In WaPo, Ruth Marcus says she asked Trump point blank, “Do you read?”

Mika Brzezinski and I had a tense meeting with Trump following what I considered to be a bumbling debate performance in September 2015. I asked the candidate a blunt question.

“Can you read?”

Awkward silence.

“I’m serious, Donald. Do you read?” I continued. “If someone wrote you a one-page paper on a policy, could you read it?”

Taken aback, Trump quietly responded that he could while holding up a Bible given to him by his mother. He then joked that he read it all the time.

I am apparently not the only one who has questioned the president’s ability to focus on the written word. “Trump didn’t read,” Wolff writes. “He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate. Others concluded that he didn’t read because he didn’t have to . . . He was postliterate — total television.”

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard that Trump doesn’t read. If you google “Trump doesn’t read” you get a ton of links to articles testifying to that. And then there’s this, from May 2017 Newsweek by Chris Riotta: “Trump Doesn’t Read His Daily Intelligence Briefings; Prefers Big Pictures Instead.”

Almost every day at about 10:30 a.m., President Donald Trump sits with the heads of the intelligence community and a fresh Diet Coke to discuss some of the world’s most highly classified information in the Oval Office. He prefers “killer graphics,” like pictures, videos and charts, and often interrupts the meeting with questions and unrelated asides, according to CIA Director Mike Pompeo and National Intelligence Director Daniel Coats.

The president also favors tiny “nuggets” of intelligence that pop out at him during his daily briefings, and information that can be boiled down to a single page. “That’s our task, right?” Pompeo asked in a Washington Post article published Sunday. “To deliver the material in a way that he can best understand the information we’re trying to communicate.”  …

… The president prefers “big pictures” during his intel meetings in more ways than one: Trump doesn’t care to read long narratives about developing events around the world, instead preferring imagery he can better understand.

This led to some speculation that perhaps he couldn’t read. He has been known to use a teleprompter from time to time, but not very skillfully.

It’s hard to imagine someone graduating college, even with so-so grades, without being able to read at all. But there’s another element to this reading thing; it’s a skill one can lose with dementia.

I’m thinking of my mother, who was very bright. In the 1940s he completed a five-year program to earn a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of Missouri. After a long career as a hospital nurse she ran a Licensed Practical Nursing program at our local community college. Although math was her strongest subject, she certainly could read perfectly well (including doctors’ handwriting).

I flew home for a visit in early summer 1999. My father was very ill and would die of congestive heart failure in a few weeks, but he was still living at home. He and my mother had been engaged in a long disagreement about the best places to go out to dinner. He liked to go to proper restaurants where he could sit down, order from a menu and be waited on. She always wanted to go to buffets.

At one point she and I went out to dinner. I am inclined toward my father’s preferences, and we ended up at a sit-down restaurant. Mom was quiet and seemed uncomfortable, and she barely looked at the menu. After I ordered from the menu she told the waitress that she would have the same dinner I was having.

Her Alzheimer’s wouldn’t be diagnosed for a few more months, although my brother, who was a psychologist, told me she had it the day after Dad’s funeral. That was when I realized she couldn’t read menus. And she was embarrassed to let anyone know.  So she preferred buffets, where she could see the food. It was a coping mechanism.

Oddly enough, she could still write. A professional to the hilt, she had been keeping nurse’s notes on my father’s medicines and treatments to the end. But she couldn’t read menus. And bills and bank statements confused her. But she could understand the labels on the pill bottles, at least for a little while longer. She also continued to do crossword puzzles, although with diminishing success.

I’m just throwing this out as something to think about. Of course I don’t know if Trump has Alzheimer’s or some other mental impairment. But it would explain a lot.

First, some background. Michael Wolff wrote a puff piece on Trump for the Hollywood Reporter that was published in June 2016. So when he talked to Trump about writing a book about him, Trump assumed he would write a flattering book about him and gave him all kinds of access. As Wolff described it,

I interviewed Donald Trump for The Hollywood Reporter in June 2016, and he seemed to have liked — or not disliked — the piece I wrote. “Great cover!” his press assistant, Hope Hicks, emailed me after it came out (it was a picture of a belligerent Trump in mirrored sunglasses). After the election, I proposed to him that I come to the White House and report an inside story for later publication — journalistically, as a fly on the wall — which he seemed to misconstrue as a request for a job. No, I said. I’d like to just watch and write a book. “A book?” he responded, losing interest. “I hear a lot of people want to write books,” he added, clearly not understanding why anybody would. “Do you know Ed Klein?”— author of several virulently anti-Hillary books. “Great guy. I think he should write a book about me.” But sure, Trump seemed to say, knock yourself out.

So Wolff was allowed to hang out with the Trump campaign and transition team and in the White House itself. The staff was encouraged to cooperate with him.

“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

Can we trust that what Wolff wrote was accurate? Josh Marshall wrote,

One of the many oddities and comedies of this moment is that Michael Wolff is anything but a reliable narrator of the Trumpian moment. A year ago he was effusively and conspicuously praising himself as a practitioner of sycophancy-based access journalism, the only journo who would or could cover Trump on the merits rather than be swept up with the preening opposition and grandiose efforts to destroy the real estate hawker turned politician. Now this. It makes perfect sense. Never trust an ingratiating reporter. But to keep ourselves on our own toes, again, I don’t think we should see him as an entirely reliable narrator of the story. The key points though, the quotes? They probably bear out. In any case, according to Mike Allen at Axios, Wolff has tapes. I’m sure he does.

Wolff doesn’t strike me as someone with a political agenda. He is a clever writer, and as a clever writer he must have realized from the get-go that the real story, the money story, was not a puff story. There already are a bunch of puff books out about Trump, most of which you have probably never heard of.  Wolff realized that the big ticket story was a freak show story, a Holy Bleep These People Are Crazier Than Bleep story.  And I’m sure he’s clever enough to know that he was dealing with very powerful and even ruthless people, so he’d damn well better have tapes.

Say what you will about Wolff: Unless the book is wholesale invention, something in his I’m-with-the-band swagger in the West Wing attracted awesomely sordid material from Trump’s scurvy syndicate. In John Sterling at Macmillan, the book has a masterful editor, and three fact-checkers reviewed it. So I’m betting “Fire and Fury” will withstand whatever charges of journalistic impropriety come at it.

I will add that publishers crank out exposés about politicians all the time. The trash-talking books about Hillary Clinton alone are so common they make up their own genre. They sell enough copies to make a profit, because people who hate Politician X will buy them and maybe read a few pages and leave them on the coffee table for awhile. This book is already a best-seller and appears to be turning into a sure-enough phenomenon.  Lots of people want to read it.

It’s also the case that, in a meta sense, Wolff is not telling us anything we don’t already know. James Fallows writes at The Atlantic:

The details in Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury make it unforgettable, and potentially historic. We’ll see how many of them fully stand up, and in what particulars, but even at a heavy discount, it’s a remarkable tale.

But what Wolff is describing is an open secret.

Based on the excerpts now available, Fire and Fury presents a man in the White House who is profoundly ignorant of politics, policy, and anything resembling the substance of perhaps the world’s most demanding job. He is temperamentally unstable. Most of what he says in public is at odds with provable fact, from “biggest inaugural crowd in history” onward. Whether he is aware of it or not, much of what he asserts is a lie. His functional vocabulary is markedly smaller than it was 20 years ago; the oldest person ever to begin service in the White House, he is increasingly prone to repeat anecdotes and phrases. He is aswirl in foreign and financial complications. He has ignored countless norms of modern governance, from the expectation of financial disclosure to the importance of remaining separate from law-enforcement activities. He relies on immediate family members to an unusual degree; he has an exceptionally thin roster of experienced advisers and assistants; his White House staff operations have more in common with an episode of The Apprentice than with any real-world counterpart. He has a shallower reserve of historical or functional information than previous presidents, and a more restricted supply of ongoing information than many citizens. He views all events through the prism of whether they make him look strong and famous, and thus he is laughably susceptible to flattering treatment from the likes of Putin and Xi Jinping abroad or courtiers at home.

As far as the fallout is concerned, I’m sure that even as we speak right-wing interests are working overtime to find whatever dirt they can find on Michael Wolff to discredit him, so we’ll see what comes out. Once the online herd of Trump supporters get their hands on the book, they will be combing through it for any detail they can refute, and I’m sure there will be something. And the bobbleheads on Fox News will discuss those details to death over the next several days. But if the copyeditors at Macmillan did their jobs, those details will be mostly inconsequential things.

We’re already seeing much of the Right taking sides with Trump against Bannon. How the Alt Right feels about that, I do not know. I don’t expect Bannon to disappear entirely, but especially after the debacle (for him) of the Roy Moore loss, I expect that from now on most Republicans and what’s left of movement conservatism will keep him at arm’s length. Maybe he and Karl Rove can form a Loser’s Club.

I expect the book may accelerate some ongoing trends. Editorialists already have been less hesitant to question Trump’s basic mental competence, and those voices will grow louder.  It also will likely accelerate Trump’s mental deterioration. I don’t see him getting through this year without a complete meltdown requiring, at least, confinement from public view or hospitalization.

We may learn there are breadcrumbs in the book for Bob Mueller to follow.

If the book is as big a money-maker for the publisher as it appears so far, expect more publishers to come out with books and magazine features talking trash about Trump.

Can you think of anything else?

Boy howdy, have we got some news today. A new book by Michael Wolff titled Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House has set Trump and his minions at each other’s throats.  In the book, Steve Bannon called Junior’s Trump Tower meeting with a pack of Russians “treasonous” and added there was no way Trump didn’t know about it. In response, Trump says Bannon lost his mind.

Here’s just one excerpt:

Few people who knew Trump had illusions about him. That was his appeal: He was what he was. Twinkle in his eye, larceny in his soul. Everybody in his rich-guy social circle knew about his wide-ranging ignorance. Early in the campaign, Sam Nunberg was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” Nunberg recalled, “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”

The day after the election, the bare-bones transition team that had been set up during the campaign hurriedly shifted from Washington to Trump Tower. The building — now the headquarters of a populist revolution –­ suddenly seemed like an alien spaceship on Fifth Avenue. But its otherworldly air helped obscure the fact that few in Trump’s inner circle, with their overnight responsibility for assembling a government, had any relevant experience.

Ailes, a veteran of the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41 administrations, tried to impress on Trump the need to create a White House structure that could serve and protect him. “You need a son of a bitch as your chief of staff,” he told Trump. “And you need a son of a bitch who knows Washington. You’ll want to be your own son of a bitch, but you don’t know Washington.” Ailes had a suggestion: John Boehner, who had stepped down as Speaker of the House only a year earlier.

“Who’s that?” asked Trump.

We also learn that Rupert Murdoch once called Trump a “f—ing idiot.” Will I be reading this book? You betcha.

From Bloomberg:

President Donald Trump denounced his former top strategist, Steve Bannon, on Wednesday, saying that he “lost his mind” after leaving the White House last summer.

“When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind,” Trump said of Bannon in a statement the White House issued. “Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look.”

The statement represented an emphatic break from the person considered the architect of Trump’s presidential campaign. Bannon continued to enjoy access to the president after he left the White House, but that has ended, one person familiar with the matter said.

Earlier on Wednesday, New York Magazine published excerpts of a forthcoming book by author Michael Wolff in which Bannon criticizes Trump’s campaign as well as the president and his family. The Guardian published excerpts of the book in which Bannon predicts that Special Counsel Robert Mueller will “crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV” over the president’s son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in June 2016.

Bannon also called Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with the lawyer, in which he expected to receive damaging information on Trump’s election opponent Hillary Clinton, “treasonous” and “unpatriotic,” according to the Guardian.

Here is the official White House statement from Trump on Bannon:

Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.

Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans.

Steve doesn’t represent my base–he’s only in it for himself.

Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.

We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda. Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up, rather than simply seeking to burn it all down.

Officially, Bannon was chief executive officer of Trump’s campaign, beginning August 2016. After Trump was inaugurated Bannon became White House Chief Strategist and sat on the Principals Committee of the National Security Council. It will be interesting to see if the Alt Right sides with Bannon or with Trump.

Trump is supposed to unveil his infrastructure plan some time this month. Trump has made grandiose noises about investing $1 trillion to fix the nation’s infrastructure. However, so far he has only allocated $200 billion in federal funds for infrastructure repair.

So, as with all things Trump, one must ask — where’s the grift?

Nicole Goodkind at Newsweek:

Sources told Politico that Trump will split the infrastructure bill into three sections: streamlining bureaucracy, increasing funding and ending the agency review process. He would like to allocate $200 billion for infrastructure projects over the next decade, Politico reported, and expects the rest of the money to come from private-public partnerships and state and local funding.

$200 billion for infrastructure projects over the next decade? For the entire country? Might as well fund it all with Home Depot coupons.

Cohn [Gary Cohn, director of the White House National Economic Council] claimed that states and localities already have the money to complete large-scale infrastructure projects but are hindered by red tape at the federal level. White House officials have said states and municipalities that want such things as new bridges or broadband internet access will be asked to compete for federal assistance by proving they’re willing to put their own money down and raise revenue from taxes, fees and other sources.

States and localities already have the money? On what planet?

Even better, Trump may be getting some of his ideas from Mike Pence.  Lydia O’Neal and David Sirota at Newsweek:

President Donald Trump’s $1 trillion plan to rebuild America’s infrastructure may be unprecedented in size and ambition, but it mimics a controversial scheme championed by Vice President Mike Pence when he was the governor of Indiana. That’s why Pence is the public face of the Trump initiative, and executives from financial firms that helped privatize Indiana’s toll road are in the White House, busily sculpting Trump’s national plan.

Pence and his allies like to boast about how Indiana sold control of major roads to private firms, claiming the move prompted corporations to invest money in infrastructure that would otherwise have been funded by taxpayers. But opponents say Indiana made some bad deals that offer a cautionary tale of get-rich-quick scheming, secrecy and cronyism that led the state to sell off valuable assets that were then wildly mismanaged.

A bit more googling led me to a June 2017 news story at the Indianapolis Star about the unmitigated disaster that was Mike Pence’s experiment in infrastructure upgrades.

At first, it sounded like a good idea: Indiana would use a public-private partnership to extend I-69 from Bloomington to Martinsville, relying on private sector ingenuity to bring it in on time and under budget.

But the project is two years behind schedule. The prolonged construction has increased traffic accidents and lengthened commute times. And, now, as the state is dissolving the partnership — which some argue could end up costing Hoosiers millions of dollars — a difficult question needs to be asked:

How did this once-touted project — pitched and promoted by then-Gov. Mike Pence as a model for smart infrastructure planning — become such an embarrassing mess?

It became an embarrassing mess because officials in Pence’s administration inexplicably awarded the contract to a Spanish company that had no clue what it was doing. The project added new meaning to the word “boondoggle.” The Spanish company, Isolux Corsan, gave an absurdly lowball bid that was $22 million less than the state’s own cost estimate. And the Pence Administration seems to have done no vetting of this company at all. However …

A mere three weeks after the contract was finalized, before bonds were floated to finance the work, nine company and public officials in Spain were arrested on embezzlement charges. The allegation? They had profited illegally from a bribery scheme related to a high-speed rail project built by Isolux, a scandal that’s still unfolding in Spain.

State officials did not respond when asked by IndyStar if they were aware of the arrests.

One suspects those Pence Administration officials did quite well. One suspect Trump and his cohorts expect to do quite well also.

However, there also are indications that Trump expects to dump all the responsibilities and burdens for making his plan work on states and cities. Laura Bliss writes for The Atlantic:

‘Listen, if you as a state or local elected official are willing to create a new revenue stream for infrastructure, we as the federal government want to partner with you in doing that’ – What does that even mean? Well, basically, it means that states and localities will be expected to jack up taxes and user fees to pay for whatever they want repaired, and the Trump Administration will dribble out some of its $200 billion budgeted for a whole bleeping decade for the whole bleeping country to sweeten the pot.

On what planet would that even work?

Gribbin has said the White House plan will lay out “clear, measurable, objective criteria” for how localities and states would win money. But Tomer [Adie Tomer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program] said the details he’s seen place less stress on the nature of the projects it would fund, and more on who would be paying for them. “The more you come up with new revenue, the more likely you are to get help from the feds. This is going to be the key to the details,” he said.

In other words, the poorest parts of the country that need the most help can kiss Trump’s ass. And there’s no prioritizing of any sort.

By effectively dangling infrastructure grants to the highest bidder, the White House’s proposal could pressure those same layers of government to corral what few resources they have into paying their share of an infrastructure plan. Cities that never financially recovered from the recession, like Detroit, Cleveland, Stockton, and Memphis, may feel especially limited in their spending options if federal grants are only available for big spenders.

“It’s an interesting time to be asking this sector to be more creative with revenue sources,” Gordon said. “Trying to get them to share more of the funding burden is probably not going to go over that well.”

It’s not going to help that this let-the-states-pay-for-it plan is coming on the heels of the Tax Law of Doom.

The new law, signed by President Trump on the Friday before Christmas, will add nearly $1.5 trillion to the federal budget deficit over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That in turn is likely to trigger cuts to discretionary programs that help communities build roads, fly planes, drink clean water, and connect to the internet.

And, of course, a whole lot of vital infrastructure is interstate. How’s that going to work out?

The Brooklyn Bridge: Maybe they’ll really have to sell it

Dave Barry’s Year in Review begins “Looking back on 2017 is like waking up after a party where you made some poor decisions, such as drinking tequila squeezed from the underpants of a person you do not really know. (At least you hope it was tequila.)” Yeah, pretty much.  I hope 2018 is an improvement for everybody.

Whatever happens in 2018, just remember — we’ll always have Bugs Bunny.

People are still talking about the interview of Donald Trump published in the New York Times on Thursday. It’s an incoherent mess. None of the headlines come close to how alarming it is. As Charles Pierce wrote, Trump’s New York Times Interview Is a Portrait of a Man in Cognitive Decline.

In this interview, the president* is only intermittently coherent. He talks in semi-sentences and is always groping for something that sounds familiar, even if it makes no sense whatsoever and even if it blatantly contradicts something he said two minutes earlier. To my ears, anyway, this is more than the president*’s well-known allergy to the truth. This is a classic coping mechanism employed when language skills are coming apart.

If you read nothing else about the interview, make it Ezra Klein’s analysis. It begins:

The president of the United States is not well. That is an uncomfortable thing to say, but it is an even worse thing to ignore.

Seriously, there is no other reasonable assumption to be made from that interview except that Donald Trump has a major mental impediment that goes beyond being merely stupid. There’s no question about that; the only questions are what is wrong with him? and how bad is it? IMO “dementia” and “pretty effing bad” are safe guesses.

One thing the interview cleared up for me is how he could continue to claim that he has signed more bills than other presidents, when in fact his bill signing record is way behind the norm. Trump has signed fewer bills to this point in his presidency than any elected president since Dwight Eisenhower. The issue is that he doesn’t seem to understand that an executive order is not the same thing as a bill. At one point Trump said this:

So now I have associations, I have private insurance companies coming and will sell private health care plans to people through associations. That’s gonna be millions and millions of people. People have no idea how big that is. And by the way, and for that, we’ve ended across state lines. So we have competition. You know for that I’m allowed to [inaudible] state lines. So that’s all done.

Now I’ve ended the individual mandate. And the other thing I wish you’d tell people. So when I do this, and we’ve got health care, you know, McCain did his vote.

… We’ve created associations, millions of people are joining associations. Millions. That were formerly in Obamacare or didn’t have insurance. Or didn’t have health care. Millions of people. That’s gonna be a big bill, you watch. It could be as high as 50 percent of the people. You watch. So that’s a big thing. And the individual mandate. So now you have associations, and people don’t even talk about the associations. That could be half the people are going to be joining up. … With private [inaudible]. So now you have associations and the individual mandate.

Somewhere in that word salad one finds reference to associations. Ezra Klein explains,

He signed an executive order making it easier to form association health plans, which are health plans formed by groups of small businesses, and making it easier for those plans to skirt Obamacare’s insurance regulations and to contain small businesses from multiple states.

As of now, and Trump doesn’t seem to realize this, it’s just an executive order — the rules defining and implementing it have not been written, so it is not yet happening, and we don’t know how it will work in practice, much less how many people may eventually sign up. Nor does the order get rid of the prohibition on selling insurance across state lines for most people — it’s only for this one kind of plan which can include members in multiple states, and which will only serve a tiny minority of the health insurance market.

See also Association health plans: Trump’s attack on Obamacare, explained.

In the past few days Trump has been on a de-regulation roll. He scaled back the use of fines against nursing homes that harm residents, for example.  He rolled back offshore drilling safety rules put in place after the Deepwater Horizon spill.  Also this past week he laid off the entire Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) without bothering to give a reason. Here I go back to something Charles Pierce said —

In Ronald Reagan’s second term, we ducked a bullet. I’ve always suspected he was propped up by a lot of people who a) didn’t trust vice-president George H.W. Bush, b) found it convenient to have a forgetful president when the subpoenas began to fly, and c) found it helpful to have a “detached” president when they started running their own agendas—like, say, selling missiles to mullahs. You’re seeing much the same thing with the congressional Republicans. They’re operating an ongoing smash-and-grab on all the policy wishes they’ve fondly cultivated since 1981. Having a president* who may not be all there and, as such, is susceptible to flattery because it reassures him that he actually is makes the heist that much easier.

It’s not just Republicans in Congress; probably the whackjobs who make up his “staff” are happily writing whackjob executive orders and putting them in front of him to sign. One can imagine Mike Pence behind the firing of the HIV/AIDS advisors.

One part of the interview that drew a lot of criticism is his comment,  “I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department.” Ezra Klein did a good job unpacking that, I think. He points to this section of the interview —

TRUMP: It’s too bad Jeff recused himself. I like Jeff, but it’s too bad he recused himself. I thought. … Many people will tell you that something is [inaudible].

NYT: Do you think Holder was more loyal to …

TRUMP: I don’t want to get into loyalty, but I will tell you that, I will say this: Holder protected President Obama. Totally protected him. When you look at the I.R.S. scandal, when you look at the guns for whatever, when you look at all of the tremendous, ah, real problems they had, not made-up problems like Russian collusion, these were real problems. When you look at the things that they did, and Holder protected the president. And I have great respect for that, I’ll be honest, I have great respect for that.

In other words, Trump thinks the job of the attorney general is to protect the president; he thinks the Justice Department works for him. And when he said of the Mueller investigation, “For purposes of hopefully thinking I’m going to be treated fairly, I’ve stayed uninvolved with this particular matter,” Ezra Klein wrote,

Here, Trump offers insight into his own thinking. He appears to believe that he is engaged in some explicit or implicit quid pro quo with the Department of Justice: He doesn’t fire Jeff Sessions, demand prosecution of his political enemies, or whatever it is he imagines doing with his “absolute right,” so long as they treat him and his associates “fairly,” which likely means protecting him from Mueller’s investigation.

See also Josh Marshall, “Read His Words Carefully.” “President Trump has a decades-old penchant for public comments which are nominally conciliatory but contain an indifferently concealed note of menace,” Marshall writes. Trump is saying that he’ll leave the Department of Justice alone as long as they do their job as he defines it, which is to protect him. If he thinks they are not protecting him, however, heads will roll.

See also “The 47 most outrageous lines in Donald Trump’s New York Times interview.”

To me, the most frightening thing about the fact that the so-called president is mentally incapacitated is that nobody’s doing anything about it.  We’re well into 25th Amendment territory here. A responsible Congress would be taking steps in this direction already. However, the current Republican-dominated Congress isn’t going to do anything as long as they think having Trump in the White House is useful to them. So, safeguards don’t work.

More about those pesky Russians —

Kremlin trolls burned across the Internet as Washington debated options (Washington Post)

After you’ve read that, check out this:

Kremlin Troll ‘Alice Donovan’ Reportedly Writing News As Recently As October (Talking Points Memo)

Regarding the word of Kremlin Troll Alicce Donovan, from the TPM article:

Perhaps predictably, some of the sites that published Donovan’s work have reacted largely with shrugs in much the same way that right-wing organizations felt too much was made of pro-cop memes, anti-Hillary jokes, and anti-immigrant sentiment. The origin of the articles was unimportant, suggested both Veterans Today editor Gordon Duff and Counterpunch editors Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank. “I don’t edit what people do. If it’s original, I’ll publish it,” Duff told the Post. “I don’t decide what’s real and not real.” Today Duff wrote his own conspiracy-filled piece about the Post story, primarily to criticize Counterpunch, at Veterans Today.

There are news sites and there are junk news sites; know the difference. IMO Counterpunch used to be better than it is now, though.

Counterpunch took a more philosophical tack: “So why did we run five pieces by Alice Donovan?” asked St. Clair and Frank. “First, because they were interesting and timely. The short pieces on Syria, in particular, came at a moment when Trump was engaged in his first big military action and we were eager, perhaps too eager, to publish as many different perspectives as possible on his new, more aggressive policy.”

Another site, We Are Change, didn’t respond to the accusations at all, though it did remove Donovan’s work from its public web presence.

See also, Russia Wants Americans to Doubt Mueller, Experts Warn (Newsweek)

There’s a lively debate going on about whether, and how much, the tax cut bill will hurt Republicans in the midterms. Some people are pointing to the current unpopularity of the bill; the most recent CNN poll shows that 55 percent of Americans oppose it. But Republicans think this opposition will melt away when people see reductions in taxes withheld from their paychecks, starting a few weeks from now. Maybe. I’ll get back to that.

There are a couple of wild cards out there that could change the game. One, a big one, is health insurance. Companies providing employee benefit health insurance had already announced big increases in premiums (thanks in part to Trump), a portion of which are deducted from paychecks. From what I have read this could wipe out at least half of the tax cuts for middle income people and all of the tax cuts for low income people, none of which were all that generous to begin with.  Republicans appear to be blissfully unaware of this.

The other wild card is chaos. Because of the speed and carelessness with which this bill was put together, it’s going to take months to work the kinks out. The IRS has to issue rules for employers for how much to deduct. The IRS may have to design new W-4 forms that everyone will have to fill out and return. The IRS may not be able to process all this in a timely manner.

The chaos is likely to take months — and perhaps longer — to sort out as the IRS begins writing the rules governing the law’s implementation. The agency has already said it doesn’t expect the tax tables helping employers decide how much in federal taxes should be withheld from workers’ paychecks to be ready until mid-January, allowing them to be implemented in February.

“The IRS will be working closely with the nation’s payroll and tax professional community during this process,” the agency said in a statement.

But some tax experts are also concerned about the IRS’s ability to quickly address the mounting concerns. The agency has been attacked by Republicans for years and has seen its budget cut repeatedly, leading some to question whether it will be up to the task. When the IRS’s former commissioner, John Koskinen, stepped down last month, he blamed Congress for underfunding the agency.

“I don’t know how the IRS is going to enforce this stuff. They have to write regulations, give guidance to taxpayers. They are probably going to feel the brunt of this more than anyone,” said Willens, the tax attorney.

The bottom line is that people who expect to see a big change in their deductions in January will be disappointed. And there will likely be many news stories about all the uncertainty and chaos being created by the tax law.

And then there’s Obamacare. Trump actually bragged about killing the individual mandate. That’s going to create another level of chaos, as insurers are likely put their feet down and refuse to insure people with pre-existing conditions.

Amber Phillips wrote in WaPo:

In the throes of his superlative-filled praise of the Republicans’ tax bill, President Trump said this Wednesday: “We essentially repealed Obamacare.”

It is not true — and it could also have been a major political blunder for Trump and Republicans.

Republicans did pass a tax bill Wednesday that undoes one of the central components of Obamacare: the mandate that people have health insurance, or pay a fine.

Health-care experts say that does not mean Obamacare is dead. It is just in trouble — and by extension, so are the health-insurance markets that have framed their business model around the law. That means Trump may have opened up his party — and himself — for taking responsibility for whatever trouble lies ahead for the markets.

We don’t know how extensive the damage is going to be and how widely it will be felt, but it’s going to be felt.  And there will be many, many news stories about the millions of people who are losing their health insurance.

Still, Republicans think they’ve got a winner:

“We will run on tax reform and win on tax reform in 2018,” said Matt Gorman, the NRCC’s communications director. “This bill will help ease the cost of living for millions of Americans who feel left behind.”

On the other hand, it’s equally remarkable that not a single Democrat in either chamber voted for this, including all 10 of the senators up for reelection next year in states Trump won. “Democratic obstruction of middle-class tax reform will be our No. 1 issue going into next year’s elections,” said Senate Leadership Fund President and CEO Steven Law, a former chief of staff to Mitch McConnell….

However, if the middle class doesn’t actually see this tax reform in any tangible way, will they still believe in it?