There’s also Deutsche Bank.

Most banks steer clear of Trump; Deutsche Bank is the big exception.

Regulators are reviewing hundreds of millions of dollars in loans made to Mr. Trump’s businesses through Deutsche Bank’s private wealth management unit, The New York Times reported, citing three people briefed on the review. The regulators are examining whether the loans might expose the banks to heightened risks.

New York regulators have paid particular attention to personal guarantees Mr. Trump made to obtain the loans.

There is no formal investigation of the bank, and personal guarantees are often required for big loans from wealth managers. The regulators are focused on whether these guarantees could create problems for Deutsche Bank should Mr. Trump fail to pay his debts, leaving it with a choice of suing him or risking being seen to have cut him a special deal. The concern is not hypothetical: Mr. Trump sued the bank to delay paying back an earlier loan.

You’d think that would make them want to terminate the relationship, wouldn’t you.

Separately, Deutsche Bank has been in contact with federal investigators, and it is likely eventually to have to provide information on the Trump accounts to the special counsel in the Russia inquiry, Robert S. Mueller III.

I’m sure he’ll find that everything is on the up and up.

Linda Qiu points out some of Trump’s lies and buffoonish errors in his interview with the “failing” Times. My favorite is the last item, to do with Napoleon and Paris.

Mr. Trump may have been confusing Napoleon Bonaparte with his nephew, Louis Napoleon or Napoleon III, when he claimed that Napoleon “designed Paris.” In 1853, about 30 years after the first Napoleon died, Napoleon III appointed Georges-Eugène Haussman to carry out his reconstruction project, envisioned to accommodate rapid population growth and to discourage future revolutions, according to the Museum of the City.

“His one problem is he didn’t go to Russia that night because he had extracurricular activities, and they froze to death,” Mr. Trump continued.

Quite right! He was with some French floozie that night so they all froze to death so that was the end of his brilliant plan to conquer Russia in an evening.

While he identified the correct Napoleon, his version of the 18th century conqueror’s failed attempt to invade Russia is garbled. Napoleon’s 1812 campaign into Russia lasted about six months, not, as Mr. Trump suggested, one night. And the French emperor did take Moscow in September, before withdrawing a month later as food supplies began to dwindle. Of nearly half a million men under his command, about 6,000 returned home from a combination of battle, disease and the weather.

Well yeah okay but Trump’s version is much funnier.

Oof, he’s landed us with a whole new plateful of headlines.

He sat down for a cozy chat yesterday with the “failing” “fake news” New York Times. He said he was very very mad at Jeff Sessions for recusing himself, and that he never would have given him the job if he’d known he was going to recuse himself for cryin out loud. He seems to think Sessions knew all along that he’d be recusing himself, that it was a plan, like planning to go to Hawaii on vacation next year.

In a remarkable public break with one of his earliest political supporters, Mr. Trump complained that Mr. Sessions’s decision ultimately led to the appointment of a special counsel that should not have happened. “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” Mr. Trump said.

It was very unfair to him, Trump said mournfully.

In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, the president also accused James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director he fired in May, of trying to leverage a dossier of compromising material to keep his job. Mr. Trump criticized both the acting F.B.I. director who has been filling in since Mr. Comey’s dismissal and the deputy attorney general who recommended it. And he took on Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel now leading the investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s election.

See, it wasn’t like this on The Apprentice. On The Apprentice Trump was the Top Dog and that was the end of it – there weren’t all these people getting in his way and investigating him and recusing themselves. The presidency should be like that too. It should be The Donnie Show, on which Donnie gets whatever he demands, and everyone jumps when he says jump, and there are frequent opportunities for everyone to gather round and say how awesome Donnie is. That’s how a presidency should be. Except when it’s Obama of course, but that’s a whole other thing.

Instead there’s all this annoying policy and procedure, all these rules and constraints, all these people cluttering up Donnie’s photo ops. It’s such a crappy third-rate loser kind of presidency when it should have been so golden and awesome.

Asked if Mr. Mueller’s investigation would cross a red line if it expanded to look at his family’s finances beyond any relationship to Russia, Mr. Trump said, “I would say yes.” He would not say what he would do about it. “I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia.”

Trump had a second, secret conversation with Putin at the G20 meeting.

The hourlong conversation in Hamburg, Germany, took place at a private dinner among world leaders at a concert hall on the banks of the Elbe River during the Group of 20 economic summit meeting, with only a Kremlin interpreter present to listen to the exchange. It followed a formal meeting between the two presidents that lasted more than two hours earlier in the day, and included their foreign ministers for a fraught discussion about Moscow’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 American elections.

Only a Kremlin interpreter – so it’s like when Trump had the private meeting with Kislyak and Lavrov in the Oval Office…only more so, because this is Putin, and there was no one else there except the Kremlin interpreter.

This guy. I swear.

But the intimate dinner conversation, of which there is no official United States government record, because no American official other than the president was involved, is the latest to raise eyebrows. Foreign leaders who witnessed it later commented privately on the oddity of an American president flaunting such a close rapport with his Russian counterpart.

“Pretty much everyone at the dinner thought this was really weird, that here is the president of the United States, who clearly wants to display that he has a better relationship personally with President Putin than any of us, or simply doesn’t care,” said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a New York-based research and consulting firm, who said he heard directly from attendees. “They were flummoxed, they were confused and they were startled.”

I wonder what he gave away. Did he tell Putin to help himself to the Baltics? Say the US really doesn’t care what he does to his own people? Offer him a few spare nukes?

In a statement, a White House official on Tuesday described the meeting as routine and brief, and explained the lack of an American translator by noting that the president was accompanied by a Japanese interpreter who did not speak Russian. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that any insinuation that the White House has tried to hide the encounter was false.

A second White House official confirmed that the meeting had occurred but did not offer any details, and insisted on anonymity because the discussion was private.

Private?? What do they mean private? He doesn’t get to go having “private” secret just-him meetings with Putin. They’re not lovers, they’re heads of rival states.

Russia specialists said such an encounter — even on an informal basis at a social event — raised red flags because of its length, which suggests a substantive exchange, and the fact that there was no American interpreter, note taker or national security or foreign policy aide present.

“We’re all going to be wondering what was said, and that’s where it’s unfortunate that there was no U.S. interpreter, because there is no independent American account of what happened,” Stephen Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine who also specializes Russia and nuclear arms control.

“If I was in the Kremlin, my recommendation to Putin would be, ‘See if you can get this guy alone,’ and that’s what it sounds like he was able to do,” added Mr. Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Because Trump is that stupid…or treasonous.

This time it’s a fire truck. A made in America fire truck. Boop boop.

The Wall Street Journal has stern advice for Don and Fam: spill everything.

Mr. Trump seems to realize he has a problem because the White House has announced the hiring of white-collar Washington lawyer Ty Cobb to manage its Russia defense. He’ll presumably supersede the White House counsel, whom Mr. Trump ignores, and New York outside counsel Marc Kasowitz, who is out of his political depth.

Mr. Cobb has an opening to change the Trump strategy to one with the best chance of saving his Presidency: radical transparency. Release everything to the public ahead of the inevitable leaks. Mr. Cobb and his team should tell every Trump family member, campaign operative and White House aide to disclose every detail that might be relevant to the Russian investigations.

That means every meeting with any Russian or any American with Russian business ties. Every phone call or email. And every Trump business relationship with Russians going back years. This should include every relevant part of Mr. Trump’s tax returns, which the President will resist but Mr. Mueller is sure to seek anyway.

That’s the best chance of saving his presidency? I’m not seeing it. If he released everything, that would probably end his presidency. The WSJ seems to be assuming he hasn’t actually done anything criminal or incompatible with being president, but that’s a huge and rather perverse assumption. I think the reason Trump is hiding as much as he can is because the truth would discredit him. The bits of truth that have been leaked have certainly done a lot to discredit him, and the full truth would do that more thoroughly. The likelihood of some miraculous Innocent Explanation is…slight.

Then release it all to the public. Whatever short-term political damage this might cause couldn’t be worse than the death by a thousand cuts of selective leaks, often out of context, from political opponents in Congress or the special counsel’s office. If there really is nothing to the Russia collusion allegations, transparency will prove it. Americans will give Mr. Trump credit for trusting their ability to make a fair judgment. Pre-emptive disclosure is the only chance to contain the political harm from future revelations.

But that’s true only if this release of all of it shows him to be not a liar, thief, fraud, cheat, and corrupt operator.

Mr. Trump somehow seems to believe that his outsize personality and social-media following make him larger than the Presidency. He’s wrong. He and his family seem oblivious to the brutal realities of Washington politics. Those realities will destroy Mr. Trump, his family and their business reputation unless they change their strategy toward the Russia probe. They don’t have much more time to do it.

But it’s not the brutal realities of Washington politics that caused Trump to be a fraud, cheat, thief, liar, bully, and sleaze – he did that himself years ago. I don’t see how admitting it all is going to save his presidency.

Maggie Haberman reports that Trump is again confiding in us about just how sleazy and morally empty he really is.

“Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent,” Mr. Trump posted on his Twitter account just after 10 a.m. “That’s politics!”

Of course. That’s what sleazy morally empty people do – they say everybody does it, they say you would do it in a heartbeat if you had the chance, they say everybody is as sleazy and morally empty as they are. It’s a lie – a sleazy and morally empty lie. Donald Trump is a moral vacuum, but that does not mean that everyone else is. Even in the US, where that brand of “character” is cheered on, it’s not universal.

The president has insisted he learned of the meeting only a few days before The Times article. His aides helped write his son’s initial statement describing the meeting as they flew back with the president from the Group of 20 summit meeting in Europe.

His son’s initial statement that was a lie and had to be revised as soon as the Times reported again.

The US government is a moral sewer at present. All we can do for now is try to keep track.