March 14, 2018

Team Trump Is Getting Worse and Worse

Jeff Malet/Newscom via ZUMA

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Gabriel Sherman reports that Donald Trump met with John “Let’s Bomb Iran!” Bolton a few days ago to discuss hiring him as National Security Advisor:

Sources added that Trump spent much of the time with Bolton fuming that McMaster was speaking privately with Barack Obama’s former national security adviser Susan Rice. “Trump kept saying, ‘Can you believe it? To Susan Rice? Can you believe it?’ ”

I wonder how Trump knew this? Surely H.R. McMaster wasn’t foolish enough to tell him—or anyone else, for that matter? Susan Rice has been a Republican bogeyman ever since they made idiots out of themselves trying to pretend that Rice was responsible for deliberately misleading the nation about Benghazi. Trump, of course, doesn’t know Susan Rice from Rice-a-Roni, but he knows that she’s bad, and that therefore it’s bad that McMaster talks to her occasionally.

Then there’s this:

Sources said Trump has discussed a plan to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions. According to two Republicans in regular contact with the White House, there have been talks that Trump could replace Sessions with E.P.A. Administrator Scott Pruitt, who would not be recused from overseeing the Russia probe.

This would be Pruitt’s dream come true, but it would be a horror show for everyone else. For all his faults, Sessions does have a sense of integrity about applying the law. Pruitt has no such constraints. He is consumed solely by ambition and a hatred of liberals, and he would do whatever Trump wanted.

In other news, Trump has hired TV economist Larry Kudlow to head up the National Economic Council. Here is Kudlow’s background: he has a BA in history and a long history of blathering about supply-side economics on TV and radio. He should fit right in. If all of these moves take place, it would mean:

  • Rex Tillerson, H.R. McMaster, Jeff Sessions, and Gary Cohn

    have been replaced by

  • Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Scott Pruitt, and Larry Kudlow.

And you thought Team Trump couldn’t get worse? Think again.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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