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.

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

I have been an avid reader of @joshtpm since he launched @TPM and finally ponied up for Prime. Pay for what you value. #abouttime

— ((((Peter Sagal)))) (@petersagal) July 17, 2017

Okay, I probably do need to say more. We’re just past midway through our annual drive and have a goal to meet by the close of the month. Are you a longtime reader? If you haven’t taken a moment to sign up for Prime, please take a moment to do so today. It’s important and we appreciate it no end.

Over the last few weeks we’ve seen a rush of new data points on the Russia collusion front. But there’s one point which wasn’t new to me precisely but reminded me of something I’d lost focus on as the Russia/collusion story has heated up. That is, the GOP quest for Hillary Clinton’s 30,000 deleted emails.

Let’s go back more than two years ago, to March 2015. That’s when news of Hillary Clinton’s ‘private email server’ first came out. Closely coupled with that news was Clinton’s announcement that her lawyers had separated out the personal from professional emails, turned over the latter to the State Department and destroyed the former. I remember this quite clearly and quite painfully because, as I wrote here at the time, I knew this was classic Clinton and would lead to endless bad news. Not illegal, probably not wrong but exactly the kind of decision that would lead to months and years of horrible press and political self-inflicted wounds. Read More

TPM’s Alice Ollstein asked Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) about a report that Mitch McConnell was double-dealing and now look what’s happened.

In the wake of Sen. Ron Johnson pulling back on his clear support for Senate Trumpcare 2.0, Sens Lee and Moran have now also pulled their support altogether. That leaves Mitch McConnell well under the 50 votes required for passage. Expect other conservatives and moderates to jump off the ship probably as soon as this evening.

This is a big, big development. But it would be quite wrong to see this as the end of Obamacare repeal. Expect McConnell to take at least another crack at rejiggering the bill for eventual passage.

As you can see, this evening a rapid-fire succession of events appears to have closed the door on Trumpcare 2.0 in the Senate. That doesn’t mean Obamacare repeal is over by any means. But it’s another major defeat. And after a while defeats tend to grow on themselves. I fully expect Mitch McConnell to go back to the drawing board, tinker with the bill and try again. But this is the first time I sense that McConnell’s next attempt may be harder than the last. Or, to put it a different way, it’s possible that this defeat for the repealers may prove a turning point in the grinding war over Obamacare repeal even though it will not be the final battle.  Read More

Check out our look at some of choicest nuggets from Josh Green’s new bio of Steve Bannon, “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency,” the first big book of the Trump era. How about the time Bannon raged at Speaker Paul Ryan as “a limp-dick motherfucker who was born in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation”? Broken clock, a way with words … Josh will be taking your questions in The Hive on Friday at 9:00 AM eastern. Get your questions in now and join Josh at The Hive Friday morning.

I was discussing with a friend this morning that much of the drama and chaos of the first months of the Trump administration is explained by a simple fact: President Trump thinks running the US government is essentially like running his private family business in which people work for him (it’s a very personalized operation) and people have to do what he says. That’s not how the US government works at all. It’s not even how the executive branch runs. Read More

Alice Ollstein walks us through Day 2 of the collapse of Obamacare repeal.