1. Max Boot: Trump is an illegitimate president whose election is tainted by fraud

there is growing evidence that the president is, to use the word favored by Richard Nixon, “a crook.” Even buying the silence of his reputed playmates could by itself have been enough to swing an exceedingly close election decided by fewer than 80,000 votes in three states. Trump certainly would not have authorized the payments unless he thought it was politically imperative to do so. There is also considerable evidence, as I previously argued, that Russia’s intervention on Trump’s behalf affected the outcome. Even more than Nixon,

Trump is now an illegitimate president whose election is tainted by fraud.

The inevitable question is: Now what? If Trump had an iota of decency, he would resign — but he doesn’t, and prevailing Justice Department guidelines hold that a president can’t be indicted while in office. So the onus is on Congress to act. A responsible Congress would have by now already convened an impeachment inquiry. But that is not the Congress we have. We have a Congress dominated by political hacks and moral invertebrates who are determined to act as the president’s enablers and legitimizers at all costs. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/trump-is-now-an-illegitimate-president/2018/08/22/d1c9271c-a613-11e8-97ce-cc9042272f07_story.html

2. Peter Wehner: The Full-Spectrum Corruption of Donald Trump

Everyone and everything he touches rots.

A party that once spoke with urgency and apparent conviction about the importance of ethical leadership — fidelity, honesty, honor, decency, good manners, setting a good example — has hitched its wagon to the most thoroughly and comprehensively corrupt individual who has ever been elected president. Some of the men who have been elected president have been unscrupulous in certain areas — infidelity, lying, dirty tricks, financial misdeeds — but we’ve never before had the full-spectrum corruption we see in the life of Donald Trump.

For many Republicans, this reality still hasn’t broken through. But facts that don’t penetrate the walls of an ideological silo are facts nonetheless. And the moral indictment against Mr. Trump is obvious and overwhelming. Corruption has been evident in Mr. Trump’s private and public life, in how he has treated his wives, in his business dealings and scams, in his pathological lying and cruelty, in his bullying and shamelessness, in his conspiracy-mongering and appeals to the darkest impulses of Americans. (Senator Bob Corker, a Republican, refers to the president’s race-based comments as a “base stimulator.”) Mr. Trump’s corruptions are ingrained, the result of a lifetime of habits. It was delusional to think he would change for the better once he became president.

A warning to my Republican friends: The worst is yet to come. Thanks to the work of Robert Mueller — a distinguished public servant, not the leader of a “group of Angry Democrat Thugs” — we are going to discover deeper and deeper layers to Mr. Trump’s corruption. When we do, I expect Mr. Trump will unravel further as he feels more cornered, more desperate, more enraged; his behavior will become ever more erratic, disordered and crazed.

Most Republicans, having thrown their MAGA hats over the Trump wall, will stay with him until the end. Was a tax cut, deregulation and court appointments really worth all this? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/25/opinion/sunday/corruption-donald-trump.html

3. Michael D. Shear and Katie Benner: Trump’s War on the Justice System Threatens to Erode Trust in the Law

It is a once-unimaginable scenario: Sometime soon in an American courtroom, a criminal defense lawyer may argue that the prosecution of an MS-13 gang member is a politically motivated “witch hunt” built around a witness who has “flipped” and taken what the lawyer calls a plea deal of dubious legality.

He will be quoting the president of the United States.

That is potentially the gravest danger of President Trump’s sustained verbal assault on the country’s justice system, legal experts say. In his attempt at self-defense amid the swirl of legal cases and investigations involving himself, his aides and his associates, Mr. Trump is directly undermining the people and processes that are the foundation of the nation’s administration of justice.

The result is a president at war with the law.

“You are dealing with a potentially indelible smearing of our law enforcement institutions,” said Neal K. Katyal, who was acting solicitor general under President Barack Obama. “If Trump’s views were actually accepted, there would be thousands of criminals who are out on the streets right now.”

The president’s public judgments about the country’s top law enforcement agencies revolve largely around how their actions affect him personally — a vision that would recast the traditionally independent justice system as a guardian of the president and an attack dog against his adversaries. For more than a year, he has criticized the Justice Department, questioned the integrity of the prosecutors leading the Russia investigation, and mercilessly mocked Jeff Sessions, his own attorney general.

Mr. Trump continued that pattern on Twitter on Saturday morning, seizing on disputed reports in the conservative news media that the F.B.I. had ignored “thousands of Crooked Hillary Emails” and vowing to get “to the bottom of all of this corruption.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/25/us/politics/trump-justice-legal-system.html

4. Gabriel Sherman: “Trump Is Nuts. This Time Really Feels Different”: Trump Rejects “War Council” Intervention, Goes It Alone

More than ever, Trump is acting by feeling and instinct. “Trump is nuts,” said one former West Wing official. “This time really feels different.” Deputy Chief of Staff Bill Shine has privately expressed concern, a source said, telling a friend that Trump’s emotional state is “very tender.” Even Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are unsettled that Trump is so gleefully acting on his most self-destructive impulses as his legal peril grows. According to a source, Jared and Ivanka told Trump that stripping security clearances from former intelligence officials would backfire, but Trump ignored them. Kushner later told a friend Trump “got joy” out of taking away John Brennan’s clearance. His reaction to the death of John McCain—quashing a White House statement in praise of the senator, and restoring White House flags to full staff—falls into the same self-indulgent category.

The news of Cohen’s plea and Paul Manafort’s conviction, which were followed by revelations that Trump Organization C.F.O. Allen Weisselberg and National Enquirerpublisher David Pecker are cooperating with federal prosecutors, have rattled Trump like few other turns in the investigation have, sources said. Flying on Air Force One to his West Virginia rally last week, Trump seemed “bummed” and “down and out,” a person briefed on his mood told me. “He was acting like, ‘I know the news is bad, but I don’t know what to do about it,’” the source said. At the rally, an uncharacteristically subdued Trump barely mentioned Cohen or Manafort.

By the weekend, though, his anger had returned. “He spent the weekend calling people and screaming,” one former White House official said. According to sources, the president feels cornered with no clear way out. His months-long campaign to get Sessions to resign—so that Trump could appoint a new A.G. who would shut down the Russia probe—not only failed to get Sessions to step down, but it’s caused him to dig in, as evidenced by Sessions’s rare statement asserting the independence of the Justice Department. “Trump knows at least through the midterms he won’t get another A.G.,” a former White House official said. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/08/donald-trump-nuts-rejects-war-council-intervention-goes-it-alone

5. Garrett Graff: Big Questions After The Cohen And Manafort Bombshells

Just minutes apart, in courtrooms in New York and outside Washington, DC, two of Trump’s closest aides—his longtime personal lawyer and his former campaign chairman—became felons, as the former pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges, and the latter was found guilty by a jury on eight other charges.
For the better part of two years, Trump has remained by all accounts obsessed with his narrow, unlikely campaign victory, bragging about his electoral college totals in numerous settings, including to foreign leaders like Vladimir Putin, even as he lost the popular vote by 3 million votes. Yet after Tuesday, the victory appears increasingly tainted, the American presidency as the spoils of ill-gotten gains, an election whose pivotal moments were shaped—potentially decisively—by Russian attacks overseas and hush money cover-ups at home.

After all, the question, following Tuesday’s back-to-back bombshells, is no longer whether Trump’s surprise victory was aided by criminal acts—that much has been made clear both by Robert Mueller’s sweeping indictments against two dozen Russians, working for Vladimir Putin’s military intelligence as well as for the Internet Research Agency, as well as by Michael Cohen’s decision to plead guilty to campaign finance violations.

To state that more simply: At least two separate criminal conspiracies helped elect Donald Trump president in 2016, one executed by the Russian government, another by Trump’s personal lawyer. https://www.wired.com/story/manafort-cohen-guilty-trump-mueller-investigation

6.  Jonathan Chait: Trump Wants to Ban Flipping Because He Is Almost Literally a Mob Boss

The failing @nytimes wrote a Fake piece today implying that because White House Councel Don McGahn was giving hours of testimony to the Special Councel, he must be a John Dean type “RAT.” But I allowed him and all others to testify - I didn’t have to. I have nothing to hide......— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2018

Dean famously testified about Nixon’s obstruction of justice. Nobody claims Dean lied about Nixon. The sin in Trump’s eyes is that he flipped, violating the omerta. Trump even uses Mafia lingo, “rat,” to describe Dean’s cooperation with law enforcement. To gangsters, a rat is considered the worst kind of person because they pose the greatest danger to their ability to escape prosecution.

It is obviously quite rare to hear a high-ranking elected official openly embrace the terminology and moral logic of La Cosa Nostra. But Trump is not just a guy who has seen a lot of mob movies. He has worked closely with Mafia figures throughout his business career. “I know all about flipping, for 30, 40 years I’ve been watching flippers,” he tells Fox News. “Everything’s wonderful, and then they get ten years in jail and they flip on whoever the next-highest one is, or as high as you can go.”

Trump’s claim of expertise in his area is not some idle boast. He hired Roy Cohn, by that point a mob lawyer, worked closely with figures linked to the Russian-American mafia, Felix Sater and Michael Cohen, and made money in his properties attracting money launderers.

Like a mobster, Trump takes an extremely cynical view of almost every moral principle in public life, assuming that everybody in politics is corrupt and hypocritical. (Hence his defense of Vladimir Putin’s murdering journalists: “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”) He also follows mafia practice of surrounding himself with associates chosen on the basis of loyalty rather than traditional qualifications. Since the greatest threat to a mafia don’s business is that subordinates will betray him, he typically surrounds himself with family members, even if they are not the smartest or best criminals. Trump has accordingly surrounded himself with his children, or demonstrated loyalists who would have trouble finding remotely comparable jobs at another business. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/almost-literal-mob-boss-donald-trump-wants-to-ban-flipping.html

7. Eric Levitz: The President Is Getting Away With Blatant Crimes. That’s Normal.

If Cohen’s testimony did little to illuminate the nature of Trump’s malfeasance, it did throw the congressional GOP’s complicity in that malfeasance into sharp relief. The president might be immune from criminal indictment, but he is not supposed to be immune from legal culpability of any kind. Rather, Congress is supposed to police the Executive branch’s alleged crimes and misdemeanors. It is now clear that there is probable cause to believe that the president has committed a felony. If we are “a nation of laws,” then Congress must now mount an investigation into Trump’s alleged campaign finance violations — and, if evidence substantiates that allegation, impeach the president so that he can then be held accountable for his crime in a federal court, just as any other American would be.

But Congress (or, more precisely, the GOP majority that controls it) has no intention of doing that. Why don’t congressional Republican feel compelled to uphold the principle of equality before the law — a principle that their own standard-bearer described as “foundational” to our “constitutional system”? http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/trump-indictment-impeachment-michael-cohen-campaign-finance-violations.html

8. Gracy Olmstead: How's that swamp draining going?

Indeed, GOP lawmakers have long intoned against "waste, fraud, and abuse," claiming the corruption, bloat, and thoughtlessness of big government represents a gross injustice to U.S. taxpayers. Are they ready to drain the swamp and be responsible stewards of public money and trust?

Nope.

As but one example: This week, party leaders decided to sidestep any attempt at farm bill subsidy reform — efforts that would have limited the amount of taxpayer dollars that go to the nation's wealthiest farmers — so that they could instead focus on putting additional work requirements on the bill's food stamp beneficiaries. Those requirements could reduce benefits by $9.2 billion between 2018 and 2028, and cause as many as 2 million food stamp recipients to see their benefits reduced or eliminated.

Let's be clear about what this means: Our government is literally taking food out of the mouths of America's poorest citizens to lavish excessive taxpayer money on the rich.

The top 10 percent of the nation's wealthiest farms receive 77 percent of the farm bill's commodity subsidies. Meanwhile, as Caroline Kitchens wrote for the R Street Institute earlier this year:

To be eligible for [food stamps], Americans must show their gross monthly household income is below 130 percent of the poverty line. For a family of three in 2018, that means making less than $2,213 a month, for an annual income of just $26,600 a year.

By contrast, farmers are able to rake in taxpayer handouts regardless of the size and profitability of their operation. The federal crop insurance program subsidizes, on average, 62 percent of farmers' insurance premiums, with no means test whatsoever. This allows the largest farm operations to receive virtually unlimited subsidies. Owners of mega-farms have received more than $1 million in subsidies from taxpayers. [R Street]

What kind of swamp draining is this? The Republican Party wants to make it harder for America's poorest citizens to receive basic food stamp support — but they have no problem dishing out millions in taxpayer money, no strings attached, to the nation's largest agribusinessesl.

As long as Trump and his entrenched, elitist colleagues lead the GOP, not an ounce of muck will be drained from the swamp that is our nation's capital. http://theweek.com/articles/791675/hows-that-swamp-draining-going

9.  Eugene Robinson: Trump the mob boss wants protection

There’s a reason President Trump increasingly sounds like the mob boss in a cliche-ridden gangster film: That’s basically what he is — and he must know how such movies usually end.

Trump referred to John Dean, the White House counsel whose truth-telling was instrumental in President Richard M. Nixon’s downfall, as a “RAT.” And during a Fox News interview broadcast Thursday, he complained at length about defendants who “flip” and inform on higher-ups in exchange for leniency at sentencing: “This whole thing about flipping, they call it, I know all about flipping. For 30, 40 years I have been watching flippers. Everything’s wonderful and then they get 10 years in jail and they flip on whoever the next highest one is, or as high as you can go. It almost ought to be outlawed.”

Those are not the words of some two-bit hoodlum who feels the law closing in. They are the words of the president of the United States — who apparently feels the law closing in.

Trump speaks as though the Trump Organization, the Trump campaign and the Trump administration were one long continuing criminal enterprise. The man charged with faithfully executing the nation’s laws paints his own Justice Department as a villain and celebrates criminals who stoically go to prison rather than inform on higher-ups. Nixon talked that way in private, among friends and co-conspirators; Trump just blurts it out. He makes no bones about valuing loyalty over respect for the law. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-the-mob-boss-wants-protection/2018/08/23/55882f5a-a70c-11e8-8fac-12e98c13528d_story.html

10.  Jonathan Chait: NRA Says FBI Is Treating Trump As Unfairly As Al Capone

You’re nothin’ but talk and a badge! Photo-Illustration: Daily Intelligencer; Photos: Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images (Trump); Paramount Pictures

President Trump has drawn upon his vast knowledge of American history and used the case of Al Capone as a point of comparison to defend his former campaign manager Paul Manafort. (Trump reportedly considered the Capone line especially clever, and expressed pride in his handiwork to advisers.)

But why waste such a clever historical analogy on a mere underling when it can be used on the boss himself? NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch informs her audience that the FBI is trying to pull the same tricks on Trump that they used to entrap the beloved Prohibition-era Chicago gang leader:

They’re trying to Al Capone the president. I mean, you remember. Capone didn’t go down for murder. Elliot Ness didn’t put him in for murder. He went in for tax fraud. Prosecutors didn’t care how he went down as long as he went down.

You might wonder why Trump’s supporters believe his legal defense is aided by analogizing him to a murderous criminal. Perhaps the answer is that Capone had several qualities that recommend him to the Republican grassroots base. He was a business owner — or, in modern Republican lingo, a Job Creator. He was an avid Second Amendment enthusiast. And, most importantly, Capone, like Trump, was a victim of the deep state. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/nras-dana-loesch-compares-trump-to-al-capone.html

11.  Paul Krugman: The Tax-Cut Con Goes On

In a recent interview with CNBC’s John Harwood, Representative Steve Stivers, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee — in effect, the man charged with containing the blue wave — declared that, given the size of the budget deficit, the federal government needs to save money by cutting spending on social programs. When pressed about whether that included Social Security and Medicare, he admitted that it did.

And he’s not alone in seeing major cuts in core programs for older Americans as the next step if Republicans win in November. Many major figures in the G.O.P., including the departing speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, and multiple senators, have said the same thing. (Meanwhile, groups tied to Ryan have been running attack ads accusing Democrats of planning to cut Medicare funding — but hey, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. So, apparently, is honesty.)

Now, Republicans who call for cuts in social spending to balance the budget are showing extraordinary chutzpah, which is traditionally defined as what you exhibit when you kill your parents, then plead for mercy because you’re an orphan. After all, the same Republicans now wringing their hands over budget deficits just blew up that same deficit by enacting a huge tax cut for corporations and the wealthy. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/opinion/obamacare-medicare-social-security-midterms-republicans.html

12  Andrew Sullivan: Here’s Where Things Get Dangerous With Trump

There was a sense among some this week that we had at last reached that golden “inflection point” when all of Trump’s lies, scams, cons, and crimes finally sink in with Republicans, and the cult begins to crack.

I tend to think something else is happening: that we are entering the most dangerous phase of Donald Trump’s presidency. We always knew this would happen — that the rule of law and Trump would at some point be unable to coexist — but we had no idea how it would specifically play out. Now we see the lay of the land a little more clearly.

Four Trump campaign officials and his longtime lawyer and fixer have now pleaded to or been convicted of felonies; Trump’s now-convicted campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, faces another trial shortly; his media fixer, David Pecker, is now cooperating with authorities, and has, The Wall Street Journal reported, been granted immunity; Trump’s White House counsel talked to the special counsel’s office for 30 hours, without Trump’s knowledge, and, according to the New York Times, because he feared Trump might try to make him a fall guy for obstruction of justice; and his chief fixer for years, Michael Cohen, has every interest in telling law enforcement everything he knows about Trump’s past mafia boss–style behavior.

What we’re about to find out is if Trump can pull off all his usual tricks, and face no serious political or legal consequences for this. I’d say that question remains nerve-rackingly open. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/andrew-sullivan-trump-is-more-dangerous-than-ever.html

13. Ryan Cooper: How the New York attorney general can take down the president

In his trial for an enormous spree of tax fraud and other financial crimes, which ended in a conviction on eight counts, President Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was clearly angling for a pardon. Unlike several of Trump's other criminal associates (Michael Cohen, Rick Gates, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos) Manafort did not plead guilty and turn state's evidence for a reduced sentence, and didn't even mount a defense in his trial.

In return, Trump hinted to Fox & Friends host Ainsley Earhardt that he might well pardon Manafort for being a loyal stooge. In classic Mafia don fashion, Trump is signaling he might abuse his powers of office to protect criminals who refuse to implicate the leader (he even argued in the interview that flipping lower-level mobsters to get them to testify against kingpins should be illegal). Because the Constitution makes it so difficult to remove a president from office, he will almost certainly continue to be able to dangle this power in front of anyone who is brought up on federal charges.

However, the president's pardon power extends only to federal crimes. Governors, not the president, have pardon power over state crimes. It follows that state attorneys general could use their prosecutorial power to investigate Trump's criminal empire free of the mafioso abuse of pardons. By far the most important of these is the New York attorney general, for which there is a primary election on Sept. 13. Zephyr Teachout in particular — who recently released a book on the history of American corruption — is making an all-out attack on abuse of power the primary argument for her candidacy. http://theweek.com/articles/791950/how-new-york-attorney-general-take-down-president

14. Glenn Kessler: Not just misleading. Not merely false. A lie.

The first denial that Donald Trump knew about hush-money payments to silence women came four days before he was elected president, when his spokeswoman Hope Hicks said, without hedging, “we have no knowledge of any of this.”

The second came in January of this year, when his attorney Michael Cohen said the allegations were “outlandish.” By March, two of the president’s spokesmen — Raj Shah and Sarah Huckabee Sanders — said publicly that Trump denied all the allegations and any payments. Even Cohen’s attorney, David Schwartz, got in on the action, saying the president “was not aware of any of it.”

In April, Trump finally weighed in, answering a question about whether he knew about a payment to porn star Stephanie Clifford, who uses the stage name Stormy Daniels, with a flat “no.”

It’s now clear that the president’s statement was a lie — and that the people speaking for him repeated it.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Donald Trump’s presidency has been his loose relationship with facts. As of the beginning of this month, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker had documented 4,229 false or misleading claims from the president — an average of nearly 7.6 a day.

How to characterize Trump’s statements has become its own pitched political battle, with many of the president’s critics demanding that they be called “lies.” The Fact Checker has been hesitant to go that far, as it is difficult to document whether the president knows he is not telling the truth.

On Wednesday, Sanders said during a White House briefing that it was “a ridiculous accusation” to say the president has lied to the American people.

But this week’s guilty plea by Cohen, offers indisputable evidence that Trump and his allies have been deliberately dishonest at every turn in their statements regarding payments to Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/08/23/not-just-misleading-not-merely-false-lie/

15. Peter Wehner: The Full-Spectrum Corruption of Donald Trump

Everyone and everything he touches rots.

A party that once spoke with urgency and apparent conviction about the importance of ethical leadership — fidelity, honesty, honor, decency, good manners, setting a good example — has hitched its wagon to the most thoroughly and comprehensively corrupt individual who has ever been elected president. Some of the men who have been elected president have been unscrupulous in certain areas — infidelity, lying, dirty tricks, financial misdeeds — but we’ve never before had the full-spectrum corruption we see in the life of Donald Trump.

For many Republicans, this reality still hasn’t broken through. But facts that don’t penetrate the walls of an ideological silo are facts nonetheless. And the moral indictment against Mr. Trump is obvious and overwhelming. Corruption has been evident in Mr. Trump’s private and public life, in how he has treated his wives, in his business dealings and scams, in his pathological lying and cruelty, in his bullying and shamelessness, in his conspiracy-mongering and appeals to the darkest impulses of Americans. (Senator Bob Corker, a Republican, refers to the president’s race-based comments as a “base stimulator.”) Mr. Trump’s corruptions are ingrained, the result of a lifetime of habits. It was delusional to think he would change for the better once he became president.

A warning to my Republican friends: The worst is yet to come. Thanks to the work of Robert Mueller — a distinguished public servant, not the leader of a “group of Angry Democrat Thugs” — we are going to discover deeper and deeper layers to Mr. Trump’s corruption. When we do, I expect Mr. Trump will unravel further as he feels more cornered, more desperate, more enraged; his behavior will become ever more erratic, disordered and crazed.

Most Republicans, having thrown their MAGA hats over the Trump wall, will stay with him until the end. Was a tax cut, deregulation and court appointments really worth all this? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/25/opinion/sunday/corruption-donald-trump.html

16. Michael D. Shear and Katie Benner: Trump’s War on the Justice System Threatens to Erode Trust in the Law

It is a once-unimaginable scenario: Sometime soon in an American courtroom, a criminal defense lawyer may argue that the prosecution of an MS-13 gang member is a politically motivated “witch hunt” built around a witness who has “flipped” and taken what the lawyer calls a plea deal of dubious legality.

He will be quoting the president of the United States.

That is potentially the gravest danger of President Trump’s sustained verbal assault on the country’s justice system, legal experts say. In his attempt at self-defense amid the swirl of legal cases and investigations involving himself, his aides and his associates, Mr. Trump is directly undermining the people and processes that are the foundation of the nation’s administration of justice.

The result is a president at war with the law.

The president’s public judgments about the country’s top law enforcement agencies revolve largely around how their actions affect him personally — a vision that would recast the traditionally independent justice system as a guardian of the president and an attack dog against his adversaries. For more than a year, he has criticized the Justice Department, questioned the integrity of the prosecutors leading the Russia investigation, and mercilessly mocked Jeff Sessions, his own attorney general.

Mr. Trump continued that pattern on Twitter on Saturday morning, seizing on disputed reports in the conservative news media that the F.B.I. had ignored “thousands of Crooked Hillary emails” and vowing to get “to the bottom of all of this corruption.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/25/us/politics/trump-justice-legal-system.html

17. Gabriel Sherman: “Trump Is Nuts. This Time Really Feels Different”: Trump Rejects “War Council” Intervention, Goes It Alone

After Michael Cohen’s plea deal last week, Donald Trump spiraled out of control, firing wildly in all directions. He railed against “flippers” in a rambling Fox & Friends interview, and lashed out on Twitter at Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Justice Department, and Robert Mueller. In the wake of his outbursts, White House officials have discussed whether Trump would listen to his closest New York City friends in an effort to rein him in. Two sources briefed on the matter told me that senior officials talked about inviting Rudy Giuliani and a group of Trump’s New York real-estate friends including Tom Barrack, Richard LeFrak, and Howard Lorber to the White House to stage an “intervention” last week. “It was supposed to be a war council,” one source explained. But Trump refused to take the meeting, sources said. “You know Trump—he hates being lectured to,” the source added. (Spokespeople for LeFrak and Lorber say they have no knowledge of a meeting. A spokesperson for Barrack didn’t comment.)

More than ever, Trump is acting by feeling and instinct. “Trump is nuts,” said one former West Wing official. “This time really feels different.” Deputy Chief of Staff Bill Shine has privately expressed concern, a source said, telling a friend that Trump’s emotional state is “very tender.” Even Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are unsettled that Trump is so gleefully acting on his most self-destructive impulses as his legal peril grows. According to a source, Jared and Ivanka told Trump that stripping security clearances from former intelligence officials would backfire, but Trump ignored them. Kushner later told a friend Trump “got joy” out of taking away John Brennan’s clearance. His reaction to the death of John McCain—quashing a White House statement in praise of the senator, and restoring White House flags to full staff—falls into the same self-indulgent category. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/08/donald-trump-nuts-rejects-war-council-intervention-goes-it-alone

 

18. Dana Milbank: Donald Trump, constitutional scholar

The bedrock principles of Trumpian jurisprudence can be summarized in his own words:

“No. 1, there is no collusion.”

“No. 2, collusion is not a crime, but even if it was a crime, there was no collusion.”

A corollary holds that obstruction of justice is also not a crime because “it would seem very hard to obstruct justice for a crime that never happened! Witch Hunt!”

By contrast, everything done by special prosecutor Robert Mueller can be placed in one of three baskets of criminal offenses: “illegal,” “ILLEGAL!” or “SO ILLEGAL!”

First-year students of Trumpian jurisprudence are puzzled to learn that some crimes are legal and some legal acts are criminal. This confusion comes from a textual discrepancy. The U.S. Constitution, as written, has seven articles. But Trump’s Constitution has 12.

During the campaign, Trump informed a group of lawmakers who asked for his views of Congress’s Article I powers: “I’m for Article I. I’m for Article II. I’m for Article XII.”

Trump’s discovery of five previously nonexistent articles in the Constitution gives him broad leeway in interpreting law — making him a modern-day Hammurabi, or Confucius.

The common thread to Trumpian law: Stuff he and his allies do is legal, even if previously outlawed; stuff his opponents do is illegal, even if previously kosher. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/whatever-trump-dislikes-should-be-illegal/2018/08/28/9a689962-aaf8-11e8-a8d7-0f63ab8b1370_story.html

19. Walter Shapiro: A Post-McCain Mystery: Why Does the GOP Put Up With Trump’s Graceless Vulgarity?

The central mystery of the Trump presidency: Why do his supporters put up with it?

Any generic Republican president (say, Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio) would have slashed taxes, rolled back regulations and appointed conservative judges. But no honorable man or woman in public life would have ... hang on, it’s a long list:

Ridiculed a Vietnam POW. Lied compulsively about everything. Trusted felons like Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and Michael Cohen. Viciously and repeatedly attacked the integrity of the FBI, the Justice Department and the national security establishment.

Declared war on a free press. Cozied up to authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin. Kept secret what happened at the Helsinki summit.

And continually treated Canada (yes, Canada) like a major enemy.
The list is far from comprehensive and skips pre-presidential actions like approving hush money for a porn star. But, to steal a line from Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign, “Where’s the outrage?”

What is it about Trump that has the power to cloud the minds of Republicans who should know better? https://www.rollcall.com/news/opinion/post-mccain-mystery-gop-put-trumps-graceless-vulgarity