Like most political observers, I watched Donald Trump’s Thursday press conference–if that’s what you want to call it–with a mixture of fascination and horror. On reflection, I wrote these observations for New York:

Donald Trump’s impromptu 80-minute press conference today was by all accounts an unprecedented event. To journalists accustomed to the traditional presidential press conference, it was an interminable violation of all the rules — not just of presidential-media relations, but of grammar, logic, decorum, and even political common sense. Trump brought up, unbidden, his own past mistakes in order to fulminate about how they were covered months ago. He changed subjects constantly and unpredictably, beginning with the fact that the whole thing began as an announcement of his new Labor Secretary nominee, Alexander Acosta, but soon went far, far afield and never returned. He insulted members of the working press before, during, and after their questions; he suggested one African-American reporter set up a meeting for him with the Congressional Black Caucus because he assumed they were probably “your friends.” And just when one outrage concluded, another began, world without end.

Here was Politico’s take:

“It was an extraordinary scene in the White House, which Trump essentially turned into a venue for a campaign rally, trashed the country’s most influential news outlets, cited approval polls and spread misinformation. It came two days before Trump will hit the road for a campaign rally in Florida, where he said the crowds would be ‘massive.'”

What seems plain in retrospect is that Trump has no intention, at least at present, to use presidential press conferences the way his predecessors have employed them: to convey information to the American people via the media, sometimes despite the media’s efforts to impose an uncongenial interpretation on the intended “message.” Presidents have varied in their skill at this game; some, most famously Richard Nixon, descended into an openly antagonistic relationship with journalists; virtually all the others have on occasion played favorites or “punished” disfavored reporters or outlets by denying access. But nobody until now has used a press conference to send one basic message over and over: With a few exceptions the people in this room are all lying scoundrels and you should not believe a word they say. Because that was Trump’s message: Every grievance he could dredge up, dating back to the ups and downs of the campaign trail, found its way into his tongue-lashing of the media today.

And that is why he by no means came across as the fearful Nixonian pol grudgingly giving his media enemies as little time as possible for questioning after his opening remarks, and then getting out of the room with as little damage as possible. As Trump said, he was enjoying the whole spectacle, and extended it again and again. And why not? If his goal was to convince his supporters that the media is their, as well as his, sworn enemy, then the longer he baited reporters and the longer they responded with obvious chagrin and efforts to pin him down, the more he succeeded. Had it gone on all day, it would have just reinforced the vast gap between his world and that of the people his senior counsel Stephen Bannon calls “the opposition party.”

“Tomorrow, they will say, ‘Donald Trump rants and raves at the press.’ I’m not ranting and raving. I’m just telling you. You know, you’re dishonest people. But — but I’m not ranting and raving. I love this. I’m having a good time doing it….”

Working journalists are, of course, left wondering how to deal with the role Trump has assigned them as cartoon villains who deploy “facts” and “logic” to try to trip up the man who is just too wily to play their malicious game. It is hard to change the behavior of a politician who craves media criticism —the more the better — the way a wino craves cheap muscatel. The fact that he acts genuinely aggrieved at such criticism even as he courts it — and for all we know, his alleged pain may even be genuine — makes it all the harder to treat him normally.

Perhaps the most important thing to happen at today’s press conference is that respectable Republicans in Washington and elsewhere had to be at least disturbed a bit by the spectacle, which no one could imagine any prior Republican president since Nixon, and probably not even the Tricky One, producing. At some point they will have to ask themselves exactly how much damage to traditional politics and government they are willing to accept in exchange for cutting taxes, criminalizing abortion, or giving the people who own most of the country relief from regulations.

The agony of congressional Republicans as they try to figure out how to keep various promises on repealing and replacing Obamacare is becoming fascinating to watch. I tried to explain their plight this week at New York:

[T]he GOP congressional leadership seem[s] to be coalescing around a strategy sometimes called “repeal-plus”— using the pending budget-reconciliation bill they authorized last month to repeal the non-regulatory portions of the Affordable Care Act and at the same time enact those elements of a replacement plan on which most Republicans can agree.

But the strategy must somehow thread the needle between the desire of the public (reinforced by Donald Trump’s promises) for maintaining Obamacare levels of health coverage, and conservative pressure to get rid of as much of the socialist abomination as is possible. This latter pressure point is gaining strength as House conservatives threaten to vote against anything that’s not a straight repeal of Obamacare, while the venerable tea party group FreedomWorks plans to mobilize grassroots support for the least Obamacare-like alternative out there, Rand Paul’s let-’em-eat-markets approach.

As Politico reports, as many as 50 House Republicans are prepared to demand a vote on the “dry run” Obamacare repeal legislation Congress sent to Barack Obama for a certain veto early last year. It was a straight repeal without replacement provisions, and, for dessert, also included defunding Planned Parenthood. This is the same bill, it should be remembered, that the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated would cost 18 million Americans their health coverage almost immediately (and 32 million within ten years), while boosting individual insurance-policy premiums by more than 20 percent.

The odds of such legislation getting through the Senate are vanishingly small, even though (a) no Democratic votes would be necessary and (b) all non-freshman Senate Republicans voted for it last year, when of course they knew it would not become law. This latter factor means that Mitch McConnell would use all his leverage with Paul Ryan to avoid such a bill coming over from the House and showing up GOP senators as having something less than the courage of their alleged convictions.

Everybody understands these dynamics, so it’s likely the real purpose of the House conservative gambit in pushing a politically disastrous repeal-without-replace plan — aside from signaling impatience about inaction — is to keep GOP leaders from going too far in the direction of continuing the very Obamacare policies the public (and presumably fearful Republican senators) would like them to continue. Provisions that might lead to a full-scale conservative revolt range from maintenance of the taxes that financed Obamacare coverage (and that would be supremely useful in paying for a GOP replacement), to too-generous subsidies for private insurance purchases, to excessive generosity to states that accepted the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, to inadequate “freedom” for insurers to discriminate against the old and the sick.

That could leave Republicans with not much more in the way of “replacement” items as such hardy GOP perennials as subsidies for Health Savings Accounts, authorization of interstate insurance sales, and sharp reductions in mandatory benefits for those receiving subsidies. As Ron Brownstein pointed out recently, all these ancient conservative health-policy ideas would erode coverage for the older Americans who happen to be most likely to vote Republican, while boosting out-of-pocket costs for the white-working-class voters who think costs are too high under Obamacare.

These cross-pressures to avoid anything that looks like Obamacare Lite but at the same time to avoid disruption of existing coverage are why Republicans are in such disarray on the subject to begin with. Just punting tough decisions down the road with a repeal-and-delay strategy that maintains Obamacare for years no longer seems like a viable option; conservatives hate it and it creates too much uncertainty in markets. But doing a mini-replacement (which is where “repeal-plus” seems headed) in the current budget-reconciliation vehicle means that any further replacement elements will require 60 Senate votes, meaning at least eight Democrats would have to go along.

As budget expert Stan Collender notes, that brilliant GOP plan for a legislative blitzkrieg this year that would repeal and replace Obamacare, slash taxes, and “reform” the welfare state, all through budget vehicles that made Democrats irrelevant, is looking mighty iffy now. Congressional Republicans cannot put off decisions about Obamacare much longer without imperiling the timetable for everything else they need to do. And there is always the possibility they will be caught by some random Trump tweet and forced to change direction. You have to figure Republican discussions on the legislative agenda, which were supposed to be resolved at a GOP retreat nearly three weeks ago, are in danger of descending into sweaty white-knuckled madness.

It would almost be fun to watch, if it did not affect health coverage for tens of millions of Americans.

As unprecedented as the Trump administration seems, it is very important to look to history to see how to deal with him, as I argued this week at New York:

Efforts to put Donald Trump’s authoritarian tendencies into a historical context usually begin with the simultaneously troubling and reassuring precedent of Richard M. Nixon. Like Trump, Nixon was a mistrustful and self-conscious “outsider” who hated the news media and compulsively focused on “enemies.” As we fear Trump will do, Nixon harnessed government resources to harass those enemies, ordered widespread law-breaking, expanded presidential powers to the breaking point, and tried to hide his more nefarious activities from scrutiny. But despite his power and a reelection landslide victory that makes a mockery of Trump’s pretensions of popularity, Nixon was brought to heel and eventually forced to resign. A potential authoritarian threat to democracy was repulsed.

Nixon was not, however, unique in succumbing to the temptations of an imperial presidency. As Jonathan Rauch reminds us in an important new analysis of how to contain Trump if he goes off the rails, all presidents cross lines and seek to expand their powers. And in fact, the most relevant precedent may be a relatively recent one:

“For a good example, one need look back no further than the presidency of George W. Bush. After the 9/11 attacks, Bush claimed alarmingly broad presidential powers. He said he could define the entire world as a battlefield in the War on Terror, designate noncitizens and citizens alike as enemy combatants, and then seize and detain them indefinitely, without judicial interference or congressional approval or the oversight called for by the Geneva Conventions.”

It’s initially hard to think of the sometimes-comical and often self-deprecating W. as resembling the volatile narcissist in the White House today; when Bush call himself “the decider,” more people laughed than cowered. But whatever the 43rd president lacked in bully-boy arrogance the people around him — most notably his vice-president — supplied abundantly. And there is no getting around the fact that the Bush team deliberately exploited the national emergency of 9/11 to do all sorts of things it had no real popular mandate to do, most notably the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and to intimidate opponents with the charge of anti-Americanism. It is very easy to imagine Team Trump doing the same thing. The president’s charge that he would hold “the court system” responsible for any future terrorist attacks is a credible threat that like Bush he might convert a national-security failure into a warrant for near-total power.

As Rauch notes, however, Bush was, like Nixon, eventually brought to heel as well, without the trauma of a threatened impeachment and a resignation. He quotes one-time Bush administration Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith as describing a “giant distributed networks of lawyers, investigators, and auditors, both inside and outside the executive branch” that reined in a potentially authoritarian regime….

Eventually Congress and the courts joined this effort, and in 2006, so did the American electorate, in a midterm buffeting of the president’s party that ruined Karl Rove’s painstaking efforts to build a durable GOP majority based on a combination of national-security fearmongering and carefully targeted domestic initiatives. But it was a near thing.

The good news is that many of the same forces that helped rein in Bush are at hand today, and Trump’s open contempt for norms has put them on high alert. But as Trump’s election showed, the old norms don’t have the power they had in the past — even the most recent past.

It should be relatively apparent that the first step toward making sure the Trump administration doesn’t lurch down the path to authoritarian abuse of power via a national-security “emergency” is to deny it the sort of government-of-national-salvation status Bush and his team enjoyed in the wake of 9/11. If that means Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans (the few who are left, anyway) have to run the risk of being attacked for insufficient patriotism, so be it. It is their patriotic duty to do so. And as the example of George W. Bush shows, the sooner the president is denied imperial powers, the sooner his imperial pretensions can be exposed as mere power-grabs.

With luck, there will not be an incident like 9/11 — or the Iraq War — during the Trump presidency. But if there is, does anyone doubt he will exploit it to the hilt? That’s the authoritarian emergency for which we must all prepare.

As unprecedented as the Trump administration seems, it is very important to look to history to see how to deal with him, as I argued this week at New York:

Efforts to put Donald Trump’s authoritarian tendencies into a historical context usually begin with the simultaneously troubling and reassuring precedent of Richard M. Nixon. Like Trump, Nixon was a mistrustful and self-conscious “outsider” who hated the news media and compulsively focused on “enemies.” As we fear Trump will do, Nixon harnessed government resources to harass those enemies, ordered widespread law-breaking, expanded presidential powers to the breaking point, and tried to hide his more nefarious activities from scrutiny. But despite his power and a reelection landslide victory that makes a mockery of Trump’s pretensions of popularity, Nixon was brought to heel and eventually forced to resign. A potential authoritarian threat to democracy was repulsed.

Nixon was not, however, unique in succumbing to the temptations of an imperial presidency. As Jonathan Rauch reminds us in an important new analysis of how to contain Trump if he goes off the rails, all presidents cross lines and seek to expand their powers. And in fact, the most relevant precedent may be a relatively recent one:

“For a good example, one need look back no further than the presidency of George W. Bush. After the 9/11 attacks, Bush claimed alarmingly broad presidential powers. He said he could define the entire world as a battlefield in the War on Terror, designate noncitizens and citizens alike as enemy combatants, and then seize and detain them indefinitely, without judicial interference or congressional approval or the oversight called for by the Geneva Conventions.”

It’s initially hard to think of the sometimes-comical and often self-deprecating W. as resembling the volatile narcissist in the White House today; when Bush call himself “the decider,” more people laughed than cowered. But whatever the 43rd president lacked in bully-boy arrogance the people around him — most notably his vice-president — supplied abundantly. And there is no getting around the fact that the Bush team deliberately exploited the national emergency of 9/11 to do all sorts of things it had no real popular mandate to do, most notably the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and to intimidate opponents with the charge of anti-Americanism. It is very easy to imagine Team Trump doing the same thing. The president’s charge that he would hold “the court system” responsible for any future terrorist attacks is a credible threat that like Bush he might convert a national-security failure into a warrant for near-total power.

As Rauch notes, however, Bush was, like Nixon, eventually brought to heel as well, without the trauma of a threatened impeachment and a resignation. He quotes one-time Bush administration Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith as describing a “giant distributed networks of lawyers, investigators, and auditors, both inside and outside the executive branch” that reined in a potentially authoritarian regime….

Eventually Congress and the courts joined this effort, and in 2006, so did the American electorate, in a midterm buffeting of the president’s party that ruined Karl Rove’s painstaking efforts to build a durable GOP majority based on a combination of national-security fearmongering and carefully targeted domestic initiatives. But it was a near thing.

The good news is that many of the same forces that helped rein in Bush are at hand today, and Trump’s open contempt for norms has put them on high alert. But as Trump’s election showed, the old norms don’t have the power they had in the past — even the most recent past.

It should be relatively apparent that the first step toward making sure the Trump administration doesn’t lurch down the path to authoritarian abuse of power via a national-security “emergency” is to deny it the sort of government-of-national-salvation status Bush and his team enjoyed in the wake of 9/11. If that means Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans (the few who are left, anyway) have to run the risk of being attacked for insufficient patriotism, so be it. It is their patriotic duty to do so. And as the example of George W. Bush shows, the sooner the president is denied imperial powers, the sooner his imperial pretensions can be exposed as mere power-grabs.

With luck, there will not be an incident like 9/11 — or the Iraq War — during the Trump presidency. But if there is, does anyone doubt he will exploit it to the hilt? That’s the authoritarian emergency for which we must all prepare.

Some alarming news is seeping out of Republican circles about designs on a program only Democrats seem to care about anymore, Medicaid. I promptly sounded an alarm at New York.

One of the peculiar aspects of the debate over Republican aspirations to “repeal and replace” Obamacare is how little of it revolves around the provision that has accounted for the majority of uninsured Americans obtaining coverage under the Affordable Care Act: the state option to expand Medicaid eligibility. Instead, most of the talk has been about the private insurance exchanges, and the subsidies that help pay for individual policies, and the purchasing mandates designed to encourage younger and healthier Americans to participate, and the mandated benefit packages, and the regulations against preexisting-condition exclusions and overcharging old folks. That’s understandable due to the incredible complexity of the exchanges and the high visibility of premium increases and insurers pulling out of the exchanges altogether.

But any “repeal and replace” scheme absolutely has to deal with Medicaid. And left to their own devices, Republicans would almost certainly pursue an idea that’s been nestled in various Ryan budgets and was embraced by Donald Trump on the campaign trail: a Medicaid “block grant” that would to a greater or lesser degree shift responsibility for indigent health care to the states, in the process saving the feds a big chuck of change and getting rid of all those headachy policy decisions related to a troublesome, Democratic-leaning constituency.

Unfortunately for the GOP, 31 states — including 16 governed by Republicans — accepted the ACA Medicaid expansion, going in exactly the opposite direction conservatives nationally have supported. Some —including the current vice-president of the United States (who was then governor of Indiana) — rationalized accepting the filthy federal lucre (a much higher federal match rate covering new enrollees) for an expansion because the Obama administration let them conduct conservative-sounding policy experiments, mostly involving the kind of premiums and co-pays Medicaid beneficiaries normally don’t have to deal with.

So the political and substantive complexity of squaring a Medicaid block grant with Medicaid expansion on the ground has helped place Medicaid on the back burner for the Trump administration and congressional Republicans, as something that would probably be handled in a second budget bill later in 2017, or perhaps even in freestanding legislation….

[But] [n]ow Politico’s Jennifer Haberkorn reports that the transformation of Medicaid could be in the very first budget-reconciliation bill aimed at “repealing” Obamacare — the bill already authorized by a budget resolution that was whipped through Congress last month. But the above-mentioned dilemmas have not gone away:

“Medicaid is proving to be the most complex piece of a replace plan in the repeal bill. Republicans want to dramatically overhaul the program by imposing spending caps tied to the number of enrollees in a state. But they are running into problems sorting out such details as whether funding should be allocated based on state enrollment before Obamacare or after.”

My guess is that they will come up with a Solomon-style solution, picking some arbitrary enrollment figure halfway between states that expanded Medicaid and states that did not — recognizing that there were major state variations even before Obamacare. But the key thing to understand is that putting a Medicaid block grant into the “repeal” bill means it can be enacted without Democratic votes. And more generally, doing so successfully would mean Republicans had succeeded in all but abolishing a key Great Society federal-safety-net program by making it “about” Obamacare. For the many millions of Americans who would ultimately be affected — including the majority of Republican voters who have no idea Obamacare repeal will affect Medicaid — it would represent a classic bait and switch.

It would be a very good time for Democrats and others who care about guaranteeing that the poorest and sickest Americans have access to lifesaving health care to stop playing the GOP game of getting down into the weeds of Obamacare’s private-insurance provisions and beginning pointing and shouting about what Republicans may be about to do to Medicaid.

Since church-state relations are such a complicated and often-misunderstood topic, I decided to take on one of them at New York that Donald Trump has revived in a big and nasty manner:

It is beginning to look like a big week for the Christian right in Washington. On Tuesday night President Trump gave them the SCOTUS nominee most of them wanted, in Neil Gorsuch. Then word got out that the administration had drafted a sweeping executive order on “religious liberty” that could have been drafted by Jerry Falwell Jr. And then on Thursday morning, at the National Prayer Breakfast (itself an annual ritual of presidential deference to conservative Christians), Trump repeated a campaign promise to repeal the so-called Johnson Amendment, a 1954 law preventing open electioneering by tax-exempt nonprofit organizations. Actually, the term he used was not “repeal,” but “totally destroy.” Very presidential of him.

What this would mean in practice is that people employed by religious bodies (and other kinds of nonprofit organizations), most especially ministers of the Christian Gospel, could endorse and exhort support for special candidates and other matters decided at the ballot box right there in the pulpit — or perhaps more importantly, through utilization of church resources (signs, flyers, phone and email lists, and presumably even paid ads). It would save the time and trouble involved in the winking and nodding that often goes on with clerical politicking. But less innocently, the proposed new policy might also pave the way to coerced electioneering statements imposed on individual ministers and congregations by denominational leaders. It would definitely politicize the Sabbath in a big way.

Trump, of course, tries to make this sound like a simple matter of freedom, daring to cite as an authority the predecessor for whom separation of church and state was a first principle:

“Jefferson asked, ‘”Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?”Among those freedoms is the right to worship according to our own beliefs. That is why I will get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution — I will do that.”

Put aside for a moment the fact that religious groups violating the Johnson Amendment practically have to hit the IRS over the head with their views to attract the rare investigation or enforcement action. Even if it were regularly enforced, nothing in the Johnson Amendment keeps anyone from worshiping as they wish; “representatives of faith” could have devoted every 2016 sermon to demanding votes for Donald Trump or excoriating the baby-killing devil-woman Hillary Clinton if they wanted. They just cannot at the same time accept taxpayer subsidies.

That is the real misunderstanding here. Groups demanding the freedom to say and do whatever they want, and/or to violate anti-discrimination laws in the name of God, seem to view tax-exempt status as quite literally a matter of divine entitlement. But it’s a very secular thing conveying crass, material benefits in great abundance. Not only does church property (and some forms of church employee compensation) escape taxation: The dollars placed in the collection plate convey a tax benefit to the contributors. All told, the value of the tax exemptions for churches has been estimated in one recent study as amounting to $71 billion annually. That’s certainly enough to justify a bit of self-control in playing with electoral politics.

Since the Johnson Amendment is a matter of statutory law (enacted, as it happens, by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed by a Republican president), not executive-branch policy, Trump cannot “get rid of and totally destroy it” by fiat. But because it involves the tax code, congressional Republicans can almost certainly nestle a Johnson Amendment repeal into one of the two “budget reconciliation” bills on tap this year — perhaps the first one, mainly aimed at whatever the GOP decides to do with Obamacare, which will supposedly be unveiled this month or next.

One way or another Trump will try to redeem this campaign pledge to the Christian Right. And it’s hard to imagine Republicans standing in his way, whatever their private misgivings.

Democrats need to expose this exercise in clerical welfare before it happens.