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Jeremy Corbyn seems to have pulled off the impossible. Britain's prime minister, Theresa May, called an early election just seven weeks ago, and at the time, Corbyn was seen as having no chance at getting even a half-respectable result. His left-wing Labour Party lagged as much as 20 points behind May's right-wing Conservatives.Even members of his own party warned ofa historic defeat.

And yet, asBritons voted Thursday, it became evident that something had changed. Corbyn had clear momentum. In the end, he was able to not onlyquash May's dreams of bolstering her slim majority in Parliament but to gain Labour seats. The Conservatives have now been forced into an unstable minority government with help fromNorthern Irish unionists to pass legislation. While May is staying in office for now, in the medium term, her chances of remaining at 10 Downing Street look dim.

Whenconsidering Corbyn's polling numbers over the past few weeks, it's tempting for Americans to look at another recent electoral upset by an underdog closer to home: Donald Trump.

Thecomparison is appropriate in some ways. Both politicians have tapped into anger at the status quo, a feeling that can be observed around much of the world.

Jeremy Corbyn represented a challenge to the government, saidBen Page, chief executive of the polling firm Ipsos MORI, adding that Labour's platform spoke to an anti-elite anxiety as widespread in Britain aselsewhere. One unnamed Corbyn aide even told Politicothis year that the Labour leader planned to copy media strategies from the Trumpplaybook.

But big differences in the political landscape, not to mention the candidates themselves, limit such comparisons. Corbyn's electoral success can also be read as a backlash to Britain's rightward swing in recent years, including last summer's vote to leave the European Union. He has some anti-establishment rhetoric, yes, but that rhetoric and the support it attracts are distinct from the ethos of Brexit or Trump.

As politicians, Corbyn and Trumpdo share some similarities. Both are roughly the same age but entered mainstream politics only recently. They grew their support through social media and rallies, while facing ridicule from the political elite and media outlets. At certain points, they have sharedsome views on international affairs, criticizing foreign intervention and the logic of NATO. And both Corbyn and Trump stand accused of making unrealistic promises on the campaign trail but ultimatelyperformed better than expected against more established female politicians (though both Corbyn's Labour and Trump received fewer votes than their rivals).

The contrasts in the two men's backgrounds far outweigh the similarities, however. Corbyn is an old-school British leftist who cut his teeth in the antinuclear protests of the 1980s. Trump is a real estate developerturned reality television star who made his political career by suggesting that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya. While Corbyn was riding his bike to work in Parliament, Trump was flying between resorts in a personally branded private jet.

These different backgrounds are reflected in their ideologies. The British politician has a dogmatic view of social democratic policies and has spent decades in that ideological world. Trump's political views seem to be malleable: A former Democrat, he is now a Republican who enjoys the support of the far-right fringe. Though Corbynwas once a leftist Euroskeptic, he campaigned for Britain to remain in the European Union last year. Meanwhile, Trump dubbed himself Mr. Brexit and formed a personal bond with Nigel Farage, the former leader of the anti-Europe, right-wing U.K. Independence Party.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/video/world/conservatives-lose-majority-in-british-parliament-calls-for-may-to-resign/2017/06/09/e0352cd2-4cdd-11e7-987c-42ab5745db2e_video.html

There is little possibility of warm personal ties developing between Corbyn and Trump. While May has been keen to present herself as one of the U.S. president's key allies, the Labour leader has criticized Trump frequently.Donald Trump should not be coming to the U.K., he said in February.

But the frustration with political norms that helped Trump in the United States is certainlyevident in Britain, too.Page pointed to the Ipsos Global Trends survey, which compares the attitudes of select countries, including Britain and the United States, on politics and social changes. The survey found last year that more than three-quarters of Brits and Americans believedthat the economy was rigged to favor the rich and powerful. Aslightly lower percentage thought the government does not prioritize their concerns and the concerns of those like them.

British exit polls don't collect the same complicated data that their U.S. peers do, so a full postmortem on how this anti-elite sentiment may have helped Corbyn isn't available yet. But there are some hints in pre-election polls.Chris Curtis, a political researcher with YouGov, notedthat in the final poll conducted this week, 58 percent of Labour supporters suggested that health care was the most important issue facing Britain, compared with 27 percent of Conservative supporters. May was widely accused of being out of touch after telling a nurse that her lack of pay raises was because there was no magic money tree.

Inclear contrast to Trump, who received support from significant numbers of older voters, under Corbyn Labour is believed to have found more younger supporters in part because of dramatic promises such asCorbyn's pledge to abolish tuition fees at British universities. Registered-voter turnout is reported to have risen to 69 percent for this election. We believe it will have rose proportionally among the young, said Page, adding that most of these young voters are likely to have gone to Corbyn.

Whereonce polls missed right-wing voters, now they ran the risk of missing younger left-leaning voters, Page said. Many of these voters were frustrated by the past seven years of Conservative rule. Britain was once politically divided by its class system, he added, but now we are a country divided by generations. Another factor was that after years of political fragmentation, Britain appears to be returning to a two-party system meaning a distinctly left-wing Labour may be regaining some voters who began supporting the more centrist Liberal Democrats a little over a decade ago.

The biggest similarity between Corbyn and Trump may not have been their campaigns or their support, but their opponents. In the United States,some analysts criticized Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton for running a lackluster and arrogant campaign against her underestimated, upstart rival.In Britain, much of Corbyn's success is being attributed to May's failures.

People went into this election with a very strong impression of Theresa May, Curtis said, then she ran a campaign that really went against her chief strengths. Instead ofoffering an impression of strong and stable leadership, Mayappeared weak and wobbly on the campaign trail. That failure may havehelped the initially unpopular Corbyn with the fastest and most incredible shift we've seen since YouGov started polling, Curtis said.

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After last years Brexit vote, younger Britons look to turn the tide

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Jeremy Corbyn's surprise success tapped into an anti-elite sentiment, but he's no Donald Trump - Washington Post

President Donald Trump greets thenFBI Director James Comey in the Blue Room of the White House on Jan. 22.

Joshua Roberts/Reuters

In March, President Donald Trump accused President Barack Obama of wiretapping him. At the time, I wrote that in the unlikely event that Obama were to file a defamation claim against his successor, the former might have a case. Now comes the potential for another defamation claimthis time by former FBI Director James Comey. He and Trump are exchanging charges of mendacity, and a defamation claim might be one way to resolve them. As with the statements about Obama, the issueif Comey were to choose to pursue itwould likely come down to the limits of executive immunity from lawsuits.

At Thursdays hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Comey explained his decision to memorialize his meetings with the president by expressing his worry that Trump might lie about their meetings. In defending both himself and the FBI against charges that the organization was in disarray, Comey bluntly stated: Those were lies, pure and simple. He said thatin these prior statementsthe administration and the president had defamed him and the bureau.

Trump, of course, deployed his Twitter-finger in response:

In a statement following the testimony, meanwhile, Trump and his lawyer directly accused Comey of lying under oath. This statement also accused Comey of illegal leaks of classified information and privileged communications. Finally, at a news conference on Friday, Trump said that Comeys testimony that the president had asked him for loyalty and had asked him to let go of the Flynn investigation was false, essentially accusing the man of perjury. He even promised to testify as much under oath. In almost any other situation, such accusations, if false, would be an easy case for defamationeven though such cases are generally very tough to win. Some background on defamation will help.

This tort claim protects reputation, which Shakespeare called the immediate jewel of [our] souls. Accusing someone of lyingunder oath, in this caseis sure to harm the good name of the accused. And even if Comey cant prove he was damaged by the charge, in defamation cases the harm is generally presumed in cases where the statement is libel (written defamation) rather than slander (spoken defamation). Tweets would qualify as libel.

If there isnt a tape of their conversations, it could still ultimately come down to he saidhe said.

In cases involving public figures, the Supreme Court has applied an additional requirement: The false statement must be made with actual malice. Thats a legal term meaning that the defendant must either know the statement is false or act in reckless disregard as to whether it was true. These additional requirements shouldnt pose a problem in this case, because Trump knows (or certainly should!) whether the statements are true or false.

Of course, any Comey lawsuit against Trump for defamation would be met with a more elaborate version of the accusatory tweet: I didnt lie, Comey did. To succeed, Comey would have to show that Trumps charge was false. Unless there are tapes, lordy, proving the point one way or the other, the issue would come down to whether a civil jury would believe Comey or Trump.

Ill leave the question of each individuals personal veracity alone, except to mention Comeys response to a question about why people should believe him instead of Trump: I think people should look at the whole body of my testimony. In the same answer, he drew attention to the significant fact that Trump kicked everyone out of the room before allegedly expressing the hopewhich was read as a directivethat Comey would let the Flynn investigation go. This, on top of the fact that Comey documented his version of this conversation in a memo immediately after and shared it with several contemporaneous witnesses, might bolster his case. But if there isnt a tape of their conversations, it could still ultimately come down to he saidhe said.

During the hearing itself, the Republican senatorsfor the most partknew better than to attack Comeys credibility and chose instead to undermine the suggestion that Trumps statements amounted to obstruction of justice. Trump has also called Comey out for leaking the memorandum describing his closed-door meeting to a friend, supposedly in violation of, well, something, that his lawyer didnt clearly define. The charge that Comey did something illegal here appears to be groundless and thus could equally be the subject of a defamation claim if he could prove in court that he hadnt illegally leaked anything.

As I explained in March, it seems very unlikely that the always-sanguine former President Obama would bring such a suit. Its unclear whether thats true of Comey. Trump did fire him, call him a nut job, and has now flatly called him a liar. He may have had just about enough; hes already publicly accused the president of trying to defame him and the entire FBI. A lawsuit would underscore the point.

Yet Comeys a smart lawyer who knows that his claim would face one very steep obstacle: presidential immunity. The Supreme Court has held that the president enjoys broad immunity from civil liability for official acts committed while in office. Were the tweets and his lawyers statements official acts? The law isnt so clear, and it doesnt help Trump that the tweets were sent from his private account rather than his presidential account. Theres been a lot of discussion lately about whether these 140-character eruptions constitute the official White House position; a defamation lawsuit based on tweets would draw that question into dramatic relief.

In Clinton v. Jones, the Supreme Court equivocated on whether potentially defamatory statements made by President Clintons press secretary against Paula Jones were official acts. Although the court allowed the claim to proceed, it stated that the statements arguably may involve conduct within the outer perimeters of the presidents official responsibilities, adding an unhelpful footnote that described the matter as not free from doubt.

Top Comment

Interesting article. I believe that Mr. Comey, like Mr. Obama before him, will choose the higher road and bask in the glow that comes from being an unassailable, and unimpeachable, target of PT's legendary alternative facts. More...

On the side of liability, its hard to argue that falsely accusing someone of lying under oath should be protected conduct. As I mentioned in the Obama defamation piece, surely theres some limit to what even a president can get away with: Had Trump punched Comey, no one would be arguing for immunity. But for statements made about what was, or wasnt, said during a meeting between the president and another high-ranking public official, perhaps the best remedy lies within the political process, up to and possibly including impeachment. Comey might get no relief there, of course, since the current leadership in both the House and the Senate seems prepared to ignore or excuse anything the president does. In that case, Comey would have to take comfort in the prospect that most peopleincluding the very Congress members and senators who seem unwilling to hold the president accountable for these possible liesare likelier to believe him than the president of the United States.

Disclosure: James Comey and the author were once well-acquainted, but havent seen each other since 1986 and have exchanged only a couple of email pleasantries since then.

More:
Did Donald Trump Just Defame James Comey? - Slate Magazine

New York Times

Fact Check: Donald Trump's Claims About Infrastructure New York Times Mr. Trump announced plans to turn over the Federal Aviation Administration's air traffic control responsibilities to a private nonprofit organization on Monday, a broad push for a $1 trillion infrastructure investment on Wednesday, and the creation of ... and more »

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Fact Check: Donald Trump's Claims About Infrastructure - New York Times

Is federal environmental review holding up megaprojects? Mostly not.

C-SPAN

In a speech on Friday dedicated to speeding up infrastructure construction, President Trump couldnt resist deploying one of his favorite props: a big stack of paper.

Henry Grabar is a staff writer for Slates Moneybox.

This time, the paper was the 10,000-page environmental report for the Intercounty Connector, an 18-mile highway in Maryland, enclosed in three binders that the president borrowed from a state highway official to demonstrate the waste and folly of federal bureaucracy.

Denouncing the report as nonsense, Trump unceremoniously dropped the binders on the floor, to applause, before kicking them out of the way as he returned to the lectern. Nobodys going to read it, except the consultants who get a fortune for this, the president said. "These binders could be replaced by just a few simple pages, it would be just as good. It would be much better."

The Intercounty Connector, or MD-200, is a$2.4 billion, 18-mile highway that was first proposed more than 50 years ago but not completed until 2014. Supporters of this tolled alternative to the Beltway, which slices through suburbs and wetlands parallel to the Washington ring road, have condemned its opponents as tree-huggers standing in the way of progress.

But with exaggerated traffic estimates furnished by consultants, the predictions for toll revenue failed to come true: Vehicle counts were 20 percent lower than what consultants had predicted. Revenue was one-third the low-end prediction. Its true that environmentalists battled the road in court for years, delaying it and raising the construction costs. But they also got the size of the highway reduced from 12 lanes to six.

Imagine if the ICC had been twice the size. As it is, Maryland had to raise tolls on other crossings to pay off ICC debt. The ICC only passed its year-one toll revenue estimate in its third year of operation. Around that time, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan canceled Baltimores Red Line project and shifted the states $1.35 billion contribution into highway funding instead, a decision that prompted an investigation from President Obamas Department of Transportation.

The ICC is slowly filling up, because new highways always do. They dont solve traffic congestion. But they do create more car-dependent lives, stemming from new personal choices and new car-dependent patterns of housing and employment. Or as the California Department of Transportation put it in a recent paper, Increasing Highway Capacity Unlikely to Relieve Traffic Congestion.

As a symbol, then, the ICC represents the overwhelming influence of the highway construction lobbymore than the obstructionism of environmental activists.

Trump was announcing the creation of a new office in the Council of Environmental Quality dedicated to rooting out inefficiency, clarifying lines of authority, and streamlining coordination between different levels of government.

The president bemoaned, as he has before, the glacial pace of public works construction in the United States, and spoke wistfully of the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge, built in five and four years, respectively.

Top Comment

Trump no like books! TRUMP SMASH! More...

Could U.S. infrastructure be built more quickly? Yes. Is 10,000 pages too many pages for an 18-mile highway? Yes. And yet, according to a Congressional Research Service review of the subject, environmental reports prompted by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) are mostly a scapegoat. Causes of delay, the CRS reports, "are more often tied to local/state and project-specific factors, primarily local/state agency priorities, project funding levels, local opposition to a project, project complexity, or late changes in project scope.And while phony environmental concerns are used as a pretext to forestall growth of all kinds, the bias in highways is definitively towards building.

But hey, the trade-offs involved in expediting the construction of public works are difficult. And dropping binders on the floor is easy. And fun.

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Watch Donald Trump Throw Binders Full of Highway Environmental Reviews on the Floor - Slate Magazine (blog)

The last time Trump sent out a tweet was 8:17 a.m. on Wednesday. It said this: "Getting ready to leave for Cincinnati, in the GREAT STATE of OHIO, to meet with ObamaCare victims and talk Healthcare & also Infrastructure!" Between that moment and the time of this posting, roughly 37 hours have passed. That, according to calculations made by the one and only Philip Bump of the Washington Post, is the fifth-longest Twitter outage for Trump since he announced his candidacy in June 2015. To pass the fourth longest drought, Trump will need to stay away from Twitter for 2,312 minutes -- 38 total hours, or until 10:17 p.m. Thursday -- which looks doable. To break his all-time longest tweet drought, according to Bump, Trump would need to not tweet until 6:14 a.m. tomorrow.

What's fascinating about the past droughts is that they almost always have corresponded with slow news moments. Trump's longest break from Twitter, for example, came over the 2016 Thanksgiving Day weekend -- soon after he had been elected. The second longest was earlier that same month, the weekend after the election when Trump was, almost certainly, worn down from the just-concluded campaign.

If ever there was a time when you might expect Trump to take phone in hand and offer his own counter-narrative, this past 37 hours was it. And yet, nothing.

Theories abound to explain it.

The most common one is that someone took Trump's phone away, ensuring that he simply lacked the ability to tweet. I doubt it. He's the President of the United States. He's made clear -- in the face of much criticism -- that he isn't going to stop tweeting. I'm not sure anyone is in a position to simply tell the President to stop doing something and have him actually listen.

Or maybe Trump's staff, as they had hoped to do, successfully distracted the President over these past 37 hours -- keeping him from thinking too much, and therefore tweeting too much about the situation. But how is that even possible given that we know Trump is an absolutely avid news consumer and there has been so much (and so much bad) Trump news over that period of time?

The short answer is we don't know why Trump hasn't tweeted since 8:17 a.m. Wednesday. But with every passing minute of Trump Twitter silence, he edges closer to his own personal best (worst?).

One other thing we know: Silence isn't Trump's natural state. So when the drought breaks -- and it will break -- look out.

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Donald Trump hasn't tweeted in a very long time - CNN