Elsewhere in Trump:

President Trump praised the NFL’s decision to mandate that players either stand for the national anthem or stay in the locker room in a TV interview that aired Thursday.

And he questioned whether players who choose not to stand “proudly” should be in the country at all.

Oh did he. Did he really. This lying stealing bullying garbage fire of a man who defecates on this country every day has the gall to question whether African American athletes who protest racism by kneeling instead of standing while a song is sung should be in the country at all.

“Well, I think that’s good,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News. “I don’t think people should be staying in locker rooms, but still I think it’s good. You have to stand, proudly, for the national anthem or you shouldn’t be playing, you shouldn’t be there, maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.”

No you don’t “have to.” Opinion should not be coerced, and public expression of opinion should not be coerced. Employers can make workplace rules, but morally speaking (at least) there are some rules they should not make. It’s not Trump’s decision to make either way, but he does love to find opportunities to bully brown people.

Trump canceled the meeting with Kim, and sent him a ridiculous letter saying so…and tweeted the ridiculous letter so that we can all see how ridiculous it is. He seems to have actually written much of it (that is, spoken it aloud) himself.

I was very much looking forward to being there with you. Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting.

Says the childish stupid man who called Kim “Little Rocket Man” repeatedly on Twitter.

Trump withdrew from the summit after a North Korean vice minister of foreign affairs slammed Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday as a “political dummy,” the latest harshly worded statement from Pyongyang.

Trump and his aides were infuriated by the statement and wanted to respond forcefully, multiple people familiar with the situation told CNN. The specific and personal targeting of Pence is what irked US officials, three people familiar with the matter said.

Infuriated on what grounds? Given the way Trump talked about and to Kim repeatedly in full public view?

Trump and his aides had insisted over the past week that planning for the summit was still ongoing amid the increased bluster from Pyongyang. A logistics team was dispatched to Singapore to finalize details with North Korea officials. And a commemorative coin was stamped by military aides labeling Kim the “Supreme Leader.”

Oops. Those coins are supposed to appear after a successful summit meeting, not before. Guess why.

The whole letter in all its clownish absurdity:

Dear Mr. Chairman:

We greatly appreciate your time, patience, and effort with respect to our recent negotiations and discussions relative to a summit long sought by both parties, which was scheduled to take place on June 12 in Singapore. We were informed that the meeting was requested by North Korea, but that to us is totally irrelevant. I was very much looking forward to being there with you. Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting. Therefore, please let this letter serve to represent that the Singapore summit, for the good of both parties, but to the detriment of the world, will not take place. You talk about nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.

I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me, and ultimately, it is only that dialogue that matters. Some day, I look very much forward to meeting you. In the meantime, I want to thank you for the release of the hostages who are now home with their families. That was a beautiful gesture and was very much appreciated.

If you change your mind having to do with this most important summit, please do not hesitate to call me or write. The world, and North Korea in particular, has lost a great opportunity for lasting peace and great prosperity and wealth. This missed opportunity is a truly sad moment in history.

Love,

Donnie

“I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me”

But then you broke my heart.

Trump can lie cheat and steal but at least he can’t block his critics on Twitter.

U.S. District Court Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald cited First Amendment principles in holding that the social media platform offered a forum in which people could not only consume information and opinion from public figures but offer feedback to elected officials — just as they have the right to do in newsprint or in person in public spaces.

Buchwald boiled down the case to two simple questions: Can a public official block someone from seeing her or his Twitter feed given First Amendment protections of free speech? And does it matter if that public official is the president?

“The answer to both questions is no,” Buchwald wrote at the top of her opinion.

The case was technically filed against Trump, his former communications director Hope Hicks, his chief press secretary Sarah Sanders, and his social media director, Daniel Scavino. The White House did not give any indication to NPR or others whether the administration will appeal the decision.

Buchwald did not order any compensation for damages but instead offered a declarative judgment — one that involved declarative statements from the judge. “[N]o government official — including the President — is above the law,” she wrote, “and all government officials are presumed to follow the law as has been declared.” The judge wrote she expects Scavino to unblock critics and to not block others in the future.

He uses it (a lot) to make presidential assertions and blurts and insults, so it’s only reasonable that that means he can’t wall it off.

Originally a comment by Seth on The ultimate disrupter.

The worst thing about this whole mess is that, if the Republic does somehow limp through and Trump manages to get re-elected without going full-on fascist and sunsets without too much fuss when it’s over, the presidency will forever then be seen as an insulating force to one’s criminality and indeed one’s reputation. Just listen to the milquetoast way the author says ‘…a president who might not always be known for accuracy’.

Such an obvious Bowdlerisation of what everyone knows to be true is disgusting. Everyone who matters is pretending that the prestige of the office is paramount, and in so doing they are shitting on all of the work done by all of Trump’s predecessors in building that prestige and earning that respect so that the worst person in the world can skate by on his venal criminality. And when he’s gone, without having had to answer for any of his crimes, with a party eager to ‘put it behind them’ and a country too weary to right itself, nobody will ever be able to trust or respect the President of the United States ever again.

Bush did immeasurable harm to the office, and to the country. Obama was such a stark contrast that his very presence allowed the world to forget, to write Bush off as a temporary madness, and to more-or-less pretend the whole sordid administration simply had not happened. Now that the office has been opened to naked hucksters and ravening criminals (as long as they are Republicans, anyway), the US will never be able to recoup that reputation. It’s gone, and it simply is not coming back.

Good luck. You’ll need it.

Mark Leibovich at the Times talked to some press secretaries for the Golden Hitler.

“What’s true on Monday in terms of a process decision may change by Friday,” Sanders said. “And I can’t always know that things will be different.” It often does not take that long for a “process” to evolve, I said. Sometimes a 5 a.m. tweet generated from the White House residence amounts to a “process” in Trump’s presidency. Or an old friend of Trump’s who just joined his legal team might go to dinner and jump on Fox News for a few minutes, and then the “process” jumps again. Like many of her White House colleagues, Sanders is quick to suggest that some of the criticism the Trump White House has received is a product of a biased press.

Except that that’s less true of Trump than it is of other Republican presidents. There are many Republicans who detest his lies and bullying (the two are closely linked – lying is a kind of bullying, especially in someone as powerful as he is).

“It certainly bothers me,” she said of the “liar” rap. “Because one of the few things you have are your integrity and reputation.” She added that “there’s a difference between misspeaking or not knowing something than [and] maliciously lying.”

Integrity and reputation can’t survive working for Trump. It’s not humanly possible.

No one would argue that a person’s integrity isn’t of paramount importance, I said. But I asked Sanders if there is a danger in linking your integrity to a president who might not always be known for accuracy. There have been many instances where the president has not told the truth, I said.

“But you’re asking about me,” Sanders said, not challenging the premise.

True, I said, but she has to speak for him. I asked the question another way: “Is it possible to be factual if you’re speaking for someone who is trying to make a point that is not factual?”

“Uh, I don’t know,” Sanders said. “I’m not following totally.” But it was important for me to remember this: Donald Trump is president. “And I think one of the biggest reasons Donald Trump is president is because he is not scripted, not following your conventional playbook.” He is “the ultimate disrupter,” and people find his plain-spoken style “refreshing.” They like that he is unfiltered, she said, like that he “tells it like it is.”

But her emails.

President Donald Trump uses a White House cellphone that isn’t equipped with sophisticated security features designed to shield his communications, according to two senior administration officials — a departure from the practice of his predecessors that potentially exposes him to hacking or surveillance.

The president, who relies on cellphones to reach his friends and millions of Twitter followers, has rebuffed staff efforts to strengthen security around his phone use, according to the administration officials.

He doesn’t have time for that, he’s too busy tweeting. On his phone. The one without sophisticated security features designed to shield his communications.

The president uses at least two iPhones, according to one of the officials. The phones — one capable only of making calls, the other equipped only with the Twitter app and preloaded with a handful of news sites — are issued by White House Information Technology and the White House Communications Agency, an office staffed by military personnel that oversees White House telecommunications.

While aides have urged the president to swap out the Twitter phone on a monthly basis, Trump has resisted their entreaties, telling them it was “too inconvenient,” the same administration official said.

Because there could be a tweet-demanding emergency at any moment.

The president has gone as long as five months without having the phone checked by security experts. It is unclear how often Trump’s call-capable phones, which are essentially used as burner phones, are swapped out.

President Barack Obama handed over his White House phones every 30 days to be examined by telecommunications staffers for hacking and other suspicious activity, according to an Obama administration official.

Well there you go. He was born in Kenya, so obviously Trump is going to do the opposite of whatever he did.

Former national security officials are virtually unanimous in their agreement about the dangers posed by cellphones, which are vulnerable to hacking by domestic and foreign actors who would want to listen in on the president’s conversations or monitor his movements.

“Foreign adversaries seeking intelligence about the U.S. are relentless in their pursuit of vulnerabilities in our government’s communications networks, and there is no more sought-after intelligence target than the president of the United States,” said Nate Jones, former director of counterterrorism on the National Security Council in the Obama administration and the founder of Culper Partners, a consulting firm.

While the president has the authority to override or ignore the advice provided by aides and advisers for reasons of comfort or convenience, Jones said, “doing so could pose significant risks to the country.”

But what does that matter compared to Trump’s convenience?

[C]ybersecurity experts pointed to sophisticated adversaries like Russia and China as the biggest threats, and expressed shock over the president’s refusal to take measures to protect himself from them, particularly when engaged in delicate negotiations.

“It’s baffling that Trump isn’t taking baseline cybersecurity measures at a time when he is trying to negotiate his way out of a trade war with China, a country that is known for using cyber tactics to gain the upper hand in business negotiations,” said Samm Sacks, a China and technology expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

It’s not really baffling if you keep in mind how self-centered and stupid Trump is.

Lie often enough and shamelessly enough and you win the game.

James R. Clapper said something Tuesday that he maybe shouldn’t have. In the course of rebutting President Trump’s conspiracy theories about the FBI “spying” on his campaign, the former director of national intelligence momentarily conceded Trump’s premise.

“They were spying on — a term I don’t particularly like — but on what the Russians were doing,” Clapper said. Asked whether Trump should be happy the FBI was doing this, Clapper said, “He should be.”

“He should be” if he cared about US interests, or about how authoritarian and criminal Putin is, or both.

Trump’s response? Take that badly out of context.

@foxandfriends “New Bombshell in the Obama Spying Scandal. Did other Agencies SPY on Trump Campaign?” Even Clapper, worlds dumbest former Intelligence Head, who has the problem of lying a lot, used the word SPY when describing the illegal activities!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 23, 2018

“Trump should be happy that the FBI was SPYING on his campaign” No, James Clapper, I am not happy. Spying on a campaign would be illegal, and a scandal to boot!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 23, 2018

And to be clear, this is a really important semantic point. Trump and his allies have launched a concerted effort to insert the word “spy” in this debate, despite there being no evidence that there was anything untoward about the FBI’s use of an informant, Stefan Halper, to look into contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. Trump included the word in ALL CAPS infourseparatetweets Wednesday morning — including christening the supposed scandal as “SPYGATE.” The word also appeared almost incessantly on his favorite morning show, “Fox & Friends.”

So they’ll win, by being willing and eager to repeat lies often enough and shamelessly enough.

How much does Trump understand about the institutions he’s damaging and the norms he’s defying? It doesn’t really matter, because he doesn’t care in any case. As has been regularly pointed out, his motivations are all entirely self-directed; he does what he considers good for him and is entirely indifferent to what’s good for other people or the country as a whole.

Greg Sargent at the Post:

[W]hat we now see happening is that Trump is directly pressuring Justice to conduct this investigation into his campaign in a certain way, and at least to some extent, it is complying. As Charlie Savage puts it, Trump is slowly eroding an “established constraint on executive power.”

Trump signaled in his own words that he was going to do this and more. Trump recently tweeted that “at some point” he will “use the powers granted to the Presidency and get involved!” Late last year, he said that “I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department.” On still another occasion, Trump revealingly admitted that he is “very frustrated” by the fact that he is “not supposed to be involved” with the Justice Department, meaning he recognizes there is a norm that dictates this limit on his power, but he sees it as an inconvenience and does not recognize that there are good institutional reasons for preserving it.

He recognizes that there is a rule (however tacit) that dictates this limit on his power, but he has worked out an ideology that lets him see rules of that kind as Children of the Swamp aka Artifacts of the Deep State, so that he is doing a fine and populist thing by smashing them for his own criminal purposes. He may well recognize that from the point of view of the FBI there are good institutional reasons for preserving the rule, but the fact that the rule is an obstacle to what he wants is far more salient. To the rest of us, the ability of the FBI to find out what Putin and Co did to our election is important, but to Trump it is as a bit of milkweed before his need to avoid prosecution. Who ya gonna take care of, the whole country or Trump? The question answers itself.

The Watergate scandal led some to propose isolating Justice entirely from the executive branch. But this, too, was seen as unworkable, because that would mean the Justice Department is not subject to political accountability. So Justice must be overseen by the executive branch. But that subjects it to presidential manipulation. The answer to this thorny problem is the norm of prosecutorial independence. The answer is the idea, as one senator put it during Watergate, that the Justice Department’s “client is not only the president of the United States but includes the people.” The president is their boss, but prosecutors are answerable to the law and to the people as well. That norm’s existence depends on it being observed by both prosecutors and the president alike.

But this is an idea that Trump plainly does not accept. He has said again and again and again in his own words that he views law enforcement as merely an instrument of his political will, to be turned loose on his political opponents at his whim and to be weaponized against itself when it tries to hold him accountable. This appears rooted in a uniformly corrupt impulse that also animates all of his profiteering off the presidency (as Adam Serwer writes), and is an extension of his long history of trampling rules and laws with impunity as a businessman (as Timothy L. O’Brien writes). As president, it’s not clear that Trump recognizes any institutional obligation of any kind to the law or to the people.

Or rather, it’s all too clear that he does not.

Jennifer Rubin explains the legal norms Trump is stamping on.

Former acting attorney general Sally Yates hit the nail on the head on Monday on “Morning Joe.” She explained, “I think what we’re seeing here is the president has taken his all-out assault of the rule of law to a new level and this time he is ordering up an investigation of the investigators who are examining his own campaign. You know, that’s really shocking.” And things got even worse as the day progressed.

Among the other things it is, it’s a massive abuse of power. The rest of us don’t get to order the Justice Department to investigate the people who are investigating us. But even more basically it’s the opposite of how this is supposed to work. Investigators are not supposed to collaborate with the suspects they’re investigating, for obvious reasons. Investigators look for evidence that the suspects don’t want them to find, so the two parties are kept separate. There is no expectation that investigators will share what they find with the suspects while the investigation is in progress. Trump and his people are pretending there is, and that it’s just normal and appropriate and Only Fair.

Now, President Trump orders up an investigation of investigators based on no evidence of impropriety and then meets directly with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray to discuss sharing and/or releasing such information. Yes, we are through the looking glass.

That’s the trouble with electing a criminal president. Let’s not do that again.

“Based on the meeting with the President, the Department of Justice has asked the Inspector General to expand its current investigation to include any irregularities with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s or the Department of Justice’s tactics concerning the Trump campaign,” the White House said in a written statement. “It was also agreed that White House Chief of Staff [John] Kelly will immediately set up a meeting with the FBI, DOJ, and DNI [Director of National Intelligence] together with Congressional Leaders to review highly classified and other information they have requested.” It’s far from clear what this entails, but it appears to be a wholly improper attempt to give Trump’s allies in Congress a peek at critical documents for Trump’s legal benefit.

Maddow pointed out with much emphasis that Nunes and his friends will instantly share any “highly classified and other information” they see with the White House.

Trump’s TV lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani blabbed to Politico the real reason for the request:

[He] said the documents requested by Trump will “indicate what the informant found.” He also said the memos “should be made available to us on a confidential basis,” he added. “We should be at least allowed to read them so we know this exculpatory evidence is being preserved.” It’s unclear if there were any arrangements made for the White House to view the documents.

This goes beyond obstruction to total disruption of an investigation, with an implicit request for Congress to turn over to a potential defendant classified materials. Trump’s lawyer asking for critical investigative documents in the press is about as blatant as one can get.

The normal separation between the White House and the Justice Department on investigative matters is being obliterated before our eyes — and worse, Trump is using his powers as president to aid in his own defense.

And nobody is stopping him. Just a couple of weeks ago Rosenstein said the Justice Department won’t be extorted, but oh look the Justice Department is being extorted.