monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

“One thing Steve wants Trump to do is take this more seriously,” the Bannon confidant told me. “Stop joking around. Stop tweeting.”

Presidents are typically advised to avoid commenting on active legal proceedings, as such comments can be used by defence lawyers to argue their clients cannot get a fair trial, The New York Times reports.

"Mr President, we all know he should get the death penalty. But when *you* say it, it makes it harder for DOJ to make that happen," Andrew C McCarthy, a former assistant US attorney said.

I slapped my head when I saw that. A first-year law student would get his client off based on such stupidity from Trump.

Cycloptichorn

America is facing an epistemic crisis
What if Mueller proves his case and it doesn’t matter?

...But we are disturbingly close to the following scenario:

Say Mueller reveals hard proof that the Trump campaign knowingly colluded with Russia, strategically using leaked emails to hurt Clinton’s campaign. Say the president — backed by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Fox News, Breitbart, most of the US Cabinet, half the panelists on CNN, most of the radio talk show hosts in the country, and an enormous network of Russian-paid hackers and volunteer shitposters working through social media — rejects the evidence.

...Epistemology is the branch of philosophy having to do with how we know things and what it means for something to be true or false, accurate or inaccurate. (Episteme, or ἐπιστήμη, is ancient Greek for knowledge/science/understanding.)

The US is experiencing a deep epistemic breach, a split not just in what we value or want, but in who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know — what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening.

The primary source of this breach, to make a long story short, is the US conservative movement’s rejection of the mainstream institutions devoted to gathering and disseminating knowledge (journalism, science, the academy) — the ones society has appointed as referees in matters of factual dispute.

Why This Is Not Trump’s Watergate
...Which is why comparisons to Watergate are so facile. Never mind the obvious factual differences in the stories—the allegations of Russian collusion are far more grave—American law, politics, and journalism are far too different now to think that matters will unfold the way they did in the 1970s. As complex a story as Watergate was, it reads like a children’s book compared to what Mueller and his team are dealing with. As vicious and as partisan as the events were back then, they seem quaint in comparison to the poisonous atmosphere in which the current scandal is unfolding. We can still talk about the possibility of impeachment, but it will be an even more partisan process than it was in 1974.