THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 2/4/18

SOTU REAX: The State of the Union was this week (can you believe it was this week? Doesn’t it feel like it was a month ago?), and lord knows I could not and did not watch it. But I read some good discussion of it. My favorite take came from Charles Pierce; I encourage you to read it! Chait’s reaction: “Trump the president in many ways resembles Trump the candidate — or, for that matter, Trump the branding magnate. He sells himself, not anything concrete. His endless superlatives take the place of any real value he could offer. Everything he says he is doing for you lies far off in the future, after the time when he can still be held accountable for failing to deliver it.”

THE MEMO! THE STUPID FUCKING MEMO!: I can’t handle one more second of the massive, bottomless bad faith that produced The Goddamn Memo and perpetuates its send-me-to-the-fainting couch reaction. Here’s what the stupid fucking thing, which was released on Friday, actually says: It says that when the FBI got a warrant from the FISA court in October 2016 to surveil Carter Page, a former Trump advisors, it failed to tell the court that some of the information being used in its FISA application came from a source that was paid by Democrats, and thus could be politically motivated. That is the entire memo. I am not spinning this or obfuscating: That’s literally the entire sum of the allegations in the memo. This was the stuff that was supposed to be so outrageous, so criminal, as to put Watergate to shame.

There are many things that are bizarre about The Memo and Its Hype. First, and not least, the memo not just undercuts but disproves what had been the prevailing right-wing conspiracy theory: that the entire FBI investigation was based on the so-called “dossier” made by British spy Christopher Steele. (That was supposed to be a scandal because the dossier was paid for by Democrats, so that means it is ipso facto fake news or something.) Since the FBI investigation was premised on what the Right likes to call “the dodgy dossier,” then the entire thing is a hoax and Mueller should be promptly canned. But then the Memo, in its last paragraph, just flat-out states that “[t]he Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016,” confirming the New York Times’ reporting on this.

Second, of course, is the odd decision to base an entire conspiracy on the supposed injustice of surveilling Carter Page. This is a guy who was already on the FBI’s radar as of 2013 because of his cavorting with known Russian spies. This is a guy who bragged about being a close advisor to the Kremlin. A guy who’s entire face screams: “I’m guilty!” AND, what’s more, this is a guy who the White House has insisted played a next -to-nothing role in the campaign and was not even part of the campaign as of October 2016, when he was surveilled. So the GOP wants us to simultaneous believe that Carter Page was a nobody with no connection to the campaign and that the FBI, in surveilling him, was engaged in a conspiracy to take down Trump’s campaign and sabotage his chances of winning the White House.

Third, the memo revealed that the surveillance of Page was approved by FBI and DOJ officials and the FISA court four separate times -- including by Trump’s hand-picked deputy AG Rod Rosenstein. This is important not only because it undercuts the insination that rogue Obama-era officials were ginning up faux investigations into Trump’s people, but it also means that new evidence was presented to the court that the surveillance was bearing fruit:

When a FISA order is obtained to conduct surveillance on an American, the FBI must get a reauthorization from the FISA court every 90 days. In seeking renewal they cannot simply recycle the original application—they must demonstrate that the surveillance has been fruitful. In other words, they need to show the judge that the surveillance has developed foreign intelligence that reaffirms the original probable cause determination and shows that their suspicions had merit and the target is acting on behalf of a foreign power. If the FBI cannot show new evidence like this, the surveillance is likely to be terminated. In other words, the fact that the FISA order was renewed means that the original “poison” of the Steele memorandum did not taint the subsequent renewals—it means that there actually is a “there there”—at least in the eyes of the renewing judges.

Accordingly, according to former Whitewater investigator Paul Rosenzweig,  it is “utterly implausible (if not borderline impossible) for the renewal that Rosenstein approved to be reliant on the Steele memorandum.”

Next up is the fact that nowhere does the Memo purport to claim that the Steel information provided the probable cause necessary to obtain the warrant. In fact, it seems likely that it was not the crucial, but-for cause of the warrant -- because if it were, the memo surely would have said so.

Finally -- and really, I can’t believe I’ve even taken us down this rabbit hole of stupid -- is the obvious fact that, if the FBI were trying to sabotage the Trump campaign they probably would have, you know, done that rather than single-handedly ensure that Trump won. Remember: Both the Clinton campaign and the Trump campaign were under FBI investigation, one for possibly being careless with her emails and the other for possibly colluding with a hostile foreign power to undermine American democracy. (Samsies.) During the campaign, only one of those investigations was known by the public. About only one of those campaigns were there frequent and misleading leaks from the FBI. And the FBI explicitly lied to the New York Times about its findings regarding the Trump campaign. I can’t believe I even have to remind us all of this, but there was ONE campaign that the FBI actively and overtly destroyed, and ONE campaign that it buoyed if by no other action than by staying silent.  

In fact, the absurdity of this goddamn idiocy has become so obvious that even Republicans are running from Nunes’ overwhelming stupid. “Calling on Trump not to interfere in Mueller’s investigation, four Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee dismissed on Sunday the idea that the memo’s criticism of how the FBI handled certain surveillance applications undermines the special counsel’s work. Reps. Trey Gowdy (S.C.), Chris Stewart (Utah), Will Hurd (Tex.) and Brad Wenstrup (Ohio) represented the committee on the morning political talk shows.” If it’s too stupid for Trey Gowdy, you know you’ve really sunk to what should be but is likely nowhere near the bottom of the world’s reserve of idiocy.

So that’s the goddamn memo.

P.S. Dahlia Lithwick reminds us that deep in the sticky muck of Stupid we’re currently immersed in lies real danger: “Robert Mueller is just fractionally less safe than he was on Thursday, the country is fractionally less confident in the independence and efficacy of the national intelligence apparatus, and everyone is slightly more baffled that something as stupid as the Nunes memo serves to achieve those ends. In a Zeno’s paradox of constitutional meltdown, another nothing just inched us closer to a really big something.”

Endorsements:

• The entire reason I wanted to write a newsletter this week was so that I could endorse this truly spectacular video.
• Good news: Trump’s truly psychotic nominee to head the Council on Environmental Quality is out.
• This timeline of Trump’s obstruction efforts (not even including this Memo crap).

THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 1/28/18

Ed Note: I started a really good novel this week (The Nix, by Nathan Hill), so my internet perusal was a little less thorough than usual, and this week’s TWIPN will be correspondingly brief. It’s quite a lovely predicament!

THAT WAS QUICK: If you stretch your memories all the way back to 7 days ago, the government was shut down (Yes, that was only 1 week ago. Every day in the Trump Era feels like a week.) and I was trying to figure out how it would end. Well, I guess it should have been obvious: The Dems would (and did) cave. It was a pretty pathetic move, given that they didn’t last long enough for people to even form an opinion, and certainly not long enough for the Dems to settle on an actual message about what they were doing. But given that the latter was extremely unlikely to ever happen (these are Democrats, of course), I guess it was better to cut our losses sooner rather than later. Indeed, I don’t actually think the “cave” was all that bad: We got full funding for CHIP for 6 years and lived to fight another day on DACA, with a continuing resolution lasting only until February 8. Matt Fuller at HuffPo lays out a very strong argument as to why the Democrats played this hand well. By making McConnell make an on-the-floor promise to hold a vote on DACA, Dems increase the chances of a stand-along DACA bill passing with bipartisan support in the Senate, which then puts pressure on Ryan to bring it for a vote in the House -- and helps justify a second shutdown if he refuses (it’s much easier to demand that a specific bill come up for a vote than for amorphous progress on a given issue). (He makes other really good points, so read it.) The question is what happens between now and the next spending bill deadline. There’s been some noise that Democrats are willing to negotiate a new spending bill without DACA, on the strength of the promises that a Dream Act will be voted on separately. This seems like a dangerous idea -- the one piece of leverage we have is that Republicans are desperate to raise spending caps on the military, and they need Democrats’ votes to do it -- but I don’t want to get angry about it until I know for sure that it’s happening and until I understand the purported reasons for it. I also think everything may have shifted on Thursday, when the White House released its immigration plan. (See below.)

WHITE HOUSE PROPOSES SWEEPING IMMIGRATION CHANGES: On Thursday, the White House released its framework for what it supposedly thinks of as a compromise on immigration. Unsurprisingly, it is extremely extreme. In exchange for granting Dreamers a path to citizenship, it demands “$25 billion in border-wall funding (not coincidentally, that’s what Chuck Schumer was offering the president on January 19 in the negotiations aimed at heading off a government shutdown); an end to the diversity visa lottery that provided a way into the country for many people from developing (or to use the president’s term, ‘shithole’) countries; a restriction of family-based immigration (the program would be limited to spouses and minor children of people already in the country); and significantly enhanced enforcement resources for non-border activities. This last item, suggesting a plan to step up deportations, was a bit of a nasty surprise for pro-immigration advocates.” It’s not entirely clear whether this is actually Trump’s opening negotiation bid, or if it’s just Stephen Miller’s fantasy white nationalism run wild -- one that Trump will promptly ignore when sitting down to negotiate. Trump says that he wants to shift immigration away from family-based immigration -- which currently accounts for about ⅔ of immigrants who come to this country each year -- to a skills-based system. but what highly-skilled person is going to want to move to a new country without being able to bring over his or her parents or siblings or adult children? How can we convince “the best and the brightest” to come here even as we say our doors are closed to their families? (Indeed, though the White House has refused to answer specifically, it appears that Melania Trump or her sister have sponsored their parents for residency in America.) Also, it should be noted that Trump and other right-wingers often speaks as though immigrants can bring over their entire extended families. They’re simply wrong. Under current law, US citizens can sponsor their spouses, parents, and minor children for green cards and there is no cap to the number of such visas given out. Visas for adult children and siblings of citizens are capped, as are visas for spouses, minor children, and adult married children of legal permanent residents.

IT’S GOOD TO REMEMBER: As we talk about DACA and what Democrats should be doing to protect the Dreamers, it’s good to remember that, ultimately, Democrats have very little leverage to pass legislation to achieve their priorities. It’s worth quoting extensively from Yglesias’s good piece making this point: “[I]t’s worth pointing out the obvious: Republicans are the people who have put the hundreds of thousands of DREAMers at risk. It was mostly Republicans who killed comprehensive immigration reform in 2007; it was overwhelmingly Republicans who killed the DREAM Act in 2010; it was even more overwhelmingly Republicans who killed comprehensive immigration reform in 2013. It was a Republican president who canceled DACA in 2017, and it is exclusively Republicans who are blocking a wise and humane legislative replacement for DACA in 2018. The real reason Schumer and Senate Democrats are struggling to secure help for DREAMers is that there are only 49 of them in a 100-person body (and you need 60 to pass legislation), their colleagues in the House are even more disempowered than they are, and the executive branch is controlled by people who are fundamentally hostile to the cause. . . . I’m not entirely sure why, exactly, Republicans leaders are so eager to ruin DREAMers’ lives but they do seem to be pretty determined. And that’s the core issue, not any question of legislative tactics.”

THE RUSSIA et. al. STUFF: The big news this week was that Trump ordered that Mueller be fired in June, but White House counsel Don McGahn stopped him by threatening to resign. There were new reports about Trump raging about his inability to control “his” Justice Department, and insists that the Attorney General, the FBI, and the rest of the Justice Department should be loyal to him and him alone (rather than, you know, the rule of law). We also learned that, when acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe came to meet Trump just after Trump fired Comey, Trump demanded to know who McCabe voted for in the 2016 election -- and raged about McCabe’s wife being a Democrat.

So let’s review what we’ve learned: Trump demanded loyalty from Comey and asked him to drop the Russia investigation. After Comey acknowledged the ongoing FBI investigation into Russian interference in the election, Trump demanded that his team find “dirt” on Comey with the ultimate goal of sacking him. Sessions declared that he wanted one negative story every day in the press about Comey. Then Trump, acting with Sessions and deputy Rod Rosenstein, cooked up a fabricated reason to fire Comey (supposedly because he was too mean to Hillary Clinton), a lie that lasted all of about 3 days before Trump confirmed multiple times that the firing was because of the Russia investigation. Then Trump sought a loyalty pledge from Comey’s successor Andrew McCabe, tried to ensure that he was a Republican, and expressed his outrage that McCabe had a Democratic wife. When McCabe (now serving as Deputy Director of the FBI) refused to bend to Trump’s will, Trump spent months publicly lambasting him while Sessions pressured the new director to fire him. (McCabe has announced his upcoming retirement.) Meanwhile, Trump fought desperately to keep Sessions from recusing himself from the Russia investigation, insisting his Attorney General had a duty to cover up any and all of his crimes. When Sessions did recuse himself, Trump erupted in a rage. And then Trump ordered the man leading the investigation, Robert Mueller, be fired. To put it mildly, this is not the way an innocent person behaves.

Chait and Brian Beutler both have good and dispiriting reactions to this news. Chait argues that it should be obvious by now that, if and when Trump does fire Mueller, the GOP will immediately and roundly cover for him. We know that because we can see how they reacted, this week, to news that Trump already tried to fire Mueller. (You should read Chait’s piece.) Beutler shows how conservatives are firing up the argument that an obstruction charge with no underlying specific crime somehow doesn’t count. But Trump and his team plainly collaborated with Russians to tamper with the election, and then lied over and over again, to the public, the press, and, it turns out, to the FBI, about that collaboration. That there may be no specific crime on the books making collaborating with foreigners to aide your election is (or should be) utterly beside the point.

Endorsements:

• Will Ferrell helps us remember that George W. Bush was really, really awful.
• Caity Weaver wrote something, which means it gets an endorsement.
• Trump has not destroyed Obama’s legacy. He hasn’t even come close.
• Let’s not pretend otherwise: Paul Ryan is a knowing, active, purposeful accomplice into Trump’s crimes.
• Jill Lepore on Barbie dolls, Judge Kozinski, and #MeToo is everything. EVERYTHING. (I’m not sure there has ever been a better first four paragraphs of a New Yorker essay.)
• Everyone online is saying that this long piece about Paul Manafort is a must-read. I haven’t had time to read it yet, but check it out for yourself.

THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 1/21/18

Shithole Shutdown Edition

The federal government has shut down. This week, I try to help you make sense of it -- plus some other stuff.

THE BASICS: On Friday at midnight, the government’s funding ran out, forcing a shutdown. This is because Republicans wanted to pass a continuing resolution (“CR”) to keep funding levels at their current levels, but did not want to pass any protection for the Dreamers (despite multiple promises to do so), and Democrats decided not to support another CR without protection for the Dreamers and full funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Although bipartisan majorities supported a compromise plan that would have protected the Dreamers and even provided Republicans with additional border security funding, the Republican leadership refused to bring that to a vote after the White House rejected it. Without a compromise, the Democrats refused to vote for the CR, and the government ran out of funding.

WHY WERE WE AT THE BRINK TO BEGIN WITH?: This crisis was precipated by the fact that the Republican congress has failed to pass a budget for 2018, despite the fiscal year beginning more than four months ago, on October 1. Although the House has passed an omnibus spending bill, it has not even been taken up in the Senate, which was focused on cutting taxes for rich people. So in early September, after the devastating hurricanes that hit Texas and Puerto Rico, Congress passed a CR (plus hurricane relief) to get them through December 8, with the idea being that now they’d have three more months to work out the larger 2018 spending. As he bypassed the far-right of his party to sign the CR, Trump also announced that he wanted to work with Democrats to fix DACA long-term (only a day after ending the program unilaterally). But then three months passed with the GOP focused solely on tax cuts, and so Congress passed yet another two-week CR on December 7. You guys won’t believe this, but they had still made no progress two weeks later. Just days before Christmas, Congress passed yet another short-term CR, with funding set to expire January 19.

WHAT ARE WE FIGHTING OVER?: At bottom, the Democrats are demanding protection for the Dreamers and long-term funding for CHIP, two things that Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Trump himself have all not only said they support but have promised to deal with. (That is why this shutdown is nothing like the 2013 shutdown, when Republicans shut down the government, under Ted Cruz’s leadership, over defunding Obamacare -- when Obama was president.) Here’s a helpful timeline from our friends at Pod Save America (with some additions):

9/5/17: Trump rescinds DACA but demands that Congress find a fix to protect the Dreamers.

10/1/17: The GOP let CHIP funding expire, later claiming there wasn’t enough money for a program that saves the government $6 billion over a decade. Meanwhile, they passed a $1.2 trillion tax cut paid for by unicorn’s wings and wishes.

10/24/17: Paul Ryan says he wants a long-term spending bill that protects the Dreamers

12/21/17: As he passes another short-term CR to mid-January, McConnell promises a vote to protect the Dreamers if the Senate comes up with a bipartisan deal: “If negotiators reach an agreement on these matters by the end of January, I will bring it to the Senate floor for a free-standing vote.”

1/9/18: Trump holds a televised meeting and manages not to drool on himself or scream “pussy” at a senator, and so the whole thing is declared a major success. At the meeting, Trump says that he’ll “take the heat” for a bipartisan deal on immigration that protects the Dreamers, and promises to sign any bipartisan bill that passes Congress.

1/11/18: Durbin and Graham present a bipartisan deal that can pass Congress, that protects the Dreamers along with providing additional border security funding (despite literally two years of campaigning that “Mexico” would pay for the wall), eliminating the visa lottery, and slashing other legal immigration. Trump rejects the plan -- saying he doesn’t want immigrants from “shithole” countries but instead wants them from white countries. No other reason is offered for rejecting the plan that, 48 hours earlier, he had said he would support.

1/19/18: Republican leaders in the House and Senate refuse to bring the bipartisan plan to the floor for a vote (breaking their earlier explicit promises).

So to summarize: The President says he wants a deal. McConnell promises to allow a vote on a deal. Ryan says he wants to protect Dreamers. And yet a deal that does all the things Republicans have demanded -- including money they can claim is for a “wall”! -- is rejected, with only Trump’s racism offered as a reason.

P.S. For an extra dose of rage, watch this exchange from January 2017 between Paul Ryan and a Dreamer: “If you’re worried about some deportation force coming knocking on your door this year, don’t worry about that.” What a terrible, terrible human.

P.S.S. For a much more entertaining explanation of how we got here and what we’re fighting over, watch Jon Lovett summarize the situation in under 3 minutes.

SO WHAT HAPPENS NOW?: This one I am less equipped to answer. On Friday, Democrats tried passing a 4-day extension to give everyone time to negotiate, but McConnell blocked it. McConnell also blocked Claire McCaskill’s attempt to ensure military spending during the shutdown. It appears the White House and the GOP believe shutdown politics are good for them. Democrats need to break through the noise here. The problem is that while Trump himself has signaled willingness to compromise, his staff (ie, John Kelly and Stephen Miller) have then reneged on deals he has discussed. On Friday night, Trump and Schumer were close to a deal before John Kelly vetoed it, reportedly after McConnell told him to quash any deal Trump made. After Trump had rejected the Durbin-Graham proposal last week, they asked for a counteroffer but received no response, making it almost impossible to negotiate. At bottom, Trump and the Republicans are being wilfully obtuse about what policy outcomes they actually want. If they want to deport the Dreamers, they need to say so, and be held accountable. If they want to protect them, then they should protect them. I am flabbergasted every day by these people’s bottomless bad faith.

OTHER INSANE THINGS THAT HAPPENED THIS WEEK: First, in the coda to Shithole-gate, DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday and testified that she did not remember whether Trump referred to countries with non-white populations as shitholes -- though she admitted that Trump praised Norway. When Leahey asked her if Norway was a predominantly white country, she professed total ignorance: “I actually don’t know that.” These people.

Next up we have the truly abominable story of the Department of Justice putting out a blatantly mendacious report purporting to show that about 75% of convicted terrorists in the U.S. are “foreign-born” immigrants. How did they arrive at this figure? First, they counted every suspect who was extradited to the U.S. for trial as an immigrant. Second, they included only Muslims in their count, excluding Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other far-right extremists. They tried to justify this by saying the report was only about “international” terrorism, but they defined “international terrorism” simply to mean terrorism by Muslims, as a former FBI official explained: “If you’re a Neo-Nazi terrorist in the United States, even if you’re Canadian or French, you’re a domestic terrorist.” Super cool.

Finally, we have a couple of stories from the Department of Insane Trump Administration Personnel. First up is Carl Higbie, who resigned Thursday as chief of external affairs for the federal government's volunteer service organization after CNN reported a number of shockingly racist, sexist, and homophobic statements he had made on his radio show. For example, he said "the black race" had "lax" morals. “He added that black women think ‘breeding is a form of government employment.’” Speaking of Muslims, he said: “Go back to your Muslim shithole and go crap in your hands and bang little boys on Thursday nights. . . . I just don't like Muslim people. . . . Well people are like, 'well, you can't hate somebody just for being Muslim. It's like, yeah, I can. Do you hate people who rape little boys?” He said that soldiers with PTSD had “a weak mind.” He said the government should invite gun owners to the border to shoot those crossing illegally. He called Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein “bitches.” He said, “You know, I don't like gay people. I just don't." He called Obama “the Muslim who was born in Kenya.” And he said anyone that takes any form of government assistance should not be allowed to vote. So, yeah, he was a real winner -- and a real perfect choice to run the department that oversees federal volunteer programs. Great work, Trump administration!

Last is Taylor Weyeneth, a 24-year-old former campaign aide turned political appointee who had been the de facto head of the national office of drug policy until the Washington Post brought this embarrassment to light. It appears that he is not only blatantly unqualified for the post, but that he doctored his resumes along the way -- which I guess makes sense if “volunteering at a monastery” is one of the few bullet points under your “Experience” header: “In the first résumé, Weyeneth said he volunteered for more than 275 hours at the monastery between 2012 and 2016. The second résumé he submitted to the government said it was more than 150 hours. The résumé provided by the White House does not mention volunteer work at the monastery.” Today, the Post reports that, during his incredibly short working life, Weyeneth was fired from a law firm for failing to show up for work. “In a résumé initially submitted to the government, Weyeneth said he worked at the firm until April 2016. When an FBI official called as part of a background check in January 2017, the firm said Weyeneth had left eight months earlier than the résumé indicated.” He remains the deputy chief of staff. Oh well -- it’s not like we have any sort of drug crisis on our hands at all, right?

OH ALSO THE PRESIDENT HAD AN AFFAIR WITH A PORN STAR: On Earth 2, where Things Still Matter, the news that Trump had (i) an affair (ii) with a porn star (iii) after giving his wife Melania “one week” to lose the baby weight after she gave birth to their son, and that (iv) he told the porn star that she was “just like” his daughter, and that (v) they had unprotected sex, and that, to keep all this quiet, (vi) his personal lawyer set up a dummy corporation to pay $130,000 to said sex worker in the weeks before the presidential election would be, well, news. Which is more than it is on Earth 2, where Nothing Matters.

Endorsements:

• Jonathan Chait wants us all to wake up to the fact that Republicans won’t lift a finger if Trump quashes the Mueller investigation.
• My current favorite song.
• Chait’s take on Trump’s first year.

THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 1/14/18

RECAP OF THE WEEK: I lay this stuff out there only to show that, in Normal Times, almost any one of these stories would have been existential-threat-type stories for a president. Now it’s just Tuesday.

• Monday: Everyone was talking about a new book by Michael Wolf “that depicts Trump as a functionally illiterate, mentally unbalanced figurehead, frighteningly incapable of doing the most important job in the world.”
• Tuesday: Trump held a televised meeting on immigration to show that he was not in the early stages of dementia. At the meeting, he was utterly uninformed of the policies in question, and seemed to agree with whatever lawmaker last spoke to him. But the media fell all over itself to credit him for, I guess, his ability to sit up in a chair without screaming obscenities or demanding McDonalds, and his ability to remember lawmakers’ names -- or, rather, reading the name tags that were placed in front of them.
• Wednesday: I must have blacked out on Wednesday.
• Thursday: In the morning, Trump got tricked by Fox into tweeting out against a signature policy of his administration. Two hours later, one of his handlers had to tweet out a face-saving reversal. That afternoon, Trump said he wanted fewer black immigrants and more white ones. (See below.) Oh, and he gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal in which he boasted about how he had succeeded at everything he did; declared, “I was always the best athlete”; said he had a good relationship with Kim Jong Un; and accused an FBI agent of treason. (You missed that one, didn’t you?)
• Friday: In the morning, Trump blatantly lies about why he canceled his trip to the U.K. In the evening, news broke that Trump’s lawyer paid, in October 2016, $130,000 in hush money to a porn star that Trump had had an affair with while married to Melania.

THERE IS ALWAYS A NEW LOW: The lesson from this presidency is that there is always a new low, and we will never, ever reach the bottom. Thursday’s entry came when Trump, while being briefed on immigrants from Haiti and Africa, asked, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? We should have more people from Norway.” This echoes earlier reports that he decried immigrants from Haiti because “they all have AIDS” and those from Africa because, once coming to the U.S., they won’t want to “go back to their huts.” On Friday, NBC put together a revoltingly unsurprising list of other blatantly racist statements Trump has made in private as president, including repeatedly asking an American intelligence analyst of Korean descent where she was from (after refusing to accept her answer of “New York”), and then, upon learning that her parents were Korean, demanding to know why the “pretty Korean lady” was not in charge of negotiations with North Korea. Oh and the other time he asked members of the Congressional Black Caucus if they knew Ben Carson -- and then seemed surprised that they did not. These are textbook examples of racist statements. Not “controversial.” Not “charged.” Not “vulgar.” Racist. (At least some of the press is willing to admit it.) (These statements also entirely consistent with Trump’s habit, on the campaign trail, of spinning lurid and imagined tales of how black Americans live like animals.) Trump’s racism has real consequences for real people. This week, Trump abruptly canceled the temporary protected status of tens of thousands of immigrants from El Salvador, who were permitted to live in the U.S. for more than a decade following a devastating earthquake in 2001. “The decision came just weeks after more than 45,000 Haitians lost protections granted after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, and it suggested that others in the program, namely Hondurans, may soon lose them as well.”

P.S. Just to be absolutely clear on this, because I think some of the coverage I’ve read is missing the point of what is so truly offensive about this. It’s not just that he denigrated an entire continent as a shithole. It’s that it was explicitly linked to immigration: He does not want black African immigrants; he wants white Norwegian immigrants. If he were just saying that he didn’t want to travel to Africa because it was a shithole, that’d be ignorant and disgusting and offensive, but it is the explicit link to immigration policy -- and the contrast with desirable immigrants from Norway -- that makes the statement so shockingly racist and deplorable.

DEMS APPEAR TO BE CAVING ON DACA: Shithole-gate came out of discussions Trump had with legislators over immigration, the hot topic this week. Despite Trump repeatedly professing to want to protect the Dreamers -- he told the WSJ on Thursday: “I think that we should be able to do something with DACA. I think it’s foolish if we don’t, they’ve been here a long time, they’re no longer children, you know.” -- the actual policy of the White House (apparently set by “C+ Santa Monica fascist” Stephen Miller) is to demand significant concessions for passing a Dream Act. And the Democrats appear to be going along with it. On Thursday, a bipartisan group of Senators announced a deal in principle, which would provide a 10-year path to citizenship for Dreamers, $2.8 billion in border security (including $1.6 billion for a wall), a bar on citizenship for parents of Dreamers (though they would be protected from deportation), and changes to the 500,000 visas that are given out through a lottery every year. It was this deal that Graham and Durbin went to the White House to present -- but because Miller was apparently so worried Trump was going to make a deal, he called in far-right-wing senators to surround Trump and make sure he rejected any deal. Which Trump did -- after telling the senators he wanted more white immigrants and fewer black ones. So the Democrats have bent over backward to give concessions -- substantially increased border security and changes to the lottery program -- only to have the deal shot down by the most conservative elements of the Senate. This is insane. The Democrats must insist on a clean DACA bill -- a bill that gives Dreamers a pathway to citizenship, period -- given that so many Republicans and Trump himself have repeatedly said they want to protect Dreamers. We must NOT offer any further concessions, and we have to be willing to vote against a budget (ie, for a shutdown) that continues to enforce racist and dangerous immigration policies that a majority of congressmen and the president all profess to want to fix. It doesn’t seem that complicated to me.

OH ALSO, THERE’S THIS: Trump talking literal nonsense on the vast difference between “DACA” and “Dreamers.” WTF is he talking about??

MORE NEW LOWS, HEALTH CARE EDITION: This week, the Trump administration announced that, for the first time in its 50+ years of existence, Medicaid would be permitted to have work requirements attached, if a state required. Medicaid -- a health insurance program for the poor and disabled. Because apparently we don’t want poor and sick people to be lulled into, um, poverty and illness by the promise of free health care. This is what it means when people say health care is a privilege, not a right. Chait points out that this measure will increase bureaucratic red tape and administrative costs, and create frustration and coverage gaps -- all in service to right-wing fever dreams of the Indolent Moochers. “[T]he pathology of seeing medical care as a privilege, and the fear that it is being extended to the wrong kinds of people, is an embedded characteristic of American conservatism.” This is Reason Number 657,476 that liberals need to focus on control of state legislatures if we have any hope of preventing the further immiseration of our fellow citizens.

THERE IS SOME ACTUAL GOOD NEWS THIS WEEK: Shock of all shocks, some good things happened this week! First, and biggest of all, a panel of three federal judges in North Carolina struck down the state’s gerrymandered district maps as so outrageously partisan as to be unconstitutional -- the first time a court has struck down a map based on partisan gerrymandering. “Judge Wynn, who sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and was a member of a special panel considering the congressional map, said that ‘a wealth of evidence proves the General Assembly’s intent to “subordinate” the interests of non-Republican voters and ‘entrench’ Republican domination of the state’s congressional delegation.’” This was a particularly egregious map: The Republican leader said he created a map with 10 Republican districts and 3 Democratic only because he could not figure out a way to create a map with 11 Republicans and 2 Democrats. For the lawyers out there (and others who may be interested), check out Nick Stephanopoulos’ thoughts on the case on Election Law Blog here, including an explanation of what appears to be an entirely workable legal standard the court employed.

Second, in a somewhat surprising ruling, “The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Monday unanimously rejected a proposal by Energy Secretary Rick Perry that would have propped up nuclear and coal power plants struggling in competitive electricity markets.” This rejection came despite the fact that four of the five members of the board are Trump appointees.

Third, two vulnerable California Republicans decided to hang their hats rather than face reelection, increasing Democrats’ chances of taking back the House. Darryl Issa, a man whose lips were stolen from a lizard, and Ed Royce, a standard-issue Republican I know nothing about, both announced they would retire from their districts in southern California, both of which were won by Clinton.  

THE STORY THE GOP DIDN’T WANT YOU TO HEAR: Let’s review where things stand in the right-wing alt-narrative of the Russia investigation: According to this view, Hillary Clinton hired Fusion GPS to investigate Trump. Fusion hired a British spy, Christopher Steele, to dig up dirt on Steele. Steele improperly obtained info, some of which may have been disinformation intentionally planted by the Russians, who, for some unexplained reason, were out to sully Trump’s name and hurt his electoral chances (they’ve never explained their theory on that part). Steele then gave this disinformation to the FBI, which maybe paid him for it, and the FBI used that information to open an illegal investigation into Trump. Thus, the whole investigation is a fraud perpetrated by the Russian government through the FBI -- and thus we need to purge the FBI of its rampant, anti-Trump bias. Okay, so we’re caught up on Visions From Crazy Town. Note that the hinge of this unhinged thesis is that the FBI opened its investigation on the basis of findings from Steele. That thesis was undermined by reporting in the Times last week that found that the FBI was tipped off by an Australian diplomat to whom Trump foreign policy advisor George Papadopolous confided about the soon-to-be-made-public hack of emails. The thesis was blown to smithereens by the under-oath testimony of Fusian GPS leader Glenn Simpson, whose testimony was released unilaterally by Dianne Feinstein after GOP congressional leaders had refused to make it public for weeks -- even as they continued to peddle false claims that were belied by the testimony. Simpson testified that, when Steele took his findings to the FBI (because he was so concerned that he had uncovered a massive scheme to harm the US), the FBI made it clear they had already started an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian governmental figures, and that they had been tipped by someone inside the campaign. We further learned that Steele, with his decades of experience in intelligence gathering, was convinced that none of his sources were planting disinformation, and that when he presented the info to the FBI (and later the media), he did not cherry-pick the evidence to produce only the most damning material.

As Brian Beutler points out, though, we learned even more from the testimony transcript. The questioning from the Republican staffers on the committee, he writes, “is a monument to Republican complicity in Trump’s jaw-dropping misconduct. By my count, over the course of about five hours, Chuck Grassley’s lawyers asked Simpson literally zero questions designed to increase their own understanding of Russian efforts to disrupt the election. . . . They spent their hours instead trying without much success to impeach Simpson’s credibility and paint him as a partisan. . . . Confronted with the allegation that the Trump campaign was complicit in a criminal plot to sabotage the Clinton campaign, Grassley’s representatives wanted to know why Simpson had the nerve to try to alert the public, through the media.” It is clear that the Republicans no longer have any interest in actually uncovering the truth about what happened or didn’t happen during the 2016 campaign. They are interested solely in protecting Trump. They have spent weeks peddling false stories about the origins of the FBI investigation and the conduct of FBI agents, knowing full well that the stories were false but working their hardest to prevent the truth from coming out. There is no low to which these people will not stoop. There will not come a day when their eyes will open and the fever will break. The only hope we have is to beat them, and beat them thoroughly.

Endorsements:

• This thread on Oprah’s charisma and why, with Trump so historically unpopular, Oprah is not the candidate we should look for -- because we could do better. (I also found this piece, arguing against an Oprah candidacy, persuasive.) My view is that 2018 is probably the most important election in the last 100 years, and a full 100% of our energy should be directed at that. Every minute we spend talking about 2020 is a minute wasted that should be spent organizing for 2018.
• Portland police and prosecutors said they had the absolute right to go through people’s trash without a warrant. So reporters went digging through the trash of the District Attorney, the police chief, and the police commissioner. Hilarity ensues.
• This thread about how, exactly, “shithole countries” became that way -- and the United States’ starring role.
• This absolutely perfect account of the White House’s inability to figure out how to work a conference call.
• This exchange between Trump and the WSJ:

WSJ: You think North Korea is trying to drive a wedge between the two countries, between you and President Moon?

Mr. Trump: I’ll let you know in—within the next 12 months, OK, Mike?

WSJ: Sure.

Mr. Trump: I will let you know. But if I were them I would try. But the difference is I’m president; other people aren’t. And I know more about wedges than any human being that’s ever lived, but I’ll let you know.

• Alexandra Petri on #MeToo.
• There has never, ever been a more perfect Twitter exchange ever ever.
• Charles Pierce: Are Americans Going to Vote Their Hopes, or Their Fears?