monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Removing Nixon from office was pretty damaging to his presidency.

Scooter Libby was wrongfully convicted and disbarred for a crime that he never committed.

The Trump Administration has been weakened by all the allegations against them

Previous Democratic presidents, for example, committed the same "crime" that Nixon committed, only the Democrats did it on a far larger scale.

Can you credibly establish that there is anything wrong with Republicans doing so?

That's a lot worse than Nixon having a handful of operatives place a bug in Democratic headquarters.

It applies to politicians who are being horrendously savaged unjustly.

I’d love to know exactly what pushed Bannon over the edge.

Maybe just the firing, but it seems like there’s an ideological schism between Trump(maybe Jared) and Bannon. No love lost for Don Jr, either.

Bannon was a bit of an isolationist, wasn’t he?

Anyway, watching with interest.

I’d love to know exactly what pushed Bannon over the edge.

Maybe just the firing, but it seems like there’s an ideological schism between Trump(maybe Jared) and Bannon.

Trump expresses wariness of Bannon’s war on GOP establishment

The president — after meeting with McConnell — says he may try to talk his former chief strategist out of recruiting certain GOP primary challengers

President Donald Trump, who in 2016 ran as the nontraditional, nationalist insurgent riding roughshod over the establishment, on Monday expressed skepticism about Steve Bannon’s attempt to produce a wave of such candidates in coming Republican primaries.

“Some of the people he may be looking at, I'm going to see if we talk him out of that,” Trump said during a Rose Garden news conference when asked about Bannon’s pledge to recruit primary challengers to all but one sitting Republican senator in 2018.

President Donald Trump, who in 2016 ran as the nontraditional, nationalist insurgent riding roughshod over the establishment, on Monday expressed skepticism about Steve Bannon’s attempt to produce a wave of such candidates in coming Republican primaries.

Trump’s stance was muddied, however, because roughly two hours earlier he appeared to voice support for Bannon's avowed war on establishment figures, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Trump told reporters that Bannon "is a friend of mine” and is "very committed to getting things passed."

Trump’s apparent commitment to stand by incumbent Republican senators against his former campaign CEO and White House strategist shows that even a tradition-bucking president may hew to the party line in the interest of moving his agenda forward and maintaining a governing majority.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has called a June 2016 meeting with a group of Russians attended by Donald Trump Jr. and his father’s top campaign officials “treasonous” and “unpatriotic,” according to excerpts of a new book seen by Reuters on Wednesday.

Bannon expressed derision and astonishment over the meeting in Trump Tower in New York in which a Russian lawyer was said to be offering damaging information about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, according to the book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” by Michael Wolff.

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad ****, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”

When an intermediary proposed the meeting, saying the Russians were offering damaging information about Clinton, Trump Jr. responded in an email, “I love it.”

Bannon was incredulous about the meeting shortly after it was revealed, according to the book, concluding sarcastically, “That’s the brain trust they had.”

The book, due out next Tuesday, was based on more than 200 interviews with Trump, senior White House staffers and confidantes conducted by Wolff, a contributing editor for The Hollywood Reporter, according to publisher Henry Holt.

There was no immediate comment from the White House or Bannon on the book details, first reported by the Guardian. The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Trump Jr.

Bannon became Trump’s campaign manager in the months before the November 2016 election, but after the Trump Tower meeting, and was chief White House strategist during the turbulent first eight months of Trump’s presidency.

Trump fired Bannon in August, removing a far-right architect of his election victory and a driving force behind his nationalist and anti-globalization agenda.

In the book, Bannon also said he believed the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow will focus on money laundering.

“They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV,” Bannon was quoted as saying.

Manafort and business associate Rick Gates, who also worked on Trump’s campaign, pleaded not guilty in November to federal charges brought by special counsel Robert Mueller including conspiracy to launder money, conspiracy against the United States and failing to register as foreign agents of Ukraine’s former pro-Russian government.

As soon as the campaign team had stepped into the White House, Walsh saw, it had gone from managing Trump to the expectation of being managed by him. Yet the president, while proposing the most radical departure from governing and policy norms in several generations, had few specific ideas about how to turn his themes and vitriol into policy. And making suggestions to him was deeply complicated. Here, arguably, was the central issue of the Trump presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-­literate. He trusted his own expertise ­— no matter how paltry or irrelevant — more than anyone else’s. He was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however confused, was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do. It was, said Walsh, “like trying to figure out what a child wants.”

Recently, Bannon notably backed former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore in the state's Senate race. Trump, on the other hand, backed incumbent appointed Sen. Luther Strange in the Republican primary, arguing he was more electable.

Moore, who faced allegations of past sexual misconduct, went on to lose that race for the seat once held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to Democrat Doug Jones.

After Jones was sworn into office Wednesday, Trump Jr. sarcastically tweeted: "Thanks Steve. Keep up the great work.

“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency,” Mr. Trump said in the statement. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”