recession. Here’s our total trade deficit:

The total trade deficit, including both goods and services, went up 0.21 percentage points, which is an appreciable amount. The trade deficit in goods went up 0.14 points. Neither one is anything remotely close to a record, though.

I’m always happy to rub Trump’s nose in something, but we don’t have to make stuff up. The US trade deficit did go up a bit in 2017, but not by a lot and certainly not by a record amount. Let’s leave the phony outrage to the Republicans.

If Congress can’t come to an agreement on DACA, President Trump could always just extend the program a while longer. Right?

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly said Tuesday that President Trump is not expected to extend a March 5 deadline for when legal protection and work permits begin to expire for young immigrants known as “dreamers” — raising the stakes for lawmakers struggling to reach a solution….He told reporters that he was “not so sure this president has the authority to extend it” because the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that protects roughly 690,000 undocumented immigrants was not based on law.

Let’s get this straight. Trump had the authority to extend DACA for six months. But not for nine months. Because the program is illegal. Uh huh.

Elsewhere on the front page, the Washington Post explains what’s really going on with Trump and immigration:

Roger that.

Mother Jones Illustration; Evan Vucci/AP

Generally speaking, I figure I can make common cause with any conservative who opposes Donald Trump. Jonah Goldberg, for example, might believe that the best way to fix Social Security is to let Monsanto grind up old people and manufacture Soylent Green for sale to North Korea. Whatever. We can argue that out later. For now, recognizing the danger of Trump is good enough.

And yet…there is more to Trump than just Trump himself. Here is Goldberg today on some of the reasons for the cult of Trump:

One is the tribal belief that the other party is an existential enemy that will do anything. And so we must be just as ruthless….The dynamic only gets worse with each election. The party out of power convinces itself that obstruction — or now “resistance” — is the only option.

….The result is that the party in power races to get its agenda accomplished and the base forgives any abuses or violations of norms in the process, thus proving the worst suspicions of the opposition. Liberals roll their eyes at the claim that President Obama violated democratic norms or abused his power. But putting aside the specific arguments, conservatives saw plenty of abuses and violations, from the IRS scandals and Benghazi to the Iran deal. Obama said many times he couldn’t unilaterally implement the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program because he wasn’t a “king.” Then he did it anyway.

Yeah, OK, except that we really can’t put aside the specific arguments here. We know now that the IRS “scandal” was a minor screwup that affected both parties, and certainly had nothing to do with Obama anyway. Benghazi was a tragedy, but not a scandal in any reasonable sense of the word. The Iran deal was…the Iran deal. And getting new legal advice on DACA is hardly some unprecedented norm violation. It’s up to the courts to decide if an executive order is legal, and so far no court has even taken up the question of DACA, let alone ruled against it.

I’m not trying to paint Democrats as boy scouts here, but I am trying to make the point that Republicans have not just gone down Goldberg’s road of tribalism, they’ve roared off the edge of the tribalism cliff at a hundred miles an hour with flags flying. If their obsession with corrupt, America-hating Democrats hadn’t existed in the first place, Trump never could have won the GOP nomination. There’s a reason, after all, that Republicans nominated a guy like Trump in 2016 while Democrats nominated a mainsteam party lifer like Hillary Clinton.

Criticizing Trump is relatively easy. But purging the country of Trumpism means purging the Republican Party of the lunatic wing that truly believes liberalism means the end of America as we know it. This means more than just refusing to give it oxygen. It means no longer tolerating it. It means no longer indulging in Benghazi or the IRS or Solyndra or any of the other faux scandals, even though they’re a lot of fun. And it means calling out conservatives who do indulge in lunacy. That means Hannity. It means Glenn Beck back when he mattered. It means Rush Limbaugh. It means Steve King and Devin Nunes. It means Fox & Friends. It means evangelical leaders.

You can ask the same of Democrats, of course, but only if you recognize that this is fundamentally a Republican epidemic, and that’s where emergency measures are needed first.

This is a "cabinet of curiosities," not the kind where the rich and powerful met to plot against their enemies. But you get the idea.Smithsonian Institution Libraries

From Politico:

Kellyanne Conway’s ‘opioid cabinet’ sidelines drug czar’s experts

Say what? A cabinet full of opioids?

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway has taken control of the opioids agenda, quietly freezing out drug policy professionals and relying instead on political staff to address a lethal crisis claiming about 175 lives a day. The main response so far has been to call for a border wall and to promise a “just say no” campaign. Trump is expected to propose massive cuts this month to the “drug czar” office, just as he attempted in last year’s budget before backing off. He hasn’t named a permanent director for the office, and the chief of staff was sacked in December. For months, the office’s top political appointee was a 24-year-old Trump campaign staffer with no relevant qualifications. Its senior leadership consists of a skeleton crew of three political appointees, down from nine a year ago.

Oh, that kind of cabinet. Why do we call it that, anyway? John Kelly—not the one who’s a member of Trump’s cabinet, some other John Kelly—explains:

In the 16th century, there were two main meanings of cabinet. The first, and earliest, cabinet named a “case” that kept secret valuables….The other cabinet named a “small, private chamber.” Leaders would meet with political advisors in such places, apparently, to discuss the most sensitive and confidential matters. Over the first half of the 1600s, and by the metaphorical process known as metonymy, cabinet became the official name for the people who met in a such a room to advise a leader.

OK, got it. Anyway, the reason for sidelining the actual drug professionals is pretty obvious: they would recommend programs that cost a lot of money and regulate pharmaceutical companies, and Trump doesn’t want to do either. He just wants to sound really tough, like he did yesterday in Ohio:

America will not overcome this epidemic overnight….Our children are being decimated. You know, one drug dealer can kill thousands of people. One drug dealer. If you ever did an average — nobody has ever seen this, you’ve probably never heard this before — but if you ever did an average, a drug dealer will kill thousands of people. And we don’t even come down on these people. So it’s time to start, and that time is now. Right now.

….People form blue ribbon committees, they do everything they can. And, frankly, I have a different take on it. My take is, you have to get really, really tough — really mean — with the drug pushers and the drug dealers. We can do all the blue ribbon committees we want. We have to get a lot tougher than we are. And we have to stop drugs from pouring across our border.

There you go. If we just get a lot meaner, the opioid epidemic will go away. I wonder why no one ever thought of that before?

Alvin Chang writes about how the media got snookered—again—by a ridiculous Republican obsession:

We’ve been here before: the Uranium One conspiracy; the allegation that Hillary Clinton colluded with Russia; the theory that the DNC killed a staffer who was supposedly the source of the email leak; the stories about the “deep state” trying to undermine Trump; and even Pizzagate….As the rest of the media tries to make sense of the spectacle, these conspiracy theories end up completely dominating news cycles. Making these storylines mainstream doesn’t work unless CNN, MSNBC, the nightly shows, the morning shows, and even Saturday Night Live engage seriously with the topic. And they do, time and again.

….It would be one thing if this was the first time, but it’s not. Time and again, mainstream media is enamored with the spectacle, to the point that much of the news is observing this spectacle and trying to make sense of it. There is a real conundrum in how much to cover these conspiracy theories, and how to do it. But eventually, we will get real, hugely consequential information — and the true indicator of whether the conspiratorial right has won will be whether the media can get the public to listen to that signal amid all the noise.

It’s not just the media, though. One thing that’s clear is that this stuff drives clicks and ratings on both sides of the aisle. We all wanted to hear about the Nunes memo, and we tuned out when the news was about something else. Partly this is because of the media coverage, which sucks us in. But then we start demanding more, and the media obliges. It’s a vicious circle, and it’s not even clear who’s to blame for starting it. It’s tempting to say that it’s obviously the media, but there’s always a point at the beginning of these things where coverage is perfectly justified. It’s news, after all. And then it gets out of control because the media doesn’t have either the desire or the self-discipline to stop the hype machine. But neither do we, it turns out.

At the moment, all I can suggest is the Hannity test: If Sean Hannity is going crazy over something, the rest of us should ignore it. He’s an almost perfect barometer of what’s news and what’s nonsense.

Unsurprisingly, President Trump’s lawyers are dead set against having the fabulist-in-chief sit down for an interview with Robert Mueller:

His lawyers are concerned that the president, who has a history of making false statements and contradicting himself, could be charged with lying to investigators. Their stance puts them at odds with Mr. Trump, who has said publicly and privately that he is eager to speak with Mr. Mueller as part of the investigation into possible ties between his associates and Russia’s election interference, and whether he obstructed justice.

Mr. Trump’s decision about whether to speak to prosecutors, expected in the coming weeks, will shape one of the most consequential moments of the investigation. Refusing to sit for an interview opens the possibility that Mr. Mueller will subpoena the president to testify before a grand jury, setting up a court fight that would drastically escalate the investigation and could be decided by the Supreme Court.

This has been the state of play for a while. What I don’t get is what the court fight would be about. Why do Trump’s attorneys think he could refuse a subpoena?

They are convinced that Mr. Mueller lacks the legal standing to question Mr. Trump about some of the matters he is investigating, like the president’s role in providing a misleading response last summer to a New York Times article about a meeting Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. had with Russians offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. The advisers have also argued that on other matters — like the allegations that the president asked James B. Comey, then the F.B.I. director, to end the investigation into the former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn — the president acted within his constitutional authority and cannot be questioned about acts that were legal.

By an odd coincidence, this year is the 20th anniversary of Bill Clinton’s testimony before a grand jury after Kenneth Starr subpoenaed him. I suppose my memory might be foggy, but I’m pretty sure Republicans back then insisted unanimously that Starr did indeed have the standing to subpoena Clinton. Right? Help me out here.

The president’s lawyers are playing a weak hand here. If they decline an interview and Mueller issues a subpoena, Trump has to testify without benefit of counsel. That’s the last thing they want, and Mueller knows it. With the Starr precedent to back him up, all Mueller has to do is give them a simple choice: Trump can testify either voluntarily with counsel or under subpoena without counsel. What’s it going to be?

Trump is on thin ice for another reason: he can tweet all he wants about this being a witch hunt, but Republicans control every branch of government. This investigation isn’t being run by Democrats and Mueller wasn’t appointed by a bunch of liberals. Unless you believe that the FBI is a hotbed of socialism—and nobody believes that except for Trump’s true believer fans—this whole thing is a conservative show from start to finish. Hillary Clinton isn’t involved. Nancy Pelosi isn’t involved. Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders aren’t involved. There’s just no way to credibly paint this as a partisan inquisition.

Gary M Williams/EFE via ZUMA

At a rally today in Ohio, President Trump said that Democrats who didn’t clap at his State of the Union address were treasonous. Over at National Review, Dan McLaughlin comments:

If you watch the actual video, you can see the flippancy here. Trump is plainly not being serious about treason — he’s playing this for laughs, and getting them — and liberals going to DEFCON 1 as if he is yet again proving how little interest they have in distinguishing between tyranny and mere boorishness. The loss of perspective is just wearying to watch at this point.

Fair enough, I guess. But then he launches into what I can only call a postmodern deconstruction of the meaning of Trump. Or, actually, maybe it’s the exact opposite of postmodern. Anyway, here it is:

The real problem here is…that he’s basically openly mocking the idea that words in politics mean anything at all….That’s the subversive, somewhat cleansing but ultimately corrosive part of Trump’s brand of political performance art: he’s talking to people who by and large think that politicians never mean anything they say, and he’s out there telling them, you’re right. We can say anything we want and none of it matters. It’s all a racket. Hey, how ’bout you and I call each other traitors and then punch the clock at the end of the day and get a drink together? Maybe our political class really has earned being treated this way, but every time Trump does it, he makes it harder to rebuild the broken norms he inherited and has treated with such contempt.

This is either brilliant or full of shit. I’m really not sure which.

Things that make you go “hmmm”:

I can’t say that these things are necessarily related. Presumably bitcoin is crashing because it was a Ponzi scheme all along and the air finally went out of it. The stock market isn’t crashing, but it is tumbling and I have no idea why. Neither does anyone else, no matter what they tell you. But it’s down even though corporate earnings are solid; a generous tax cut is on its way; and the rest of the world is doing pretty well. It may be true that the crazy growth of January wasn’t really justified, but the market has given back way more than that. Why? Trade worries? Random panic? Fear of Trump finally hitting everyone? Beats me.

Waiting for the train.

The Philadelphia Eagles won the Super Bowl yesterday. But that wasn’t the only good news for Pennsylvania. There’s more.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently ruled that the Republican gerrymandering of the state’s congressional districts was wildly unconstitutional. That is, it violates the state constitution. Republicans immediately appealed to the US Supreme Court, which was a savvy move since Samuel Alito, the most conservative justice on the court, represents the district that includes Pennsylvania. If there was even a ghost of a case to be made, he’d recommend that the full court take a look.

He didn’t. Even Sam Alito could see there was just nothing there. So that’s that. One way or another, Pennsylvania’s districts will be redrawn in a tolerably honest way for the 2018 elections.

It’s worth noting that since this is based on state law, it has no bearing on the gerrymandering cases the Supreme Court is deciding this year. Those cases will be based on federal law and the US Constitution. Still, the mere fact that other courts are starting to rule against egregiously partisan gerrymandering efforts creates a favorable environment. I’m cautiously optimistic that the court will at least set out some minimal ground rules when it issues its gerrymandering opinion later this year.