Spicey is shocked, shocked, that people think there was anything wrong with the way he talked to April Ryan yesterday. Or, more likely, he’s pretending to be shocked. They want to normalize asshole behavior so that Trump won’t look so glaringly abnormal and psychopathic.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer responded to accusations of sexism and racism after he repeatedly told senior journalist April Ryan to stop shaking her head during Tuesday’s press briefing.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticized Spicer’s actions Tuesday, labeling the incident an example of the kind of sexism that women encounter every day. But Spicer said that Ryan was a tough reporter and he was “astonished” at the accusation. He insisted that he

The Trump gang tried to stop Sally Yates testifying.

According to letters The Post reviewed, the Justice Department notified Yates earlier this month that the administration considers a great deal of her possible testimony to be barred from discussion in a congressional hearing because the topics are covered by the presidential communication privilege.

Yates and other former intelligence officials had been asked to testify before the House Intelligence Committee this week, a hearing that was abruptly canceled by the panel’s chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).

Who worked on Trump’s transition team. That Devin Nunes.

Yates and another witness at the planned hearing, former CIA director John Brennan, had made clear to government officials by Thursday that their testimony to

But at least he’s working hard!

Or is he.

The alert from Fox News went out at 5:30 p.m. Sunday.

“PRESIDENT TRUMP SPENDING WEEKEND WORKING AT THE WHITE HOUSE,” the chyron announced, under an image of the White House presumably captured just minutes before.

The timing of the tweet alert was curious: After all, the weekend was nearly over.

Also…how is that news? Presidents are expected to put in a lot of hours.

But also also, of course, it’s not even true. How he really spent the weekend: furtively playing golf and watching golf on tv while his minions told the press he was in “meetings.” Yeah meetings with a golf ball.

According to pool reports, the president spent

Of course he did.

President Donald Trump on Monday signed new legislation repealing a regulation protecting workers from wage theft. The new law undercuts the Obama-era policy that encouraged businesses to follow workplace safety guidelines and pay their workers fairly by terminating federal contracts with companies that accrued too many violations. The new Trump-era legislation, however, undoes those employee protections, as Republicans in Congress said the Obama rules were restrictive and job-killing. Trump referenced the bill in a Monday tweet: “Today I’m signing 4 bills under the Congressional Review Act that cancels regulations & eliminates unnecessary, job-killing rules,” he wrote. “#MAGA”

Yeah, because what worker doesn’t want a dangerous job working for a boss who steals her wages?… Read the rest

Hmm.

Senate investigators plan to question Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and a close adviser, as part of their broad inquiry into ties between Trump associates and Russian officials or others linked to the Kremlin, according to administration and congressional officials.

The White House Counsel’s Office was informed this month that the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, wanted to question Mr. Kushner about meetings he arranged with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, according to the government officials. The meetings, which took place during the transition, included a previously unreported sit-down with the head of Russia’s state-owned development bank.

Ah. Previously unreported, eh. The head of Russia’s state-owned development bank, eh.… Read the rest

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