Just released by the White House. Read More
I am trying to write a book, but I keep getting diverted by events in my hometown. The latest is the furor over Michael Wolff’s portrayal of Donald Trump and Trump’s break with his former aide Steve Bannon. I have three marginal reflections about this that have to do with Trump’s physical and mental state and with the way he governs.
We thought all hell was breaking loose yesterday. We were wrong. That’s happening today. The idea that a sitting President is threatening to sue a former top staffer over an NDA and (putative) defamation is so comically ridiculous as to defy rationality and mark a new summit of nonsense even in the nonsense pile of the Trump presidency. Taking the matter on the merits, it is hard to imagine the number of first amendment-based fences Trump and his lawyer (the same lawyer who Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel used to destroy Gawker. Really.) have to jump to sustain this. In any case, close to a certainty, there will be no lawsuit.
Meanwhile, Matt Drudge is shooting off a series of tweets that appear to be either a prediction or a suggestion or perhaps even a report that the owners of Breitbart News will fire Steve Bannon. On this a minor digression … Since Breitbart the website has become a strange amalgam of right-wing chop shop with a Stalinist sensibility purveying fake news with an antic edge, there’s been a backdrop of criticism on the right that the Bannon-era Breitbart represents a betrayal of the late Andrew Breitbart who died in 2012. Read More
A couple of additional thoughts (Prime access) on Tierney Sneed’s latest.
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
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.
“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
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
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.
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.