Political scribe: Mueller Is Damaging the Nation

“Half the country seems to believe that Donald Trump is not the duly elected president of the United States,” observes The Week’s Matthew Walther, and most of the blame for this belongs to Robert Mueller. The special counsel has spent two years hunting for evidence of wrongdoing and only ended up ensnaring small-time “crooks” like Michael Cohen. Yes, Trump may have looked into “building one or more skyscrapers” in Moscow, but that doesn’t make him a Manchurian candidate. Notes Walther: “Winning a successful outsider bid for the presidency of the United States seems like a very circuitous route to obtaining a building permit.” Walther concludes that the “fair-minded explanation of the Russia investigation is that it exists to paralyze the Trump administration.”

The Boss: Trump Looking Strong in 2020

Bruce Springsteen is no fan of Trump, so the president “should be pleasantly surprised to learn” that the Boss thinks he’s headed for re-election, writes Danny Clinch of his interview with the aging rocker in the (London) Sunday Times. “I don’t see anyone out there at the moment,” Springsteen tells Clinch, “the man who can beat Trump.” To Springsteen, Democrats “need someone who can speak some of the same language” as Trump when it comes to disappearing industrial jobs and decimated small towns. Instead, notes Clinch, Dems are “preoccupied with plastic straws and ever-tighter controls on struggling smokestack industries.” Does that give the Jersey crooner an opening to run for president? “No, not in anyway,” says Springsteen. “I’d be terrible.”

Foreign desk: An Islamic Reformer in Egypt

There is a “religious war” afoot in Egypt, notes Zvi Mazel in The Jerusalem Post. On one side is President Abdel Fatah al Sisi, who has called for a “revolution” in how Islamic texts are understood and taught, and on the other Islamists determined to resist his reforms. “Islamic sages must do their utmost to find in the Sharia the way to enlightenment,” Sisi believes (in Mazel’s telling), and a way out of violent interpretations. Such talk has drawn the ire of Islamists and alienated leaders of Al Azhar University in Cairo, Sunni Islam’s most prestigious institution of higher learning. But Sisi remains “undeterred,” and he’s even drawn up plans for a new training center to prepare male and female preachers.

From the left: Too Many Progressives Lining Up for 2020

Democrats have a “glut” of progressive candidates edging to run in 2020. That’s good news, says The Huffington Post’s Robert Kuttner — and also bad: If the hard-left candidates “cancel each other out,” it leave the party with “yet another centrist corporate Democratic nominee.” Trump’s victory in 2016, Kuttler says, owed much to the fact that the likes of Barack Obama and the Clintons sidled up to Wall Street and abandoned working-class issues. Now, a slate of candidates wants to return the party to its lunch-bucket roots. The problem: Between Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown, there’s too many of them. Compounding matters are “faux-progressives” like Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker. In all, this means yet another Clinton-type liberal centrist might clinch the nomination, disappointing progressives.

From the right: A Winsome Populist Agenda

“Donald Trump has lost his Republican Congress and must now come up with an agenda that saves his presidency and preserves the Republican Party from a potential disaster in 2020,” argues Michael Brendan Dougherty in National Review. With the Dems increasingly representing “America’s corporate elite,” the GOP must continue to move toward middle-class populism. It should emphasize “family-friendly” measures like child tax credits, stand strong on immigration restrictionism, and squeeze a ruthless and increasingly censorious Silicon Valley. Above all, he says, Trump and the GOP should “rebalance our priorities toward work and away from education,” ditching the obsession with college for all in favor of technical schools and vocational training fit for “the many remunerative and unfilled jobs” in the labor market.

— Compiled by Sohrab Ahmari