It seems obvious that early worries about an unbound authoritarian Trump — fears that our institutions would not hold up or that Trump would bulldoze them — now look overblown. But nonetheless, echoes of these traits do appear present. The nonstop lying and endless attacks on the news media appear designed to obliterate shared agreement on the legitimate institutional role of the press in holding Trump accountable to some semblance of shared truth and reality. Importantly, many of Trump’s favorite lies exaggerate the significance of his electoral victory: There’s the claim that Trump would have won the popular vote if not for millions of illegal voters; the buffoonish efforts to inflate his inaugural crowd sizes; and the assertion that former president Barack Obama wiretapped his phones, showing that he, too, had been illicitly targeted during the election.

Meanwhile, Trump’s underlings must constantly find ever-more-creative ways of propping up those lies: a “voting fraud” commission; Sean Spicer’s assaults on the media for minimizing Trump’s crowd sizes; the internal hunt for “evidence” of the Obama wiretap; and so forth. But the Russia probe persists. It plainly nags at Trump because he believes it undercuts his legitimacy. Sessions and Comey have both failed to make it go away. Trump is reportedly raging about that failing, and even seems to have fired Comey over it. And Comey hasn’t even told his side of the story in public yet.

* TRUMP’S LAWLESS PRESIDENCY: David Leonhardt has a must-read documenting all the aspects of Trump’s presidency that are rooted in a fundamental contempt for the rule of law. Many of these are the ones related above. And there’s also this:

Foreign governments speed up trademark applications from Trump businesses. Foreign officials curry favor by staying at his hotel. A senior administration official urges people to buy Ivanka Trump’s clothing. The president violates bipartisan tradition by refusing to release his tax returns, thus shrouding his conflicts…

The behavior has no precedent. “Trump and his administration are flagrantly violating ethics laws,” the former top ethics advisers to George W. Bush and Barack Obama have written.

Their attitude is clear: If we’re doing it, it’s O.K.

This often escapes notice, but Trump’s serial shredding of baseline norms of ethics and transparency is also a key component of his autocracy — he does this, because he can.

* WALL STREET JOURNAL RIPS TRUMP’S BLAME-EVERYONE-ELSE APPROACH: The Wall Street Journal opens fire on Trump for his latest bout of blaming everyone around him for wounds he has inflicted on himself. Note this, on his attacks on the courts:

He is exercising core presidential powers over foreign affairs that the courts may restrict if Mr. Trump keeps daring them to do so … Trump has given liberal judges Twitter evidence to conclude that his motives may be suspect. At the very least he is making it harder to corral a Supreme Court majority.

It is plausible that Trump’s bottomless bad faith and contempt for process are undermining his agenda, and the attacks on the courts could indeed make them more inclined to constrain him.

* CONGRESSIONAL GOP PLUMMETS ON HEALTH CARE: A new Morning Consult poll finds an enormous swing toward the Democrats on the question of which party is trusted more on health care. In early March, Republicans led, 43 percent to 39 percent, among registered voters. But now, voters back Democrats on the issue by 48-35.

It turns out that pushing a plan that would leave 23 million fewer covered, gut protections for preexisting conditions and cut hundreds of billions from health spending on poor people to fund an enormous tax cut for the rich might turn voters off.

* SOME REPUBLICANS ARE PESSIMISTIC ABOUT HEALTH PUSH: McClatchy reports that Senate Republicans will meet today to discuss various options for moving their own repeal-and-replace bill. Note this:

Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said leadership is “optimistic and we’ll see how it goes in the next few days.” But he said the Senate at a certain point will need to move on: “I don’t think this gets better over time,” he said. “My personal view is we’ve got now until the Fourth of July to decide whether the votes are there or not.”

We’ll see. I would not be surprised if Senate Republicans who currently oppose the worst aspects of the House GOP approach suddenly find a way to argue that they have been mitigated in the Senate version.

* AMERICANS WANT ACTION ON CLIMATE, BUT THERE’S A PROBLEM: A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds:

68 percent of Americans want the United States to lead global efforts to slow climate change, and 72 percent agree “that given the amount of greenhouse gases that it produces, the United States should take aggressive action to slow global warming.” … Even so, Americans rank the environment near the bottom of their list of priorities for the country. Only about 4 percent of Americans believe that the “environment” is a bigger issue than healthcare, the economy, terrorism, immigration, education, crime and morality.

And there you have it. Climate activists may be winning the argument, but no one knows how to make this a voting issue.

* DEMOCRAT WOMEN LINE UP FOR 2020: Politico reports that four female Democratic senators — Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris — may run for president and notes that Democratic strategists are trying to learn from Hillary Clinton’s loss:

High-level Democratic operatives remain confident that Clinton’s treatment from Republicans was singularly brutal, a result of decades’ worth of history as a leading figure in the public eye — something that none of the four possible top-tier 2020 hopefuls have endured. So while strategists are concerned about sexism weighing them down, the expectation is that they’d face a less furious reaction than Clinton.

This seems right. Clinton was uniquely pilloried for more than two decades, and this — plus her own obvious flaws — surely helped explain the durability of her high negatives.

* TRUMP TRIPLES DOWN ON ‘TRAVEL BAN’: Last night, Trump again tweeted that his travel ban is a travel ban, even if Sean Spicer and the lawyers say it isn’t.

That’s right, we need a TRAVEL BAN for certain DANGEROUS countries, not some politically correct term that won’t help us protect our people!

As Adam Liptak and Peter Baker point out: “In calling the revised order ‘politically correct,’ Mr. Trump suggested that his goal throughout had been to exclude travelers based on religion.”

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