Our reading for today comes from Seinfeld, Episode #29 …
George: Was that wrong? Should I have not done that? I tell you I gotta plead ingnorance on this thing because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first started here that that sort of thing was frouned upon, you know, cause I’ve worked in a lot of offices and I tell you people do that all the time.
Some of you will recognize this passage from a classic episode of Seinfeld, which now seems hilariously and painfully familiar. We’ve now heard from the President’s son, the President’s top media toadies and now even the President himself a simple message: Yes, we’d work with a hostile foreign intelligence service to get dirt on and defeat a political enemy. Anyone would. “That’s politics!” as the President put it this morning. In other words, we’ve now gone rapidly from “no collusion, no obstruction” to “collusion is awesome.” Read More
Joshua Green is a senior national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek, focusing on political coverage for the magazine and Bloomberg News. Green regularly appears on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, NBC’s Meet the Press, HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, and PBS’s Washington Week. His latest book, The Devil’s Bargain, which focuses on Steve Bannon and his relationship with President Trump, will be released on July 18th.
Joshua will be in The Hive on Friday, July 21st at 9 AM ET for a chat about Bannon and the alt-right. Submit your questions at any time or join us on Friday! If you’d like to participate but don’t have TPM Prime, sign up here.
A few days ago, I predicted that we would soon arrive at the stage where Trump supporters would be arguing that “The Trump’s deserve our pity rather than our contempt. Where was Obama to help them? They are a family of mentally challenged individuals with no experience following the law.”
It seems we’re getting close to that.
Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow now says the Secret Service, in addition to ensuring the physical security of candidates, should protect the candidate, the candidate’s advisors and even the candidate’s family from their own potential criminal wrongdoing – a seriously expanded brief!
With today’s mix of incriminating, lurid and fantastical news, it’s worth taking a moment to remember that we as a nation made a collective decision to make Trump’s world of corruption and nonsense into our world. And here we are.
Let me highlight a few details from stories touching on June 2016, December 2016 and February 2017 … Read More
The Russian-American lobbyist, who is reportedly a former Soviet-era counter-intelligence officer and attended the June meeting at Trump Tower, says Natalia Veselnitskaya brought a package of documents with her to the meeting. And he thinks she left them with Trump. Here’s his account. Read More
I know I speak for the whole staff – because I’ve spoken to probably half of them about this already this morning – when I say that for all that we are collectively steeped in this story, we are very much having a hard time keeping up with all the different threads that have emerged out of the original Times Don Jr stories over the last week. I’ve mentioned that as we expand the new TPM Investigations Desk and create new parts of the site, some part of Prime, some not, one of our big focuses is on narrating and helping you organize and make sense of the different dimensions of these emerging stories. For me that has always been an essential part of what TPM does, breaking down the fourth wall of the journalistic voice, stepping back to explain connections between different threads of stories and so forth. In any case, these are dimensions of the site we will be expanding in the coming days, weeks and months. Today, a lot of this will inevitably come from the Editors’ Blog.
For now, I will simply say that if it looks to you like the wheels are coming off all this really rapidly, yes, it looks that way to me too.
I was tempted to say this was a paradox. But it’s too straightforward for paradox. The key truth of Trumpism is that for all the purported hatred of “the media”, the main Trumpers are almost all fundamentally media creatures. They think in media terms. They are media creations. Read More
Besides the latest Trump admission we have another major story (congressional sex tape, cyberstalking) that just broke. I’m supposed to be asking you to join Prime this month. If you’re a regular reader, please sign up today so I can focus on posting. Thanks.