Jonathan Freedland points out how each new disclosure simply slides off Trump:

…late on Tuesday, the lawyer for Michael Cohen – Donald Trump’s personal attorney, fixer and keeper of his secrets – released a tape in which he and Trump are heard discussing how exactly to fund the silencing of a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal. Cohen apparently wanted it be handled legally, while Trump seemingly had other ideas.

“We’ll have to pay,” Cohen says. Trump’s reply: “Pay with cash.”

Put aside the impact an equivalent revelation about Clinton would have made in 1992. Just imagine the storm this would have caused if it had come out at the time Cohen and Trump had that conversation, just two months before the 2016 election. The entire political class would have assumed it would be devastating.

But now they know better, because nothing is devastating to Trump. There is a new story, there is outrage, then there’s a new story. It’s a pattern.

Note this month’s revelations by BBC’s Panorama programme that Trump behaved like a “predator” at parties packed with teenage girls in the 1980s and 1990s. It included the testimony of Barbara Pilling, then a young model, who recalled Trump asking her age. On hearing that she was 17, Trump said: “Oh, great. So you’re not too old and not too young. That’s just great.” Pilling added that she “felt I was in the presence of a shark”. Again, imagine what similar revelations would have done to the standing of Clinton or any previous president. Yet for Trump, they made barely a dent.

Grab one pussy, grab them all – what’s the difference?

For this reason, we shouldn’t be hoping the Mueller inquiry will make any difference.

Even if Mueller produces jaw-dropping evidence against Trump, the president’s base is unlikely to be impressed. For a flavour of the likely response, note Alex Jones’s latest Infowars broadcast, making the wild, evidence-free allegation that Mueller was involved in a child sex ring and fantasising about shooting Mueller. (Predictably, Facebook, which carries Infowars, said the broadcast did not breach its rules.)

We have to face the grim reality that in our post-2016 world few of the previous norms and standards apply. In Britain, too, we can see how things have changed. There was a time when a government admission that it was having to plan for the possibility that food and medicine would run out – not through natural disaster, but because of a policy it was pursuing – would have been terminal. Now it’s just another day in Brexit.

So that’s cheery.

Today Trump went to give the annual address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, which is a thing presidents do.

“Don’t believe the crap you hear from these people — the fake news,” Trump told the crowd of veterans. “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Raising the issue of immigration, Trump claimed many Democratic politicians are “disciples of a very low IQ person,” Rep. Maxine Waters, a frequent Democratic critic of the President’s. He also falsely accused Democrats of being “OK” with crime in the US.

“They want open borders, and crime’s OK,” Trump said. “We want strong borders and we want no crime.”

The usual vulgar lies and abuse, in short. Thanks for your service.

Oliver Burkeman explains how it can be true both that things are overall getting better and that we still run around with our hair on fire because of all the things that are getting worse. There’s this study…

In the experiment, participants were shown hundreds of dots in shades from deep purple to deep blue, and asked to say whether each was blue or not. Obviously, the bluer a dot, the more likely people were to classify it as blue. But what’s interesting is what happened when researchers began reducing the prevalence of the blue dots they displayed. The fewer dots that were objectively blue, the broader people’s definition of “blue” became: they started to classify purplish dots that way, too. Their concept of blue expanded, a phenomenon the study authors label “prevalence-induced concept change”. Which clearly has nothing to do with social problems such as poverty or racism – except that, actually, it might.

Of course it might…and that’s not even necessarily wrong (as he goes on to say). A social evil may be ameliorated but we still want to do more, and that’s a good thing. Yes, many Jim Crow laws were repealed, but there are still all those Confederate statues sending their messages about violent subordination of former slaves so let’s not quit yet ok?

But then again sometimes that finding The New Burning Injustice can get…warped.

It’s been argued that we live in an era of “concept creep”, in which concepts like “trauma” or “violence” have stretched to encompass things no previous generation would have worried about. Hence the idea that certain forms of speech are literally violence. Or that letting an eight-year-old walk to school alone is actual child neglect. Or – to pick an example from the current contentious debate over gender identity – that to question someone’s preferred explanation for their experience of gender is to deny their right to exist. Subsequent stages of the blue-dot study showed that prevalence-induced concept change affects this kind of issue, too. For instance, if you ask people to classify faces as threatening or non-threatening, then reduce the incidence of threatening ones, they’ll define more neutral faces as threatening. Ask them to classify research proposals as ethical or unethical, then reduce the unethical ones, and they’ll expand their definition of “unethical”. As co-author Dan Gilbert put it, “When problems become rare, we count more things as problems.”

Sometimes that’s a good thing, other times not so much. The expansion of human rights into the claim that one’s subjective ideas about oneself are both infallible and To Be Respected has a lot of absurd implications that bear no great resemblance to social justice.

The challenge when it comes to social problems – or your personal problems – is to ask whether the thing you’re worrying about is more like the former or the latter: a serious problem in its own right, or one you’ve essentially invented? If it feels like nothing’s improving, it might be because your brain keeps shifting the goalposts.

Exactly so.

Jeff Sessions decides that of all the things we have to worry about right now, the prospect of a generation of “supercilious sensitive snowflakes” is major enough that he should fret about it in a speech.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions was speaking at an event hosted by the conservative group Turning Point USA on Tuesday when the crowd began to chant, “Lock her up.” The phrase was a common refrain among supporters of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign and referred to the desired punishment for his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

Sessions, whose position advising that campaign was parlayed into one as the nation’s chief law enforcement official, chuckled.

Heh heh heh. Chuckle chuckle chuckle. These guys are such awesome comedians, aren’t they?

“Lock her up,” he said.

Sessions’s speech to TPUSA’s High School Leadership Summit was focused on the perceived rejection of free speech rights on college campuses, a favorite subject of TPUSA.

“Too many schools are coddling our young people and actively preventing them from scrutinizing the validity of their beliefs and the issues of the day,” he said. “That is the exact opposite of what we expect from universities in our country.”

Oh yes? What about the example set by his boss, then? Is he a model of scrutinizing the validity of one’s beliefs? Is he even a model of not brazenly lying to our faces multiple times every day? No he is not, so Jeff Sessions can just shut up forever about scrutinizing the validity of one’s beliefs.

“I can tell this group isn’t going to have to have Play-Doh when you get attacked in college and you get involved in a debate,” Sessions said. “You’re going to stand up and defend yourselves and the values that you believe in. I like this bunch, I can tell you. You’re not going to be backing down. Go get ’em! Go get ’em!”

The crowd, which had erupted into a “lock her up” chant earlier, began the chant again.

“Lock her up,” Sessions chuckled. The chants continued, and he added, “I heard that a long time over the last campaign.”

Wait, are we talking about scrutinizing the validity of one’s beliefs or are we talking about standing up and defending them? Are talking about questioning or are we talking about not backing down? And by the way, Jeff, how about scrutinizing the belief that Hillary Clinton should be “locked up” for bungling the issue of secure communications in a way that many people were doing at the time?

Bradley Moss at Lawfare on the taking away security clearances issue:

Trump is considering steps by which their clearances can be revoked because “they’ve politicized and, in some cases, monetized their public service and security clearances,” as well as “ma[de] baseless accusations of improper contact with Russia or being influenced by Russia against the President.” In 11 years of representing civilian employees, military personnel, political appointees and government contractors in security clearance proceedings, I can say with certainty that these types of “allegations” are nothing like anything I have ever seen in a memorandum outlining bases for denying or revoking a security clearance.

As usual with them, it’s not normal, but can they do it? It depends.

There’s a standard process for removing security clearances, which Trump is unlikely to use because “it affords far too much due process for his taste.” Yeah. He prefers to do things as summarily and dictatorially as he can get away with.

What’s more, it would require civil servants at the respective agencies to sign off on the paperwork. I can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that those civil servants would not put their names on a document moving to revoke someone’s security clearance for nothing other than bad-mouthing the president on television or writing a book (both of which are protected activities under the First Amendment, assuming no classified information was disclosed—and there is no evidence that any was, despite complaints from the White House about Comey’s “leaking”).

There’s a national security exception but that would still involve current agency heads’ having to sign off on this “take it away because they say bad things about me” nonsense, and they probably wouldn’t do it.

That leaves the “because I said so” option.

The president could claim the inherent constitutional authority to revoke the clearance eligibility of each of the individuals without any due process. There is no precedent for such an action, as no president (at least as far as I am aware) has ever personally intervened in the clearance revocation (or approval) of an individual. That has never happened before because past presidents—whatever their flaws or scandals—knew there were certain institutional norms and customs that a president simply should not disturb.

Trump, though, is not burdened with an affinity for respecting institutional norms. He already bulldozed those norms when it came to hiring his daughter and son-in-law, refusing to place his assets in a blind trust, and refusing to disclose his tax returns. What is to stop him from running over another norm?

He sees it as part of his awesomeness that he bulldozes all the norms.

If the president were to take this unprecedented exercise of his authority, it is anyone’s guess how the courts would construe the issue. It would set up a serious clash of constitutional questions between the inherent authority of the president regarding classified information, the procedural due-process rights of clearance holders under the Fifth Amendment, and the extent to which the judiciary is even permitted to rule on the matter.

As the president would say, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Due process is for wimps; real men just issue orders.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on It’s the sense of entitlement.

Here are some more of those Trump voters we’re supposed to respect.

People who believe in a literal, physical hell and heaven, and speculate on what appliances they will have in their kitchen in heaven. (But I was assured that Gnu Atheists were arguing against a literal form of religion that nobody actually believes!)

People who dismiss Trump’s vileness on the grounds that “we are not to judge,” but claim that Hillary Clinton is “of Satan.”

People who believe Obama was a Muslim.

People who believe that the annihilation of Christians in America is nigh. (But don’t you dare call them delusional!)

People who believe that when Jesus said “love thy neighbor,” he meant “love thy American neighbor.”

People who believe that they can look around a hospital emergency room and figure out the immigration status of everyone there. (Gee, I wonder what basis they use?) People who are sure that hospital staff — for reasons unknown — are choosing to treat the illegal immigrants first and make Americans wait untreated.

People who think slavery wasn’t that bad — hey, the slaves were fed and clothed!

People who oppose having memorials to the victims of lynchings, because they’re afraid that African-Americans will be motivated to take revenge.

People who think that “Rosa Parks time” was “scary.”

But don’t you dare call them bigoted!

Originally a comment by Noxious Nan on It’s the sense of entitlement.

We’ve received the hard sell for accepting Trump voters as good people who were tired and wanted a change. It’s been such a hard sell, that I’ve really tried to visualize tolerant people driven to such a point that they would vote for Trump….It just doesn’t compute.

As someone defending these voters, Skeletor, please explain to me how it computes! Every line I try leads to eventual conscious racism or misogyny on the part of the imagined voter.

As a woman I experience misogyny every single day, albeit most of the time it is limited to small, subtle demonstrations and messages. These demonstrations come from loved ones almost as often as from anywhere else. It’s so goddamn disheartening that sometimes I just want to stop breathing! People I love voted for Trump. Nobody wants to go down this rabbit hole when this is about real people that we know and see and love every day, voting for someone who would have us live in the world Trump wants to create. It breaks my fucking heart!

They love me enough to tell me there are other reasons for that vote, like wanting a change, but that doesn’t distract me from the fact that they knew what it could do to me and millions of their fellow Americans. I’m not going to be quiet about that anymore. Maybe this happened because I was quiet and polite about it before it came to this.

Maybe I have to speak up every single goddamn time I am 2nd classed by family, friends and peers. I don’t even know if that’s possible. But I do know I’m done giving these people a pass, and I was done WHEN they voted for Trump. That was my apocalyptic alarm. That was the day they lost all benefit of the doubt that I ever had to give any of them, utterly and completely.

A disgusting display:

They will take their revenge on everyone if they can. We just have to hope they’ll be stopped in time.

Pompeo was ranting at Iran yesterday a few hours before Trump’s late-night all caps threat.

Pompeo’s remarks Sunday reprised his criticism of the Iranian government, but on a deeply personal level that is likely to be repeated in the U.S. government broadcasts into Iran.

He lit into what he called Iran’s “hypocritical holy men,” saying the ruling elites have enriched themselves through corruption, and called out officials by name who he said had plundered government coffers through embezzlement or by winning lucrative contracts.

I wonder if any thoughts of his boss occurred to him while he did all that.

He cited “the billionaire general,” Interior Minister Sadegh Mahsouli; Grand Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi, the “Sultan of Sugar”; and Sadeq Ardeshir Larijani, the head of Iran’s judiciary, whom he said had embezzled $300 million in public money.

“Call me crazy,” Pompeo said, “but I’m a little skeptical that a thieving thug under international sanctions is the right man to be Iran’s highest-ranking judicial official.”

And yet, he works for a thieving thug. He plays Secretary of State for a thieving thug.

Not your call, dude.

Democrats, please, please don’t lose your minds and rush to the socialist left. This president and his Republican Party are counting on you to do exactly that. America’s great middle wants sensible, balanced, ethical leadership.

— James Comey (@Comey) July 22, 2018

First of all…please. When do Democrats ever rush to the left of any kind, let alone socialist? Democrats never do anything but drag us ever farther to the right, in the name of exactly that kind of “oooh everybody wants to be in The Center” bullshit. Voting for one socialist in one primary in New York is not “rushing to the socialist left” let alone losing anyone’s mind.

Second, it’s not his job to tell us not to move to the left. Granted his real job got yanked away from him in the rudest way possible, but that doesn’t free him up to be a freelance private unofficial cop of all our politics. I doubt that anyone asked him for advice on which direction to rush in, and if anyone did that’s anyone’s problem, not ours.

Third, G-man doesn’t like the left; well knock me down with a 2 by 4. We know: the FBI thinks the left is demonic. That’s probably a big part of why we’re in this mess: all those decades of treating the left like a fatal highly contagious virus.

Fourth, “America’s great middle” my ass – that sounds like Trump crooning over the flag. There’s nothing especially great about the middle. Many lefty policies would be great for this country, and treating them as akin to a disease is old news and stupid.

Fifth…if it weren’t for Comey we wouldn’t be in this mess.

Sixth, it’s obnoxious (and, again, kind of Trumpish) to assume all the sense and balance and ethics are in the middle.

Seventh, the middle is way to the right of where the middle was ten, twenty, thirty, fifty years ago. It’s not as if “the middle” is some kind of Platonic essence of immutable perfectness; it’s just a label, and a way of saying “don’t change anything.”

Eighth, we’re not “losing our minds.” That’s just rude. One election in one city isn’t “losing our minds.” Comey isn’t our daddy and we don’t need him telling us to get a shave and do our homework.

Ninth who even asked him?

I have a feeling I could go on this way indefinitely so I’ll just stop abruptly now.