Trump does not remotely understand his role, status, and duties as President and Chief Executive, and this failure infects or undermines just about everything he does. It is an amazing state of affairs: A President of the United States who does not at all grasp the Office he occupies, and who thus entirely lacks the proper situation sense, or contextual knowledge, in which a President should exercise judgment or act. Let that sink in, and then imagine all of the decisions a President must make, all that he is responsible for. This reflection is the main reason why I have come to believe that the President does not deserve a presumption of regularity in his actions—not just by courts with respect to the immigration executive orders, but by the public more generally with respect to “everything the Executive does that touches, however lightly, the President.”

In her fascinating recent book Strangers in Their Own Land, the brilliant sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild asks readers to climb the “empathy wall” and really try to understand the worldview of Trump voters—as she did, spending over five years getting to know white Southern Louisianians, many of them Cajun, who have extreme free-market, anti-government Tea Party politics although they live in “Cancer Alley,” an area where the petrochemical industry, abetted by the Republican politicians they voted for, has destroyed nature, their communities and their health. Hochschild has a deep grasp of human complexity, and her subjects come across as lovely people, despite their politics. As she hoped, I came away with a better understanding of how kindly people could vote for cruel policies, and how people who don’t think they’re racist actually are so.

But here’s my question: Who is telling the Tea Partiers and Trump voters to empathize with the rest of us? Why is it all one way? Hochschild’s subjects have plenty of demeaning preconceptions about liberals and blue-staters—that distant land of hippies, feminazis, and freeloaders of all kinds. Nor do they seem to have much interest in climbing the empathy wall, given that they voted for a racist misogynist who wants to throw 11 million people out of the country and ban people from our shores on the basis of religion (as he keeps admitting on Twitter, even as his administration argues in court that Islam has nothing to do with it). Furthermore, they are the ones who won, despite having almost 3 million fewer votes. Thanks to the founding fathers, red-staters have outsize power in both the Senate and the Electoral College, and with great power comes great responsibility. So shouldn’t they be trying to figure out the strange polyglot population they now dominate from their strongholds in the South and Midwest? What about their stereotypes? How respectful or empathetic is the belief of millions of Trump voters, as established in polls and surveys, that women are more privileged than men, that increasing racial diversity in America is bad for the country, that the travel ban is necessary for national security? How realistic is the conviction, widespread among Trump supporters, that Hillary Clinton is a murderer, President Obama is a Kenyan communist and secret Muslim, and the plain-red cups that Starbucks uses at Christmastime are an insult to Christians? One of Hochschild’s subjects complains that “liberal commentators” refer to people like him as a “redneck.” I’ve listened to liberal commentators for decades and have never heard one use this word. But say it happened once or twice. “Feminazi” went straight from Rush Limbaugh’s mouth to general parlance. One of Hochschild’s most charming subjects, a gospel singer and preacher’s wife, uses it like a normal word. Equating women who want their rights with the genocidal murder of millions? How is that not a vile insult?

A new poll from the Pew Research Center has found that Donald Trump's presidency is strongly and negatively impacting how the rest of the world views the United States.

At the end of Barack Obama's term, 64 percent of global respondents said they were confident in the U.S. president, compared to 22 percent now. Seventy-four percent of those surveyed said they have no confidence in Trump.

Compared to the final years of Obama's presidency, Trump received higher ratings in just two of the 37 countries surveyed – Russia and Israel.

I stand with my colleagues in Congress to say: The president’s tweet is beneath the dignity of the office.

This is not making America great.

The president has at last done the unthinkable: He has insulted a morning television personality in crude and ghastly terms and I must — in consequence of this hideous and vile breach of the dignity of the office — withdraw none of my support from his legislative agenda. (If you can call it a legislative agenda and not a ragtag collection of bad ideas quickly stapled together with a dead pigeon in the middle.)

His remark about Mika Brzezinski is absolutely shameful and I do not stand with him, except insofar as it is necessary to stand with him so that we can make sure infants get access to pesticides, as the Founders would have wished.

I am shocked and appalled by his behavior. And I am not afraid to say so. At a fundraiser. For him. Before asking for more donations.

Everything else the president has done is fine — the continued attacks on the media’s legitimacy, the carelessness toward history and diplomacy, the harmful rhetoric about Muslims, the — well, it is all fine. This is too much, though, and I am putting my foot down, here, on my way to vote against icebergs.

...

By God, this is not what George Washington would have wanted, and I am thus withdrawing my support for everything but the legislation Trump would like us to pass. His words are a shame, but it is too important that we end health insurance for indigent seniors in Ohio...

#65279; Four things happened yesterday that pose a grave danger to voting rights.

1. The House Appropriations Committee voted to defund the Election Assistance Commission, the only federal agency that helps states make sure their voting machines aren’t hacked...

2. The Department of Justice sent a letter to all 50 states informing them that “we are reviewing voter registration list maintenance procedures in each state covered by the NVRA [National Voter Registration Act]” and asking how they plan to remove voters from the rolls. While this might sound banal, it’s a clear instruction to states from the federal government to start purging the voting rolls. “Let’s be clear what this letter signals: DOJ Civil Rights is preparing to sue states to force them to trim their voting rolls,” tweeted Sam Bagenstos, the former deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Obama administration. There’s a very long and recent history of Republican-controlled states’ purging their voting rolls in inaccurate and discriminatory ways—for example, Florida’s disastrous purge of alleged ex-felons in 2000 could have cost Al Gore the election—and it’s especially serious when the Department of Justice forces them to do it.

3. The White House commission on election integrity, led by vice chair Kris Kobach, also sent a letter to 50 states asking them to provide sweeping voter data including... While Kobach asked for “publicly-available voter roll data,” much of this information, like someone’s Social Security number or military status, is, in fact, private. Never before has a White House asked for such broad data on voters, and it could be easily manipulated by Trump’s commission.

4. The Trump administration named Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation as a member of the commission, who’s done more than anyone other than Kobach to spread the myth of voter fraud and enact suppressive policies. Von Spakovsky was special counsel to the Bush administration’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Brad Schlozman, who said he wanted to “gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the [voting] section.”...

All four of these actions would be disturbing on their own, but taken together they represent an unprecedented attack on voting rights by the Trump administration and Republican Congress. The actions by Kobach, in particular, appear to mark the beginning of a nationwide voter-suppression campaign, based on spreading lies about voter fraud to justify enacting policies that purge the voter rolls, and make registration and voting more difficult.

Why does he want to do this? By making voter fraud seem rampant, he can build support for policies like requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, which has blocked one in seven Kansans from registering since 2013. Nearly half of them are under 30...

Luckily, election officials from states including California, Kentucky, and Virginia have said they’ll refuse to comply with Kobach’s request, calling the commission “an attempt to legitimize voter suppression efforts across the country” (Kentucky), “a waste of taxpayer money and a distraction from the real threats to the integrity of our elections today” (California), and “a pretext to validate Donald Trump’s alternative election facts” (Virginia).

Let’s be clear what’s happening: Republicans have no desire to prevent another hack from Moscow, but they are dead set on limiting voting rights at home.

In the event I were to receive correspondence from the Commission requesting the following,

‘if publicly available under the laws of the state, the full first and last names of all registrants, middle names or initials if available, addresses, dates of birth, political party (if recorded in your state), last four digits of social security number if available, voter history (elections voted in) from 2006 onward, active/inactive status, cancelled status, information regarding any felony convictions, information regarding voter registration in another state, information regarding military status, and overseas citizen information,’

My reply would be: They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great State to launch from.

Mississippi residents should celebrate Independence Day and our State’s right to protect the privacy of our citizens by conducting our own electoral processes.”

27 states now opposing Kobach: AZ, CA, CT, IN, KY, MA, MN, MS, MT, NC, NM, ND, NV, NY, OH, OK, OR, PA, RI, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, VT, WA, WI

Numerous states are refusing to give information to the very distinguished VOTER FRAUD PANEL. What are they trying to hide?

16 states undecided on Kobach request according to @washingtonpost. ID, AZ, WY, NE, IA, IL, MI, LA, AL, FL, WV, NJ, DE, MD, HI, ME

24 states giving only limited public data to Kobach. WA OR NV CO UT MT ND TX OK KS AR MO WI IN OH PA NC SC GA NH VT RI CT AK

11 states, representing 97 million people, won't comply at all with Kobach voter data request. CA, NM, MN, NY, VA, MA, DC, SD, KY, TN, MS

But I guess this is where we’re at as a country. The nation’s most treasured texts are being interpreted as protests against the president. Which really makes you wonder what Trump supporters stand for. If the Declaration of Independence is now anti-American, what counts as patriotic?