The Post looks back on Trump’s lively weekend:

Asked how he would grade his presidency during a Sunday morning interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News, President Trump offered only the smallest amount of hesitation before giving himself top marks.

“Look, I hate to do it, but I will do it, I would give myself an A-plus,” he answered. “Is that enough? Can I go higher than that?”

It wasn’t even hesitation, really. It was saying “I know this is gross and conceited but hey I am gross and conceited.”

The weekend kicked off with Trump’s bizarre comments about raking leaves. Touring California communities that have been decimated by the deadliest fires in the state’s history, Trump told reporters on Saturday that he had recently been talking to the president of Finland. “He called it a forest nation,” Trump said, referring to Finnish President Sauli Niinisto, “and they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don’t have any problem.”

As The Washington Post’s Avi Selk pointed out, Trump had made similar remarks on Friday before his California trip, telling Fox News Sunday: “I was watching the firemen the other day, and they were raking areas. They were raking areas! They’re raking trees, little trees like this — nut trees, little bushes, that you could see are totally dry. Weeds! And they’re raking them. They’re on fire.”

I saw that clip at the time. He was all wound up, the way he gets. “They were raking areas!” It’s so frustrating for him, how stupid people are – leaving all that rubbish on the floor! If they would only pick it all up these things wouldn’t happen!

The remarks provoked a fair amount of head-scratching, as Finland’s forestry-management practices are not ordinarily considered germane to the issue of wildfire suppression in the arid West. Niinisto was no less baffled: While he had discussed forest management with Trump, he told the Associated Press, leaf raking had not entered the conversation. Meanwhile, bemused Finns clarified that they didn’t actually spend their spare time raking up leaves in the nation’s forests, and responded with a hashtag: #MakeAmericaRakeAgain. Some posted humorous photos of their rakes.

Or their snow.

Picture from Finland where raking is the reason for not having forrest fires. #RakeAmericaGreatAgain #raking #Trump #RakeNews #Finland pic.twitter.com/xQIaKwdZtH

— Laura Tiitinen (@LauraTiitinen) November 18, 2018

And then there was the part where he couldn’t manage to remember the name of the town that was devoured by the Camp fire.

“If you’re watching from New York or you are watching from Washington, D.C., you don’t really see the gravity of it,” he told reporters. “As big as they look on the tube, you don’t see what’s going on until you come here. And what we saw at Pleasure, what a name right now. But we just saw, we just left Pleasure —”

“Paradise,” interjected a slew of officials.

“Paradise,” Trump confirmed, then moved on.

Not quite, actually. He said “Or Paradise.” See what he did there? He pretended the town has two names, and he was using one while the slew of officials was using the other. It’s what he does when he flubs a word in a written speech, too – he pretends he didn’t make a mistake but is just expanding on the point.

So the White House is throwing down, Colonel Jessup style: you’re god damn right we’re going to use our power to shut down reporters we don’t like.

CNN and the network’s chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta have asked a federal judge for an emergency hearing after the White House sent Acosta a letter saying it planned to suspend Acosta’s press pass again, just hours after the same judge ordered the White House to temporarily restore Acosta’s credentials Friday. Unless the judge extends that 14-day order, it will expire at the end of the month.

Dear Jim: We’re gonna take your press pass away again in 11 days because we’re just that authoritarian and proud of it, love Sarah.

CNN’s lawyer asked the judge to issue a preliminary injunction on an expedited schedule in light of the administration’s defiance.

In the letter, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders and Bill Shine, assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff for communications, told Acosta that his behavior at a Nov. 7 news conference “violated the basic standards governing [news conferences], and is, in our preliminary judgment, sufficient factual basis to revoke your hard pass.”

President Trump, the letter makes clear, “is aware of this preliminary decision and concurs.”

That is, Trump told them to do it, no matter how stupid and reckless it is.

[Judge] Kelly’s decision to issue the 14-day temporary restraining order Friday while he considers the merits of the case was grounded mostly in the Fifth Amendment’s due process guarantee. Kelly said the White House has an obligation to afford due process to Acosta before it can revoke or suspend his access, and found that the White House’s decision-making process in this case was “so shrouded in mystery that the government could not tell me . . . who made the decision.”

CNN’s motion characterized the letter from Sanders and Shine as an “attempt to provide retroactive due process.” Ted Boutrous, an attorney for CNN, told Justice Department lawyers in an email that he found the White House’s letter to be a “disappointing response to the court’s decision and our attempts to resolve the matter amicably.”

Aka “like adults.” It’s so odd, this spectacle of a guy at the pinnacle of power flatly refusing to do what we all learn we have to do in order to function, which is to tame our crudest emotional impulses when we interact with other humans. We all recognize these fits of rage and pageants of vanity, but we also understand that they are repulsive to everyone who is NotSelf. Trump doesn’t even seem to understand that much. I guess it’s unusual to see the combination of lotsa money and complete lack of executive function. Television fame makes the combination possible? I guess?

“More fundamentally, though,” he wrote in the email, “it is further evidence of your clients’ animus towards Mr. Acosta based on his work as CNN’s chief White House correspondent.”

And their total lack of inhibition about putting that animus on display. Where are their inhibitions?

Sanders and Shine gave Acosta the opportunity to contest its “preliminary decision” to again suspend his press pass by 5 p.m. Sunday. In a response from lawyers, Acosta contested the decision, saying that despite the White House’s previous admission that there are no actual written rules for journalists participating in press conferences, Acosta is now being punished “based on a retroactive application of unwritten ‘practices’ among journalists covering the White House.”

This application “of vague, unarticulated standards to a journalist’s access to the White House is not only different from your original explanations, but it is the same sort of due process violation that led the district court to issue a temporary restraining order against you on Friday.”

There are no rules but we gonna punish you for violating the non-existent rules anyway, because we think we can.

Trump did another Blab All with Fox News today.

President Trump said he would not overrule his acting attorney general, Matthew G. Whitaker, if he decides to curtail the special counsel probe being led by Robert S. Mueller III into Russian interference in the 2016 election campaign.

“Look, it’s going to be up to him . . . I would not get involved,” Trump said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”

Oh, suddenly the AG has all kinds of autonomy, when the previous one (who was for real as opposed to Acting) was supposed to protect Trump instead of recusing himself. Funny how the rules work in Trump-world. Sessions was supposed to jump when Trump said jump, and Whitaker is supposed to chart a courageous lonely course through the murky waters of How Exactly To Kneecap Mueller.

In the weeks since Trump forced Jeff Sessions to resign as attorney general and chose Whitaker to serve as his interim replacement…

How do journalists lose track of time so easily? It’s been eleven days, not “weeks.”

In the weeks since Trump forced Jeff Sessions to resign as attorney general and chose Whitaker to serve as his interim replacement, Whitaker has faced calls from Democrats to recuse himself from oversight of the probe given his previous criticism of the investigation. Trump said in Sunday’s interview that he “did not know [Whitaker] took views on the Mueller investigation as such” before he appointed him to his position.

Big lie. Big obvious flashing-lights almost-funny lie.

During Sunday’s wide-ranging interview, Trump said he does not feel it is necessary for him to listen to an audio recording of journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s killing inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul last month.

“We have the tape. I don’t want to hear the tape. No reason for me to hear the tape,” Trump said. He described it as “a suffering tape” and told Wallace, “I know everything that went on in the tape without having to hear it. . . . It was very violent, very vicious and terrible.”

So he lets himself off the hook, while maintaining his tight embrace of Saudi Arabia.

The CIA has concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the killing of Khashoggi, a prominent critic of Saudi leaders and a contributing columnist to The Washington Post. But Trump maintained on “Fox News Sunday” that the crown prince had told him “maybe five different times” and “as recently as a few days ago” that he had nothing to do with the killing.

Ya, same with Putin, who said several times that he didn’t interfere with the US election. Meanwhile, lock her up, and the Central Park Five totally did it and should be executed, or perhaps lynched. Top class epistemology.

“Well, will anybody really know?” Trump said in Sunday’s interview when asked whether the crown prince might have been lying to him. He added: “You saw we put on very heavy sanctions, massive sanctions on a large group of people from Saudi Arabia. But, at the same time, we do have an ally, and I want to stick with an ally that in many ways has been very good.”

Good at indoctrinating the guys who knocked down the twin towers, for instance. Very good at that.

Trump praised Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen but also suggested that she may leave his administration at some point. Trump has voiced dissatisfaction about Nielsen’s performance on immigration enforcement and has previously told advisers that he has decided to remove her in the coming weeks.

“I want her to get much tougher, and we’ll see what happens there. But I want to be extremely tough,” Trump said in Sunday’s interview.

By which he means, he wants to violate human rights, imprison children, turn asylum seekers away contrary to international law, and generally be as sadistic and brutal toward brown people as he possibly can. Extreeemlee tufff.

Now he’s there and he’s still talking the same stupid shit there on the ground. It’s a wonder no one has bashed his head against a tree – oh wait no it isn’t, there are no trees left.

After touring some of the fire damage in Northern California, President Donald Trump was asked whether seeing the devastation changed his opinion on climate change.

“No, no I have a strong opinion. I want a great climate. We’re going to have that, and we are going to have that are very safe because we can’t go through this. Every year we go through this. We’re going to have safe forests and that’s happening as we speak,” he told reporters during a briefing at a command center in Chico, California.

Earlier at the center he was asked about the role of climate change in the recent California fires. He said, “Well I think we have a lot of factors. We have the management factor that I know Jerry has really been up on and very well and Gavin is going to — were going to be looking at that together.”

But the no rain factor and the dry dry dry timber factor and the rising temperatures factor will make the management factor look about as significant as the careful wiping of each needle one at a time factor.

Surrounded by fire damage, Trump told reporters it is “very sad to see it.”

He said a lot of people are unaccounted for and “some areas are beyond this” in terms of damage.

“Nobody thought this could happen,” Trump told reporters surrounded by burnt out trees and other remnants.

“Hopefully this is going to be the last one of these,” Trump said.

Without explaining himself, the President said the floors of the forests need to be taken care of and again talked about time needed to be spent on raking and cleaning.

That “nobody thought this could happen” class of remarks is just driving me crazy today – that childish way of attributing what he thinks and knows to everyone, as if all people on the planet were as ignorant and clueless and feckless and fucking out to lunch as he is. Many many people not only thought but knew this could happen, because they pay attention. Could tinder-dry forests cause terrible wild fires? Is that a thing that could happen? Yes, of course it is. Climate scientists, to name just one set of people, warn us about such things until they’re hoarse and out of breath. Of course they thought and understood and were aware it could happen. Trump didn’t because Trump is too busy hiding the evidence.

Also. Why does he wear the same stupid outfit for all disaster visits? The windbreaker over the white shirt spread bizarrely wide open so that it looks like a middy blouse? Huh? Why does he do that?

He can’t even wear a shirt right.

The BBC reports more startling examples of Trump’s mind-blindness.

Donald Trump says he has finished answering questions about alleged Russian meddling during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The US leader told reporters he had personally answered the questions “very easily”, but his responses had yet to be submitted to the investigating team.

That’s just gooofy as well as mind-blind…as if he were taking a test as opposed to answering questions from The Law.

On Thursday, he took to Twitter to describe Mr Mueller as “conflicted”, called the investigation “absolutely nuts”, adding that those involved in the long-running probe “are a disgrace to our nation”.

No awareness that other people will see this as lunacy coming from a president who is talking about his own justice department. He apparently can’t even form the thought that we will think he sounds like a mobster as opposed to Mister President.

Speaking to reporters on Friday, he said the investigation had wasted “millions and millions of dollars” and “should never have taken place”.

Mr Trump also suggested the people who wrote the questions he agreed to answer “probably have bad intentions”.

“I’m sure they’re tricked-up because, you know, they like to catch people,” Mr Trump said, after making it clear he had written the answers to the questions.

That’s the one that really stood out. They probably have bad intentions, they trick-up their questions, they like to catch people – all said by the president about federal law enforcement.

Narcissism like that is so all-engulfing that it makes everything About the Self. The investigation is unpleasant to Donald Trump, THEREFORE it is bad in itself and will be obviously so to EVERYONE.

It’s a severe disability. Severe.

Another version of Trump’s problem with other minds: he’s been so public in his efforts to stifle Mueller that he can’t stifle Mueller.

The president himself might not quite realize it yet, and he probably doesn’t understand why it happened. But he has lost that conflict, and the reason is simple: His attempts to fight Mueller were so ham-handed and so public that it made it impossible for him and his administration to shut Mueller down.

The president is simply incapable of subtlety and judges everything by how it plays out in the media. But in this case, the more attention he drew to his rage at Mueller, the greater the consequences of moving against Mueller became.

He’s incapable of subtlety because he’s incapable of grasping that the way he sees things is not the way everyone sees things; mind-blindness.

The Sessions problem for instance: he kept roaring in public about how furious he was that Sessions recused himself, which made it untenable for him to get rid of Sessions. To those of us who aren’t totally mind-blind, it seems like such a simple point to grasp, but to Trump it might as well be particle physics.

So months passed while Mueller was diligently working away — amassing evidence, turning witnesses and handing down indictments — and Trump could fire Sessions only after the midterms were over.

Then when he finally did it, Trump once again acted without any subtlety or understanding of how his moves would be interpreted publicly, installing Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general likely in no small part because of Whitaker’s apparent hostility to the Mueller investigation.

Again – we think, how could he possibly not understand how that would be perceived? But it’s by being such a thorough narcissist that he has no theory of mind at all. It’s something to behold.

A judge has issued a temporary restraining order against the White House’s grabbing away of Jim Acosta’s press pass.

CNN sued President Trump and other White House officials on Tuesday over the revocation. Kelly’s ruling was the first legal skirmish in that lawsuit. It has the immediate effect of sending Acosta back to the White House, pending further arguments and a possible trial. The litigation is in its early stages, and a trial could be months in the future.

Kelly, whom Trump appointed to the federal bench last year, handed down his ruling two days after the network and government lawyers argued over whether the president had the power to exclude a reporter from the White House.

Trump will pitch fit about ingratitude and disloyalty of judge in 5, 4, 3, 2…

In his decision, Kelly ruled that Acosta’s First Amendment rights overruled the White House’s right to have orderly news conferences. Kelly said he agreed with the government’s argument that there was no First Amendment right to come onto the White House grounds. But, he said, once the White House opened up the grounds to reporters, the First Amendment applied.

Orderly news conferences? How can the White House have orderly news conferences when the guy at the top is Trump? Trump is disorder.

He also agreed with CNN’s argument that the White House did not provide due process. He said the White House’s decision-making was “so shrouded in mystery that the government could not tell me . . . who made the decision.” The White House’s later written arguments for banning Acosta were belated and weren’t sufficient to satisfy due process, Kelly said.

Plus they came after what looked to some observers like entrapment mixed with fraud. Did Trump and his people tell the intern to grab Acosta’s mic? Was the whole thing planned? Were Kushner and other toadies exchanging smirks as Trump called on Acosta?

CNN has argued that the ban on Acosta violated his First Amendment rights because it amounts to “viewpoint discrimination” — that is, the president is punishing him for statements and coverage he didn’t like. The network has also said the action violates Acosta’s Fifth Amendment right to due process because his exclusion follows no written guidelines or rules and has no appeal or review procedures.

CNN had requested “emergency” relief from the judge, arguing that Acosta’s rights were being violated with each passing hour.

Until the White House’s action last week, no reporter credentialed to cover the president had ever had a press pass revoked.

Which has to mean that the idea of it had been taboo, because otherwise it would have happened before.

A government lawyer argued basically “He can if he wants to!” Also that it was because Acosta was so ruuuuude – unlike the exquisitely polite Donald Trump.

Burnham also explained that Trump’s rationale for Acosta’s ban was his “rudeness” at last week’s news conference, in effect arguing that Acosta’s conduct, not his right to free speech, was the relevant issue.

I have to wonder how he could bring himself to argue that, given that the whole thing is available to watch. Trump is actively unpleasant, as he so often is, and Acosta is in fact entirely civil. Other reporters may have a beef with him for hogging the mic, but it’s not Trump’s job to referee that.

Media organizations have been alarmed by the White House’s treatment of Acosta, saying that revoking his “hard pass” to enter the White House is a threat to other journalists who might be similarly banned. Trump has suggested other reporters could face a similar fate if they displease him in some unspecified way. Thirteen news organizations, including The Washington Post and Fox News, said Wednesday they would jointly file a friend-of-the-court brief supporting CNN’s position.

The White House Correspondents’ Association, which represents journalists in negotiations over access to the president, filed its own brief on Thursday that urged the court “to roundly reject the president’s dangerous legal position.” It disputed the government’s claim that the president has “absolute, unbridled discretion to decide who can report from inside the White House.”

During the presidential campaign in 2015 and 2016, Trump banned more than a dozen news organizations from his rallies and public events, including The Washington Post. But he said he wouldn’t do something similar as president. Last week, he went back on that statement.

“Promises kept”? Hmmm?