Hmmm, so it turns out that Trump, friend of manufacturing companies and friend of Wisconsin, is not all that welcome at the Milwaukee Harley-Davidson plant after all. Why not? It’s nothing personal, it’s just that he has these…critics.

An administration official told CNN that President Trump was set to visit a Harley-Davidson factory in Milwaukee on Thursday, but the trip was called off after the company decided it didn’t want to deal with a planned protest.

The White House announced the visit to Milwaukee on Monday, but did not give a specific location. Technical Sergeant Meghan Skrepenski, with the 128th Air Refueling Wing of the Air National Guard in Milwaukee, confirmed to the AP on Tuesday that the trip was canceled.

Trump was expected to sign executive orders related to manufacturing during the trip. The group Milwaukee Coalition Against Trump said it organized a call-in protest to Harley-Davidson after learning that Trump would tour the company’s plant in Menomonee Falls. By Tuesday afternoon, 1,200 people said on the group’s Facebook page that they were planning to protest outside the plant on Thursday.

Trump’s people are denying it. He was never planning to go to Milwaukee. It wasn’t the protests that made him decide not to go – he has to do some laundry that day. Milwaukee is coming to him, not the other way around. Milwaukee is not a real place, it’s fake news. Milwaukee is the opposition party and should shut its mouth. Milwaukee needs to show us its long-form birth certificate. Milwaukee is guilty guilty guilty, no matter what the DNA evidence says, and should be executed. Milwaukee is bad people.

The Times’s daily Trump briefing includes an item that should not fly under the radar.

It also turns a sarcastic eye on Trump’s name-check of Frederick Douglass:

Trump: That Frederick Douglass “has done an amazing job.”

Yes, that Frederick Douglass, former slave, abolitionist and statesman who died in 1895.

Meeting with African-American supporters at the White House on Wednesday, the president let it be known that Mr. Douglass, an important figure in American history, had come to his attention.

“Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who has done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice,” Mr. Trump said. “Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks and millions more black Americans who made America what it is today. A big impact.”

Yes, he said that.

He’s just that good.

But the must not go under the radar item – it’s that Trump wants to undo regulations that hinder the ability of for-profit “universities” to rip off people who can least afford it. Gee, I wonder where that came from.

The Obama administration’s efforts to regulate the once flourishing for-profit university system did not get a lot of attention, but they had big consequences.

Critics of the universities saw fake diploma mills that recruited students with advertising on buses, on subways and even in homeless shelters, and then helped them get guaranteed student loans from the federal government. Money in hand, the for-profits often left the students to their own devices. If they dropped out, or got degrees that proved worthless in the work world, so be it: The taxpayer would pay off the loans if the students couldn’t.

The Obama-era regulations tightened up recruiting rules and tied loans to the schools’ records of getting their students the jobs they were promised. Many for-profit universities went under.

Now, President Trump — who just settled a fraud suit against his Trump University — has asked Liberty University’s president, Jerry Falwell Jr., a stern critic of accreditation rules, to head a White House task force on higher education, assigned to focus on “overregulation and micromanagement,” a Liberty spokesman told NBC News.

Yeah – “overregulation and micromanagement” that keep ruthless shitbags like Trump from cheating poor people out of the little money they have and pushing them into debt. Trump wants to restore the freedom of ruthless shitbags like him to rob people blind.

Of course it’s not at all “overregulation and micromanagement” for Trump to run around banning all citizens of an assortment of majority-Muslim countries from entering the US – oh hell no, that’s “keeping our country safe.”

But wait – can Trump really be a racist? After all, today he was at a meeting to mark the start of African-American History Month, so how can he possibly be a racist when he did that?

He was awesome, too.

Sitting in the Roosevelt Room on Wednesday for what was billed as a listening session to mark the start of African-American History Month, President Donald Trump took the occasion to once again criticize the media for covering him unfairly while also praising famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass as “somebody who has done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more.”

“Last month we celebrated the life of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., whose incredible example is unique in American history. You read all about Dr. Martin Luther King a week ago when somebody said I took the statue out of my office. And it turned out that that was fake news from these people,” Trump said during his introductory remarks, gesturing at the pool reporters who had been allowed in to view the start of the meeting. “Fake news. The statue is cherished … but they said the statue, the bust of Dr. Martin Luther King, was taken out of the office. And it was never even touched. So I think it was a disgrace. But that’s the way the press is, very unfortunate.”

See there? He managed to say “Martin Luther King” twice before veering off to talk about himself again. So how can he be a racist? Right?

The president was flanked on each side at the Roosevelt Room conference table by Housing and Urban Development Secretary-designate Ben Carson and Omarosa Manigault, a former contestant on Trump’s reality TV show “The Apprentice” who joined his administration in the Office of Public Liaison.

He was flanked by his very own Black People. He has enough of them that he could have one on each side. So not racist.

Speaking of the influence African-Americans have had on the U.S., Trump listed Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman as individuals who “made America what it is today.” He said famed orator Frederick Douglass “is an example of somebody who has done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”

Does that kind of sound as if he has no idea who any of them actually are? Yes. But somebody told him their names and he actually said them aloud. What more do you want?

The president continued his attack against the media moments later as he introduced Paris Dennard, a supporter of Trump’s who appeared regularly on CNN and other media outlets during the campaign. Often paired against a supporter of Democrat Hillary Clinton, segments featuring Dennard occasionally became heated, which Trump noted in his remarks.

“Paris has done an amazing job in a very hostile CNN community. He’s all by himself. He’ll have seven people and Paris,” Trump said. “I’ll take Paris over the seven. But I don’t watch CNN so I don’t get to see you as much. I don’t like watching fake news. But Fox has treated me very nice, wherever Fox is, thank you.”

That is of course the new standard. Critical of Trump=fake news; treating Trump very nice=authentic news.

He went on to agree with Bannon on the news media:

“A lot of the media is actually the opposition party. They’re so biased. And really it’s a disgrace. Some of the media is fantastic and fair. But so much of the media is opposition party. And knowingly saying incorrect things,” Trump said. “So it’s a very sad situation. But we seem to be doing well. You know, it’s almost like in the meantime, we won, so maybe they don’t have the influence they think. But they really are — they really have to straighten out their act. They’re very dishonest people.”

Says the most brazen liar ever to have the gig.

Trump’s latest official statement on Twitter. This is the president of the United States.

Everybody is arguing whether or not it is a BAN. Call it what you want, it is about keeping bad people (with bad intentions) out of country!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 1, 2017

I guess he wants us all to understand exactly how racist he really is. He thinks the way to keep “bad people” out of “country” is to close the doors on everyone from seven majority-Muslim nations. He’s saying all Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians, Yemenis, Sudanese, Somalis, Libyans are bad people.

The essence of racism, in one little tweet.

Merkel had to explain the Geneva Convention to Trump when they talked on the phone Saturday.

Donald Trump’s executive order to halt travel from seven Muslim-majority countries – Iraq, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia – has provoked a wave of concern and condemnation from international leaders and politicians.

A spokesman for Angela Merkel said the German chancellor regretted Trump’s decision to ban citizens of certain countries from entering the US, adding that she had “explained” the obligations of the refugee convention to the new president in a phone call on Saturday.

“The chancellor regrets the US government’s entry ban against refugees and the citizens of certain countries,” Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said in a statement.

“She is convinced that the necessary, decisive battle against terrorism does not justify a general suspicion against people of a certain origin or a certain religion.

“The … refugee convention requires the international community to take in war refugees on humanitarian grounds. All signatory states are obligated to do. The German government explained this policy in their call yesterday.”

That’s the kind of thing he should already know.

Trump’s other stupid item yesterday – signing an order saying if you want a regulation you have to give up two existing regulations. Spoken like a true market fundamentalist, who just assumes that regulation is inherently bad. Right. Those busybodies who made it impossible to sell Thalidomide; what were they thinking? Regulations against fraud, pollution, exploitation – all a caTAAAAAStrophe, if you’re Pinhead Trump.

It’s hard to overstate just how silly and arbitrary this notion is. It’s sloganeering, not public policy – but we’d all pay for it if such an absurd vision of regulatory reform actually became reality.

It isn’t hard to see how Trump’s catchphrase would play out in the real world, for the worse. Say an industrial cleaner or pesticide turns out to be harmful to humans in ways that weren’t understood before. Should regulators really have to go digging for two unrelated regulations to eliminate before they can do something about it?

Or say a new financial product cooked up by unsavory lenders is proliferating on the internet. Should regulators really have to let financial institutions go unshackled in two unrelated ways before stepping in?

No, of course not. Government should regulate the things that need to be regulated in order to protect the health of the population and prevent people from being duped – full stop.

Deborah Lipstadt was in Amsterdam for a screening of Denial when her phone lit up with the news about Trump’s Holocaust Memorial Day statement that conspicuously did not mention Jews. At first she thought it was just a clumsy mistake…but then she no longer did.

I quickly learned that the White House had released a statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day that did not mention Jews or anti-Semitism. Instead it bemoaned the “innocent victims.” The internet was buzzing and many people were fuming. Though no fan of Trump, I chalked it up as a rookie mistake by a new administration busy issuing a slew of executive orders. Someone had screwed up. I refused to get agitated, and counseled my growing number of correspondents to hold their fire. A clarification would certainly soon follow. I was wrong.

In a clumsy defense Hope Hicks, the White House director of strategic communications, insisted that, the White House, by not referring to Jews, was acting in an “inclusive” manner. It deserved praise not condemnation. Hicks pointed those who inquired to an article which bemoaned the fact that, too often the “other” victims of the Holocaust were forgotten. Underlying this claim is the contention that the Jews are “stealing” the Holocaust for themselves. It is a calumny founded in anti-Semitism.

There were of course other victims, she says, but that was not the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was something entirely different. It was an organized program with the goal of wiping out a specific people. Jews did not have to do anything to be perceived as worthy of being murdered. Old people who had to be wheeled to the deportation trains and babies who had to be carried were all to be killed. The point was not, as in occupied countries, to get rid of people because they might mount a resistance to Nazism, but to get rid of Jews because they were Jews.

…

Had the Germans won, they probably would have eliminated millions of other peoples, including the Roma, homosexuals, dissidents of any kind, and other “useless eaters.” But it was only the Jews whose destruction could not wait until after the war. Only in the case of the Jews could war priorities be overridden. Germany was fighting two wars in tandem, a conventional war and a war against the Jews. It lost the first and, for all intents and purposes, nearly won the second.

They frequently compromised their military capacity by diverting it to the extermination project. Trains, fuel, soldiers and SS needed for the war were instead used for the genocide.

The de-Judaization of the Holocaust, as exemplified by the White House statement, is what I term softcore Holocaust denial. Hardcore denial is the kind of thing I encountered in the courtroom. In an outright and forceful fashion, Irving denied the facts of the Holocaust. In his decision, Judge Charles Grey called Irving a liar and a manipulator of history. He did so, the judge ruled, deliberately and not as the result of mistakes.

Softcore denial uses different tactics but has the same end-goal. (I use hardcore and softcore deliberately because I see denial as a form of historiographic pornography.) It does not deny the facts, but it minimizes them, arguing that Jews use the Holocaust to draw attention away from criticism of Israel. Softcore denial also makes all sorts of false comparisons to the Holocaust. In certain Eastern European countries today, those who fought the Nazis may be lauded, but if they did so with a communist resistance group they may be prosecuted. Softcore denial also includes Holocaust minimization, as when someone suggests it was not so bad. “Why are we hearing about that again?”

…

After Hicks’s defense of the statement, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus doubled down, insisting that they made no mistake. On Meet the Press Chuck Todd gave Priebus repeated chances to retract or rephrase the statement. Priebus refused and dug in deeper, declaring “everyone’s suffering in the Holocaust, including obviously, all of the Jewish people… [was] extraordinarily sad.”

In the penultimate sentence of the president’s statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the White House promised to ensure that “the forces of evil never again defeat the powers of good.” But the statement was issued on the same day as the order banning refugees. It is hard not to conclude that this is precisely what happened at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

And Reagan went to Bitburg.

Originally a comment by AJ Milne on An independent judiciary.

That custom thing, I think that’s just everywhere with established norms. As democracies age, they work out what works, spot the boundaries they know they can’t cross. It doesn’t always get written down, exactly, or not in the law.

And that’s why there has to be a heavy political price for going anywhere near them. People who try to game the system, effectively, by arguing, well, technically you never said! Even if it’s like playing chess and suddenly saying I’m gonna colour your queen black and call it mine… Because nothing technically said I couldn’t.

I worry that this is in part the price of people being (I think, frequently, deliberately and manipulatively) made alienated from the process, made especially cynical about it, convinced it’s all just a shoddy, shameful game, so play to win, and anything’s fair. Nations and communities also stand on their common, understood, frequently unspoken values, things you don’t do, things that will absolutely get you struck off the dinner invitation list…

And absolutely, you can bet any number of his loud, braying thugs on the net are now going to be loudly bleating ‘but you never said’, and screaming holy hell if any other government body tries, as is only their damned responsibility in a system of checks and balances, to check their chosen tyrant. Oh, and see also the usual ‘but it’s a crisis, to hell with tradition, he needs extraordinary powers’ gambit, and never mind that, dramatic and arresting as the terror events he’s using as a pretext are (and are meant to be, and note the usual convenient synergy between strongman one and violent extremist authoritarian two, as both will attempt to drive you to accept their rule through fear), they’re still about as much a statistical menace to anyone specifically in the mainland US as is being hit by lightning.

This is the absurdity that remains for me, here. I appreciate people get scared; isn’t like I’ve never felt that; I lived near enough to the plane that hit the Pentagon, once upon a time, and these things are designed to be visceral, terrifying, heart-wrenching and generating much alarm, between your sympathy for the suffering and fear that next it may be you or one of your own. But remember: it’s still fear they’re using, and a fear you need to manage accordingly, deal with sensibly, and, to my mind, whose very crude purpose you should deliberately try to frustrate, as well as you can by saying ‘fuck that, you ain’t scaring me into anything rash’. And also, really, a rather innumerate fear, at the end of the day, so many places. A bit like selling your house to buy lottery tickets, this, in terms of what you give up for the still faint odds being addressed, here. Let’s trash our entire international reputation and, effectively, let ourselves be broken by this fear they continually try to make the only thing worth considering here, and never mind the groups that do only use these sensational events because that’s all they can do, really, lacking the means to pose an actual, meaningful military danger…

All of which argues, back: go with proportional, measured responses, things you can afford, things that don’t splash ruin on everyone within miles, things that don’t break what you’re trying to protect in the first place. And when you catch someone grandstanding, playing this card for power, send them back to their crappy reality television show with a boot up their ass.

Matthew Miller was the Justice Department’s public affairs boffin for a couple of years in the Obama administration. He explains why firing an Attorney General is not such a brilliant plan.

Under long-standing traditions in administrations of both parties, the attorney general is charged with enforcing the law free from political interference from the White House. This standard of independence, unique among Cabinet members, is designed to insulate questions of law from inappropriate political pressure, and presidents and attorneys general who have violated that standard have typically paid a grave price for doing so.

I guess no one explained that to Trump? Maybe no one who works for him is even aware of it?

It’s really not a good look to fire an AG for saying an order may be unlawful.

But then it’s also not a good look to issue a sweeping Executive Order without taking any legal advice. Trump and his minions literally seem to think he can Order any damn thing he wants to.

The legality of the underlying executive order is hotly debated. Four federal judges have already halted the administration from enforcing various aspects of it, and people affected by the ban continue to bring new lawsuits. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel did apparently approve the order on the narrow basis of “form and legality,” but since the Trump administration has not released a copy of the office’s opinion or answered questions about whether it raised any objections, we do not know the extent of its analysis.

They think he can Order any damn thing he wants to and do it as secretively and arbitrarily as he wants to.

But whatever one thinks about the executive order, the more fundamental issue is that in this case the decision whether to defend it in court rested not with the president, but with the attorney general. When Yates raised her objections to the order, she noted that she remained open to being convinced of its legality. The White House, which did not consult with her or other Cabinet members in drafting the order, could have worked with her to make changes that would satisfy her concerns about its legality. Instead, the president chose crisis and chaos.

Because he’s a Malignant Narcissist, and he cannot stand being “disobeyed.”

The White House’s statement announcing her firing revealed the political nature of Trump’s decision. It accused Yates — a career prosecutor with 25 years experience of putting violent criminals behind bars — of having betrayed the Justice Department. Instead of even attempting to wrestle with any questions of the attorney general’s proper role, the White House attacked Yates as being “weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration.”

Earlier on Monday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer had announced that career State Department officials who disagreed with the president’s immigration order should “either get with the program or they can go.” In its attack on Yates, the White House made clear the president expects the same level of quiet obeisance from his attorney general.

He expects it from everyone.

But the thing is, as with the tax returns and the conflicts of interest and so much else, none of this is statutory – it’s a matter of custom. Trump could not give less of a fuck about what is custom.

Trump’s actions on Monday have now raised the ante for the Senate. Recusal might have previously been enough to put to rest concerns about Sessions’s independence, but now that Trump has made clear he expects his attorney general to follow orders without questioning them, the Senate must respond by rejecting that notion and showing it will confirm only someone who is truly independent. Sessions does not clear that bar.

There is no law that establishes the Justice Department’s independence. Like many democratic norms, it has rested on faithful adherence by committed public servants, attorneys who are willing to make independent judgments, and the oversight of Congress and the free press. Trump just made clear that he does not respect this tradition. It now falls to the rest of us to show that we do.

I hope we can.

A person can’t have a life these days, if all these things are going to be happening after she firmly closes the laptop for the day and tries to think about other things. Donnie from Queens, do me a favor and take the evenings off.

But I shouldn’t complain. Rachel Maddow had to do a second broadcast, at midnight her time.

So, the Times on the firing of Acting Attorney General Sally Yates:

Ms. Yates’s order was a remarkable rebuke by a government official to a sitting president, and it recalled the so-called Saturday Night Massacre in 1973, when President Richard M. Nixon fired his attorney general and deputy attorney general for refusing to dismiss the special prosecutor in the Watergate case.

…

At 9:15 p.m., Ms. Yates received a hand-delivered letter at the Justice Department that informed her that she was fired. Signed by John DeStefano, one of Mr. Trump’s White House aides, the letter informed Ms. Yates that “the president has removed you from the office of Deputy Attorney General of the United States.”

Two minutes later, the White House officials lashed out at Ms. Yates in a statement issued by Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary.

“Ms. Yates is an Obama administration appointee who is weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration,” the statement said.

The government is not an athletic competition. It’s not a dick-swinging contest. It’s not supposed to be a street brawl, but currently that is what it is.

Ms. Yates, like other senior government officials, was caught by surprise by the executive order and agonized over the weekend about how to respond, two Justice Department officials involved in the weekend deliberations said. Ms. Yates considered resigning but she told colleagues she did not want to leave it to her successor to face the same dilemma.

By Monday afternoon, Ms. Yates added to a deepening sense of anxiety in the nation’s capital by publicly confronting the president with a stinging challenge to his authority, laying bare a deep divide at the Justice Department, within the diplomatic corps and elsewhere in the government over the wisdom of his order.

“At present, I am not convinced that the defense of the executive order is consistent with these responsibilities, nor am I convinced that the executive order is lawful,” Ms. Yates wrote in a letter to Justice Department lawyers.

In other words, what we have here may be an unlawful order. Those two words carry a heavy freight of history – think Nürnberg, think My Lai, think “I was just following orders.”

The president decided quickly: She has to go, he told them.

The official statement from Mr. Spicer accused Ms. Yates of failing to fulfill her duty to defend a “legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States” that had been approved by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

How does one deal with the claim that the order was “designed to protect the citizens of the United States” when the mechanism involved is so very invisible? It’s like passing a law that no one may combine cheese and bananas in one sandwich and saying it’s “designed to protect the citizens of the United States.” Just saying it in your head doesn’t make it true or a reasonable belief. It’s a fantasy that slamming the door closed on seven random majority-Muslim countries will do anything to “protect the citizens of the United States.” Trump must think, in that tiny little cupboard he uses for a brain, that a mere show of “toughness” will do the trick. It won’t do the trick: it will do the opposite.

“It is time to get serious about protecting our country,” Mr. Spicer said in the statement. He accused Democrats of holding up the confirmation of Mr. Sessions for political reasons. “Calling for tougher vetting for individuals traveling from seven dangerous places is not extreme. It is reasonable and necessary to protect our country.”

“Dangerous places”? What is that even supposed to mean? And why those seven and not Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, Nigeria? Not to mention the fact that the vetting already is “tough.”

I’m seeing people saying this is a cunning plan of Bannon’s, to distract us with a Shock so that he can get away with something much worse while we’re still staggering around dealing with the Shock. I don’t find that very convincing. I think it’s more that he’s getting his fun while he can, because he can tell they don’t have much time.

Kate Brannen at Foreign Policy says it’s become clear that it’s Bannon who’s running the show.

Even before he was given a formal seat on the National Security Council’s “principals committee” this weekend by President Donald Trump, Bannon was calling the shots and doing so with little to no input from the National Security Council staff, according to an intelligence official who asked not to be named out of fear of retribution.

That seems healthy. A week in, and people are afraid of retribution, and the guy calling the shots is a guy who built a new career on racism.

“He is running a cabal, almost like a shadow NSC,” the official said. He described a work environment where there is little appetite for dissenting opinions, shockingly no paper trail of what’s being discussed and agreed upon at meetings, and no guidance or encouragement so far from above about how the National Security Council staff should be organized.

The intelligence official, who said he was willing to give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt when it took office, is now deeply troubled by how things are being run.

They’re doing all these executive orders without the normal consultation and discussion.

Under previous administrations, if someone thought another person or directorate had a stake in the issue at hand or expertise in a subject area, he or she was free to share the papers as long as the recipient had proper clearance.

With that standard in mind, when some officials saw Trump’s draft executive orders, they felt they had broad impact and shared them more widely for staffing and comments.

That did not sit well with Bannon or his staff, according to the official. More stringent guidelines for handling and routing were then instituted, and the National Security Council staff was largely cut out of the process.

By the end of the week, they weren’t the only ones left in the dark. Retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, the secretary of homeland security, was being briefed on the executive order, which called for immediately shutting the borders to nationals from seven largely Muslim countries and all refugees, while Trump was in the midst of signing the measure, the New York Times reported.

That’s not surprising, at this point, but it is terrifying.

The lack of a paper trail documenting the decision-making process is also troubling, the intelligence official said. For example, under previous administrations, after a principals or deputies meeting of the National Security Council, the discussion, the final agreement, and the recommendations would be written up in what’s called a “summary of conclusions” — or SOC in government-speak.

They’re important. They make it possible to go on discussing the decision.

During the first week of the Trump administration, there were no SOCs, the intelligence official said. In fact, according to him, there is surprisingly very little paper being generated, and whatever paper there is, the NSC staff is not privy to it. He sees this as a deterioration of transparency and accountability.

“It would worry me if written records of these meeting were eliminated, because they contribute to good governance,” Waxman said.

That’s putting it incredibly mildly. Transparency and accountability are crucial, and these dictators are preventing them.

It is equally important that NSC staff be the ones drafting the issue papers going into meetings, too, said Schulman. “The idea is to share with everyone a fair and balanced take on the issue, with the range of viewpoints captured in that document,” she said.

If those papers are now being generated by political staff, she added, it corrupts the whole process.

It could also contribute to Bannon’s centralization of power.

“He who has the pen has the authority to shape outcomes,” the intelligence official said.

Now Bannon’s role in the shadows is being formalized thanks to an executive order signed Saturday by Trump that formally gives Bannon a seat on the National Security Council’s principals committee. The same executive order removed from that group the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of national intelligence, and the secretary of energy. Their new diminished role is not unprecedented, but some still find it a troubling piece of this larger picture.

It’s not unlike a coup.

I don’t want to be governed by a Breitbart troll who has seized power in secret. I really don’t.

Meanwhile, Bannon’s new role is unprecedented. Under Obama, it wasn’t unheard of for his chief political advisors, John Podesta and David Axelrod, to attend NSC meetings, but they were never guaranteed a seat at the table. Under Bush, the line between national security and domestic political considerations was even clearer. Top aides have said they never saw Karl Rove or “anyone from his shop” in NSC meetings, and that’s because Bush told him explicitly not to attend.

The signal Bush “especially wanted to send to the military is that, ‘The decisions I’m making that involve life and death for the people in uniform will not be tainted by any political decisions,’” former White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten said last September.

That’s actually rather impressive. Well done Bush.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called Bannon’s appointment to the council as a permanent member a “radical departure” from how the decision-making body was organized in the past, adding that he found the change “concerning.”

Inside and outside of government, there are also deep reservations about Bannon’s alignment with the far right and white nationalism, thanks to his previous leadership of Breitbart.

Well quite. He doesn’t belong there. None of this is ok.

Trump’s management style is known to be highly unstructured, if not chaotic. The Post reported in May that he was running his presidential campaign like he ran his business — “fond of promoting rivalries among subordinates, wary of delegating major decisions, scornful of convention and fiercely insistent on a culture of loyalty around him.”

“While this may have worked for his company, it is certainly not a way to run a country,” the official said.

No, it’s not. It’s a nightmare.

Is Trump planning to do an anti-LGB executive order? Spicer refuses to deny it.

Is Donald Trump getting ready to take executive action that would screw over his treasured LGBTQ constituency—the very citizens he promised to protect on the campaign trail? It was a charge that White House press secretary Sean Spicer couldn’t deny during Monday’s briefing, writes Towleroad.

Spicer responded to a question from Chris Johnson at the Washington Blade at today’s briefing.

Said Spicer:

“I’m not getting ahead of the executive orders that we may or may not issue. There’s a lot of executive orders, a lot of things the president has talked about and will continue to fulfill but we have nothing on that front now…”

LGBTQ Nation published a story early on Monday citing anonymous sources saying that an executive order was rumored to be in the works that would allow discrimination against LGBTQ Americans based on religious grounds. If true, that would be rich—since the text of Trump’s own refugee ban reads:

“The United States should not admit those who engage in acts of bigotry or hatred […] or those who would oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation.”

Wellll, Malignant Narcissists are allowed to contradict themselves that way, for the simple and elegant reason that they are never wrong about anything. Feel better now?

I'm told reliably there is a draft Executive order on LGBT issues including adoption. Details and timing unclear.

— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) January 30, 2017

If there’s a bad thing to do, Trump will do it.

To make it all worse, there’s every reason to think Trump is psychologically, intellectually, and emotionally incapable of learning from failures or paying attention to criticism. Goldwater “Rule” or no Goldwater rule, it’s hard to deny that he’s a Malignant Narcissist. Malignant Narcissists don’t listen to no stinkin criticism.

Until recently, it was illegal for psychologists to assess public figures and talk to journalists about their findings. But this rule has now changed, and mental health experts are speaking out about Trump.

Ah no. It wasn’t illegal – how could it have been? No, it was a professional rule, and I gather that professionals considered it pretty binding, but that’s very far from “illegal.” At any rate the extreme menace of Trump has eroded the rule (and made it a menace itself).

In a bid to warn the public, psychologists are publishing their diagnoses of Trump. Most recently, John D. Gartner said Trump “is dangerously mentally ill and temperamentally incapable of being president.”

I read that story when it appeared, and was going to blog it, but Trump’s frantic activities got in the way.

He believes Trump shows signs of “malignant narcissism,” which is defined as a mix of narcissism, antisocial personality disorder, aggression and sadism in Campbells’ Psychiatric Dictionary.

Check check check check. He’s all of those and then some.

Just after the election, a group called Citizen Therapists Against Trumpism was created, which was joined by thousands of psychologists. They published a manifesto warning of Trump’s psychosis, citing the following as the signs to fear:

“Scapegoating and banishing groups of people who are seen as threats, including immigrants and religious minorities; degrading, ridiculing, and demeaning rivals and critics; fostering a cult of the Strong Man who appeals to fear and anger; promises to solve our problems if we just trust in him; reinvents history and has little concern for truth (and) sees no need for rational persuasion.”

The American Psychiatry Association has a nine-point checklist for narcissism – if someone displays just five of the traits, they have Narcissistic Personality Disorder:

1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognised as superior without commensurate achievements).
2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
3. Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions).
4. Requires excessive admiration.
5. Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favourable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations.
6. Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.
7. Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognise or identify with the feelings and needs of others.
8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.
9. Shows arrogant, haughty behaviours or attitudes.

All nine of them fit him like a very tight leotard. He tweets most of them daily.

“With Trump, he’s a disturbed person who protects himself by building up his ego and tearing down others,” an anonymous psychologist explained to the NY Daily News.

One woman who used to be one of Trump’s construction workers, Barbara Res, emailed the NY Daily News with a story from 1982 when she was working on one of his construction sites. The NY Times had just published an article about narcissism, which one of the team-members brought to work.

“Being the team who was charged with building Trump Tower, we all knew Donald Trump very well, especially myself. To a person, we all agreed that the characteristics outlined in the article fit Donald to a ‘T’. Now, 35 years later, professionals are saying what we knew back then. Only now he is so much worse.”

And now he’s president, and can make people suffer in airports, and launch the nukes.

This should be the part where a magic being comes in and saves the day. Sorry, there doesn’t seem to be one.