Don Junior is refusing to answer.

In a closed-door interview with congressional investigators yesterday, Donald Trump Jr. refused to divulge the contents of a phone conversation with his father — that would be the president — that took place just after news broke of Trump Jr.’s now-notorious June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with a Kremlin-connected lawyer. According to reports, investigators wanted to know whether Senior and Junior discussed what happened at that meeting and how they should respond to the news of it, but Trump Jr. cited attorney-client privilege and clammed up.

…

In an interview with me this morning, Rep. Adam Schiff (Calif.) — the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, which interviewed Trump Jr. yesterday — told me that if Trump Jr. continues to refuse to answer questions about this phone call, he will push for the committee to subpoena Trump Jr. and try to compel him to testify about it.

But, of course, he’s in the minority party, so if all the Republicans are happy with being tainted by the Dons this way, no subpoena, no answering questions, no anything. Putin can go on running us as long as the Rs keep their majority.

In his session with the Intelligence Committee, Trump Jr. was pressed to detail what transpired on a call he had with the president about the Trump Tower meeting in July 2017, just days after the news of it broke. Trump Jr.’s email chain, you will recall, confirmed that he took this meeting — which was also attended by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign chair Paul Manafort — in the full expectation that it would yield dirt on Hillary Clinton provided by the Russian government, which was trying to tip the election to his father. Trump Jr. declined to detail the conversation, on the grounds that lawyers for both Trump Jr. and his father were also on the call, meaning it is protected by attorney-client privilege, a claim Schiff rejects.

Schiff told me — as he also told reporters late yesterday — that Trump Jr.’s lawyer asked for some time to study whether they will ultimately comply with investigators’ request for more detail about the call. Schiff said in our interview that he hopes Trump Jr. and his lawyer ultimately decide that privilege does not apply and that they will be forthcoming.

Any bets?

Schiff told me he’s concerned that if Trump Jr. continues to refuse to discuss this call, Republicans will not press the issue, to avoid determining what happened on it.

“If the majority isn’t willing to find out, then they’re not living up to their commitment to the American people to follow the facts wherever they lead,” Schiff said. “Effectively they’re saying, ‘We don’t want to know where the facts lead, so we’re not going to insist on answers.’ ”

The larger context here is that the president himself helped dictate the initial statement that misled the American people about the true rationale for this meeting. Investigators want more info about the call between Trump Jr. and his father because it might help establish both what happened at that meeting and why Senior and Junior subsequently covered it up.

But they’re criminals, as opposed to public servants, so they have zero sense of responsibility to be forthcoming with us.

Not happy.

In the West Bank city of Ramallah, there were harsh words for Mr. Trump from Palestinians agitated at the idea that they were being forced into another period of conflict.

“We will never allow East Jerusalem to be taken away from us,” said a retired farmer who gave his name as Abu Malik, 54. “Trump is a crazy man who knows nothing about politics. I think he should go back to making WWF videos, rather than making these dangerous decisions that will only bring more headaches and bloodshed to our region.”

Maysa Hanoun, 20, a student at Al-Quds Open University, said she believed recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital would set off a third intifada. “He really doesn’t know what he’s getting himself into,” she said of Mr. Trump. “The Palestinians will unite and raise hell.”

Palestinian officials were weighing whether to go so far as to cut off contact with the Trump administration, calling him so biased toward Israel that he had effectively disqualified himself from playing peacemaker.

“We were very close to receiving an offer for peace from the Americans,” Majdi Khaldi, an adviser to Mr. Abbas said in a telephone interview. “We want to be positive and to be partners to the U.S., and to all parties that want to make peace, but this act is making it very difficult to continue with business as usual. Really, we want to make a historic peace with the Israelis, but that is not the way.”

Don’t worry. Trump knows best.

The confidence Trump has in his own judgement and rightness is astounding. He has no qualms about reversing decades of policy just because he glorious he thinks it’s an awesome idea.

President Trump on Wednesday formally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, reversing nearly seven decades of American foreign policy and setting in motion a plan to move the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to the fiercely contested Holy City.

“Today we finally acknowledge the obvious: that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital,” Mr. Trump said from the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House. “This is nothing more or less than a recognition of reality. It is also the right thing to do. It’s something that has to be done.”

How would he know? What does he ever know about what “the right thing to do” is? He has a long history of doing the very very wrong thing, so why should we have any confidence that he can even see the right thing when he encounters it, let alone come up with it all by himself?

Oh but he has brilliant advisers, like his brave and stunning slumlord son-in-law, and…no, slumlord is it.

Mr. Trump emphasized the domestic political dimension of the decision. He noted that he had promised to move the embassy during the 2016 presidential campaign, and added, “While previous presidents have made this a major campaign promise, they failed to deliver. Today, I am delivering.”

Also? Electoral college. They said it couldn’t be done. Inaugural crowd. Her emails. Pocahontas. Everybody says. Good people on both sides. Covfefe.

“There will of course, be disagreement and dissent regarding this announcement,” the president said. He appealed for “calm, for moderation, and for the voices of tolerance to prevail over the purveyors of hate.”

Yes, let’s make that happen, starting with getting the Purveyor of Hate in Chief out of office.

Mr. Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem isolates the United States on one of the world’s most sensitive diplomatic issues. It has drawn a storm of criticism from Arab and European leaders, which swelled on Tuesday night after the White House confirmed Mr. Trump’s plans.

Pope Francis and the Chinese foreign ministry joined the chorus of voices warning that the move could unleash a wave of violence across the region. At a meeting in Brussels, Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson was sternly reproached by European allies.

Standing next to Mr. Tillerson, the European Union’s top diplomat, Federica Mogherini, made clear that Europe saw the president’s decision as a threat to peace in the Middle East.

They like that; they see it as swamp drainage.

Mr. Tillerson has been largely shut out of the usual back-and-forth between Israelis and Palestinians that many secretaries of state spent much of their tenures conducting. Instead, Mr. Trump entrusted that task to his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner.

Sure, why not? Why not let some callow little weasel with no experience or knowledge play Junior Secretary of State with one of the most highly charged issues on the planet. What’s the downside?

At least one former Obama administration official also weighed in with sharp criticism. John O. Brennan, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said in a statement that Mr. Trump’s action was “reckless” and would “damage U.S. interests in the Middle East for years to come and will make the region more volatile.”

He’s just jealous.

Maybe it’s his eating habits that have warped him into the monster we see today.

“Trump’s appetite seems to know no bounds when it comes to McDonald’s, with a dinner order consisting of two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish, and a chocolate malted.”

This 2,400-calorie meal is among the details in a forthcoming book by Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and aid David Bossie, as described in a preview by The Washington Post.

That’s unhealthy af, obviously, but it’s also…well it tells us something about him. He could eat anywhere and order anything, and he chooses that.

Maybe he can’t even detect better things. You know, the way we can’t hear higher frequencies that dogs can? Maybe he’s so constituted that anything better than a Filet-O-Fish is too subtle for his palate, and he just can’t tune it in. If so, what a sad sad sad world he lives in.

The book’s authors, who traveled with Trump early in his presidency, write: “On Trump Force One there were four major food groups: McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, pizza, and Diet Coke.”

That’s a sad sad sad world.

The food enters the President not only in abundance, but with haste. Ivanka Trump said in a 2015 interview with Barbara Walters, “I wish he would eat healthier and maybe slow down. Sometimes I tell him, like, ‘Oh, you have to, you know, slow down.’ But it’s the only speed he knows …”

All of this could be taken as simple evidence of Trump’s cultural vacuousness.

He should know other speeds; he has dined with other people. He should enjoy a wide array of foods; he has been afforded the opportunity to have anything he wants.

Maybe he simply can’t. Maybe he’s fried his taste buds so thoroughly that McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken are all there is.

Good chocolate? A tree-ripened peach? Gelato? Raspberries plucked from the vine?

He has no idea. He’s just passing through.

Oh and also? In case we haven’t had enough yet? The Jerusalem thing too. I guess Trump is rushing to break everything he can before the cuffs are on.

President Trump told Israeli and Arab leaders on Tuesday that he plans to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a symbolically fraught move that would upend decades of American policy and upset efforts to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

He’s told Mahmoud Abbas and Jordan’s King Abdullah II, although the embassy isn’t actually packing up the dishes and books yet because they don’t have a building in Jerusalem. Middle East experts say that’s weird, because all they have to do is change the sign on the consulate in Jerusalem.

Mr. Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital — and to set in motion an embassy move — is his riskiest foray yet into the thicket of Middle East diplomacy. Arab and European leaders warn that it could derail any peace initiative and even ignite fresh violence in the region.

That’s what he wants. He wants to make the biggest mess he possibly can. That’s literally all he wants.

King Abdullah II strongly cautioned against the move, “stressing that Jerusalem is the key to achieving peace and stability in the region and the world,” according to a statement from the royal palace in Amman.

“King Abdullah stressed that the adoption of this resolution will have serious implications for security and stability in the Middle East, and will undermine the efforts of the American administration to resume the peace process and fuel the feelings of Muslims and Christians,” the statement said.

Few details of the conversation between Mr. Trump and Mr. Abbas were released, but a P.L.O. spokesman said that the call had given shape to the worst fears of Palestinians — that the United States would break with decades of practice and longstanding international consensus by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

The Palestinians hope to make East Jerusalem the capital of a Palestinian state, and the city is of great religious significance to Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Don’t worry, Kushner will fix it all.

More on the “thinking” behind this No National Monuments For You move:

Trump told a rally in Salt Lake City that he came to “reverse federal overreach”

What is that even supposed to mean? How is it “overreach” to keep public land for public use? Why is that called “overreach” in contrast to handing the public land over to private developers to exploit and damage? Why isn’t it “federal overreach” for Mr Pinchyhand to bounce in and remove protections from public land?

Trump told a rally in Salt Lake City that he came to “reverse federal overreach” and took dramatic action “because some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington.”

So by that logic there should be no public lands at all, right? So there should be no national parks, no freeways, no dams, no federal courts, no federal anything, because the country is just too damn big, is that it? But in that case what does Trump think he’s doing? Why is one very distant racist sexist pig located in Washington better than a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington?

But also, there’s “controlled.” What “controlled” means here is protected, preserved, shielded from harm and damage, kept for gentle public use as opposed to destructive exploitation. It means conservation…which you would think conservatives would see the point of.

It’s public. It’s for all of us. Trump, like the lying scum that he is, is framing it as if a few people in Washington were keeping us all out when in fact it’s private ownership or exploitation that would do that.

“They don’t know your land, and truly, they don’t care for your land like you do,” he said.

“Care for”? But the whole point is to remove the land from protection so that it can be exploited and damaged for the profit of a tiny few.

It’s Malheur all over again, of course – those ridiculous cowboys grabbing a federal wildlife reserve because they wanted ranchers to be able to exploit it (for free, of course) instead of leaving it undamaged for wildlife and people who like to observe and study wildlife.

And somehow they get away with the absurd reversal.

Not appropriate. Should not happen. Should be rejected. Should be turned away at door if it goes that far.

President Donald Trump will be traveling to Mississippi on Saturday to attend the opening of a new civil rights museum.

No. That’s insulting. The man is a vehemently openly unabashedly racist pig. He

• was a “birther” for years
• was sued for refusing to rent properties to black people
• made a “Pocahontas” “joke” to three Native Americans in the Oval Office just last week, in front of a portrait of Andrew “Indian Removal” Jackson
• told April Ryan to “make an appointment” for him with the Congressional Black Caucus at a press conference
• took out a full page ad in the New York Times demanding the death penalty for the Central Park Five
• said the Central Park Five were guilty after DNA evidence had shown that they were not
• said Mexican immigrants are rapists
• said Judge Gonzalo Curiel wouldn’t judge a case against Trump “University” fairly because he’s Mexican
• said there were good people on “both sides” in Charlottesville
• has ranted repeatedly for weeks about football players taking a knee instead of standing for the national tune in protest over racist police practices
• has insulted John Lewis

And that’s just off the top of my head. He’s a noisy angry racist who spends a lot of time shouting his racism into the public discourse in order to make other people noisy angry racists too. He has no business going anywhere near any civil rights museum.

Mr Destroy Everything hopes people will rush out to Utah in order to mine and farm and pave over the entire state without delay. He expects a cut of the profits.

President Trump said he would dramatically reduce the size of a vast expanse of protected federal land in Utah on Monday, a rollback of some two million acres that is the largest in scale in the nation’s history.

The administration said it would shrink Bears Ears National Monument, a sprawling region of red rock canyons, by about 85 percent, and cut another area, Grand Staircase-Escalante, to about half its current size. The move, a reversal of protections put in place by Democratic predecessors, comes as the administration pushes for fewer restrictions and more development on public lands.

Yeah. Let’s build condos on every inch of Yosemite, and shopping malls all over Yellowstone (supervolcano nothing – it will save a bundle on heating bills), and golf courses in Olympic National Park, and casinos in the Grand Canyon. Why the fuck not?

Look at all that wasted land, just lying there, with honest entrepreneurs not allowed to build hotels on it.

The decision to reduce Bears Ears is expected to trigger a legal battle that could alter the course of American land conservation, possibly opening millions of protected public acres to oil and gas extraction, mining, logging and other commercial activities.

Yay! No more public lands! All of it private and put to work and off limits to the smelly peasants.

“Some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington,” Mr. Trump said, speaking at Utah’s domed State Capitol. “And guess what? They’re wrong.”

“Together,” he continued, “we will usher in a bright new future of wonder and wealth.”

And money money money, and no dirty damp dangerous public lands for people to walk on and enjoy. If they want beautiful places and nature and mountain vistas they’ll just have to buy them!

Environmentalists and some native tribes say Mr. Trump’s move will destroy the national heritage and threaten some 100,000 sites of archaeological importance tucked into the monuments’ desert landscapes.

Oh blah, who cares. Read an old National Geographic, it’s the same thing.

For its supporters, the Bears Ears monument designation came to symbolize an indigenous victory after centuries of frustration.

For its opponents, it was an abuse of power by Mr. Obama, an infringement on the right of local people to decide what happens in their backyard.

“Our country places a high premium on consent,” said Phil Lyman, a county commissioner who lives at the edge of the monument. The designation, he said, “felt very nonconsensual.”

Wellllll…by “local people” and “their backyard” and “consent” they of course mean local white people and white people’s backyard and consent of white people. They don’t mean the browner people who were there long before the white people and who never gave their consent to all that moving in and taking over and calling it their “backyard.”

Setting the cat among the pigeons.

In a mysterious trip last month, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, traveled to Saudi Arabia’s capital for consultations with the hard-charging crown prince about President Trump’s plans for Middle East peace. What was said when the doors were closed, however, has since roiled the region.

According to Palestinian, Arab and European officials who have heard Mr. Abbas’s version of the conversation, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman presented a plan that would be more tilted toward the Israelis than any ever embraced by the American government, one that presumably no Palestinian leader could ever accept.

The Palestinians would get a state of their own but only noncontiguous parts of the West Bank and only limited sovereignty over their own territory. The vast majority of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which most of the world considers illegal, would remain. The Palestinians would not be given East Jerusalem as their capital and there would be no right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants.

I guess Kushner came up with that “plan”?

The White House says that’s not its plan, and the Saudi government said it doesn’t support it. But of course “the White House” is such a steadfast liar these days that who knows what that’s worth.

Even if the account proves incomplete, it has gained currency with enough players in the Middle East to deeply alarm Palestinians and raise suspicions about Mr. Trump’s efforts. On top of that, advisers have said the president plans to give a speech on Wednesday in which he would recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, even though both sides claim it, a declaration that analysts and regional officials say could undermine America’s role as a theoretically neutral broker.

I think it’s safe to assume that Trump is assuming He Can Fix It where No One Else Can, and that he thinks that’s all he needs to know, and so that he’s probably perfectly happy to let his slumlord son-in-law pretend to be a policy expert in an area that has foiled actual experts for generations. Yeah that should work well.

Mr. Trump assigned the effort to reach what he calls the “ultimate deal” to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, aided by Jason Greenblatt, his top negotiator, and other aides. After nearly a year of listening tours to the region, they are developing a comprehensive plan but have kept details under wraps.

“We know what’s in the plan,” Mr. Kushner said in a rare public appearance on Sunday at the Saban Forum, a Middle East conference in Washington hosted by the Brookings Institution. “The Palestinians know what discussions we’ve had with them. The Israelis know what discussions we’ve had with them.”

Said a callow young nobody who should be doing rental accounts in a small dusty office in Hoboken, not playing Miracle Diplomat at the Brookings Institution.

The Palestinians are saying hell no.

Adding to the shock for Palestinians, according to Palestinian officials from Fatah and Hamas, as well as a senior Lebanese official and several other people briefed on the matter, was the claim that Prince Mohammed had told Mr. Abbas that if he would not accept the terms, he would be pressed to resign to make way for a replacement who would.

Several of the officials said the prince had offered to sweeten the agreement with vastly increased financial support to the Palestinians, and even dangled the possibility of a direct payment to Mr. Abbas, which they said he had refused.

Elegantly put – “even dangled the possibility of a direct payment to Mr. Abbas” aka offered a bribe.

Mr. Abbas’s spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, dismissed the accounts of the Riyadh meeting and the Saudi proposals as “fake news” that “does not exist,” and said the Palestinians were still awaiting a formal proposal from the United States.

But the main points of the Saudi proposal as told to Mr. Abbas were confirmed by many people briefed on the discussions between Mr. Abbas and Prince Mohammed, including Mr. Yousef, the senior Hamas leader; several Western officials; a senior Fatah official; a Palestinian official in Lebanon; a senior Lebanese official; and a Lebanese politician, among others.

Ahmad Tibi, a Palestinian member of the Israeli Parliament, described a similar set of ideas that he said the Palestinians had received from the Americans and Israelis: a Palestinian state with only “moral sovereignty” and noncontiguous territory and without East Jerusalem as the capital; no Israeli settlement evacuation; and no right of return for Palestinian refugees.

And word of the plan has worried even some of the United States’ closest allies, who are eager for clarification from the White House.

Is this really just Trump, or Trump plus Kushner, doing yet another calculatedly off the charts extreme thing for whatever crazed reason Trump does such things? To rub everyone’s nose in it, to say Because I Can, to smash everything, to drain the swamp?

While the proposals may sound far-fetched on their face, they have deeply alarmed Palestinian and Arab officials because they come in a context of fast-moving new dynamics in the region.

Prince Mohammed, 32, is very close to Mr. Kushner, 36, both young men without much foreign policy experience who see themselves as creative reformers able to break with the ossified thinking of the past.

Uggggggggggh yes that’s what I was afraid of – young empty Mr Kushner thinking he’s a creative reformer. He has no foreign policy experience, none, zero; he is a slum landlord, period. He’s young, he’s shallow, he’s ignorant, he’s corrupt, he’s greedy, he’s happy to treat his wife’s horrible daddy’s job as permission to try to bully the Palestinians into giving everything up. There are rules against this crap, it should be stopped.

And the Saudi prince has made clear that his top priority in the region is not the Palestinian-Israeli issue, the fulcrum of Arab politics for generations, but confronting Iran.

Regional officials and analysts say they believe he might be willing to try to force a settlement on Palestinians in order to cement Israeli cooperation against Iran.

Hoo-boy.

Alarms began to go off across the region last month, when Mr. Abbas started making phone calls to political leaders in the region after he had left Riyadh.

One Lebanese government official who received a call was most surprised by what he said was a Saudi suggestion that the Palestinians could have Abu Dis, a suburb of East Jerusalem, as their capital.

Abu Dis is separated from the city by a wall built as part of Israel’s separation barrier.

The Lebanese official said no Arab could accept that kind of gamesmanship, adding that no one could propose that to a Palestinian unless a person lacking experience was trying to flatter the family of the American president.

This is what the Giant Nepotism Takeover is reaping: the perceived need to flatter the family of the American president cutting gashes in the landscape all over the globe.