No wonder Trump forced the government shutdown.

Lawyers for President Donald Trump are invoking the government shutdown to seek a delay in a court case over claims that Trump is illegally profiting from business his Washington hotel does with foreign countries.

Justice Department attorneys representing Trump asked a federal appeals court on Wednesday to postpone indefinitely all further filings in an appeal related to a suit that the governments of Maryland and Washington, D.C., filed over Trump’s alleged violation of the Constitution’s ban on foreign emoluments.

Convenient, isn’t it. If you get sued for abusing your presidency to fill your pockets, you just shut down the government so that the case can’t proceed. Heads he wins, tails we lose.

So close, and yet…

Hey, kids under 8 years old, thanks for reading The New York Times. But this time, please don’t. Maybe go play Minecraft or something instead.

… O.K., are they gone now? Cool. Here’s what President Trump said to a child about Santa Claus on Monday: “Are you still a believer in Santa? Because at 7, it’s marginal, right?”

“Yes, sir,” the child, Collman, responded twice. She had spoken with the president for at least 10 seconds before he suggested that her parents had been lying to her all her life.

Ah, are we going to talk about that?

No; the next paragraph is about Collman putting out cookies for Santa.

Whatever. But the thing is, if she does think Santa Claus is real then her parents have been lying to her all her life, and she will find that out before long. Is the idea that that would be bad at age 7 but it’s fine at age 8? If so, why?

Mr. Trump’s faux pas was roundly mocked on social media, where he was criticized for breaking the covenant in which we have all agreed to deceive our children.

I think that is one strange covenant.

I wrote a somewhat sarcastic column for The Freethinker about it.

There’s the big picture, and then there are the details. One detail is the town of Fergus Falls, Minnesota.

Claas Relotius, who spent weeks reporting in Fergus Falls last year for one of Europe’s most respected publications, could have written about the many residents who maintain friendships across partisan lines, about the efforts to lure former residents back to west-central Minnesota or about how a city of roughly 14,000 people maintains a robust arts scene.

To give a sense of the place, he could have described local landmarks like the giant statue of Otto the Otter. Or the Minnesota-shaped welcome sign next to the Applebee’s. Or the expansive prairie that surrounds the town.

But he did not.

Instead, Mr. Relotius invented a condescending fiction. On the venerated pages of Der Spiegel, a German newsmagazine, Mr. Relotius portrayed Fergus Falls as a backward, racist place whose residents blindly supported President Trump and rarely ventured beyond city limits. He made up details about a young city official. He concocted characters, roadside signs and racially tinged plotlines.

A bit like Sinclair Lewis, except that Sinclair Lewis was straightforwardly writing fiction; Relotius was supposed to be writing and researching journalism.

“We’re taking the high road,” Mayor Ben Schierer said in an interview, in which he praised his city’s arts, parks and schools, which mostly seemed to escape Mr. Relotius’s notice. “We’ve moved on.”

Indeed, amid the heartache and hassle, some in Fergus Falls have seized an opportunity to tell the world what their city is really like. Sure, it has its struggles and tensions. But on the whole, residents get along, there is plenty to do, people enjoy living there.

Not all small towns are hotbeds of racism (and few or none are 100% populated by racists); not all Minnesotans are Trumpers.

Because the article was published only in German, its readership in Minnesota was limited. But civic leaders commissioned a professional translation, the text of which circulated around town in a shared online document. Outrage simmered.

The article’s fabrications ranged from the trivial (an account of a foreboding forest that does not exist and a Super Bowl party that did not happen) to the personally devastating (the city administrator was falsely portrayed as a gun-obsessed, romantically challenged man who had never seen the ocean) to the downright inflammatory (Mr. Relotius claimed there was a sign that said “Mexicans Keep Out” at the entrance to town).

No no, that’s the Oval Office.

The Times took some photos.

Credit Tim Gruber for The New York Times

It doesn’t exactly look like a shithole, does it.

The county did heavily vote for Trump (64%) but that’s not all there is to say about it.

“What happened, I think, was that he was trying to look for a cliché of a Trump-voting town and he simply didn’t find it,” said Christoph Scheuermann, the Der Spiegel correspondent who visited Fergus Falls last week to apologize and write about the town’s true story.

Mr. Scheuermann said the Fergus Falls he encountered was “almost the opposite” of the one Mr. Relotius described.

“I felt a lot of warmth,” he said. “Everybody was welcoming.”

You know, if you’re a journalist looking for a cliché of a Trump-voting town and the one you’re in isn’t it, you can always go find another town…or you could write about expecting a cliché and not finding it. Just a thought.

SpiegelOnline a few days ago:

It has now become clear that Claas Relotius, 33 years old, one of DER SPIEGEL’s best writers, winner of multiple awards and a journalistic idol of his generation, is neither a reporter nor a journalist. Rather, he produces beautifully narrated fiction. Truth and lies are mixed together in his articles and some, at least according to him, were even cleanly reported and free of fabrication. Others, he admits, were embellished with fudged quotes and other made-up facts. Still others were entirely fabricated. During his confession on Thursday, Relotius said, verbatim: “It wasn’t about the next big thing. It was the fear of failure.” And: “The pressure not to fail grew as I became more successful.”

That crude mishmash, which looked like masterful works of feature writing, transformed him into one of the most successful journalists in Germany in recent years. It earned Relotius the German Reporter Prize on four different occasions, the Peter Scholl Latour Prize and the Konrad-Duden, the Kindernothilfe and the Catholic and Coburger media awards. He was named CNN “Journalist of the Year,” he was honored with the Reemtsma Liberty Award, the European Press Prize and he even landed on the Forbes magazine list of the “30 under 30 – Europe: Media.” One wonders how he could endure the praise at the award ceremonies without running out of the hall in shame.

Well, there are people like that. I constantly wonder how Trump isn’t curled into a ball on the floor in shame, but I also know it’s foolish to keep wondering. It’s who he is.

So now the Trump ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, is making hay with the story.

Since the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel disclosed a fabrication scandal that has sent tremors through the news world at a tense time for journalists globally, Grenell has taken aim at the company.

He has tweeted about Der Spiegel, often harshly, and retweeted the criticism leveled by others, more than a dozen times in the past week.

“Spiegel hasn’t answered as to how this fraud happened,” he wrote, for example, on Dec. 23, apparently dissatisfied with the company’s somewhat extensive efforts to publicize the wrongdoings of the reporter, Claas Relotius. “It’s absurd for them to pretend this is only about one reporter.”

Yes, that’s definitely how ambassadors to friendly countries are supposed to behave.

Grenell wrote an incendiary letter to Der Spiegel, which it published on its site, in which he asked the company to arrange for an outside organization to conduct a thorough investigation of what went wrong.

“These fake news stories largely focused on U.S. policies and certain segments of the American people,” Grenell wrote. “While Spiegel’s anti-American narratives have expanded over the last years, the anti-American bias at the magazine has exploded since the election of President Trump.”

Surprise surprise. Trump is a crook, a liar, a sadist, a bully, and an empty sack of wind, so a country that puts him at the top of government has something badly wrong with it. It’s not “anti-American bias” to pay a lot of attention to Trump.

Trump, who has made undermining otherwise credible news reporting a central effort of his presidency, has often claimed, without evidence, that reporters make up their sources.

Against this backdrop, the Relotius affair has predictably fueled a long-standing right-wing campaign to criticize media whose reporting is not friendly to Trump.

Shawn Steel, the committeeman of the Republican National Committee in California, tweeted about it on Christmas, calling it the “German Fake News” that was guilty of “hating” Trump and America.

Home of Fox News and Breitbart.

An actual feminist fighting an actual oppressive patriarchy…. https://t.co/Ex0N4DDHwO

— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) December 26, 2018

Well thank fuck we have Jordan Peterson to tell us which oppressive patriarchies are actual, right?

Nick Cohen says the reason Corbyn and pals are so chill about Brexit may be that old Leninist magic.

Labour has inherited the mental deformations of the Leninist style of doing business: the leadership personality cult, the love of conspiracy theory, the robotic denunciations of opponents, and most critically for our current crisis, the ineradicable fantasy that the worse conditions for the masses become, the brighter the prospects of the far left are. Disaster socialism is its alternative to disaster capitalism.

You know the one: don’t support reformist candidates because they will merely make things slightly better and thus kneecap more radical reforms. The idea is clear enough but…risky.

Labour’s leaders don’t sound remotely fearful, however. When asked about Brexit they deliver bland, mendacious slogans and make it as clear as a waiter trying to avoid eye contact that they would much prefer to talk to someone else. The easy point to make against them is that ending freedoms is what the far left has always done: there was precious little freedom of movement across the Iron Curtain. But, for anyone familiar with socialist history, it is the embrace of what Leninists called “revolutionary defeatism” that is Labour’s most striking characteristic.

Corbyn wrote for the Morning Star, the newspaper of the old Communist party, which managed to carry on being pro-Soviet even after the Soviet Union collapsed. His Stop the War coalition was founded by Trotskyists from the Socialist Workers party and Islamists, an alliance of believers in the one-faith state and one-party state, as some of us noted at the time.

A coalition of Trotskyists and Islamists – it mirrors the weirdness of The Women’s March over here, with hijab-flaunting anti-Semitic Linda Sarsour as its poster woman.

Lenin established the doctrine of revolutionary defeatism during the First World War. He had no time for “banal” socialists who were campaigning for peace. The true communist welcomed war and yearned for the defeat of his country. For a defeat, in Lenin’s case of Russia by Germany, would incite “hatred of one’s own government and one’s own bourgeoisie” and bring the revolution closer.

Or (as Nick goes on to point out) it brings something altogether nightmarish so close that you can’t get away from it.

Beyond the practicalities lies the morality. To wish suffering on people who are weaker and poorer than you is disgusting and it is no less disgusting when Jeremy Corbyn rather than Jacob Rees-Mogg is hoping that the misery of others will advance his political programme.

It’s not a good gamble and it’s not with your own money, so get away from the table.

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them,” said Maya Angelou. The dominant factions of the British far left have shown you since the 1970s that they are anti-European. All far-leftists have shown you since 1917 they believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that catastrophe should be welcomed as the midwife of socialist revolution. Why not believe them?

Call a different midwife.

Here’s a new distinction – for the first time ever the US is on the Reporters Without Borders list of most dangerous countries for journalists. High five?

At least 63 professional journalists were killed doing their jobs in 2018, a 15 percent increase over last year, said the group, Reporters Without Borders. The number of deaths rises to 80 when all media workers and people classified as citizen journalists are included, it said in its annual report.

The world’s five deadliest countries for journalists include three — India, Mexico and, for the first time, the United States — where journalists were killed in cold blood, even though those countries weren’t at war or in conflict, the group said.

“The hatred of journalists that is voiced … by unscrupulous politicians, religious leaders and businessmen has tragic consequences on the ground, and has been reflected in this disturbing increase in violations against journalists,” Secretary-General Christophe Deloire said in a statement.

The Annapolis shoot-up is what put us on the list.

Is it fair to say Trump has made the US a lot more dangerous for journalists? Damn right it is.

Speaking of Wall and the border and holiday festivities and telling brown people to get out, we’ve killed another child in custody.

An 8-year-old boy from Guatemala died in United States custody early Christmas Day, according to the United States Customs and Border Protection.

The boy died just after midnight on Tuesday at a hospital in Alamogordo, N.M., where he and his father had been taken after a Border Patrol agent saw what appeared to be signs of sickness, according to a news release from the agency.

I think Trump’s sudden lurch into rational skepticism at a socially inappropriate moment is hilarious, but I’m not going to pretend the whole “don’t tell the kids Santa is a story” routine makes any sense.

What’s the point of telling one’s children a lie that you know they’ll find out is a lie long before they’re out of childhood? Why not just tell them it’s a story? Adults don’t tell children pumpkins are the personified Spirit of Halloween, so what’s with all the “Shh shh don’t spill the beans” silliness? Apart from anything else I don’t see why parents would want to give their children reason to think Mommy and Daddy make a habit of lying to them.

Like so:

Hey, kids under 8 years old, thanks for reading The New York Times. But this time, please don’t. Maybe go play Minecraft or something instead.

… O.K., are they gone now? Cool. Here’s what President Trump said to a child about Santa Claus on Monday.

Jokey [as if kids under 8 read the Times!] but still referring to a real taboo. What Trump did is hilarious because of the taboo.

Sadly, we do not know how the 7-year-old, named Coleman, responded to the president of the United States’ suggestion that his parents had been lying to him all his life and that he would probably get wise to it soon. The president made the comments from the White House while he and the first lady, Melania Trump, fielded calls from a hotline for children wondering where Santa was.

Mr. Trump’s faux pas was roundly mocked on social media, where he was criticized for breaking the covenant in which we have all agreed to deceive our children.

Exactly; why has everyone agreed to do that? It’s kind of a bully move, and I remember being annoyed about it when I was a child.

I’m with Katha on this.

https://twitter.com/KathaPollitt/status/1077414771065004033

Claire McCaskill tells us what we already suspect – Senate Republicans know Trump is many cards short of a deck but they keep shtum because Republicans.

In the interview, the blunt-speaking Missouri Democrat, reflecting on her election loss to Republican Josh Hawley — a political novice whom she also referred to as a “bright shining object” — also didn’t mince words for the Republican Party.

While she warned that history “will judge some of my colleagues harshly that they didn’t stand up to this President at some of the moments where he has been unhinged about particularly the rule of law,” she also said that GOP senators have privately conceded they can’t speak out against Trump because of backlash they’d receive from their base.

“Now they’ll tell you, if it’s just the two of you, ‘The guy is nuts, he doesn’t have a grasp of the issues, he’s making rash decisions, he’s not listening to people who know the subject matter,’ ” she said. “But in public if they go after him … they know they get a primary, and they know that’s tough.”

So it’s all about them, and not the good of a country of 327 million people. “Gee, I don’t know, Marv, which is it gonna be, the welfare of 327 people plus to a considerable extent the rest of the 7 billion on the planet, or…me? Tough choice but I’m gonna hafta go with me, because me. Me and my job. That’s the important thing here.”

We knew this, but that doesn’t make it any less disgusting.

Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice in the Times yesterday:

This country’s national security decision-making process is more broken than at any time since the National Security Act became law in 1947. Nothing illustrates this dangerous dysfunction more starkly than President Trump’s reckless, unilateral decisions to announce the sudden withdrawal of all 2,000 United States troops from Syria and to remove 7,000 from Afghanistan.

These decisions went against the advice of the president’s top advisers, blindsided our allies and Congress, and delivered early Christmas presents to our adversaries from Russia and Iran to Hezbollah and the Taliban. The costs of this chaos are enormous, starting with the blunt, unnerving resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, one of the last senior administration officials committed to preserving American global leadership and alliances.

…

Cutting and running from Syria benefits only militants, Turkey, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, Russia and Iran. We are abandoning our Kurdish partners, leaving them vulnerable to Turkey’s offensive, after they did the hard work of undermining the Islamic State.

But Turkey, Russia and Iran are going to be our new best friends. Aren’t they?

The near simultaneous order to withdraw half of the American troops in Afghanistan shocked our NATO allies, who have served alongside United States forces since Sept. 11, and shook the Afghan government in advance of precarious presidential elections next year. This arbitrary and precipitous withdrawal will strengthen the Taliban and undermine diplomatic efforts to jump-start reconciliation talks, while opening the field to greater Russian and Chinese influence.

But it will save money, which we can spend on Wall.

If our national security decision-making process were even minimally functional, there would have been a carefully devised plan to execute moves, including wrongheaded ones. The plan would have included strategies for mitigating risks to our partners on the battlefield and to friendly governments; advance consultations with allies; briefings of Congress; and a press strategy.

One reason our national security decision-making process is not minimally functional is because Bolton doesn’t talk to people and is always flying off somewhere instead of sticking around to talk to people.

The other, of course, is Mister Shit-for-brains.

The president couldn’t care less about facts, intelligence, military analysis or the national interest. He refuses to take seriously the views of his advisers, announces decisions on impulse, and disregards the consequences of his actions. In abandoning the role of a responsible commander in chief, Mr. Trump today does more to undermine American national security than any foreign adversary. Yet no Republican in Congress is willing to do more than bleat or tweet concerns.

Happy holidays.