GOP Rep. Diane Black of Tennessee has introduced a bill that would set up a Kickstarter/Gofundme-style crowdfunding site to fund Trump’s wall. Read More

I just finished listening to a CNN segment where “norms” figured heavily in the discussion. It was a good segment. I clipped a couple snippets of video because they were so good. But we need to stop talking so much about “norms”. And it’s not just CNN. The term has come up a number of times in our editorial conversations at TPM just today. I’ve talked about them. But we need to stop talking so much about norms. Because it doesn’t capture what is happening or the situation we’re in. In every kind of communication, clarity is the most important thing. By talking so much about “norms” and the violation of “norms” we’re confusing the situation and even confusing ourselves. Read More

The BBC is reporting that after being kept at arms length by the White House, the President of Ukraine paid Michael Cohen at least $400,000 to arrange a meeting between the President Poroshenko and Trump. Read More

Here is a very notable passage from a new Bloomberg article about PSY Group, the psy-ops company run by Joel Zamel, the Israeli social media expert who was in that Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr pitching his services in August 2016 … Read More

With so many bewildering things happening in the news, it’s important not to lose the thread. The FBI’s counter-intelligence division was confronted with evidence that the Trump campaign was riddled with operatives colluding with a hostile foreign government to throw the 2016 election. Those fears have now all been amply confirmed. The agents assigned to the case used the least invasive, most conservative means to investigate the evidence they had. Read More

Key moments on the collapsing North Korean summit and “spies” in the Trump campaign from President Trump’s just completed press appearance… Read More

This is perhaps my favorite bizarre nugget of information of the last 24 hours – and there are many. President Trump’s lawyer’s lawyer is a foreign agent for the government of Qatar. Or at least he was last year when a lot of the shenanigans we’re discussing were happening. Read More

As the U.S.-North Korea Summit on June 12th now seems increasingly in doubt, I wanted to review the timeline and what it tells us. Relations between the two countries appeared to take a dramatic turn on March 8th when President Trump chose to interpret a comment from a South Korean government official as a North Korean invitation to meet. Trump promptly accepted. This spurred two months of confidence-building measures and overtures, including a meeting between the leaders of the two Koreas at the DMZ and the release of three U.S. nationals imprisoned in the North. Read More

Fascinating new details on the Nader and Broidy’s role in the UAE/Saudi influence operation, what appears to be the Gulf component of the Mueller probe.

Over the weekend I flagged this video clip of Fox Business News’ Maria Bartiromo previewing her weekend show. Today we picked up clips from the show itself. The gist in both cases is Bartiromo, once a reasonably well-respected business news journalist, is aping the wildest conspiracy theories about a ‘deep state’ conspiracy against President Trump. Watching the reaction to her comments put me in the mind of a topic I have been wanting to write about for some time but don’t yet know enough to fully capture it in its fullness.

There’s something about New York, New York City, that is, that is at the root of the Trump phenomenon. This comes from watching the Trump story unfold over the last three years. It also comes from my own experiences living here for fifteen years.

New York City is a liberal city, probably the most progressive big city in the country, as far as it goes. Yet its power structure, its money class includes a whole community of people with extreme wealth who live in a culture in which predation and acquisition is the norm. Read More