You remember all the smoke about Jerry Falwell Jr for some inexplicable reason going into the divey, boozy youth hostel business with a young pool attendant in South Florida and the fact that Michael Cohen somehow also happened to have some kind of relationship with Falwell. At least one outlet has picked up this new article on the case by Aram Roston at Buzzfeed and claimed it says Michael Cohen brokered the deal. That’s definitely not what it says. Not close. But it certainly seems clear that Roston thinks that’s where this is going. And I bet he’s right.
One of the most characteristic qualities of the Trump era is the deep-seated uncertainty. We talk a lot about the endemic chaos and unpredictability that President Trump seems to thrive on. But I mean something different. Most Presidents usually act in relatively predictable ways based on a more or less known set of basic beliefs and policy goals. The Trump White House operates very, very differently. Read More
President Trump makes everything so binary, everything so black and white, that there is an inevitable tendency to lionize anyone who goes into opposition to him. That is a tendency worth resisting, as much with out-going Secretary Mattis as with anyone else. I’m trying to resist over-interpreting his resignation letter. But it doesn’t leave a lot of room for interpretation. The critical passage in my mind comes here …
Here’s one of the weirder dimensions of late 2018 Trumpism. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me the word has apparently come down from the White House that the wall, as in the wall to be built along the southern border, must now be called “wall”. In other words, no definite article, no “the”. President Trump now does this. It was part of a DHS press release a week ago. And today in a congressional hearing, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told Rep. Tom Marino: “From Congress I would ask for wall. We need wall.”
"I would ask for wall. We need wall." pic.twitter.com/mkgHZWFgyI
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) December 20, 2018
TPM’s Tierney Sneed obtained a copy of the lengthy Mueller-bashing memo that Attorney General nominee William Barr sent to the justice department earlier this year.
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This is down deep in the NYT story just out on the open and public battle between the White House and the Pentagon over whether to withdraw immediately all U.S. troops from Syria:
If you’ve been in the news business long enough, either as a producer or a consumer, you know that it doesn’t always – maybe doesn’t mainly – work in logical or linear ways. Last night CNN’s Chris Cuomo went live with a copy of the letter of intent President Trump signed to build a Trump Moscow development project in October 2015. Read More
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