White House aide Stephen Miller reportedly had to be escorted off the CNN set after refusing to leave following his contentious interview with Jake Tapper.

One of the recurrent questions in political discussions is whether there may be some points of principle that unite forces on the right and left who otherwise agree on very little. The focus is usually on core issues of civil liberties and the rule of law.  The left may support a broad public commitment to providing health care for the public; the right may say it should all be determined by the market. But perhaps on these core issues there’s more agreement. Perhaps recognizing that is the due we should give to others we disagree with.

Recent events makes clear how baseless this assumption really is. Read More

We are now back on to the feverish debate about whether or not Donald Trump is mentally ill or suffering from the onset of dementia. The most important thing to know about this debate is that it simply doesn’t matter. Diagnoses are something for trained professionals and even they are challenged to make them without a proper in-person examination. But again, it doesn’t matter. Read More

Roy Moore accuser’s house burns down. Arson task force is investigating.

The Times published a big story yesterday that shed key new light on President Trump’s effort to control the Russia investigation and fire James Comey. I read it last night and immediately thought of how new details fit into what we already knew of the timeline surrounding Comey’s dismissal. I’m still putting my thoughts together on how this affects the larger Russia story. But I wanted to share with you the timeline I put together in addition to some additional thoughts (Prime access) on what it means, especially with respect to McGahn’s, Sessions’ and Rosenstein’s complicity in President Trump’s effort to protect himself from the probe. I use these to frame my thinking and visualize the chronological relationship between events.

I tried to tease out in an Editor’s Brief (Prime access) just where the shuttering of the bogus Kobach voter fraud commission leaves us in terms of the fight over access to the ballot. TL;DR version: Don’t exhale yet.

And since this is my first post here, a bit about me: I’m a former TPM reporter, and I’m back as a senior editor. I’ve also been a reporter at MSNBC, and I wrote a book about the conservative assault on voting rights and democracy, published by Crown in 2016. Looking forward to offering my analysis on voting and democracy issues, among others, for Prime readers.

Six months ago I joked that the President’s defenders would eventually come around to arguing that we should pity the President rather than hold him in contempt because he’d been raised in a culture of criminality and had no experience following the law.

Next month: The Trump family deserves our pity, not contempt. They are a family of mental deficients with no experience following the law.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 11, 2017

The weird thing is that I’m now coming around to that defense. Now, needless to say, it’s no defense. But allow me to explain. Because I do think it is illuminating, inasmuch as something as dark as President Trump’s predatory, criminal instincts can be brought to the light. Three times in recent days we’ve seen references to the President’s belief that Attorneys General for Presidents Kennedy and Obama protected them from the law and that Trump had great respect for this. He has displayed a running rage and contempt for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, once his most important political ally, because he failed in this most basic of duties: protecting the President from the law. Read More

“The communications team urged all of the senior advisors to cooperate. They thought this was going to be a positive book for the President.”

"The communications team in the White House urged all of the senior advisors to cooperate." https://t.co/WOeX8TWXlq pic.twitter.com/Qpw9R6dwmj

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 4, 2018

A quick look at Charles Harder (Prime access), the lawyer at the center of the Trump-Bannon-Wolff spat, who has had a role behind the headlines quite a bit in recent years.

This was quite bizarre even for this White House …

Today's 1984/Wizard of Oz hybrid is off to a wild start …. pic.twitter.com/yJT8hC6JV5

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 4, 2018