We begin today’ s roundup with Aaron Blake at The Washington Post:
There have been few more surreal moments in the Russia investigation — indeed, in the entire Trump era — than the one we just witnessed.
The Washington Post's Josh Dawsey broke the news Monday afternoon that former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg was shunning special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's grand jury subpoena, and in the article Nunberg supplied a series of colorful comments. Then he took to MSNBC and CNN for some even more unplugged interviews.
Stephen Collinson at CNN writes about the latest round of White House chaos:
The grinding pressure of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation is starting to do strange things to people's heads. How else to explain a staggering, reality TV-style meltdown of short-lived Trump campaign adviser Sam Nunberg on Monday, played out in a batch of cable news interviews, marking the oddest twist of the Russia saga yet?
In a stunning blast of accusations, insults and non-sequiturs, Nunberg vowed to defy a grand jury subpoena, dared Mueller to arrest him and claimed the relentless prosecutor believed that Donald Trump was a Manchurian candidate.
At
The Boston Globe,
Michael Cohen argues that Trump isn’t spiraling out of control, the chaos has been there from the very beginning of his presidency:
In all of the accounts from last week’s meltdown, Trump is variously depicted as
isolated, paranoid, angry, and delusional. While I can certainly understand why media observers might view last week as a new low, even for this president, it’s worth asking a variation of a soon-to-be topical question: How is this week different from all other weeks?
Rekebah Entralgo at Think Progress dives into the latest developments concerning a payment of $130,000 to adult film star Stormy Daniels:
Advocacy group Common Cause filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, asking for an investigation into whether the payment to Daniels violated election law. The payment would be illegal if its purpose was to benefit the campaign. Cohen’s statement that he would “always protect Mr. Trump” seemed to bolster that theory.
These new details only make it far more likely that Trump violated campaign finance laws
At Vanity Fair, Tina Nguyen describes how Ben Carson has “lobotomized” HUD:
In many ways, it was easy to predict that a man whose campaign for president faced innumerable self-imposed stumbling blocks would make for an equally bumbling agency head. But Carson’s incompetence has had more concrete effects, too. Per the Times, his first six months in office saw the departure of dozens of experienced staffers, as well as resistance from the White House over new nominees, and his hesitance to lobby the president for funding has come at a steep cost.
Jill Lawrence at USA Today writes about how the tariff maneuver from Trump is just the latest in a series of factually wrong policies that will take a lot of work to reverse once he’s out of office:
Someday President Trump will be gone, along with all of his chaos and sleaze, relatives, cronies and Republican enablers. But they will still be with us in the form of an economic legacy so misguided that national decline is staring us in the face.
Has there ever been a collection of leaders so oblivious to facts, data, history and the future? Have there ever been so many bad economic choices inflicted on America? Trump and his “conservative” majorities in Congress don’t agree on everything, but between them they are taking the country in every wrong direction.
On a final note, don’t miss this piece by Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Cristina Jiménez, executive director and co-founder of United We Dream, about the need for action from Trump on DACA:
The Supreme Court last week left in place a federal judge's order temporarily continuing the program, thus denying Trump the chance to immediately carry out one of the cruelest policies of his presidency: deporting the Dreamers, as the DACA participants are known. Yet this is only a partial reprieve. Those who have DACA status can apply to renew the permits that allow them to be in the United States legally, but there’s no path for more than 1 million young people who do not already have DACA status and thus have no protection from deportation at all. [...]
The reality of Trump’s unnecessary and cruel chaos flies in the face of his words one year ago when he said, “We are gonna deal with DACA with heart,” because, “You know, I love these kids.” He, of course, has the executive authority to fix the problem immediately by restoring the DACA program he ended and stopping his drive to kill bipartisan solutions. Anything less is a callous determination to force mass deportation, which the American people do not want.