Robert Reich on Trump’s “billing” of Germany:

It turns out Trump’s meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel last weekend was even worse than we thought. According to London’s Sunday Times, Trump handed Merkel a bill for more than $300 billion that Germany supposedly owed NATO — supposedly calculated by adding the amounts by which Germany has fallen short on annual payments to NATO since 2002, and adding interest.

That’s absurd. The United States has a huge stake in a strong NATO, and has no authority “collect” what’s “owed” by other nations.

Besides, German spending on global defense isn’t limited to NATO. “There is no account where debts are registered with NATO,” German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen

Seriously? He really did that?

Donald Trump reportedly gave German Chancellor Angela Merkel a bill for £300bn when the pair met recently to cover contributions he believes are owed to Nato.

The US president made the demand during private talks when the pair met in Washington DC, the Sunday Times reported.

Surely he didn’t. Surely even he can’t be that crude and stupid and inappropriate.

Nato countries pledged in 2014 to spend two per cent of their GDP on defence, something only a handful of nations – including the UK, Greece, Poland and Estonia – currently do.

The sum being demanded by the US has been backdated to 2002, the year Mrs Merkel’s predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, pledged to spend more

The Trump people decided to take the nation’s pulse. They sent out an email Thursday with the subject line “Vindicated.”

It went like this:

Since even before Inauguration Day, Democrats, the media, and the entire opposition have tried to take down President Trump by resorting to nasty attacks and spreading fake news.

But President Trump has fought back and been vindicated time and time again – and he will KEEP FIGHTING to deliver on the promises he made to you, the American people.

Then it asked a super-serious important question:

What happens if you click on the second option, the one for bad stupid people?

They send you here:

Heads they win, tails we lose. We can give them … Read the rest

Hmm. So Trump uses “failing” as his standard epithet for the New York Times, the way a poet might talk of Brave Achilles and Wily Odysseus – and yet when his health care repeal goes belly-up, he phones the Times for a chat.

Just moments after the Republican plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act was declared dead, President Trump sought to paint the defeat of his first legislative effort as an early-term blip.

The House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, was preparing to tell the public that the health care bill was being withdrawn — a byproduct, Mr. Trump said, of Democratic partisanship. The president predicted that Democrats would return to him to make a deal

Originally a comment poem by Lady Mondegreen on Brothas from anotha motha.

The world has held great heroes

As history books have showed

But never a name to go down in fame

Compared with that of Toad Trump.

The clever men at Oxford

Know all that there is to be knowed

But they none of them know one half so much

As intelligent Mr. Toad Trump.… Read the rest

So that didn’t happen.

House Republican leaders abruptly pulled a rewrite of the nation’s health-care system from consideration on Friday, a dramatic acknowledgment that they were unable to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

“We just pulled it,” President Trump told The Washington Post in a telephone interview.

The decision came a day after Trump delivered an ultimatum to lawmakers — and represented multiple failures for the new president and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).

Good.

In the interview, Trump deflected any responsibility for the setback and blamed Democrats instead.

“We couldn’t get one Democratic vote and we were a little bit shy, very little, but it was still a little bit shy so we pulled it,” he said.

Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman have another State of Trump article, about how he’s encountering self-doubt for perhaps the first time in his life, thanks to discovering that he can’t just ram through the repeal of Obamacare as if he were raping it.

A president who prefers unilateral executive action and takes intense pride in his ability to cut deals finds himself in a humbling negotiation unlike any other in his career, pinned between moderates who believe the health care measure is too harsh, and a larger group of fiscal conservatives adept at using their leverage to scuttle big deals cut by other Republican leaders.

Just imagine: government is not identical to running a bizness. Who could possibly have … Read the rest

And today the FBI is telling us some of what it has.

The FBI has information that indicates associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, US officials told CNN.

This is partly what FBI Director James Comey was referring to when he made a bombshell announcement Monday before Congress that the FBI is investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, according to one source.

The FBI is now reviewing that information, which includes human intelligence, travel, business and phone records and accounts of in-person meetings, according to those U.S. officials. The information is raising the suspicions of FBI counterintelligence investigators that the coordination may