Elizabeth Williamson at the Times on Pres-i-dent Trump and the babysitters.

The epigraph:

“You treat me like a baby! Am I like a baby to you? I sit there like a little baby and watch TV and you talk to me?”

— Donald Trump to Paul Manafort in “Devil’s Bargain,” by Joshua Green.

Why yes, Don, of course you’re a baby to us. You act like a baby. You talk like a baby, you have no idea how to think, just as a baby does.

He lives in the White House, where he gets two scoops of ice cream instead of one for dessert. He is commander in chief, eating “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake” with the Chinese president while he fires missiles at Syria. As he told the Russians, “people brief me on great intel every day,” with lots of pictures and “tweet-length sentences.” He has a “beautiful Twitter account.” Uh-oh!

Mr. Trump’s staff can’t control him, so they coddle him. They make sure he starts his day with a packet of good news about himself, compiled by Republicans who get up early to search for positive stories, headlines, tweets or, failing those, flattering photos.

It’s a full-time job for one of his aides, who makes a very nice salary for doing it.

Mr. Trump likes “unstructured time” to watch TV. His favorite station is Fox News Channel but he’ll watch any show where they talk about him. If they say something bad about him, he tweets. That makes everyone nervous. His staffers try to limit his screen time during the day and keep him from “calling old friends and then tweeting about it.” But then it’s off to bed with his phone, and “once he goes upstairs, there’s no managing him.” Uh-oh!

Trump says the job is hard. People yell at him. He gets cranky.

He screams at the television, at staffers, and at Republican legislators, demanding that somebody make it stop. But when Mr. Trump’s advisers tell him what he might do, he likes doing the opposite — like when he fired James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., or stared at the solar eclipse. After he blurted out secrets to Russian officials in the Oval Office, his team worried about “leaving him alone in meetings with foreign leaders.” H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser, tries to correct the president and keep him out of trouble. The president calls General McMaster “a pain.”

When Mr. Trump has one of those “moods where sometimes he wants to blow everything up,” his staff takes him outside. He sat in an 18-wheeler in the White House driveway one time. “Honk, honk!” went the horn. He sat in a red fire truck, too. “Where’s the fire?” Mr. Trump asked Vice President Mike Pence. “Put it out fast!” Mr. Trump went to Saudi Arabia, where they gave him steak and ketchup and put his photo on the side of a building. But most of all Mr. Trump likes when his staff plans field trips to rallies in red states, where he can campaign for president again.

But even that nice military General Kelly can’t control Trump himself. Uh-oh!

Business Insider argues that Trump’s pardon of Arpaio, coupled with his asking Sessions months ago if he could get the case dropped, undercuts the claim by Trump allies that he didn’t actually order Comey to drop the Flynn investigation, he merely expressed a hope.

When Trump allegedly asked Sessions this past spring whether it would be possible to drop the federal criminal investigation into Arpaio, Sessions told Trump such a move would be inappropriate, but that Trump could pardon Arpaio if he was convicted, The Post reported, citing three people familiar with the conversation.

Trump ultimately granted the pardon on Friday evening, sparking fierce backlash from liberals and some conservatives.

But some legal analysts also pointed out that Trump’s decision to pardon Arpaio, and the actions he took preceding that, may serve as an important piece of evidence to special counsel Robert Mueller, who is reportedly investigating the president for obstruction of justice.

It has to do with his intent in that February conversation with Comey.

According to Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in June, Trump privately told Comey, who was spearheading the FBI’s Russia probe at the time, he “hoped” Comey would “let this go,” referring to the investigation.

Several Trump allies and Republican lawmakers have since grasped those words and said they do not prove Trump tried to obstruct justice by asking Comey to drop the investigation and subsequently firing him.

They resorted to the hyper-literal Nice Little Place defense: saying “nice little place you got here, would be a shame if it burned down” is just an observation like “rainy today isn’t it.” Senator Jim Risch of Idaho did a little dance with Comey, insisting that Trump never issued an order of the form “drop the investigation into Flynn.” Right, and by the same token, a man inviting a woman to his hotel room for coffee at 4 a.m. is absolutely not a lightly veiled sexual overture, it’s all about the caffeine.

When Comey said that despite Trump’s words, he took it as a direction from the president of the United States, Risch said, “You may have taken it as a direction, but that’s not what he said.”

The main thing Mueller — who was put in charge of the Russia investigation after Trump fired Comey — would need to prove in an obstruction of justice case is whether Trump acted with corrupt, or unlawful, intent when he asked the FBI director to drop the Flynn investigation.

“[Trump’s] defense would be that he thought it was appropriate to end the Flynn investigation because it was meritless and that there was nothing wrong with him, as president, making that determination,” Mariotti told Business Insider.

But the president’s decision to pardon Arpaio demonstrates that “this has become a pattern of activity where he tries to end investigations of his friends,” he added. “Everything he said, did, and was told as to Arpaio is relevant to help us understand what he was thinking when he tried to end the Flynn investigation.”

He was barely in the door when he started trying to end investigations of his friends.

It’s a tall order when most of your friends are corrupt in one way or another, but Trump enjoys a challenge. Well not a challenge exactly, but an opportunity to bully. That’s what Trump really enjoys. He likes to be in a position of power so that he can tell others “You’re fired” or “You’re pardoned” according to his own tastes and whims.

This happened.

On August 24, the Trump administration’s Department of Energy censored a Facilities Integrating Collaborations for User Science proposal from Dr. Jennifer Bowen, an associate professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

She posted a screenshot of the email on Facebook, writing, “This just happened. I’m just going to leave this here for people to ponder.”

In the email, Dr. Bowen was told, “I have been asked to contact you to update the wording in your proposal abstract to remove words such as ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change.’ This is being asked as we have to meet the president’s budget language restrictions and don’t want to make any changes without your knowledge or consent. Below is the current wording for your abstract—at your next convenience, will you kindly revise the wording and send back to me as soon as you can? That way we can update our website.” The words “climate change” and “global warming” were highlighted for removal in the proposal.

So Trump gets to control the wording used by independent scientists who don’t work for the government but do contribute research to government agencies. That’s pretty stunning.

The Guardian reported earlier this month that the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) has been censored from using the term “climate change.” They have been directed to use the phrase “weather extremes” instead.

Scientists have feared the Trump administration’s efforts to scale back and undermine climate change initiatives. On August 7, The New York Times reported that scientists from 13 federal agencies leaked a climate change report for fear it would be censored or its findings would be prevented from release. The Trump administration is politicizing and manipulating scientists’ work and research to better fit its own political agenda, which favors industries that profit from suppressing climate change science.

Good plan. By the same token the Trump administration should suppress information about approaching hurricanes for the sake of industries that profit from selling hot dogs on the beach.

Philip Bump at the Post has drawn up a master list of all the protections and rules Trump has undone.

We’ve seen most of them before but a master list is always good to have.

Samples:

Revoked an executive order that mandated compliance by contractors with laws protecting women in the workplace. Prior to the 2014 order, a report found that companies with federal contracts worth millions of dollars had scores of violations of labor and civil rights laws.

Cancelled a rule mandating that financial advisers act in the best interests of their clients.

Repeal of a bill that mandated that employers maintain records of workplace injuries.

Rescinded an Obama effort to reduce mandatory sentences. Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered that prosecutors seek the most stringent penalties possible in criminal cases.

Cancelled a phase-out of the use of private prisons.

Reversed the government’s position on a voter ID law in Texas. Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department argued that the law had discriminatory intent. Under Sessions, Justice withdrew that complaint. On Wednesday, a federal court threw out the law.

Rescinded a rule mandating that rising sea levels be considered when building public infrastructure in flood-prone areas.

Reversed an Obama ban on drilling for oil in the Arctic.

Rolled back school lunch standards championed by Michelle Obama.

Halted or cancelled hundreds of other minor regulatory actions.

Revoked a ban on denying funding for Planned Parenthood at the state level.

This stuff is why they put up with him.

Noah Feldman at Bloomberg says pardoning Arpaio would be an attack on the judiciary itself.

Arpaio was convicted this July by Judge Susan Bolton of willfully and intentionally violating an order issued to him in 2011 by a different federal judge, G. Murray Snow.

The order arose out of a civil suit against Arpaio brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, accusing him of violating the law by detaining undocumented immigrants simply for lacking legal status.

Snow issued a preliminary injunction that ordered Arpaio to stop running so-called saturation patrols — police sweeps that essentially stopped people who looked Latino and detained those who were deemed undocumented. The basic idea was that the profiling, warrantless stops and detention were unconstitutional.

Yet despite the federal court’s order, Arpaio kept running the unlawful patrols for at least 18 months, and publicly acknowledged as much.

We don’t want law enforcement people doing that, any more than we want the military doing that.

Judge Bolton convicted Arpaio of criminal contempt. She found he had “willfully violated” the federal court’s order “by failing to do anything to ensure his subordinates’ compliance and by directing them to continue to detain persons for whom no criminal charges could be filed.” And she held that Arpaio had “announced to the world and to his subordinates that he was going to continue business as usual no matter who said otherwise.”

This is the crime that Trump is suggesting he might pardon: willful defiance of a federal judge’s lawful order to enforce the Constitution.

…

Such a pardon would reflect outright contempt for the judiciary, which convicted Arpaio for his resistance to its authority. Trump has questioned judges’ motives and decisions, but this would be a further, more radical step in his attack on the independent constitutional authority of Article III judges.

An Arpaio pardon would express presidential contempt for the Constitution. Arpaio didn’t just violate a law passed by Congress. His actions defied the Constitution itself, the bedrock of the entire system of government. For Trump to say that this violation is excusable would threaten the very structure on which is right to pardon is based.

Fundamentally, pardoning Arpaio would also undermine the rule of law itself.

The only way the legal system can operate is if law enforcement officials do what the courts tell them. Judges don’t carry guns or enforce their own orders. That’s the job of law enforcement.

In the end, the only legally binding check on law enforcement is the authority of the judiciary to say what the law is — and be listened to by the cops on the streets.

And we need to have a legally binding check on law enforcement. They’re heavily armed.

The Constitution isn’t perfect. It offers only one remedy for a president who abuses the pardon power to break the system itself. That remedy is impeachment.

James Madison noted at the Virginia ratifying convention that abuse of the pardon power could be grounds for impeachment. He was correct then — and it’s still true now.

But that of course does not mean it will happen.

Who knew that Trump had a “spiritual adviser”? Let alone more than one, so that one among them is the chief. I don’t think we’ve ever seen a more of the earth earthy human. This is a guy who talks about “beautiful chocolate cake” in the same breath with missile strikes. But apparently he does.

Televangelist and pastor Paula White has known Donald Trump since the early 2000s, and she is thought to be the president’s closest spiritual adviser. She prayed at his inauguration, appeared with him when he signed his executive order easing restrictions on pastors engaging in politics, and told evangelical TV host Jim Bakker she is in the White House at least weekly these days. This week, as Trump faced sustained criticism over his response to the violent white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, she proved her loyalty once more, appearing on the Jim Bakker Show to defend Trump’s presidency and his spiritual bona fides in apocalyptic terms. While White has condemned white supremacy as evil and has a racially mixed fan base, she didn’t mention Trump’s equivocations that have roiled the nation.

I suppose that’s because she’s so spiritual. In the spirit there is no color, so it doesn’t matter how racist white people are, yeah?

Instead, she made an extended comparison of the president to the biblical figure Esther on Bakker’s show Monday, in an interview that at times sounded more like an impassioned sermon. Like Esther, White said, Trump is a come-from-nowhere figure elevated to leadership against all odds in order to do God’s will. She described Trump as a generous, humble man of “character and integrity” and vouched repeatedly for the state of his soul. “He surrounds himself with Christians, and he is a Christian,” she told Bakker, about a man who’s been widely reported as being irreligious for most of his life, prompting applause from the studio audience. “He loves prayer.”

Nope. He’s not generous, he’s not humble, he has the character of a mean, vengeful, petty, selfish, greedy, reckless, angry bully. He has zero integrity. He’s a terrible person on every dimension we can observe, and it’s morally perverse to say otherwise.

[In] A damning investigative piece written for the now-shuttered conservative site Heat Street, Jillian Melchior reported this spring on her dubious record as a televangelist and pastor. White’s church outside Orlando attracts an almost exclusively black audience, many of whom have low incomes and little savings. That doesn’t stop White from asking for what they have. White asked congregants to donate up to a month’s salary as a one-time special offering to mark the beginning of the year.

Is that squalid and ruthless enough for a “spiritual adviser”?